Dust

by Joan Frances Turner

  I thought of Linc, kicking and flailing on the ground with Jim, his own gang tearing into his flesh, and decided to think of something else. There were new, dangerously thin walls up in my mind that wouldn’t let me think of Joe at all, wouldn’t let me remember just what that had been like; the walls hemmed me in like a box, a flimsy magician’s cabinet that could collapse on me in an instant, so it took all my concentration to keep the walls standing upright, myself safe inside. Sam’s face, alien, twisted with starvation-fueled hate. Renee, staring with dead, hollow eyes up at the moon.

  “Jim said you lived with him,” I said. “In Mom and Dad’s old house. He said he locked you inside when you got sick.”

  “I got out,” she said softly.

  “He never mentioned that.”

  “They’d have found me anyway. Probably killed me. Him too. They were asking him questions. He worked in the labs. It’d got out that they did something, maybe, that helped cause this. Everyone was getting sick. I’d disappeared all of a sudden. They knew what was going on.” She pulled herself to her feet, paced back and forth before the altar. “Jim was—I saw him, in the woods, after he got sick, I can’t believe that was just days ago, I, you’re right. I barely knew him. It’s not like someone just being dead.” She shuddered. “We were all we had left, Jessie, that’s the thing, and I . . . wasn’t doing well. He was so good to me, it killed him inside too when you and Mom and Dad—but he held it all together for me. Because I just couldn’t. He took care of me, when I needed it. And then at the end, when I needed it again. At least he tried to. I don’t know what he was doing at the labs, he wasn’t supposed to tell me but I don’t care what anyone says, Jessie, I don’t believe for one goddamned second he had anything to do with—”

  “I asked you one simple question,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about him again. Ever. You talk too damned much.”

  And it’s because of you. Because you came home and said you’d seen me, because that made whatever Jim was holding together inside go flying in all directions and look what he’s done now, Lisa, look what he’s done trying to save the day like he did when we were all alive. Alive before. Salvage Thanksgiving. Jump between me and Dad. Shout at you, try to get you mad enough to stand up for yourself at long last. Kill the whole world to try to get me back. It’s all down to me, Lisa. And him. And you. You were right, Billy. Hell of a family affair.

  Lisa stared silently out the remnants of a stained glass window. I got up too, my whole skin tender and almost raw, and began searching for more food. It was hard, in fact almost impossible, to think about anything else; my box’s flimsy walls were holding up easier than they should have, because even as words like alive and human and Joe and Linc and Renee and sister kept flitting through my head my mind kept pirouetting away, lighting right back on food, hunger, food. It wasn’t like before, the bursts of flesh-lust that subsided the second the meat slipped down your throat—this was constant, insistent, tugging at every corner of my body like a whining toddler who wouldn’t let go. We’d stripped the corpses to nothing, a pair of piranhas on a picnic. I wrenched off bits of bone, ate them barely tasting them, and suddenly Lisa was right beside me feverishly munching her share.

  “You’ve been out for days,” she said. “Eating in your sleep.”

  I cast around my memory, dredged up nothing but the horrible screaming from my dream. “So what’d I miss?”

  Lisa didn’t answer, just popped bits of vertebrae whole in her mouth. I searched the pews for more bodies, allowing myself shock at how easily and quickly one foot slipped in front of another, muscles flowing like liquid with every long loose step—no more jerking stiffness, no more stagger. So much easier to keep my balance, too, with two arms. It was like dancing and I might have enjoyed it, except for the growing, unshakable sense of panic that there was no more food in the church, that there might not be any more food anywhere and where had all that meat and bone gone, the heavy weight of flesh distending my gut just minutes ago and now I might never have eaten at all? I scratched at one of the dried bloodstains on the floor, trying to bring up some of the brownish powder, then crouched and put my tongue to it to coax it back into liquid. I tasted the sandy edge of concrete, and kept licking anyway.

  “What are you doing?” Lisa demanded, right behind me.

  I jumped backward, the heat rising to my new face, and snarled at her. She just shrugged again, like nothing surprised her, and handed me pieces of skull, a sucked-out bit of femur. As I gulped them down and licked my fingers clean she glanced out another of the window holes, the spring breeze wrapping half-bleached hair strands around her face, and sighed. I touched my own hair, touched it with my new right hand; it was one huge snarl, but thick and covering my whole scalp once more.

  “Is this how it happened to you?” I said. “Like this, but worse?”

  “First, you’re so sick you can’t eat anything. Hot, dizzy, aching, weak. Your skin turns blue. Then blackish. Then . . . rotten. Oh, hell, you saw it.” She shook her head, remembering. “And it feels raw, like a huge blister. It’s hard to breathe. A lot of folks died in that stage of it. Just asphyxiated. Then you get hungry. Ravenous. All day. All night. But you’re sick along with it, can’t stop throwing up. Then . . .” She shrugged. “You either die for real, like you must’ve thought I did, or you’re out cold for a while and then you wake up like this.” Her voice was dull and indifferent, like a comedian weary to get to the punch line and crawl offstage. “For better or worse. Sometimes you’re a little crazy, right after you do wake up again. Happy crazy. Furious crazy. Crazy like you can’t stop laughing at everything, right before you kill it—”

  I remembered the gleeful, deranged glitter in Ben’s eyes, the all-consuming chill coming off Sam like winter breath. Poor Sam. “I’ve seen,” I said.

  “Well, that’s what it’s like for humans anyway, living humans. Your kind too, I guess. It used to take weeks. Now it’s hours. I guess the virus mutated again—”

  “Bacterium,” I said. “But this goes away, right? Feeling like this?”

  Lisa hesitated. I thought of Teresa’s trembling, Rommel’s bellows of famine. Food. More food. I’m hungry, goddammit. Ben, bitten, his arm gone rotten, dead. He and Sam. Except not. You’re out cold for a while and then you wake up like this. Hot, dizzy, aching, weak. Like I’d been feeling, before Teresa ever attacked me. Just like Joe said. He was right. All along, he was right.

  “Are any humans left?” I asked. “Is anyone immune to this?”

  “A few. I think. If they can outrun all the sick ones like me, who’ll eat anything they can—a few. Very few. I don’t envy them at all.”

  Immune, just like Joe. Who got tired of running. “It goes away,” I said. “Feeling like this.”

  “It did for a while.” Lisa turned to me, arms wrapped around herself, around her stomach aching like mine. She crunched another mouthful of bone fragments. “Then it comes back. The hunger comes back. And it’s even worse than before. And then, at the very end . . . well. You can’t eat at all. You just waste away.”

  I slipped a hand into my pocket, gripping the lake stone that sat there like a long-ago promise, like a reproach. Stop wasting them bits and pieces. Why should I, Florian? Just because they’re all I have left now of you? Of anyone. The blistery feeling making my skin twitch and shiver subsided, receded as I stroked its surface, like something was gently touching me in turn. Florian’s pouch of stones still rested on my hip but someone had undone the ties holding it in place while I was out, retied them in an inept bird’s nest of a knot. Lisa must’ve been looking for more food. Stones were one of the few things my teeth, my good old undead teeth now stolen from me forever, hadn’t been able to crunch through. More food. We needed to look for more food. Run away from this horrible place where my afterlife ended, was stolen away. Where Joe, Linc, Renee, the Sam and Ben I’d known had all died, because I couldn’t hide and keep still around a grave-haunting hoo. Hunger and shame. And grief. Nothing else to of
fer Lisa, or anyone. I clutched the stone tight as I could.

  “I have to get out of here,” I said.

  “Might be smart. There’s all sorts of gangs and mobs wandering around out here now, looking for more meat. They’ll strip your forest clean in days. Every animal they can hunt. Until they start dying too.” Lisa looked thoughtful. “Though if we just lie low for a while longer, until they do—”

  “I have to get out of here.”

  Lisa stared at me for a minute. Then she nodded. “North,” she said. “Toward the cities. The dying part of the plague’s in full swing up there. Bodies everywhere. There’ll be a lot more to eat.”

  Her voice was detached and casually distant but the flicker of horror in her own eyes, at herself, made her suddenly seem more like my Lisa, the sister I’d known living, than anything in her face, her voice, her hair reverting back to its old nondescript brown. Those things, those physical things, were mere familiar signposts along the road to her but that moment of shame, disgust, grief, all-consuming famine, that was the destination. I knew that place so well already, in such a short time. The look died in her eyes just as soon as it sparked.

  “Can you walk okay?” she asked, as she twisted her hair into a chaotic ponytail.

  “Never better,” I said, and almost laughed to realize it was true. “Lisa?”

  “Yeah, Jessie?”

  “I’m so hungry.”

  It just came out and I was so embarrassed saying it, teary embarrassed, like a little kid needing the bathroom for the fourth time in a row and it really felt as urgent as that, worse. Lisa didn’t laugh, though. I saw anew just how thin her face was, how her beautifully taut unbroken unrotted skin outlined every bone in her wrists and arms.

  “So am I,” she said. “So is everyone. Like I told you. Don’t worry, though—if it comes to that, you’re probably strong enough to fight me off.”

  Ten, fifteen, twenty miles up the empty highway heading past Morewood, through the long-abandoned remains of Taltree Acres, veering toward Lake Station and Gary. I didn’t speak, just kept feeling my chest expand full of air by slow degrees, let it out, take it in again, over and over like it’d never lost the knack; I breathe now, I kept thinking, breathing with my lungs, it was so awful and so dependent of me, the thought the earth that gave birth to me could now suffocate me filled me with horror, but still I drew in long, short, fast, slow breaths until I hiccupped and grew dizzy, amazed at the sheer novelty. And my hand, my new hand, my new arm! And how quickly, easily my legs swung forward and forward again, like they’d been born to the task! Neither of us seemed to need rest, never mind sleep.

  What stopped us was hunger, the need to pause every half hour, every quarter hour, every tick on the stopwatch to gorge on possum or rabbit until bloated and sick and then feel it all melt away in a mile. We didn’t find much possum or rabbit either, as we retraced Lisa’s path: She was right, the forests were being stripped. By the time we hit the old u-pick blueberry farm on the Lepingville outskirts we were chewing fistfuls of weeds, cursing the sweet wonderful berries denied us because summer hadn’t hit. At least it made it easy not to think about Joe or Renee or Sam or Linc. Too much. The flimsy box walls in my mind wavered, but they held. Who did Lisa think about? Jim? That guy Jim had mentioned, who didn’t stick around? She’d gone so quiet, chin dipped to her chest in a posture of mobile defeat, I was scared to ask.

  When we got to Lepingville proper, the trees suddenly gave way to empty car washes, deserted office parks, abandoned strip mall after strip mall after strip mall; lots of abandoned cars now too, no more clean deserted roads, but nary a body in sight. Lisa abruptly came to life, yanking me right off the roadside.

  “More gangs up here,” she muttered, as if we were house-safe crouching in a six-inch ditch. “We’re a moving target.”

  “We’d be one anyway. Let’s hit the fast-food places, they might have supplies in storage, meat patties—”

  “I told you, they’ve already beat us to it—you’ve been a little isolated, haven’t you? You were lucky.” She laughed, squatting there in the dirt. “Lucky, lucky. Nothing to eat here. Nothing to eat anywhere.”

  She’d used herself up, I realized, in the retrieving of me and now was falling back into some sort of habitual starved torpor. So why even bother rescuing another mouth to feed? The surge of irritation I felt was another welcome distraction.

  “I’m looking anyway,” I said, and ran across the road before she could stop me. She was right, of course: Burger Mart, Steak Shack, Mambo Italiano, the Mexican Grill, the Texas Grill, the Hawaiian Grill, Al’s Country Grill, all looted and stripped to the Formica and that too was scored deep with toothmarks. The stench of leaking gas was everywhere. At least there were still those lovely little packets of ketchup, relish, honey mustard, steak sauce, mayonnaise, jam, dozens of them that we popped into our mouths whole and let burst on our tongues.

  As we walked on, spitting out plastic scraps, all else we found to eat were chewed-up bits of bone lying near the shells of cars, thrown into careless heaps like the remains of a jumbo-bucket chicken dinner. Through it all the seagulls still swooped and strutted around the empty parking lots, pecking at the garbage and rising upward with slow, mocking ease whenever we tried to catch them. The smell of burned flesh, a mere hint in the air just outside town, grew stronger and more acrid the farther we walked.

  “I told you,” Lisa said, stuffing her pockets with bone leavings and shaking hard with hunger. “Nothing to eat anywhere, until we get to the cities. Maybe not even then. Nothing to eat except us. Tell you what, I really miss when all that ate humans were walking corpses you could outrun without trying. We were so spoiled. We didn’t know how good we had it.”

  “I didn’t eat humans,” I said.

  She made a harsh sound barely disguised as a laugh. “Then you were definitely a cut above us.”

  A few more miles, and we started seeing signs of life: actual dead bodies mixed in with the skeletons (bird-pillaged, barely any flesh left for us), a few random figures wandering slowly, haphazardly around the parking lots with too little purpose to be an actual gang. As we watched they hunched in a circle, tearing a corpse to bite-sized pieces—a silent, weirdly harmonious scene—except for one who seemed confused and just kept squatting down, standing up, squatting again yards from the actual meal. Suddenly he collapsed where he stood, sinking to the asphalt and going instantly still. His friends, busy eating, didn’t seem to notice.

  “Oh, good,” Lisa whispered, her eyes glittering, and we almost ran across the highway: Only one of them looked up when he heard, but he just bent right back over his food. We tore off handfuls of corpse flesh and barely bothered chewing before we swallowed, too tearfully grateful for actual real meat to savor our meal, and I was in such a thick haze of hungry oblivion that when I felt something tap my shoulder I shouted in surprise.

  Lisa growled like an undead, jumping to her feet ready to fight. It was another fellow from the group, this one older and even more gaunt, more of a starveling than Lisa. He raised his hands in surrender, then motioned toward his friends: One of them had grabbed a matchbook from somewhere and was building a fire with scraps of wood, roasting the last bits of corpse to a turn. He nodded at the fire, then the piece of flesh I gripped in my hands. It could’ve been a trap, I supposed, but what’s life without risk? I walked over and watched him fuss silently over the fire, blowing at it until it leapt to life, then move back so we could all cook our meals.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  No reply. It felt weird holding our food directly over the flames with our hands, seeing my own flesh go boiling red and then blacken and instantly heal again, but it’s not like we had any sticks and I didn’t feel a thing but a vague, faraway warmth. Cooked meat, it turned out, was so incredibly good I almost moaned biting into it. The others ate too but more slowly, indifferently, and one of them dropped his last bit of meat to the blacktop; they all shuffled away, abandoning the fire as they headed past the
intersection and toward the county line. The second they were gone Lisa ran for the fire, trying to roast half an arm whole over the little flickers of flame.

  “God,” she whispered between bites, shaking, “the fat just gets all hot and sizzling, it’s—God—”

  Maybe the one we were eating would have offered us a place by the fire too. That bothered me, and the thought that it was supposed to bother me didn’t help (talk about your useless, bygone sentiments), but what scared me was that the others didn’t want his flesh anymore—that’s what the fire was really for, I could see it, a bit of novelty to try to coax themselves to eat. Was that what awaited us, after this horrible hunger finally ebbed? Lisa said so, by the end you couldn’t eat at all. And apparently, from the way my own charred flesh healed in seconds, the way Sam and Teresa got right back up again after being smashed in two, you couldn’t even kill yourself. You had to let yourself be scorched by famine, seared as if someone took a slow blowtorch to every cell, and then feel it consume you from the inside out, Prometheus and the vulture in the same body—

  The liver. Lisa hadn’t found the liver yet, the guts, she was too human to know they were the best part. I tore at the corpse, determined to get them before her, and when I raised my head again I saw an old gray-headed fellow on a rusty bike watching me from the roadside. I just stared at him, and he must’ve been a true hoo because he moaned aloud, the waaahh of prey that knew it was only a matter of time, and pumped the pedals so hard down the road shoulder I could hear him wheezing and gasping even as I laughed. Off he went, right into the arms of our new friends.

  I could have caught up with him, and eaten him, yes. Easily. That second. But looking at his crumb-encrusted beard, the parka deflated from all the holes where the cotton batting escaped, his shoes splitting off from the sole, I thought it was damned unfair to kill someone just because he couldn’t buy the fleeting protection of a car.