Dust Read online

  It was hot this morning, too hot for barely spring. We headed east toward the riverbank, passing the weed-smeared signpost for the Sullen Trail (a settler’s name, John or Jim Sullen of years past, or someone’s stupid idea of funny?), and began our ambling walkabout of watching, listening, sniffing for hoos. There was no way two slow-moving undeads could cover the whole park in a day, there could be a platoon of Marines camped on the other side of the forest for all we knew, but Teresa insisted.

  “She does this just to keep us busy,” I muttered.

  “That’s no news, pet.” Florian called everyone pet, even Teresa. “But also for some make-believe excitement—what if there are hoos in the woods, with guns? Or worse, matches? What if we’re all in their sights?” He spat: not from a swampy mouth, he’s barely got any coffin liquor left, but from long force of habit. “Hoos, hah. They started packing up and running away from here long before you were born—before Teresa was born, but she still sees ’em everywhere. Behind every tree.” He pulled a jay from its hiding place in a bush, snapped it dead in his fingers and crunched it down feathers and all, not faltering a step. “Gives Billy and them something to think about, though, other than dethroning her.”

  This was true. Billy and Ben never said no to watch duty, always shouting about how if they did find a goddamned hoo then by God they’d make it sorry (unless, like always, they’re so lazy or stuffed full of deer they can’t be bothered). I didn’t mind either; really, it got me away from her. And I liked trees and riverbanks now, in a way I never had when I was alive; I’d wanted to save all the animals, but nature bored the piss out of me. This way was better.

  “You still gotta wonder where she goes, when she takes off.” I rubbed my shoulder socket against some tree bark, getting in a good scratch. “I don’t see what’s so special and secret about—”

  “You ever miss your folks?”

  Florian loved to do this, pretend he was listening and then interrupt with some dispatch from Pluto—like I said, he was old—but the question made me tense up. “Why’re you asking now?”

  “’Cause I wondered, that’s why. Do you miss your folks?”

  I thought about the first few weeks after joining the Flies, how I would lie awake mornings waiting to hear their brain-sounds getting closer—those nervous strings, furious drums. Waiting for them to find the gang and get joined up too. But they never did. No other gang I knew of either. They just disappeared. It happens. Would definitely have happened to that Renee, if Teresa hadn’t dragged her back. But it didn’t matter; we always pretended we’d never had any other family. “No point,” I said. “Gone’s gone.”

  Florian watched me, one sunken eye moving independently of the other. “Gone may be gone, but that don’t make gone fun. Just asking.”

  “And I just answered, so can you find a new useless question?”

  He shrugged and pushed his walking stick—the branch Joe had torn away in his fall—against the softening ground as we headed forward. The birds twittered and screeched overhead in two-note complaints, rising to a roar of mass discontent as the river snaked through a clearing and past a wall of oaks; this was a migration stop-off, and twice every year that sea of bird sound up high signaled autumn turning to winter, then winter to spring. We paused to listen.

  Fighting, they were always fighting. Fighting to the death, the last I ever saw them. That’s all I really keep with me about my parents. They must’ve loved me, I suppose. I don’t know. When I needed help with a science project, or a ride somewhere, or someone to yell back on my behalf, I went to my brother, Jim. Lisa, my sister, for everything else. I don’t blame them for clearing out like they did—I was counting the hours myself—and I could call them whenever I wanted. And Lisa, whose college was closer, would come visit sometimes just to get me out of the house, but it just got worse and worse after they were gone.

  “I still miss my children,” Florian murmured, as the birds squawked and cried. “Sometimes. Two daughters and a son. Grandkiddies. Don’t know what became of them. If they ever tunneled up too.”

  And even if they did they might just turn their backs on you for half a rabbit, old man, so what the hell do you want from me? They were always like that, since I could remember, my mom and dad. “Ma” and “pa,” I guess Florian would say. I wonder why people say “mom” and “dad” now, instead. Language evolves, my English teacher said. He’d intone it all solemn like a Bible verse, lann-guaaage evolllves, but never explain how or why it did. Always shouting. Always fighting. Absolutely anything could set them off. When I got scared I’d go sleep in Lisa’s room with her.

  “I hate it here,” she would whisper, not to me but herself, when the crash of something thrown downstairs made us both jump. She’d have her arms wrapped around me and I’d feel the sudden tensing twitch in the muscles, almost more startling than the noise that caused it. “I hate it here so fucking much.”

  I’d hear Jim sometimes too, shouting at them to shut up, control themselves. You wanna know why you can’t pay Jessie to talk to you and Lisa’s scared of her own shadow why don’t you both look in a mirror, get a goddamned divorce if you’re that miserable, we’ll all throw a fucking party. He’s right, we would have. The little martyrs, he’d call Lisa and me sometimes, he hated that we’d both hide in her room. What’d he expect us to do, take a hurled paperweight in the face for the team?

  But he didn’t take their shit and I liked that. One really terrible Thanksgiving he just said, “Screw this,” right there at the table, and loaded me and Lisa and Grammy Sullivan into his car and we all went to the turkey buffet three toll stops down the road. They’re entitled to ruin their own holiday, he said, but not ours. I liked that. We each had our own holiday, it wasn’t theirs to keep inflicting on us their way. Grammy Sullivan, who’d looked ready to walk all the way back to the nursing home, cheered up and handed out chocolates. I’d already given up meat and all the vegetables looked butter-soaked so there wasn’t much else for me to eat except plain bread and cranberry sauce, but it was still the best Thanksgiving in forever.

  No, Florian, I do not miss my folks. It’s just that sometimes I’m still listening for them, even now, and I don’t know why. That’s force of habit for you.

  “Why’s it so hot today?” I said, stomping my feet on the soil like I could force the coolness up through my legs. “It can’t be later than March. I’ll rot like a Florida feeder.”

  “It ain’t hot at all.” Florian sounded puzzled. “That wind coming in is—”

  “—way too warm. It can’t be later than March, there’s barely any violets yet—”

  “Ain’t trying to be difficult, you know,” Florian said, face still tilted upward. “I never thought much about old times when I was your age either, but it’s different lately. Can’t think about much else.” He turned to me. “Thinking about the human days, of all the useless things. I knew my last times were on me anyway, and this about settles it—”

  “You’re not going to die,” I said. It happened to be a fact: The sun would never come up in the west, Florian would never die. He was already a dried-up shrunk-down remnant when I first met him, had died in his sleep as an older-than-hell hoo back when this was the Northwest Territories, all Indian tribes and a few trading outposts. He remembered the Revolutionary War. (He was a Tory.) And the Civil War. (He was dead, no need to take hoo-sides anymore.) He remembered when Lepingville, where I grew up, was just a giant farm field (which it might as well be now anyway, if you ask me). He’d survived the Pittsburgh Uprising of ’68, all the young undeads turning on the dusties when they got sick of killing and eating hoos; he’d survived fights, forest fires, starvation, hunting teams, the hoos deciding again and again that we didn’t really exist and crowding into our living space like nasty little gerbils grabbing a new cage. You didn’t see all that, live through all that and then just . . . vanish, like all those reserves and survival skills meant nothing in the end. I wouldn’t accept it.

  Florian smiled. H
is skin in the strengthening sunlight was jaundiced and tissue thin, sagging at every joint like a collapsing awning. “Don’t be silly, pet.”

  I got sillier. I threw my arm around him, letting him laugh and pat my shoulder. We didn’t hold with mushiness, but I didn’t care. Things were easy between him and me like they weren’t with anyone else but Joe. “You’re not going to die.”

  “Course I will, I’m—” He frowned. “Well, hell, I got no idea how old I am now, but damned old, I know that. It’s long past time. Sick of being sent on watch rounds, just so she can get rid of me. Sick of everything.” He sighed, studying himself, the crumbling silhouette of his bones. “You’d never believe it now, pet, but this arm”—he made a joking flex of the biceps he didn’t have—“this arm could bend an iron streetlamp post barely trying. These legs could kick through concrete, just like yours. That’s why they wanted me. Now they’re just waiting to be rid of me. So I’ll go.” His voice was light and pitiless, almost reveling in the pronouncement of death, but his face grew wistful. “All I wish is I could see my beach again.”

  “It wouldn’t be the same.” Florian had lived for a while, a long while, in the woods around the Indiana Dunes, way back when they were just unprotected piles of sand and not a park. “I know nobody’s supposed to live out near there, but you hear stories sometimes about—”

  “There was always hoos out there making one kinda trouble or another, that ain’t nothing new. I remember when some damned fool company just took one of the biggest sand dunes away, two hundred feet high and they hauled it all off in boxcars to melt it down, make glass jars out of it—I said I miss my beach, not their beach. Hasn’t been my beach in forever.”

  He stopped to rest near the shell of a dead tree, a blackened stub that made me imagine a long-ago lightning bolt. “That sand could hurt a rotten foot, all gritty, but there was still something about it, you lay down in it to sleep and woke up every night feeling good. All those woods, barely a soul in ’em, and that big long slope down to the shore and the shore was nothing but waves that kept rolling in, real soft. Like a lot of drowning people’s hands laid all in a row, touching the sand and then getting pulled under all at once. All kinda flowers to look at, stuff you never seen anywhere else, and too many birds to count.”

  He watched the Great River meander past us, all slow-moving liquid mud. “The Indians left us alone. Well, they’d get mad when we raided their muskrat traps, but a body’s gotta eat. Then they made ’em all leave. Built railroads and steel mills right there on the sand. Beach houses. Couldn’t make us leave, though. They only thought they got rid of the Indians, the ones that tunneled up all came back too. Dozens of us, and we never had much of any fighting, ’cept when we got bored. Time just kinda stopped there. Every day the same as the next—”

  “Yeah, not at all like being out here.”

  “Every day just like the next.” Florian was long gone now, that look on his face old people get when they’re all excited about something that happened before you were born. At least he didn’t expect me to act excited too, like Grammy Sullivan would. “All flowing together, just one big day and one big night. All peaceful. And I don’t know what it was, but you broke down so slow there, your body did. Took a good thirty, forty years before I found even the first bug on me. Hoos would see us and think we were still them, before they saw how we walked. Seemed like we all barely rotted at all.”

  He sighed. “If you ever get there, pet. I won’t say heaven, but it was more beautiful than anything else.”

  I’d never seen the Dunes except in photographs, growing up. Too dangerous, though sometimes kids would go to the unincorporated areas on a dare. A few from the class a year ahead of mine did that and never came back. I knew I was meant to feel sorry for them, but it was kind of hard when all it meant for the rest of us was more goddamned safety drills and this was after we’d already suffered through it all in Safety Ed: endless variations on Don’t Go Out There, You Idiots. Nothing stopping me now, of course, though no swimming unless I wanted to be reduced to a skeleton within minutes. Decaying flesh plus a steady water bath, it’s like parboiling.

  There were rumors of government facilities out on the beaches, research labs, in the Prairie Beach part of Gary and Burns Harbor and the other lake coast towns. Some out in the prairie preserves too. Thanatology labs, studying us in the belly of the beast. I knew a girl whose dad supposedly was a guard out there, though you weren’t meant to know about it. Or that they were out there at all. He made way too much money, everyone said, for any ordinary security guard. There were rumors that my kind never killed the kids that disappeared, that they stumbled into a restricted lab area, got shot, left out for us or the birds and coyotes. Who knew. I’ve never heard much tell of it, but then it’s not like I go out looking.

  “So why’d you ever leave?” I asked. “If it was all so great.”

  Florian just shrugged. He reached into the little leather pouch he kept looped around his waist, as creased and worn down as Joe’s jacket, and shook out a couple of old stones: Lake Michigan beach stones, flat and smooth and soft greenish-gray, pale pearl. He had more of them he’d dragged with him everywhere he went, hidden somewhere in the woods. Another old person’s eccentricity.

  “Can’t stay in any one place forever,” he said, running the bones that had once been fleshy fingers over the stones’ surfaces. “No matter how much you like it. Gotta keep moving. I been everywhere. Everywhere I could walk.” His fingers curled around the pearly gray stone. “And no matter where I been, no matter how bad things was there, if I had these with me I always felt like I was safe, that I’d come out of it alive and fighting. Even in Pittsburgh, back in the uprising. I got bit hard by a young feeder, I shoulda lost my arm. Didn’t. So much damn luck. And these, right here, they’re my lucky tokens. Ain’t never been without them.”

  He put the stones back in their pouch with a happy little look in his eyes, like he’d just had a private conversation with them I didn’t know anything about. I guess when you’re verging on your three-hundredth birthday or so you’ve earned the right to be loopy. I nudged a clump of snowdrops with my foot, fresh salady green against twenty shades of dirty brown. The tree leaves were just coming in, lighter greens tinged with yellow.

  “This is pretty beautiful too,” I said. “Just like your beach.”

  No answer. I poked around an old duck’s nest, found nothing and was set to head another mile down the river when the smell hit me. Florian caught it too, raising a hand for silence though there was no sound but birdsong. Human flesh, definitely, but also a note of something chemical that I couldn’t place: like deodorant gone stale, cheap lotion turned metallic with sweat, but stronger and stranger than that. We kept staring and sniffing and finally saw a shadow zigzagging through the spindly trees, too fleet-footed to be an undead. Every now and then you see a few vagrant guys out on the forest edge, though if Ben or Billy or Joe’s feeling hungry you never see them for very long. This one, though, was female, lolloping fast toward us, all hunched-over nervous speed like a little ape; she paused, raising her blond head to sniff, came stumbling barefoot along the riverbank and, just yards away from us, smacked straight into a linden tree and clung to it stunned. Her breath rattled, lungs fighting each other for the last gulp of air, and drool snaked from her open mouth.

  It was the hoocow from last night, the one who’d come on a drunken tear through the parking lot. Her skin had gone from blue-tinged to outright blue, one huge fast-spreading bruise: Cyanotic, I thought, a word I remembered from health classes. There was a weird sheen on it too, like sweat if sweat was beads of tree sap, and she stared at us without fear or any other human look in her eyes. Nothing human about her smell, the chemical stink pouring from her skin, and nothing undead either, nothing I could call hoo or not-hoo and I shivered, smelling it.

  “Hey!” Florian shouted, waving his skeleton arms, baring his yellowed teeth to try to scare her off. “We know you. This ain’t no camping groun
d, you better get out of here. There’s lots more of us and the rest won’t help you. You understand?”

  She just stood there. “You understand me? Those old park bums ain’t your friends either. Get out!”

  Of course everything we said was so much hrruhhh ugggh muhhhhh to anyone but us, but if she hadn’t got the gist she really was too stoned to live. I snarled at her, spitting a mouthful of black blood, and when it spattered her bare feet she gazed up at me in something like wonder. Her eyes were glassy and smudged and shadowy like she had cataracts, marbles smeared with greasy fingerprints, and as I stared back something about the angles of her face, the tilt of her chin flowed into a falsely familiar shape, some strange foreign substance poured into a well-worn mold; then the shape melted away and left only her, nobody and nothing, standing there gripping the bark for dear life. Why are you looking at me like that? I don’t know you. I’m not your friend.

  “No . . . camping ground,” she repeated, in a croak, holding the words in her lips like little bits of sugar. Not the way humans said them, but the way we did. “The old bums . . .”

  Imitating, I thought, as the chords pounded fast and feverish through my brain, she didn’t understand us, hoos couldn’t understand anything we said. Like a babbling baby. The old bums. Maybe she’d just learned the hard way they weren’t her friends.

  “What about ’em?” I gave her a shove, making myself go gentle because a hard push would snap her shoulder. If she really were the hoo she looked like. “What do I care for some old bums, some dead-meat eaters? You like ’em so much, go—”

  She moaned, a high, scared horse’s whinnying, and her little sob sounded so much like Renee’s hunger pangs that I grabbed for Florian’s hand. Her chin lolled back and she swayed, seizing the linden bark harder, and reached one shaking arm up to where a squirrel was splayed frozen and praying to be invisible. He went crazy, thrashing and biting in her grip, and she bit down. Her head jerked left, right, trying to pull off a piece, and he let out a horrible shrill scream of terrified pain and held it and held it until her teeth found his neck and wrenched it apart.