Come to Dust

by Bracken MacLeod

  And what about the boy? What do I do about him? He tried to think, to conceive a plan where he brought his niece back to life and was still able to do something right by the boy. He’s not my responsibility. I don’t owe him a thing. Except he didn’t believe that at all. Everyone else had failed the kid, and they’d buried him like a dirty secret. He’d pulled him out of the dirt to do what? Shove him back in the ground and pretend he’d never seen him? He couldn’t bury all of his problems. He wasn’t any good at covering things over and walking away.

  Mitch recollected the conversation he’d had with the detectives on his front porch. Although the boy was suffering from months of decomposition, he could tell the child didn’t resemble either Faye or her adopted daughter. Re-homing. “You’re not Faye’s. Whose son are you?” The child couldn’t answer.

  The silence deepened. He checked his watch again, and whispered, “Time to go.” Standing, he held out a hand for Sophie. She refused to move. “Come on. It’s time.” She pulled the boy closer, nestling him against her shoulder like Mitch did with her. He knelt down and caressed her gray face and wept. “I can’t help him. I can’t.” Her brow furrowed and she scowled at him. “I can’t save every kid in the world, Sophie. I just want to save you.” She didn’t move. He sighed and held out his arms. He had to do something. “Okay.” She smiled and allowed Mitch to take the boy from her arms. Together they stood and headed for the stairs.

  45

  Faye lay in bed, sprawled out and dead to the world. Next to her, the boyfriend was also unconscious. His pants were bunched around his knees and her skirt shoved up over her hips, but neither had gotten as far as taking their underwear off and actually getting it on before passing out. Mitch thought about shielding Sophie’s eyes and covering the couple up before letting her at them. But given what she was about to do, seeing a pair of losers in an embarrassing state of semi-undress wasn’t going to scar her.

  He led her to the side of the bed and stepped back, waiting. She didn’t reach out for the couple the way he’d seen Amye’s son, Brandon, do. Instead, she turned and pointed to the child in Mitch’s arms. It squirmed uncomfortably trying to find a comfortable position, but jutting, exposed bones meant no matter how the boy shifted, one of the two of them was repositioning. Mitch shook his head at her and said, “No. You go first.” She shook her head and pointed at the boy.

  Mitch sighed and stepped up to the bed. He crouched in front of Sophie and implored her, “Please, honey. He can go second. Just leave enough behind for him. Please, do this for me.” She shook her head and reached for the child. Mitch helped her hold the boy in front of Faye’s face. His small jaws opened and closed, tiny brown teeth clicking softly. Sophie gently nudged them forward until the dead child was close enough. Mitch felt his ribcage expand in his hands as the boy took in a breath much too deep for a child his size.

  Faye’s unfocused eyes popped open and she struggled to sit up. Mitch shoved a hand down on her head, forcing her back against the mattress. He looked into her face. It was frightened and full of panic. He knew that look. It was the expression of every person whose life had just taken a turn they couldn’t control as it spun out from under them like a swift current propelling them toward the falls. It was the look his mother wore as his father popped her for “mouthing off,” his sister when she embarrassed her boyfriend in front of his crew, Junior Wilson on the wrong side of a hammering, and a fresh fish on the block staring at his cell door. It was the look of having your self-determination and dignity taken from you by force. As he held her head down on the mattress, moving his palm up to the side of her overtanned, wrinkled face, Faye pleaded with him with wet, wide eyes begging for a mercy that wouldn’t be reciprocal if circumstances were reversed. Mitch stared in Faye’s face and denied her grace.

  The boy continued to inhale, stealing her breath, and Mitch felt her skin growing cold beneath his fingers. The chill crept up into his hand; he kept his hold firm and let the boy take what he needed from her. He let the child hold her accountable for the things she’d done, knowing that when he’d stared up at her with that same look, she’d turned him down. When Sophie had begged for compassion, Meghan shook her until her little brains were bruised, and she died in her crib while Mitch and Liana slept in the next room unaware the entire world had been shaken.

  Sophie grabbed Mitch’s shoulder and pulled at him. He let go of the woman and let her lead him away. Settling on the floor next to his niece, they watched the rotten flesh on the back of the boy’s head begin to fill in and darken with pink life. Faye’s skin was thinning and wrinkling, fat blue veins protruded as liver spots grew and spread like drops of ink on paper. The boy was taking her future away from her, reclaiming every day she’d denied him. The kid stepped back, teetering on unsteady feet. He looked better, but still dead. Patches of flesh filled in with fresh, thin skin, pale and delicate. His eyes were full and brown beneath the fading cataracts. Faye lay on her stomach, gasping shallowly and shivering.

  Fucking hell! He left her alive.

  Faye was still conscious of what was happening, and couldn’t do a thing for herself even though Mitch wasn’t holding her down anymore. Despite his horror at the realization, he tried to push Sophie forward to take the boyfriend. Instead, she led the boy around like an older sister and grabbed the man’s hand, trying to drag him closer to the edge of the bed. When she couldn’t move him, she let out a frustrated groan and knitted her eyebrows, asking Mitch for help. He stood and shifted the drunk man over so his head hung off the edge of the bed. The boy breathed him in. Mitch turned away, not wanting to watch Sophie’s last chance at restoration slipping away. Given away by a girl who’d always been generous and eager to share what little she had, no matter how little.

  He felt her hand slip into his and he dropped back down to the floor, pulling her in for a hug. Mitch couldn’t control himself any longer. All her life, he’d been trying to do the right thing and never coming quite close enough. Nothing he did fixed the problem. He made things worse, broke promises and people, and failed at every attempt to make anything better. His attempts always resulted in him being left with fewer options than when he started, and this time was no different. Every single act of justice he’d attempted in his life left him feeling empty and alone. “I’m so sorry for everything.”

  “Don’ cry,” she said. She wiped away his tears with tiny fingers. When she smiled again, a touch of life sparkled in her eyes and he though he caught a glimpse of the girl she’d been before he’d let everything slip away. The girl who laughed when he blew on her belly. Who giggled uncontrollably when he pretended to stub a toe and hopped around the playground on one foot. The girl sitting on the floor asking the woman he was infatuated with to crouch down and build her a pyramid. Like the child she’d been in the best moments of his life.

  It was only a few seconds long and gone in an instant.

  Nothing good can last.

  He looked at the boy. The child had finished with the lover and was sitting on the floor against the wall. His cheeks flush and toddler fat, hazel brown eyes unblemished and clear. He glanced at Mitch and his face screwed up in a tortured expression. Feeling the pangs of a living body for the first time in who knew how long, the boy responded in the way that toddlers do when they feel any kind of need like nourishment, warmth, or love. He began to cry. The high keening noise rose in the quiet night, drowning out the labored breathing of the half-corpses on the bed. It filled the room and spilled out into the hall. And Mitch felt the pull at his gut. The drive to heed the cry and answer the call with whatever the child needed. A blanket, a dry diaper, a meal.

  The boy pushed himself up from the floor and tottered over to him and Sophie. He was so small, so fragile. Someone had to miss him. Someone had to wonder what had happened to their little boy, didn’t they?

  “Shut that fackin’ baby up!” a drunken voice called out from down the hall.

  Meghan, he realized. He’d forgotten about Meghan.

 
At the sound of her voice, Sophie latched tighter to him and cried, “No shakes! No shakes!” He realized then why she hadn’t wanted to take from Faye and her beau. It was Meghan who’d shaken her to death. Meghan who owed her life. Faye had come over afterward and relieved her daughter, sending her out into the night to establish an alibi, knowing that it would be their word against hers. Knowing what to do, because she’d done it before.

  The boy cried. The woman shouted.

  “I said...”

  Mitch heard heavy footsteps thumping toward the bedroom. Sophie clutched at him and the boy cried harder. The steps hesitated. Mitch imagined Meghan trying to work out why there would be a baby crying in their house, but having trouble making sense of it through the fog of drink and whatever else was pulling at her consciousness. He set Sophie down and stalked toward the door. It swung open before he could get his hand on it, the knob punching him in the gut and his forehead smacking the door. He staggered back, seeing stars. Meghan stared at her mother, a nascent scream trapped in her throat. Faye had been a fifty that looked seventy and acted fifteen. Now she looked like a thousand-year-old mummy.

  Meghan turned and saw Mitch as he lurched toward her. She sidestepped him and stumbled drunkenly along the edge of the bed. He was dizzy from the knock against the door and overshot, but righted himself quickly. Turning to face her, he wondered why she’d run into the corner where she couldn’t get away. She’s still wasted. She has no idea what she’s doi—

  The sight of the gun from the nightstand cut his thoughts short and he was reduced to an animal recognition of peril staring him in the face. The hair on his arms stood on end as his skin pimpled up and his breathing increased. He launched himself at the girl as she pulled the trigger. The flash from the muzzle in the dark blinded him, but he still found his mark and tackled Meghan into the wall. The rush of breath out of her body stank of booze and bile as she vomited down his back. She pulled the trigger again, somehow missing him a second time. His ears rang and the sound of the world around him dulled. All he could hear clearly was the throb of his pulse pounding in his skull. He drove an uppercut as hard as he could into Meghan’s stomach, unconcerned that he was laying into a girl half his size.

  She had the equalizer.

  He punched her again and again, feeling her muscles convulse and go slack until he realized that his body was the only thing keeping her on her feet. Mitch stepped away and let the girl fall to the floor, convulsing and dry heaving. The gun was lost. He turned. His world came apart.

  Sophie lay slumped against the wall next to ragged holes where the two rounds that had gone all the way through her had embedded behind her. She was never aiming at me!

  He rushed to his girl, dropped to the floor, and lifted her into his lap. He cradled her ruined head, gently trying not to hurt a child who couldn’t feel a thing. “Sophie! Don’t leave me! Sophie!” The boy’s cries faded back into the world as Mitch’s dulled hearing slowly repaired itself and the sounds of the room returned to life. Behind him, he heard Meghan groaning and a heavy thump as she tried to pull herself back to her feet and failed.

  Not like this. Please, not like this. I can’t take it again. “Do you hear me?” he shouted. “She can’t die again!” He howled into the dark. He cried and cursed and damned everything that had led to this moment. He blamed himself and Meghan and God and everyone real or imagined that he couldn’t hold to account. He cursed everything and prayed for the world to end in a blast of cleansing fire. Without her, nothing!

  Without her, nothing!

  No cleansing spark ignited in the night. No light came to show him the way. He knelt on the floor clutching a dead child and wished for another chance.

  But wishes are worth less than the time it takes to make them.

  46

  Bill Dixon closed the door on Meghan Cantrell and slapped his palm twice on the roof of the car. The patrolman turned on the lights and drove away from the curb, leaving the detective standing on the sidewalk at the far end of the lawn in front of the house. His partner was supervising the medical examiner’s team loading the body of the dead girl into the back of a transfer van while her uncle sat on the stoop, wrapped in a gray wool blanket, staring blankly into a cold cup of coffee. His eyes were puffy and swollen from crying. His face looked like that sad sack boxer suckered with promises of a shot at the title and a big purse to come after you win this one fight. But that guy never had an honest shot at the title. The best he got was a good mention by some retired, punch-drunk pugilist on HBO if he had the stones to stand toe-to-toe with the fate predestined to him by the odds fixers. Still, some take their lumps hoping that the gods might be fixing the other guy’s odds instead. Hope dies last.

  Life is a sucker’s bet the minute they put you on the scale.

  The ME’s van pulled out of the driveway, leaving Braddock standing alone by the kitchen door around the side of the house. Dixon shrugged. Braddock nodded once before they converged on Mitch.

  “Time to go,” Dixon said as he approached the steps. “We’ve got some more questions for you.” Mitch had told him that he and the girl had needed a place to crash after their own house was ransacked. He said he thought the neighbors were still staying down at the boyfriend’s place in Revere. When Faye and her beau came home, he and Sophie retreated to the basement. That’s when they found the dead boy and things started to go south.

  The story was almost plausible. Until he got to the part where he and Sophie fell asleep waiting for the party upstairs to die down.

  “When I woke up, the boy was gone. Everything was quiet and so I went upstairs to find him. I was going to take Sophie and him and leave. That’s when I found them all in the bedroom like that.” His delivery was sincere. The details were simple and not too great in number. The guy was a damned good liar. But Dixon ferreted out lies for a living. People fed him a line of bullshit every hour of every day and if he couldn’t see through it, he never would have made it to lieutenant detective. He wasn’t perfect, though. Fortunately, everything he missed, Braddock caught. Today, they both agreed: Mitch LeRoux was convincing, but he was also full of shit.

  Dixon extended a hand to help the man off the steps. Mitch refused it and stood up on his own. Braddock gestured to their car; Mitch shuffled toward it like an old man. Both detectives had seen a lot of people prematurely aged in the last few weeks. Their bodies wasted by the appetites of the dead kids, but their minds left solid and clear. Prisoners locked in meat-cells that would probably live for decades, if cared for. Even if those people had no one to tend to their needs, the Commonwealth would step up. It’d work to keep them alive. And that was what most of them deserved. Going through the records, as they had, none of the kids who’d come back had died of things like leukemia or other acts of God. He almost laughed at the thought of an act of God. It had seemed like that at first. A lot of people had gone on about divine mercy and the meek being blessed. And then the kids got hungry and Hell broke loose. It wasn’t long before they found the first adult victims of God’s mercy drained and left for dead in a kitchen, a bedroom, a church cafeteria. You only had to open your eyes to see it wasn’t mercy that brought the dead kids back from the grave. But Mitch wasn’t one of those. Instead of having his soul sucked, he’d been aged by experience, disappointment, and despair. All the things that build up and kill people slowly—the precursors to a bullet in the mouth or leap off a bridge into freezing water. Mitch wasn’t a dead man, but he was dying inside and unless something intervened, it wouldn’t be long before his despair metastasized.

  Dixon helped him into the back seat with a hand lightly atop his head before closing the door with more care than he’d shown Meghan Cantrell. Braddock waited on the other side of the vehicle. They’d worked this out while they waited for the social worker to come for the boy. He was two years old and looked healthy, but there was no telling how long he’d been in that basement—in the grave Mitch had failed to mention in his confession, but Dixon found anyway. Who knew how
long the kid had been in the ground? It complicated things. He might have gone off the grid years ago. Who knew where to go looking for a missing boy who’d been essentially transported through time? Two and a half years old when he died, two more until he came back, how many years later. He tried not to think about it. They were homicide detectives, not missing persons or special victims. No living child was supposed to be their problem.

  “So, what do you think?” Braddock asked.

  Dixon checked his watch. “Day’s early. We’re good.”

  The partners climbed into the car. Braddock turned over the engine and pulled out into the light mid-morning traffic. Dixon turned around in the seat and said, “We’ve been looking for you for a while, Michel.”

  • • •

  For hours, Mitch sat in the interrogation room, shivering, waiting for the detectives to come in to pick apart his story, confront him with the inconsistencies and holes in his tale and get him to confess to what he’d plotted in Faye’s house. They hadn’t done that. Instead, they left him in the bright box with a soft plastic bottle of “purified” tap water and a chocolate chip granola bar from a vending machine.

  My last meal.

  So he waited. He waited for them to come haul him back to jail to await trial. Although he had no illusions about what he’d do if freed, he didn’t allow himself the fantasy of what life would be like on the run, heading to Canada to hide out. There was no point to it. He couldn’t imagine a scenario where a judge would grant him bail. He was officially a recidivist and a flight risk. Instead, he sat and worked out his confession. A true one.