Dust Read online

  We marched beyond the sharp bend in the Great River, through the erstwhile playground, past a faded sign pointing to ye olde historic gristmill and sawmill and sugaring shack (maple syrup in Indiana, who knew?) and spilled into the parking lot, the late winter asphalt morgue-cold and soothing against swollen and bony feet. I was half asleep, wishing vaguely for a little marrow bone to suck on while I drifted off, and then suddenly wide awake as a pair of blaring headlights swung off the county road, knocked over the orange cones blocking their path, shot through the barricaded park entrance, peeled toward us in a wide screeching curve and came to a bucking-horse stop yards away, right there in the middle of the lot.

  Unbelievable. The park is abandoned, the farms and subdivisions deserted, the roads strictly Drive At Your Own Risk, there’s no guards and no safe houses and no barrier gates and not a sane hoo for miles around and the assholes still come barreling through thinking they can be Big Mighty Zombie Hunters? Hasn’t happened in years, hasn’t happened since the unincorporated-county hicks finally lost enough Billy Bobs to realize we can do anything we want out here—as long as we stay out here—and there’s no National Guard to come raging in with machine guns like in the movies. This wasn’t a pickup truck though, just a crappy little white Honda, and before we could react the driver’s door flew open and a skinny blond hoocow crumpled onto the pavement and splattered herself with puke.

  Correction: Mighty Zombie Hunters, and the occasional wrong-turn drunk. I fucking hate drunk drivers. I have my reasons.

  If we weren’t already stuffed sausage-tight with meat and blood we would have tried rushing her, hope she’d run toward the woods in panic, but we just wanted a little fun. She was too busy groaning and pulling at vomit-caked hair strands to register our presence so we moved in a little closer, and a little closer, and when she finally realized that wasn’t more puke she smelled we were within easy stumble of dessert. She stared at us, bleary-eyed, face ashen. We stared back.

  She dove head-first back into the car, slammed the locks shut and propelled the thing straight toward us. Sam just stood there, glowing and skeletal in the oncoming headlights, and put his hands out to the front grille; the tires squealed, turning over and over on themselves, and when his arms shook with the effort Billy and I stepped up too, our palms splayed side by side like a chart of fleshly decay. She gunned the accelerator, giving me a good bodily jolt but not moving the car an inch, and as Mags and Ben and Joe swarmed around the doors her whole body went slack with fear. Joe rapped on the windshield, a light little tap that made the glass blossom in a cobweb of cracks.

  “You lost?” he shouted, looming in close so she could see his gnawed-up face. “Is somebody lost?”

  Mags staggered around the car groaning, her drooling-retard undead act, fingers buried in the mush of her own flesh up to the knuckles. The smell of terror poured through the door seals like gas from a vent; Billy and Sam on one side, Joe and me on the other, we rocked the car gently back and forth, up and back down again, and the hoocow tore at her own hair and screamed and screamed. Linc and Florian held back, like they always hold back, but they were both wheezing with laughter.

  “Come on,” Linc managed, “knock that off. Or I’ll tell Teresa.”

  We ignored him, the car way off to the side, balanced on one set of furiously rotating tires, then back. The hoocow was puking again, from vertigo or fear anybody’s guess.

  Florian spat, a thin depleted stream of coffin juice, and stamped his bony feet. “You all a lot of pussycats?” he asked, drawing out the first two syllables. “How long you gonna stand here playing? Either kill it and eat it or leave it alone.”

  Killjoy. We rested the car gently on the asphalt, stepping backward with bows and curtsies. The hoocow just sat there, covered in sick, probably stunned. She had big bewildered brown eyes, actual cow eyes, that skin so pale it always looks bluish. Actually she looked plain old blue, a dark sickly tinge rising up and suffusing her skin like a blush. Billy made elaborate motions toward the park gate and she just sat there. Little chips of windshield had fallen out, bits of glitter sprinkling the ground.

  “You better leave,” Linc called out, pointing at the gate. He can’t talk any better than the rest of us, lips and tongues and palates all moldered away, but his mishmash of syllables at least sounded friendly. “This place isn’t for humans. You better go.”

  The hoocow drew her brows together, startled, then gazed in wonderment at the puke on her T-shirt, at her left hand grasping the wheel and the right pulling the brake. At me. Big, dark stupid eyes staring into mine, sidling on down to take in my face and the rags of my clothes and lingering on my one remaining hand and Jesus Christ, how drunk was she? I screamed at her through the windshield and she started awake, throwing herself into reverse and heading exitward at a downright leisurely pace. The car meandered from side to side, nearly wandering into a clump of trees, then righted itself and vanished slow and unsteady out the park gate.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Joe demanded, like I would know.

  Ben yanked the ragged remnants of his fedora further over his eyes. “So stoned she couldn’t tell which hand was which. Big deal.” He gazed across the parking lot, frowning. “I coulda used a little tasty treat, myself—if she wanted to stay that bad, you shoulda let her.”

  It was halfhearted protest; his voice had the same lazy edge of satiety as Joe’s, and by the time we crossed into the wide, empty park field bordered by gristmill and sugaring shack and thick bands of cottonwoods Lady Hoocow was nearly forgotten. Uncut for years, the tall grass was choked by taller weeds, their stems sharp and crackling as we pushed through them to get home. Teresa’s gazebo, its white paint peeling and carved patches of roof rotting away, sat across a little footbridge in an enclave surrounded by rusting park benches and clusters of oaks; the “Great” River, narrow and slow-moving and perpetually clogged with mud, circled around the rear and disappeared back into the forest.

  The queen’s throne, but of course Her Majesty was nowhere to be seen. Teresa loves to disappear for hours and days at a time, no saying where or why, no saying how she fed. Ben and Billy and some of the others wander off too, go human-hunting whenever deer and ducks and possum and coyotes stop tasting exciting, but they always bring back bones and stories for the rest of us, make it worth everyone’s while. Teresa, she’s just too good to share and of course we can’t have a walkabout if she’s having one; we all have to be right there, sitting tight, waiting for whenever she decides to stroll back home.

  That act’s getting old, dusty and ancient in fact. But right then I was too tired to care.

  Ben groaned, crawling under one of the benches; the ground was softening with the approach of spring, but still cold and firm enough for good sleeping. “All that fuss to get back and she ain’t here. Told you we should’ve stopped for a snack—”

  Florian, curled up against the gazebo wood, was already sound asleep. Sam hauled himself up again, groaning. “Our turn for watch, Billy, c’mon.”

  He and Billy left for watch duty, to tramp around the near perimeter of the park looking for any more interlopers until all the sun and daylight exhausted them and a new shift took over. Not my turn yet, thank God. I get sleepy now the way little kids do, big wild bursts of energy evaporating in a flash, and falling into the tall grass was a relief. Joe settled next to me, front to front, Linc on the other side back to back. Mags was flopped out snoring at my feet.

  “Wait’ll she gets back home,” Joe muttered, already half-asleep. “Th’hoocow. Stories she’ll tell. Zombie this, zombie that—”

  “Good.” I shifted away from a sharp rock. “Keep her kind away.”

  The sunrise was full orange, striated with wide soft streaks of pink. Stomach full. It was time to go to sleep.

  I remember, when I was alive, reading somewhere that Eskimos don’t call themselves that—white men did, a corruption of some word that meant “raw flesh eater.” They called each other “The People.” Raw fl
esh eater. There actually is a gang up in the Dakotas that calls itself The Eskimos, but a lot of folks don’t get the joke. My gang, Teresa and Joe and Sam and all the rest, is called the Fly-by-Nights. Our turf is what used to be the Great River County Park in Calumet County, right over the Illinois-Indiana border and just south of where the Lake Michigan beach dunes begin, and it’s been their place, our place, long before I tunneled up and they took me in as family.

  We’re not the only gang around here, not by a long shot—there’s the Carnies over in Michigan City, the Bottom Feeders in South Bend, the Way of All Flesh that practically runs Cicero and the Rat Patrol that goes wherever the hell it wants whenever it wants—but this is my gang, the best gang, and so that’s what I call myself if you ask me, a Fly-by-Night. Undead, if you want something more basic. Jessie, if you’re not such an asshole you never ask my name.

  What I never call myself, ever, is “zombie.” It’s racist, for one thing, just like “Eskimo.” I cared a lot about racism and animals and justice and all of that, when I was human. But I haven’t been human for a long time.

  2

  Nine years ago, I was alive. Nine years ago, Jessica Anne Porter was fifteen and lived in a nice house in the very well-guarded town of Lepingville, an hour out of Chicago, and got okay grades and wanted to do something someday with animal rights. Her hair was auburn dyed something brighter, I forget what. I don’t see bright colors well anymore. She had a mother, father, a sister in her first year of college, a brother in his last—neither of them could wait to get out of the house, they barely spoke to her parents. And her parents barely spoke to each other. Then one day they were in a rare good mood and took her out to dinner, and then there was the Toyota ride home.

  Dad took the back roads home, the scenic tour. You weren’t supposed to do that, you were supposed to stay on the main highway with the blindingly sulfurous roadside lights (the “environmental hazards,” as we called them, you never put it more directly than that, supposedly hated bright light) and the toll booths. Each booth had a FUNDING COMMUNITY SAFETY sign so you wouldn’t throw a tantrum as you forked over your money, a sentry bearing an emergency flamethrower. See? Safety. Suck on that, you suburban cheapskates. The small, cramped booths could serve as safe houses in a pinch, if a “hazard” somehow surprised you on the road. They had to let you in, that was the law. But my dad had paid four tolls in eighteen miles just to get to the restaurant and my mom complained the road lights gave her headaches and it was a pretty night and for once nobody was screaming at each other so why not take the old road, the long way home? Rest your eyes. Have a bit of peace and quiet.

  It was two miles from the county line, where the former industrial park gave way to beachy dune grass and rows of half-built condos sat empty along the roadside, silhouetted in weirdly dim, soft white road lights. The old-fashioned kind. This was after they finally passed the moratorium on residential building in rural areas, the one the developers held up as long as they could, until the “hazards” somehow got into that gated community near the Taltree Preserve; whose woods, fields and ex-farmlands these are, even they then managed to figure out. Nothing hazardous that night, though, just the dark sky and the low fuzzy whiteness and everything peaceful and sleepy until suddenly there were two blinding headlights bearing down on us from the wrong side of the road, howling brakes and screaming and then, like the lost breath from a hard stomach punch, everything gathered into a fist and struck, and then stopped.

  I remember a pickup truck, yellow, gone faded saffron under the road lights. And a woman’s voice, not my mother’s, moaning over and over like some nauseated prayer while I lay on the pavement dying, Oh Christ, oh God, oh Christ oh Christ oh Christ oh my God and I thought, Lady, it’s a little late for that now isn’t it? Her voice was washed out, staticky with the buzz of a million angry flies eating her up, and the buzzing became louder and louder and there were new flashing lights, red ones, but it was too late, I was all eaten up, and I closed my eyes and fell asleep for a long time.

  Then, days or weeks or months after the funeral, I woke up.

  In old horror movies where someone gets buried alive, there’s always that moment where they blink into the darkness, pat and grope around the coffin walls and let out that big oxygen-wasting scream as the screen goes black. Me, though, I knew I was dead, really dead and not put away by mistake, and another giant fist was gripping my brain and nerves and shoving away shock, surprise, bewilderment, only letting me think one thing: Out. And I knew, with absolute certainty, that I would break free. I didn’t seem to need air anymore, so I could take my time.

  I tried putting my hands out just like in the movies, to feel the force and weight I was fighting—six feet under, that’s a lot of piled-up dirt—and that’s how I found out my right arm was shot to pieces. The left could rattle the box a bit, but not enough. I raised my legs, each movement a good long achy stretch after the best nap in the world, and pressed my palm, knees, feet against the white satiny padding overhead. Felt a rattle. Pressed harder. Heard a creak.

  Then I kicked.

  The first blow tore through the satin lining and slammed into the wood without a moment’s pain; the second splintered it, cracked it, and I kicked and kneed and punched until I hit shards of timber and musty air and then, so hard my whole body rattled, a solid concrete ceiling overhead. A grave liner, Teresa explained to me later, another box for my box, but I felt real panic at the sight and had to make myself keep kicking, harder, harder, and that awful concrete became fine white dust that gave way to an avalanche of dirt. I was gulping down mouthfuls of mud and I was sad for my shirt, they’d buried me in my favorite T-shirt that read ANIMALS ARE NOT OURS TO EAT, WEAR, OR EXPERIMENT ON and now it was plastered mute with damp black dirt, but I kept swimming one-handed, kicking, tunneling upward through a crumbling sea. The moist tides of soil were endless, then I felt something finer and powdery-dry and my good hand found thin cords of grass-roots, poked through the green carpet-weave and ripped a long jagged slit open to the air. The air—I didn’t need it, maybe, but as I lay there drained and exhausted and felt it cool on my dirt-caked back I almost cried.

  The sunset was a needle-thrust in my eyes. I crouched in my own grave hole, retching up pebbles and earth, and gasped at the smells of the world: the turned soil, the broken grass stems I clutched in my fist, graveside flowers old and new, the trees and plants and the thousands of people and animals that’d left scents behind traversing the cemetery grounds. My own dead, dirty stink, and it still didn’t shock me, I was too distracted by the other million fits and starts of odor flooding my nostrils—this was how to experience the world, this note of mushrooms sprouting in damp grass, this trace of old rubber from a sneaker sole, compared to this banquet eyes and ears told you nothing! My head pounded, painlessly, like a great throbbing vein: the hard pulsations of my new brain, my undead brain, but I didn’t know that yet. I reached up, like someone would be there to lift me, and touched something rough and cold. A tombstone, my tombstone: AUGUST 14, 2001. I died on August 14, 2001, but what day was it now? Where was I now? Where would I go, where will I sleep, do I have to sleep—

  I smelled it before I saw it, darting quick and confused across the grass. Rabbit. Fresh, living rabbit.

  Every other scent and smell in the world instantly vanished. Hunger rattled my skull and shook my bones—pork chops, hamburgers, steaks rare and bloody, everything that would have made me vomit when I was alive but I had to have them now, I had to have them raw and oozing juice and if I didn’t get that rabbit, if I didn’t kill it and devour it now, I had nothing to live for at all. I staggered to my feet and stood there trembling, legs stiff and exhausted, but before I could even try to run for my food something bloated and rotten in the shape of a man, his dark suit jacket torn and spilling fat little white grubs, crawled on all fours from the pile of dirt that had been his grave. The grave next to mine. The rabbit had halted too soon, crouching frozen with fear by our collective tombstone, and as I
watched it spasm and kick against death, as I watched my father sink long teeth into its skull and spit out soft tufts of brown fur, I was small again and only wanted to scream and cry, Daddy, why did you take my toy?

  Something crawled from behind a yew tree, feverish and fast. A woman in the rags of my mother’s favorite blue sweater fell on him, grabbing the rabbit’s meaty hindquarters for herself, and held on tight and chewed no matter how hard he punched and kicked, so hard she sobbed between bites: Whap, cry, swallow, whap, cry, swallow.

  But, Daddy, that’s my toy.

  They rolled on the ground, snarling with rage.

  And you. What are you doing in my mom’s favorite sweater?

  But they’d dropped the rabbit carcass, fighting that hard, and I was so hungry and it was so good and I knew the answers to my questions, I already knew.

  A garter snake slithered over my mother’s foot and they both went crazy, grabbing fistfuls of grass where it had shot out of reach. Arguing again, fighting forever, only with sounds now and no words—screeching violins, deafening pounding drums. I was gone already, walking away. I never saw them again.

  I scraped a deep, gouging ridge in my back, crawling through a gap I’d torn in the cemetery fence, and felt only a paper cut. A pinprick. I ran my tongue along my teeth and almost screamed; the fence’s barbed wire was nothing, but my teeth had all grown long and blade-edged and when I pulled my hand from my mouth, there was something thick and syrupy from the new cut on my tongue and fingers, almost like blood but black. Coffin liquor, Florian told me later, my own putrefaction flowing through my veins. My hand was swollen and livid, the veins and arteries gone dark.

  I could barely walk. I staggered, tried crawling like my mom had but with the bad arm that wasn’t any better. CALUMET COUNTY MEMORIAL PARK, read the sign; that told me I was in the middle of nowhere, if you insist on burying instead of burning they make you do it far away from everything and don’t come crying to us if the funeral procession gets attacked, but where this particular nowhere was I had no idea. Other than me and that garter snake, no sign of life. I crawled and stumbled and crawled again, pushing through grass, gravel, leaves and underbrush. Snapping branches scared me, a single car speeding by terrified me; it’d find me and run me down if it got a chance. I didn’t feel like a monster but I knew I looked like one. I cried from fear, wept from hunger, black syrupy tears splattering my muddy shirt.