Frail (4 page)

A soft, slumping crash, like boxes full of fabric tipping over. I had Dave’s old hunting knife, a big drop point blade. It’d do me no good against a gun. But then guns did no good against one of
them
. I pulled the knife out, switched off the flashlight, kept it like a bludgeon in my other hand. A cat. A disoriented rabbit, wandering the wrong warren.

A hollow
click, click
of toenails against concrete, rounding the corridor, so loud but nowhere nearby. Not a rabbit. Not a cat.

Two rheumy pinpoints suffusing the room in dim, sickly light, like a candle about to gutter. No. Not again. This isn’t
fair
.

“What do you want?” I shouted. “You hungry? I don’t care! Get your own fucking food!”

The nail-clicking stopped, the pinpoint lights sputtered and faded out. Then something that wasn’t there growled low and ravenous straight into my ear and I threw the backpack down, scuttled up the ladder and ran.

 

 

You’re not there, I thought, my too-big boots slapping the ground as I ran through someone’s front yard, found the sidewalk bordering the preserve, headed counterclockwise toward the monastery. You’re not there, hurts to run, acid sickness all in me, could vomit up everything since last fall but what I did eight days ago maybe nine will sit inside me like a gravel sack until I die, and afterward, through all of eternity—

The sky was a cake of blue ice, clusters of thin tree trunks cutting across its surface like skate tracks as the dog emerged not from the manhole but from the woods, big and coffeecolored and baring long yellowed teeth, running toward me. Not my phantom but a genuine, living dog gone feral, the collar and tags still jingling round its neck. I skidded to a stop, dropped my eyes. If you looked them in the face it was a challenge. It braced its paws on the sidewalk and growled low in its throat, a great walking stomach gurgling at the sight of more food.

I couldn’t breathe. I don’t like dogs, never did, not after that Great Dane bit me when I was five. This was a boxer, mastiff, I don’t know what the hell the breeds are, something bullet-headed and muscular and huge. I took a step backward and it growled louder, drawing out victory as long as it could, and I was running again knowing it was the worst thing I could do but I couldn’t stop, it flew after me in a blur of deep brown with silvery sunlight glinting on those useless tags, so much faster, I couldn’t run any faster—

My boot caught on a torn-up crust of concrete and I pitched face-first onto my own skidding palms, the breath knocked out of me. It growled straight in my ear and I felt a stinking heat on my neck, my back, and I couldn’t lie still for my punishment. I thrashed and screamed, torn-up hands trying to shield my eyes, my face. Teeth sliced at my jacket, my mother’s jacket. My arm, searing, wrenched away, any second now it’d snap—

Feet thudded toward me and the hot murderous weight on my back suddenly lifted, a stone dragged from the mouth of a cave; I turned on my side and saw a woman, skinny, lank-haired, wrestling with the dog, rolling from the sidewalk to the dirt at the edge of the spindly inky trees. It tore at her in a frustrated frenzy and she was beneath it now, pinned and kicking as it ripped at her breast, arm, side of her face and there was blood everywhere, her blood, oozing onto the sidewalk like juice from an overripe fruit.

I was crying and grabbing for something to throw, shoe not heavy enough, hurt to hold anything in my hand—but if I did it’d run back at me and I was such a horrible coward, lying there bawling while they rolled and tussled on the fouled sidewalk. She clutched the dog in a bear hug, almost sliding along the pavement. It tore her open from shoulder to elbow, she lost her grip howling in pain, it got teeth hard and deep into her throat and I bawled harder, watching it savage her, watching her die—

But she didn’t go down. Her own blood sprayed thick over her face but she closed her eyes, arched up with a great roaring burst of strength and she pinned it, her broken bleeding hands gripping sticky brown fur so hard that I waited for, dreaded the crunch of snapping bones. But she pulled away like she didn’t want to hurt it, like screaming in its face to scare it was enough, and it whined and bawled in her grasp knowing it’d lost and then it was running, frantic, tail down, past the woods and the monastery and into the remains of a neighborhood that might once have been its home. Gone.

And she was still there, kneeling breathless in the thick tacky puddle of her own blood. The long gaping rips in her jacket and shirt were still there too but the awful lacerations in the flesh beneath, the arterial ground-chuck mess of her cheek and throat, it was all knitting up smooth and whole before my eyes like nothing had touched her, like she’d gone out for a walk with a song in her heart and tap-danced into a bucket of red paint. All washes out. For them. For one of
them
.

She pulled herself to her feet, ran fingers through the blood tarring her hair. I wanted to stand up to run but my hands hurt, my arm hurt, my back, my legs, I couldn’t move. It’s a sign of aggression, to meet someone’s eyes. Asserted dominance. The ex stared straight at me, just daring me to raise my head.

“Are you all right?” she said.

They don’t speak like us, the ex-zombies, or the ex-humans, whatever she is. They went from mush-mouthed moaning, palates reduced to rancid syrup, to hard glassy rat-a-tat-tat, each syllable a cap gun cartridge exploding between their teeth:
Are! YOUUU! allriiigh-TAH!
Onomatopoeia inside out, twisting English into noise; everyone would forget what humans were supposed to speak like, sound like, all conversation warped into sleet clattering on a thousand metal roofs. They’re even taking away our talk. She can’t have anything else. Go eat the dog, you’re so fucking hungry like all your kind.

“You’re hurt.” She was coming at me. “Let me—”

“Stay away from me.” I put my hand to my belt, reaching for my knife—and I’d lost it. My knife, Dave’s knife. No good against her but now I couldn’t even try to fight her, I didn’t want to die, my arm hurt so much I just wanted to crawl away like that dog and wail. “Stay away.”

“It’s all right. Are you the only one here? My name’s Lisa, I just—I won’t hurt you—”

Bullshit, Lee-SSSaa-AAAHHH. “Don’t you touch me.”

“I won’t hurt you.” Hands outstretched like that meant she wasn’t armed, like those fingers alone couldn’t snap me to pieces. “You’re bleeding, your hands are torn up, let me help you. I don’t want to feed off you, I’m human, I was human before—”

“You’re not now. I’m getting up, I’m leaving, if you try to stop me—”

“You’re hurt. Can you stand up? Let me get a look at your arm—”

“No!” I don’t want to die. It’s dripping down my elbow now. I’m bleeding to death. “Go away!”

“I’m Lisa. Lisa Porter. Could you just tell me—”

“I don’t give a shit what your name is! Leave me alone!”

“I’m not going to hurt you!” Her voice cracked like thin porcelain, going high with frustration. “Goddammit, I just saved your life, you could be grateful for one damned second, if I were after your ass like you think I am I could’ve just let that dog tear you to shreds—”

“The hell you’re not! Think you look like such a good Samaritan—you’d just rather do it yourself! Fuck off, freak! Fuck off and let me—”

I bit down hard on my lip. My arm was killing me. How dirty were dog bites, were they as bad as cat or human teeth? What if it had rabies? I wouldn’t know for weeks. I cradled the arm in my other hand and saw the raw mess of my palm, tiny pebbleshreds embedded. There were new shredded tears in my jacket, my mother’s charcoal LCS jacket she left behind for me, bullshit it could withstand zombie jaw pressure if one starving dog could do this, I would not cry anymore in front of this bitch. The sidewalk blurred and distorted and she was squatting down beside me, tugging at her own ripped-up sleeve, putting a hand to my arm. Go on, then. Do it. Your teeth are just as sharp. She glanced behind her, down the street where the dog had run.

“Poor thing,” she said. “It still had its tags. The owners must’ve died, or couldn’t feed it, last winter—it went feral. Maybe it still thinks about them, sometimes.” She let out a hollow little laugh. “Maybe sometimes it still misses its mommy.”

That used to drive me up a tree, people acting like their pets were really children and going on about being “dog mommies” and little Sergeant Blueberry Muffin’s poopy-poos until it made you sick, but I’d seen hurt and starving dogs since then. Crying, like kids. Cats too. They had the brains of toddlers, dogs and cats both, I read somewhere; maybe even in the fever of newfound wildness they wondered sometimes, late at night, what the hell happened, how everything they knew could be gone, why nobody who loved them was there to take them home. Maybe this one was just scared, it thought I’d hurt it and attacked first. I could’ve fed it. She looked so sad, that ex, like she was thinking what I was thinking, that it confused me, made me want to shout at her more. They didn’t have any feelings, exes, they were just hunting and eating machines like all the zombies gone extinct.

“Stay here,” she said. “Okay?”

She trudged back down the sidewalk, a pencil smudge overpowered by splashes of cobalt paint overhead, scarlet underfoot. Disappeared into the trees, came back with a battered nylon backpack groaning at the seams. She rifled inside it frowning, muttering, then pulled out a plastic jar of handwipes, a water bottle, a clean towel, a handful of alcohol swabs in little paper packages. She tore one open neatly across the top and gave it to me, not touching me anymore with those gripping hurtful hands, those horrible undead-strong teeth.

“You have any grit stuck in your hands?” she said. “I have a tweezers.”

That’s something I hadn’t thought to bring. I did have more swabs than I needed, though, Dave’s diabetic leftovers. I cleaned my palms, gritting my teeth, nothing staying stuck in the flesh, took new swabs as she opened them, let her run a soothing stream of water over my hands when I’d finished. Made myself sit up. Nothing felt broken. She wet part of the towel, handed it over.

“Amy,” I said, mopping my face. “Amy Holliday.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“My sister’s fifteen. Well, was.” She scraped at the blood on her boot, pulled at the sticky candy-apple latticework of her hair. “I’d been living with her and her friends, this winter, but I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I left, to see what things were like outside.”

“They’re crap,” I said. “And you’re an idiot if you left a halfway decent shelter for—”

“Are you alone?”

“I was with some people. I mean, actual people, not like you.” I stretched out my bitten arm in slow increments. “They’re dead now.”

“Can I see your arm?”

Maybe she really wanted my jacket. It was too big on me, the hem dipped close to my knees, but she was tall like my mother and the sleeves weren’t all that torn. She’d fit in my jacket. She wasn’t getting my jacket.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Just give me more of those—”

“You’ve got pretty hair,” she said.

That surprised me enough I didn’t know what to say.

“I always wanted to be a redhead.” She scrubbed her boot against the sidewalk, scuffing the leather without scrubbing off the blood. She talked when she was nervous, you could tell, though what one of her kind had to be nervous about I couldn’t fathom. “Something distinctive, anyway, when I looked in the mirror—Jessie, my sister, she dyed her hair blue once, that bright robin’s-egg blue. It looked great on her, actually, you wouldn’t have guessed. Is your arm still bleeding? Just let me look, for God’s sake, if it needs stitches you can’t do that yourself.”

“If it needs stitches, I’m screwed anyway—”

“Will you just
let me look at it
and then I’ll go away forever! All right? Just humor me and let me think I didn’t leave you to bleed to death and then I’ll be out of your life forever! And good goddamned luck to you, if that dog comes back!”

You want a
pet
, because you walked out on folks and now you’re lonely? Here, girl, I’ve got butterfly bandages and a can of Desenex! Sit, stay,
good
girl! I’d rather die. No, seriously, I really would rather die. “Are you threatening me?”

“Take it any damn way you want. I can’t stop you.”

A thin ribbon of blood was stiffening and drying on my jacket sleeve, like a varsity stripe. My whole arm burned. I wouldn’t know if it were rabies for weeks.

“What if it’s rabies?” I said.

She shook her head. “I’ve seen rabid dogs, along the road. This one wasn’t.”

We kept looking at each other. Her eyes were large and brown and sad in a sharp, thin, completely undistinguished face. Pass her on the street, never even register you’d seen her. I slid off my jacket and sweatshirt and cotton sweaters down to an old Army T-shirt, arm aching deep in every muscle, and let her roll up the T-shirt sleeve, wet the towel and run it over the wound.

“Not very deep,” she said. Her voice kicked up lightly, it sounded like sincere relief. “Mostly got a mouthful of jacket cloth—let it bleed. That helps clean it out. I have a needle and thread—”

“I’ve got a whole sewing kit.” I folded the jacket up, clutching it in my lap; it wasn’t just her, I didn’t like anyone else touching it. I put my hand to my jeans pocket, making sure ID cards, license, dead cell phone hadn’t fallen out. She dug in her backpack again, pulled out what looked like a pair of old gardening gloves.

“For later,” she said. “If your hands still hurt. They’re clean on the inside.”

I took them from her and stood up, the jacket tucked under my arm. “Thanks.”

No answer. Wobbly on my feet, but my knee could take my weight; I rocked side to side, felt pain shoot up my back, down my arm, through my hands, I had to go get my knife and my own backpack but all I wanted to do was lie in the grass and take another nap. Couldn’t do that. Especially not now.