Dust Read online

  So where have you been the last few nights, Joe? You and Teresa? You never did answer that question.

  6

  An entire sunrise to sunset of passed-out cold, undisturbed sleep and I felt halfway like myself again, even though Linc was still acting cool and distant and Joe silent and brooding and Florian peaked and weary and nothing, not fresh meat or new violets or the comforting dark of the nighttime, could coax Renee from her funk of misery. I was going to grab Joe for watch duty, tell him what Florian and I saw, and smelled; all else aside it’d distract him, he needed some kind of diversion from whatever’d just jumped into his grave. I was going to do that, but there was a dance that night. Nobody ever announces one; you just wake up, same as always, and feel in the marrow of your bones that it’s the time and the night. And you can’t skip out on one, you just can’t.

  It was a cool, fresh-smelling evening. When twilight faded Joe rolled over, half asleep with one arm still around me, and sniffed at the air; there was something quiet, expectant, about the sky and clouds, and seeing and feeling it we all turned as one toward Sam. “Almost,” Sam said, an ear cocked to the wind, seamed face breaking into a rare smile of joy. “Almost.”

  Before he wandered our way Sam lived in Kansas, on the outskirts of Lawrence, and he still gets sentimental over the dances he and his old gang used to have. There was an abandoned, run-down amusement park on the edge of town where gangs from miles around would meet every time the spirit moved, everyone’s mental music running together in a slurry of sound that coalesced into ceaseless waltzes and minuets; all fights and rivalries set aside, they would dance until sunlight and exhaustion made them stop.

  Sam never talked about his old gang, or what happened to them—There was this new girl, he said once, and that was all—but he remembers it so well and dances with such feeling that it’s always him who says when the time is right, when it’s time to rise to our feet and become one. We lay there waiting, prickles of electricity all down our shoulders and spines, while Sam stared up at the rising moon and Joe, beside me, put aside the brooding and held his breath.

  Everything, everyone had gone unnaturally silent.

  “Now,” Sam said, still staring at the sky as he rose. “Now.”

  Of course now. Could it be any other time than now? We shuffled to our feet, hunting hunger forgotten; this was a far more urgent need. Joe nudged me and pointed to Renee. “Go take care of her,” he muttered. “She’s spoiling it.”

  Renee lay knees to chin, looking sullenly into the distance. All this fuss over a family who’d faint if they saw her now—I kicked her until she stood up, pulling her into the rapidly forming circle.

  “I’m tired,” she said, shaking off my hand. “I want to rest.”

  “Too bad. Just wait.”

  She was twitchy with need like we all were, I could see it, but she didn’t know why. “Wait? For wha—”

  She stopped talking when she heard it. Piano, banjo, cello, violin, harpsichord, trumpet, sax, electric guitar, all those clashing and chaotic brain radios melting together into something that flowed lightning-fast from Sam, to Mags, to Teresa, to her, to me, round and round the circle. It gathered strength and energy as it traveled, electricity singeing flesh, and together just by standing there we fashioned a tune from our collective head never heard before by anything, living or reborn, one that never, no matter how much we wished it, would ever be heard again.

  The music is different for every dance, wild and melodic and gorgeous and elusive; you try to remember it, hum parts of it a week or a month later, and it’s all gone save the memory of its beauty. There are other times when we’re all in some semblance of mental harmony, during a good hunt or a good feed or when a dream of the peaceful underground passes among us in our sleep, but never like this. We weren’t just choosing to play together; something else was playing us.

  Renee’s eyes widened, feeling it, and she turned to me like a hoo-kiddie ready to ride the big roller coaster. She looked so small and thin and shadowy under the moon. I pushed her in Sam’s direction and she lunged forward with arms outstretched, a Frankenstein stagger, and Sam caught her hands and spun her dizzy. Our mutual song, traveling shrill and high as a winter wind on this mild spring night, slowed and thickened into a waltz so simple and plaintive that every note was a separate, irreparable heartbreak. Florian snuffled, melancholy at the sound, and Mags and Joe wept. Renee stood mesmerized, letting herself be spun.

  Sam slipped an arm around her waist: step-one-two, step-one-two, Ben reached for Mags, Joe for me; Florian was a serene satellite, humming and shuffling around the spinning planets of Linc, Billy, Teresa. Perfect rhythm, perfect harmony, perfect unison. Renee whirled away, grabbed my hands, swung me right back round to Joe. Somewhere out there a hoo turned restlessly in his sleep, her sleep, dreaming of the calliope playing endlessly in some faraway carnival.

  The music grew higher, sharper, the waltz more frenetic; we turned again and again around one another, rotating from night to day to night around each other’s perpetually shifting suns. The calliope notes only we could hear drowned out all distraction, stifled caution. I kept my eyes tightly closed and felt my feet lift free as I whirled from hand to hand without plan or thought, the better to take in the whistling winds, the birds’ night cries, the chitter of insects in the brush and the crawlers feeding slower than slow on our own dead flesh, the whole turn and tide of dying and rotting and earth-nourishing life and that smell, that lovely flesh-rotten chemical smell like formaldehyde except stronger and sterile like bleach diluting blood—

  The smell made me open my eyes, that and a hand firmer and fleshier than any of ours clutching mine. I had wandered away, been carried away to a circle all my own, and the stranger dancing with me had sickly bruise-blue skin, a dazed expression and beads of sticky, slow-moving sweat congealing on his bare forearms like pine sap. Three or four others like him surrounded me, performing a mechanized stumble left, right, left and back again; their music was a shambling lampoon of ours, each tuneless note snot-sticky as the sheen on their skins and tense as guitar strings tightened to snapping point. They’d lurked on the perimeter of our dance, they must have done, awaiting their opportunity, and I jumped right into their arms and nobody even saw me go.

  I pulled away, shouting, and they pressed in with shoulders, elbows, stinking skin—intact, fleshy, springy human skin—and formed a tight, insistently moving circle to keep me close. I pushed back, gagging on the smell, and they pressed closer, ashen faces and unseeing eyes dull as grimy glass shards in a gutter. They didn’t see me. My gang didn’t hear me. I threw my weight forward, trying to break through their Red Rover grasp, and slipped on a patch of mud. I was falling, they were closing in tighter. I flailed unable to right myself with only one arm and they grabbed me, squeezing tight like toddlers clutching a kitten, tighter—

  The circle wavered and broke as Joe barreled in, striking at random with fists, feet; they released me, crying with pain. Joe hit harder. They had human blood, bright red, congealing the second it hit air. We yanked them upright and shoved them in the direction of the parking lot; they inched like failing windup toys back over the lot and toward the empty road, voices rising and falling in unmistakable hurt and confusion, like dogs wanting to play. We spat at them, bared our teeth, until they vanished from sight.

  Nobody else had heard a thing, or if they had still couldn’t tear themselves from the dance; I could hear the real music again, but it was ruined. Joe led me into the trees, out of earshot. “You okay?”

  I nodded, shaking. “It’s nothing,” he said, rubbing my back. “Just some gang rejects from somewhere who heard the music way off, wanted a party—they’ll wander back to the city, get an even bigger ass-kicking soon enough.” He grinned. “C’mon, Jessie, they were pathetic. You have to admit it’s kind of funny.”

  I waited for laughter to bubble up and banish fear. Joe was waiting too.

  “Those things,” I said, “whatever they are, they were b
reathing. I felt it. And they bled red. And the smell, I know you caught it, like—”

  “Jess? No offense, but you need to cycle down.”

  “—like antiseptic and bug spray, not even honest formaldehyde, and don’t tell me to cycle down. That hoocow who drove her car in here? Florian and I found her wandering in the woods, looking just like that bunch, exactly like—and she died right in front of us. I mean, she wasn’t really alive, and she wasn’t really dead, and then she wasn’t anything at all.” I growled at a raccoon, who fled back into the brush. “Her body’s beneath that old underpass, you can see it yourself.”

  Joe’s expression had turned wary, that look you give someone who’s raving about how the Jews shot JFK or Clinton was secretly elected pope. “Jessie, remember I was on watch last night with Billy? We went through the underpass, out to where that old cornfield is, and there’s no body anywhere around there. No smell of one either.”

  “You can’t have missed it. She had blond hair, her skin was all sticky like—”

  “Jessie, I didn’t see a damned thing—and if you don’t believe me, does this sound like something Billy would keep to himself? You know what a mouth he has. Ask him.” He gave me a shove. “Well? If you’re so sure I’m lying, go yank him out of a sound waltz and ask him!”

  Could Florian have moved the body, got nervous and decided to hide it better without telling me? That wasn’t like him, though, even if he’d still had the strength. I was somehow sure no animal would touch it. Which left only two possibilities: Joe was lying, or someone took the body away. My money was on Teresa, and would Joe cover for someone who’d humiliated him like that? Never. Which made me feel no better, because it meant he was in fact ignoring his own senses and acting like a fool. I couldn’t figure this out with the help of dying old dusties and stubborn fools.

  I shoved Joe back, a lot harder. We tussled for a while, more feet than fists, and when he got me pinned his mood lifted and his face grew thoughtful. “Of course,” he mused, “the real question is how Teresa ended up with that stink all over her too—”

  “So you did notice?” I sat up, squirming away from his grip.

  “She had her hand wrapped around my throat, how could I not? I thought maybe it was from dragging that ’maldie back, but it didn’t seem like an embalming smell. I didn’t know what it was.” He shrugged. “Hell, maybe the Rat Patrol knows something about it—Billy does walkabout with them a lot, you know, goes hoo-hunting with them, he says she wants to try to join back up.”

  Joe and Teresa both used to be in the Rat Patrol, before my time, or so they said. The Rat was the largest gang in our neck of the woods, hundreds, sometimes thousands of members, all constantly trawling the unsecured neighborhoods of Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, South Chicago, Whiting, Marquette, Calumet City, Lansing, Harvey for all the hoomeat they could stuff down their throats and fighting to kill each other just for fun; hardly mattered if they stomped a dozen of their own at a time into the dirt, there were always more hungry recruits. Every now and then a handful wandered out to the countryside, hung out with us and hunted deer for the sheer novelty, but mostly they had far better things to do. I don’t know when or why Joe left the Rat. I’d always had this feeling I shouldn’t ask.

  “What the hell would they want with her?” I demanded. “They can do better on a bad day.” They sure as hell never wanted me, not with my hoo-shyness and deadweight arm. Or any dusties. Or know-nothing ’maldies. Or a loudmouthed bitch who won’t even hunt for herself anymore. “She can’t think she could challenge Rommel as leader, even she’s not that crazy—”

  Joe shrugged. “You sure about that? All I can say is, good luck to the dumb bitch if she tries.” He snorted at the thought. “But that’s her lookout, no point in getting worked up about it. Or about some weak little ’maldie shitheads stumbling into our turf—that’s probably what we’re smelling anyway, all that wood alcohol and crap they shoot into their skin. Hell, maybe we should both go after them, huh? Ask ’em to take that Renee off our hands?”

  He smiled at me, the issue settled. I twitched, feeling beetles creeping over my skin, but it was just nerves. Joe was such an ant farm you felt itchy just looking at him.

  “You’re wrong, Joe,” I said. “I don’t know what all this is about yet or what those things are or what the hell Teresa’s really up to, but you’re wrong.”

  Joe slammed his fist against a rock. It cracked down the middle like spring ice. “Okay, so what’s your brilliant theory?

  Huh? You’re so full of superior wisdom, except you crap yourself when a couple of arm-flapping retards come wanting to play—”

  I spat at him, sticky black like a tobacco plug gone rotten. “You’re talking brain damage? That’s just rich. I know what I saw and you know I’m right, you just can’t stand that I could figure anything out or even find my own ass without your help—”

  “You can?” He struggled to his feet, yanking me upright with him and then letting my hand slide out of his like it was something diseased. “So if you can take such good care of yourself, what am I doing ‘saving’ you from something a kiddie could kick to dust?”

  “What do you want from me? I didn’t even see them until—”

  “Yeah! Exactly!”

  “Well, if you think I’m that worthless, just don’t fucking bother!” I aimed a hard kick at his leg. “But if that’s how it’s gonna be, don’t try to hide behind me or push me into challenging Teresa because your time’s running shorter and you’re scared and you think you can’t fight like you used to, or maybe you’re just too damned lazy to get off your ass and do it yoursel—”

  He pushed me so hard I went flying backward, stumbled over an exposed tree root, fell on my side sliding against rough bark and a cluster of pebbles so the skin from shoulder to hip scraped clean away. I lay there, clench-toothed and dizzy, and when the ground stopped tilting long enough to let me sit up again I saw Joe looming over me, arm held out, the old look in his eyes of genuine remorse mingled with the stubborn certainty that he’d been right all along, that he really was sorry for what he’d done but mostly very sorry I’d ever provoked him into doing it. I hated that look. I hated that I could never even see the sorry part of it anymore, the part that really mattered, all I could see was how it was still always me that was wrong and him that was right. Always. No matter what.

  I turned my back on his outstretched hand, getting up again without his help; I stood there clutching a piece of broken rock, my knuckles slowly pulverizing it to powder.

  “Just go back to the dance,” I said, and walked away.

  I went slowly, giving him a chance to follow, say he really was sorry—for all of it—but when he didn’t I turned and tracked a bend in the old nature trail, seeking out the little wooden observation deck built over a bit of riverbank. You could look without being easily seen out across the river toward the gristmill and the cottonwoods, as far as the footbridge leading to the gazebo. I could still pick up the strains of music, merry and supremely indifferent, feel my legs moving in unconscious time but I was damned if I’d go scuttling back. Maybe some of my new friends would, dozens of them I hoped, so Joe could find out firsthand how frightening it was to have something neither living nor dead nor properly in-between pressing in on you, filling your nostrils and mouth with a stink of skin scrubbed like a floor, shocking strength in its sterile unrotted muscles but only dust and hollowness behind its eyes—

  Something was crossing the footbridge from the gazebo side, so thin and tottering that even from this distance I recognized it as Florian. Dust and hollowness. He took a few steps and stopped, clutching the railing like a living old man gasping for breath, and as I stood up in alarm he seemed to gather himself, moving with renewed speed into the open field past benches lost in swaths of grass. He picked his way toward the rise of a little hill right near the old sugaring shack. It took him so long. The dance had drained him dry.

  As he came closer, pushing himself to move just a few mo
re feet and then a few more, I felt the ache in my own arms and legs, a little clay ball surrounding a hard painful stone. Finally he curled up on the hillside, wedging himself beneath another rusted bench, and almost instantly fell asleep, alone and unmissed. He trembled in his sleep. He got tremors a lot now, he said it was just old age, but from where I sat he looked like a twist of dried-out paper folded into human shape, hiding and shaking with fright at the prospect of sharp scissors, a lit match, a good gust of wind.

  I watched him for a long time, ignoring the fading notes of the calliope, and when my chest grew tight from sadness I lay down on the deck, my back to him, and fell asleep.

  BOOK TWO

  DANSE MACABRE

  7

  Florian died three days later.

  Once he found that little hillside spot, the night of the dance, he never left it; he just lay curled on the grass, sleeping, rocking back and forth, singing softly to himself. “Go along, pets, go ahead. I’m tired,” he’d whisper, every time we went to hunt. We brought him back fresh deer meat that he nibbled like candy and never finished. His brain radio was soft and fading, you had to strain to hear it, but it was still there: banjo, a merry strum when he was in his prime but now slow plucks of weak, tired fingers on strings he’d forgotten how to play.

  A slow banjo is the loneliest sound in the world.

  The sun was just coming up and we were wandering back from a hunt, drunk on blood and heavy with meat. We went past the gristmill and sugaring shack and up to the little hill and as we got closer we saw no movement in the winter-browned grass, felt only silence. My stomach lurched.

  Teresa stood there for a moment, then walked away. Considering everything that happened later I should be fair and say it was our way, we left each other alone and in peace when it was time to die again, and Billy and Ben and the rest all followed her but I couldn’t do it, Florian I couldn’t leave like a dead raccoon on the road shoulder. I pushed my way through the grass and found him huddled knees to chin in a nest of tree roots, his jaw clicking in slow mute taps. He stretched suddenly, rolling flat on his back, and clutched at the grass stems like he might float away.