Dust (24 page)

And then his eyes clicked open again, staring impassively down at his own flesh as the organs knitted themselves together, as arteries and veins resealed themselves and muscle, fat, skin crept over all of it like a smooth blanket pulled over ulcerous legs. Drying blood soaked his clothes, made a huge scab of the sand. His eyes, looking at me, weren’t old Sam’s old eyes, and they weren’t any sort of creature’s I recognized at all.

“I’m hungry,” he said, his voice sharp and cold as Ben’s, and glared at me like a stranger, like a hateful thing blocking his path as he wrenched himself to his feet. “What’re you gaping at, you little shit? Go get me something to eat.”

“Sam.” I wanted to cry. Where was my poor, funny old Sam, who loved flowers and hated hunting, who only needed a warm spring day and Ben to be happy, who was too old to move this quickly? “I’m so sorry—”

“I’m
hungry
,” he snarled, his eyes feverish like Rommel’s, like Jim’s, and lunged toward me and Joe. Joe turned and kissed me, a brush of nonexistent lips and bone-stripped jaw, and grabbed me in a hard, hurtful embrace.

“I’m glad you were here with me after all, Jessie,” he said. “Later days.”

He shoved me away from him so hard I stumbled, lost my one-armed balance, fell heavily on my side. Sam knocked him flat to the dirt and he didn’t struggle, just lay there with his face open and expectant and before I could shout or plead, before I could get back on my feet and fight, Sam snapped his neck between two fully fleshed, powerful hands. He kicked in Joe’s skull the way I had Adriana’s, staining the grass with a burst of brains and bugs, and Joe’s body convulsed one last time like his limbs were hooked to wires and then lay still. Dead meat.

Teresa giggled, watching. I would have hit her, I would have broken her open but some sort of hazy web had wrapped itself around me, keeping me from moving at all. Sam crouched over Joe’s body and tore with smacking, furious noises at his bug-hatched flesh, crunched through bone with sighs of satisfaction. Eating rot. Relishing dust. Then Ben couldn’t take it anymore and hunched beside him, twitching to feed, and Jim was crawling toward his body too and Teresa, and I couldn’t look anymore, I couldn’t. Scavengers. Human buzzards. Cannibals. That’s what Jim tried to make of me. I hunched down like Jim with my hand against a tree’s knobbly bark, sick, so sick, I couldn’t stop.

Sam was crawling through the sand now, alongside Ben, both of them digging feverishly for more meat. Jim was groaning, holding his stomach, starting to cry in earnest as the pains inside wouldn’t go away. Teresa, her arms folded, watched me with malicious glee. There was a streak of tarry black at the corner of her mouth.

“He asked me to bite him,” she said, her lips dancing merrily at the thought. “He begged me, after I did in Ben. Because he just couldn’t make the change. Everyone else catching this new germ, but not him. I laughed in his face.” She shook her hair from her eyes, her long wild hoo-thick hair. “He just wasn’t worth the bother. Worthless, from start to finish.”

Jim had crawled to the clearing’s edge and was heaving and spitting again, just like the cornfield hoos, everything in him coming up. Sam and Ben pulled at Joe’s remains, Sam crunching a mouthful of purloined bone and not letting go even as Ben kicked and punched him in an increasing fury: whap, cry, swallow. Whap, cry, swallow. Sam got the last bite, and Ben let out a sound like a rabbit’s death scream and they
ran
after each other into the woods, ran like the feral, damaged human beings they’d become, so fast, such a perfect interlocking flow of muscle and bone that watching it I felt like I never had before: crippled. Left behind.

There was a mess of bone and dust and crushed skull and drying coffin liquor near the slide, something reaching from it still with the bare semblance of an arm, and that was all that was left of Joe, and we had just been talking, dancing and I’d told him that I could kill him, kill him right then and there, and the thought of it made me shake all over as I let out a shuddering cry.

“Jesus,” Teresa sneered, tossing that thick black hair over her shoulder. “You’d think she actually lost someone
living.
”

“I’ll kill you,” I said, and I’d thought and fantasized it dozens of times, hundreds, but this time I felt so cold and tense with purpose that I knew I really would. “I killed Adriana, I can kill you—”

“Adriana was still transitioning,” Teresa said, hitching her shoulders back like she was shrugging off a coat. “Not me. You wanna try it, bitch? Come on. This has been a long time coming.”

I made a fist of one rotten, stiff, creaking hand—this really was it and we both knew it, but I had to try, didn’t I, for Joe, for Ben, for poor old Sam? “You’re the worthless one,” I said, as we circled one another, as Jim lay there watching us, stretching out a hand, weeping. “And you’re bragging about it. You’re sick. I wouldn’t be like you, I’d rather kill myself than be like you, insane, crazy, sick, a cannibal—”

“Don’t worry,” said Teresa, slowly advancing on me. “None of that will happen. You’ll just be dead. That’s all you’ll ever be.”

Jim made an urgent moaning sound and then something came flying from the trees, hitting Teresa smack, smack on the shoulder, the cheekbone. Red blood streamed from her face as she whipped around, snarling, and then she was ducking handfuls of lake stones, hurled with undead force. Linc and Renee staggered out, unchanged still, vibrating with tension and fear as they clutched their weapons in their hands. Sticks and stones. Linc looked from Teresa, to Jim, to the remains lying at the foot of the slide, and I didn’t have to explain. “Oh, Christ,” he said, and started laughing like he’d never stop. “I knew it. I always knew it.”

Teresa raised up a warning hand, her wounds from the stones already healed. “Private business, kiddies. Very private. Turn around and leave right now, or you won’t walk away alive.”

Linc snarled, a blessed display of teeth and black rot. “What makes you think you will?”

Teresa was all smiles, all happiness as she advanced on them both, running zigzag and forward and back in a bizarre, mocking little dance just to show how fast she could move. “Jessie,” said Renee, full of urgency but none of her old teary panic, “what do we do?”

“She needs to breathe!” I shouted, as Teresa turned and leapt for my throat. “She needs to—”

She hurled me into the blood-soaked sand pile, yanked me out and slammed me over and over against the swing set poles, until coffin liquor streamed into my eyes and a cheekbone snapped and collapsed. Air, my brain chanted frantically over and over,
she
needs air again. I don’t. Teresa threw me on my back and I reached out and squeezed, trying to get her nostrils and mouth in one grip and of course I couldn’t, of course she bent my arm backward and then backward again until there was a long loud splintering crack and I screamed, and screamed even harder when she jumped on my legs, breaking a femur, wrenching and pulling. Something tugged and tore and snapped, and then one of my legs was gone below the knee and I’d barely felt it, in fact I felt nothing below the chest at all.

Linc howled, a long screech of fury like a song for me, as he grabbed Teresa and held her face down in the sand pile. Renee kicked hard and Teresa’s skull split open, bone and hair flaring in a fan and brains leaking into the adulterated sand. Then it knit itself together again, closing as neat and fast as Florian’s had opened in death, and she rose up in a spray of dust and grabbed Linc around the neck, wrenching forward, backward, breaking him open along the spine like a gutted fish still flopping for the water. Renee was on her, screaming, trying to pull her off, and then Teresa got a hand wrapped around Renee’s throat and they were both staggering through the sand in their murderesses’ dance while I rolled, so gently, down a long red tunnel. Renee wasn’t moving anymore, she wasn’t moving, the dance was all Teresa’s. Wake up, little Renee, wake up. Linc, don’t die—

Renee lay on her back, motionless, eyes staring vacant and hollow into the night sky. Linc was on the ground beside her and Teresa straddled him with guttural sounds of delight, teeth ripping into his face, fingers tearing the flesh from his arms. Something thick streamed from Linc’s stomach, soaking Teresa’s shirt, and I just lay there too, watching, the tunnel walls contracting around me. My cheek was oozing dark syrup from where a lake stone clipped it as I fell; my arm, what was left of my legs wouldn’t move at all. I was back in the coffin, staring up immobile as the lid slammed down for good. Teresa bent over me, her mouth melting before my failing eyes into a chasm the color of bleached bones.

“Close your eyes,” she murmured. “It’ll go so much quicker—”

Wordless, ceaseless screaming erupted in a flood behind us, sirens crying out after the bombs had dropped. A thunder-clap of running feet, bare, booted, belly-white, blister-red, forest-filthy, and through the pillars of legs I saw Ben, Sam, a Rat here, a Rat there, fleeting glimpses of the streaming hair and long grasping fingers and blackened eyes of strangers rushing in to help us die. Ben ran straight for Teresa, wrenched her off me and hurled her on her back with a bellow of triumph. Jim was cowering on the ground now, moaning in fear, sobbing in pain, grabbing for the underbrush like he could tunnel inside it and bury himself forever away from what he’d done, and then he was lost in the swarm and I couldn’t see him, I couldn’t hear anything but teeth crunching through bone and Teresa shouting, then howling loud enough to shake the earth. Then nothing.

Sam bent over me, his mouth still thickened with blood and black bile. I closed my eyes, waiting and remembering the deer, the hoos, the stray dogs and squirrels and raccoons and possum and countless other helpless stupid little animals we had cornered and killed. Not so stupid as us, reduced to this. What did a deer think of in death? No fear, if you were a deer you wouldn’t have any of this sort of knowing fear, you’d just remember how the sun streaked the river when you bent down to drink, how the branches curved and arched like a curtsey to let you pass through. The taste of ripe berries on the twig. The axe-edge of winter. The spring. The night.

The moon.

I smelled rain approaching and the air felt strange, heavy with quiet and emptiness, as Florian and I walked together along the dunes. I wasn’t sure what I was walking on, one leg gone and the other broken beyond repair, but somehow I was upright. The rain smell burned off as quickly as it arrived and the sun suffused a thick wall of clouds, turning everything pearly luminous gray.

“Is this heaven?” I asked. Someone was screaming, horrible breathless screams like muscle tearing off the bone, but even that couldn’t shatter the peace.

Florian smiled. “You just leave that be till you’re all used up.”

“Weren’t you watching that fight?” I picked up a lake stone, tossed it in a wide arc at the water. “I am used up, old man. Far out and floating. See?” I pointed at the bloated, torn-up body bobbing on the Lake Michigan waves. “There I am.”

The screams from somewhere else didn’t stop.

“That?” Florian looked scornful. “That ain’t nothing but the water. If you’re smart, you’ll stick to the sands.” He dug a toe bone into the damp sand near the shoreline, gone dark from the rolling waters. “This is where we all came from. This is where we were born.”

“So that’s true then?” I picked up another stone. “Something happened here, ages ago, something that infected all the sands? Got into the air? Was it a meteor?”

“Infected all the sands,” Florian said, an echo instead of an answer. “Got into the air. Strangeness everywhere. Sickness everywhere. Death everywhere.”

His toes pushed deeper into the sands. Near the shoreline, if they’re dry enough, you can get them to make a little sound underfoot, like the sound when you crunch through hard snow except fuller, heavier, almost melodic like a flat, subdued musical note. Singing sands, they call them. But here it was all waterlogged, sullen and quiet. The screams that much louder. Like sounds of childbirth. Born times three.

“The screaming sands,” I said.

“The sands started this,” he said. “And the sands’ll finish it.”

“I’m already finished.” I flipped the stone, the silvery pink of a salmon’s skin, over and back in my palm, raised my arm to throw it. “I’m done, I’m through—”

He grabbed my wrist with the strength he must have had when he was young, new-hatched, when my hoo-self was still centuries from birth. “Stop that,” he hissed, wrenching the stone away and brandishing it before my face like he might strike me with it. “You stop wasting all them bits and pieces, tossing them away. They made us what we are today. They’re what woke us up from death. What made us. What’ll keep you walking. These are
us.
”

“Igneous,” I said, taking the stone back from him. I cradled it in my hand like it might break. “Sedimentary.”

“Metamorphic,” he said. His eyes were suddenly sad. “Meteoric.”

“I’m dead. Done. Finished.”

“This’ll keep you walking.” He closed my fingers around the stone. “Keep you walking till you get to the sands.”

I shook my head, laughing. “I’m
at
the sands, old man!” I shouted. “I’m here! I’m in front of you! Can’t you see me?”

I tried to let the stone go, drop it back where I’d found it, but somehow my fingers kept clutching it tighter and tighter the more I tried to let it go; its edges dug into my flesh and I was laughing harder, laughing hard and breathless like screaming and I couldn’t stop. Florian didn’t seem to hear. He shambled away, tottering slowly and then running on his tinder-stick legs, and then he became a huge fattened tick of a deer. The stone became my hand and I slashed his throat with nails grown to long bone-white spikes, heard the poor deer sigh and collapse like Florian had at the moment of death. Blood soaked the sand, rising higher and higher with the incoming tide. I spat out mouthfuls as Teresa’s drowned, howling corpse bobbed and floated toward me, rose up and grabbed my throat, pulling me under—