Dust

by Joan Frances Turner

“I’ve had to talk Mags and Billy out of stomping my skull in, thinking I was like Teresa,” I said. We picked our way through the underbrush at the bridge’s end, thick and knotty with no more work crew to cut it back. “Thinking I might kill them like she killed Ben. Scared of me. Can you explain that one?”

  “You’re a lot safer with Billy scared of you. That’s common sense, woman—”

  “Don’t you pretend that was to protect me!” I shoved him, hard enough that he stumbled into the bushes. “You told them I was changed, a freak, you said I was going behind their backs, collaborating with hoos—”

  “Weren’t you?” Joe said.

  “I was trying to find out what’s happening! I wanted to find out for us, like you kept saying, and you—”

  And you. After everything between us. I wanted to hit him again, knock him down and punch until my knuckles were thick with syrupy black but he looked too old to hit now, too bone-stripped to bleed, he couldn’t have gone dusty so soon. Time doesn’t give a shit what you want. Slams right into you and leaves you bleeding, broken, dying on the pavement while you weren’t even looking. Fine, Joe. Go ahead and laugh. Laugh at how fucking stupid I’ve been, all along. Well? Go on.

  “Go on, then,” Joe said, backed up now against an oak’s peeling, desiccated bark. “Hit me. It’s all in your eyes, I can see it. Kick the shit out of me for lying to you. It’s what I deserve, right? Look at me, look how fucking old I am now, fuck knows you could grind me to powder without breaking a sweat—right? That’s what you want, right?” Glaring. Waiting. “Well? Go on!”

  He was vibrating with anger but his limbs were slack, relaxed, like he wouldn’t strike back or even duck if fists and feet came at him. Waiting, resigned and open, for oblivion. There was a little tremor in his fingers, as he clutched at a branch.

  “You’re not old,” I said.

  His eyes were giving-up tired, hollowed-out sad. Like Sam’s, before he disappeared. He turned and kept walking and I followed him.

  That smell was back again: that same strange, heavy mixture of living and undead flesh saturating the air, like whole milling mingled crowds of human and undead. The park playground was empty, though, nothing but rusted-out swings and a jungle gym of thick softening wood planks; its metal was a ghastly, peeling shade of sulfur yellow that must have been blinding when it was new. And that huge sandpit in the middle, roiled and lumpy as old oatmeal, ground glass to rotting skin. No pretty faded lake stone colors in it, just a dull listless swath of beige. I gave it a wide berth, sitting on the swings. There was something else in the air around us, something urgent and expectant making a slow burn of my skin and nerves; it wasn’t anger or sorrow or anything like, it was the tremors that echo through the arm after a hard blow of the fist, the taste of still-warm flesh forever fading from the mouth. Joe paced in front of the jungle gym, seeming restless as I felt.

  “I’m here,” I said, stroking the swing chain. “So let’s hear it.”

  He draped his arms over the rusty metal bars, fingers picking idly at the peeling paint. “Feel funny lately,” he said, staring down at the dirty yellow chips all curled up like skin flakes. “Feel funny right now.”

  I did too. Which wasn’t the point. “Well? You wanted me here, I’m here. So tell me more about how you’ve gone behind everyone’s back, lying, making up stories, disappearing for days at a time and never bothering to—”

  “Jessie, you know, you just don’t listen to me no matter what, you get your teeth into an idea of how things are and you won’t stop biting, you won’t—”

  “You lied to me.”

  “You won’t goddamned hear me when I tell you it’s not that simple, even the flat truth’s never that simple and if you keep biting that hard you’re gonna break your jaw—”

  “You told them I was diseased, Joe! You made them think I was a freak, something to run from, you threw me into the Rat nest without even—”

  “Jessie?” He had my arm now and was grabbing hard, vicious, finger-bones sinking in and eyes urgent and almost feverish like it was him who was dying to hit me, again, like he was starving and the last lingering taste of meat from the bone was melting away, gone. “Jessie. Listen.”

  The slow burn all through me was heating up, crackling hard and fast like the electrical current searing Stosh’s bones as he fried and died his first death; I was twitching, struggling to evade not the hand clenching my arm but the overpowering ache in every cell, and then suddenly I was listening, listening just like Joe demanded, because I couldn’t not hear it. The crash and chaos of two dissonant, discordant brain radios suddenly hearing secret harmonies, a mutual music low and mournful and so far beyond ordinary sound that I stretched out my hand as if I could try to seize it, felt Joe twine fingers in mine as gently as if all our young, old, inexorably crumbling bones might shatter. No triumph in his eyes, no smug glint of pleasure at distracting me from my own anger—he didn’t do this. He couldn’t do it.

  You never know when a dance might happen, your head can’t summon song at will. It just is. The melody is different every time, it vanishes from your memory even as it leaves a mark inside you that never fades, but as the notes played between us and grew faster and wild I knew just the tune I was hearing, knew exactly how it was and what it meant: Last chance.

  I let Joe pull me up from the swing seat, and we started to waltz.

  The moon was sickly and anemic, half dark (all dark, really, nothing but a dead thing’s reflection of life and light), the air around us stank of disease. I can’t hum or tap out the music that passed between us and I wouldn’t ever try, it was something we never had before, ever, a dance that was all and only ours. Us, and nothing else, yet shifting and spinning in confluence with everything alive. Joe sidestepped us past the sandpit like it might swell over in a dry tide, pull us in to drown, and I slid my hand up and down his arm as if that could steady its continuous tremble: the signature, terribly gentle palsy of a bug-bare body, finally going to dust.

  “You’re not old,” I repeated, as though saying it might make it true. “And I’m not changed.”

  His head was tilted back, lost in the notes of the calliope, but he still kept watching me. “I don’t care what everyone keeps saying, Joe, I’m not changed—”

  “You got Adriana.” Here we go round the jungle gym, butterfly bush, abandoned swings. “So I heard. And Linc got Carny, which frankly does the whole universe a favor. Damned good work, Jessie.”

  “You want out,” I said. “That’s what this is. Isn’t it?”

  His denuded jaw grinned merrily away but his eyes were calm, the stony calm of someone who’d expected to be caught in a lie. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “This is why you got me out here, isn’t it, Joe? Except you couldn’t just say it, straight out, and I don’t know why.” Here we go round the stinking sands, so early in the evening. “Remember, after Lillian, we both agreed that if one of us got blinded like that, crippled, we’d send each other out? We wouldn’t wait around again for Teresa to play hanging judge? But you didn’t even have the decency to ask me first.” Sticky dark wetness leaked from my eyes, smearing my cheeks as we spun. “I would have done anything for you, Joe, time was, and—”

  “And I didn’t need to ‘just say it,’ after all. Did I?” Joe’s feet shuffled slower, easier, relaxing into the dance. “You knew. In the end. And that’s something. Isn’t it?”

  “You lied to me right off, Joe.” My stomach twisted, clenched. “You told Mags and Billy you suspected something about me was different. Didn’t you? Something you couldn’t quite see or smell, but it was there, just like with Teresa. Just like with the Rat. You thought.” He was keeping us slow and easy when my feet itched to stomp the ground. “Because everyone’s getting this sickness, this mutation, whatever the hell it is—and for some reason, you aren’t. It’s not happening. You’re immune. Right? No new flesh, no new strength, and they all laugh at the old man who wanted to be a big noise and God forbid he say, Je
ssie, help me. Jessie, there’s something freaky out there and it’s stronger than us—”

  “Listen to it, Jessie.” His fingers kept clutching, hard and unyielding, their seething life gone so fast to dryness and bone. “Listen to it play. You heard it, right when I did. You’ve heard it all along. That’s why I never had to say it—”

  “—could never just say ‘Jessie, Teresa’s changed over, the Rat’s changed over, everyone’s changing over, I’m afraid I’m the only one left, I’m afraid you’re diseased now, I don’t know if I can trust you, I’ll get you to walk into the Rat nest and let all the sick-strong ones jump you, if you die then we’re golden, you’re unchanged like me but if you walk out again I know we’re finished—’ ”

  “Jessie—”

  “It was a witch trial, Joe!” I was shouting now and I didn’t want to, not over the music, not over the sound that was us and only us, but I couldn’t stop. “So did I drown, or did I float?”

  “Jessie?” Fingers around my arm, the softened sinkhole of my waist hard enough to hurt. “Adriana, Carny, you know what that means? Changed or not, it means you’ll stay alive. You, Linc, Renee, you can defend yourselves. But me, Billy, Mags, Sam—Florian, too, if he’d lived—we’re weak and old and our time’s done. It’s not our world anymore, and we’re walking targets—”

  “I wouldn’t let that happen! I’d—Jesus Christ, Joe, if I can fight, if I can fight them, I can fight for you!”

  I was clutching back now, like I could drag him away from something nameless, all-pervasive, waiting there patient in the light and dark for its chance to grab him and feed. “I wouldn’t let that happen to you! Don’t you know that about me by now?”

  The calliope notes skittered through our heads faster and faster, feeding on sorrow, anger, that strange heavy flesh smell rolling through the air. Then Joe laughed.

  “Just tell me something, Jessie,” he asked. “You never once, ever, cursed this reborn life? Trapped in the back of beyond, nothing to do but eat raw flesh and sleep too much and fight about nothing, all the best land gone to the best gangs long before you tunneled up and you can’t even run away from it, you know? You can stumble, shuffle, fall on your ass without the fun of getting drunk, yeah, you can do that, but you can never run.” He sidestepped and kicked at a half-buried stone, forcing it up from the dirt. “Decades stuck in this rotten shell of a body, covered in bugs—”

  “You brought me meat that was supposed to go to Teresa.” I was pleading with him now, and for what I didn’t even know. “Remember, when I first tunneled up and the gang jumped me and I jumped you and I couldn’t move for days after? I was this little suburban idiot and you taught me how to hunt, how to really fight, how to survive in the woods with no shelter. You taught me everything. We were . . .” The word sat in my head, limp and pathetic, and I said it anyway. “. . . special.”

  “Decades, Jessie, covered in bugs. Marinating in bugs. Do you know how much it itches when they really start hatching? You looking forward to that happening to you? Did you know you can go bugfuck insane, literally, because your skin won’t stop twitching, crawling, jumping, all over you, all the time, waking, sleeping, no matter what you do? Decades like this, hiding, falling apart, doing nothing, being nothing. Centuries.” He looked me up and down, shaking his head. “And at least I got a life beforehand, but what were you, fourteen? Fifteen? Christ. No growing up, no graduation, no college, no travel, no sex, kids, family, life—”

  “—no job, no obligations, no responsibilities, no burdens, I’m living now! Right in front of you! I have a family now, and a life now—”

  “And I was trying to look out for that, all right? For you! Just like we promised each other after Lillian, just like we said!” His voice was rasping and sharp, even as he swung me round so carefully like I might bend, snap, break. “You don’t have any idea what it’s really like out there now, Jessie, you never wanted to learn, I was trying to make sure you’d—”

  “You can’t leave me!”

  An echo snaked sidelong through our song, the sound of something inside me bending, twisting, threatening to snap and break. I stumbled, almost tripping over Joe’s feet, and he stopped where he stood as the echo grew louder, stronger, almost drowning us both out.

  “You’ve got a life now, Jessie,” he said. “That’s what you said. And it’s the truth. And one way or another, mine’s running out. And we swore we’d never leave each other to die alone, we swore that—”

  “I can take care of you. I can do that.”

  “That’s not how it works for us, Jessie. You know that. So quit acting so damned sentimental, and just—”

  “Stop telling me what to do. I am so fucking sick of you telling me what to do.”

  “This is what we promised each other, Jessie. You can’t—”

  “Stop it,” I said, trying to bite back the echo, his words, all of it, just to hear the song of us and nothing else. I couldn’t do it. “Stop.”

  “Listen to the music, Jessie,” he said. “Just listen. For once. It’s beautiful.”

  Stop telling me what to do, Joe, for once in your sorry afterlife just stop—but I couldn’t help it, it was beautiful and it was ours and we’d never have it again, no matter if we both lived as long as Florian before we crumbled away, my feet stepped back and forth of their own volition and I was leading Joe now, we were leading each other. The rustle of the air through the spring-sprouting trees was our high countermelody and beneath it us, and nothing else, the sound of what we both were and had been since long before we both went underground.

  “I could kill you,” I said, quiet, soft. Mother to child. “I could kill you right now. Just like you wanted.”

  “And now I know I can’t let you,” he said. “Because you’d never forgive yourself. Just like with me and Lillian. Even knowing it’s what I wanted.”

  We could have had this all along, could have had it right up to the end (whatever and whenever the end was, it wasn’t this, I wasn’t sick, he wasn’t old—). But it was more important to test me. “Is this what you wanted?” I asked. “Everything the way it is now?”

  Joe gazed up into the dark gray sky. “None of it’s what I wanted,” he said. Even quieter, and so sad. “But it’s what we’re all gonna get. It’s what everybody gets in the end.”

  The most horrible part of all was, he wasn’t lying. Not now, not anymore. Died alone once, I’m not doing it again. A lifetime, an eternity ago he’d said it and I’d agreed with him, swearing reckless oblivious fealty like the infant idiot I was and now he’d gone and taken me at my word, taken me seriously like nobody ever had while I’d lived, believed me when I promised neither of us would go on without the other. But I could promise him anything, back then, because it’d never happen, we’d never die, I’d never leave. It’d never turn out he was so angry at being torn from his first death and so revolted by himself and so ceaselessly gut-twisting terrified of everything about this accursed reborn life that he needed me in ways I’d only ever imagined I needed him—Joe, I love you. Twisted-up as all this is you’d never have done it if you didn’t love me. Why couldn’t you just have told me, why couldn’t I have seen, that all this time, since the very beginning, all you ever wanted was to go back to sleep, forever?

  I wouldn’t have called you a coward. I swear it. Because it’s me, not you, who can’t just face facts, see sense, lie down in the tall grass and accept that this is all we get, all anyone who ever lives ever gets no matter how good, how selfless, how beloved—

  The music stopped. And we’d never have it again. Joe had an arm around me and he stopped us both short at the edge of the sandpit, the dry tide just past the swings that would never quite roll in—but it was rolling over both of us now thick and dense as felt, the smell of human flesh under a smeared-on cake frosting layer of undeath and beneath that, like a vein of ore in a rock, the oily chemical stench that first gave Teresa away. The sandpit reeked of it, the sandpit that was more than large enough to hide a body.
Joe turned toward me and there wasn’t triumph in his face, but remorse.

  “I thought you’d have figured it out before this,” he said. “Probably would’ve, if the dance hadn’t—”

  “Joe.” The smell seemed to get stronger the more I stared. “What’s in there?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to see any of it.”

  But he did see it, whatever it was. And he knew. All this time, he knew.

  Behind me I heard the creak of footbridge planks and the rustle of branches, then slow cautious steps. Linc? I wanted Linc, Renee, anyone who was still truly us in the vicinity because something was even more wrong than I’d known and I was scared. From the corner of one eye I saw something with the gait of the cornfield folk, bobbing unsteadily on its toes like a cork in rough waters and throwing out hands to trees for balance as it approached. I didn’t turn. Joe tossed a stone hard at the sand, and something quivered and shifted underneath in response.

  “This world’s not built for us, Jessie,” he said. “It’s not built for the risen-up, the mortal undead, not anymore. If it ever was. We’re gonna get wiped out. We’re being wiped out right now. So I wanted to live up to that promise we made each other, after Lillian. I wanted to make sure that one way or another, neither of us have to live like this anymore.”

  The steps stopped next to me, the strange smell now overpowering, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and nodded. I’d had a feeling it was him. The girl who’d vanished from the underpass, or him.

  “Ben,” I said.

  He smiled from lips smeared with drying blood. His teeth were still like ours, longer and sharper than any hoo’s, but they’d turned the gleaming white of high-polished bone.

  “In the flesh,” he said.

  13

  Ben just kept grinning and grinning. “So how’s tricks, Jessie?”

  Real words, articulated with full tongue and teeth. He was still there, still him—not like the cornfield people, those hollow rotten husks of their old selves—but there was a new hardness in his voice, an edge that could draw blood. His bitten arm was whole again, a thick solid sheet of flesh painted in a sleeve-sized bruise that flickered and wavered like pond water; fat veins cut through it like rivers in muddy ground. I couldn’t help it, I reached out to touch and felt the smooth unbroken patina of living skin. Human skin.