“Jessie, I didn’t know what they were, okay, and I just goddamned told you what I do know. Whatever this is, Teresa’s got it, the Rat smell like they’ve got it.” His grip loosened, eased, and he slid his hand away. “And you said you’ve been feeling sick.”
I just kept staring at him. I couldn’t think how the hell else to react to that.
“What are you talking about?” I demanded.
“You’ve been tired all the time, right? Feeling hot? Feverish? Under the weather?” He was looking down at me not in triumph, no gotcha glances, but genuine concern. “You’re eating okay, you don’t smell all that different but—”
“All that different?” I shoved him, I didn’t want a fight, not another one like the last one, but he was revving up to deserving it. “So who’s the crazy paranoid here? Yeah, I’m goddamned tired and worn out, I have a right to be: Teresa’s acting nuts, Renee’s up my ass, you’re always pitching a fit, those sick hoos are all over our woods like beetles on a feeder—”
“I took care of them,” Joe said. “Don’t worry.”
Those bodies in the cornfield. Another question answered. Maybe. “All that different? I wanna know what you mean, ‘all that’ different—”
“Jessie, it’s like I keep telling you, I just want you to be okay.” He folded his arms, stepping back when I tried to push him, not letting me set him off. “If you’re just tired and that’s all then fine, great, but Teresa’s watching you, I told you she’s got you singled out—”
“So the best way to make sure I’m okay is to make up some bullshit story about ’maldies and—”
“I told you, I didn’t know what the fuck they were! You were right, they smelled human, they bleed red, I should’ve guessed it myself, I’m sorry!” He curled his fist to strike out at an oak in frustration; his arm hovered clenched and suspended in midair like a stop-motion frame, then he slowly let it drop. “You were right. And Teresa, the Rat, I know they know something, they know a lot. All Teresa ever let slip once was that it has something to do with a lab.”
I nodded, calm and easy like this didn’t signify anything in particular to me. Joe bared his teeth, irritated as he always was when he couldn’t be my expert on everything. “The Rat’s all over Gary and Burns Harbor and everywhere else the scientists are meant to be, they’d know all about this better than she ever would. Maybe that’s another reason she wants in with them, they can all—so who the fuck asked you two in on the conversation? Get the hell out of here before I crack your little skulls in half!”
Linc and Renee turned and walked away; I saw Linc’s sardonic expression, Renee’s long sharp mother-of-pearl teeth scraping and grinding at her lip, and then they went back through the trees arm in arm.
Joe sneered at their retreating backs, spitting in their wake, and I rubbed at a temple starting to ache. Yeah, look here, Joe, this means I’m a plague-dog for sure, it can’t just be you’re all a goddamned pain in my head, my neck, my ass. I was holding a string of half-truths and unfinished stories fragile as Florian’s dusty powdery bones, a paper chain dropped in a puddle, but I had to figure it all out because hoos were getting sick, when they got sick they always took it out on us, what if they decided to try to burn us out, if we all—enough. Enough decline, enough dropping into dust, enough of everyone falling ill. There had to be a way to stop it.
“I don’t know much either,” I said. That was nothing but the truth.
What if this really was just as bad for us as hoos, if we all died? Like Lisa might die, and Jim? Joe. Linc. Ben—I shoved that last thought out of my head, you couldn’t kill anyone just with teeth, not for trying. Ridiculous. Joe was right, he’d heal up.
Joe actually smiled at me, the proud, almost proprietary smile of someone who thinks you have a problem only they can solve. “We’ll figure it out, Jessie,” he told me. “One way or another, we’ll get the jump on Teresa. If she thinks this is gonna be good for her, all this, whatever it is, she’s in for a surprise.”
When Teresa made us take out Lillian, after Teresa jumped her for the gang leadership and blinded her and Happy Tsarina’s first royal decree was making us two stomp her, we did as told; we let Florian and Annie and Sam kiss her good-bye and dragged her far out in the woods where nobody’d have to hear or watch, she was sobbing, she’d lost all her courage when she lost her remaining eye, Don’t do it, you fucking backstabbers, you’re happy about this, I don’t deserve to die again. Don’t do it. Don’t. Joe kept talking to her all the way to the clearing, calm, quiet, no furious guitar chords and no sneering at her soft-headed hoocow pleading. We’re doing you a favor, Lillian. You can’t hunt this way. Can’t fight. You’d die slow. We’re making it quick. You’d do it for us. You know you would.
“We’ll figure it out,” I repeated. “What Teresa’s up to. This sickness. All of it.”
“Together,” said Joe.
Lillian just stood there in the clearing, waiting, no matter all her hoocow pleading and sniveling she wouldn’t lie down to die, we’d have to knock her down. We’d have to fight. Joe nodded slow in renewed respect and I started backing away, backing away and now he was grabbing me instead, I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do this to her. Yes you will, he told me, still quiet, still calm, so much merciless pity in his eyes I couldn’t stand looking at him, at Lillian. Yes you will. Because you’re not leaving me to do this all by myself, Jessie, not if you love me. I’m not shouldering this one all by myself.
“I’m not sick,” I told Joe. “I’m just tired. Sick and tired. Of everyone and everything.”
Joe nodded. Sadness flittered fast and evasive across his face.
“I know the feeling,” he said.
Joe, I can’t do this, I can’t stomp a blind—
Lillian’s my friend. Not yours. And she won’t last like this. That’s why I’m doing it, not for Teresa. But I’m not living with doing it all alone.
So we both did it. Quick. She started crying again when we were on her but that didn’t last long. Afterward we sat in the woods together, far from her body, not saying anything. So that’s that, was all I kept thinking. That’s that for that. And now there’s no there there. One thing when it’s an out-of-control pickup truck that does it, another when it’s me. Us. Joe was right. Let it be both of us.
Where have you been, Joe? You and Teresa?
“We’ll find out what all this really means,” he said. “Okay?”
I nodded and smiled, the reluctant sort of smile you’re supposed to give someone to show they’ve cheered you up, and we went back to the gazebo together in silence. The bugs still chittered and clung to the remains of his slowly disintegrating leather jacket, his face was still sunken and decayed; he looked the same, he smelled the same. But things were different. I could feel it. And I knew I wouldn’t figure out why unless I did it without him.
11
Ben died that night. We found him huddled stiff and motionless next to Sam, the arm Teresa bit gone black to the shoulder; it was charred-looking like his face but sticky and disintegrating, like tar bubbling up from asphalt. The bugs had deserted his body and a smell like human flesh, cooked flesh, seeped from his skin. We dragged him to Florian’s spot on the hill and left him there: me, Linc, Joe, Billy and Sam, who’d been Ben’s best friend. Sam took Ben’s old fedora hat, the only remnant of him, and stood there turning it over and over in his hands, wringing it like a dishcloth.
“She’s dead, Sam,” Billy reassured him, with vigorous nodding from Mags. “The bitch might be flexing her muscles lately—and I’d like to know where she got muscles—but even she still needs to sleep. We’ll track her down, if she doesn’t come back, and then she’s gone. Slowly.”
We all murmured our agreement, Joe included—he really had thought Ben would get up again, he looked just as shocked as anyone. We all knew, inside, that we wouldn’t see Teresa again. We should’ve let Sam take the watch shift, so he could go mourn in solitude, but Linc and I had bigger priorities lying at the wood’
s edge and we left him sitting on the side of the hill, still turning that rag of a hat around in his hands. I gave Linc Joe’s version of events as soon as we were out of earshot.
“Jim won’t be there,” Linc warned me, as we followed the Sullen Trail as fast as we could. “He’ll be holed up in that lab playing with his little samples, God knows what else he knows about all this that we didn’t get to—”
“I’m not looking for him, for Christ’s sake,” I snapped, kicking aside ancient, petrified horse clods as I walked. None of you could make the change. Jim “didn’t know” what this disease did to us? I could help him out there, save for those few hunger pangs Teresa was about as weak and delicate as an Olympic athlete. “Who we should be looking to talk to is the Rat but not if they’re anything like Teresa now, we can’t fight them off by ourselves—I just want to go back to the cornfield, see what’s there now. See if anything’s there.”
“Yeah, well, you won’t find anything, even Joe the great all-seeing prophet made that clear—if he told the truth about killing them himself. I wouldn’t even believe they were dead except you saw it.” Linc kicked at the clods in turn, expression sour. “Well, Joe or someone did your brother and all his scientist friends a huge favor, didn’t he? No more disgusting sick hoos wandering around, needing feeding—”
“Because Jim would look just that panicked if those were the only ones.” We’d reached the turnoff to the Sunlit Trail, a skinny hilly thread of a footpath that shortcut through the darkest parts of the woods; I had to struggle for balance climbing up it with just one arm, Linc reaching out at intervals to steady me. The trees bowed inward and a comfortingly damp, fungal stink surrounded us like a tunnel. “Right so far, isn’t he, about this being a lot worse for humans than us—did Teresa look sick at all to you? Other than in the head?”
“You really think we’d get the full story on anything from a human? Family or no family? Don’t go in too far, Jessie, you’ll drown in the sea of bullshit.” We reached the summit of the trail’s steep first hill, collecting mud, mats of dead leaves and rain-dampened dog crap with every step. “And the sad part is, I’d even believe him before I do Joe—”
“Linc, this he wasn’t expecting, trust me. He thought Ben would get better.” I felt weird and guilty, dissecting Joe’s talk with anyone else. “We all thought Ben would get better—”
Linc let out a brusque laugh. “I didn’t,” he said, nearly stumbling over a tree root. “I didn’t. I could see it in his eyes. And that means this is bad for us, Jessie, at least for some of us, whether your brother knows it or not. And maybe it’s better if he doesn’t, because he said right out he’s all about wiping us off the map and screw all his talk about ‘changing his mind’ and ‘making things better,’ if he really thinks something’s out there killing hoos and making us stronger, more adaptable—”
“And he does.” I pulled twigs off a dead gray branch, feeling both glum and foolish. I’d wanted to believe Jim when he said he didn’t want to kill us, that he just wanted to try to help Lisa, figure out why this was happening, but if humanity’s shit really was hitting the fan he’d hardly stand on untested principles, now would he? I wouldn’t, in his shoes. “Whatever Teresa’s got in her, that she could do that to Ben? Maybe that’s something else he’s trying to isolate—”
“Are you sure Jim never ran into Teresa?”
I shrugged. “He could have, if he’s been out here looking for me so much. Or Joe, or anyone, though I don’t know why they wouldn’t just kill him where he stood. I don’t know where Joe’s been, I don’t know if he’s been with Teresa, I don’t know what anyone else knows . . .” I scraped my fingers down the branch, its dry ash-colored bark peeling away in flakes. “I don’t know a damned thing.”
But I knew who might. Joe was right, the Rat were all over the place, all over the hoo-towns and lab-lands helping things fall apart, they weren’t just sitting around the ass-end of nowhere waiting for the rest of the world to come to them—and why, especially now, would they give a damn for a half-crippled country cousin and her dumbass questions? You want your answers, bitch, go to the cities and beaches and look for yourself. Not that you’ll be walking out of Rat turf to do that—we’re all pumped up lately, high on the hoo-germs, wanna have ourselves a little fun with the weak sisters. A one-armer and a stringbean, trying to fight off any number of them by ourselves? Might as well just strike Teresa’s matches on our heads and call it a day.
“I think we have to go to church,” I said. “Rat or no Rat.”
Linc laughed again, and clapped my shoulder. “Why do you think we’re going down the Sunlit? It’s a straight shot from here to the highway. At the cornfield, you have to loop all the way around.”
The church was a big brooding two-story box, gleaming eggshell white peeled down to a dirty gray cinderblock yolk; there was a plain rusting cross on the flat roof, window holes framed in shards of pink stained glass, a letter-dropping marquee reading JUDG NG BY CHU ATTEND NCE, H VEN WON’T BE CROW. That used to be another hoo myth, that we were magically unable to set foot in churches. Nobody out front, and as we crept from the cluster of elms near the roadside into the church parking lot we didn’t see anything inside. Steeling ourselves, we flung open the doors.
Empty, no Rat traces. Unless you counted the mess all over the floor, that is, the slick smear of dried fat and blood and human-smelling body parts scraped down to the bones. Human flesh, and the faintest lingering traces of human fear—instead of breaking necks right off the Rat might have dragged them here to die, unable to resist having their own sacrificial altar. They were boring that way, sometimes. Nose-twitching hints of dust and mice and, everywhere, that chemical stench, Teresa’s stench, strong as a soaked cotton ball against the nose. Linc bared his teeth in disgust, then drooled; we hadn’t eaten in a good three hours and the reminder of meat was taunting us. Nothing fresh here, though, and all the bones were sucked dry.
Another human body lay near the altar steps, most of its head missing and the rib cage scooped clean; it had shat itself. A lot. Guess I would have too. Other than our footsteps the place was tensely, heavily quiet, like a sky right before a thunderstorm. Linc poked around some of the pews, motioned to a side door leading to a chapel, choir dressing room, who knew.
“Horrible stink back there,” he whispered. “It’s oozing under the door. Maybe they’re—”
“WHOOOOO’S THAT EATING FROM MY BOOOOOWWWWL!”
Linc and I let out bellows of surprise. Screaming laughter echoed from the eaves to the pews, drowned out by a chorus of crashing stomping footsteps and a symphony of mental noise, horn and cymbal and the deranged screech of strings. With a volley of ululating war whoops Rommel hurled himself over the balcony, plummeted through the air and landed just shy of the altar with a thud that would have shattered a hoo’s ankles, and back, and pelvis; another half dozen Rats followed like paratroopers in his wake as he rose to his feet, all six five of him swathed in tatters of black leather bristling with bent spikes and rusty nails. Carny, always an idiot, nearly impaled himself on a music stand as he came crashing down in the choir pit. Ron grabbed him, slammed his skull against the floor for being so stupid and rolled from the altar steps; after a wet smack on Linc’s forehead he tossed him aside and shook me like a stuffed toy.
“Jess-ay! Baby! Kiddo!” Ron finally let me go, eyes lingering on the stump of my left shoulder. “What the hell are you doing here?”
I looked from one face to another, familiar from a dozen-some of their little countryside deer-hunt vacations: Rommel, the big chieftain; Ron, his lieutenant, small and wiry and crazy like a rabid maggoty ferret; Adriana, massive and bristling with teeth; Stosh, still in his voltage-blackened electrician’s overall, Union Local 942 cap jammed on his head; bullet-headed, thick-skulled Carny. The Rat Patrol’s inner circle, such as it was, plus a rotter newbie Ron called Dembones, crouched drooling on the floor with a length of motorcycle chain wrapped leashlike around his neck. He just let himself be
dragged along, grinning, teeth jagged and gleaming with febrile spit. His undead brain hadn’t come in right, it looked like: It happens every now and then, you get some that revive but are too damaged to know how to hunt, how to fend for themselves. Usually they just starve or get stomped quick for their own good, but the Rat sometimes took them as pets. They could afford the feeding expense.
“I could ask the same question,” I said. “What the hell’s the brains of the outfit”—I gave Carny and Dembones a pointed glance—“such as they are, still doing holed up out here?”
The church’s front door flew open. Renee stood there in the doorway, gaping, and when she saw, and smelled, the Rat and the messy remains of their dinner she whipped around so fast her bones clicked. Not fast enough, though; Stosh got her arm twisted behind her, dragging her inside, and threw her into a pew.
“I heard you and Joe talking,” she said, glum and dejected. “And Linc.” Then pressed her lips shut when Rommel and Ron loomed over her, leering.
“Beautiful,” said Stosh, producing an agitated palmful of soot as he rubbed his charred face. “So what’s that bug-faced cretin found out that he’s blabbing to the whole goddamned—”
“Shut it,” Rommel muttered, and clapped Renee on the back so hard she gasped and doubled over. “Of course he talks to the family, he’s a good boy—you didn’t have to sneak in, baby, there’s always room for another pretty face. What’s your name?”
Renee just sat there wide-eyed. Coward. “Renee,” I said, “this is Rommel. Rommel, Renee. Say hello to the nice Rommel, Renee.”
Renee mumbled something unintelligible. Ron took one last bite of his midnight snack, a fresh-torn human arm, and gallantly threw her the rest; she let it fall at her feet, cringing. Ron shrugged, scooped it up again and broke off bits like a candy bar. “Plenty for everyone, you know,” he said around a mouthful. “Just bagged a couple refinery workers with car trouble—”
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