Dust (19 page)

“You know my name,” Linc said, with bland politeness. “My name’s Linc.”

“Hey!
You Horton? This little Horton the Wannabe Hoo?” Carny shoved him harder, making him stagger. “This the Horton who prances around eating his squirrel sandwiches ’cause he doesn’t have the balls for a real hunt?” He slammed one bloated, greenish fist into another with a hatred you could smell. “Listen to you. ‘
My
name’s Linc.’ Aren’t you cute. So is it hoo you won’t eat, or just hoocow?”

Linc shook his head. “Someone thinks
we’re
wanting hoodom,” he said, chatting all calm at me and Renee like Carny wasn’t still there in his path, seething, boiling over for a fight. “Someone’s getting on
us
about what we eat, with their dead meat. Cooked flesh. Old scraps. Garbage guts. Pathetic.” Grinning now, Linc was, as he walked around Carny right up into Rommel’s face. “Sick and pathetic.”

Laughing coolly as you please, he started walking back up the aisle. He didn’t even turn when he heard Carny screeching dementia behind him, just let himself get kicked square in the back and go sprawling to the floor. Ron and Rommel screamed laughing, clapping Carny on the back as he roared and pumped his fists like he’d just conquered Normandy. Linc shrugged and pulled himself to his feet.

“If you want it,” Linc said, and threw himself at Carny. Carny and Ron got him pinned in the aisle, one hitting, one kicking. Renee stumbled to the rescue from behind and got a motorcycle chain snapped whip-hard in her face; she fell screaming, clutching her cheek in her palm, and Dembones knelt down laughing, stroking the chain links of his own leash slicked with smears of Renee’s skin. The sudden glint of eager, sharp intelligence in his eyes, as he cooed over his handiwork, decided me: fair game.

I grabbed the chain and whipped the other way, hoping for a clean neck snap, and Dembones reeled me in like a cat toy on a string, jumping on my back and pounding until my ribs crunched broken into my useless lungs. Fighting the new strength in him was like trying to toss a lightning strike back out of my body, trying to waltz with a bank safe crushing my chest, and I wrenched myself back and forth, kicking, punching, snapping my teeth at anything in range—and then all that iron and steel suddenly melted into puff pastry, he was beneath me and I pounded and punched at the flabby dough of his face with no idea of how I’d flipped him. Dembones wailed in protest, and Rommel stumbled toward us, grabbing Dembones’s chain and holding up a hand. Ron pulled back from Linc, instantly obedient, and Linc loosened the arm he’d wrapped around Carny’s neck. Rommel grinned.

“Family pet’s off limits,” he told me, patting Dembones’s sides possessively. “Want some more fight, though? Take it.”

More fight. Yes, I wanted some more fight. There was something inside me like a pain, stronger than the stabbing of my ruined rib cage and I thought,
This
is the curiosity that killed the cat: that sudden need to know, have I really got it? Could I outrun that freight train a second time? Let’s find out. I smiled at Adriana, who slid from her perch next to Stosh and strolled slowly up to me. Carny, panting with humiliated rage, bared his teeth at Rommel and got a shrug in return.

“Okay,” Carny murmured, his voice the low slow growl of a dog about to spring. “Not funny.”

He fell on Renee. Linc jumped Stosh, rolling toward us in a tumbleweed of arms, legs and open jaws. Rommel had pulled back completely, Dembones at his side, watching and testing his crew. Renee yanked Carny’s arm backward until it snapped, and he dropped her with a furious howl; Ron dragged her like a wheelbarrow, her scalp in shreds. Stosh pounded on Linc, got his neck square in his teeth and crunched. There was a loud, snapping crack, and Linc fell limp to the floor and didn’t move.

My vision was a sudden blur, seeing that, but I made a grab for Adriana’s throat all the same. She bent back my arm, almost giggling, then pinned me flat on my back and started punching. I was a crazy thing underneath her, legs and arm flying like I was breaking out of that underground box all over again, and it did me no damned good. Renee, a fish convulsing in Ron’s net, screamed encouragement between punches, and Carny bellowed obscenities even louder and the balcony Rat were in a stomping frenzy, I was going deaf, I would shoot straight out of my skin hard as Adriana’s fist meeting my face if the noise all didn’t stop,
stop!
Carny loomed over me, ready to stomp my head to teeth and tissue, then he was suddenly gone with a howl, and a crunch, and silence.

I spat bile, gasping, whipping my head from side to side as the thick steel bands of Adriana’s legs tightened and squeezed. She punched my arm, my head, flipped me facedown on the linoleum with my spine twisted and my broken ribs a bed of nails. She couldn’t break my back. If I got out of this alive I’d still be stomped, just like Lillian, because the Flies wouldn’t shoulder a cripple. She was going to break my back.

I was half-blind from exhaustion and panic, getting only crazy formless snapshots as I tried to twist away: Renee crawling moaning to a pew, holding her tattered head, Ron circling us like a wrestling coach dying to join in, Stosh standing in a strange grim silence. Rommel scratching Dembones idly behind the ears, all the time in the world. Screaming, I sank teeth into Adriana’s arm, and she grabbed my shoulders and slammed my face full force into the lino. I was gone for crucial seconds as she twisted my arm immobile and got her other hand around my neck, and the gallery was screaming and I awoke just long enough to wait for . . . welcome oblivion—

Rommel let out a shrill cry of victory, and the rafters echoed as the Rat all picked up the sound. And for a half-second, no more, Adriana turned and forgot herself in that flood of impending glory, loosening her grip just enough so I could use a sudden, enraged new surge of strength to push back around and bite her arm, sinking in until I heard a lovely, splintering crunch. She bucked backward, falling hard on her ass trying to shake me off, and I rose up, threw her face forward, planted my soles on her back and jumped. As her spine broke there was no gunshot crack, just a soft thick sound like an egg carton crumpling underfoot, like peanut brittle crumbling in a hoo’s teeth. The balcony gasped. Then they laughed.

She was done, there was no need for more, but I bit and sliced into her cheeks, her nose, her nasty stinking regrown face, pulled out handfuls of seaweedy hair. Rommel stood over me, grinning with a mocking joy. Blood was blood, and he didn’t care. I could hear him like he’d spoken:
Just do her. You know you wanna. She’d do the same to you. And what good is she to us anymore?

I took her eyes. She was so dazed she never saw it coming but I did it, I knelt there and shoved in my thumb, left, right, out, vile jelly. I tore them out. Adriana screamed and screamed, eye sockets streaming human red, and Renee laughed. I’d never heard her laugh like that before. I smashed Adriana’s skull, fast, furious, the nauseating liquid softness of her brains scrambled eggs under my pounding fist. She twitched violently, and fell still, and her diminishing brain radio went forever silent.

I staggered backward, dazed, surveying the damage. Carny lay sprawled across a pew, skull flattened. Renee crouched near him; she was bald in wide strips now, scalped, her one torn dangling eyelid now ripped away and gone, and the metal chain had cracked one temple open so I could see the clean white pulse of her brain inside. Mind the gap, I thought, and started to giggle. Dembones rooted in Carny’s remains until Ron shoved him away, all of them staring at me with shock, confusion, something like genuine respect. I spat like Billy would and turned away.

Linc was standing now; that cracking sound hadn’t been his neck after all but his collarbone, now sunken and collapsed on one side. It must have stunned him. And then he must’ve played possum, that little country squirrel-eater’s trick, until he had Carny back in his sights. I helped him keep upright while Renee retrieved the lake stones fallen from her and Linc’s pockets, all three of us jangling with the nervous energy of a dozen successful hunts. This must have been what sex felt like, or what hoos kept wanting sex to feel like: this great wrenching push of sound and light and flesh-lust that knocked me over and hauled me back up again and kept me dizzy where I stood. Rommel circled us and glanced at Carny, at Adriana, nudging her with his boot.

“That bitch,” he said. “She never could resist playing to a crowd.”

“We’re leaving now,” Linc said. “All of us.”

“Yeah? Well, you can have the ’maldie back, she ain’t pretty anymore. That might change, though. In time.” Rommel laughed like he’d planned this, like he wasn’t as flummoxed as that balcony full of murmurs and buzz. “Get what you came for? Come to surprise us with how the country cousins got some doctor’s medicine, too—”

“We haven’t,” Renee snarled. “We’re not changed. We’re not freaks. We’re just better fighters than you.”

Rommel chuckled like an indulgent grandpa, chucking Renee under the chin. “Long as you’re sure, sweetie. All I know is, some of us are changing, adapting one way or another, and some are stuck on the outside looking in. Like your old man, Jessie. So any time you get sick of him and the country life and living off baby food, you know how to find us again. Not Teresa, though, you can keep that sorry bitch. Don’t much care for folks who walk around bellowing about kicking ass and taking names and have to find out the hard way they ain’t nothing. I like the ones who crawl in all weaselly-like and then . . . surprise me.”

He winked at me, a small flicker of exquisite muscle control he would never have had before. Linc got his feet steady and I let him go.

“Later days,” Ron called out. By the time we were out the door he and Rommel were already laughing free and easy, no more regard for Adriana and Carny lying there amongst the human corpses than for a pair of rabbits. Stosh, and the balcony, stared after us in silence.

Once we were safe on the Sunlit Trail Linc brushed off the church dust with slow, precise gestures, fingering the new punched-out hollow in his collarbone. “How did we do that?” he asked, a little tremor of shock in his voice. Shock, and eagerness. Silent Renee stared at me with shiny wet rabbit eyes, twitching with energy, waiting for the answer.

“I’m starving,” I said. “I’m gonna get sick if we don’t eat.”

“Possum just ran by,” Linc said, pointing into the trees. “Nasty stuff, but—”

“So that was all for nothing?” Renee cried, rubbing fretfully at her wounded head. “We still don’t know much of anything—”

“We?” I demanded, pressing at a broken rib to try to shove it back into place; the pain was like a hard little jolt of nausea, then it snapped to like a jagged Tinkertoy. “Just how the hell much nosing around and listening in have you been—”

“I wouldn’t say it’s for nothing,” Linc said, craning his neck for the possum. “We know this thing is everywhere, that it’s spreading. That it spreads fast. And that even the Rat don’t know how this happened, or aren’t telling. And that Teresa’s definitely got it, though it sounds like they didn’t know that until we told them—”

“Joe knew,” I said. “He knew all along. He just didn’t want to believe it.”

“Joe.” Linc let his name hang in the air, a joke fallen flat. “That’s bullshit that he told them you were sick or anything else, they just wanted to rile you up for some fun. Careful what you ask for.” Grim satisfaction flashed across his face. “And it sounds like it’s contagious, but spread how? Biting? Spitting? I bet Jim could tell us. I bet he could tell us a lot more than he did.”

The lab at Chanute Beach, where all the trouble started. Maybe. Supposedly. The Rat had no idea who Jim was to me, they had no reason to make that up. Fucking Rat. Fucking Rommel, those nasty fleshy springform lips of his twisted up sneering over Joe,
can’t kill a bitty kiddie
, pissing himself about flamethrowers—after all Joe’s talk, his
screaming
, about how I wasn’t any sort of hunter if I never learned to hunt that.

Unless he’d always been just that scared. Unless, even worse, no matter how he tried he had no true gut-burn to kill something he’d once been himself, and that was why the Rat booted him out on his ass in the first place. What if he’d always wanted me with him not to show me what’s what, but in case he needed help, needed rescuing? Because he was so scared he’d die, if he did go gate-crashing and ended up snared in a circle of swift-stepping flamethrowing hoos, and he just didn’t want to take another chance on dying without me, on dying alone?

Because, for all his talk, in the end he was just like me. Both of us so scared of the fucking hoos, in our own worthless ways, and so damned we’d never admit it, and so slow on the uptake when we saw it in each other. Pathetic. Completely goddamned pathetic.

I slipped my fingers into Florian’s bag of stones, grabbing one tight; I was doing that a lot lately, needing to feel that cool smoothness, that strange tingling in the palm of my hand, like a little last reminder of something good I’d once had in abundance. Renee took one from her pocket as well, rubbing it between her fingers, and the agitation on her face started to subside. I gripped tighter. The lab at Chanute Beach, where Jim works.
Joe told us you’ve got this.

“Maybe Jim doesn’t know anything else,” I said.

“Or maybe he’s lying,” said Linc. “Or maybe he’s not lying, he’s just got these suspicions, but he won’t say them out loud without proof, he’s gotta study his samples first. Be a scientist. Looks to me like everyone just knows bits and pieces of the story, and they’re all keeping their bit quiet so they can have the advantage. Not that they even know what the advantage is.”

“So like I said,” Renee retorted, “we didn’t learn a damned thing.”

Except that we can fight, I thought. That we can fight
that
.

Linc scratched vigorously at his shoulder, dislodging a new cluster of watch beetles. I raised my arm, sniffing at my skin: dirt, forest, cornfield, Adriana’s too-reddened blood and the rot that was uniquely me, no hoo-smell, no solvent or sap-bead sweat. But Teresa had looked normal—for a while—and Joe, and Linc and Renee for that matter, and Rommel said the first thing that happens is you feel tired, and hot, and worn out, and how the hell was I walking side by side with Renee the little superspy like she’d been part of this all along, not just the stupid new girl sniveling about her embalming going soft? I reached around and gave her a shove just to set things right and she stumbled, shrugged, clung to my armless shoulder as the hill got steeper and we turned back onto the Sullen Trail. The snowdrops lining the path were withered now, the violets thickening in earnest.