Frail (5 page)

She looked so sad, about the dog.

“There’s a shelter over the ridge,” I said. “I have some stuff there. More supplies than I can use.”

She just kept looking at me so I nodded, feeling almost embarrassed, and limped away. A wind gust spat a clot of dead leaves over my shoes, and behind me I heard footsteps, boots squeaking with that gassy little squelch they make when the soles are starting to loosen and split off. If I turned around right now, yelled at her to leave me alone, she would. I was sure of it. She wouldn’t bother me anymore.

But if I had somebody to talk to then the black dog, the ghost dog, would go away.

 

 

“So we were all living at the beach,” Lisa said, as we sat in the grass near the safe house entry. “My sister, Jessie, two of her friends and me. Out by Cowles Shores, over the county line. They’d been undead, all three of them, before they got sick.” She frowned. “It’s not like we didn’t get along, just, they didn’t
understand
. They don’t think like humans, even now. Jessie loved to remind me of that, that humans and undeads literally don’t have the same brains at all—”

Her voice was giving me a headache, that ceaseless jackhammer of hard spitting t’s and d’s and popping p’s hitting my ears like ball bearings on a saw blade. She couldn’t help it, I could see her twisting her mouth into slow low shapes to try to soften the blow of her words, but it didn’t work with that palate like hardformed plastic, her tongue a rubber band snap-snap-snapping against it. “You’re taking all the chips,” I said.

“Sorry. I used to crave sour cream and onion. It’s been a while.” Chastened, she took one last big handful and handed over the party-sized bag, already half empty. “You have the rest.”

Chips, beef jerky, honey roasted nuts, a jar of raspberry preserves. Her teeth ripping at huge chunks of dried beef looked like mine but just the smallest bit longer, a fateful bit sharper; she could tear straight through flesh and bone, reduce anything living to shreds and pieces just like an undead. A whole stick of jerky in two bites. Bits of dried potato sprayed all over her like plaster from a collapsing ceiling. I must’ve looked disgusted because she ducked her head, shrugged.

“I can’t help eating like this now,” she said. “Or talking like this. It’s from the sickness. I mean, you’re not hungry like—like before, thank God, but still when you see food sometimes you forget everything else. Sorry.”

She shoved that handful of chips in her mouth, gulped it down with the barest hint of chewing. I still had no proof she wouldn’t decide to do that to me. The sickness. Always the excuse. Dave got attacked out in the woods, while he was setting snares for rabbits, he was lucky to get away. I think that’s how the trouble really started, for Dave: (In)human teeth are horribly septic, I read that somewhere, only cats’ mouths are worse, and diabetics don’t heal well.

“So that’s why you left?” I asked, around a handful of chips. I was shoving them in too but I still felt downright dainty, hearing her crunches and lip-smacks and belchy gulps. “I don’t get it. You’re the
same
, you all died of the plague, you all came back—”

“We’re not the same,” Lisa said, an edge to her voice. “I know I’m not human anymore, believe me I know it, but I still have the mind of a living human being. The same thoughts, emotions, perceptions, personality . . . but the undeads, something happened to their minds, when they died originally and then came back—”

“Yeah, I know.” I spooned up more jam. “Their minds turn to mush. Everyone knows that.”

“Everyone knows shit.” She sucked more salt off her fingers, wiped them on the tarp we’d brought up for a blanket. “They felt, reasoned, communicated with each other. They had a language, mostly thoughts and hands. I mean, you know, no tongues, most of them. But they remembered.” Chomp. Gulp. “They knew us, when they saw us. We were the stupid ones. Who forgot them, because we couldn’t deal with how they looked. Or smelled.”

That thing my mother killed looking at her like it knew her, like it remembered. No way to talk to her, beg for mercy, plead to die again, the words were all stoppered up in its rotten mouth like a wad of putty it couldn’t spit out, couldn’t swallow. All it could do was scream.

“They didn’t think like us,” I said. I took the jar of nuts, sat it in my lap. “They didn’t think at all.”

Something like a little streak of lightning flashed through her eyes, all righteous sparking, then subsided. “So where were you from?” she asked.

“Lepingville.”

“Me too.” Her fingers twitched, wanting to grab the nut jar, and even as the salt burned my raw fingertips I kept eating slowly, steadily, delicately just for the pleasure of seeing her try to hold back. Go rip off a squirrel’s head, if you’re that hard up. “Over on Meredith Street, near the old Baptist church.”

Where the rich people lived, though not half as rich as here. “We lived on Cypress. So what’d you do, before?”

“Had a lot of nervous breakdowns.”

She shrugged, matter-of-fact, like it hardly mattered anymore, and of course it didn’t. I put the nut jar back between us, but she didn’t touch it.

“I wasn’t much good at taking care of myself,” she said, scratching hard at her scalp. “This has all been quite the education. I lived with my brother.” She cracked open a cream soda. “He was a researcher at the big thano lab in Gary, over on the Prairie Beach side of town. Still no idea just what he did. You certainly couldn’t go there to look. They’d shoot you, no joke. I wasn’t supposed to know about that. Hell of a lot I was never supposed to know about. But I learned it.”

A thano? No wonder they had a house on Meredith. My mother hated lab types, said they’d say absolutely anything to keep their jobs and special privileges, access to any restricted area, all those closed-off beachfronts, no curfews, no road tolls—but then she got slivers of that cake too, working security.
My hands are filthy too,
she was the first to say that. I still didn’t believe zombies had any thoughts besides
food, eat, meat, kill
. They made all that up to get more research grants.

“Do you want those nuts?” Lisa asked. “If you come with me we can pack some more, if you want, they’re not heavy.”

“Come where?”

She pried the jar away from me, gently, kept staring at me until I looked her in the eye. Her bloody hair looked like rain-soaked cotton candy; only a pounding storm would get it clean.

“We were at Prairie Beach for a while, before,” she said. “My sister and her friends, but—things didn’t work out. They all wanted to leave, so I left with them. But . . . like I said. We’re not like each other. They’re all wrapped up in each other, they have years together Jessie and I never had—”

“You grew up with her. They don’t have that.”

“And she’s not the person I knew. She never can be again. It’s not her fault.” She shrugged, laughed. “I want to see what things are like again, back at Prairie Beach. There’s supposed to be a lot of us there now, there’ll be others like me who remember being human, who think like—I want to see it for myself. Stop just being tolerated, put up with.”

Her big dark eyes were full of something soft and pleading you wanted to poke, prod just to watch it burst and leak. Maybe that was the real problem, that this Jessie always poked and prodded right back. I lived my whole life a human amongst humans and I was only just tolerated too, me and my mother. “So what’s this got to do with me?”

“There’s human settlements forming. There’s one right outside Gary, over in Elbertsville. They need anyone they can get, anyone young, strong, they’d take you in a second.” She munched down a handful of nuts, a faint scrim of oil clinging to her fingers. “You can’t wander alone forever, food deserts, wild animals, gangs of—why am I telling you what you know? Come with me as far as Elbertsville, I’ll keep you company. Keep you safe.”

“Why do
you
care about keeping me safe? You don’t know me. You don’t know where I’ve been.”

You don’t know what I’ve done. You and your big soft kindly eyes, your own blood smeared everywhere, powder-ground into your skin neck to knees, making stiff corrugated paper of your clothes. At least you can say that much, that it’s your own. This time. At least.

“There’s a little creek, a mile or so north,” she said. “It’ll be freezing, but we could both have a bath, slap some laundry on a rock—”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” I tilted the jam jar and watched the little streams of raspberry juice flow from the bottom, serous bits of stained glass sliding up toward the lid. “That there’s anything in Elbertsville? That I might not as well just stay here?”

“You don’t. You’ve got no proof at all, none.”

Fair enough. “And why me? You already got this far without—”

“Because I’m selfish.” Her mouth curled up suddenly at the edges and there was a fleeting, self-mocking light in her eyes. It animated her whole face, made her almost attractive. “I don’t do well without someone to talk to. I never have. Talking to myself doesn’t work, you see, even I don’t think I’m much in the way of company, and I’m heading north anyway, and you can’t last here by yourself, and—Christ. You remind me a lot of my sister. Okay? You do. I mean, the way I remembered her before. Not like now.” Nails sawed at her scalp, back and forth, down and back. “I
hear
there’s a human settlement in Elbertsville. They need anyone young, anyone strong. If it’s not so, or you don’t like it, we’ll turn right around—”

“And if I don’t like it there,
you’ll
already be long gone. In Prairie Beach.” I poked my fingers through a slit in the tarp, rubbing at the short damp spring grass. “And I can’t ever go there. Not with your kind.”

Lisa stretched out her legs, curled her arms over her head. Sharp shoulders, pointed elbows, jutting hips, a stick-figure drawing scratched in haste by an angry hand. Not a trace on her of anything she’d eaten; it all melted away inside her, just like with the famished sick.

 

 

She folded up the empty, greasy potato chip bag, smaller and smaller in a neat little square, then changed her mind and shook it out again, dropped the empty cream soda can and jerky wrappers inside it. I took more jerky sticks from the pile she’d left on the tarp, stuffed them in my jacket pockets. She didn’t stop me.

“What month is it?” I asked.

“April,” she said. “April fourth. I’ve been keeping track. You want a bath?”

“First I want my knife.”

It was on the concrete safe house floor; I must’ve let it go without thinking, to grab the ladder railing two-handed. Lisa went down to look for it, my leg hurt too much for the ladder, and gave it right back, then headed creekward with her soap and little detergent bottle. Of course it didn’t bother her at all, me right behind her at the perfect vantage point to stab her in the back—Dave’s knife wouldn’t do a damned thing to her. I knew that. It was still mine. She wasn’t getting it.

The wind had died down, the air thick with increasing heat. Behind me I heard a harsh heavy noise like breath and boot soles, like someone pounding at panicked speed against the asphalt, sobbing for air, finally losing all direction and staggering around and around in a bewildered, foot-thudding circle before falling down to die. There was no one behind me, nothing corporeal that could be making that noise. The trees sprouting pale lacy green rustled furiously and bent double in a sudden wind gust that I couldn’t feel, that didn’t touch my hair or Lisa’s clothes at all, and as the boot soles faded away another soft sound filled my ears, steady and insistent. Not quite barking. But close enough.

Lisa didn’t turn around for that. I knew she couldn’t hear it. Barking mad. This is how it starts.

I just need someone to talk to. That’s all. To keep distracting me. Then I won’t be crazy anymore.

THREE

G
rocery carts crammed with junk and roads ripped to ribbons from frost heaves are an unholy combination. Less than five miles of maneuvering around the potholes, heaving onto back wheels, slamming back down on the front pair to jump the gaps, and my bitten arm felt like raffia tugged into frayed little threads. How septic were dog’s teeth, anyway? We’d found antibiotic scrub but maybe it wouldn’t work. Lisa kept offering to push both carts, take my backpack, but I wasn’t giving my sewing kit and lighters to an ex, not for anything. She looked worn out, actually, wrestling past another pothole, the skin under each eye an uneven smeary bruise like unblended shadow, but that was her lookout; she fussed over
me
, I never made any promises. A screwdriver and flashlight flew from her cart and she swore in frustration, squatted on the curb, ran an anxious finger over the flashlight lens seeking out cracks.

“I don’t know why you didn’t pack that on the bottom,” I said. My own cart had some of our creek-laundered clothes draped across the top, dirty again from falling damp into the road a half dozen times but at least the worst of the sweat stink was gone. “It could—”

“Break, yes! I know that!” She shook it, heard something loose rattle inside, crammed it deep inside a pile of towels in frustration. “I wasn’t thinking. It happens. A lot. Just ask anyone.”

She yanked her cart sideways, trying to angle it toward the curb. Creek-dampened hair stuck to her cheeks in thick ribbons, like dead leaves on a car windshield; her arms pushing the cart, her ankles in an old pair of canvas sneakers were long twisted strips of sinew, perpetually flexed and poised to burst straight from her shoes and run. I checked my pockets again, feeling for my cell phone, my mother’s licenses and badges and cards, they were all there and she hadn’t stolen them while I was bathing. Yet.

“Do you even need flashlights?” I jammed my cart wheels through a little jigsaw puzzle of broken asphalt. Not a pothole, it looked like someone took something sharp to the tarmac and tried cutting it up, bits of a thick-peeled fruit mired in tarry, frozen syrup. “I thought your kind could see in the dark. Like cats.”