Frail (18 page)

“All right,” I said, and sat down to help her snap stems. All that night while I worked I kept my eyes down and my mouth shut, like Naomi, not letting anybody in. It was safer that way, but then, it really always had been.

That strange feeling that had gone all through me at the thought of my black dog, my ghost dog lying there hunted and dead: It was guilt. Guilt at having wanted it dead. That tight, shivering feeling you get in the pit of your stomach imagining every familiar hallmark gone, every edifice crumbled away. Everyone you ever knew, who ever loved you, dead.

Except my mother isn’t dead. She never has been, whatever anyone says. So I’m not like anyone else around here, all mourning and wailing inside. There was nobody but her for me to lose, not ever. My father, I suppose, but I barely remembered him at all.

This is not all about to vanish right beneath my hands, dying like everyone died, fading and melting into nothingness the harder I try to pull it to me. I have not fabricated anything. Everything around me right at this moment, Lisa, Naomi, Don, Janey, Billy, the mournful lowing bird sounds and small fearful animals rushing unwitting into our snare and the cool supremely indifferent night sky—this whole city is not all just a dream. It can’t be. It can’t be because if it is I will lose what’s left of my senses long before I ever wake up.

ELEVEN

S
unset, again. Work. Again. I was wandering down to the cookhouses on Illinois, staring at grass blades sliding up through the sidewalk cracks wondering how long it would take them to eat up all the concrete, when Phoebe came slithering from behind a willow tree and slid her skinny arm around my shoulder. I kept trying to pull away and she kept gripping tighter, her longer legs setting the pace.

“So how’re you
doing
lately, kid?” Grinning right in my face, her eyelids still puffy and dropping with sleep but her jaw clenched and twisted tight with the tension that never left her; she was a tooth-grinder, you could tell just looking at her. I’d hear my mother doing that sometimes as she slept, a soft little
squeak, squeak
from the next room like a blunt knife sawing at Styrofoam. “It’s been
days
! Settling in okay? Rest of the kitchen kids treating you all right—”

“Don’t you have any work to do?” I asked, shoving hands in my pockets. I was tired of being polite to her. “The commissary must be busy, this time of day.”

“Don’t ask me, kid—not my bailiwick this time!” She tilted her chin back, staring up into the darkening sky beaming and beatific like she expected starlight to shoot up her nostrils. “Not today, not me—I’m heading over to the engineering crew, see what they want me to fetch and carry. Bosses rise with the setting sun, a human’s work is never done.”

She was a gofer, then, nothing more than that; no better than Natalie, or me before Billy intervened. All that fussing and takecharge, all for nothing. “Everything’s fine,” I said, and started tugging free in earnest. “I have to go to work now.”

“So nobody’s giving you a hard time?”

Her arm around mine was trembling, nonstop, not with any sort of fear but like she might burst out of her skin and start screaming any second with all the pent-up, frustrated energy. I should have felt sorry for her, I know I should’ve, but she wasn’t wasting any pity on me. “So how’re you getting along with that Stephen kid? Because not to tale-tell outta school but that boy’s got an attitude, he hasn’t made too many friends around here, y’know, not many friends at all—”

“Not like you.”

Her mouth twitched, subsided, hearing that, then she smiled even broader than before. “So you’re getting along, you and he? I heard you were getting along.” She had my arm again. “See,’cos it’s like I told Billy, I just had this feeling? When he moved you to the crew? I told him, I said, if
anyone
would hit it off with Stephen, I just bet it’d be you.”

Something like a hot little needle poked at my insides, leaping up at her words to jab and sting. “What do you care how I get along with anyone?” I yanked my arm away from hers, checked for CDs and cards and fork and dead cell phone in the sudden certainty she’d slid up so close to pickpocket. “What the hell business is it of yours? You didn’t even know me three days ago and now—”

“Calm
down
, kid! For the love of Pistol Pete!” Phoebe had pulled back in earnest, hands midair and waving like I was a swarm of gnats she had to fight off. “I didn’t mean anything, don’t know why you’re always so
suspicious
of anyone who looks at you slanty-eyed! I’m just saying, same age or thereabouts, he doesn’t have any family, you don’t . . . or at least none you’ll talk about, either of you.” She halted in her tracks, fixed smile suddenly wavering. “And you both had a hard time, right before you ended up here. I mean, you know, maybe even harder than usual. For a lot of reasons.”

The needle jabs inside became a slow, steady pain, like someone was easing a knife blade down my sternum, patiently slicing the flesh open layer by layer. “We all had a time,” I said. “We all had a time, this winter.”

“Well, there’s a time . . . and then there’s a time.” She smiled at me again, with the faintest little glint in her eyes. “Isn’t there. Must’ve been especially bad for you, right? I mean, not having your mother or your dad around at all, for all those—”

“Amy!”

Lisa was coming out of the trees, wiping something from her mouth; Mags was right behind her, barefoot in a flowery bloodspattered green dress, all cascading auburn hair and soft pale folds of flesh. Mags blinked at me, like she’d already forgotten who I was, and gave Phoebe a look that would’ve made anyone in their right mind take off running. Phoebe, though, she bounced right in her shoes like an excited child, nearly split her face in two with welcoming smiles.

“Where’s Naomi?” I asked, before Phoebe could ooze rancid honey all over them both.

“Sleeping,” Lisa said, and gave me a touch on the arm. Like she was actually glad to see me, not totally wrapped up in something younger, littler, nicer. “Amy has to go to work now, Phoebe, you’re holding her up. Go to the cleanup crew, Kevin needs you.”

“I was just telling Amy,” Phoebe kept right on going, like she was one of them and they couldn’t wait to hear her reports from the field, “I’m not one tiny bit surprised she and Stephen get along so well. I mean, they’ve got so much in common, they’re both so
quiet
about how they got here in the first place, making up all those silly stories about sisters and mothers as if anyone would believe—”

“And what the hell business is it of yours?” Lisa stepped forward, inches from Phoebe’s wide, glinty grin. “You don’t run this place, you don’t get to interrogate anyone on how or where they—”

“I bet you and Stephen would get along great too,” Phoebe said. She wasn’t backing down at all, she was crazy enough or reckless enough to thrust her face right at Lisa’s like an eager sniffing dog. Mags just stood there, arms folded, watching it all happen. “I mean, you’ve both got the lab in common and everything—” Her smile was suddenly reserved, calculating. “You know what I mean.”

Lisa’s face went pale. But why? She hadn’t made any secret of having lab rats in her family, when she met me, unless all that was somehow different among the exes—but Mags looked as confused as I felt. “Be quiet,” Lisa told Phoebe, and something in her hard, blunt voice was so much harder and heavier than I’d ever heard before that I wanted to back away. “Be quiet, and stop talking.”

“Do you know what I mean, Amy?” Phoebe had turned back my way and had her hands clasped behind her, rocking from foot to foot, swaying with a triumphant ease to some music only she could hear. “What’s she been telling you, anyway, about
her
plague year? Because she was right at the heart of the action, belly of the beast, God forbid they ever let me who had more fucking brains than all of them combined near any of the halfway relevant research but
now
, oh frabjous day, here’s Jim Porter’s so-called rhesus girl, here’s Patient Zero right in the flesh—”

Lisa’s hand shot out and grabbed Phoebe’s arm, the fingertips squeezing deep and hard so I saw instant dark bruises welling up and Phoebe let out a harsh little scream. Mags laughed in appreciation, rocking back on her heels watching, and Lisa kept squeezing and squeezing, her eyes swallowed up by the pupils and fixed like a cat’s on her target. Phoebe hissed between her teeth with pain, started screaming even louder—my hands were on Lisa’s arm, no power except persuasion to pull her away, but she flinched like I’d hit her and made herself let go, I could see the effort it took to uncurl her fingers and step back. Her arm was shaking, under my touch. Phoebe was trembling and sweating, cradling her arm and moaning a little bit like the sound could soothe it better.

“Broken?” Mags grunted, looking bored again.

Phoebe shook her head, scrunch-shouldered and miserable. Mags threw her curly head back, let out a long trumpeting belch.

“Then get your ass to work,” she told Phoebe.

Phoebe stumbled into the trees, nearly falling over a thick dead branch before vanishing from sight. Mags snorted, shaking her head, then turned to Lisa.

“So what’s all this ‘Patient Zero’ bullshit?” she asked. No particular avidity in the asking, that I could sniff out, just plain postprandial curiosity.

Lisa didn’t answer, just stood there breathing hard and stomping her feet like she could shake her flared-up temper out through the soles. Her fingers slid to her head but instead of yanking at the hair, wrenching it ragged like she always did, she scratched back and forth at her scalp like she could dig something out, yank it loose, toss it back into the overgrown shrubbery so it’d scuttle away and cease all its torments.

“Crazy bitch,” Lisa finally said. Her head still down. “That’s what it is.”

Mags thought that one over. “Jim Porter,” she mused. “Who works in a lab. So . . .” She wrestled with the neckline of her dress, stuck and slid down on one shoulder so I could see the crease between arm and torso, the sidelong bump of a breast. “So you must be Jessie’s Lisa.”

She actually swallowed, staring at Lisa, like she was quite scared of being wrong. Lisa’s chin rose up slowly and she stared at Mags, her mouth open.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “So you’re—” Lisa started laughing, shaking her head, looking at Mags with sudden gratitude like she’d just dropped something sweet and nourishing in her lap. “I’m an idiot, I’m such an idiot not to—she talked about someone named Maggie or something like that, a couple of times. I never knew—”

“Where is she?” Mags too looked unmoored all of a sudden, knocked off her pins by the eagerness for something she couldn’t beat or threaten out of anyone. “What happened to her? Did she get sick like us? She musta got sick, she was one of the first of all of us to—”

“She got sick.” As she spoke, something in Lisa’s face suddenly closed up, the little burst of gratitude and hunger retreating and sliding away. “Very sick. Then she got better. She’s like us now.”

I was waiting for Mags to sneer, Not like
us
, dear, not at all like us but like
me
—ex-undeads sticking up for each other, but Mags just nodded, let out this ragged breath and smiled like people do when they’re trying to control themselves. “Well, Jesus Christ,” she said, a soft almost sweet little chortle weaving through her ground-glass words, “William is just about gonna shit himself when he hears that, we were sure she was dead and gone just like the rest of ’em. Isn’t that a pretty picture? All of us dead, from the old gang, all the undead gangs everywhere around here. All of us except me, and Billy, and her.”

Lisa opened her mouth to say something, and then closed it again. Her sister’s friends, that she’d told me about, that Lisa had been living with on the beach until she left. She wasn’t going to tell Mags about them, wouldn’t tell her where they all were, if they were alive or dead—still angry about Naomi, or she had her own reasons I didn’t want to know about. Ex-politics. Mags kept yanking at the neck of her dress, a soft coppery green thing with rivulets of something’s blood dried on it like rust, and finally wrenched the fussy little bib of pearl buttons properly in front.

“You human types,” she told Lisa, “you don’t know what the hell you were all missing, behind all your gates and locked doors and your little safety booths popping up everywhere. Your ‘storm’ cellars. You never had any idea what freedom felt like.” She’d plain forgotten I was standing there listening, she couldn’t even properly see her own surroundings; she was too wrapped up in another place, another time, the exact same longing I saw from the humans around me every minute of the day. “Everything around us, the woods, the animals, the empty roads and buildings, all ours while you all huddled up in your little houses scared of your own shadows. I hated that, when I was alive—don’t do this, don’t do that, nod smile act right sit down shut up if you don’t want your ass beat, you could have all of it. I woke up in that potter’s field with all those real dead bodies all around me and I was laughing, laughing like crazy, nothing could keep me back anymore. Nobody would ever fucking tell me what to do.”

Her head pivoted around and then she was staring at me, big shiny gray clear-water eyes so pale you could see right down to their bottoms but it was me who was transparent, pinned down and shot through, as sure as Phoebe when Lisa had her arm. Mags looked me up and down, and her lip curled. “You never liked it either, did you, frail? Being told what to do. I can smell it all over you. Never, ever.”

I was afraid not to respond so I shook my head. Confirmation, denial. Let her decide.

“Smell it all over your nasty human skin like a stench. I always could, you know. The humans who should’ve been us. Who, when they died, if they came back, really
would’ve
been one of us.” Her mouth became a straight prim line, the haughty contempt of a teacher faced with a willfully worthless student. Then she chuckled. “Ate ’em anyway. But I always felt bad about it. Jessie, that’s what she’s like, she was another one who could never stand the hoo-life, something in her always screaming to get out of that meat-body like a corpse outta the coffin—she was born to be dead. So angry. So hungry. One of the best.” She turned back to Lisa. “You got no idea what it’s like, do you? That hunger. That heat to hunt all coursing through everything. That
being
ness. You so-called living. I heard about you.” She laughed, a rough little bark devoid of triumph. “I heard what you’re like. Sister or no sister, you were never her family.”