Dust

by Joan Frances Turner

  There was a mess of bone and dust and crushed skull and drying coffin liquor near the slide, something reaching from it still with the bare semblance of an arm, and that was all that was left of Joe, and we had just been talking, dancing and I’d told him that I could kill him, kill him right then and there, and the thought of it made me shake all over as I let out a shuddering cry.

  “Jesus,” Teresa sneered, tossing that thick black hair over her shoulder. “You’d think she actually lost someone living.”

  “I’ll kill you,” I said, and I’d thought and fantasized it dozens of times, hundreds, but this time I felt so cold and tense with purpose that I knew I really would. “I killed Adriana, I can kill you—”

  “Adriana was still transitioning,” Teresa said, hitching her shoulders back like she was shrugging off a coat. “Not me. You wanna try it, bitch? Come on. This has been a long time coming.”

  I made a fist of one rotten, stiff, creaking hand—this really was it and we both knew it, but I had to try, didn’t I, for Joe, for Ben, for poor old Sam? “You’re the worthless one,” I said, as we circled one another, as Jim lay there watching us, stretching out a hand, weeping. “And you’re bragging about it. You’re sick. I wouldn’t be like you, I’d rather kill myself than be like you, insane, crazy, sick, a cannibal—”

  “Don’t worry,” said Teresa, slowly advancing on me. “None of that will happen. You’ll just be dead. That’s all you’ll ever be.”

  Jim made an urgent moaning sound and then something came flying from the trees, hitting Teresa smack, smack on the shoulder, the cheekbone. Red blood streamed from her face as she whipped around, snarling, and then she was ducking handfuls of lake stones, hurled with undead force. Linc and Renee staggered out, unchanged still, vibrating with tension and fear as they clutched their weapons in their hands. Sticks and stones. Linc looked from Teresa, to Jim, to the remains lying at the foot of the slide, and I didn’t have to explain. “Oh, Christ,” he said, and started laughing like he’d never stop. “I knew it. I always knew it.”

  Teresa raised up a warning hand, her wounds from the stones already healed. “Private business, kiddies. Very private. Turn around and leave right now, or you won’t walk away alive.”

  Linc snarled, a blessed display of teeth and black rot. “What makes you think you will?”

  Teresa was all smiles, all happiness as she advanced on them both, running zigzag and forward and back in a bizarre, mocking little dance just to show how fast she could move. “Jessie,” said Renee, full of urgency but none of her old teary panic, “what do we do?”

  “She needs to breathe!” I shouted, as Teresa turned and leapt for my throat. “She needs to—”

  She hurled me into the blood-soaked sand pile, yanked me out and slammed me over and over against the swing set poles, until coffin liquor streamed into my eyes and a cheekbone snapped and collapsed. Air, my brain chanted frantically over and over, she needs air again. I don’t. Teresa threw me on my back and I reached out and squeezed, trying to get her nostrils and mouth in one grip and of course I couldn’t, of course she bent my arm backward and then backward again until there was a long loud splintering crack and I screamed, and screamed even harder when she jumped on my legs, breaking a femur, wrenching and pulling. Something tugged and tore and snapped, and then one of my legs was gone below the knee and I’d barely felt it, in fact I felt nothing below the chest at all.

  Linc howled, a long screech of fury like a song for me, as he grabbed Teresa and held her face down in the sand pile. Renee kicked hard and Teresa’s skull split open, bone and hair flaring in a fan and brains leaking into the adulterated sand. Then it knit itself together again, closing as neat and fast as Florian’s had opened in death, and she rose up in a spray of dust and grabbed Linc around the neck, wrenching forward, backward, breaking him open along the spine like a gutted fish still flopping for the water. Renee was on her, screaming, trying to pull her off, and then Teresa got a hand wrapped around Renee’s throat and they were both staggering through the sand in their murderesses’ dance while I rolled, so gently, down a long red tunnel. Renee wasn’t moving anymore, she wasn’t moving, the dance was all Teresa’s. Wake up, little Renee, wake up. Linc, don’t die—

  Renee lay on her back, motionless, eyes staring vacant and hollow into the night sky. Linc was on the ground beside her and Teresa straddled him with guttural sounds of delight, teeth ripping into his face, fingers tearing the flesh from his arms. Something thick streamed from Linc’s stomach, soaking Teresa’s shirt, and I just lay there too, watching, the tunnel walls contracting around me. My cheek was oozing dark syrup from where a lake stone clipped it as I fell; my arm, what was left of my legs wouldn’t move at all. I was back in the coffin, staring up immobile as the lid slammed down for good. Teresa bent over me, her mouth melting before my failing eyes into a chasm the color of bleached bones.

  “Close your eyes,” she murmured. “It’ll go so much quicker—”

  Wordless, ceaseless screaming erupted in a flood behind us, sirens crying out after the bombs had dropped. A thunder-clap of running feet, bare, booted, belly-white, blister-red, forest-filthy, and through the pillars of legs I saw Ben, Sam, a Rat here, a Rat there, fleeting glimpses of the streaming hair and long grasping fingers and blackened eyes of strangers rushing in to help us die. Ben ran straight for Teresa, wrenched her off me and hurled her on her back with a bellow of triumph. Jim was cowering on the ground now, moaning in fear, sobbing in pain, grabbing for the underbrush like he could tunnel inside it and bury himself forever away from what he’d done, and then he was lost in the swarm and I couldn’t see him, I couldn’t hear anything but teeth crunching through bone and Teresa shouting, then howling loud enough to shake the earth. Then nothing.

  Sam bent over me, his mouth still thickened with blood and black bile. I closed my eyes, waiting and remembering the deer, the hoos, the stray dogs and squirrels and raccoons and possum and countless other helpless stupid little animals we had cornered and killed. Not so stupid as us, reduced to this. What did a deer think of in death? No fear, if you were a deer you wouldn’t have any of this sort of knowing fear, you’d just remember how the sun streaked the river when you bent down to drink, how the branches curved and arched like a curtsey to let you pass through. The taste of ripe berries on the twig. The axe-edge of winter. The spring. The night.

  The moon.

  BOOK THREE

  RESURGAM

  14

  I smelled rain approaching and the air felt strange, heavy with quiet and emptiness, as Florian and I walked together along the dunes. I wasn’t sure what I was walking on, one leg gone and the other broken beyond repair, but somehow I was upright. The rain smell burned off as quickly as it arrived and the sun suffused a thick wall of clouds, turning everything pearly luminous gray.

  “Is this heaven?” I asked. Someone was screaming, horrible breathless screams like muscle tearing off the bone, but even that couldn’t shatter the peace.

  Florian smiled. “You just leave that be till you’re all used up.”

  “Weren’t you watching that fight?” I picked up a lake stone, tossed it in a wide arc at the water. “I am used up, old man. Far out and floating. See?” I pointed at the bloated, torn-up body bobbing on the Lake Michigan waves. “There I am.”

  The screams from somewhere else didn’t stop.

  “That?” Florian looked scornful. “That ain’t nothing but the water. If you’re smart, you’ll stick to the sands.” He dug a toe bone into the damp sand near the shoreline, gone dark from the rolling waters. “This is where we all came from. This is where we were born.”

  “So that’s true then?” I picked up another stone. “Something happened here, ages ago, something that infected all the sands? Got into the air? Was it a meteor?”

  “Infected all the sands,” Florian said, an echo instead of an answer. “Got into the air. Strangeness everywhere. Sickness everywhere. Death everywhere.”

  His toes pushed
deeper into the sands. Near the shoreline, if they’re dry enough, you can get them to make a little sound underfoot, like the sound when you crunch through hard snow except fuller, heavier, almost melodic like a flat, subdued musical note. Singing sands, they call them. But here it was all waterlogged, sullen and quiet. The screams that much louder. Like sounds of childbirth. Born times three.

  “The screaming sands,” I said.

  “The sands started this,” he said. “And the sands’ll finish it.”

  “I’m already finished.” I flipped the stone, the silvery pink of a salmon’s skin, over and back in my palm, raised my arm to throw it. “I’m done, I’m through—”

  He grabbed my wrist with the strength he must have had when he was young, new-hatched, when my hoo-self was still centuries from birth. “Stop that,” he hissed, wrenching the stone away and brandishing it before my face like he might strike me with it. “You stop wasting all them bits and pieces, tossing them away. They made us what we are today. They’re what woke us up from death. What made us. What’ll keep you walking. These are us.”

  “Igneous,” I said, taking the stone back from him. I cradled it in my hand like it might break. “Sedimentary.”

  “Metamorphic,” he said. His eyes were suddenly sad. “Meteoric.”

  “I’m dead. Done. Finished.”

  “This’ll keep you walking.” He closed my fingers around the stone. “Keep you walking till you get to the sands.”

  I shook my head, laughing. “I’m at the sands, old man!” I shouted. “I’m here! I’m in front of you! Can’t you see me?”

  I tried to let the stone go, drop it back where I’d found it, but somehow my fingers kept clutching it tighter and tighter the more I tried to let it go; its edges dug into my flesh and I was laughing harder, laughing hard and breathless like screaming and I couldn’t stop. Florian didn’t seem to hear. He shambled away, tottering slowly and then running on his tinder-stick legs, and then he became a huge fattened tick of a deer. The stone became my hand and I slashed his throat with nails grown to long bone-white spikes, heard the poor deer sigh and collapse like Florian had at the moment of death. Blood soaked the sand, rising higher and higher with the incoming tide. I spat out mouthfuls as Teresa’s drowned, howling corpse bobbed and floated toward me, rose up and grabbed my throat, pulling me under—

  I jolted awake, flailing. I lay on something hard and cold and my right shoulder felt funny, like a weight was pulling it down. My legs ached—legs. My legs. Not numb, or severed, or dead. I tried to sit up, just to check, and it was like pulling a concrete block by twine. Then some heavenly smell drifted past me and there were hands propping me up, holding the bit of heaven just under my nose. It was very dead, whatever it was. My stomach was a hollow husk, dry and thin and feeling like it might tear in two.

  “Eat,” said the voice. A woman’s voice I almost knew, from somewhere.

  I ate and ate and ate and didn’t look at what I swallowed, just grunted like a kiddie for more. I tried to sit up again because I still had that strange feeling in my shoulder, I had to check, and then I was staring down at my arm, at my hand. My hands. My two hands, firm and pink with the skin gathered just right at the knuckles, little pintucks of flesh with no swelling or decay. The nails embedded so tight, so solid at the tips. My hands.

  I dropped the piece of maggoty carrion I’d been devouring and felt at my face, at my mouth where a soft cushiony lip line now masked my teeth and jaw. Lips were such nasty rubbery things, what did I need with them? Why bother growing them back? My cheeks had gone almost plump and it hurt to touch them, like a big blister. I spat into my hand, and got something streaked with black but turning unmistakably clear. I sniffed my skin. Pure, unadulterated hoo.

  My stomach buckled, twisted, but I didn’t get sick, just sat on the feeling like an egg until it subsided. Happy now, Jim, wherever you are? I’m not giving you a goddamned thing to eat, I’m keeping it for myself. Eating filth. Eating anything. My hands shook and I grabbed the piece of dead flesh back, swallowed it down in huge tearing mouthfuls; it was delicious to me now, that was the worst part. Happy now?

  Someone sat close to me, too close, watching me eat as she made soft munching noises of her own; long straw-dry hair, half bleached blond and half grown-out brown, brushed my face. I turned, and immediately I recognized her. It was the woman from the woods, the one Florian and I saw die, the one whose car came sailing into our parking lot a lifetime ago. Her skin was pink again, not the bluish-black of her transitioning time, and the thick anxious arch of her brows, the curve of her jaw as she bit into her meat and the querulous quirk of her chin, all made up a face I’d known long before, should have known right away when we met again. Standing over my gravestone wiping teary eyes, big bewildered brown eyes I’d looked straight into, back at the park, but never saw for themselves. Opening her mouth square in a scream as she turned and ran. Falling over sick, dying, right at my feet, the shape of her so familiar but with a new liquid, a livid death-liquor, poured inside it so everything about her looked distorted, wobbly, a gelatin torn in two as it separated from the mold. I should still have known. I hadn’t wanted to. Just like with so much else.

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

  I nodded. My sister Lisa shook her head, the feel of her hair against my skin like an itch.

  “Then you’re one up on me,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m me anymore. But I’m not like the others—like some of the others. Some of us did keep our heads. Or find them again, after a while, for whatever good it does us. Then there’s everyone else.”

  She put a finger to my cheek, so cautious, like the cheekbone might shatter beneath her touch. “It’s good to see you again, Jessie. Even like this.”

  Good to see me like this, again. But not the other way. I had nothing to say to that, absolutely nothing, so I kept eating.

  Lisa twitched as she watched me, then grabbed another piece of flesh from the corpse lying next to us and devoured it in two large bites. She was painfully thin, cheeks bending inward like scooped-out gourds and eyes dark-circled and hollow.

  “You didn’t recognize me at all,” she said, licking her lips for the last traces of the taste. “Back in the woods, I mean.”

  “Your hair,” I said. I held out my hand, my right hand, my new right hand, for more meat. “You still had brown hair, when I saw you last. And your face, when you were sick. It was all . . . distorted.” The swollen bluish-blackness of her as she staggered up to me and Florian desperate for recognition, starving for squirrel flesh she couldn’t keep down. I shuddered. “For a minute, I think, I wasn’t sure, but—even your voice sounded different.”

  “I don’t like remembering it. Actually, I don’t remember a lot of it.” Lisa shook her head. “I wish I could have explained, but my brain wasn’t working right. I think the change is a lot rougher on humans than on . . . what you were.” She pulled at the cloth of her jeans, twitching, twitching. The shy, soft timidity she’d always had, the pliancy like she was made of a putty you could stick your thumb in deep and yank into any form you chose, had hardened with age or sickness or both, turned her nervy and brittle. “Your face was a hell of a lot different too, when I saw you, but I recognized you. I knew you right off. Your eyes. I can’t believe you couldn’t see it was me, my eyes, something that—”

  I put down my bit of rotten meat and stared into her face, hovering whiny-needy inches from mine. “Someone I love is dead,” I said, slow on each syllable. “Dead and eaten. My friends are dead. They tried to help me, and because of it they’re dead. They’re all dead and thanks to your brother the ones who aren’t dead are monsters like they never were before and everything I loved is gone and I’ve apparently turned back into the thing I most hate in the world, so can you give me a fucking break for five minutes or do I have to shut you up the hard way?”

  She didn’t have anything to say to that so I finished my meal, almost bringing it all back up again in a giant Billy-style belch
. So many words all at once, so fast, so effortless, completely distinct, so much tongue and teeth! That couldn’t have been me talking, it was a fluke. I grabbed another piece of rottenness and chewed as I looked around. We were in the old abandoned church out on the highway, the floor still covered in brown bloodstains and the powdery remnants of dry-sucked bones. And new corpses, our meal, dragged here who knows when by the Rat or maybe some of them were the Rat, I couldn’t tell, not anymore. Like it mattered. Anymore. I glanced up at the balcony; we were alone, at least for now. I couldn’t stop staring at my new hand.

  “It’s because you lost it in death,” Lisa explained. “When the truck hit you. That and your legs. Anything you lost dying you get back. If you were born without it, though—tough luck. That was disappointing for a few people.” She shrugged, actually looked like she might laugh. “Life’s just never fair.”

  “Where are the rest of them?” I asked, more to hear myself talk than anything. Still my voice but it had gone cold, sharp-edged and rat-a-tat staccato, like Ben’s or Sam’s, like one of the women in those old noir movies: Johnny, don’t ya see I had ta turn ya in! Yer a rotten bum, Johnny! “The others. Where’d they go?”

  Lisa shrugged. “I’ve been at the wood’s edge for a while, I just followed them back in. There’s gangs like that everywhere now, running around. Just looking for more food.” She laughed, a flat, toneless sound. “All anyone anywhere can think about, more food. More food. But it’s all running out.”