Among These Bones

by Amanda Luzzader

  At last the truck slammed to the steeply pitched ground blow. The windshield disintegrated in a startling shower of pebbled glass and we shot down the precipitous grade, bouncing from our seats so violently that not only did our heads strike the top of the cab but our shoulders, too. All I could do to keep the truck from veering too far and flipping into a rollover was squeeze the wheel in my two small fists.

  *

  When I came to, there was the taste of blood in my mouth and the smell of burning oil. But it was quiet. The engine had stopped and there were no sounds of gunfire or other vehicles. All of the windows of the truck were broken and the pebbles of glass were all around—down my shirt, in my hair. I looked over to see Chase slumped in his seat—his eyes shut, mouth open.

  I turned and saw that the jump seat was empty. Gracie’s little lamb was there on the floor, but Gracie was gone.

  “Where’s Gracie,” I muttered.

  Chase opened his eyes and blinked.

  “Where’s Gracie!” I clicked the button to release my seat belt and tore it off. I shouldered the door open. Deep gouges down the side of the miserable vehicle told how we’d had absolutely no space to spare between the tree trunks. And the tires were not only completely flat but had begun to unravel. The truck sat in the dirt on its rims in the furrow-like tracks it left, looking like it had exploded into its component pieces and then clumsily reassembled. It steamed and hissed.

  “Gracie? Gracie!” I called.

  I searched through the cottonwoods looking for her—desperation flooding my mind as I feared what may have happened.

  Then I spotted a tiny bundle—so small—lying just beneath the line of trees we’d bashed through. It so easily could have been just a discarded jacket or bundle of clothes. But I knew instantly it was her.

  I raced over. Blood covered her face. Her eyes were open—but fogged over and glassy. Already the skin around her mouth had turned blue.

  Dead.

  I screamed and Chase was suddenly beside me.

  “You’ve got to save her,” I said, tugging furiously at his jacket. “Please, please, please. You’ve got to.”

  He knelt beside her, but then looked back at me. His eyes were wet.

  “No,” I cried. “Do CPR. Do something. She can’t be gone. No.”

  He turned back to her and gently picked her up—she was limp. Like a doll. And so tiny in his arms.

  He looked like he might say something, but then his chin crumpled and he pressed his lips together to keep from sobbing.

  I wanted to die. It hurt so much—seeing Gracie’s broken body and Chase’s sorrow. It was more than I could bear. All that had happened—it was too much. For as little as I knew Gracie, I loved her. Chased loved her. We all did. And now she was gone.

  “This is my fault,” I said.

  Chase shook his head. “No.”

  But I knew it was. Insisting that Gracie come along, pulling the gun on the Agency Officers, driving the car off a cliff—I had killed Gracie. I had killed her. A living angel of a girl.

  *

  It was dusk by the time Chase finished digging the grave. We had both cried on and off as he worked. Our eyes and noses were red. We didn’t talk much at all. I didn’t feel real. I felt like an outsider watching a horrible scene take place.

  We had no shovel and so Chase had loosened the soil with his knife and then cleared it away using an old board he found in the truck.

  “It’s not very deep,” he said.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said.

  He gingerly laid her body in the grave and covered it with her blanket.

  In the weak sunlight, he used the board to push the soil back into the grave. It felt wrong to be covering her up that way.

  Once Gracie was buried, Chase and I collected a few dozen large stones to cover over the grave.

  “I feel like we should say something,” I said.

  “What is there to say?” Chase asked as he stared at the pile of stones.

  What was there to say? I couldn’t make sense of it. Losing my memories, Arie, and now Gracie. Why? Why was it happening?

  We opened the boxes we had stolen from the Agency and box after box was filled with broken glass—the life-saving serum seeped out. Not even one dose had survived the chase. And so then it was all for nothing.

  “I should have stopped when we saw the Agency vehicles,” I said.

  Chase shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  “She’d still be alive then,” I said.

  “We’d have been arrested,” Chase said. “And with all that stuff in the back, we’d almost surely been shot.”

  “But she’d be alive.”

  Chase swallowed hard. “You don’t know that.”

  Rewind. Rewind. Nothing could fix this. Nothing. I considered the trajectory that had taken us to this moment and wondered where a change could have been made, where things could have been altered. There were so many forks in the road, so many chances. If only I’d known.

  I was disgusted with myself. What kind of person was I? I’d failed Arie. I’d failed Gracie. I’d failed Chase and all the others. What was I good for? Nothing.

  Chase got out his binoculars again and scanned the darkness. I sat in the rubble watching him.

  “We should go,” he said, lowering the binoculars. “They went to the bottom of the foothills. Probably looking for us down there, waiting for us. But they’ll make their way up here, eventually.”

  Chase got to his feet and slapped the dust from the seat of his pants. “Let’s get moving. Find someplace to bed down.”

  We walked down through the foothills toward town, but we found no homes. Soon the temperature dropped until the nightly hoarfrost appeared on everything, and so we settled for a small brick pump house in a ravine by a road. It had one door and two small windows, and there was nothing inside but an electric pump with its water pipes, which came up through the floor and exited through the back wall. I looked around. It was bleak and dusty but it was well sheltered from the cold, and there was just enough room for us to lie down.

  “Can we make a fire?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Chase. “A little one won’t hurt.”

  We gathered up some tinder and a few armfuls of deadfall. Chase produced a lighter and built a small fire beneath a window that swung open. In a few minutes the small space grew reasonably warm. I lay down with my head on my pack. Chase sat with his back against the wall, and his stretched-out legs almost reached me across the tiny room.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  His face was ruddy and somber in the firelight. “I’m going to miss her,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “Me too.”

  Chase sniffed and looked down. “Won’t matter in a few months. We’ll just forget.”

  I sat up. “What do you mean? What about the other serum?”

  “Well, you’re assuming that Ruby and the others managed to get away with their load of serum, and you’re further assuming that it won’t wipe our memories. And on top of that, you’re assuming that I’m willing to take it.”

  “If you’re not even going to take it, then why are you working with Ruby and the rest?”

  He shrugged. “That was before.”

  “So you’ll go back to the Agency? Forget again?”

  “You want me to remember this?”

  “We need our memories to be ourselves. And we need your memories. This is how you want to deal with it? Let them poison you again and erase anyone you’ve ever loved? Erase Gracie?” I could hear the angry growl in my own voice.

  I’d heard somewhere that anger wasn’t a primary emotion—that it was always cover for some other emotion—like fear or sadness—and I knew in my case it was both.

  “Why do you care?” asked Chase. “Why are you angry with me?”

  “It’s fine, Chase. Go ahead and start the new year with none of your memories. But what about what you know? What you’ve learned?”


  He sighed. Then he shrugged. “I apparently woke up with the ability to take care of myself. I assume that’s how I’ll wake up next time.”

  “Maybe you could use what you know now to help other people.”

  “How could I possibly use any of this to help other people? How does seeing that little girl’s face in my mind make one damn difference?”

  “Chase, if we can’t remember anything, then what’s the point? All we have is our memories. And even when they’re taken from us, we feel the people we’ve lost. You said it yourself. You lost someone—you don’t know who but you miss them.”

  “I want to live peacefully more than I want to remember,” he said.

  “Not me. I’d rather die than take that serum again. And you can’t forget anyway. You’ll always miss Gracie, even if you can’t remember her. You know that, right?”

  He looked down at the fire and said nothing.

  “I can’t just give away everything I know again,” I said. My voice caught and hitched. “I can’t forget—”

  “Them,” he said.

  We looked at each other across the fire for a while. It snapped and fumed.

  “Hell, I might even want to remember you,” I said. “But I can’t keep letting them take everything away from me.”

  We were quiet then. After a while we lay down with our backs to the fire. I took off my coat and draped it over myself for a blanket, then dozed a little. Chase shifted on the concrete.

  “Chase?” I said.

  “Yeah.” His voice was oddly clear in the small, quiet room.

  “Tell me the truth. Would you really be okay if you forgot?”

  “No, Al. I’m starting to think it’d be a big mistake to forget any of this.”

  CHAPTER 21

  In the morning we began the trek back to the amusement park. It was far enough that we agreed it’d take most of the day to make it back—maybe two. But we could drink from the river, and we both had a little food in our packs. Chase had his radio, but the battery was more than half expended.

  He radioed Ruby as we walked and told her about Gracie.

  “Dammit,” Ruby had said. That was all. We figured she turned off her radio after that. I could picture the rest of them hearing the news and the gloominess that would permeate the space. The anger and sadness and regret they would feel and that we still felt. Woolly, Carlos, even Glen—we all adored that little girl.

  I suspected they’d blame me, and I deserved it. Over their objections, I’d put her in harm’s way. I knew I could never make it up to them. It made my heart heavy.

  What had happened changed things between Chase and me, and it was the last thing I would have expected. I thought he’d want nothing to do with me, but instead it seemed to make us closer. His opinion was that Gracie’s death was a consequence of the toxic, dysfunctional world she found herself in. A hundred different perils awaited a child like Gracie in this world—being thrown from the truck was simply the one that claimed her.

  And passing through that heartbreak together—placing her in that shallow grave and then covering her with dirt—was something few others would be able to understand. He held my hand as we walked, helping me over fences and jumping across creeks.

  We had a new bond. It was a sad one, but it was strongly forged—as long we remembered.

  Still, we didn’t speak as we walked back, almost as though we were carrying out a silent vigil in memory of little Gracie.

  The trees along the path edged closer in, so Chase walked behind me, occasionally bumping into me.

  “I can’t get over thinking about it,” Chase finally said.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Is this how it was? When you lost your son?”

  I nodded.

  “Does it get better?”

  “No,” I answered honestly. “You just make room for it.”

  “You’re a good person, Alison. You’re nice. Everyone knows that. Makes me want to be a little nicer, too.”

  I didn’t feel nice. Not after all that had happened. Not after the poisons that had seeped into me—rage, vengeance, selfishness.

  “I don’t blame you,” said Chase. It was almost like he was reading my thoughts. “And I mean that.”

  The trees began to thin, allowing the sun to shine through. It warmed our faces. The air was crisp and fresh. The ground was soft with wet leaves and bark.

  “I think we want to head up there, cross the bluff, then back down into town,” said Chase.

  I nodded, and we went. The sun stood high in the sky now, and it grew warm. Winter birds darted among the bare branches of the trees, fluttering in petty disputes over the sparse forage.

  We crossed the river over a rotting footbridge, then pressed through a thicket of Russian olive. When we came through, we found ourselves at the edge of an enormous meadow of low, gently rolling mounds. With only patches of snow remaining, the meadow was grown with tall, bronze-colored grass that seemed to glow in the sunshine. Off in the distance a herd of doe deer raised their heads from grazing and watched us.

  “Wow,” I said. “Pretty.”

  The only sign I could see that people had ever been there were on the far edge of the expanse, where a few yellow-orange bulldozers and some trucks stood idle in the otherwise pastoral setting, and even the machines were grown around with weeds and saplings. It was some abandoned excavation now almost obliterated by nature. I walked into the waist-high grass and let the sun warm my face.

  “Al,” said Chase from somewhere behind me. “Hold up a sec.”

  I turned. Chase had stopped. His hands were on his hips, and he looked at the ground with a frown. He took a few steps, kicked at something.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  He bent down and wrested something from the soft ground. It was a sneaker.

  I chuckled. It was just so random. “What’s that doing here?”

  His eyes had darkened and his lips were pressed into a hard line. “On second thought, let’s go back and follow the river down,” he said.

  “Back that way?” I asked as I walked his way. “Won’t that take forever? And it’ll take us closer to the highway. There could be patrols.”

  “It’s just—”

  That is when I saw it. A human arm, and a hand. Just bones pressed into the earth and almost obscured by the grass. There were a few shreds of shirt sleeve, and a wristwatch, its metal parts covered with green and white scales and corrosion, loosely circling the bleached white wrist.

  Then I looked across the meadow, noticing for the first time that the rolling mounds were orderly, evenly spaced.

  “What is this place?” I said.

  “Let’s go back.”

  I walked on. The meadow whispered as wind shushed through the blades of grass.

  “Al, really,” said Chase.

  The ground was littered with tattered and half-buried artifacts. Bits of clothing, a pair of crushed eyeglasses, purses. And the shoes—hundreds of shoes. There were bones, of course, showing whitely in the sun. Femurs, ribs, the round caps of skulls—all of them disarticulated and scattered. My stomach twisted.

  We came to one of the mounds. It was only twelve feet tall. I crested it and counted ten more ahead in long rows. I raced over them with an urgent curiosity. The little herd of grazing deer fled into the tree line at my coming. Across the meadow there was another row of the mounds, and another beyond.

  Chase followed me, but at a distance.

  Then I reached the bulldozers and saw what they had excavated years ago. The contours of the grim work site were softened by erosion and the prolific grass, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. A shallow, empty trench and beside it a pile of pushed-up earth—bulldozers still standing by to push it back into place. The trench was thirty or forty feet wide and its length was three times that.

  On the near side of the trench the grass grew unevenly. I knew what I would find there, but I had to know.

  The remain
s of hundreds of people, lined up and stacked. Disturbed now by scavengers and the elements, but it had once been a wall of corpses awaiting interment in hasty, industrial graves, the final abandoned project of the society that was. The skeletons lay intermingled now, each bone belonging to all. Weeds grew up through eye sockets and between the startling white ribs, and all picked clean—first by birds and mammals, and finally by maggots and beetles and ants. So many skulls they formed a whited cobblestone path. So many toes and foot bones they lay piled like reefs of gravel. Child-sized skeletons in once-brightly colored coats were cradled in between the adults. Decaying clothing melted over them all, like dripping rags.

  Arie and I had visited their houses, ransacked their belongings. Street after street, block after block. And I’d wondered where the people had gone to. I looked back at the mounds I had crossed and the field of human debris beyond that—the remains of those who were dumped with even less care.

  They were here. At last I’d found them.

  I’d often envisioned them outside somewhere. Evacuated past the Zone boundaries, living lives that were at least somewhat normal and happy. And remembering. How lucky they were, I’d think. But they never got out. The dead lay here by the tens of thousands, so many of them that the toil of burying them had surely turned desperate and sloppy and enormously repugnant to those who were left to do it. And the open trench and pile of unburied dead was a final testament that it was a job that ultimately went unfinished.

  The rest of us, living in miserable circumstances without memories and only little hope of something better—it turns out, we were the lucky ones.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a person so long dead. Sometimes Arie and I would creep into an abandoned house and the putrid, musty scent of death would still linger delicately inside. People who hadn’t been found or processed. Once we saw the body of a man from the front window of his bungalow, before we had even tried the door knob. He was desiccated, eyeless, his skin a dusky gray, black mouth agape. His blond hair was standing on end—the shocking result of the way his scalp had shrunk and hardened and he slowly mummified.