I grabbed the chain and whipped the other way, hoping for a clean neck snap, and Dembones reeled me in like a cat toy on a string, jumping on my back and pounding until my ribs crunched broken into my useless lungs. Fighting the new strength in him was like trying to toss a lightning strike back out of my body, trying to waltz with a bank safe crushing my chest, and I wrenched myself back and forth, kicking, punching, snapping my teeth at anything in range—and then all that iron and steel suddenly melted into puff pastry, he was beneath me and I pounded and punched at the flabby dough of his face with no idea of how I’d flipped him. Dembones wailed in protest, and Rommel stumbled toward us, grabbing Dembones’s chain and holding up a hand. Ron pulled back from Linc, instantly obedient, and Linc loosened the arm he’d wrapped around Carny’s neck. Rommel grinned.
“Family pet’s off limits,” he told me, patting Dembones’s sides possessively. “Want some more fight, though? Take it.”
More fight. Yes, I wanted some more fight. There was something inside me like a pain, stronger than the stabbing of my ruined rib cage and I thought, This is the curiosity that killed the cat: that sudden need to know, have I really got it? Could I outrun that freight train a second time? Let’s find out. I smiled at Adriana, who slid from her perch next to Stosh and strolled slowly up to me. Carny, panting with humiliated rage, bared his teeth at Rommel and got a shrug in return.
“Okay,” Carny murmured, his voice the low slow growl of a dog about to spring. “Not funny.”
He fell on Renee. Linc jumped Stosh, rolling toward us in a tumbleweed of arms, legs and open jaws. Rommel had pulled back completely, Dembones at his side, watching and testing his crew. Renee yanked Carny’s arm backward until it snapped, and he dropped her with a furious howl; Ron dragged her like a wheelbarrow, her scalp in shreds. Stosh pounded on Linc, got his neck square in his teeth and crunched. There was a loud, snapping crack, and Linc fell limp to the floor and didn’t move.
My vision was a sudden blur, seeing that, but I made a grab for Adriana’s throat all the same. She bent back my arm, almost giggling, then pinned me flat on my back and started punching. I was a crazy thing underneath her, legs and arm flying like I was breaking out of that underground box all over again, and it did me no damned good. Renee, a fish convulsing in Ron’s net, screamed encouragement between punches, and Carny bellowed obscenities even louder and the balcony Rat were in a stomping frenzy, I was going deaf, I would shoot straight out of my skin hard as Adriana’s fist meeting my face if the noise all didn’t stop, stop! Carny loomed over me, ready to stomp my head to teeth and tissue, then he was suddenly gone with a howl, and a crunch, and silence.
I spat bile, gasping, whipping my head from side to side as the thick steel bands of Adriana’s legs tightened and squeezed. She punched my arm, my head, flipped me facedown on the linoleum with my spine twisted and my broken ribs a bed of nails. She couldn’t break my back. If I got out of this alive I’d still be stomped, just like Lillian, because the Flies wouldn’t shoulder a cripple. She was going to break my back.
I was half-blind from exhaustion and panic, getting only crazy formless snapshots as I tried to twist away: Renee crawling moaning to a pew, holding her tattered head, Ron circling us like a wrestling coach dying to join in, Stosh standing in a strange grim silence. Rommel scratching Dembones idly behind the ears, all the time in the world. Screaming, I sank teeth into Adriana’s arm, and she grabbed my shoulders and slammed my face full force into the lino. I was gone for crucial seconds as she twisted my arm immobile and got her other hand around my neck, and the gallery was screaming and I awoke just long enough to wait for . . . welcome oblivion—
Rommel let out a shrill cry of victory, and the rafters echoed as the Rat all picked up the sound. And for a half-second, no more, Adriana turned and forgot herself in that flood of impending glory, loosening her grip just enough so I could use a sudden, enraged new surge of strength to push back around and bite her arm, sinking in until I heard a lovely, splintering crunch. She bucked backward, falling hard on her ass trying to shake me off, and I rose up, threw her face forward, planted my soles on her back and jumped. As her spine broke there was no gunshot crack, just a soft thick sound like an egg carton crumpling underfoot, like peanut brittle crumbling in a hoo’s teeth. The balcony gasped. Then they laughed.
She was done, there was no need for more, but I bit and sliced into her cheeks, her nose, her nasty stinking regrown face, pulled out handfuls of seaweedy hair. Rommel stood over me, grinning with a mocking joy. Blood was blood, and he didn’t care. I could hear him like he’d spoken: Just do her. You know you wanna. She’d do the same to you. And what good is she to us anymore?
I took her eyes. She was so dazed she never saw it coming but I did it, I knelt there and shoved in my thumb, left, right, out, vile jelly. I tore them out. Adriana screamed and screamed, eye sockets streaming human red, and Renee laughed. I’d never heard her laugh like that before. I smashed Adriana’s skull, fast, furious, the nauseating liquid softness of her brains scrambled eggs under my pounding fist. She twitched violently, and fell still, and her diminishing brain radio went forever silent.
I staggered backward, dazed, surveying the damage. Carny lay sprawled across a pew, skull flattened. Renee crouched near him; she was bald in wide strips now, scalped, her one torn dangling eyelid now ripped away and gone, and the metal chain had cracked one temple open so I could see the clean white pulse of her brain inside. Mind the gap, I thought, and started to giggle. Dembones rooted in Carny’s remains until Ron shoved him away, all of them staring at me with shock, confusion, something like genuine respect. I spat like Billy would and turned away.
Linc was standing now; that cracking sound hadn’t been his neck after all but his collarbone, now sunken and collapsed on one side. It must have stunned him. And then he must’ve played possum, that little country squirrel-eater’s trick, until he had Carny back in his sights. I helped him keep upright while Renee retrieved the lake stones fallen from her and Linc’s pockets, all three of us jangling with the nervous energy of a dozen successful hunts. This must have been what sex felt like, or what hoos kept wanting sex to feel like: this great wrenching push of sound and light and flesh-lust that knocked me over and hauled me back up again and kept me dizzy where I stood. Rommel circled us and glanced at Carny, at Adriana, nudging her with his boot.
“That bitch,” he said. “She never could resist playing to a crowd.”
“We’re leaving now,” Linc said. “All of us.”
“Yeah? Well, you can have the ’maldie back, she ain’t pretty anymore. That might change, though. In time.” Rommel laughed like he’d planned this, like he wasn’t as flummoxed as that balcony full of murmurs and buzz. “Get what you came for? Come to surprise us with how the country cousins got some doctor’s medicine, too—”
“We haven’t,” Renee snarled. “We’re not changed. We’re not freaks. We’re just better fighters than you.”
Rommel chuckled like an indulgent grandpa, chucking Renee under the chin. “Long as you’re sure, sweetie. All I know is, some of us are changing, adapting one way or another, and some are stuck on the outside looking in. Like your old man, Jessie. So any time you get sick of him and the country life and living off baby food, you know how to find us again. Not Teresa, though, you can keep that sorry bitch. Don’t much care for folks who walk around bellowing about kicking ass and taking names and have to find out the hard way they ain’t nothing. I like the ones who crawl in all weaselly-like and then . . . surprise me.”
He winked at me, a small flicker of exquisite muscle control he would never have had before. Linc got his feet steady and I let him go.
“Later days,” Ron called out. By the time we were out the door he and Rommel were already laughing free and easy, no more regard for Adriana and Carny lying there amongst the human corpses than for a pair of rabbits. Stosh, and the balcony, stared after us in silence.
Once we were safe on the Sunlit Trail Linc brushed
off the church dust with slow, precise gestures, fingering the new punched-out hollow in his collarbone. “How did we do that?” he asked, a little tremor of shock in his voice. Shock, and eagerness. Silent Renee stared at me with shiny wet rabbit eyes, twitching with energy, waiting for the answer.
“I’m starving,” I said. “I’m gonna get sick if we don’t eat.”
“Possum just ran by,” Linc said, pointing into the trees. “Nasty stuff, but—”
“So that was all for nothing?” Renee cried, rubbing fretfully at her wounded head. “We still don’t know much of anything—”
“We?” I demanded, pressing at a broken rib to try to shove it back into place; the pain was like a hard little jolt of nausea, then it snapped to like a jagged Tinkertoy. “Just how the hell much nosing around and listening in have you been—”
“I wouldn’t say it’s for nothing,” Linc said, craning his neck for the possum. “We know this thing is everywhere, that it’s spreading. That it spreads fast. And that even the Rat don’t know how this happened, or aren’t telling. And that Teresa’s definitely got it, though it sounds like they didn’t know that until we told them—”
“Joe knew,” I said. “He knew all along. He just didn’t want to believe it.”
“Joe.” Linc let his name hang in the air, a joke fallen flat. “That’s bullshit that he told them you were sick or anything else, they just wanted to rile you up for some fun. Careful what you ask for.” Grim satisfaction flashed across his face. “And it sounds like it’s contagious, but spread how? Biting? Spitting? I bet Jim could tell us. I bet he could tell us a lot more than he did.”
The lab at Chanute Beach, where all the trouble started. Maybe. Supposedly. The Rat had no idea who Jim was to me, they had no reason to make that up. Fucking Rat. Fucking Rommel, those nasty fleshy springform lips of his twisted up sneering over Joe, can’t kill a bitty kiddie, pissing himself about flamethrowers—after all Joe’s talk, his screaming, about how I wasn’t any sort of hunter if I never learned to hunt that.
Unless he’d always been just that scared. Unless, even worse, no matter how he tried he had no true gut-burn to kill something he’d once been himself, and that was why the Rat booted him out on his ass in the first place. What if he’d always wanted me with him not to show me what’s what, but in case he needed help, needed rescuing? Because he was so scared he’d die, if he did go gate-crashing and ended up snared in a circle of swift-stepping flamethrowing hoos, and he just didn’t want to take another chance on dying without me, on dying alone?
Because, for all his talk, in the end he was just like me. Both of us so scared of the fucking hoos, in our own worthless ways, and so damned we’d never admit it, and so slow on the uptake when we saw it in each other. Pathetic. Completely goddamned pathetic.
I slipped my fingers into Florian’s bag of stones, grabbing one tight; I was doing that a lot lately, needing to feel that cool smoothness, that strange tingling in the palm of my hand, like a little last reminder of something good I’d once had in abundance. Renee took one from her pocket as well, rubbing it between her fingers, and the agitation on her face started to subside. I gripped tighter. The lab at Chanute Beach, where Jim works. Joe told us you’ve got this.
“Maybe Jim doesn’t know anything else,” I said.
“Or maybe he’s lying,” said Linc. “Or maybe he’s not lying, he’s just got these suspicions, but he won’t say them out loud without proof, he’s gotta study his samples first. Be a scientist. Looks to me like everyone just knows bits and pieces of the story, and they’re all keeping their bit quiet so they can have the advantage. Not that they even know what the advantage is.”
“So like I said,” Renee retorted, “we didn’t learn a damned thing.”
Except that we can fight, I thought. That we can fight that.
Linc scratched vigorously at his shoulder, dislodging a new cluster of watch beetles. I raised my arm, sniffing at my skin: dirt, forest, cornfield, Adriana’s too-reddened blood and the rot that was uniquely me, no hoo-smell, no solvent or sap-bead sweat. But Teresa had looked normal—for a while—and Joe, and Linc and Renee for that matter, and Rommel said the first thing that happens is you feel tired, and hot, and worn out, and how the hell was I walking side by side with Renee the little superspy like she’d been part of this all along, not just the stupid new girl sniveling about her embalming going soft? I reached around and gave her a shove just to set things right and she stumbled, shrugged, clung to my armless shoulder as the hill got steeper and we turned back onto the Sullen Trail. The snowdrops lining the path were withered now, the violets thickening in earnest.
“What do we tell the others?” I asked. “They must realize something’s up by now.”
“Maybe,” Linc said, “they realized it weeks ago. Months. Right?”
Renee, smelling of confusion and worry, kept her eyes on her feet. Billy liked to wander around hoo-country too, what did he know, what had Ben? Not a damned thing, that I could tell, nor did they really want to. Poor Ben. Poor crippled blinded stupid Adriana. Poor Florian, coming apart in a spill of dust like sand shaken from a shoe. Poor things in the cornfield, poor Lisa, sick to death, begging for death. What had Jim really done, what did he really know, what did he really want with me and my remnants? Why was Joe so sure I could fight Teresa, knowing her plague-strength, knowing it all along—or had he changed his mind, actually looked where he was asking me to leap, when he saw what happened to Ben? He hadn’t seen that coming. I knew he hadn’t. Distracted, I stumbled over a tree root and Linc cut in on my thoughts with a laugh.
“Remember that movie?” he asked.
“What movie?”
His voice oozed false hoo joviality, a cut-rate Bela Lugosi: “‘They’re coming to get you, Bar-buh-rah.’ ” Then he faltered, his eyes fearful, a palm resting on his newly broken collarbone. “Jessie, what’s happening?”
A graveyard, a car that wouldn’t start, an old farmhouse, a gas pump bursting into flames. A local station showed it every Halloween, overexposed black-and-white with bad makeup and worse acting, and I remembered all the rumors that some of it wasn’t acting or makeup at all—some of it was real footage, the start of the real ’68 Pittsburgh massacre caught on film by a few foolhardy hoos, and when nobody wanted to watch or admit the actual truth they threw in some junk about Venus probes and radiation and made a monster movie. But those were only rumors, like Joe’s stories that Teresa had an eye on me, and Jim’s of a strange new sickness burning up out of nowhere, and Rommel’s of new speed and flesh and strength all down to one particular beach, one particular lab. What’s happening, the female lead pissed and moaned when she finally made it to safety in the farmhouse, what’s happening?
And do we try and find out, really try—or do we do like we all learned when we were alive, when we’d be driving down the sulfurously lit roads and see human-shaped shadows huddled by the roadside, ravaged faces of those we’d buried years ago illuminated in the headlights, and just look away and pretend they’re nothing? Retch and run away when they hold out a hand?
“I don’t think anyone but us really cares to know,” I said. “Including the Rat.”
Renee gripped my shoulder tighter and Linc slipped an arm through mine. I felt foolish slowing my steps for them, marching abreast and intertwined like we were dancing our way to Emerald City (speaking of stupid movies I’d hated), but glad at the same time, protected from some shapeless, sulfurous shadow behind us, inside us, that I couldn’t and wouldn’t name.
12
Back at the park I could smell agitation and anger in the air, thick and heavy as grease. Since when did we need Billy’s permission to scupper? I bared my teeth for another fight as he staggered up to us, Sam and Mags tight-lipped and tense behind him. Joe was nowhere in sight.
“So where the hell have you three been?” Billy demanded. “Did you do it? No, what the hell am I saying, Saint Linc would never prank like that. Ben’s gone,” he said, waving his gas-puff
ed hands. “Gone.”
“He disintegrated? Already?”
“No, Madam Curie, I said he’s gone. He was just lying there, stone dead, and now he’s not and there’s no trace of him anywhere, ash or otherwise, and if someone—something—carried him off, we’ve got no clue where.” He grinned, a wet tarry smear of fury. “Goddamned Sam, falling asleep at the—”
“Don’t you start on me,” Sam snarled, hands curled into bony fists. “If you’re too busy stuffing your face to pay attention to what’s in front of you—”
“What’s in front of me? You fell asleep right next to him, you senile bag of maggots, and you just let them take him!” Billy let out a rumbling, swampy belch and cobra-spat at Sam. “Hears nothing, sees nothing, as much good on watch as a deer skeleton—”
“Boys, boys,” Mags cut in, mechanically weary; this must have been going on for hours. “Jessie, we’ve been looking and looking, and not even a smear of ash. Sam didn’t hear anything, and Billy and I were off hunting.”
“Where’s Joe?”
“Off searching the woods—he thinks maybe Ben was just stunned, woke up and wandered off. Now, I know doornaildead when I smell it, but your boy’s an optimist.”
Off searching the woods, I thought, remembering the tarry disintegrating mess of Ben’s arm, or tracking Ben to kill him, like those cornfield hoos, kill what was left of him for his own good? The mere thought of trekking all over the park or back to the cornfield to try to find out made me sway with exhaustion, but as my father used to say about med school, fortune favors the sleepless. “I’ll go help him look,” I said.
Mags shook her head. “No, you’re tired, dear heart—you can stay. Stay and explain why you’ve been acting so innocent face-to-face and then sneaking around talking to hoo-scientists, kissing up to the Rat, behind our backs like a little pissant ’maldie bitch.” Her hand clutched the back of a wrought-iron bench, twisting it into new designs. “Or like Teresa.”
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