“Remember,” I said, “when we were on watch or out hunting and it was all boring as hell, and you had all those stories to pass the time? The ones about when you were living back on Prairie Beach, or the Three Dead Queens, or all the ones you made up in your head? Prophecies. You always called them your prophecies.” I plucked a handful of twigs from the dead fallen branch, watched them crumble to flakes there in my fingers. “Well, if you got one now, old man, that explains why you’re here—or how—just tell it. All of it. I’ve got no belly for riddles.”
Nick reared up, front paws pressed against Florian’s leg. Florian patted him absently, soothed him, until Nick dropped back to the leaves and stared up at him just like all of us, dark and expectant.
“I ain’t even supposed to be here,” Florian said. “And I guess that’s the whole damned prophecy.”
“I couldn’t talk face to face with living folks before all this. All this new change, I mean, that brought me back here in the flesh. That’s why I couldn’t explain who I was, when I followed you folks here—couldn’t speak with a human tongue, couldn’t say who I was. Don’t know how that changed. Us full-dead folks, we’re not meant to be able to talk to living folks at all. Not in any form. Not even in dreams.”
Florian sat on a dead bit of log right up at the top of the big sand ridge, wrapped in his huge black coat like a strong winter wind threatened to knock him aside. Even though I’d only ever known him as a broken-down dusty skeleton, he looked so much frailer than that now, like a living old man, shivering even in the strongest sun. Amy’s dog lay nose to paws at his feet, her dog that never needed to eat and came from nowhere into our world. Just like Florian had himself. Billy wandered around the periphery, not even glancing at Amy, all his killing and maiming fervor drained away. He and Mags should’ve just died back when the plague first hit, instead of hanging around to turn into this. Of course, you could say the same of all of us, sitting here, all except Lisa’s little born-human, stayed-human kiddie. Of course, nobody ever talks about all that.
“Those dreams I had about you,” I said, “back during the plague. You weren’t supposed to be able to do that? Come and... talk to me?”
Renee and Linc swiveled their heads around to stare at me. I ignored them. The breeze blew a sporadic mist of sand against Florian’s coat seams and pressed his thin pure-white hair flat against his face, each strand its own little down feather sticking to his skin, then lifted it up and let it flutter back again. “Don’t look like I was, no,” he said. “’Course, I didn’t mind it. I’d missed you.” He smiled a little. “And then, it was like the whole living world was coming back to me, stronger and stronger, while the place I’d gone to, after I died for the last time, was getting weaker and weaker.”
He reached a hand into his coat pocket, took out one of the smooth matte stones that were scattered like the start of some great mosaic all over the sands; this one was dull green, with a few brown streaks like muddy rivers chugging through mossy, overgrown ground. As he sat there, he examined it thoughtfully from all angles, a new-minted phenomenon, as though he hadn’t carried pocketfuls of them everywhere he went for centuries on end.
“The place you’d gone to,” Amy repeated. Her voice shook with nerves, though her eyes were calm; she wore one of Renee’s old shirts, her own torn to shreds by Stephen’s knife, with a stiff black jacket with “LCS” stitched on the sleeve pulled over it. The jacket was torn up, too, but she wouldn’t let it go. “When I... died, before, it wasn’t like everything just disappearing. It wasn’t just nothingness. It was like I went somewhere else, maybe only in my head, and then I came back. Like I sank to the bottom of the biggest lake there ever was, and then floated right back up again.”
She glanced at her mother, like she expected her to back her up with yep, big lake, dying is drowning, you’re absolutely right—but Lucy just kept quiet. Florian gazed down at his greenish-brown rock, like a tiny mossy riverbed in his hand. Then he placed it down in the sand by his feet.
“That don’t sound familiar,” he said. “Drowning and all that. But you got the rest of it right. It ain’t just nothing, afterward, when you die. It’s someplace. You can’t say exactly where it is, what it is—but it’s there, and you’re in it, and it’s too big for you ever to find the beginning or the end of it. And whatever it’s made of, that place, that’s what you’re made of too. Like it’s all a big giant beach, million times bigger than this one, and you’re one little speck of sand on one particular dune. And no matter what, no matter how strong the wind gets, it can’t ever shift you. You can’t ever be blown away.” He looked up at me. “Till now.”
A warm, pleasant breeze snaked over the sands, but Florian burrowed down deeper in his coat like it was December. He pointed out beyond the ridge, his finger finding some precise, faraway spot none of the rest of us could see. “Remember I told you there was a huge sand dune, used to be out on one of these beaches? Hundreds of feet high? They carted it all away in train-loads, boxcars of sand, to melt down and make into glass. Guess they got as much as they wanted, ‘cause they never came back again. Lately I feel like that dune, like something’s breaking up and hauling bits of me away, melting me into something I ain’t supposed to be—and whatever’s doing it just keeps coming back for more, and more, and more. It’s not just me, my particular dune, that’s disappearing. It’s the whole blessed beach, all around me.”
There’d been a beach in one of those dreams I’d been having, the ones I didn’t want to talk about: it looked like our beach but I knew, even as I dreamed, that it wasn’t, and when I stood on the shore, the water suddenly rose up around me, suffocating me in blackness. It wasn’t like drowning, though, not like that kid Amy insisted; it was more like a huge not-thing ate up all the water, and then it got even hungrier and devoured me. Another plague, a famine plague, like the one last year that left us all like this—except instead of just making you want to eat the whole world, this one actually went ahead and ate it. Except that was ridiculous. Because dreams were just dreams, they didn’t mean shit.
Except they meant a lot, last year, when it was Florian talking to me in them. They meant almost everything. And without them, we wouldn’t be here now.
“Like going blind,” Stephen suddenly said. He’d been stone quiet, looking strictly at the sand instead of Amy sitting inches away from him covered in her own blood, but now his chin jerked up and he came alive like Florian had flicked a switch. “Like not just that you can’t see, but there’s nothing there to see anymore—”
“All eaten up,” Florian agreed. “Big pieces of it, hauled away. All around me.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Stephen said softly. His eyes darted to Nick, still resting comfy at Florian’s feet, and then away again. “It happened to me, when I woke up this morning. And—a few times before and after that.” He grabbed a stick, speared the sand with it like he was trying to stab something underneath. “I couldn’t see anything. Or I’d see something, I thought, but it was all wrong. Like with... Nick.” He thrust the stick deeper into the ground, pressing his weight against it like it was a cane keeping him upright where he sat. “I saw things that didn’t really exist, at least not in this—”
“Bullshit,” Billy said. He’d been wandering round and round the ridge, shuffling quietly past murmuring nonsense to himself, but now he stopped in his tracks and glared at Florian, listing heavy to one side like he were deer’s-blood drunk. “Talk and talk, old man, you never did do a goddamned thing but talk. Nothing’s coming apart, it’s all right there, waiting for me, but I’m stuck in this goddamned body and I can’t get past the wall, to get to—”
“You’ve seen Death, too,” Amy said to Florian. “Just like I have. Haven’t you.”
Florian lifted up his hands, examined with infinite interest their bony knuckles and sunken aged skin. “Just can’t get used to havin’ actual flesh and fat on—but anyway. Not in a good long time, I haven’t. But when I was alive, alive for the first tim
e, I was a young fella and I got into a fight—never mind how it started. We were both pretty drunk, I guess.” His face closed up. “I got in a fight, and I killed the other fella. Got him good. And left him lyin’ there. Spent the next coupla years looking over my shoulder, but they never caught me, maybe they never even cared who killed him—he weren’t nothing, the other fella, wasn’t rich, no family, and I wasn’t nothing either. And nobody but us two saw me kill him.”
He had Amy in his sights now. Staring at her so hard and intent it was like light, a harsh white beam of light, invading a softly darkened room. “Least, I thought no one else saw me.”
Amy squeezed her hands together, slowly twisting them up, then down. Wringing them. Lucy’s arm tightened around her shoulder.
“I’d got married,” Florian continued. “Had a family. Bought a farm. I was walkin’ along in the trees one day, tryin’ to decide how much more land needed clearing, and there he was. Big as life, like they say. Big as night.” His mouth quirked, a self-deprecating little twist. “I thought it was the devil come for my soul. He laughed at me when I begged him, said there weren’t no devil and there weren’t no hell but that didn’t mean there was no kinda divine retribution. Told me all about the man I’d killed, stuff I’d never known about him startin’ with his name, but I somehow knew it was all true. Told me how the man died, how I’d killed him, like he’d been watching it all. He told me—” Florian’s hands went up again and he looked them over from all sides, flexing the fingers, flipping them slowly from palm to back to palm. “—that a person who takes someone else’s life, for whatever reason, that person makes himself a special friend of Death. A sorta adopted child. And it’s not like he does anything to ya, in particular, it’s not the lake of fire... but you can still feel him all around you, everywhere, in all sorta ways you never did before. Dogs your steps, even when you don’t see him or hear him and you’re just goin’ about your business. Like a weight on your chest, that you feel every time you breathe, or an itch that won’t go away no matter how you scratch. And it stays that way. Waking and sleeping. Night and day. For the rest of your life.”
Amy rocked back and forth where she sat, like she could somehow launch herself straight into the air and away from this whole conversation; then Lucy’s arms reached out tighter, almost mercilessly steady, holding her still. So Amy had killed someone too, some fellow human? What the hell did if matter if she had? Hoos had done all sorts of shit to survive the plague-year—even Tina didn’t claim dove-white sainthood, no matter how much she loved her holy talk—and in any case, why cry about it now? Whoever it was would probably have gotten sick and died anyway. Florian’s wax-pale hands disappeared into his sleeves, like they were too cold in this near-summer to remain exposed.
“Remember what your brother said, back before everyone got sick?” he asked me. “That undeads seemed to rise up in cycles—lots of ‘em at once, then for decades at a time almost none, then there they were all over again? He was the scientist and all that, at that big lab they went and built on my poor beach, I guess he’d know.”
Florian had been dead, actually dead, by the time that talk with my brother Jim ever happened. But of course he knew about it anyway. Somehow that hardly surprised me. “Boom and bust,” I said. “Dead folks tunneling up from the grave didn’t just suddenly start happening, at some particular date and time—it’d been going on for thousands of years. That’s part of why the Egyptians came up with embalming, thinking it’d keep them quiet in the tomb. And all that Samhain shit in Ireland.” Anyone who’d gone past the third grade in school knew that much, but I still liked saying it, still liked thinking about how they’d tried and tried to hold us back and nothing they did, nothing, ever helped. Until the lab stole my undeath from me, without the slightest warning, and wiped out the better part of the living while they were at it. Proud of yourself, Jim? “But the scientists could never figure out why it happened. Or why some dead people rose up again, and some stayed put in the graves. Or why sometimes we rose up in masses, everywhere, and other times a hoo could go their whole life without ever seeing one of us. Or why it only ever happened to human beings, not any other animals. All that tax money, all that research, and they never figured out a damned thing.”
Except, in the end, how to kill us dead, truly dead, for good. Except how to cut us few left off from each other like we were stranded on our own islands of exile, the brain-music that was our bridge and lifeline to each other silenced forever. Deafening silence. They managed that. The only justice was that almost none of the fuckers had survived to gloat about it.
“Only people,” Florian agreed. “Not animals or any other living thing—and not all people. Here and there. Some and not others. Now and then. ‘Cept in the boom times, so many of us were rising up we scared the hoos shitless. The Black Plague, so-called; the Detroit rise-up; the Pittsburgh Massacre—we showed them we could drive ‘em into a corner. We scared them. So they retreated behind their gates.”
The soft, quiet nostalgia it all stirred in me was a welcome pain. Without taking his eyes off Florian, Linc reached over and squeezed my hand; Renee pressed her cheek against my shoulder. They understood. Lisa sat there looking uncomfortable, removed, like she always had when she ran up against something only us three who’d been truly dead could understand. Naomi, her human kiddie, sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, leaning forward, frowning intently at Florian like he were a spymaster and she a field agent memorizing the secret codes.
“So things happened,” Renee said, “like they were supposed to happen.”
Florian laughed softly. His fingers emerged again out of his sleeves, grub-white insects tunneling slowly from dark folds of earth. “And just like Jessie’s brother said, seemed like the more time passed meant more boom times for us, more bust times for humans, and they didn’t rightly know what to think or do. These last few centuries, right before the plague? That’s when we just started havin’ boom after boom, hoos crowded into their little corners more and more, and that’s when they really started gettin’ scared. And nobody could figure out why it happened. They just didn’t know what to do. Then, I guess, they finally decided they’d had enough and built all those damned labs.”
The wind picked up, flinging fistfuls of fine-grained grit at our clothes, our hair; Billy stumbled past us, laughing at nothing in particular, and fell to his hands and knees in a bed of dead, splintered twigs. I turned my head away so I didn’t have to see him crawl. Florian watched Billy’s circuit impassively, a sort of pitying pitilessness lighting up his eyes as Billy laughed harder and louder, and shook his head.
“The way I see it, is this,” he said. “Life’s an arrow, a long flexible arrow, and however the shaft folds and bends and buckles, it always points toward death. That’s the road. That’s everybody’s road—or it’s supposed to be. Wouldn’t you suppose, when the labs started tryin’ to make a fork in the road away from him, take what was rightfully his, that Death’d get mad? Try to punish the folks who did it, shoot another arrow right through ‘em? But he never did, not that I could see, all those years of all those labs doing what they did and he never went near ‘em—he might be the most powerful thing there is, but I guess that don’t make him fast or wise. He never went near ‘em, and in the end, they did it to themselves. So it can’t be down to them, whatever this is that’s happenin’ now.” His palm ran lightly over his white hair, cupping his skull. “There’s no good reason for it, that I can rightly see. No good reason at all.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Amy and Lucy exchange glances, Lucy put a hand to her mouth as if something had just occurred to her that should’ve been obvious long ago. She didn’t say anything, though. They both kept dead quiet.
“I shouldn’t be sitting here,” Florian said. “I ain’t supposed to be here, in the flesh. I ain’t supposed to be able to open my mouth and talk to you, all you living folks, right now. This dog here—”
“Nick,” Naomi corrected him.
“This Nick here.” He smiled at Naomi, the absent grimace of a hoo so totteringly old he’d stopped remembering which kiddies were his own grandchildren and which were the neighbors’ brats years before. “Nick, this fella, he ain’t supposed to be here. Ain’t supposed to be anywhere near here. There’s a wall up between the living world and the dead”—here Billy halted in his pit-pony tracks, listening intently—”a great invisible wall so tall and so wide it’s big as the afterlife itself, no way to cross it and no reason to try. Except now the wall’s collapsing, bits and pieces comin’ off to make holes, and I ended up crawlin’ through one without ever meaning to or knowing how I did it. Just like this dog here, this Nick. That whole world’s collapsing, it feels like, pieces crumblin’ off it into slabs of pure nothing. And here, too.” Florian tapped his chest, hard, his bone-white knuckles lingering and digging in. “Inside here, bits and pieces are comin’ off too. There won’t be anything left of me, soon. Nothing left of my world, over the other side of the wall. And if what that boy said’s the truth, about things that shoulda stayed in my world—like me—comin’ into his, seein’ what he shouldn’t and then bits of those things crumblin’ off to make him go blind—then everything’s comin’ apart. Everything’s turnin’ to... nothing.”
He was looking me straight in the face again. “So I decided, if I can’t do nothing else, I can at least find my beach again, my beach I always missed. Find it and see it one last time, before it all crumbles into nothing. And find what’s left of the old gang, you last ones left, and try and warn you what’s coming.”
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