Dust

by Joan Frances Turner

  “We were so strong,” said Renee, with no regret, just a sort of wonderment for glories long past. “For a few days. And so hungry. And now . . .” She laughed. “We can’t eat anymore. Can’t eat anything. Can’t make ourselves eat, can’t keep anything down. Hair’s starting to fall out too. And I’d been so glad to get it back.”

  Wasting away. I didn’t even get the glory part, I was too busy being delirious. I put an arm around her and squeezed for a moment. Then I picked up her hand, studying it, the hand that had scrubbed the mess of fighting and crying from my own face: It glinted faintly in the sunlight, rings piled indiscriminately atop each other on the nearly fleshless fingers like horseshoes on a stake. Teresa’s rings. Silver filigree, a sterling turtle with little opal eyes, a whole stack of what looked like dirtied white gold wedding bands. A garnet in a nest of tiny tarnished leaves.

  “I wanted them,” Renee said. She had a look in her eyes like the night we’d fought the Rat except quieter, harder. “So now I’ve got them.”

  “They won’t do you much good now,” I said.

  “They’re worthless,” she said. “But they’re a good reminder.”

  I thought about that, and nodded, and let her hand drop.

  “Well, I’m still hungry,” Lisa said, her voice loud and defiant. “And it doesn’t look like there’s too much competition for the eats, so what do you say, Jessie?”

  Renee shrugged, not taking the bait, and glanced around the silent encampment full of emaciated faces. “No, you’re right,” she told Lisa, “none of us can eat, and you already saw there’s some food over by the trees—”

  “I still think we should bury them,” Linc said.

  “And I already told you, don’t waste what energy you’ve got left,” Renee replied, with a sharpness that told me this wasn’t a new argument. “Jessie still needs food, too. Eat what you want,” she called out, “but do it over by the hillside, not here. We want to keep this place halfway civilized, while we can.”

  Lisa ran feverishly for the corpses. I looked into Renee’s and Linc’s solemn faces, saw how even Ron had turned quiet and weirdly pacific in his dying, thought of the hoos who’d let us share their fire, and felt ashamed of myself. Linc must’ve seen it because he patted my arm, understanding in his eyes. “It’s easy for us to act civilized, now,” he said. “I mean, there’s nothing else left we can do.”

  I avoided his gaze. My stomach was still growling for more but even though that had been all of us here, every one, I still felt too embarrassed to go scuttling for food. I fumbled with the knot on Florian’s stone pouch and slipped it off my hip, sat holding it in my lap. It was starting to feel heavy. Much too heavy. Renee actually smiled at the sight, slipping a ringed-up hand into her pocket and producing a stone with striations like mother of pearl.

  “We took them with us,” she said. “All the ones we could pick up.” She curled her fingers over it, holding on tight. “I feel a little less sick when I have one in my hand. Makes me think of things before. Another good reminder. Funny, huh, how even when you know it’s all in your head—”

  “Why did you come all this way?” I asked. The pouch’s bulging, blunted edges were, in fact, reassuring to the touch. “It’s not any better here. Worse.”

  “Damned if we know.” Linc laughed. He slipped a hand into the pouch, pulled out a green stone, stroked its surface. “Not any better? You’re being nice, it’s hell up here. We just . . . felt like we had to be here.” He dropped it back inside, fished around again, pulled out a gray one. “Like we had to die here. I don’t know why.”

  “I miss the beaches,” Ron said, watching Linc’s hands with a vague, but unflagging, interest. “Used to like it here. Even with the fucking scientists maggot-crawling everywhere trying to tag your every move—”

  My beach. Miss my beach. Get me my beach. The scientists. Octave Chanute. That would be right near here, the nearest beach, just a little farther north. Jim’s lab. Where it all began and not just in happy sand-strewn myth-time, where whatever the hell I am now was born—you wanted to go back to what made you so bad? See where you came from? Here’s the belly of the goddamned beast, have a grand old time sloshing around inside. I felt like laughing myself.

  “How far away is it?” I asked Ron. “The beach.”

  “Ten more miles? Little less? Fuck, I don’t know.” He clutched the blanket tighter around him. “Doesn’t matter now. Too damned far away.”

  Ten miles? That was nothing, Lisa and I had gone so much farther to get here, Ron, Renee, Linc so much farther still—and now that I’d made the mistake of giving in to Lisa’s exhaustion, sitting down, the thought of even one more mile made me shake where I sat and cling to the stone pouch like the edge of a life raft. Linc let the gray stone slip back inside and I retrieved it, held it in my fingers, slowly squeezed with all the strength I had left to make its edges crumble into a fine, pebbly powder; we’d eaten that too, Lisa and I, licking at the chalky remnants of rocks and concrete and chunks of asphalt as we crawled up north. I squeezed harder. The lake stones wouldn’t crumble, chip, crack, not for anything. Linc smiled at the sight.

  “We tried that too,” he said. “When we were still hungry. Almost split our teeth trying to bite them.” He gently took the stone from my hands, slipped it back into the pouch. “Just as well. They’re all we have left of . . .”

  He trailed off. Everything. That’s all they are. All we have now. And each other, for a few more days, a few more hours. Linc wasn’t lost. Renee. Maybe that meant that somehow, somewhere out there, by some crazy fucked-up miracle, Joe—

  Enough. Tarry black blood and a few random bits of broken bone, one still stretched out like an entreating arm. Nothing. Nothing for anyone. Just like he wanted.

  Linc pulled himself off the ground and motioned for me to get up, led me toward the others. “There’s someone else here,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ll want to see them, after—but they’re here.”

  Ron trailed behind us, like he had nothing better to do (and still, even now, I had to remind myself he wouldn’t jump me, that Rommel wasn’t in the trees coiled and ready to spring). Past the huddled masses, all shivering though the day was spring hot, and then Linc took me down a hill slope and toward the preserve’s tiny visitors’ station, a concrete box sitting on a broken bit of parking lot. A body lay outside the restrooms, curled up in a familiar posture of approaching death. Standing over it, stomping his feet and laughing at nothing, was a bag of bones with Ben’s broad, angular face. He caught my eye and without thinking, I backed away.

  “Jessie,” he said, with an oblivious, crazy grin. “It’s so good to see you again, Jessie, we gotta get the old gang back, we were over there and now we’re here, I don’t know how we got here but we gotta all get back together, we gotta show the Rat that’s not their land—”

  “Jesus,” Ron muttered, shaking his head. “If you were gonna try to cave someone’s skull in, Jessie, why couldn’t it have been him?”

  “Calm down now, Ben,” murmured the body at his feet, every shaking muscle evidence of the effort it took him to speak. “Calm down. It’s all right.”

  Sam. I knelt down by his side. His face was weary, resigned, almost serene in its utter lack of hope. Just like he’d always looked, since first I’d met him.

  “It’s good to see you again,” I whispered.

  “You can’t mean that,” he said, and I actually got a smile. “Not after—”

  “Yeah, I do,” I said, patting him gently on the shoulder. He was himself again, the plague-madness had passed. I always had a weakness for the old ones. “I do. How long has he been like this?”

  Sam smiled again, slow and delicate like a hairline crack spreading through porcelain. “When we stopped being hungry, and he realized what we’d both done.”

  “We gotta get the old gang back together, Jessie.” Ben crouched by us and rubbed his hands together like he could abracadabra himself an appetite, teeth chattering, shivering head to
toe. His skin was tinged blue, like Lisa in her transition. “We can get the old gang back together, get back into the forests where there’s some really good hunting—”

  “There’s no more hunting, Ben,” I said. “Not now. There’s nothing left to hunt.”

  “It’s true,” Ron said, and grinned proudly even as he shivered and stamped his emaciated feet. “We stripped those woods clean. Everything we could eat. Didn’t do us any damned good, though.”

  Sam lay there on his side, moaning like Florian when he was dying. A thin little thread of his blood went drip, drip from a wound on his hand, then the vein sealed itself shut once more. My mouth watered and I put a hand to it quickly, stanching the flow. He raised his chin, his eyes glassy-bright marbles shining with pain; the thin little tufts of gray hair on his head were falling out again, his skin the color of ash.

  “Joe,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry—”

  “It’s okay,” I said, and it was. Even though it never would be, it was. “You couldn’t help it. And he wanted to die.”

  Sam shook his head and moaned again, in pain or shame or both. Ben stomped his feet harder, faster, like he could crush whatever was killing all of us underfoot, then suddenly lay down next to Sam and closed his eyes. “Calm down, Ben,” he muttered to himself. “It’s all right.”

  Ron shook his head and started walking back up the hill; none of the Rat ever could abide it, babying the unfit. Sam watched until Ron had vanished over the hill crest, then dropped his head with relief and grabbed at my hand, at Linc’s.

  “I want to go,” he said. “I—”

  A fit of coughing rattled him and Ben squeezed his own eyes tighter shut, twitching and crying like a scared dog. “Calm down, Ben,” Sam said, gasping for breath, and squeezed my fingers. “Second time now, that I cut my throat and it didn’t do anything. First time, undead. Second time, this.” His expression turned hard, urgent, cold. “No third.”

  I turned to Linc; this was his gang and Renee’s, or at least that’s how I saw it. He nodded. “Go get Renee,” I said. “So she can say good-bye.”

  Linc nodded and walked off. To find Renee, so she could say good-bye. So after that, she and Linc would have first crack at some fresher meat they might actually be able to keep down. I told you we were never sentimental. A little breeze drifted over the lot carrying the fragrance of the lilac bushes near the restroom doors, tiny scrubby lilacs giving us a last burst of sweet scent before they died. I remembered that deer hunt in Great River and Lisa, already sick unto death, nearly crashing her car in that other parking lot. Just a few months ago. Decades of days.

  Footsteps were coming back down the hillside. Linc. Renee. Lisa. Some other, strange faces. News traveled fast. Sam lay there back to back with Ben, like sleeping in the old days, and kissed my hand with a sweep of cold, dry lips.

  “Make it quick,” he whispered. “For us both. Make it quick.”

  We did. We feasted, that night, on Sam’s body, on Ben’s. Even Linc and Renee ate. And we were all starving again in under an hour.

  16

  Lisa held my head as I got sick, sick everywhere, puking up everything I’d ever eaten. The thought of meat, of any meat, still made my mouth drip drool and my stomach tighten in anticipation, but then it kept tightening and tightening like an iron band until the meat rocketed back up again and my throat burned with acid. Lisa’s own puking marathon had ended hours earlier and now she was even sicker, shivering furiously no matter how warm the sun and the old, telltale blue tinge creeping over her skin like mold blooming on bread. Full circle, I thought, huddled on my knees and clutching my middle, trying to will the iron band to loosen. Full circle.

  “Help me out here, Rob,” Lisa said softly. “I need—”

  “Ron.”

  “Whatever. Give her some water, we can both keep that down. I think.”

  Since her own hunger dissipated Lisa had grown still and calm, her famished combativeness draining away like dirty water down a storm drain. Ron hovered around her in a way that made me laugh; subtle as a train wreck, he was, even now. He held out a half-empty water bottle and I gulped until the acid taste in my mouth started to fade.

  “This part’s the worst,” he assured me, “where you’re still hungry but can’t eat. It’ll pass.”

  I crouched down to be sick again. I still couldn’t get used to this, a Rat as our new best buddy, there had to be some scheme behind it and could I please stop being nauseous for just five minutes, that’s all, so I could put together what it was? Lisa shivered holding me and Ron patted her arm, shaking himself.

  “Why don’t you go bother Renee, and leave my sister alone?” I said. “You never cared before, as long as they were blond—”

  Ron just laughed, glancing at Lisa with the old slyness. “I don’t see big sis here complaining—”

  “You’re sweet, Jessie,” Lisa said, voice barely above a whisper, “but he’s all right.”

  “He was happy about this,” I told her, wiping my mouth. “He was attacking anyone who wasn’t sick, a lot of folks who were, before it all went south, if that’s your idea of sweet—”

  Ron just laughed, tossing a drained water bottle over his shoulder. “Hey, well, shit happens. I dragged a crate of these from the grocery store, back when I could still carry stuff, I’ll go get another. You’re gonna be sick for a while here.”

  He walked off into the trees. I could see the effort it took for him to keep moving, the constant ripple of shivers and tremors gripping every muscle and how he had to stop every few yards just to rest. Then I was sick again, everywhere, my eyes watering and throat raw; there was no more relief in between bouts of vomiting, just the dread of when it would happen again. Lisa cradled my head against her arm, mop-ping the cold sweat from my face. I was starting to get cold, too. Soon I’d be Saint-Vitusing through the daisies just like everyone else.

  “Could I ask you something?” I said. “And don’t go all nuts on me. Your daughter.” I hesitated, when I felt her shake a little bit harder, but I had to know. “Did you . . . kill her or something? Did you?”

  Lisa actually laughed, an abrupt, constricted sound like someone spitting something solid from between their teeth. Then she stroked my head, sighing. “Karen had leukemia,” she told me. “She died before any of this. Her father couldn’t handle it and took off. I don’t know where he is. Was.” She cradled me a little closer. “Only three years old, my Karen. This family’s had more than its share of fun, let me tell you—but I’m glad. I’m so, so glad she’s dead.”

  “Sorry. Stupid question, I guess—”

  “No, it isn’t. Traveling the road out to you, I saw . . .” She shuddered, her body stiffening against mine. “Never mind what I saw. Even what we both saw, it was nothing like what I saw. But it’s a perfectly logical question.”

  I brushed my hair out of my eyes and when I took my hand away, saw it covered in sweat-dampened strands: That was starting then, too. Sick all the time, hair falling out—maybe someone had set off a bomb or something and we didn’t know it. No dust clouds blotting out the sun, though, no silhouettes blossoming on the walls—just bodies everywhere, bodies in rows and piles and heaps and torn-up pieces for the birds and rats and dwindling ranks of the hungry. My own dying flesh. Six more corpses beside me, right now, losing their rigidity and swelling up with gas; Linc had stopped trying to move them, it was too much for him now. He, Ron, Lisa, Renee and I huddled in our own little group just like the others, half-dazed and moaning every now and then when the shivering or the bone-ache or the waves of nausea got to be too much. After Ron got back with our water, his last big burst of energy, he just curled up and trembled against Lisa’s shoulder for hours.

  “I hope there isn’t really a hell,” he said around incessantly chattering teeth, “or I’m so fucked.”

  “What do you call this?” I demanded, rocking back and forth against the aching in my legs, my back, my head. “If this isn’t hell?”

  He let out a little
bark of laughter. “Real life. That’s what I call it.”

  He burrowed under his filthy blankets and quit talking altogether. I lay down on my side, shivering and rocking and sometimes crawling a few feet away to vomit up bile; the chewed-up grass and soft powdery dirt felt like ground glass against my palms and knees, my skin still intact but tender as a great spreading blister. Linc kept handing me water bottles from Ron’s half-empty carton, but I wasn’t the least thirsty anymore, didn’t care about the taste in my mouth anymore. My hair was coming out now in clumps.

  “Over soon,” Linc whispered, his arms around me from the back and Renee’s from the front. “It’ll be all over. For all of us.”

  It hurt horribly where their bones pressed against my skin, I winced and tried instinctively to ease away, but I was too scared to be alone. Other groups kept their own vigils, crouched on their own desert islands of misery, and I heard coughing, vomiting, crying, snatches of prayers, attempted jokes, dazed monologues of shock and loss. I lay there clutching one of Florian’s lake stones in my hand, pale pink with a silvery sheen like salmon skin, and that hurt too but I couldn’t let go of it, the thought of losing my grip on it filled me with a vague, nebulous panic that made me hold on even tighter even as the touch made my palm throb with pain. I was too exhausted to stand upright. I couldn’t sleep.

  Mom, Dad, if you’re out there—no, I know you’re dead. I’m sure of it. I just know. Sam. Ben. Joe. My Joe. Billy, Mags? Maybe they made it to the next county, maybe it hasn’t spread there yet. Maybe chickens are penguins. Karen, my niece. Rommel. Maybe Jim, Teresa, how many more. All the Rats. All the Flies. No National Guardsmen coming to help us, no Red Cross, no Marines, no search-and-rescue teams, no paramedics, no government researchers, no special army divisions, no nothing. Just all of us, dying together, the county or the state or the whole country or the world. Well, why not? Why shouldn’t the world end now? Stranger things have happened. Like me, the should-be skeleton, being here to see the end at all.