Frail (13 page)

“They’re not here to keep us in?”

She shrugged, scrubbed at an armpit. “Sorry to disappoint you, but they’re a lot more worried about keeping gangs
out
. And away from us. We’re valuable to them, we clean, we cook, we keep everything up and running while they’re off sleeping and hunting and fighting with each other—”

“And what you said about being roasted, on a spit. You were joking, right?”

My voice was high and wavering and I didn’t realize how hard I’d been thinking about that, wondering, as Phoebe let me stuff and fatten myself with as much fish and fruit as I wanted. They ate anything, exes. Anything. Phoebe put the soap down, shook another low soft volley of laughter from her throat like someone rattling a pair of dice in the cup.

“Rabbits, deer, squirrels, possum,” she said. “All over the woods. Lots of woods around here, you’ve seen, don’t forget this whole side of the city’s
inside
national parkland. And they don’t give a shit what they eat as long as there’s a lot of it, they don’t fight us for the canned stuff—I mean, you don’t want to know why the streets around here are mostly clean of bodies. Long-dead bodies. Little girls don’t need to ask.” She plucked a dry towel from the bathroom floor, wrapped it around her tight. “Cattle, they had plenty of those before we ever came along. What they really need are mules.”

I could see the bottom of my cup now. I sipped slower. But still, Phoebe, still they
can
eat anything.

“What’s a skip?” I asked. “I heard someone talk about cleaning up—”

“Dead body,” Phoebe explained. She shook her jeans, layers of thin T-shirts, thick cotton sweaters out, threw them back on. “Buggy skips, bony skips, like I said there aren’t that many, but the cleanup crew handles what we’ve got. That and the hunting remains, the bosses leave that shit lying everywhere. Everyone rotates through the different work crews, cooking, cleanup, construction, you’ll get your turn,
no fear
.” She chortled at the thought. “I don’t suppose you were a little math whiz or anything, were you? Tops in your school science fair, building A-bombs in your bathtub for fun?”

“I hated science.”

“Pity.” Phoebe took the cup as I held it out to her, gulped down the last muddy mouthfuls. “Every now and then we get someone who was an engineer, doctor, sewage and sanitation—they get the plum assignments, working on getting the electricity and the water and all of that up and running again.”

“How are they going to do that?” I didn’t know anything about how all that worked, less than nothing, but I was pretty sure you needed oil or natural gas or something and there was that Amoco refinery, up in Whiting, but Whiting might as well be on the moon. “I mean, without any oil or—”

“The kid’s a little technician now! Don’t ask
me
, that was never my area. I just know there’s blueprints and plans and all kinds of fuss about it, maybe they can get the generators up and running or something.” She dipped the coffee cup in our abandoned bathwater, scrubbing it out with soap-scummy fingertips. “Or, that giant lake, right over yonder, hydroelectricity or—hell, I don’t know. Above, my, pay grade.” She shook out the cup, her face easing from its rictus of friendly fervor into weary, sagging resentment. “I’m a scientist, you know. I’m a biologist, I worked at the lab in Prairie Beach before the plague hit. Me and Kevin, my husband. We’re not allowed back there, it’s bosses-only now. Except under ‘special circumstances,’ and don’t ask me what those are, they’re not talking. So where are you from, anyway?”

“Lepingville.” I reached over and worked the sink faucet, like I had the tub’s; nothing came out, of course, but something in me still wanted to test it, make sure. “But I was in Leyton for a while too.”

“Yeah, we’ve all wandered all over the place. Step ahead of the microbes, right?” She flashed me a grin, kept swooping the cup through the grimy water gone a faint gray. “So you lived in Lepingville all your life? Or did you move there from somewhere else, you and your mom and dad?”

“My mom and dad and I,” I said, jiggling the toilet handle and hearing only hollow rattling metal, “and my older sister and brother, we all lived in Leyton. My mom and dad were both lawyers.” Lawyer, that was rich enough for a Leyton house. I liked this, kind of, inventing my own little false family history; I’d have to tell Lisa about it, so she didn’t give me away. “But I was born in Lepingville, they lived there before that, when Lisa was just—”

“Kid, we all know Lisa’s not really your sister, give it up.” Phoebe pressed her lips together in a prim little pout, shook the cup out again. “It’s okay. So did you really have a brother and sister and all that? Or was it just you and your mom? In Lepingville, or maybe Leyton?”

She was staring at me now. Staring hard. That fading afternoon light spilling soft from the bathroom window, it was no bare police station bulb. I stared right back. “Do you really have a husband, named Kevin, and all that?” I replied, smiling that same wide-eyed way she smiled. “Are you really a biologist? In Prairie Beach, or maybe Burns Harbor?”

Something in her face twitched, subsided. “You don’t need to get all sensitive, kid, seriously. I mean—” She was winding herself up again, I could see it, every bit of her down to the ends of her wispy cropped hair bristling like her thrilled-up nerves. “—I mean, I’m just curious, I was just wondering, we’re all in the same boat, we’re
all human beings here
! ’Cept, of course, for those who aren’t.”

She smiled at me again. “Your mom’s not with you. That’s too bad. I’m sorry. Did she get through the winter okay, or did—”

“What work crew am I on?” I asked.

“So was it just you and Lisa, then? Last winter?”

“Kevin, your husband, has he stopped beating you?”

Phoebe’s eyebrows shot up, two feathery black gulls rising from the sands, and she gave the coffee cup one last swish and jumped to her feet.

“You’re a gofer, to start off,” she said, frowning at herself in the mirror and picking strands of my hair off the brush before dragging it over her scalp. “Go from group to group, do what anyone needs, you’ll get your own crew eventually. Don’t get lazy and wander off, you’ll get reported.” She chuckled, scratched hard at a dry patch. “Billy and Mags, they’re in charge of everything around here, but you don’t bug them with questions, ask the crew supervisors instead. Your shift’s sundown to sunup, breakfast when you get up, dinner at three A.M., you just had your weekly bath. There’s a few latrines dug over by Olney Avenue, two blocks west, we’re working on more. You need supplies, tampons, tissues, aspirin, whatever, you run it by me or Jenny from the day shift and you never just come in here and grab shit, there’s an inventory. We’ll find out.”

She turned from the mirror, the patch she’d scratched bright pink and oozing, like that thing on Dave’s neck that never healed up. “You’re a good kid,” she said. “I can tell. And you’ll get used to it. You’re a lot better off here than on the outside. Give it time. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay!”
She scampered past me onto the hallway’s flattened, filthy beige carpeting, sweeping an arm furiously behind her for me to follow. “That’s the attitude I like to hear! I’ll give you to Kevin’s crew first, sure I’m prejudiced but trust me, he never bites . . .”

I trailed behind her, watching the living room windows catch fire in soft flickering golds and roses. Sunset. They’d better not be lying about Lisa. If I don’t see her again by sunrise, I’m not letting anyone shut me up about it. Not Phoebe, or that Billy.

Maybe Don will shoot me, if I ask about Lisa. I need to teach myself not to be scared of that. I saw someone shooting people in the street once at the height of the plague, I think his wife and then himself, and as long as it’s in the head it’s quick. Messy, I screamed watching it, but quick. I need to remember that.

EIGHT

K
evin, Phoebe’s husband, turned out to be the genial oversized linebacker guy from the cleanup crew; he was easy to be around, big and steady, one of those people whose inner calm is like the warmth from an invisible furnace that seeps right into your own bones. Keeps you steady too. I couldn’t imagine what the hell he’d ever seen in Phoebe, but my mom once said that that was more marriages than you’d think. I helped him and his crew clear more clumps of dead leaves from the gutters, no skips buggy or otherwise this time, and then he sent me to help another crew dig holes for trash burial, and then to help a gardening crew sort out salvaged hoes, rakes, gardening gloves. No serious planting yet, not until the middle of May.

The others, they weren’t friendly or unfriendly: mostly quiet and contained within themselves, that way folks have of holding their eyes down, shoulders drawn in, elbows close to their bodies to show they need to grab a bit of space any way they can. They didn’t care if I were new or not, didn’t care I was clumsy with a shovel and almost sliced my wrist open trying to hack dried dirt from a trowel. A lot of them, their shuffling feet, hollow eyes, greasy lank hair never mind the weekly bath, you could tell they’d stopped caring about much of anything. Kristin, all over again. I turned my back on it and kept working.

No exes, not in charge of the crews, not anywhere. If you stayed away from the guard perimeter you might never see them, never know about all the invisible hands divvying up our labors. I wanted to ask about that, but all those dead faces stopped me cold.

A few dozen humans on night shift, a few dozen on day, no more, all clustered in four or five Elbert houses that hadn’t flooded. Men’s dorm, women’s, family dorm. The “commissary” building and other houses, here and there, held the supplies foraged from dozens of safe houses; there were scouting teams that still went out, looking for more, but those were ex-only. A huge falling-apart manse on Illinois, with another woodstove in it, that was our dining hall. The old zombie fencing we’d passed through on Mass Avenue, the bits of forest ringing the whole neighborhood, those were our borderlands. Five or six blocks in each direction, our whole world. Prairie Beach, Lake Michigan, no more than a few miles removed but still, on another planet.

The exes, a few dozen of them, had the bigger houses on Indiana Avenue, but folks said some of them never got over their zombie habits and still liked to sleep in the woods. “You could stumble over ’em,” a garden crewwoman named Corinne warned me. “Just lying there, sleeping the meat off like a wino on a park bench. If you do? Step right around ’em, then run like hell.” She poked at the dead leaf piles, clustering them together so the day shift could lay them down for mulch. “Or you might not come back at all.”

“Quit scaring her,” someone muttered.

“It’s true.” Corinne looked up from her mulch pile, bulgy blue rabbit eyes daring them to deny it. “Isn’t it?”

The other crew members snorted, smirked, went back to scrubbing the rust off rake tines. Maybe I was being hazed. I didn’t care. I got the real message: Even when you don’t see the “bosses,” they’re always around. And they’ll get what’s theirs. One way, or another.

So really, when you think about it, nothing much has changed at all.

 

 

Dinner. I followed Kevin’s crew across the backyards toward Illinois Avenue, all except him ignoring me entirely and talking among themselves, and then I jumped when someone slipped from between the houses and stopped me in my tracks. Lisa. I grabbed her hand and she hugged me, carefully, just draping her arms around me and not squeezing.

“I was worried,” she said, almost abashed like she thought I’d laugh at her. “You can’t get any straight answers from anyone—”

“Neither can I,” I said, and rubbed at my arm, bitten, bruised, aching down to the fingertips from helping dig the trash holes. Lisa frowned when she saw that, scoured a dirt streak from my face with her knuckles. “Where’ve you been? Kevin said you were all hunting? We never see any exes when we’re working, outside the guard perimeter—”

“Hunting. Sleeping. Like you. There’s a big house on Indiana, mint green siding, where they graciously let me bunk.”

I took her arm and we wandered into the yard of a big gray house with holes all through the roof and a back porch half clinging to the house wall, half-collapsed into a pile of rotten wood; the front porch was intact but with boards missing here and there, dark rectangular gaps like the black keys on a piano. Inside it was hot and stuffy, even with the faint nighttime chill and all the windows open. Flashlights were propped in every corner, the big industrial kind, turning the room into a constellation of rushing shadows and melting spotlights; people threaded their way toward tables crammed with a profusion of mismatched chairs.

“You, Red,” someone growled. Right by my ear. “In here, you and your owner. I want a better look at what Don’s dragged in.”

Billy. I swallowed, pushed back into the front room with Lisa, grabbed a chair. Kevin was already there, sitting hunched up and awkward on a too-small chair and looking about as happy as I felt. The rest of his crew were in a long line snaking toward the kitchen, or maneuvering past with plates full of food; they went back out the door, to eat on the porch steps or the lawn. Billy sat right across from us, towheaded and lounging easy in his chair and even though it was so stuffy, he wasn’t sweating a drop. Sitting next to him was a woman with big gray eyes and curly, deep auburn hair spilling over her shoulders; she had soft pale skin, a soft fleshy body spilling out of a wine-colored summer dress, a fat little cupid’s mouth pert and prim and painted Janey-red. A worn-down torch singer from some really old movie, she looked like, any moment now she’d jump up on the table and start caterwauling about how her man done her wrong. Billy noticed me looking, and gave her a nudge.

“You got an admirer, Mags,” he said, half-sneering and halfproud. “Lookit it, even meat on two legs knows a good thing when they see it—
Naomi!
Get your ass in here
now
!”