Dust (36 page)

A few minutes. Hours. Days. My arm hurt and my head was heavy so I lay down again.

The hoos had Jim’s body now but their strength was ebbing too, they’d only managed to drag him a few feet away. They squatted over him, moaning, then bent their heads down and tore at his flesh, trying to bite deep. One of them had a knife too, a big sharp thing like hunters carried. The blade covered in rust, or dried blood.

“It’s not fair just to leave them there,” I told Renee and Linc, almost belligerent like they’d been fighting me about it. “We have to go back. We have to get them.”

“We will,” Linc promised. His eyes were closing too, his hand slipping from my grasp. “We will.”

They’d got the knife deep into Jim now. Sawing at him. Blood oozed thick onto the duneface and a couple of other hoos crawled up, groaning, grabbing handfuls of drenched sand. Like Sam, after he woke up again. At least he was out of this now. Him and all the others.

I knew her, I suddenly realized. The one who’d been staring at me. I knew her. She was one of our neighbors, three or four houses down the street in Lepingville: Mrs. Finnegan? Ferguson? I’d forgotten. Had a dippy border collie that got into everyone’s garden. Brought us platefuls of Christmas cookies. She snatched a handful of torn-up flesh from another sick hoo, punching him hard, weeping as she bit down, and I turned my head away.

“Look at the sun instead,” Renee said. Her eyes were open again, staring straight up; tears rolled along her cheekbone, disappeared near her ear. “It’s beautiful. It really is.”

Gold and tangerine and rosy pink, flooding my eyes. I squeezed them shut, it was too much, and sunspots pulsed and floated in an orange film behind my lids.

I wonder what she brought to the house, to Jim and Lisa, after our funerals. She was the sort who would have. Lasagna? That was about right. They always bring things you can spoon out and cut up. Out of nowhere random thoughts of food flitted through my brain, wandering bright and sudden as those sunspots, sense memories I thought I’d lost forever making my mouth water: pancakes thick with syrup. Potato chips. Fresh strawberries, the tiny bruised ones straight off the vine that burst open the second your tongue touches them. The vegetarian chili Mom sometimes made just for me, everyone else would whine if they didn’t get their damned ground beef. Butter pecan ice cream. The warm, twitching, blood-soaked flesh of a rabbit, deer, squirrel, duck, possum—human? No. Not that. Not ever again. I couldn’t actually be getting hungry, normal hunger, conventional, mundane, everyday hunger free of bloodlust or starvation, right here, right
now.
Was this all part of getting better? I couldn’t be lying here, like this, knowing what was happening just a few yards away, thinking about goddamned strawberries and—

My eyes flew open and I dug at Lisa’s sand pile in a sudden, frantic fear that we really had suffocated her, that she’d somehow tunneled downward and downward into the duneface and we’d never find her again, while I lay here, like an asshole, daydreaming about pancakes. My fingers found her collarbone, slid up her throat, pressed against the slow, weak but still persistent pulse like we’d both stop breathing forever if I let go. Renee reached up, took my other hand.

“We won’t get back,” I said. The hoos were stumbling away from Jim now, wobbling as they walked, smears of flesh and slicks of blood covering their chins, chests, arms like they were babies missing their bibs. “For the others. Not in time.”

“No,” Renee said softly. “I guess we won’t. But we would have. If we could.”

We would have. If things had only been different. I hoped that was actually true.

I looked away from the hoos and into the eyes of the man from the neighboring burial mound, the one who’d lain there through all this like all the rest of them, silent and indifferent. He was sitting up now too, still half-submerged in the sands. I didn’t hate him, for just lying there. Why should I? Why should he have taken special notice, really, of that woman dying? Jim and me fighting? Any of this? Some live. Some die. Other than saving yourself, maybe a few others if you’re truly lucky, there’s just nothing you can do.

You hungry too, Mister? I bet you are.

The morning sky was an intense, almost hurtful blue, barely a single thread of cloud to stop the light from pouring in and I kept squinting, pained, as the sun made its ascent. One of the hoos covered in Jim’s blood fell over, twitching, convulsing like Jim had. Lay still. The others just kept on walking. Flesh without agency, even as they fed and pitched forward, their brains slowly, inexorably starting to shut down.

“They’re dead,” I told the stranger. As if he couldn’t see it for himself. “Aren’t they?”

“Yeah, they’re dead,” he said. His voice was weary, full of the useless knowledge of how it all might have been, if things had only been different. “They’re all messed up.”

We could have stayed. There was plenty of room and only a few dozen of us left. We did, for a while, up in the big lab: It was ransacked, of course, equipment broken, papers indecipherable, some chewed up like papier-mâché. Filing cabinets emptied. So much for playing detective after the fact.

I couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t look at the beach without seeing Jim, silhouetted against the sun screaming in death. At the trees without waiting for Joe, Florian, someone to emerge, tell me to get my ass back to the deer hunt. At my own hands without hoping for the sprout of new rot. I hoarded food I didn’t need. Started fights. Then Renee got her head split open, fighting over a dented double can of goddamned creamed corn, and so the four of us picked up and headed back east.

We stuck to the coastline, following the shore. Empty steel mills, rusting rail track, darkened casino signs, vacant lots unfurling in green ribbons from behind hulks of machinery, and then we were back in tall sharp grasses and sandy dune soil. The gravel road widened, the woods’ end marked by a faded sign reading WELCOME TO COWLES SHORES. We’d crossed over into the next county while we weren’t watching. Lake Michigan looked gray and choppy out here instead of deep blue, stretching out to the horizon like a blanket of living frost.

“This is it,” I said, standing on the dune crest. “This is where we’re meant to stay.”

“How can you be sure?” Lisa said. “How do you know?”

“Pick a house,” I told her, and ran toward a row of abandoned cabins, remnants of long-ago summers before the beach became contraband. Our homes now, side by side: Lisa’s, Renee’s, the one Linc and I share. Behind them, where the sand reverts to woods, we’ve put a circle of lake stones around the trunk of an old tree. This may not be where he was asking for when he died, but it’ll still always be Florian’s beach.

The humans know we’re out here. They stay away. Stories go around about how those who wander into the sands never return. They will not fight us on the beaches. It’s not true. It’d be too much like cannibalism now, even though we’re not really them and they’re definitely not us. Too few of them, anyway. It’d be like basing every meal around black truffles.

I don’t think any humans who got the plague reverted back: They either became one of us, like Lisa, or they died. Almost no humans left, from what I see, and no true undeads at all. My former kind, extinct. Our progenitors, rapidly getting there—

Well, hello there, Joe! Kitty-Joe, that is. Just got back from Kokomo. So many ferals out here, reverted pets, longtime strays. Joe’s a king ratter, him and Kitty-Mags. Sam’s fat and lazy, Billy’s purely vicious, Teresa’s so little and shy I never see more of her than a gray glimpse of fur. Good to have all the Fly-by-Nights together again, though, one way or another.

I get upset when they disappear, when they die. Renee does too. Lisa thinks we’re crazy. She never liked cats.

Lisa won’t talk about Jim. About what he did to her, to us, what things were like before she got out and ran away. She claims she doesn’t remember. I know she’s lying. She won’t let me say a word against him, gets angry and stalks off if I try. Linc doesn’t act like that when I talk about Joe, ever. You might even say he’s been pretty patient.

Linc says I should write all this down, everything that’s happened to us. Everything I tell him. He thinks someone, someday, is gonna want to read it. Renee says so too. We’ll be history someday, she says, in the far future. Our kind will want to know just where they came from. And I can tell them.

Sometimes Renee and Linc, and I can’t say I blame them, are both completely out of their minds.

Winter’s in the air now, I can feel it, and Lisa’s nagging about insulating the cabins. Why bother? We get cold when it snows, it’s already snowed once or twice, but no frostbite; long sleeves are all we need. Colds, stomachaches, deep cuts, sprained ankles, they never last. No need to waste our time bundling up and hiding away.

“We have to keep busy,” Lisa keeps saying. “We’ll go crazy otherwise. Every day just like every other.”

She wishes she were human again, I think. Sometimes. Then we find another human body by the roadside, naked, battered, half-eaten by animals, and she changes her mind. If she still had her daughter, it’d be different. I know it would. But there’s nothing I can do about that.

Our kind are regrouping. We hear talk from our foraging expeditions, strangers on the road, of more and more folks drifting into Prairie Beach, coming together, or at least side by side. Happy-slappy little post-necropolis. Lisa would go back. She’d go back tomorrow. Renee? I don’t know. Linc, thank God, thinks like I do: People fucked with me all my life, he says, and kept right on fucking with me after I died. Why the hell would I give them a third chance?

I’m afraid of what will happen if I’m around people again. Just look what’s come of us all, because I decided to try to say hello.

Sometimes I think what Lisa really wants is another baby. Is that even possible now? We don’t menstruate, she or me or Renee. I haven’t heard tell of any of our kind getting pregnant. So much for Linc and Renee deeming me the wise old ancestor with the funny folktales. I’ll tell them the stork really
did
deliver us, and took a giant, wet plopping shit all over humankind in the process. What can you do, eh, kids?

I hope Renee stays. Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, she and Linc became the friends I never had when I was alive, most of the time I was undead. Lisa, though, I don’t know. But she doesn’t know about me either, so I guess we’re even.

If we could talk about Jim maybe things would be different.

 

 

 

 

I was walking in the woods the other day, wandering around like old times. Just enjoying the tall oaks, the last ragged remnants of scarlet and yellow leaves, imagining what the lilies and columbines and feathery clusters of ferns would look like again in the spring, and then I saw something that looked like Jim but wasn’t, rucksack slung over one shoulder, strolling along no more than a yard removed. He turned in my direction and my body went cold and then hot in that hoo-way I’d never get used to, an icy flush of anger and fear as I stood there, rabbit-still, waiting to be swept into floodlit shadows of endless light, endless night—

Then I blinked, and he, it, vanished.

The next morning, Linc pulled me aside. “I saw a man in the woods,” he said, “the other day—”

“I know,” I said.

“He just disappeared. Right in front of my eyes.”

“He does that,” I said. We went to work on the vegetable garden, laying down dead yellow and scarlet leaves for mulch, and didn’t mention it again. He does that.

And what happens, if he ever decides to stay?

 

 

 

 

There’s a metaphor in all this somewhere, Linc says. Looking and sounding like Ben, the old Ben, thin arms folded and a battered cloth beach hat pulled over his eyes. Linc died young as I did but he still looks so old sometimes, weather-beaten, freeze-dried, tanned hide stretched over wire. Just like me. I love him and I don’t want Death to stop and stay for him, or Renee, or Lisa, but I can’t do a thing about it. Just like when I was first alive. Just like after I died.

So really, what’s new? And if this isn’t anything new, and it never was in my hands, ever, then what’s there to fear? Or maybe it’s that the fear is all part of the love, inextricable, and you just can’t have the one without the other. It would figure. Just another way other people are a pain in the ass.

Which makes as good a conclusion as any. If I ever did go and tell this whole story to anybody else.

Tonight’s sunset was like streaks from a jam jar, marmalade and blood orange and raspberry spilled across the sky, and we sat up to watch, Linc with an arm around me and Lisa half asleep with her head in Renee’s lap. It’d been a good day. The deer were jumping, like they got a prize for volunteering themselves, and we’d built a fire, roasted our meat, feasted like kings and queens at the end of the world.