Frail (36 page)

“What I know,” I said, “is that I’m crazy. And evil. That’s what I know about myself.”

“You’re no such thing,” my mother said. We were in a dank, sheltered clearing now, the tree trunks huddling close together as if for warmth and the ground a dusty coffee-brown with dead leaves, only the weakest sunlight pushing through. “We’re no such thing.”

“What the fuck would you know about
anything
I am?”

The words snapped out of me like a coiled-up snake, surprised from hibernation, striking with all the venom it had. Tears blurred the ground, dead coffee leaves all at the bottom of a puddle, and when she hugged me I grabbed hold, squeezed and sank fingers in almost hoping she’d hurt.

“I could learn,” she said. Quietly pleading, from somewhere above my head. “Again. We could both learn. It was never safe, when you were growing up, to tell you what really—I’m sorry, young man, what’s your name again? I’ve always been shit with names. That much I don’t think they caused.”

Stephen was standing near the edge of the clearing, awkward and embarrassed. “Stephen Henry. Supposedly. Last name, middle name, Henry, I don’t know. That’s what got written down everywhere.”

My mother released me, held out a hand to him. “I was Sarah before, I don’t know my last name. That person is dead. I’m Lucy Holliday now. I always liked the name Lucy. Welcome to the family.”

Stephen glanced at me, uncertainty in his eyes. Then he clasped her fingers, briefly, gazing at the ground.

“I need to know,” I said, “if I’m human or not. If I’m actually here or not. I’ve never been sure.” Death’s “special” children. Were we all, always, never like the others? Marked from birth? “Ever since I was little, I’ve never been sure.”

My mother gazed past the close-knit trees, toward the direction of the lake.

“Welcome to the family,” she told me.

There was a rush of footsteps, snapping branches and we turned and ran.

 

 

This is what a deer feels like, this is what a fox feels like as it’s hurtling through the underbrush, madness in human form thundering after it. The air seared my raw throat as I leapt over another tree root arching thrillingly high from the ground, slid and skidded on the leaves. A mere four of them behind us but that was enough, more than enough, so close I could hear their harsh torn-up breaths and they weren’t getting me again, they weren’t getting—Stephen shouted something, a garbled little roar, then my mother had my bleeding fingers in hers and they were coming at us from the other side, surrounded.

Stephen got a fist square in a Scissor face and the man’s grunt of pure shock made me cough up a laugh, and then something heavy was on my back and my hand was torn away from my mother’s, I was pitched full-face in the leaves with the breath knocked out of me, a knee stabbing into the small of my back. Inchoate shouts of rage all around me, the roar of what felt like dozens of voices at once, and I wouldn’t ever stop screaming, I wouldn’t go quiet. One of my hands was pinned behind me, the other sinking fast into the decaying layer-cake of the leaves. Those huge lolloping tree roots would let me hold on, save me, my fingers were white-knuckled clutching the bark but he had that arm now and was twisting hard enough to break, the pain shaking me loose, fingers unfurling—

From behind me came a howl of pain and I was free, lying in quiet agony against the leaves. I rolled onto my side, tears welling up when a dead branch stabbed one of my palms, and saw my ambusher sprawled breathless on the forest floor. Mags’s candy-apple hair spilled in a great snarl past her shoulders, shins caked in dirt and her flowered green dress smeared with blood; she’d tossed aside my Scissor Man like a spent cigarette, he actually cowered and tried to scoot away from her in a great rustle of mucky leaves. Stephen and my mother were still wrestling with the others, they had Stephen by an arm and a leg but he was punching, kicking, his face distorted in rage, my mother’s arms were bent back as she screamed and screamed. I crawled toward her, tried to run, and then someone else had me so light and quick as if fights like this were nothing, as if humans were all fragile-winged things lighting on his palm just to be trapped in his fingers and crushed. His big wide bare feet were sickly pale, spotted in sticky leaf-tattoos, his breath against my back consumptively rasping and deep.

“Our deal’s off!” he shouted to the others, the gear-grind of his voice rolling right over all our frail little squeaks of protest. “You understand me? No more guinea pigs! No more meat deliveries until we get what we want!”

“What
you
want?” The Scissor Man Stephen punched had bled from the mouth, bled and healed so quickly I wanted to rip the skin open all over again, but his eyes were lively and sparking with derision. “This ain’t about what you want, maggot trap, it never was! You just keep feeding ’em up and handing ’em over because you won’t get a fucking thing out of us if we can’t test—”

“Fuck your tests!” Billy wrenched an arm up behind my back, so high I almost screamed again. “Fuck your tests and your experiments and your dicking around, lolling on the throne doing fuck-all but wasting fresh meat—you promised us! You said you could reverse all this! You said you could turn it all around! We want our old lives back! We want to die!”

“Get your hands off my daughter!” my mother shouted. “She’s not what you want, I’m the—”

Choking noises, as they shoved her face back into the leaves. Stephen doubled over as a fist sank into his stomach, gasping.

“We won’t bring you back this time,” the Scissor Man muttered. “We don’t need your ass. We’ve got plenty others.” He looked up at me, smiling past me right into Billy’s face. “That one you’ve got there, we actually need. Put it down—”

Mags kicked the Scissor Man still lying on the ground, again, again, grinned in glee as he moaned and doubled up. The others had their hands full, panting as my mother rabbit-thrashed at the leaves and Stephen tried to grab the knife they held to his throat. “You heard him,” Mags said, her tongue crushing glass. “Give us what we want, or you don’t get shit.”

Mags had my legs now, they were carrying me off between them just like yesterday, only yesterday. “Stephen!” I shouted.
“Mom!”

“Shut it, you little bitch,” Billy muttered, jerking my arm so hard my vision almost went and I prayed, godless prayer, for it to stay in the socket. “You open your goddamned mouth when I tell you to, and then you don’t open it ever again.”

Back on my feet again, barely, each of them gripping an arm and my sneakers dirt-dragging with every step. I saw the brownand-white flash, the startled polished-stone eye of a deer bounding away as we approached, saw Mags gaze after it with a sudden, sorrowful longing past any sort of bodily hunger. Then they pushed me farther into the trees.

TWENTY-FOUR

“Y
ou show up,you and that bitch Lisa,and everything gets fucked.” Billy’s voice dropped lower with simmering rage. “Jessie’s fucking hoo-family she didn’t kill when she had a chance, destroyed everything, that sister of hers and
you
gallivanting around turning everything to shit with your—”

“I never wanted to be there!” Wasting what energy I had left yelling, tearing and ripping at my own fiery-raw throat, but anger turned me reckless. “I never wanted part of your shithole, Lisa didn’t, Don made us come with him—”

Billy snorted. “Yeah, Don, that goddamned frail-fucker? If I ever see his ass again, he’s dead. I’ll find a way to kill him.”

“We’ll never see Don’s ass again, Father William,” Mags said, hauling at my elbow. “His or his little bitch’s, they couldn’t clear out fast enough after—”

“Your Lisa? Your fucking Lisa?” Billy, oblivious, jerked at my other arm so hard I cried out, gulped back nausea. “They rioted on me, all the little frails, and she helped them! I fed and clothed their asses, me and Mags, and they try to burn the place to the ground! All of it! And she
helped
them!”

“No, I can’t believe it,” I shouted back, breathing shallow and sure I’d throw up from all their wrenching at me, “why would anyone do something like that after you kidnapped them, and put guards up everywhere to try to keep them in, and killed Kevin—”

“She helped them! She actually went and—”

“Fine, so she fucking helped them, she and the other little saints.” Mags had already shrugged it all off, burdens of queendom thrown aside like some heavy moth-eaten coat. “Wintertime comes around again, let them riot over that, they’ll be begging for us to come back and—quit dragging your goddamned feet!”

“Let go of me!” I screamed, and she hit me across the mouth. My head snapped back and I tasted blood and help me, Lisa, Mom, Stephen, somebody, I’m about to get my throat torn open again and this time it’ll stick—we’d stopped now, another dark little clearing lousy with clumps of mushrooms and sickly white ruffles of fungus all over the trees. Billy threw me against a sticky tree trunk and leaned over me breathing in ragged swallows of air, pupils down to pinpoints despite the dim light and pale blue irises flat and glassy as a doll’s. My shoulders curled up, trying to pull away, but Mags was breathing down my neck from the other side and there was nowhere to go.

“She helped them set
fire
to the place,” he whispered, and like a quick flame jumping on a gas burner there lit in his eyes something beyond the deposed king’s anger: an atavistic animal fear, smoldering perpetual inside. “Kitchen burnt down, whole row of houses, all in a night—Don found you by accident, you know that? It was all nothing but a goddamned accident.” He had my face in his hands now like he could kiss me, like he could crush my cheekbones and squeeze me for pulp. “Wouldn’t have known what we had until that bitch Phoebe started yapping, you and that Stephen, there was supposed to be something special about you—”

“Me and the whole kitchen crew,” I said, and the insanity in me, in him, was leaking out of both of us ready to blaze in fury and consume everything I’d known of the world. “All of us, right? Except you missed one, you missed Natalie. You missed the most important one of all.”

My words meant nothing to him, to Mags, even if they’d been listening. “You were supposed to help us,” Mags snarled, grabbing my shoulder and shoving it against the slimed-up bark. “I don’t know how, but—you and that boy, something in you would show them how to turn all this around and let us die.” She turned and spat at the lab, the lake, the bent-up old-man beachfront trees. “Be patient, be patient, we’re
working
on it, all we ever got—fuck patient, fuck secrets.” Another shove. “You tell me what it is about you, what’ll change it all back. You spit it out now.”

“I don’t know!” Her hands twisted hard enough to snap bones, I really was going to throw up—“I don’t know why I’m even here! They killed me, I died, but I came back!” I tilted my chin up, the evidence right there, the itching trickle of blood oozing from behind my ear down to the collarbone. “I came back like you did! Just like you! I don’t know how it happened, I can’t change anything, I—”

“You
fucked
with us!” Billy screamed, and twisted some more at my arm so the pain made me start crying in earnest. “You and that little shit Stephen, you don’t fuck with me, you don’t fuck with
her
! Nobody and nothing fucks with us ever again!”

He touched his forehead so perversely gentle to mine that I started shaking, it would hurt, whatever they were about to do would hurt until I cried and screamed to die. “You start talking. You start talking and don’t stop until you spit out everything you know or Mags here’ll start with your fingers. You don’t fucking need those. One, by one.”

That man in the street, that man so hunger-crazed from the plague he put his own hand in his mouth, bit down in a mass of blood until—“I don’t know!
I don’t know!
”

Mags took my hand, grasped the index finger, started to twist and bend it back. I screamed and screamed and then something made Billy thud against me, knock foreheads and pull away with a grunt of surprise. He was staggering backward against an assault of kicking feet and bared animal teeth and Lisa, it was Lisa come running from the trees, a singed stench clinging to her skin and clothes and she threw herself on him. They rolled together on the damp-dry ground, their eyes wild, and my ears filled with the hollow smack of fist against flesh and bone. Mags hadn’t let go of my hand, I’d
force
her to let go.

“Run, Amy!” Lisa was screaming, gasping at another blow to her face, kicking Billy so hard he growled.
“Run!”

There was nowhere to run I wouldn’t end up back where I started, all alone. Mags twisted at my fingers like nothing had interrupted us, so calm, and knowing I’d die for it I grabbed a knot of taffy-colored hair, sank my free hand in and pulled. We were rolling on the ground now too and her fist met my eye, I’d go blind, I’d suffocate under her soft rollicking fleshly ex-weight.

I’d hurt her, I’d hurt
her
. My head spun, my fingers throbbed, my shoulder ached, my torn-up hands stung and burned, I’d hurt her badly as that, ten times worse—I got a knee into Mags’s stomach, my head snapped back again under her fist and silvery slivers of light swam from behind my lids, not stars but little fish. A blow to my bad arm, making it shudder and vibrate. My ribs. My stomach. I choked trying not to retch and my hands were scrabbling for a hold in that soft pale flesh that couldn’t scar or bruise, that had no memory in it at all. She punched again and I made a high, scared and scary sound, a rabbit in the jaws of a cat, all I could grab hold of was folds of filthy green flowered cloth like grandma upholstery, that goddamned spill of matted grease-locked hair—

“I won’t tell you anything!” I screamed. My fingers flailed, trying to press down against her eyes—they didn’t want to bend, my swollen-jointed fingers, it hurt so much to bend them and that was her fault, all of this, all her fault. “I’m never saying a fucking thing!”

She had my shoulders now, pushing with both hands, it hurt so much I wanted to pass out. Her gray eyes were wide and serene. “Then I’ll tear your tongue out,” she whispered, and I knew she wasn’t joking, that smile reminiscent like she’d done it before. “You can write it with a stick in the dirt, you filthy piece of rotten meat—”