Dust

by Joan Frances Turner

  I really thought there’d be some soldiers, at least. Secret government lab cooking up an antidote. Red-faced vigilante guys raiding the gun stores, whooping righteously as they pumped us full of rounds: “Humanity” 187, Mutants 0. That’s how it always happens in the movies. I used to like the movies. Maybe all of this is just a big movie, and I just have to wait for the credits to roll. Soon, very soon, we’ll all be safe and well, the screen will go black and all the lights will come up.

  Linc curled up with his head in the crook of my elbow. I loved them, I thought as I held them and felt them tremble, I loved them both, and I loved Lisa, and I loved Joe no matter what he’d done to me, to us, it didn’t matter, he’d been as sad and lost as Sam ever was and I loved him, and I loved Sam too and I loved Billy and Mags enough to hope, against all common sense, that they really were safe. Even Ron, I could love just a little bit now. Teresa and Jim could go fuck themselves, I did have some limits, but it was amazing just what a love-number dying did on your brain. Useless, worthless sentiment, love—it didn’t do anything but make you feel weirdly gentle and benevolent in a way that meant your brain, your sharp, suspicious, protective brain that got you through two deaths and two rebirths in one piece, was shutting down and couldn’t do a thing for you anymore. Good-bye, brain, and thanks for thinking me out of a hell of a lot of trouble. This one, though, it’s way beyond us both.

  My head dropped down and I floated quietly away.

  I struggled to my feet and stood there weaving, dizzy. I was alone in our great chewed-up dying prairie patch, and at the same time I was on the shore of Lake Michigan watching the choppy gray waters roll and subside, looking like bumps and waves in a big blanket of plaster. Drying paste. Sand coated my feet and they stung terribly; I tried to brush it off, wincing as the grains adhered to my blistering skin, and when I looked up again Florian was standing there watching me stork-hop around the shoreline. Still skeletal, still with the old death’shead smile.

  “I told you it was beautiful,” he said, gazing out happily at the granite-colored waves. “Missed my beach.”

  The beach became the prairie became the woods, and the trees had regained all their eaten-away bark. I was hallucinating, then, just like I’d thought. I didn’t care. This might be my last chance to talk to him. “I’m dying,” I said, and started to laugh. “For once, I’m really, truly dying.”

  “Could be,” he said, looking thoughtful. “Could be.”

  “I don’t want to die.” Now I was nearly giggling. “I want to be dead, like I was. But I don’t want to die.”

  Florian mulled that one over, the trees flickering and fading before my eyes and the underbrush again becoming sand. “That case,” he said, “you won’t.”

  “How senile are you, old man?” I brandished another clump of fallen-out hair. “I mean, look at me—”

  “World’s turning,” he said, as we walked along the empty shoreline. “Earth’s turning. The soil’s turning over and the earthworms are all wriggling out to play. Omega’s gone back to alpha and you and your friends, the ones still left? Soon you’ll all be coming back. Once you make it over here. Once you’re back to the start.”

  I thought that over, shaking the strands from my fingers. “And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  He just stared at the water, toe bones digging idly at a clay-colored lake stone stuck fast in the wet sand. Enough. “What does that mean?” I repeated, and grabbed his shoulders and shook until I heard the rattle of dry sockets, felt dust caking my fingers. “What’s that mean?”

  “Ain’t no need to get so riled,” he muttered, pulling himself free.

  “Why do you keep coming back?” I shouted. “Why do you do this to me? Nothing’s been the same since you died, everything’s gone to hell and everyone’s so sick and I’m stuck in this horrible living body and everything we had is gone and I’m dying and I don’t have time for—”

  “Time?” Florian laughed, a lighthearted consumptive wheeze. “You complaining about time now? You’re still dead to me, Jessie, whatever body you’re in, and us dead folk have all the time in the universe, all the time ever made. And you know it. So quit moaning.”

  The old Florian, that was, kind even in scorn. My anger faded and I shrugged in reluctant agreement; he smiled even wider, that seamed skeletal dusty smile, and I felt a flash of nostalgia at the sight of his teeth, those long cylindrical undead-teeth that looked even longer in the absence of gums. Seeing them, you knew where hoos of old first got the idea of vampires. I wrapped my arms tightly around myself, though all my shivering had mysteriously stopped.

  “I keep coming back,” Florian continued, “’cause I know you’ll listen.” He patted me on the arm. “No matter how mad you are. Ain’t no use in talking to anyone else, I was dead to them long before I ever crumbled into dust. But this ain’t a pleasure trip. I’m here to tell you what to expect, so you’ll know how to behave when it happens.”

  “I love you,” I said, and blinked back actual saltwater tears, not coffin rot. That still startled me. “If you hadn’t died—”

  “They’d have killed me.” He picked up the loosened stone, tossed it at the water. “Even without all them new diseases changing everything. I was useless to them, and we ain’t sentimental.”

  “If my brother hadn’t—”

  “The sickness would’ve come anyway,” he said, shaking his head impatiently. “Your brother ain’t so important to all this as he thinks. Quit wasting your energy on him, you seen he lived long enough to get his punishment. Things happen like that, ain’t no point in celebrating or getting sad about it. I’m here to tell you that I seen it all. Everything. And I know what’s coming next.”

  The wind picked up, rustling the rags of my clothes and making the trees shake and bend; we were back in the forest, though still on the beach. “Where are you now?” I asked. “I mean, where are you, really?”

  Florian looked confused. “Inside your mind,” he said, scratching his back against a tree. “Where else would I go?”

  “Is it just here, this sickness? Or is it everywhere?”

  He laughed, wriggling his shoulder bones more vigorously against the bark. “Everywhere. Some places worse than others, right around here it’s especially bad, but everywhere. Government’s broken down, military’s all dead or dying, not enough survivors to rebuild a damned thing—you seen it where you are, you should see what the bigger cities look like. Bodies all over, filth, typhus, hepatitis, rabies from all the rats. Gas explosions, fires, everything looted to the foundations. Folks walking around brain-snapped ’cause they turned cannibal. Well, you seen some of that yourself. Can’t even feel sorry for some of ’em, they keep trying to shoot stuff like in the movies even though they know guns don’t do a damned thing—” He sighed. “Well, hoos have simple brains that don’t take in new facts too easy, we knew that already. But they’re gonna have to get used to a whole lotta change now, real quick. A whole lotta forever change.”

  I picked up another lake stone, a greenish one, pressing the smooth dampness hard against my palm. “Then it really is the end of the world.”

  “It’s the end of this world.” Florian shrugged. “It’s the end of their world. But it ain’t the end of the world. There’s no real end to anything, you should know that by now.”

  He reached a hand up to the fruit-laden branch of a pear tree, mysteriously materialized on the shoreline. “We’ve come close before, to having things like this, having a world without them. Other times, other epidemics. The Black Death, so-called.”

  So-called, yes. I couldn’t help smiling because I realized I knew them all, knew them from the whispers when I was first alive, knew them from my very first days aboveground: all the wars, famines, natural disasters the hoos kept insisting were nothing to do with us, nothing at all, and they knew far better than us just what a lie that was. “The Great London Fire,” I replied. “So-called.”

  “Chicago Fire too. I remember that one. Always tryin
g to keep us down by burning us out.” Florian chuckled, tossing a pear from hand to hand like a baseball. “Didn’t work. The Thirty Years’ War. The ’68 Pittsburgh massacre. The 1918 ‘flu’ epidemic. All them supposed serial killers. We’ve made our mark, pet. But the hoos never expected to lose for real, to have to turn the whole earth over to us and our kind, and it’s actually happening.” He handed me the pear, solemn, like a gift. “Don’t really know what we’re meant to do with it, tell you the truth, but we’re stuck with it now.”

  “But I’m human again, I’m one of the ones—”

  “You ain’t human,” Florian said emphatically. “You got the outer shell, you got the flesh and the breath and a couple of the appetites, but you ain’t any more human than you were the day I met you. Thank Christ.” He grinned. “You’re just a hell of a lot more living dead than you were before. The hoofolks that caught this, like your sister, same thing. The true living dead. Some of you, you’ll survive this—not many, not easy, but you will. It’ll burn off like any other disease. You and a bare handful of true humans, the living living, but they ain’t my concern and they ain’t gonna be in a position to tell you anything. You’ll rule the roost. Back to the start, back to the way it was thousands of years ago, when that meteorite that made us what we are first landed. For the first time in forever.”

  I gripped the pear, nails sinking into the unripened flesh. “Then it’s true. About a meteor landing and changing everything, the dust or radiation, or something, all those stories—”

  “Humans think they’ve always been in charge of the planet, up till now.” He shrugged. “They’re wrong. We used to have hold of it, way back when. Lost our grip. Don’t know how, don’t know why, but we did. Now we’re back. You’re back. The hoos that are left don’t like it, well, that ain’t your problem. The weak don’t get squatter’s rights.”

  “But it’ll just be us. I mean, the people who died, hoos, undead, whatever, they’re not rising again, I haven’t seen a single one resurrect. They’re just plain dead.” I clutched the pear harder. “So they’re never coming back. Sam’s not. Joe’s not. And you’re not.”

  Florian reached out and stroked my head, not seeming to notice when another clump of hair came off in his fingers. “Can’t say as I want to come back, Jessie. I got a nice life here, in your memories, you made the beach just like I wanted it. And that’s all I ever wanted. You got folks who love you too, so you’ll always have someplace inside them to go.” He appropriated the pear with a reproving glance, like I’d swiped it from him. “So go back now, quit your moaning and wailing and just get ready to die. Or to live.”

  “How can any of us live through this? We’ve got no strength left.” I grabbed for his hand like it could hold me upright. “No appetite. No place to go. Nothing.”

  Something blazed fiercely from Florian’s eyes, not anger but some breed of almost lethal determination, subsiding quickly as it sparked. “No place to go, Jessie? No place at all? You know better—there’s always one last place for you to go. Underground.”

  The beach faded, the woods, Florian himself. I was standing in grass now, overgrown neglected grass thick with weeds; before me were uneven rows of gravestones, behind me a large arching metal sign and the torn-up remains of a barbed wire fence. Calumet County Memorial Park, my “resting” place. I wandered among the broken markers and gaping dug-up graves never filled in; up the aisles, down the aisles and there we were, in a little family plot under a big yew tree stripped of its leaves and lower bark: my mother, my father, my newly added niece and I. A small crooked marker stuck in the middle like an apology: JESSICA ANNE PORTER, MARCH 23, 1986-AUGUST 14, 2001.

  I leaned forward and read the inscription over and over again. Such a tiny little hiccup of life. Ridiculously sentimental, giving over a whole precious piece of earth to house the remains of a nobody among billions because you maybe vaguely thought you loved them. I shut my eyes against the hard glare of a strangely harsh sun, and when I opened them again I saw markers for all the Flies in a row next to mine, markers in all the colors of Florian’s lake stones, laid out like the teeth of a great sad smile. WILLIAM NOWAK, 1901-1939. Billy. Stabbed in a bar fight. MARGARET MAY O’SULLIVAN, 1889-1922. Maggie. Diphtheria. SAMUEL JAMES MORRISON, 1925-1970. Razor to the throat. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN JONES, 1942-1968. Bullet to the head. TERESA KENDAL, 1945-1980. Cancer. JOSEPH ANTHONY MORELLI, 1939-1958. Car crash. Copycat. RENEE NICOLE ANDERSON, 1990-2006. Brain aneurysm. AARON DAVID LINCOLN, 1974-1990. Blunt force trauma. FLORIAN BROWN, 1712-1801. Old age, in his sleep. So rare.

  I stumbled, walked, ran up and down that whole sad-sack, bad-luck row, feeling the life flowing from the pores of the stone—all that life flaring, pushing furiously against the confines of flesh, bursting outward and upward in a great gorgeous liberating explosion called death. Billy drowning as the blood slowly filled his lungs, Maggie’s throat swelling permanently shut, Joe meeting a metal guardrail at sixty miles per hour, Ben’s skull flying into jigsaw pieces, tumors devouring Teresa’s lungs and liver and bones like us devouring a fresh-killed deer. Sam’s one moment of true happiness, the industrious glee of the suicide as he picked up the razor. The sudden snap inside Renee’s head as the swollen artery burst. Linc’s terrible, practiced resignation as the punches and kicks came down harder and harder and then, too late, finally stopped.

  The graves yawned open like jaws and I leapt into the space marked for me. I breathed in the dirt, let it fill my nostrils and mouth like solidified air and then the dirt turned gritty and grainy and damp with lake water and it was deep beige sands, singing sands, it was strength and nourishment and happiness, it took the blue tinge from my skin and the last traces of nausea from my gut; I tunneled like a sand crab into the next open grave, the next, the next, the collective release of life flowing straight into my bones. I had the strength of dozens, hundreds inside me, all that death, all that life, which was the same thing, exactly the same thing. I surfaced from the dunes and ran faster and faster across the cemetery, which was the forest which was the lake shore again, relishing the pounding glare of the setting sun, there was so much life-death-life fighting to fit itself back in my bones that this poor body couldn’t contain it, I was coming apart, shattering shaking like Florian disintegrating and I laughed out loud, shouted for joy as I flew into a billion particles of life, death, dust—

  “Jessie? Jessie!”

  I was back on the prairie preserve, nothing but dry grass and dead bodies. Renee leaned over me, looking apologetic. “You were crying,” she said.

  I put my hands to my face, feeling the traces of damp. Lisa was wide awake, sitting expressionless next to a body covered in dirt-stiffened gray blankets. Linc sat up next to me, almost groaning with the effort. “Ron’s dead,” he murmured. “So quick, while you were sleeping. Took this sudden deep breath, and never let it out again.”

  Someone else breathing in the dirt, then, no fool he. Dirt nap. I almost laughed, around a rush of true sadness. Thanks for the water, Ron, and I sincerely doubt there’s a hell, though you won’t get Valhalla either. I patted Lisa’s hand, drawing a reluctant smile, then grabbed Linc’s arm and drew him closer.

  “We have to start walking,” I said, urgency and agitation making my voice rise high. “North. To the beaches. We have to get there. We’ve got to go now. Our graves are there. We have to get back to our graves, to where we’re all buried.”

  I knew from Linc’s expression what I sounded like but I didn’t care, I had to tell everyone before the dream faded and blurred. “That’s how we’re going to get better. That’s how we’ll get well—”

  “Jessie,” Renee pleaded, “stop.”

  “I’m not gonna stop, dammit! I’m telling you, I saw Florian and he said it, hell, he said it to us back when he was dying, you heard him, we all have to go back, we have to get to the beaches, get underground—”

  “Shut up,” someone groaned, and threw a branch at me. It landed about four feet short of the mark. “Crazy bitch.�
��

  “She’s going delirious,” someone else said. “Just like that Ben. Don’t listen.”

  “We have to go back—”

  “Jessie.” Linc took my face between his hands. His fingers, his arms trembled uncontrollably. “We’re not going anywhere. Ever. For anything. This is it.”

  I was shaking with illness and the need to yell at him, explain, drag him there by force, but holding myself upright took too much effort and my outburst had worn me out. I curled up obediently on the ground, Linc stroking what was left of my hair: I needed to rest and gather what strength I had, I needed it because I was going, I was going with or without them and then I could show them, explain, I could bring it all back to them and they’d know. Linc rested his cheek against the top of my head. Keep being sweet, Linc, you do that now dying’s made all the caution and doubt in you burn away, but I’m still going no matter what and I’m making you and Renee and Lisa better again if I have to smash all your heads in to do it. You can’t stop me.

  “We felt this way too, before,” Renee said, consoling, comforting, as she settled back against my side. “Like we had to be somewhere, had to get somewhere important, like this here was just a way station, and it was right near us but we couldn’t . . . well. We just couldn’t.” She pulled my head onto her shoulder. “I guess this is as good as any place, now.”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  A way station. That’s exactly what this is, Renee. But you don’t want to understand, maybe you’re just too worn out now to understand, so I’ll have to leave off explaining it. I need to rest. I need strength, if I can ever muster it up again. Useless goddamned body, useless undecayed invincibly strong body eating itself up from the inside out.

  “Good as any place,” Linc repeated. He sounded so tired it made me want to cry. An old cat weary of life, trying to hide in a closet or under a table away from pain and death, no fear anymore of the vet or his needle. “Good as any.”