Dust

by Joan Frances Turner

  “So, are you okay?” Thoroughly embarrassed, like he could hear just how absurd he sounded but couldn’t help himself. “Is . . . do you need anything?”

  You tell me, Jim—some real answers? A plan? A clue? Some genetically engineered cow-sized deer? How about you work on wiping out your cornfield buddies, if your bosses really want to do some pest control? I wanted to laugh but I just shook my head. Linc was gazing fixedly at a clump of catmint, waiting for this to be over.

  “Will I see you again?” Jim asked.

  I shrugged, pulled my hand away and pointed at him. Up to you. He looked sad for a minute, then just nodded. “Well . . . good-bye then, Jessie.” He managed an awkward smile. “Not for good.”

  We watched until he was a speck against the trees and then a pinpoint. Linc took my arm and we headed for the woods.

  “He’d better watch himself,” he said. “Getting back wherever he’s going. Billy’s been sounding hungry lately.”

  I kept walking. Linc seemed unfazed by my silence. “Well, that doesn’t happen every day, does it? Fortunately enough.” He looked thoughtful. “We should’ve asked him just how far this has supposedly spread, shouldn’t we? I know hoos get hysterical and exaggerate everything but still, he sounded like—”

  “I know he could be lying, Linc, okay? You don’t need to say it, I’m not stupid.”

  “I didn’t say that, Jessie.” He glanced at me. “He’s hardly making up what we saw back there, is he? And if this is all an elaborate scheme to wipe us out, which we already could’ve guessed they wanted to do, it’s a pretty weird way to go about—”

  “You know I’m not stupid, Linc.” I curled my arm tighter in his. “I know he could be lying about Lisa, it’s not like she’s gonna come barreling out here to tell me he’s full of shit, I’m not completely—”

  “Jessie, don’t look for me to say you did the right thing, okay? I wouldn’t have done it, but it wasn’t my brother. Or my sister. Little late now, anyway.” We were back in the concrete tunnel, stopping every few steps to rub our feet clean of cornfield stink; he scraped his toes hard against the rough gray cement, enjoying a sound scratch. “Those things in the cornfield knew him, and it explains Teresa and all the rest of it, so maybe he isn’t lying . . .” Linc flung out a hand, helpless confusion creasing his face. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe it explains it too well.”

  I glanced down at the tunnel floor, the fleshy footprint streaks like smears of blistery butter. What was I supposed to do, break Jim’s neck because he said stuff I didn’t want to hear? They lie, the hoos, when they say we don’t care if we turn on our own flesh and blood (unlike them, all their revulsion, their screaming, their hate)—it’s our nightmare, just like theirs, only sometimes the hunger is just too strong to resist. And then, it’s too late.

  Linc pushed through the trees with an odd urgency, and it wasn’t until we were on top of it that I realized what he’d been looking for. My arm, eaten and rotted down to chipped-polish nails and too-white bone, lay at the river’s bend where it always had. I doffed an imaginary hat in tribute. He didn’t crack a smile.

  “Okay,” he said, “at least he doesn’t know about this. He being so specimen happy and all—”

  “Linc, you saw him back there, the forest might as well be radioactive. He’s not coming in here. He knows what’s waiting for him.”

  “What did he say about the sick-stomps? That they had more muscle mass? Teresa tossed Joe halfway across the damned park. You saw her.”

  I saw her. We all did. Did Joe know any of this, after all that yelling and carrying on? Didn’t know squat, I’d bet, because there was no way he’d keep any of this to himself after what Teresa did to him, after everything else between them—unless he’d meant to tell me, before we’d fought, and then said fuck it. But I hated Teresa too, he knew that, neither of us had ever forgiven her for Lillian; was he really pissed enough to shove something this big under his hat? Joe’s anger was a flash fire, flaring up huge and bright and scorching everything in his path but when it was over, it was over: He’d give you his hand, a good word, the last of the deer liver seconds later and mean it, what Linc and everyone else didn’t understand was that it really, truly wasn’t personal. That hoo-hunting fight was the only time, ever, I’d seen him carry a grudge.

  “Does anyone else know about this?” Linc asked me, gazing down at my arm like it might arc up on its fingers and scuttle away. “In the gang?”

  “I’m not sure.” I imagined the arm as some sort of deep-water creature, the remnants of decay on the bones the barnacles. The dry waving grass stems around it as seaweed. “I don’t think so.”

  Linc nodded. “It might be better that way. Maybe.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have just walked away from Joe, during the dance. He’d been sorry. I could tell. But what the hell was I supposed to do, lie about what I’d seen because he felt stupid he hadn’t seen it first? I’d seen Lisa do that placating crap with Dad while we were alive, all the time, and it never helped. Screw all his stewing in it, when he was ready to listen he knew where I was; he wasn’t getting any begging and pleading from me. And Linc wasn’t getting any vows of silence either.

  I reached into the pouch at my waist, stroked the surface of one of the lake stones; its solid smoothness felt restlessly alive somehow, all pins-and-needles, like the prickly sensation of touching a magnet covered in clusters of iron filings. I felt strangely better, a bit restored, cradling it in my palm. I was still so tired so much lately, no matter how I slept. Linc took a stone from his own pocket, tossed it idly from hand to hand, dove for it quickly when it dropped.

  “Do you think we’ll get sick?” I asked Linc. “I mean, sick like those things? Jim said he didn’t know how the disease works in us, what if we just get a few good weeks or months and then—”

  “If I do, if I get sick like that, I want you to kill me. Just knock me down and stomp until the job’s done. I mean it, Jessie, no joke.” He shuddered. “I’m not hanging around to turn into that.”

  “Only if you do the same for me.”

  Instead of answering Linc flung his arms around me, an insanely beatific look on his face, and when I realized he was only lampooning Jim we were already punching and kicking in the dirt, laughing but still fighting, raggedy hostile waves of shock and exhaustion oozing out like asphalt tar in the summer heat. My lost arm went to powder under our weight, whitish-gray ash smeared all over our legs and backs. We backtracked and found a little hollow of mossy dirt among the oaks, fell asleep in it clutching lake stones in our fists. At some point I was half-awake thinking how Florian would never believe any of this, and then I thought, Oh, yes, that’s right, never mind, and I squeezed my eyes shut around thick inky tears and went to sleep.

  The next night, I went back by myself to see. Jim was nowhere to be found and no more singing, no more moaning and begging, all the cornfield hoos were dead. A couple looked like they’d dropped where they stood, but most had broken necks, stomped skulls, guts neatly torn open but none of it eaten. A pile of smaller skinned dead things lay near them, untouched. The stench rose from their bodies without stopping, not rot but a smothering, sweaty miasma like a damp toxin-steeped fog, and I had to stop to be sick before I could get away.

  Who’d done this? Teresa? She was too strong to be sick, much too strong. I didn’t know what to believe. Like Linc had said, now it was too late.

  10

  Renee didn’t even thank me for the lake stones. Why had I bothered? She kept them, though, ignoring Billy’s taunts about hoo-wannabes and their two-bit tombstones, and started following me everywhere, asking to be hunt buddies, wanting to go with me on watch. So whatever happened to I don’t waaaaaanna learn to hunt, I can’t haaaaaaaandle it today, I’m traaaauuumatized? I had no time for all this, let her go be Teresa’s new best friend—if Teresa ever showed up long enough to accept the honor. The others were getting restless too, missing even the onerous nightly fetching of flesh too long dead: At least it
was a routine, like something normal, though it wasn’t normal at all. This new feeling, it was just a void.

  Me, I kept my mouth shut because there wasn’t any chance to talk. Less than a dozen of us, over fifteen hundred acres of space, and still there was no place to go without someone tagging behind you, Ben shouting, Billy bellowing, Renee pleading, Mags picking fights, everyone in everyone’s business every single night and when had we all grown so damned loud? Only Joe was quiet, sullen and turning his back whenever I approached, and with no way to get away without someone dogging our steps Linc and I kept mum, quiet as he’d ever said we should be. Then one night as we were stripping a deer to the bones along came Teresa, walking in from the north road with a tin bucket swinging from one hand and something clenched tightly in the other.

  “So, the prodigal leader smells fatted calf and comes scurrying back.” Billy deliberately took another large bite of the liver, Teresa’s favorite. “Sorry, we really woulda saved the best bits but there’s just not enough to . . .”

  He trailed off, startled, when he saw the box of matches in her palm, then laughed. “Well, souvenirs now. Some hoo must’ve dropped them. They already wet, or should I toss ’em in the drink?”

  Teresa headed right past him across the old baseball field, little tremors coming and going along her arms as if the bucket were weighted with bricks. We followed, all of us, as she stopped at a cluster of benches near the riverbank. There was an old fire pit built in the center, a bare dirt square bordered by bricks; she put the bucket down and with her free hand yanked branches from the nearest trees, tooth-stripped them straight and bare, threw them into the pit until she had a good-sized pile of kindling. We just kept watching, certain this was some kind of stunt or joke.

  “What are you doing, Teresa?” Joe asked, without a trace of belligerence.

  Teresa fumbled with the matchbox, lips pressed together in concentration—she had lips again, grown newly full and fleshy to cover her dead grinning teeth for the first time in years. Her cheeks were fleshy too, the rot retreating, and under saplike beads of refinery-stinking sweat her skin was smooth and firm, almost springy over solid cushions of flesh. Her hair was still lank and limp but it wasn’t dead straw anymore, it had stopped falling out. Her hands, still inhumanly bony, trembled badly but she kept at it until she pulled out a match, her whole body taut and twitching with hunger. A newborn’s hunger.

  “Teresa?” Mags said. “Put those away.”

  Teresa pursed her full new lips, studying the thin strip of striking paper. “Just go back to your meat.”

  We didn’t go back to our meat. We couldn’t go back to it because Teresa was trying to light a match, set a fire, and even without Ben’s half-charred face to remind us we knew what fire could do. Even Renee had heard Annie’s story, poor dead Annie. All those gate guards, with their flamethrowers.

  “Put those down,” I said, the words springing from me by themselves. “Now, or we’ll take them.”

  Teresa gave me a long, triumphant stare. She knew I knew, I could see in her eyes she knew, and it didn’t matter because she was far beyond us now, her illness making her something other, no need to be careful around us because she wasn’t us anymore. “Try,” she said.

  I didn’t know Linc was beside me until he took my hand, and then of all folks Renee was there too, the three of us heading for a fight before Joe grabbed and tackled me, pinning me as I flailed and cursed and spat. Renee fell back, scared, and Ben and Linc threw themselves on Teresa, grabbing for the matchbox; Teresa tossed Linc aside like trash from a speeding car and then there was the sound of lightning cracking a tree trunk in half, the sound of Ben’s arm wrenched sideways and back by Teresa’s clenched teeth. His hands lost their grip on her neck and he screamed and screamed.

  Mags gasped out loud. Teresa bit and pulled and crunched at Ben’s shoulder until I heard another snap, and then he staggered away moaning in pain and tumbled heavily to the ground. Teresa, the soul of calm, picked her matchbook up from the dirt and stood there, grinning, happy, shaking so hard with hunger pangs her rings clinked on her fingers like wind chimes.

  “Anyone else?” she said.

  Renee grabbed my hand like Linc had, and I pressed back without thinking. Joe stood beside us, ready to jump again if we went anywhere near Teresa. Linc crawled to where Ben lay twitching on the ground. Ben, oozing from the mouth, didn’t move.

  After several clumsy tries Teresa lit a match, tossed it into the pit and watched the pile of kindling slowly flicker to life. She yanked hunks of deer meat off our abandoned carcass, speared them on another branch and held them over the flames, pacing and skirting like someone waltzing with a live grenade; the smell of roasting flesh crawled through the air and Renee started to retch. Teresa chewed greedily at every burned scrap, sucking her fingers for the grease and letting out little sated sighs. I studied every face to see who else was properly sick at the sight and who looked like they wanted a taste, just a little bitty taste, and when I growled low and threatening at nothing, I saw Joe smile. Billy growled too, confused but not wanting to be left out. Ben still hadn’t moved.

  Her meal complete, Teresa picked up the tin bucket and tossed it at Sam’s feet, waiting; finally he grabbed it, shuffled silently to the river and back and doused the fire. I felt a weak sort of gratitude, watching it steam up and die. Some water splashed from the pit and Billy, feet dampened, jumped and shouted as if flames were curled up in the fat droplets ready to burst forth. Teresa shook her head in disgust.

  “Pathetic,” she sneered. “Scared of a little fire. No wonder we’re stuck out here, while the Rat Patrol’s roaming all over the whole county, half of Chicago—I should’ve known better than to come back to this hellhole. None of you could handle what I’ve seen. None of you could make the change.”

  Her voice snapped with fury but it was happy too, a high-flying manic happy like her eyes when she stared into the fire she’d made. Nobody tried to stop her, nobody got in her way as she headed for the footbridge leading to the parking lot and the outside road. Billy kicked and stomped on the bits of branch in the fire pit, reducing them to splinters.

  “Careful, sweetie,” Mags pleaded. “They might still be hot—”

  “What the hell was that all about?” he shouted, grinding his heel into the ash. “Huh? What’s wrong with that bitch?”

  Billy and Mags danced on the fire pit’s stone border, crushing it to powder, while everyone else gathered around Ben. I pushed my way through and found him rocking back and forth on his side, trying to hide his arm beneath him like something shoplifted.

  “You okay?” I asked, knowing he wasn’t. “How bad is it?”

  “My arm,” Ben whispered, cradling it as it crooked nearly backward from the shoulder; his teeth chattered, he was fever-warm. “I can’t move it, it hurts.” Linc tried, gently, to straighten it out and Ben stiffened with agony. “Don’t.”

  “You’ll live,” I said, because that was how we talked to each other when we were really hurt; pity was wasted, panic fatal. “Hell, look at me—even if you lose it, you’ll hunt fine.”

  Linc glanced at me, both of us silently thinking the same thing: Should we just tear it off, right now? It’d hurt, Ben would pass out from the pain, but he’d live. Adjust. Hunt again. We might have to, if it didn’t heal. Sam looked up at both of us.

  “No,” he said, baring his teeth.

  “It hurts,” Ben repeated, and closed his eyes. “Please go away now.”

  We left Sam sitting with him and headed for the gazebo, appetites gone, everyone staring sidelong at everyone else for a hint of the secrets they were concealing; I heard the word change in murmured snatches of talk like a coin glinting in a river, pretended it meant nothing to me. Why had she done it in front of us, why didn’t she just keep scavenging in private? Maybe just to show she could. Maybe it was a test, we were supposed to have been intrigued and amazed and demand to be transformed too. If this is what it does to you? I’d rather be ground into
compost.

  Joe held back, taking my arm, and drew me aside into the trees. He looked me in the eye for the first time since the dance.

  “So I guess you know,” he said. “That Teresa’s . . . changed.”

  “I told you,” I said, hard and cold. “I told you it wasn’t just ’maldies. Now let go of my goddamned arm.”

  “I didn’t know what the hell they were,” Joe hissed, sinking his fingers in harder. “Or if it had anything to do with Teresa. I’ve been following her, trying to figure out what she’s up to, she’s been buddying up to the Rat Patrol just like I said—I told you that, didn’t I, you can go check for yourself if you think I’m such a liar. Inside that abandoned church out on the highway, the big gray building. There’s a bunch of them there right now.”

  “You’re sure it was them? You got close enough to—”

  “Jessie, I was in the Rat for a good decade or three, I think I know Rommel and Ron and their little psycho inner circle by sight. They were all out there, just cooling their heels, a little country vacation. I left before they saw me.” He leaned in closer. “And tell you what, they all had that same smell to them. Like she does. That same look, like their faces were filling out again. You couldn’t miss it, not from yards away.”

  He paused, letting that sink in. I stared right back, letting him make whatever he wanted of the silence, and when he smelled the animosity on me the guitar chords in his head started up sharp, angry, loud.

  “You’re getting fucking paranoid,” he said.

  “Hard not to, when you’ve been flat-out lying to me—”