“Kill yourself, coward. You’re not worth the trouble it’d take me.” I wiped my feet against the dirt, trying to scrub away all contact. “And you must be a hoo, everything you think you know comes from movies—we’re not contagious. If we only were, we’d run this fucking planet.”
He just lay there. Another one started scratching at the ground and they all kept moaning in imitation song. Linc was now awkwardly patting something in a mud-caked red skirt that clutched his arm and sobbed. “C’mon,” I said, yanking him off. “We’re leaving.”
“But we’ve got to find out—”
“You know what I’ve found out? That they’re psycho and their smell’s going to make me pass out. Let’s get out of here and go someplace we can talk.”
The cornfield is wide, I cannot get o’er. The stench overpowered everything around it, our smells too, so that picking up our path again was a wearying chore. Florian and then all this, it was too much. I was vibrating with exhaustion, the hard sunlight beseeching me to lie down and sleep, and I had the trees and cool shady rest nearly in my sights when Linc and I started, and froze.
Someone was standing fifty yards away in the grass and bare dirt, strands of hair blowing over his face, frozen tense as a rabbit in sight of a cobra; he had a bulging red rucksack slung on one shoulder, a big damp spot on its side. Maybe a birdwatcher, camper, some hoo who came out here last night or at dawn and then got lost. At least he wasn’t trying to sing. He stared at me and I stared back, and it was as if something unspooled between us, a thread, a wire filament too thin for the eye, and he had one end and I had the other and our fingers were caught and tangled together like fish flailing in the same net. I couldn’t pull away. Behind us our friends grew fainter, wailing outright in lieu of making music.
“Just a hoo,” Linc murmured. “Just what we need. Let’s go scare him off.”
The human didn’t move as we approached him, as that thread between us wrapped tighter and tighter around my fingers and tugged me forward. Did I know him? How could I? Early thirties at most, neatly combed hair gone prematurely gray, wire-rimmed glasses, jeans, a rumpled blue shirt, a face so bland and ordinary you forgot what he looked like looking right at him. His smell was pure hoo. The rucksack gave off an odor of greasy plastic and, beneath that, something raw and meaty. He swallowed hard when we approached, eyes wide. He was getting our smell now too.
“Out,” Linc said, and showed his teeth. Linc has very long, very sharp teeth, even for our kind; he almost never needed to do more, the few times we had to frighten away vagrants. This fellow, though, didn’t even seem to see him. He was too busy looking at me.
“Jessie?” the stranger said.
Surprise turned me still. It couldn’t be someone from school—what would I be now, twenty-four, twenty-five? Unless I really had lost all touch with time, he was too old. Someone I knew. How would I know him? It was a guess, a joke. Linc smelled my anxiety and growled, drooling coffin juice. The hoo took a step backward.
“Can you understand me?” he said, his voice shaking, a hand to his nose. He looked like he desperately wanted to bolt and run, like he couldn’t, like whatever thread, filament had tangled me up had caught him fast as well. “Please just nod, or . . . something, if you can, I—”
“Jim,” I said.
That’s what came unbidden from my mouth but of course, he couldn’t hear it: just the throaty grunt of a creature without a tongue, even less human-sounding than when I’d tried to say Lisa’s name, years past. His voice. I didn’t recognize this gray-headed weary-eyed shit-scared stranger but he’d somehow stolen Jim’s voice for himself, my brother, my older brother, Jim. I could feel his feet twitching like they were my own, itching to run away, but he didn’t. Could sense the nausea rising in his throat, at how Linc and I smelled, but he didn’t get sick. He stood there. He let us both come closer, eyes full of shock and longing like I’d somehow turn back into the human he’d known if he just stared at me long enough. My stomach had become a vast hollowness, the full measure of the air you fall through jumping from a skyscraper to the pavement.
“Your arm,” he said, “what happened to your arm? Where’d it go?” All thick and congested-sounding, like he might cry. “It’s me, Jessie, it’s really me. You can understand me, can’t you?” Now he was blinking back tears in earnest. I could smell the fear seething inside him, rising like steam from his skin. He stood his ground anyway. “Your eyes are just the same, Jessie, I—”
“Jessie,” Linc said, a hand on my arm, “let’s get out of here.”
“I’m sorry, Jessie,” Jim said, drawing shallow, ragged breaths. “I know I shouldn’t be here, I’m so sorry—”
“Jessie?” Linc’s fingers were gripping harder now, insistent. “This does no good. You know how little good this does. We’re getting out of—”
“Tell me you understand me,” Jim pleaded. “Nod your head, anything, please just—”
“No,” I said, I shouted, to him, to Linc. It wasn’t “no” to those human ears, though, but a guttural grunt of unuhhh that could have meant anything he wanted it to, and Jim kept wiping tears from his eyes and it was really him, Jim, my family, seeing me standing here in the full sunlight stinking and rotten and suddenly I was more scared than he could ever be, I wanted to turn and run fast and mindless as Lisa had when she saw me, but that luxury of swift movement was gone forever and I could only start backing away, shaking my head. The rucksack banged against Jim’s shin, releasing a fresh burst of its greasy, meaty smell as he shoved aside his own fear, as he came right up to me like we’d been parted a day, an hour.
“Jessie,” he said, a sound like crying and laughing at once. “Oh, my God. You’re still here. It’s all right. It’ll all be all right. You’re still here.”
He threw his arms around me, and I cried out in fear.
9
Linc growled and leapt, and if I’d let him break my brother’s neck then and there maybe somehow it’d all have been different, we’d all be safe in the woods laughing our asses off right now, but some buried, accursed thing in me wanted to hold Jim next to me just as much as push him away, and I pulled Linc off before he could snap bones. Jim staggered backward, breathing hard, holding his greasy rucksack before him like protection or a bribe.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said, giving Linc a quick, fearful glance. “I can’t anyway. There’s nothing flammable in here.” He put the rucksack down on the ground between us, backed away from it. “I’m alone. Can you understand me? Jessie? Just a little bit?”
He won’t hurt us, can’t hurt us. He actually thought that needed telling. All hoos are alike. Jim, my brother. He came back. He’s not running away. The smell, when he touched me. Linc stood between us, ready to spring.
“Please,” Jim kept saying, holding his hands up like a hostage. “You can understand me, I see it in your eyes. You’re still in there. I know you can’t talk to me, I know it’s—just nod or shake your head again, or something? Please, Jessie. Please.”
I didn’t have a damned palate anymore, and he wanted to meet and greet. I drooled down my front, spitting onto his stained shoes, and he trembled a little bit as he scraped them clean against the dirt.
“I fixed up the house,” he said. His voice skittered and hopscotched over the syllables, the desperate hollow chatter of someone who knew they had absolutely nothing to say but had to keep blithering, blathering, anything but the horror of silence. “It’s pale blue now, sort of weathered blue, New Englandy? Remember those pictures you liked when you were little, the saltbox homes in Maine and Massachusetts? That blue. The old house. We’re still there, Lisa and I. She was with this guy, it didn’t work out, she moved back home again. I mean, the thing is, I mean, she was there, she moved back, but now—”
“Why are you here?” I said, and saying it shook something loose inside me, like fingers relaxing an arthritic grip, so I kept saying it even knowing he didn’t get a word. Human words. He was showing off to taunt me, all his
fancy tongue-palate-teeth family talk-talk-talk. “Why now? Nine years of nothing, and now you—”
“Your arm,” Jim repeated, almost mournful like it’d been his own limb lost. “What happened to it?”
“Jessie.” Linc kept pulling on my wrist. “This is a farce. Let’s go back.”
“—can’t even understand a word I say, can you?” I gave Jim a shove, just a light punctuation of speech for us but it made him gasp and throw his arms out too late for balance, hitting the soft ground with a squishy thud. “Can you, human?”
“Jessie, I don’t know what’s going on here but if this is your brother, I’m President Carter. Let’s go. Now.”
“Caaaaaaa-huhhh.” Jim suddenly moaned, a perfect echo of Linc: mouth fallen open, the C almost a G, the T entirely lost when voiced to a ruined tongue. “That was a name, right? Wasn’t it? Somebody’s name?” He hunched his shoulders forward, imitating the gesture we used to mean proper name. “As opposed to car. Caaaauhhh.” A shorter sound, palm held flat and sweeping away from his body to indicate moving vehicle. “As opposed to care. Cayyuhhhhhh.” Chin dipped ground-ward, arm curved like mother around infant. Then he looked up, shaking again. “I got that mostly right, didn’t I?”
I was cold all over. Linc looked to me in utter astonishment, but I had nothing. How would you feel if your slice of pot roast started talking to you, fluently? Jim sat there in the dirt, not gloating or savoring our surprise, just waiting to see what we’d do to him now.
“We’ve worked out maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty of your words,” he said, a new note, quiet, a bit authoritative, creeping into his voice. Seizing on something he’d proven he knew about to try to calm himself down. “Our psycholinguistic researchers, I mean, not me personally—I’m a biologist myself. A dime-a-dozen biologist. We’ve guessed the words, saying we’ve actually worked them out is being kind. It’s hard to do when half of your communication is telepathic. Your brains are still black boxes to us.”
I remembered the first time Joe spoke to me, the nonsensical sound-strands that twisted themselves immediately into a tight, taut thread of actual words. It hurt, that feeling, but a good hurt like that sore tooth your tongue needs to worry. Humans didn’t understand it, couldn’t talk head-to-head, didn’t have brains like ours. But apparently they were trying. I supposed I shouldn’t be surprised. I thought all they ever wanted to learn about us was how to kill us. Or maybe this was somehow part of that. Why are you here, exactly, big brother?
I motioned for Jim to get up. He’d done the right thing, he’d gone and made me curious. “Get me a stick,” I told Linc.
“I don’t believe this.” Linc actually bared his teeth at me, something he never did. “Jessie, this is about the most pisspoor idea since—”
“So go running to Teresa if you don’t like it, if you can find her—but if you’re staying, go get me a goddamned stick and then let me do the talking.”
He gave me a look of the martyred and staggered off to the nearby trees, pulling away a suitable branch and practically slapping it into my palm. I pointed the branch at Jim, making him take a few more steps backward, then wrote in the rain-dampened dirt between us:
Lab?
My letters were clumsy, scrawling, it took me a few seconds to remember how to shape a B. Jim nodded, all excited we really could somewhat, somehow, speak to each other. Looked a little scared too. “Great Lakes Thanatology Lab,” he said. “Near Octave Chanute Beach in Gary, there’s been a large zombie infesta—presence out there forever. It’s possibly interesting for other reasons too, but that’s for the geologists to work on. Like I said, I’m biology.” He smoothed his hair, his hand like a soft pink paddle. “I got an internship there my last year of college, right before you died. You wouldn’t believe the fights Dad and I had about it. It wasn’t ‘safety’ he was worried about, just, God forbid I go and study zombies because that means having to acknowledge out loud that zombies actually exist—”
Okay, enough of that word; Linc was starting to growl, hearing it, and I didn’t blame him. I waved the branch until Jim quit babbling, then wrote it there in the dirt, Zombie. Big, flourishing Z. Then wiped it out with a sweep of my foot, shaking my head violently. Jim got the point.
“Oh,” he said, and laughed nervously, the light dawning. He had the decency to look halfway embarrassed. “Undead? Living dead? Revived?”
I shrugged. He nodded. “I got an internship,” he repeated. “There’s a lab in New York that wanted to recruit me but this place is ground zero for the really interesting research, all the—anyway, after the accident I couldn’t leave. Lisa wasn’t doing well, she had to leave school, she needed someone to be with her. She was wandering around, going out to all the graveyards, saying she wanted to see where the accident happened . . . and then she came home one day, crying, sick, looking like she’d seen a ghost.” He swallowed hard. “And, well, she had.”
He waited, like this was my cue to burst into tears and give him a big hug. I kept my arm down.
“I looked for you again,” Jim said. His voice was too steady, too calm, like he was balancing something fragile on it and if it broke he would break too, everything holding us both upright would shatter. “Lisa never forgave herself for running away. Never. She just wasn’t . . . ready, for what she saw. She never went wandering again, after that. But that’s the good thing about being affiliated with the lab, you get clearance to go places where otherwise—I looked for you, Jessie, I looked everywhere. For Mom and Dad too—”
I held my hand up swiftly, and Jim saw my silent question. Shook his head, a shadow of grief flitting over his face. Like I’d thought, then. Linc shuffled his feet, awkward and restless at all this family blather, but didn’t try to jump in.
“I came out here,” he said. “I looked but I thought you were around the cemetery instead, I didn’t know exactly where—I mean, I wasn’t even sure how much of you, I mean, the real you, was left—”
I recognized Lisa, you hoo-asshole, I tried to talk to her, she’s the one who turned tail and ran and you stand there asking what’s left of me, of my insides, my memories. Goddamned humans. Goddamn all of you—
“Please don’t,” he said, his voice skittering higher, as I started growling at him too, my body tensing to leap. “I’m sorry—”
“Coward.” Linc laughed. Stepping back to see what I’d do to him next. Coward. Gawwwwwhh. No hand signs. Add that one to your C-words, human.
Jim stood there, staring at me, curling his fingers into fists to stop them from trembling with fright. And he studies us for a living, or so he says. This is Jim, my Jim, my brother? What happened to you? Remember how you used to take me for rides down the abandoned back roads, so fast the car would rattle, you could shriek out loud with the fear and fun of it, and a couple of times we saw shambling, half-hidden figures at the side of the road and you just laughed, shot them the finger, sped up even faster? Never saw any cops, though, none of them would patrol hazard country for any amount of money. Remember when I pulled one of the town break-in alarms, everyone screaming and running to their basements like they’d be eaten alive and you dared me to do it, I could’ve been arrested, sued, expelled but you helped cover for me? How Mike Hinshawe from my class, always shouting about how he was gonna go out there and kick some fucking zombie ass the first chance he got he wasn’t some goddamned fucking pussy no sir, heard that siren go off and literally wet himself? Pissed his pants in front of everyone. We laughed until we cried. Nobody ever found out it was me. Remember the time you got between me and Dad, and hit him back? Who are you now with those beaten-down eyes, bathing in a stench of defeat and fear? I can’t recognize you. Why should I listen to a word you say? A reason. Just one good reason.
“I won’t lie to you,” Jim said. His eyes sad and regretful now like he could see just what I was thinking, like he knew and didn’t blame me. “My job is about finding a safe, effective way to wipe all of you out. So ‘all of you’ were family? Loved ones? Doesn’t ma
tter, does it, when you’re supposed to be dead anyway? Right?” He paced back and forth, agitated. “I told myself that for a long time, Jessie, that that was what you’d want, that I’d be releasing you from your torment. You and Mom and Dad. What are you all but a lot of moaning brain-dead cripples, staggering around rotting in slow motion? Right? No more than that?”
The pleading defiance in Jim’s voice as he babbled at me, that was Dad after a fight, after another explosion of temper drained him dry, the please please look you gotta, a saliva bubble forming on his lip. He had Dad’s hands too, broad meaty palms with long thin fingers stuck on like twigs in clay, that same sharp curve to his lower lip. I was a little copy of Mom, everyone said. Me and Lisa both.
“It’s not genocide,” Jim was saying. Talking to himself now. “It’s euthanasia. Then you find out the brain-dead cripples actually think, and those moaning sounds are them talking to each other, God knows what they say but still their own language with its own rules, and then you see a body and a body walking in the trees, always the same two bodies together, like they mean something special to each other. And they laugh, and if something wakes and sleeps and thinks and reasons and laughs and communicates and pair-bonds that means it might even have emotions, it might feel grief and pain—”
Was I supposed to applaud all this? Seriously? My God, Jim, I know nobody credits even full-fledged hoos who can’t talk properly with working brains but you’re a scientist and this all shocks you? Sad, that’s just damned sad. He stood there, rocking back and forth on his heels, vibrating with tension. I don’t recognize you, brother, my flesh might be different but you’ve transmogrified straight down to your bones. But what you are, you are. Sad as that is, apparently.
“I changed my mind, Jessie,” he said, quieter, hands thrust into his pockets. “Even before I knew I had family out here. But you can’t say that, not where I work. You can’t say it anywhere. There’s more than a few of us, you know, that feel like this, we wanted to do something to—”
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