Dust Page 9

  This wasn’t right. He had to wake up, eat, tell one of his convoluted stories about ghosts and talking animals and spaceships heavy with radiation and always, no matter what, us triumphant against the frighteningly or comically stupid hoos; he had hundreds of stories, some decades old, invented to while away the long tedious hours of watch duty or hunting or travel or insomnia. His prophecies, he called them. All true in some time or place. He wasn’t allowed to be a dry, wordless thing curled up in the dirt. I knelt by him, murmuring, “Florian.”

  I heard footsteps behind me but stayed turned toward Florian, stroking his skull; poor little skull, the bone flaky and almost soft beneath my fingers. “Florian?”

  “M’eech.” He moaned, his failed strength gathering like a fist in a single painful sound. He spasmed, gasping, and Renee and Linc were suddenly beside me slipping arms around his shoulders, holding him steady, and I kept rubbing his head as he kept repeating m’eech, m’eech, nonsensical but full of an urgency that sapped him.

  “Tell me,” I said, touching his face. “Slower.”

  His hands, all bone, clutched my shoulders hard as he yanked himself up for a single, agonized second and then fell back into our arms. “My beach,” he murmured, calmer now. Like he knew what was coming. Like he couldn’t wait. “Get—my beach—my lake—stones—”

  His lake stones. Those ridiculous mementos. He didn’t have the pouch slung around his waist, the one he always kept them in. I hadn’t even noticed. What had he done with it? Where had it gone?

  “Where?” Linc said quietly. “I’ll get them.” He would never make it back with them in time. None of us would. “Florian? Where—”

  “M’lake.” He grabbed at my arm and then his fingers seemed not to uncurl but collapse, reduced to random bits of bone held together at the knuckles by strings: a plastic hooskeleton, curled up back in its box after Halloween. “Lake—stones—m’beach—I’ll live—”

  Tremors rushed through his body, the dust of his flesh and bits of bone coming off in sooty patches like plaster from a ceiling. His skull opened, parting as easy as a split seed pod, and his brain pulsated, ready to burst open too; it shrank and withered with every new beat, the rhythm slower by the second. A wrinkled, grayish-white little cantaloupe. A dust-caked plum. A peach pit. His eyes rolled backward, and then just melted from their sockets. He’d always had kind eyes, Florian did, steady and gentle and when he looked at you, it was like he saw nothing else. Now they were just streams of thin jelly that trickled out over his cheekbones like tears, dropping one by one into the grass.

  Gently, we laid him back against the roots.

  Blinded, Florian trembled, his jaw opening and closing click-bang-click like he was trying to shout in pain; even knowing he wasn’t feeling a thing, brain shriveled up like that, I gripped Linc’s outstretched hand tight as I could. Florian’s arms were bare rattling bones now, his teeth going to dust as his jaw clicked harder and faster. His arms went to powder at the finger joints, wrists, elbows; his legs disintegrated, his lower jaw broke off with a clatter, a chunk of his skull and the peach pit of his brain fell into musty bits of nothingness. Then there was just the top part of his skull, empty staring sockets, and the long length of his spine half-buried in soft tan ash. I kept listening for the last faded, failing banjo notes, one lingering echo of him in my head, but when I wasn’t paying attention it had all just gone.

  Renee turned to me and Linc, stricken. “What do we do now?” she whispered.

  Nothing, Renee, nothing but wait for the rain to come wash away this ash. Wasn’t that a line in some movie? A guy wishing the rain would come through the city and wash him away? Some movie my dad liked. I couldn’t remember. What did Renee care? He was kind to her, the handful of days she’d known him, but she couldn’t miss him like I did. I didn’t know why she was even there.

  “What are we going to do?” she repeated, querulous. She just wanted to show off how human she still was, sniffling over someone she’d barely known and hadn’t loved. Fresh out of gold stars, sorry. Linc took my hand again and after one last look, we turned and walked away.

  “Don’t we at least bury him or something?” Renee shouted. “Don’t we do anything?”

  We kept on walking. She had to work to catch up.

  8

  Linc and I were on watch that next morning, a relief as he never expected me to talk. I told him I’d take the Sullen Trail to the underpass, not explaining I meant to check on our dead girl; he could beat bounds the opposite way. I moved slowly, letting my thoughts drift as the riverbank disappeared behind me, the trees became denser and the flat ground gave way to slow-rising hills matted with last fall’s leaves. Everything was quiet, all the sounds and smells what they should have been, and then I saw something that made me pause: a single young, slender ash, standing in a handkerchief-sized clearing, its trunk encircled with flat, colorful stones laid out in neat spiraling rows. Sitting near it, weighted down with ordinary forest stones, the old leather pouch Florian had always worn round his waist, looking bulky and bumpy like there was still something inside.

  I picked up one of the stones, a smooth slate gray, put it down, pulled the pouch free and took it in my hand. Heavy. I couldn’t remember seeing him wear it, I realized, since that day in the woods; it must’ve been too burdensome on his old bones, those final days. His stone collection, the water-polished bits of Lake Michigan he had carried with him over miles and decades without, he once told me proudly, ever losing a single one. Precious bits of junk. He’d never say where he buried them but he’d take them out and count them sometimes in secret, like miser’s gold. I’d never realized he had so many.

  He must have stuck them here meaning to organize or bury them or just look at them one last time, but never got the chance. Get my beach. My lake. That’s all he wanted, to look at his souvenirs one last time and think of the beach, the lake, the place he’d been really happy. But I didn’t get them. I couldn’t even be bothered to try.

  I sat down on the ground and made the sounds that had to pass for crying now, not touching any more stones lest they turn to dust too. I heard footsteps behind me and Linc was next to me then, holding something in his hands, and when I saw what it was I couldn’t get angry at him for following me. He sat next to me with the bit of skull cradled in his palms, that and a strip of dirt-stiff cloth torn from his own shirt, knotted into a makeshift bag around a handful of gray ash.

  “I had to go back to get it,” he said. “The rest disintegrated when I picked it up. The backbone. But this part looks pretty solid. Please don’t cry.”

  “Renee did.” I wiped my eyes. “She barely knew him, so why shouldn’t I? I didn’t want him to die. He wasn’t so old—”

  “Over three hundred? Not so old?” His voice was gentle, not yelling at me about hoo sentimentality like Joe would have. Like he already had. Yelling louder when I just walked away. “Almost a century as a hoo and two as one of us, that’s a lot of life.” Linc put the cloth bundle down near the stones. “A whole lot of life.”

  His shoulders sagged, chin dipping down toward his chest. A big black beetle emerged from the tangle of his black hair, crawling slowly down his shoulder; Linc was getting more of those lately, making the slow transition from bloater to feeder. I took the skull from him, its eye sockets softening and flaking away but most of the cranium still solid: our old man, all that was left of him. I been everywhere. Nothing left now but the pieces.

  Did they take my mother’s organs at the hospital? She had the back of her driver’s license signed, my father didn’t. I never even thought about it before. Pieces, all cut up. The thought of meat cutting up pieces of meat to stick in another carcass of meat, it gave me a little shiver of disgust.

  Linc touched my shoulder. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I never liked mentioning parents around Linc, considering that his killed him. It seemed rude. “I don’t want to put him here—this tree’s too young.”

  We found a big mature
oak with deep fissured bark—good scratching bark, Florian loved a nice back scratch—dug with our hands in the stiff dirt next to it and pressed the skull and the tiny bag of ashes into the ground. I picked up Florian’s old leather pouch, weighted with lake stones, and with Linc’s help tied it around my own waist; maybe he’d meant it never to be found, but he wasn’t here to tell me so. I felt a bit better, feeling that little weight, Florian’s weight, against my hip. Another stone in my pocket, pale brick with striations like mother of pearl. Linc took a couple, slate gray and deeper brick, and at the last minute I took a green one for Renee, consolation for missing the funeral. A pink one, in case she didn’t like that color. I thought of Florian freed forever from old age, fighting, Teresa’s incessant insane demands, and that also felt better but not really good. Good had snuck away while my head was turned.

  “I’m not really up for watch tonight,” I said, fingering the pouch, the stones in my pocket. “If it’s all the same to you, let’s just go back.” I laughed. “Teresa won’t be there to scream at us anyway, bet you anything.”

  Linc looked suddenly wary. “I know how you feel,” he said, slowly like I might jump on him, “but I really think we need to anyway.”

  I stared at him. “Because why?” No answer. “Because what have you seen, Linc?”

  No answer. I started to laugh. “Okay, so exactly how many of us know something weird’s going on and are pretending we don’t? Huh? Me, Joe, you—”

  “You didn’t say anything during the dance, Jessie, when those . . . things came along, so I thought—”

  “You saw that happen?” I shoved him. “You saw it. So why the hell didn’t you help me?”

  Linc looked stricken. “I thought you were just fooling around with them, before Joe chased them away. They didn’t seem dangerous, whatever they were, and Joe said it was nothing but later I thought, that’s still awful strange, maybe I should look around the woods and see if they’re—”

  “Yeah, well trust me, they’re stronger than they look.” I was furious now, at Joe for spreading his fairy tales and at Linc for swallowing them so meekly. “You saw it and you just stood there with your mouth open, now you’re Johnny on the spot a week after the fact? So what’re you gonna do if they ever do send the National Guard or Marines or something after us, whine about how you weren’t sure those were really flamethrowers until your own head’s a big pile of ash?”

  I shoved him again and he didn’t fight back, just curled up on himself looking ashamed; I glared at him with his beaten-in face and slumped shoulders and shuffling feet, his eyes the only sparked-up thing about him, and saw the shadow of his living self, shoved around so much and blamed for so many things that he expected no better. I hate people who can make you feel guilty when they’ve pissed you off, but hell, who else did I have to talk to now? Renee was too new, Joe and I weren’t speaking and I couldn’t trust anyone else to keep their mouths shut. One big happy family.

  “Come on,” I said, pulling at his arm. “You want a watch?

  We’re gonna look for a dead body that might never have been alive. It’s a lot more interesting than whatever Joe’s been telling you, so shut up and listen . . .”

  When I got to the part about Teresa and our new friends using the same perfume, Linc nodded. “She says it’s industrial solvents,” he said. “Don’t laugh—Sam and I went hunting once outside Whiting, stepped in a leaking barrel of something outside the refinery and our feet stank like that for a month. Lost a whole layer of skin, too. But that doesn’t explain her face.” He lowered his voice, as if the squirrels might go tattling. “She looks like she’s got . . . modeling clay or something on her face, I don’t know, like the decayed bits are filling in but it’s not real flesh. Just in the last day or two, you can really see it—and the bugs are crawling off her, like there’s nothing for them to eat anymore. Some of them just falling off.”

  I slowed my steps, thinking. Bugs falling away en masse was nothing strange, not when they’d finally stripped off the last flesh and left you a skeletal dusty—but Teresa wasn’t that much older than Linc, she still had flesh to burn. Unless that chemical smell, or taste, was driving them away. It couldn’t be plain embalming fluid, the bugs ate you anyway (a nasty surprise for some of the vainer ’maldies). So maybe just something industrial, something she stepped in or fell in that made her reek? And those creatures from the dance, maybe they were real undeads who’d been buried near a waste site, a paint factory, something that leaked nastiness into the soil and mutated them—I’d never heard of such a thing before, but you never knew. There were mills and factories and refineries and landfills all over the county, farms soaked in pesticide runoff, stenches bubbling up from clean-seeming soil that no human had the nose to catch. I was jumping the gun, thinking this was anything sinister. Shit happens.

  None of which explained her face. Or the blond girl, who I’d stake Joe’s life was real, corrupted living flesh.

  “So is this why you were so antsy to get me on watch with you, the other morning?” I asked. “To tell me about this?”

  “I wanted to hear what she’d told you. Solvents, or . . . some other excuse.”

  “Fuck-all,” I said. “That’s what she’s told me. But what else is new.”

  The concrete tunnel floor was soothingly dry and hard underfoot. Joe hadn’t lied, the body was gone; there was a lingering disinfectant-like odor where I’d laid her out, no other smell but moss and old graffiti paint. Past the tunnel were more woods and steeper hillocks, only another half mile or so before the trees abruptly gave way to the old abandoned cornfield—overgrown Living Pioneer park exhibit, or actual erstwhile farm?—thick with shoulder-high weeds and dead fallen stalks. Thick with rats too, we wouldn’t go hungry today. It was where we marked the end of our world. We’d never pushed through to the other side, but today Linc and I crossed the wood’s edge, shoved through the stalks and waded in, sniffing and listening and pausing like cautious cats. The papery husks sliced at us and I heard Linc wince and swear. Other than the robins and mourning doves, silence.

  Something small and skinny rushed past our feet: an actual stray, part of a rat wedged in its mouth. Disgusting stuff, cat meat, outside of starvation none of us would touch it. I ripped at the stalks, trying to cut a path, and heard the rustle of something bigger, a moaning sound beneath it abruptly cut off. The stench rose slowly like steam from a stagnant puddle, fresh flesh smothered beneath a stew of solvent, rubbing alcohol, paint thinner, polish remover, oil. A thick smear of rancid margarine. Old eggshells with the taint of sulfur. A high, tuneless melody circled overhead like a thin little bird as we pushed toward the heart of the field. The stench made us gag. I thought of puddles, fetid standing water full of hatching insects and floating islands of oil.

  There, in a chopped-out clearing, a dozen-some of our newfound friends. Some bluish-black, some outright rotten, some still tinged living pink or brown but sap-sweaty and stinking, all gathered round one crouched in the middle trying to scrape out a ditch with his hands. He kept digging, taking up the tiniest nail scrapings each time, while his friends swayed and rocked and tried to sing. It took me a minute to place the melody: “Amazing Grace.” I remembered his green sweater from the dance night; he was unrecognizable otherwise, his ashen skin now a head-to-toe bruise and his hands puffy and soft with the fingernails pulling loose.

  “Can you kill us?” he said, still with hoo-lips and hootongue but the words so soft and slurred I could sense the rot forming in his mouth. His face was slack and drooping like he’d been autopsied, muscles cut through with a scalpel. “We want to die.”

  “You’re not dead already?” Linc asked, voice slow and loud. “How long have you been here?”

  The others ignored us, moaning and scratching at the dirt; Green Sweater seemed to be the spokesman. Maybe the only one who could still talk. Talking like a human, all delicate articulation, but he still seemed to understand our gestures and grunts. “Make us dead like you,” he pleaded. �
��Or just dead. Help.”

  He staggered toward us, hands held out in supplication. One of the others picked up a rat, holding it struggling and squalling in her grip, and looked at it longingly and drooling and then dropped it again with a shudder. They were all shaking, from hunger for things like that squirrel that they couldn’t keep down or kill properly. They sang without words, each note a penknife nick to the brain; the stench was searing. They trembled when I looked at them, they trembled when I stepped back. What was this ruined mockery pretending to be us? Pity was impossible. My fist clenched with the need to smash it.

  “Why aren’t you dead?” I said, slapping Green Sweater’s outstretched arms aside. “What are you? Are you human?” No answer. “You’re not one of us! Tell me what you are!”

  “Why wouldn’t you dance with me?” he demanded, the tones of a betrayed lover. “Why wouldn’t you infect us? We want to be like you—or just die. You like killing things. Kill us.”

  I just stared. He shivered and snuffled, bewildered this meager bag of tricks hadn’t worked, then let out a frustrated hiss and grabbed me hard around the throat. Linc came staggering to the rescue but Green Sweater had weakened, gone soft and putrescent since the night of the dance, and it was easy to throw him to the ground, kick him again and again until he huddled up screaming in fear. His friends didn’t even turn around. His bones felt almost soft on impact, bendy as greensticks. I spat on him, a long black trail of coffin liquor.