Dust (12 page)

Did they take my mother’s organs at the hospital? She had the back of her driver’s license signed, my father didn’t. I never even thought about it before. Pieces, all cut up. The thought of meat cutting up pieces of meat to stick in another carcass of meat, it gave me a little shiver of disgust.

Linc touched my shoulder. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” I never liked mentioning parents around Linc, considering that his killed him. It seemed rude. “I don’t want to put him here—this tree’s too young.”

We found a big mature oak with deep fissured bark—good scratching bark, Florian loved a nice back scratch—dug with our hands in the stiff dirt next to it and pressed the skull and the tiny bag of ashes into the ground. I picked up Florian’s old leather pouch, weighted with lake stones, and with Linc’s help tied it around my own waist; maybe he’d meant it never to be found, but he wasn’t here to tell me so. I felt a bit better, feeling that little weight, Florian’s weight, against my hip. Another stone in my pocket, pale brick with striations like mother of pearl. Linc took a couple, slate gray and deeper brick, and at the last minute I took a green one for Renee, consolation for missing the funeral. A pink one, in case she didn’t like that color. I thought of Florian freed forever from old age, fighting, Teresa’s incessant insane demands, and that also felt better but not really good. Good had snuck away while my head was turned.

“I’m not really up for watch tonight,” I said, fingering the pouch, the stones in my pocket. “If it’s all the same to you, let’s just go back.” I laughed. “Teresa won’t be there to scream at us anyway, bet you anything.”

Linc looked suddenly wary. “I know how you feel,” he said, slowly like I might jump on him, “but I really think we need to anyway.”

I stared at him. “Because why?” No answer. “Because what have you seen, Linc?”

No answer. I started to laugh. “Okay, so exactly how many of us know something weird’s going on and are pretending we don’t? Huh? Me, Joe, you—”

“You didn’t say anything during the dance, Jessie, when those . . . things came along, so I thought—”

“You saw that happen?” I shoved him. “You saw it. So why the hell didn’t you help me?”

Linc looked stricken. “I thought you were just fooling around with them, before Joe chased them away. They didn’t seem dangerous, whatever they were, and Joe said it was nothing but later I thought, that’s still awful strange, maybe I should look around the woods and see if they’re—”

“Yeah, well trust me, they’re stronger than they look.” I was furious now, at Joe for spreading his fairy tales and at Linc for swallowing them so meekly. “You saw it and you just stood there with your mouth open, now you’re Johnny on the spot a week after the fact? So what’re you gonna do if they ever do send the National Guard or Marines or something after us, whine about how you weren’t
sure
those were really flamethrowers until your own head’s a big pile of ash?”

I shoved him again and he didn’t fight back, just curled up on himself looking ashamed; I glared at him with his beaten-in face and slumped shoulders and shuffling feet, his eyes the only sparked-up thing about him, and saw the shadow of his living self, shoved around so much and blamed for so many things that he expected no better. I hate people who can make you feel guilty when they’ve pissed
you
off, but hell, who else did I have to talk to now? Renee was too new, Joe and I weren’t speaking and I couldn’t trust anyone else to keep their mouths shut. One big happy family.

“Come on,” I said, pulling at his arm. “You want a watch?

We’re gonna look for a dead body that might never have been alive. It’s a lot more interesting than whatever Joe’s been telling you, so shut up and listen . . .”

When I got to the part about Teresa and our new friends using the same perfume, Linc nodded. “She says it’s industrial solvents,” he said. “Don’t laugh—Sam and I went hunting once outside Whiting, stepped in a leaking barrel of something outside the refinery and our feet stank like that for a month. Lost a whole layer of skin, too. But that doesn’t explain her face.” He lowered his voice, as if the squirrels might go tattling. “She looks like she’s got . . . modeling clay or something on her face, I don’t know, like the decayed bits are filling in but it’s not real flesh. Just in the last day or two, you can really see it—and the bugs are crawling off her, like there’s nothing for them to eat anymore. Some of them just falling off.”

I slowed my steps, thinking. Bugs falling away en masse was nothing strange, not when they’d finally stripped off the last flesh and left you a skeletal dusty—but Teresa wasn’t that much older than Linc, she still had flesh to burn. Unless that chemical smell, or taste, was driving them away. It couldn’t be plain embalming fluid, the bugs ate you anyway (a nasty surprise for some of the vainer ’maldies). So maybe just something industrial, something she stepped in or fell in that made her reek? And those creatures from the dance, maybe they were real undeads who’d been buried near a waste site, a paint factory, something that leaked nastiness into the soil and mutated them—I’d never heard of such a thing before, but you never knew. There were mills and factories and refineries and landfills all over the county, farms soaked in pesticide runoff, stenches bubbling up from clean-seeming soil that no human had the nose to catch. I was jumping the gun, thinking this was anything sinister. Shit happens.

None of which explained her face. Or the blond girl, who I’d stake Joe’s life was real, corrupted living flesh.

“So is this why you were so antsy to get me on watch with you, the other morning?” I asked. “To tell me about this?”

“I wanted to hear what she’d told you
.
Solvents, or . . . some other excuse.”

“Fuck-all,” I said. “That’s what she’s told me. But what else is new.”

The concrete tunnel floor was soothingly dry and hard underfoot. Joe hadn’t lied, the body was gone; there was a lingering disinfectant-like odor where I’d laid her out, no other smell but moss and old graffiti paint. Past the tunnel were more woods and steeper hillocks, only another half mile or so before the trees abruptly gave way to the old abandoned cornfield—overgrown Living Pioneer park exhibit, or actual erstwhile farm?—thick with shoulder-high weeds and dead fallen stalks. Thick with rats too, we wouldn’t go hungry today. It was where we marked the end of our world. We’d never pushed through to the other side, but today Linc and I crossed the wood’s edge, shoved through the stalks and waded in, sniffing and listening and pausing like cautious cats. The papery husks sliced at us and I heard Linc wince and swear. Other than the robins and mourning doves, silence.

Something small and skinny rushed past our feet: an actual stray, part of a rat wedged in its mouth. Disgusting stuff, cat meat, outside of starvation none of us would touch it. I ripped at the stalks, trying to cut a path, and heard the rustle of something bigger, a moaning sound beneath it abruptly cut off. The stench rose slowly like steam from a stagnant puddle, fresh flesh smothered beneath a stew of solvent, rubbing alcohol, paint thinner, polish remover, oil. A thick smear of rancid margarine. Old eggshells with the taint of sulfur. A high, tuneless melody circled overhead like a thin little bird as we pushed toward the heart of the field. The stench made us gag. I thought of puddles, fetid standing water full of hatching insects and floating islands of oil.

There, in a chopped-out clearing, a dozen-some of our newfound friends. Some bluish-black, some outright rotten, some still tinged living pink or brown but sap-sweaty and stinking, all gathered round one crouched in the middle trying to scrape out a ditch with his hands. He kept digging, taking up the tiniest nail scrapings each time, while his friends swayed and rocked and tried to sing. It took me a minute to place the melody: “Amazing Grace.” I remembered his green sweater from the dance night; he was unrecognizable otherwise, his ashen skin now a head-to-toe bruise and his hands puffy and soft with the fingernails pulling loose.

“Can you kill us?” he said, still with hoo-lips and hootongue but the words so soft and slurred I could sense the rot forming in his mouth. His face was slack and drooping like he’d been autopsied, muscles cut through with a scalpel. “We want to die.”

“You’re not dead already?” Linc asked, voice slow and loud. “How long have you been here?”

The others ignored us, moaning and scratching at the dirt; Green Sweater seemed to be the spokesman. Maybe the only one who could still talk. Talking like a human, all delicate articulation, but he still seemed to understand our gestures and grunts. “Make us dead like you,” he pleaded. “Or just dead. Help.”

He staggered toward us, hands held out in supplication. One of the others picked up a rat, holding it struggling and squalling in her grip, and looked at it longingly and drooling and then dropped it again with a shudder. They were all shaking, from hunger for things like that squirrel that they couldn’t keep down or kill properly. They sang without words, each note a penknife nick to the brain; the stench was searing. They trembled when I looked at them, they trembled when I stepped back. What was this ruined mockery pretending to be us? Pity was impossible. My fist clenched with the need to smash it.

“Why aren’t you dead?” I said, slapping Green Sweater’s outstretched arms aside. “What are you? Are you human?” No answer. “You’re not one of us! Tell me what you are!”

“Why wouldn’t you dance with me?” he demanded, the tones of a betrayed lover. “Why wouldn’t you infect us? We want to be like you—or just die. You like killing things. Kill us.”

I just stared. He shivered and snuffled, bewildered this meager bag of tricks hadn’t worked, then let out a frustrated hiss and grabbed me hard around the throat. Linc came staggering to the rescue but Green Sweater had weakened, gone soft and putrescent since the night of the dance, and it was easy to throw him to the ground, kick him again and again until he huddled up screaming in fear. His friends didn’t even turn around. His bones felt almost soft on impact, bendy as greensticks. I spat on him, a long black trail of coffin liquor.

“Kill yourself, coward. You’re not worth the trouble it’d take me.” I wiped my feet against the dirt, trying to scrub away all contact. “And you must be a hoo, everything you think you know comes from movies—we’re not contagious. If we only were, we’d run this fucking planet.”

He just lay there. Another one started scratching at the ground and they all kept moaning in imitation song. Linc was now awkwardly patting something in a mud-caked red skirt that clutched his arm and sobbed. “C’mon,” I said, yanking him off. “We’re leaving.”

“But we’ve got to find out—”

“You know what I’ve found out? That they’re psycho and their smell’s going to make me pass out. Let’s get out of here and go someplace we can talk.”

The cornfield is wide, I cannot get o’er.
The stench overpowered everything around it, our smells too, so that picking up our path again was a wearying chore. Florian and then all this, it was too much. I was vibrating with exhaustion, the hard sunlight beseeching me to lie down and sleep, and I had the trees and cool shady rest nearly in my sights when Linc and I started, and froze.

Someone was standing fifty yards away in the grass and bare dirt, strands of hair blowing over his face, frozen tense as a rabbit in sight of a cobra; he had a bulging red rucksack slung on one shoulder, a big damp spot on its side. Maybe a birdwatcher, camper, some hoo who came out here last night or at dawn and then got lost. At least he wasn’t trying to sing. He stared at me and I stared back, and it was as if something unspooled between us, a thread, a wire filament too thin for the eye, and he had one end and I had the other and our fingers were caught and tangled together like fish flailing in the same net. I couldn’t pull away. Behind us our friends grew fainter, wailing outright in lieu of making music.

“Just a hoo,” Linc murmured. “Just what we need. Let’s go scare him off.”

The human didn’t move as we approached him, as that thread between us wrapped tighter and tighter around my fingers and tugged me forward. Did I know him? How could I? Early thirties at most, neatly combed hair gone prematurely gray, wire-rimmed glasses, jeans, a rumpled blue shirt, a face so bland and ordinary you forgot what he looked like looking right at him. His smell was pure hoo. The rucksack gave off an odor of greasy plastic and, beneath that, something raw and meaty. He swallowed hard when we approached, eyes wide. He was getting our smell now too.

“Out,” Linc said, and showed his teeth. Linc has very long, very sharp teeth, even for our kind; he almost never needed to do more, the few times we had to frighten away vagrants. This fellow, though, didn’t even seem to see him. He was too busy looking at me.

“Jessie?” the stranger said.

Surprise turned me still. It couldn’t be someone from school—what would I be now, twenty-four, twenty-five? Unless I really had lost all touch with time, he was too old. Someone I knew. How would I know him? It was a guess, a joke. Linc smelled my anxiety and growled, drooling coffin juice. The hoo took a step backward.

“Can you understand me?” he said, his voice shaking, a hand to his nose. He looked like he desperately wanted to bolt and run, like he couldn’t, like whatever thread, filament had tangled me up had caught him fast as well. “Please just nod, or . . . something, if you can, I—”

“Jim,” I said.

That’s what came unbidden from my mouth but of course, he couldn’t hear it: just the throaty grunt of a creature without a tongue, even less human-sounding than when I’d tried to say Lisa’s name, years past. His voice. I didn’t recognize this gray-headed weary-eyed shit-scared stranger but he’d somehow stolen Jim’s voice for himself, my brother, my older brother, Jim. I could
feel
his feet twitching like they were my own, itching to run away, but he didn’t. Could sense the nausea rising in his throat, at how Linc and I smelled, but he didn’t get sick. He stood there. He let us both come closer, eyes full of shock and longing like I’d somehow turn back into the human he’d known if he just stared at me long enough. My stomach had become a vast hollowness, the full measure of the air you fall through jumping from a skyscraper to the pavement.