Frail (28 page)

It felt right. It felt like something I’d always known about, and missed, the thing that had always been meant to fill the hollow spots inside me. All along. All my life.

The front doors were heavy, thick, dark wood, one of them cracked and almost swinging on the hinges. I eased the other one open, expecting it to creak long and loud like in the movies. It didn’t make a sound. The black dog at my heels, I walked inside.

 

 

The walls were a startling bluish green, with a patina of fine grime; the linoleum underfoot, in patches, was all dirt. The air was heavy and sweet, the wrong sort of rotten-apple sweet, and every breath had the mildewy wet of a pool locker room, a shower stall. All sorts of hallways and doors, no lights, no furniture except a couple of broken chairs tossed in a corner. Splintery wooden doors with frosted glass windows, nothing marked. The first door led to a tiny empty room, some sort of office, the lone filing cabinet overturned and empty. Opening the second released a stench so harsh and overpowering I gasped and slammed it shut. My dog scratched and whined at that door and even as I took little heaving nauseous breaths I was laughing, remembering the neighbor’s chihuahua who loved to stick his whole head in our compost pile and start snacking. It made me want to give this one treats, though I was good as certain it, he, never ate.

“Sorry,” I whispered, as he reluctantly gave it up and trotted alongside me. “Maybe next time—”

Footsteps. No place to hide, so I froze in place; they didn’t even see me, the little trio heading down another hallway transecting this one. Their shoes made the faintest squeaking sounds against the lino as they trudged along, their heads down, and vanished.

It’s really true, then. Life in a dead house. I’d hoped I thought it up, more of my seeing-things hearing-things mishearing-things crazy. But somewhere inside, I always knew I hadn’t.

Blackie let out another not-bark, a soft whuffing sound: They’re gone now, keep moving. Better keep you trotting down that slaughterhouse chute. I headed for the intersecting hallway, going left where they’d crossed right. Old Nick’s nails clicked softly against the flooring, the sound a steadying comfort.

The doors down this hallway were solid wood, not even a veiled, frosted hint at anything inside. Empty. Empty. Empty. Empty—

I had to close my eyes and blink hard for a moment because this room, the seventh, eighth maybe ninth, was the first with actual proper windows and it’d caught the full rising sun. Bigger than the others, bigger and bluer and full of makeshift cots just like the monastery back in Leyton, and the cots were full of people. Nobody stirred or turned their head as I walked in, no nurse or scientist or jail guard watched over them; I heard no sounds of breath, saw no telltale chest rise or fall. I approached the one nearest me, a woman with graying dark hair and a brow still knitted in arrested, waxen thought. I put shaking fingers to her lips, her nose and felt no exhaled breaths, slid them to the side of her neck—

And there was a pulse. Weak, maybe ebbing for good, but it leapt up beneath my fingers, then nothing, then as I was about to give up the ghost another tentative little throb. Again. Again. An agonizingly stretched-out rhythm. The slow frail beats of a slow frail heart.

Was this one of the lab’s new projects, to try to bring back zombies of old? But zombies had no heartbeat, I remembered that quite distinctly from biology class. They ate, did they ever eat, but they excreted no waste, they used every bit of what they ingested and were more efficient at it than heaven allowed. (“So you’re saying they’re all full of shit,” George Antich shouted from the back of the room, and Mr. Sutter laughed as hard as the rest of us.) They never drew actual, oxygenated breath.

So we were told.

I went to the other cots and some had a heartbeat, and some didn’t, and one off in the corner, his skin gave under my touch in a way that made sickness crawl up my chest. Nothing. But he’d be full of life again soon enough, all sorts of different, opportunistic life merrily hatching and feeding away. Just you wait.

I headed for the door, absently patting the side of my leg, and then I heard a little whine and turned to see Napoleon sitting by the dead man, at the foot of the rickety filthy cot like he were keeping vigil. I patted my leg again, whistled. “Come on, boy.”

Nothing but reproachful, piss-hole eyes staring back. I was getting impatient. “Rex? Fido? Champ? King? I
said
, get over here—”

He wouldn’t move. The ferryman, he’d found his payment.

The room was growing lighter, the rising sun going from painfully intense tangerine to a softer, diffuse marmalade. Rover’s eyes, as I squinted, didn’t look sickly and jaundiced anymore; they were dual spots of that same strong, flame-shot color, flickering and changing as the sunlight changed. Sunspots. I went over and scratched him behind the ears and he half-closed his eyes in pleasure, like a real animal would.

“You’re a good dog,” I said. And I really meant it. I would miss him. I gave Chauncey one last pat and after making sure the hallway was empty, slipped out the door.

 

 

The hallways twisted and bent and buckled, the stink kept getting worse. Great patches of the floor were black with grime and there was a heap of dried-out . . . something, I wasn’t going to get close enough to confirm they were actual turds. We never sank that low in Lepingville, we dug actual shit-pits before the ground froze, but that’s lab types for you. Spoiled and lazy.

Wooden chairs and metal desks were piled high along the walls, I had to squeeze sideways past them a few times, but they gave me something to duck behind when I saw two more figures walking the opposite way, coming within yards of me and then abruptly turning and vanishing. They couldn’t be my Scissor Men, for one they were both too short—but anyone who attacks you in the dead of night looks taller, stronger than the trees. Maybe the Scissors only brought back corpses, and then drifted back into the woods.

My feet, I could cut off my feet. Burning, aching, rawer than hell. I want Lisa. I want Lisa and Naomi to have got away. I won’t think what Lisa’s like right now, if Naomi didn’t.

The hallway spilled into a wider corridor, two battered wooden doors sitting side by side. The first one was locked, all my rattling and tugging and a well-placed kick wouldn’t make it budge. I tried the second. Maybe there’d be a window in the second. Something to shove open, break, for living air.

I didn’t want to breathe in this fetidness for all eternity. That was Persephone’s real despair, in the stories, I was sure of it. Not the forced marriage, not the specters of the dead, not underground darkness half the year for the rest of eternity—it was the
air
. Just like this. Bottle it, sell it as a perfumed warning, a word to the unwise.

The second door handle stuck, gave a little metallic gearflutter, then opened with a soft
click
and there was sunlight, actual sunlight, from tiny rectangular windows too high in the wall to reach. A scratched metal desk in one corner, in another a rucked-up sea of blankets and flattened pillows bunched up together on the floor.

Lousy with mouse droppings, this room, and there was a huge spiderweb along the desk’s edge, thick cottony whitish-gray like an athletic sock unstitched and stretched open. I pictured a mouse running unwitting toward the sticky strands, some mama mouse’s blind hairless piglet babies, and made myself turn away.

A stack of notebooks sitting on the desk. A miniature filing cabinet next to the desk, warped and dented on the side; the bottom drawer was half-open, and peeking out was a little doll. A rag doll, like something Laura Ingalls might’ve played with before the undead forced her family out of their Kansas cabin, with a checked blue dress and bright red yarn for hair and a gray, grimy, resolutely sweet-smiling face. The whole drawer was a toy chest: picture books, a wooden top, a set of jacks, a kaleidoscope with a mouse-nibbled paper tube, toys a child might’ve played with a century ago or more. Taped above the desk, beneath the windows, on the closet door, all around the room were drawings, done on ripped-out notebook sheets or what looked like empty lab charts. The lakeshore, most of them, the Aquatorium, the shops along Lake Street, everywhere I’d passed getting here. One had groups of people dotting a beach, a bonfire of jagged orange lines in the middle: a beach picnic, after sunset, little white-coated figures holding marshmallows and hot dogs on sticks.

The tape on some of the pictures had given out, unable to stick to the greasy grime, but as I traversed the edge of the room, going from desk to closet to bedding to the tiny bank of windows, I could see that they laid out a pattern, told a story, marked the passage of time. The pictures nearest the filing cabinet were crude, clumsy, obviously the work of a small child. A child who’d learned proportion and a bit of perspective by the time we got to the desk, then shadowing and how to draw hands by the bedding, then sharper outlines and subtler facial expressions and by the time I got to the windows the skill on display was startling, the scrubby trees right above the dunes sketched out in black and white on a field of graph-hatched green but still so well, so painstakingly done, it really was those trees pinned down to life. Another picture, right next to it: A woman, carefully cross-hatched webbing all around her eyes but her expression youthful and exuberant, standing side by side with a younger, thatch-haired, unsmiling man. Both in lab coats.

Who’d lived here, in this room? For how long?

As I reached for the door handle I heard a sound from inside the closet, a rapid shallow intake of breath like an animal was inside. Is that you, King? A little test, to make sure I don’t go licking in someone else’s bowl? I’m pretty sure I passed. The sound became sharper, then forcibly stifled: a human being, hiding. Crying. Watching me through the crack in the door, as I made my little revolution of the room.

I went over and put a hand to the closet door, a steadying palm. “Who’s there?” I said quietly.

No answer but another little breath.

“I can hear you,” I said.

No answer. I turned the handle. I will not like what I see, I told myself, though nothing in this room or under that door smelled of death, I will not like what I—

I eased the door open and blinking into the closet’s expansive darkness I saw more taped-up drawings, and a broken chair, and Natalie, her face contorted with misery, huddled up beside it.

 

 

I grabbed her and pulled her out of there rough and fast, like I was yanking a toddler away from a stove covered in boiling-over saucepans, and when I put arms out her tentative breaths became deep, furious sobs. I stroked her coalface hair, gone dusty and dull and sticking in dark threads to her cheeks, and made vague ridiculous murmuring sounds; she had a sour smell to her, the same chronically unwashed odor that I and Stephen and every other surviving human gave off and I welcomed it, that faint little milky stench as she raised arms to clutch me back, it was the smell of actual living things.

“What are you doing here,” I whispered, too afraid to speak out loud. The shafts of sunlight filtering in made me squint and I turned eyes back toward the closet. “Did they pick you up, in the woods, after you and Maria—”

“She
left
,” Natalie managed, and expelled a cascade of small sobs like sneezes before she could speak again. “We were going in circles in the woods and she went off the other way, and I was scared to follow and I kept calling at her to come back, and she never did, and then I couldn’t find her at all and these men, they—”

“We’re getting out of here,” I said. Through those tiny windows, somehow, if need be. “We’re going to get out of here.”

Natalie cried harder. “They, they do things in here, they—there’s dead bodies in—”

“I saw them. We’re going to find a way back from here, and find what they’ve done with Stephen, and—” And cry, and scream, and know it’s all deserved, here in my dry hollow plasterboard insides where no one can see. “There’s barely anyone here, anyone alive. We’re getting out.”

“I found this room.” She was laughing now, jerky spasmodic little noises, close to sick with fright. “They locked me in the C-Lab but I picked the lock, there was something dead on the floor but they never bothered fixing that lock, it had whitewash all over it but the Recovery Room was apple green. This pretty pale green with a little fish someone drew in black marker in one corner. I wanted the Recovery Room but then I found this. Can you believe it?”

Natalie’s dead,
Naomi said. They brought Natalie “home” too, the way they did Stephen. The way everyone in Paradise City despised them both, instinctively, all those good upright folk whose very cells recoiled from something they couldn’t or wouldn’t define. “How many of them are around here?” I said. “Do they make regular patrols? I saw at least four. Do they come down here?”

“I found
this room
. I can’t believe it.” She scrubbed her sleeve against her cheek and her face twisted up again. “They left it just like it was, my pictures, my toy box—”

“Do they patrol?” Natalie was telling me something I wasn’t ready to hear, whose implications I wasn’t ready to grasp and so I wouldn’t hear it. “Those Scissor Men, the ones from the woods, are they outside?”

“I hid in the closet. Because I knew they’d come back here, to find me.”

“Did you see when they brought you in?”

“I didn’t recognize your voice. I thought you were one of them.”

“Did you see anyone else?” I had her face in my hands now, part tenderness and part twitchy urge to squeeze hard and pop if she didn’t stop babbling and help me. “Did you see anyone else from Paradise, anywhere here?”

“I—let’s get out of here first, okay?” She pulled away from me, stood up with fists thrust deep in her jacket pockets, trembling horribly with the effort to keep calm. “You’re lost, aren’t you. I know my way back. I know it blind. They’ll be down here soon.”