The sky overhead had faded to pewter, suffused with a dim, dull but gaining light. The dawn’s early light. As I pushed through the gate my legs hurt horribly, the muscles like rubber bands snapping hard and brutal against my skin with every new step. The road past the gate grew narrow, winding, the tree limbs and underbrush crowding in from all sides. Apartment buildings, a restaurant or two, a pharmacy, a tiny supermarket trashed to its foundations and a pile of broken glass, then nothing but the greenery, the bodies and me.
I could smell it now, beneath the stink of all-encompassing death. The lakeshore. The dampness all in the air like expectation, a pregnant pause before the cries and whispers of the tides. The stones and broken bits of stones in my pockets vibrated, buzzing against the cloth, then started letting out a steady, audible hum. The road turned again and the overgrowth opened up, and with no warning I stood before a long, clear, endlessly wide expanse of sand and sky. Tall, waving beach grasses on either side of the road, a pale gray and softly glowing sky that seemed to run toward the water and then fly up higher and higher taking with it all the stink of decay and disease and sickness and horror; even the bodies strewn on the roadside looked calmer, quieter, like they’d all just fallen asleep.
The Octave Chanute Lakeshore Park. Says so right there on the sign. My beach. Finally. Snuck right up and ambushed me, there in plain sight. All I had to do was—
Sit here and cry again. Just for a second. It felt almost like the stones were crying alongside me but that was just knowing I was going to die alone after all: There was no way I could ever get back to the nature preserve, much less try to drag Linc and Lisa and all of them here, I had no more strength, I’d used up my whole fever-break on this wild life-chase and now—
I stumbled past the shell of a small Greek-columned, open-air building, built from blocks of worn sand-colored concrete. The old bathhouse, a Prairie School architectural landmark from back at the turn of the century before they started restricting the beaches to the researchers and us. I’d seen pictures of it. Stand up on the second floor, all open columns and roofed-in balcony space, and you got a sweeping view of the water. Past that, maybe a hundred yards away up on a high ridge, another, far bigger building. The same rosy-sandy concrete brick, Greek columns, lines boxy and graceful all at once, except this building was as closed and forbidding as the bathhouse was open: narrow half-hidden doors, tiny windows too high to reach, towers on either side of the sprawling main building with dark, slanting, overhanging roofs like arms stretched out to protect something fragile, signal the world to stay away. For all that it sat defiantly approachable there in a large patch of tree-covered parkland, no fencing around it, no guard posts. No signs.
I didn’t need a sign, I was certain what I was looking at. The lab. The thanatological lab where Jim had worked, where he had dragged our dead back and cut them open. Where they spent all their time trying to figure out how to kill us, where they first sprayed the grounds, the trees, the dirt, the air with a mutated pesticide that did them all in. Where I was born times three even though I didn’t know it—no. That was the doing of the rocks, the sands, the remnants of our long-ago meteoric mother. Our Mother Earth, just like Rommel said, when all this time I’d thought it was the dirt where I’d been buried. Right here. My real parentage, my family. The sound of the water shushing against the sands came up soft, insistent, faint in the distance.
Was anybody alive in there? Anybody at all? Quiet, everything still closed off and shuttered when every other house and building I’d seen was—no. One of the lab’s front doors was open and looked bent on its hinges. A couple of those little second- and third-story windows were nothing but dark holes. A body or two, lying there on the walkway, rotted, forgotten. Another fortress turned mausoleum. My questions might all be there, but none of my answers.
I turned my back on it and stood facing the water. Expanses of tall waving beach grasses, a tree or two outlined stark against the sky, and in the middle a narrow path of foot-beaten sand leading straight down the long, sloping duneface to the shore. If I was wrong, if it wasn’t here I was meant to be, then I belonged nowhere.
Why hadn’t I made Linc and Renee and Lisa come with me? Insisted, while I still had the chance? Too late to go back, to retrieve them. They might already have died. I didn’t want to belong here alone—
The sand underfoot was thick-layered and heavy and the grass stems, as I grabbed at them for balance, cut and sliced at my skin. The pearl gray sky and dark blue water met at a horizon line so straight and sharp it looked drawn with a ruler; the waves rushed in, the tide rushed out, with the endless repetition of a heartbeat, the gulls circling in constant call and response. I half-walked, half-slid down the duneface, resisting the strange urge born of exhaustion or sadness or some newer, unnameable impulse entirely to start crawling through the sands, let them get against my skin and in my nose and mouth and bury me, take me back underground. The stones in my pocket had gone suddenly, abruptly quiet.
As I reached the bottom of the ridge and the trail gave way to the wider beach, the sand strewn with old cigarette butts, dead twigs, bits of driftwood, I saw them. They were curled up and burrowed down in the sands, like Florian and I had both done in my dreams, lying with their backs, limbs, faces all covered; their fingertips clutched and bore down, holding on to handfuls of grains and sinking in past the wrists. Thirdborns just like me, dazed, half-bald, blue-tinged and exhausted and wasted-thin despite all our obscene feasts of dead flesh, trying to bury themselves alive, get back underground. Dozens of them, all over the shore sands like burial mounds, like a cemetery full of undeads all tunneling up and breaking through.
I stared at them and the sands beneath my feet seemed to rise and fall with the strange lung-breaths they, we, all took like the humans we weren’t, with the sounds of our newfound heartbeats regular as the tides. My heart had started again too when this plague changed me, just like my breath, I hadn’t even thought of that until now. I put a palm to my chest, to feel it, and the others squeezed their eyes shut and moaned in pain or just stared up at me, incurious, so calm. One of them held up a hand, gaunt and withered, like Florian’s before he went fully skeletal.
“You’re still sick,” he said. His voice was trembly and soft but had an undercurrent of steel; pale sands matted the lenses of his glasses, his dark brown skin like a half-frosted cake. “I can smell it on you. Come lie down.”
I wanted to lie in those sands and sleep and sleep so badly my whole body ached, but I had to know first. “Will it make me better?”
“I don’t know.” He turned onto his side, trying to push himself in farther, feet pedaling at the sands to make his sleeping hole, or his grave, that much deeper. “I just had to be here. Had to get here, somehow, before I died.”
A few yards away another one was digging a hole for herself, stopping every few moments to be sick, arms trembling and spasming with the effort but bringing up only pathetic handfuls of sand every time. I wanted to go help her. I had to lie down.
Bodies were everywhere, actual corpses, gull-shredded and swelling up with gas. Other figures wandered aimlessly over the sands, human, third-born, I couldn’t tell, some the ghastly blue-black of the actively dying. Nothing I could do for them now. Or Linc. Or Renee, or Lisa, or Sam, or Joe, or anyone at all, but there was that woman trying and failing to tunnel underground and I had to help her, after I’d caused all this without ever intending to I had to help someone other than my own damned self—
She fell to the sands before I could reach her, no more digging, hands still trembling as she lay there. One of the bruise-colored dying, his breath an uneven, rasping moan like the singing sands in pain, came up to her and kicked her, hard in the head again and again, like undeads skull-stomping after a fight; she made a horrible sound, an almost indignant gurgle twisted into a wet, choking scream, and crumpled up unmoving and silent.
The buried ones just lay there, unmoved, as if they’d seen it all before. They probably had. The one a
t my feet turned his head away.
I took a step forward. Her attacker pulled a small knife from his pocket, hands shaking worse than hers had. Still human, then, a sick human: no undead’s or third-born’s good sharp teeth. He sawed pieces off her, his pound of flesh, but as soon as he’d crammed them in his mouth he spat them out again, moaning, the same shame and revulsion and uncontrollable hunger I’d seen in Lisa, killing that squirrel in the forest, in the cornfield people retching up everything they ate. His breath grown louder and keening, he pulled himself upright, licked at the knife’s edge, coughed wetly, threw it down next to her body like it’d bitten him.
He turned and stared at me, his mouth a rictus of false cheer, his eyes full of despair and madness and silent begging to be kicked dead himself, thrown clear of his own misery. He was almost bald now, thick thatch of prematurely gray hair reduced to bitten-away threads, his cheeks concave with the plague’s starvation and his lips gone black beneath the smear of bright red blood. He stretched out a hand, his whole arm convulsing, and the loosening nails curved backward, sank deep into his sand-caked palm.
“I always knew I’d see you again,” said Jim.
18
I thrust my hands into my pockets. The stones sat there against my fingers, just ordinary rocks now, no tingling or humming or singing, but the touch of them reassured me just the same.
“Are there others with you?” I asked. I hadn’t seen anyone I knew, down in these sands, but that signified nothing. “How did you get here?”
“Two hands,” he said, like he hadn’t heard me. “Two hands, there in your pockets. I did that for you.” He weaved side to side, sliding on the miniature sand piles his feet had made, making wet hacking sounds every time he drew breath. “Lips, a tongue, a larynx. You can talk to me again like a civilized creature instead of grunting and drooling like your tongue got cut out, I did that for you, I—”
“I could talk to you before,” I pointed out. I was easy, quiet, a trainer facing a mad dog. “We talked a good long time, actually, it’s just you only bothered giving me half the truth—”
“You owe me,” he whispered, with the same feverish, glassy-eyed hatred I remembered from the woods. He yanked at his remaining hair and another handful came out, easy as a tuft of cotton candy off the stick. “Look what I’ve done for you! Look what I’ve done for all of them! Every one of you! And this is what I get for it!”
His shaking, jolting arms motioned furiously at the buried ones, at the sky growing lighter by the second, then he seemed to lose control of them and they dropped helpless, still trembling, to his sides. I stared out at Lake Michigan, that horizon line drawn so solid like it was underscoring the whole world: And that, as they say, is that. The ghost of the Chicago skyline floated out there, an unbroken distant blue-gray shadow so shockingly clear I could make out each individual skyscraper, the antenna on top of the Sears Tower. Some of the buildings looked shorter than they were supposed to, their top ends jagged and uneven. A dark haze, drifting from some of them, that might be ash or smoke.
“Lisa’s with me,” I told him. “She passed through the other side of this, like I did. She’s one of us now. But she’s sick again, like we all are—”
“Fuck Lisa.” He spat on the sand, scrubbing the drying blood from his mouth like he’d just realized it was there. “You’re sick? You’re all sick? Look at me! Look what you’ve done to me, look what all your kind did to—”
“You never told me she left.” I picked up a bit of driftwood, crumbly and fragile from all its time bobbing on the waves. I wanted to go back to speaking with a tree branch, back to when my own enforced silence, Linc’s and my ability to talk right over his head, still gave me the protection of distance. When I could pretend this dying man, my brother, was just a stranger in a foreign tongue. “You said she got sick. You said you locked her up. You never bothered telling me she got out.”
“Fuck all of you.” Jim spat again, aiming for my feet and missing. “Her too. All of you. All you that changed. You’re all monsters.”
The tide rushed in, soft, undisturbed, and back out again. Something bloated and missing an arm, a leg, came in with it, deposited like a cat’s gift of a dead mouse on the sands. I wanted to lie down so badly, never get up again.
“You said there was something strange about the sands here.” I took another step toward Jim, dropping the driftwood in case he thought it was a weapon, and he bared teeth that were long and grayish and visibly loose in the gum. “That we live longer here. That the sands make the dead revive. Your lab up there, you said it had geologists that—”
“She said I was scaring her.” Jim kept lurching foot to foot, stomping at the sands now, wasting his last energies trying to keep upright. “Before all this happened. I told her I could bring you back. You don’t know how she cried after she saw you, she said it was horrible, you trapped in that rotting body, that it was like watching you being tortured—I promised you to her. Her daughter, I promised her little girl back. Mom and Dad, I promised her, I made a promise, I—”
He started to cry. Snot-choked sobs out of honest grief for me, for Karen, Lisa, himself, crying like I’d only ever seen when the black Lab he’d had since he was six had to be put down and stop it, Jim, stop it, you’re evil, you’re crazy, don’t make me remember the person I really knew, stand here and watch yet another person I love wash away with the tides. Loved. Even worse. I reached out a hand, and he backed away from me like I was diseased. As, in fact, I was.
“Then she said I was scaring her.” He scrubbed at his mouth again, furious, sawing his hand back and forth like he could cleanse away his own words. “That it was wrong, thinking you could bring back zombies, monsters, make them human again, it was ‘wishful thinking,’ it was ‘against God,’ I should stop, I was so ‘obsessed’ I was scaring her—”
“The stories about a meteorite.” I reached into my pocket, showed him the cracked bits of stone, the dried-up sand from inside them. “I’ve heard them. Is it true? That something landed here, thousands of years back, and this stuff got into the sands? In the dirt? Is that what your geologist pals were—”
“She threatened to report me.” Jim was panting now, loose teeth grinding together, rage building big and swift beneath the teariness like Dad when he was feeling put-upon by the world, really angry. Exactly like Dad. “Can you believe it? I bust my hump for her, for you, for this whole fucking family, for half my goddamned life, and all I get in return is the bitch threatening to whistle-blow to my own boss, turn me in, after everything I’d done for—so I didn’t have any choice, Jessie, I had to lock her up. Okay? I had to lock her up, I didn’t want—and then she got sick.” He laughed. He actually laughed. “She got sick.”
I put the fragments of stone away.
“Did you make her sick?” My voice didn’t waver, I felt what was surely the same strange, unshakable calm I’d seen in Lisa’s face as she lay dying; that, and the cold certainty I already knew my answer. And I’d felt sorry for him. I’d pitied him. “Did you use her, after you locked her up, experiment on her like some sort of guinea—”
“She got sick!” Jim roared at me, all rage, Dad’s rage, eating up that weak rotting body from the inside worse than any disease. “She got sick, we all got sick, this wasn’t supposed to happen! It wasn’t supposed to be that there was a war, and your kind won it! You! The walking corpses, who already lived out your goddamned lives! You won! All without firing a fucking shot!”
The gulls cried out overhead, circling, sailing over the waters in the serene knowledge that none of this was at all bad for them. Something else was washing ashore, less recognizably human than the last one.
“We didn’t win anything,” I said. “We’re extinct now, the undead. Just like humans—worse than humans, I’ve seen living humans, I haven’t seen any more of us. You’ve wiped us out. Your bosses should be thrilled to—”
“I should have killed you.” He wrapped his arms around himself, clenching up with shi
vers. His discolored skin looked baggy and loose. “I should’ve gone back out there with a flamethrower and roasted all of you to ashes. Monsters. Monsters everywhere. Tell Lisa not to worry anymore, you had a good quick death.”
“We’re all sick,” I said. “Dying. But something about those stones I showed you? These sands? I think they’re why Florian, my friend, he was so old, they’re why he lived so long. Those stones I showed you, they were his. And I think they’re why I’m not dead now. That maybe, somehow, they’re making me better. Am I right?”
“You won. Congratulations. You all fucking won.”
“Am I just crazy, Jim? Or am I right?”
“You owe me. I gave you this, all this, you owe—”
“You experimented on Lisa, didn’t you?” I advanced on him, slow, easy. “To punish her, or because you were so panicked by then, because of all this, that you convinced yourself you were doing her some kind of favor. But she got away from you. Sick as you made her, she got away.” I started laughing too, I just couldn’t help it, as I looked around the beach, at the half-living burial mounds surrounding us. “We all did. The whole world got away from you—”
“We knew there was something here.” Jim sat down heavily on the sand, his last reserves draining away and gone. “Something that created your kind. Maybe something that cheats death itself, that—there was a meteorite that hit here, five, ten thousand years ago, when the lake was still forming. Some sort of protean matter in it. Got mixed up in everything, saturated with it, it changed the whole composition of—what’re you asking me all this for? Why? That was the geologists’ lookout! I was in biology! It was our mandate, I wouldn’t go along with it, they wanted us to wipe you all out—”
“And you have,” I reminded him.
He glared up at me, breathing hard, his fury draining away like filthy water down a sewer and leaving behind Jim again, Jim in those jaundiced eyes, that horrible sloughing cyanotic skin, full of the terrified bewilderment of any creature human or otherwise sick unto death. Like Lillian, belligerent but still sobbing, broken, begging me and Joe not to stomp her. And I’d had to—
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