Dust Read online

  Mesmerized, we watched her. Her teeth seemed long for a hoo’s but they were white and squarish like any human’s, and just as bad at tearing through hide and thick bones. She gnawed at the little bit of meat she could get, licked fresh blood from her hands, and then I heard a gurgling sound and she was looking up at me trembling in fright, dark bubbles of spume oozing from her ash-colored lips. She stared down at the torn-apart thing in her hands, warm and dripping blood and viscera and tufts of gray fur, and let out another moan, not of starvation but shame and horror; meat and bile rocketed back up, splattering the linden tree and the soil below, and she sank to her knees and doubled over, shaking and shriveling into a wracked little ball. Florian, forever too soft-hearted, must have decided she was one of us after all because he reached down and touched her hair.

  “Squirrel ain’t no good,” he said, conciliatory. “Always hated it. If you come with us, we’ll find a duck or two, some deer—”

  She howled, fists drumming on the linden bark until her knuckles split and bled. Her body arched, jerked backward, and she made horrible gasping sounds pulling in air she could no longer breathe; her fingers loosened and she almost fluttered back to the ground, curling gentle and womblike around herself as her breath softened, slowed and stopped. There was a shudder that seemed to come from somewhere else, an invisible boot kicking her in the chest, and she lay still.

  I touched her skin. It was sap-sticky, covered in congealed ooze, and cold.

  Florian bared his teeth, snapping them shut on invisible flesh. “Blessed hell,” he muttered, and turned her over and shook her and shouted at her trying to figure out if she were alive, dead, unconscious, what the hell had happened. I rubbed my fingers against the linden bark, scrubbing away that awful sweat; I didn’t want her stench on me. She didn’t move.

  “No heartbeat,” Florian said, pulling himself upright. “But she was trying to take in air. You think she’s one of us? You think there’s some . . . sickness out there, and she got it? That smell.”

  There isn’t a disease that gets us other than rot, even with those hoo-scientists out on the beach, supposedly, trying their best, allegedly, to create one. “One of us? She was trying to breathe, you just said so. And you saw her yesterday, nobody dies, wakes up and goes under again in less than a day—”

  “No hoo’s out eating squirrels with their bare hands and teeth. This isn’t nothing human.”

  “It’s nothing us either!”

  Florian stared down at her, confusion turning to anger, and let off a muttered epithet of good riddance as he kicked her. I held back. Whatever she was, whatever had killed her I didn’t want to touch her or know her, I just wanted her gone.

  The way she looked at me, just for that split second, staring like she knew me. Like I should know her. Nobody and nothing. That’s all hoos are to me. Not even meat.

  “So are we tellin’ Teresa?” Florian asked.

  For an answer I reached down and hoisted up the body, an awkward job working one-handed. Florian helped me get her slung over my shoulder, and we walked until the woods got thick and the ground hilly and we’d reached the concrete tunnel beneath the old highway underpass; we left her there, skull intact, a good warning for any of those old bums sheltering from rain. If Billy or Ben or whoever came this way, let them figure it out.

  By the time we retraced our steps Florian was pinched with exhaustion; he curled up and dozed all day in the grass while I hunted. I still wasn’t feeling so great either, hot and all tired, but I needed a good meal to distract myself from the nastiness I’d just seen and smelled. I didn’t spot any rabbits but I surprised some raccoons, a badger, a couple of ducks, there were still leavings fresh to eat when we got back, and Renee wept so much when I gave her some it was disgusting, she cried and ate and ate and cried and moaned about how wonderful I was, I was her best friend now, and when I punched her she still followed me around, mooning, like a groupie at a hotel room door. Joe couldn’t stop laughing. Neither could Teresa, who accepted the rest of the meat with the graciousness of a tsarina who’d finally got her serfs back in line. Florian, like he’d been doing so much lately, turned away and slept some more without offering a word.

  No, we weren’t telling Teresa. Because she had that same smell on her skin too, that dead hoocow’s awful sterile rot, and until I had some answers to throw in her face I was pretending everything was fine.

  5

  Renee’s grave was already pristine, the birthing hole filled in and covered with grass too even and green to be real. There’s no gate guards, the alarm systems are defunct, the barbed wire’s busted full of holes, weeds everywhere, but by God they still get those gravesites looking swank and undisturbed as soon as they humanly can. Maybe it’s all people really care about, the handful that still come to visit. I hope the pay’s good, if you’ve got that job. I bet it is. Nearly as good as a thano lab guard’s. We crouched in a patch of woods above Calumet Memorial, waiting.

  I gave Renee a shove. “Why are you so sure they’re coming? And why today?” Why the hell I’d agreed to sit with her, of course, was another question.

  “I just have a feeling,” she said, a stubborn twist to her mouth.

  “Nobody’s coming. You’re just lucky you got buried instead of burned, and they never like it when people come out to visit, they don’t want the publicity if someone gets—”

  “I just have a feeling.” Her voice was a high, breathy singsong, air whistling through the space where I’d knocked out her teeth. “I just know.”

  You just know. That’s about the only thing you know, other than how to cry for food someone else hunted for you. Infant. “So what are they, stupid, drunk or suicidal? Because that’s the only kind of humans who come out here now, even in dayli—”

  “Oh my God, that’s them. That’s them. I knew it. There they are.”

  A blond woman, a tall balding man, a blond girl maybe ten or twelve came down one of the weed-choked walkways, looked cautiously behind and around them and clustered around the gravestone. The man knelt, crossing himself, then got up and clutched his wife’s hand, shoulders heaving. The girl wiped her eyes, put a pink spray of flowers in a little vase attached to the tombstone.

  “Jennifer,” Renee muttered, teeth worrying her lip.

  “Sister?”

  “Yeah.”

  The little girl sat down cross-legged, running one hand along the gravestone as she wept. Renee stared at her, hungry, mesmerized. What the hell good did this do, hankering after humans, acting sentimental like a human when that all had nothing to do with our lives, ever again? I turned away, half-hoping I’d find a stag or a mastodon or something lurking in the trees and have an excuse to go hunt it, and when I turned back Renee was watching me instead.

  “There must be someone you miss too,” she said, like a challenge. She could make more actual words than I could, tongue not nearly so swollen and rotted: Mussth be sssthum ye missssth.

  Didn’t they even notice that grass on her gravesite didn’t look right? Of course they didn’t. They didn’t want to. No hoo ever thinks one of theirs could become one of us.

  It doesn’t matter who I miss.

  I came back here once, about two or three years after I died, after Joe and I fought and I needed to think. And I got no peace because there lo and behold was my sister, there was Lisa, standing over the family plot with daffodils and a rosary. How old was she then, twenty-one, twenty-two?

  She was crying, teary shuddering sobs, and seeing it I felt happy, foolishly blessed. Never before had I had a single flower, no prayer cards or stuffed animals or little flags, no gravesite footprints, not a single disturbed pebble or grass blade to show that anyone remembered my mom and dad and I ever existed. No friends. No Grandma Porter or Grammy Sullivan, though for all I know the shock of this killed them both. No Jim, or at least if he came by he never left any traces. And Lisa, my sister, was always so timid and so scared of everything I just assumed she’d never dare come out here where there
’s so much crime, where the environment is so harmful, but she fooled me. Isn’t it wonderful when people do that, when you put all your faith in their being selfish and self-centered and not giving a damn and it turns out, all that time, you were all wrong? She’d be shocked to see me, scared at first, but maybe we could talk. Learn to talk, since I couldn’t talk the old way anymore.

  I thought, That’s just how stupid I used to be.

  I crept closer, and it was the smell that got her, of course. She frowned, put a hand to her mouth and turned very slowly, shoulders stiffened, like she knew she’d see something she’d never forget but couldn’t stop herself from looking. I stood there and stared straight into her eyes. “Lisa,” I tried to say. “It’s me.”

  If I could still talk like humans talk, it would have been different. I know it. But I was trying to remember how to sound out her name; I got out something like “Ruzzz . . .” and it happened: I saw recognition in her eyes, dawning disbelief and sick shock. She opened her mouth square and tight around a scream, a marionette’s jaw jerked to the ends of its strings, and then she let out a belch of revulsion, vomiting on her shirtfront, crying while she ran and running like I was Satan there to pull her into Big Catholic Hell. I hadn’t moved. I was still standing there, holding out my good hand.

  But that was all a long time ago, and now it makes me laugh—man, Renee, you should have seen the look on her face. Fucking hoos.

  “I saw my sister here once,” I said. “It could have gone better.”

  Renee stared at her hoo-family, not listening, then let out a teary gasp and lunged forward. I grabbed her arm just in time. “Get back!” I hissed.

  She fought me, with hard desperate fists.

  “Get back, you’re gonna—” I kicked her, pinning her down with my legs, and dragged her ass over head into the brush. As I put a wall of trees between them and us she went limp, sagging against my shoulder like I’d shot her.

  “I just wanted to see them,” she moaned. “Face-to-face. That’s all.”

  I wanted to hit her for being so foolish, but she was crying too hard. “Show some sense! Do you know what you look like to them now? What you are? What the hell are you—”

  “I want them back,” she sobbed, stretching out her arms. “I miss them. I just want to see them again. I just want them to see me.”

  Her parents were hugging, gripping as if they could bore through each other’s backs and grab hold from the inside. I clutched Renee harder.

  “Trust me,” I said. “No, you don’t.”

  “They’ll smell you coming,” I told her. “From far off. There’s nothing you can do about that. But the good thing is that what they’re smelling is dead flesh. You’re not a living threat. Y’see? So you can be right on top of them, sometimes, before they realize they’re in trouble.”

  I’d decided to try to cheer Renee up by teaching her to hunt for herself, no more begging infant favors from me or anyone else. We were deep in the quieter, more isolated woods on the park’s west side, far from the old highway we’d crossed to get to the cemetery: I needed to keep an eye on her. She stood there slumped against a tree trunk, arms crossed and half-blond, half-bald head bowed so I could see her scalp pulsating steadily with that big new undead brain underneath; no more pinky-gray matter, her new brain, a bleached-bone white instead. Our brains are larger than a human’s, more neurons. I read that somewhere, while I was alive. I bet hoos don’t like to contemplate what that might mean.

  “Of course, the downside is that sometimes scavengers go after you instead.” I sat down right there in the underbrush; I was still feeling a little tired and peculiar around the edges, hadn’t caught up on my sleep yet what with all her crying. “I got attacked by hungry yellow jackets once, in the middle of a nap. That was fun. Then one time this goddamned raccoon actually came up to me and crunched right down on my foot, I swear, like it was some sort of tasty scavenged snack and I—”

  “I feel like I hurt them so much.” She kept her head down, mumbling at her feet. Bare now, useless shoes kicked off, those ridiculous nylon stockings torn away. “I didn’t mean to. One minute I was there, and now I’m not.” She let out a laugh that sounded like a bad cough. “All of a sudden I’m not . . . a person, anymore. And I don’t feel human either. I mean, I feel so different. Already.”

  It was that dull, resigned sound in her voice that was making me nervous. They get this way sometimes, the ’maldies especially, depressed, eating only when they can’t control the urge, trying to make themselves just fade away. Then they get worked up all over again that it’s not that easy. Can’t handle what’s happened to them. There’s really not much you can say, honestly, other than get over it. All the rest of us did.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “You’re different.” I plucked at an early cluster of violets, running my fingers up the stems. “You also have to think about what to go after, along with how. Squirrel’s not much good, nasty meat and you’re hungry again an hour later. Possum’s good. Possum sticks with you. Ducks, I really like duck, if you can get one with the eggs still inside it that’s a nice—”

  “So how long before I turn into a giant pile of rot like all the rest of you? Or a skeleton, so this can all just be over?”

  Okay, don’t be too fucking rude or anything. My fingers twitched wanting to rip violets up by the roots but I’d done that once before when I was angry, killed a tree by kicking it, and I felt so bad about it afterward my stomach hurt. I pressed my palm flat against the ground instead, to ward off temptation.

  “You’re a rotter already,” I told her. “A few months, a few decades, it depends. You’ll get some extra time out of being embalmed, but not much. So don’t expect it. You’re in the initial decay. You won’t look all that different, for a while.” I showed her my feet, swollen up and turning bruised black. “Then a bloater, I’ve just begun that, that’s when the bacteria really start breaking your insides down—”

  She made a disgusted sound. I hate ’maldies, Joe was right to be pissed Teresa dropped this walking wailing wall on our heads. “—and you go all gassy. Like Billy. But sometimes you just bloat up a little bit before your flesh collapses, that’s what happened to Linc. Then you’re a feeder. That’s when the bugs start hatching, like with Joe. It doesn’t hurt.” Itches like a bitch, so I’d heard, though. “They feed for a long time. It’s like they keep hibernating and waking up on you, or something. When they’ve got nothing left to eat you’ll be in dry decay, like Sam and Florian. A dusty.” I pulled myself to my feet. “A skeleton. Then you can be happy.”

  No answer. I started walking off by myself. I wasn’t hungry just now, but her martyrdom had officially turned boring and I wanted to look for more violets. When I heard steps behind me I didn’t turn around.

  When Joe first showed me how to hunt I loved it, it was all this secret knowledge I hadn’t had before and he was the only one of the gang, even Florian, who got excited as I did to see me picking it up. We practiced on ducks, grabbing them from the nests and snapping their necks. Crunching down the egg clutch, shell and all, somehow felt weirder than eating the duck itself, spitting out bits of splintered bone and mouthfuls of feathers; I looked like a walking down comforter, afterward. The first group deer hunt where I brought down the stag, he looked so proud of me he almost did a little dance. Proud of me and himself, of course, as the one who taught me. We had fun. Glad I wasn’t too good for it, like some. Renee was walking in pace with me now. I ignored her.

  “So we don’t need to eat people,” she said.

  I could feel how twitchy and riled up she was, not just because reality had slammed her in the face but because that’s how we are: tenser than hoos, angrier, always standing poised on the precarious, crumbling ledges of our own tempers and any slight, any sideways glance, any fleeting sensation of pique or boredom or melancholy can shove us straight over. I shrugged. “I’ve never eaten one,” I said. “Not worth the trouble. If you wanna, though, you can find them. Just follow the road nort
h. Mags or Ben can tell you how to steer clear of the flamethrowers. It’s not so hard. And you get idiot hoos volunteering themselves all the damn—”

  “So we don’t have to stay out here.”

  “We don’t have to stay anywhere.” I headed for the clearing, spotting a little flash of faded purple. “It’s just . . . this is where we are. Don’t like it, go somewhere else.”

  That was the first real fight we had, Joe and I, when he wanted to take me hoo-hunting up in Whiting with Billy and Mags and Lillian. It’s the most fun you’ll ever have, he kept telling me, the best you’ll ever eat. I was sure he was right because he’d always been before that, but every time I thought about heading back to the human areas and lying in wait upwind and grabbing one of them to snap their neck and eat (but not right away—Mags and Lillian both claimed that the hormones they oozed when terrified made the meat taste that much better, a savory pants-shitting marinade), something in my chest and stomach clutched up.

  It’s like I was afraid, and if you value your eyes never accuse any of us of being afraid of the goddamned sniveling soft-spined little hoos firearmed or otherwise, but it wasn’t really fear. It was like my body’s version of that sound Renee made, looking at my gassed-up blackened feet, and something else, something bigger, having to do with knowing how scared Lisa got of strange noises in the house, how Jim sometimes liked to be reckless and go walking on his own, late at night. I kept coming up with excuses not to go and finally Joe and I just had it out for hours, he nearly kicked my chest in and I broke his arm, and he kept getting smack in my face weeks afterward with the same failed sales pitch, over and over, exploding into a rrrrwah! of frustrated screaming like a fist to the teeth. Over and over. I couldn’t fight him when he did it because I knew he was right, he’d been right about absolutely everything before, but I also couldn’t say yes; that nameless thing stomping its gaseous feet all up and down the length of my gut wouldn’t let me. Eventually, he just stopped asking.