Dust

by Joan Frances Turner

  I smiled, the bright sunny smile we always flashed before fights. I couldn’t take another fight, I’d collapse and Mags knew it. “Guess Joe’s been telling you some stories.”

  “Joe’s got nothing for anyone but a shitload of stories,” said Linc, trying to angle himself between me and Mags like he could shield me. “He never did. You’re a fool if you listen to—”

  “Joe said you knew something about what Teresa and them were up to, and were keeping it to yourself.” Sam’s voice was dry and punctilious, his expression sympathetic. He’d never liked Mags. “He keeps saying you know stuff and you’re keeping all the rest of us out of it—”

  “Out of what?” I snarled. “Out of what? If I’m such a sneak, I’d like to know what I’m hiding.”

  “Don’t play cute,” Billy hissed, circling. “If you think we’re that stupid—”

  “Why don’t you leave her alone?” Renee shouted, yanking at the remains of her hair. “You think you’re so tough? Well, we just killed two Rat Patrollers without any of your help, ones just like Teresa. We did. You can ask them. And we can do it again!”

  We killed them, kemosabe? We? That was just downright cute—but it did stop Mags and Billy in their tracks. Mags shot a glance at Linc, who nodded confirmation. “So spill it,” she said. “And explain how you could go up against . . . that, when you don’t stink like Teresa stinks or have new flesh like she does.”

  “Why the hell should I?” I threw myself onto the grass next to the bench. “You’ve got Joe to set you straight, don’t you? What do you need me for?”

  “Are you going over to the Rat?” Mags demanded. Her eyes were tired and scared, sunk deep in the moldy folds of her face like dried-up currants in old dough. “He said you were, you and Teresa. And that the Rat Patrol’s already changed over, like Teresa has—”

  “And that some hoo-scientist somehow helped cause it all,” Sam added. “And that you snuck out to be with him. To help him. Like his little lab rat.”

  My stomach twisted like Rommel was punching me all over again. So, Renee wasn’t the only spy around here. Shouldn’t surprise me. Shouldn’t throw me off. Just what did Joe see and hear, the night I found my brother again—and why feed me those stories about the Rat, why tell me how they’d changed over? Because he knew me, better than anyone did. Because he knew I’d want to investigate, knew I’d end up smack against a rejuvenated Rommel and Ron and all-else without their numbers, muscle, energy. Just like he’d been pushing me so hard to challenge Teresa, knowing all along how much stronger she was now. Which made something in my chest wind itself tight and snap, snap as it went around and around, each revolution a new little jolt of fury. Mags just stared at me, almost timid beneath the smear of bravado. I got up again and started doing a tiger pace in front of the gazebo, too angry to lounge around.

  “The answer’s yes and no,” I said. I had to force the words out, with the rat-a-tat snapping, snapping all inside me so it was hard to talk. “So just keep your mouths shut until I’ve finished.” And then with Linc and Renee as backup chorus I told them everything, starting with the woman Florian and I saw drop dead—and then vanish without a trace, just like Ben—and ending with Adriana flat on the church floor. Halfway through Sam shuffled off into the trees, returning with some squirrels; he was testing me, I knew, making sure I could still eat real flesh without getting sick, but I was too hungry to care. Linc and Renee devoured my leavings and drifted off in mid-narrative, huddled together half asleep.

  “Well, damn,” Billy finally said, laughing like his old self, “hell of a family affair you got tangled in, isn’t it, Jessie?” He sighed. “Florian would’ve known what to do. Prob’ly seen all kinda crap like this. I miss that old heap of bones.”

  I felt pathetically grateful that even brutal, unsentimental Billy had been thinking that. “He didn’t know what to do about that woman. Neither of us did.”

  “And so Joe’s a damn liar,” Mags said, close to an apology as I’d ever get, and spat at the gazebo steps. “Half-liar, quarter-liar. There’s a shock. He know all about this?”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but not from me. I don’t think he’s changed—”

  “Hell, I could’ve told you that—he ain’t anything like them new freaks, they got flesh to burn. He’s withering up like Sam here. Like Florian.” Billy let out a single disconsolate toot of gas, pulling himself to his feet. “You, though, you and Linc and the ’maldie—”

  “Yeah, you know what, don’t you start with that.” I flourished my arm for him, for anyone to sniff for confirmation. “Don’t you start. I’m still rotten. I don’t stink of disease. I don’t have it.”

  “You wouldn’t stink,” he said, Mags grunting in agreement. “Not at first. Not right away. Later on, though—”

  “Later what?” I took a step toward him, watching his eyes narrow with a strange new wariness, Mags brace her soft, swollen feet against the grass. “What later? You see me. I don’t smell. I still eat like us.”

  “They can eat like us,” Mags said. “If they have to. And anything else too. Plants, scraps, garbage, dead meat. They can eat anything.”

  “And hip-hooray for them. I still eat like us, still talk like us, walk like us, smell like us, look like us—”

  “You don’t fight like us.” Billy was growling now, the angry, confused sound of an undead not knowing if that little flicker of light was a firefly or a lit match. “You don’t fight a goddamned thing like us, you couldn’t have killed that, you’d be lying in a brain-stomped heap if you were still—”

  “Sorry to fucking disappoint you!” My voice was high and almost shrill, like I’d been caught sabotaging a hunt, throwing a fight, and needed to lash out to save myself. “Maybe I’m just a good goddamned fighter, okay? Maybe we got lucky. Maybe Carny and Adriana just weren’t working it tonight, they were off their game, maybe they were hurt and Rommel threw them to us on purpose to finish them off, I don’t know, all right? I’m not sick! I’m not changed, I’m me! They’re them! And Linc is right, you know he’s right, Joe’s nothing but a lying backstabbing—”

  My hand slid of its own accord into my pocket and grabbed at the pearl-gray lake stone, clutching it, clenching it in my fingers as I tried to settle myself down. My teeth were grinding, sharp points sliding up against blade-edges as I clenched my jaw. Billy didn’t answer. Mags gazed at her feet, the ground, like I’d just embarrassed her. Sam just stood there. Linc and Renee had barely stirred, hearing us; he had his head buried in her shoulder, she was already snoring. Angry as I was, the sight made my last vestige of energy drop away.

  “I need to sleep,” I said, turning my back on them all on purpose; I lay down next to Renee and closed my eyes. Someone else, Sam from the dry bones of him, lay down beside me back to back. As we drifted away I heard Billy and Mags mumbling, their voices muted and far off like I was a kiddie back in my hoo-bed, parents in the next room.

  “—did eat the whole thing,” Mags muttered. “They all did. Maybe she’s right, you know Adriana was all talk and that other one, what’s-his-name, could’ve—”

  “Could you fight that and live? I know they don’t look it, but something must’ve changed. At least in her. Joe said so, he said—”

  “Joe, the liar.”

  Billy snorted. “But he ain’t all lies, is he? She said it herself, he ain’t all wrong. Yes, and no.”

  “I don’t care yes or no, Joe’s always lied. Always. Whenever he thought he’d get something out of it. Jessie ain’t like that.”

  “It don’t matter what she’s like, it matters what she is.”

  Mags made a little whistling sound between her teeth, the sound she always let out when Billy was running her nuts. “Sweet William, sir, Joe’s a liar, that hoo-scientist sounds a liar, the Rat are all scum-stinking liars. She don’t know what’s really happening. They don’t know. We don’t know. Nobody does. Nowhere.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever’s happening, I ain’t hanging around to turn into a ha
lf-hoo freak. From now on, we keep our bags packed.” He laughed. “Don’t care how strong Teresa’s now, though, when I find her we’re knocking out her teeth and then we’re working her over. Slow.”

  “Slow, and painful.” Mags laughed her old, rollicking chuckle. “Bad as we can make it.”

  “Tell ya, Mags, I’ve been out around that cornfield plenty of times and I never saw—”

  “I ain’t going anywhere near it.” Mags’s voice was sharp and fearful, pushing a suicide away from his gun and pills. “Not ever again. You watch yourself.”

  “I am watching. Never said I was going back, did I?”

  “Lookit Sam, sleeping like he didn’t already spend the whole night snoring. Useless sod.”

  “Wish he’d gone up, ’stead of Florian.”

  So afraid, I thought as I drifted away. It occurred to me that if they were that afraid they might just decide to send me up while I was out, and how easy that would make it for Joe, but vigilance and heartache were both undercut by sleep.

  When we woke up, Mags and Billy were gone. I wasn’t surprised they’d lit out for the territories, not after what I’d overheard, but it was weirdly hurtful all the same. Poor Sam sat there all by himself on the gazebo steps, picking indifferently at the carcass of a duck.

  “The mister and missus got nervous, decided to head out Valparaiso way,” he said, with the permanent inviting grin of death but tired, tired eyes. “Ain’t heard no stories of sickness there. But I guess they’ll find out. I guess it’s just you and me, kiddies. So, who’s got the energy for a manhunt?”

  Hardy-har. We grabbed the slowest-moving possum we could find and gorged ourselves, talked about nothing, told stories until the sky became streaky and pale. I went on a flower search with Sam, who’d been a gardener when he was alive and still got a kick out of spotting the first crocus. The bulbs must have been late this year. We fell asleep all in a pile, firm still-elastic ’maldie skin up against rot-softened bloater and bone-stripped dusty, and for the first time in forever it was like being a real gang again, a real us, however foreshortened. I pressed my forehead into Sam’s exposed shoulder blade, my feet into Linc’s shin where it softened like a blister, and dreamed of running around the park playground like a kiddie. Running. Had I really once been able to run? My feet twitched as I chased sleep.

  Running. I wasn’t just running but breathing in this dream, breathing with my lungs like a hoo instead of through my skin and bones, and I heard my own short, tired pants of breath in my ears as I slowed down, walked, tottered like a proper undead into the playground’s sandpit. The pit got bigger and wider and stretched out like a beachfront, the water a vague greenish-gray streak in the distance, and Florian was lying in the sand in front of me half-buried, curled on his side. Sand up over his arms and streaking his shoulders like folds of a rumpled blanket. I winced at how much all those infernal glassy grains must have hurt.

  “I gotta congratulate you,” he said to me, and smiled up at me calm and sweet. His eyes were the same quiet, peaceful blue. “You’re gonna have a baby.”

  The hoos used to think we really could get pregnant, have “zombie” babies, or maybe that was just their worst made-up nightmare. A whole new breed of undead. The uterus is one of the last things to decay, I remember I read that somewhere. All that thick muscle. Maybe that’s where they got the idea, that and seeing our bellies swollen up with rot-gas. Sometimes I do wish I’d had sex while I was living and actually had a sex drive. Not that it matters now.

  “Quit talking like a crazy hoo,” I told Florian, even though I was smiling back that he wasn’t dead after all. “I’m about as knocked up as you are.”

  “Not that kinda baby.” Something glinted in the sand beneath us and I saw the corner of a pale green lake stone, half-interred. He reached a hand out, brushed its surface clean and I suddenly saw stones laid out everywhere around him: pink, brick red, gray, pearly white, dusted with sand, organized in close spiraling rows, like a mosaic being uncovered in an archaeological dig. “You. It’s you who’s the kiddie-to-be. You’re gonna birth yourself.”

  Another one of his dusty flake-outs. Some things never change. “I’m not a baby,” I pointed out, then immediately felt like a foolish toddler saying it: I’m no baby, I’m nearly three! “You’re out of it, old man.”

  “Born once,” he said, a fistful of stones cradled in his hands. “Born twice. Born times three. Third time’s the last.” He gazed down at the stones, grinding them slowly with his fingertips into a fine, variegated powder. “The last for everyone. Everything. Everywhere. Unless they learn how to lie down and rest.”

  He blew on his palms and the ground-up bits of stone scattered in that little breeze, sprayed all over my sand-caked feet. The bruise-dark, gassed-up flesh there seemed to collapse, disintegrate like I’d passed through my full feeder time in seconds, and I was suddenly buried in pink and pale green and pearly white sands up to my shins, my knees, it was eating like a painless quicklime through all my rotten skin and as I became bare bleached bone I collapsed right next to Florian in the sands, tunneling my stripped-down skeletal self through the sand-sea’s dry tides downward, and downward—

  He’s dead, I remembered then, even as I slept. Florian’s dead. Never again, not on the beach, not in the woods, not anywhere but in your own idiot head. No more. I sank further into sleep, beyond that knowledge, beyond any sort of dreams.

  When I woke up, Joe was still gone and Sam was missing.

  We tramped around and around the woods and found nothing but a strange heavy smell of living hoo-flesh mixed with our own rot, a smell that led nowhere and seemed to come from nothing. That’s what we’d come to, wandering the woods like idiots tracking our own stink. A too-warm sun rose steadily higher in the sky and none of us could sleep that day. The air felt funny, heavy and almost spongy as it soaked up the weight of quiet and emptiness.

  “He must’ve gone to Valpo too,” I said. I knew he hadn’t.

  “Didn’t your brother ask when he’d see you again?” Renee demanded. “So let’s . . . find him, somehow, and make him explain all this.”

  “How?” asked Linc, his voice harsh with anxiety. “How the hell are we supposed to do that? He got what he wanted, we won’t see him. Never again.”

  All that day and the next night he and Renee and I tramped through the woods, fields, trails, underpass, cornfield, and no trace of Sam. On a hunch—a hollow hunch—we headed for Renee’s cemetery on the opposite side of the highway, and found it empty as we’d expected: gates swinging wide open, grass unmowed, old floral arrangements scattered thick on the ground. The old church building was empty, nothing but human leavings and Carny’s and Adriana’s bodies eaten down to mere splinters of bone, sucked marrow-dry. No Sam. No Ben. No Joe.

  That next morning, we slept in shifts. When Renee took the watch she gripped our hands in hers, glaring fiercely toward the woods waiting for the strange entity that would swoop down and tear our entwined fingers apart. I wanted to laugh at her and couldn’t. Florian came alive again in my dreams, this time big and gassed up and mocking like Billy, and wrapped his finger bones around my neck and throttled until I woke with a jolt. Renee had fallen asleep on watch, her hand slipping from mine; she and Linc were there and snoring, no boogeyman in evidence. I lay there twitching in the fading afternoon sunlight, finally gave up on sleep and headed for the riverbank in search of some luckless otter or squirrel.

  The sunset was building, streaks of raspberry and orange jam filling up a big shallow jar, as I headed down the Potawatomi Trail and farther into the trees. The deer loved to hide there. A mile in by the river’s bend I heard footsteps behind me, and then the unmistakable chitter-chitter of bugs in their most active, greedy phase, methodically devouring whole square feet of flesh. Joe stood there in a little thread of pink light. He might’ve been not half a mile away, all this time.

  “You,” I said.

  He looked me up and down. “So, you having a fine old time running arou
nd with Linc? And the ’maldie?”

  “You having a fine old time hiding from us?”

  He put a hand to my new fight spots: the small smashed-rib crater in my side, the long strip on my thigh torn open to the bone, the black-bleeding bruises surfacing on my arm and neck. His fingers lingered on my throat, where I’d always liked being touched. I shook them away.

  “The apple trees haven’t bloomed yet,” he said. Like nothing had happened. Like there was nothing bigger to say. “The ones by the old baseball field? It must still be March. I could never get over that—one day bare branches and the next, boom, fluffy pink everywhere.” He tossed a dead branch into the flowing water. “But I don’t know anything about trees or plants, not like Sam—”

  “You lied to me,” I said.

  He just shrugged. “You don’t understand. You don’t understand what I’ve been—”

  “Yeah, it’s incredibly easy not to understand when someone won’t tell you a damn thing, Joe.” My voice shook and I hated it. “Really easy, when they go on and on about how much you mean to them and then stab you in the back without—”

  “Are you gonna stand here bitching and moaning all night, or are you gonna come with me and let me explain?”

  I sized him up in the weak watery moonlight. Whole patches on him now where the bugs had done their final work and departed: scraped-thin skin flapping like an empty tent, no fat or muscle left beneath, shriveling into the parchment-paper bone covering of the dusty, the zombi ancien. His eyes were sunken and mournful and giving-up tired. When, how, had he suddenly grown so damned old? Rommel died decades before Joe—he remembered World War One if he wasn’t lying—and he’d never looked like this. I felt Joe take in my shock and pity, loathe me for it, realize it was all he had left to keep us on speaking terms. He led me along the path toward the old playground, over a footbridge whose wet, rickety wood made him grab for my hand, to steady me. I reached over and gripped the railing instead, crabwalking across.