“I’m not putting anyone through anything,” Stephen hissed back. “I’m trying to talk some sense into her head.”
“Calm down,” I said, as if anyone would listen. “Everyone just calm down.”
“You’re not my father,” Naomi reminded Stephen, almost shouting. “You’re never my father.”
“You’re right about that,” Stephen said, a false brightness in his voice that presaged trouble. “Because maybe if I were, you’d actually listen when I say that so-called dog is nothing you should be within a hundred feet of, much less trying to make some sort of pet, and if Lisa actually had half the sense Amy keeps telling me she does, then she’d—”
“Okay,” said Amy, stepping between him and Naomi. “We’re stopping.” She slid her arms from the limp, waterlogged rain slicker and threw it at Stephen like she was aiming for his face. “Right here. We can all dry off, and—”
“We have to keep moving,” said Lisa, swaying with her parcels, stubborn and angry. I’d step between her and Amy, if I had to. We’d have words. “I want to get to Cowles tonight.”
“Or what? Or your sister gets mad ‘cause her dinner got cold waiting, and kicks us all out?” Amy stroked Nick’s head with agitated vigor, almost scrubbing it, her fingers tight and tense. “She doesn’t even know we’re coming. She could kick us all out anyway. And some of us, you know, we can’t walk forever, we’re still just barely human enough that we need to—”
“Let’s just go.” Stephen had the rain slicker crumpled in a big deflated ball, fingers tugging its rubbery edges like a dog’s teeth gnawing a chew toy. “All right? Just forget I said a damned thing, and—”
“We’re stopping because I said we’re stopping, all right? God! You and Naomi and all of it, you’re driving me up a fucking wall, okay? Naomi can rest and try to play with Nick and Lisa can take a load off and everybody can just calm the hell down! Ten minutes, fifteen! Believe it or not, fifteen minutes off shift, we can still somehow get to the damned beach before tomorrow!”
Silence. As I reached up and pulled strands of hair away from her bad eye, Amy brushed a hand against her throat, her sliced, stitched-up throat that made me want to cry every time I looked at it. More of my own handiwork, in leaving her. And with every passing hour, she seemed closer and closer to forgetting it was even there.
“Also,” she muttered, “I really, really have to pee.”
The rain was dying down. We raised our arms to cool the sweat from those plastic slickers, scraped mud off our shoes, laid the slickers down as tarps over a wet tree trunk toppled on its side in a clearing of cottonwoods. Amy, Lisa, and Naomi all went off to pee. Stephen and I sat there on our log, knee to knee, in silence.
Remnants of houses fringed our patch of forest all around, standing like great grayish ruffles of fungi ringing an invisible oak. Every man-made surface had WARNING: CONDEMNED stamped over it in regulation waterproof red, the color still fresh and bright even after months, maybe years of hard sunlight, snow, rain. Nick sniffed all around our log and all around the dirt, and when he got to Stephen’s feet, Stephen drew back, rising abruptly from our perch.
“I’m gonna walk around a little,” he said, throwing a vague arm toward the waist-high backyard grasses. “Clear my head.”
He walked off without waiting for an answer. The rancor of just moments before had vanished, abruptly as a swift-moving storm passing over a prairie; he looked almost confused now, as if something outside him had been driving his temper and tongue. Maybe sharing close quarters with three women and a little girl he barely knew was a lot to ask of him, of any boy that age. Maybe getting killed and brought back as much as he had, every last cell grist for someone else’s mill, maybe it just screwed you up for good. It’d explain a lot about my own life, right after Amy was born, when I was trying so hard for her sake to be an ordinary average human. So much for that.
It was weirdly quiet here; no birdsong, no branches snapping in the wind, no soft scuttling sounds of animals in the underbrush. Everything was muted, silenced, as if the rain had been a heavy smothering blanket muffling the sky and ground. Nick ignored me and sniffed round and round one particular tree, probably chasing some elusive squirrel. Lisa had piled the backpacks at the end of the log, garish and bumpy like painted rocks, and I rummaged inside one for lunch: a bar of Honey-Kissed Bunches Of... some silage or other, best not to ask. The chocolate chips were like little bits of something charred, and the crispy rice had gone soft. Naomi came back, alone, and I handed her a bar of her own.
“Where’s Lisa?” I asked.
“Over there,” she said, angling her head toward the backyards as she sat back beside me and unwrapped her granola bar. Her face scrunched up suddenly in conspiratorial child-mirth. “She has to poop,” she confided, giggling a little as she tore clumsily at the paper. “I didn’t want to look.”
“I don’t blame you,” I said, shoving her shredded granola wrapper in my pocket. Something about the way she drummed her heels against the log, a slow steady left-right-left of pink and silver sneakers gone gray with mud, it reminded me of Amy at that same age: even her restlessness was thoughtful, methodical. As she made short work of the bar, Nick suddenly abandoned his tree and, as if he wanted to prove he wasn’t just angling for food (though really, I’d never seen him eat anything at all), sat himself beside Naomi and put his nose to her empty palm. Her whole face lit up with joy and she wrapped arms around his neck, hugged him hard, and was rewarded with a considered, careful thump of the tail. Whap against the ground, pause, whap again. Then stop.
“See?” she said, reproving and triumphant like I’d tried to come between them. “Nick likes me just fine. I know he does.”
Nick snuffled and scratched hard at an ear and let her hug him until she was satisfied. Those watery eyes of his, red-rimmed, always looking like they’re about to stream over with tears... I didn’t like him, I didn’t like Naomi touching him, but there was no reason at all she shouldn’t pet him if she wanted. Stick her finger right through that burnt melted hole in the photograph. “Nick’s a stray,” I said, not using the word I was really thinking. “We don’t know what he’s like with people, or if he’s used to them. Stephen was just afraid you might get bitten.”
The look of scorn Naomi threw me might’ve made me laugh, if things were different. “He’s jealous of Nick,” she said, scratching the dog behind the ears; whether or not Nick was used to humans, she was definitely accustomed to dogs. “He thinks Amy loves Nick better than him. And he’s scared of Nick. He’s scared of everything, but he thinks nobody can tell.” Her face fell, as her fingernails patiently worked Nick’s fur. “I don’t know why he’s so scared. Stephen was nice to me, before. He brought me extra food, and helped me hide when Papa Billy was angry at me. Now all of a sudden, he’s mad at me all the time.”
Papa Billy. Amy had told me about Mags and Billy, about how Lisa had claimed Naomi as her own. She seemed to make a habit of that, this Lisa, with other people’s daughters. Mama Mags, who my Amy killed in the Prairie Beach woods, and Papa Billy, her furious, grieving, monstrous widower—had they been little Naomi’s real parents? Alive and human, once, then turned by the plague? I couldn’t ask, didn’t want to know. She saw it all happen yesterday, little Naomi, and there was nothing we could do about that. She saw me like that, too, just yesterday, with the blood of supposed fellow humans all over and in my mouth. Feverish with biting and tearing flesh, flushed with a glorious liberation from scruples and care and letting bygones be. It had been there inside me all along, that need, that instinct, even as I tried so hard to appear normal, human, to be patient, methodical—
“Sometimes,” I said, “people get angry when they’re afraid. They say things they wouldn’t if they were thinking straight. Stephen’s been very afraid. Like we all have. It’ll all be better once we get to Cowles.” I didn’t believe that, not really, but I had to. “Everyone will calm down again.”
Naomi wriggled on her plastic cushion, hopped o
ff the log, and dragged away the draped slicker to settle herself on the wet, rough bark. The damp of the tree trunk seeped right through her pink corduroy pants; Lisa wouldn’t be at all happy when she saw it, but we didn’t have any changes of clothes. “I had a bad dream last night,” Naomi said. “It felt like I couldn’t breathe.”
I put a hand to her forehead: only as warm as it should be and the damp was from rain, not fever-sweat. “Are you getting a cold?” Just our luck if that happened, but then, it was something of a miracle none of us had gotten sick yet.
“I mean in the dream. Not for real.” She was drumming her heels again, slow, steady, right and left. Nick sat at her side, watery eyes trained on her face. “We were walking to the beach, like we are now. Then this giant dark thing, like a shadow, or a big hand smushing an anthill, it came down on top of everything and it was like we were the anthill, and I couldn’t see or think or breathe at all. In the dream. Then I woke up.” Her feet pedaled faster. “I think Amy is right—that man who was following us is a monster. Even though you can’t see him, he’s still there. But Nick saved us.”
Her eyes studied the muddy ground, a thick dead dirt-caked stick arching up like a tiny dinosaur struggling in its tarpit. “Stephen, in the dream, he was fighting with someone I couldn’t see, and he fell over covered in blood. But Nick saved him. Nick can fight better than he can, maybe that’s why he’s scared of him.”
She opened her fingers, exposing a sticky last remnant of granola, and held it out to Nick. He didn’t even sniff it, and finally she gave up and shoved it in her own mouth. I craned my neck toward the backyards, but nobody was in sight. Where was Lisa anyway, gastric call of the wild or not? And Amy? Billy had already attacked her once; there was more than one monstrous thing that might be following us.
“I’ll be right back,” I said. Nick wouldn’t leave without Amy, that much at least I could say of him. “Stay here with Nick—”
“You should pee now, if you have to,” Naomi advised me. “Lisa said we’re not stopping again until we get to Cowles.”
Lisa can quit thinking she’s in charge of this expedition, sister or no sister. Even if she stepped up for Amy when I wasn’t there.
The thickets of trees diminished to a thin scrim as I walked toward the lost backyards; Stephen was right there, walking back and forth in the grasses a few yards away, lost in thought. He wouldn’t leave here without Amy either. Despite the rain, there were tiny patches of dead grass everywhere I looked, poking up in the midst of deep green like wheat stalks, like the islands of sharp-edged beach grasses that broke up the Lake Michigan sands. The thought of Prairie Beach—not the lab, but the land around it—gave me a pang and I shoved it aside, concentrating on the thought of Cowles Shores. I hadn’t visited there since my first civic security training exercises, when Amy was barely a year old. At the farthest edge of the trees was a little spot of light brown, another of strawberry red: Lisa and Amy, sitting shoulder to shoulder with their backs to me down in the long grass. I walked closer.
“...like even when I’m right here, sitting and talking, I’m always somewhere else.” Amy’s voice was low, clear, carrying back to me where I stood still in the trees. “I mean, not even like I’m standing aside watching myself, even though it can feel like that, it’s more that I’m always two places at once.” Her hand snaked up, tugged at the grass stems. “And I don’t know where the other place even is.”
“Nobody’s thinking right anymore,” Lisa said. Her consonants snapped and her vowels scratched glass even when she tried to keep it low; even Naomi sometimes winced at the sound of her voice. A strange plague-remnant. “The entire world’s just been upended, everything’s changed-everything you’ve seen—that wasn’t even a year ago, Amy. Not even one year.” Silence. “And barely weeks since...”
“Since I killed Ms. Acosta.”
Those words sent a hot unpleasant thrill through me, listening: not horror or agony at the confession, but a ferocious desire to stand between her and any accusers, snarl them into silence. Don’t you say a word against her, Lisa, not one word.
“Since you killed Ms. Acosta,” Lisa repeated. Her hesitation hung in the air like rain. “Amy, when people are pushed to their absolute limits, beyond their limits, sometimes everything just—”
“Have you ever just wanted to die?”
The heat inside me pooled, liquefied: a sickening sensation like my insides were a wax candle, bits melting in drips and streaming away.
“If you keep talking like that,” Lisa said, and for once the nail-pounding harshness of her words was a relief, “or thinking like it, I’m going straight to your mother and—”
“For God’s sake,” Amy said, almost wearily scornful, “I’m not going to kill myself. I swear. On your stupid rosary beads, I swear it.” Her hands reached back, tugging at handfuls of ponytail until a slipping elastic inched back in place. “After everything that’s happened, it’d be pretty stupid to do that—there’s no point. Besides, I don’t want to be—have you ever wanted to die?”
I waited.
“Many times,” Lisa said. “Even if you don’t count right after Karen died—a lot of times.”
“So before the plague, too?”
“Before the plague, too.” Her laugh was a convulsive bark that made my whole skin prickle. “Especially before the plague.”
A bird called from up overhead, the trees just behind me: something whose crooning chirp started out low and rose high and then swiftly muted itself again. I didn’t know what it was. Then I heard the croaky braying of a crow, a few yards away. The first bird’s voice spiraled higher and higher once more but then, before that second low note, it abruptly stopped singing. No crow sounds, either. Just silence.
“I don’t want to die,” Amy was saying, calm and unhurried like she was working it all out for herself, out loud, for the first time. “I never wanted to die, I mean, I wasn’t afraid of dying, exactly, but I never—when I look at other people and how they live, how they’re alive, it’s like they’re doing it in a totally different way and I’m just standing there, watching them, imitating.” Her arms stretched over her head, each hand grasping the opposing elbow. “And it’s got nothing to do with the plague, or everyone dying, or what Natalie did—or even what I did. That’s the thing. Like, ever since I was born, I’ve been... traveling. Somewhere else.”
The sadness unspooling between them both was like a thread, a spun ribbon, knotting them together in a great capacious net while the rest of us swam free outside. Except I knew the feel of that net too, the texture of that rough rope cutting into my hands; I’d almost swear I’d known it in the ghost times, the most-forgotten times, before the laboratory became my whole life. But what could I have ever said to her, my own daughter, if she’d confided all this in me? No words in any language are as cloying, self-serving, as selfishly solicitous as I know just what you mean.
Lisa shifted where she sat, tugging on another strand of hair. It was a miracle she hadn’t pulled herself bald. “Look, Amy, everything that’s happened since—”
“It’s got nothing to do with that.” She didn’t sound angry, or frustrated that Lisa didn’t know just what she meant; in fact, there was almost a buoyancy to her words now, the ballast of confession tossed overboard. “It’s from a long time before—you can’t tell my mom. Okay? She’d just start in again about how it’s all her fault and if she’d just stayed—well, it was okay before, you know, I mean years ago, because it really was only her and me and we almost never talked to anyone else. I didn’t even really know enough other people to feel different. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know how you talk to people, how to get friends. Then I learned how to pretend at it, use their language, but—”
“Lots of people have trouble making friends,” Lisa said. “It doesn’t make them freaks.”
Silence again, like Amy was thinking that one over. Or just being polite. “But it does make them friendless,” she said. “Okay, see, I can see how all
of you look at Nick, I’m not blind, but I spent all that time running away from him and now it’s like he’s the only real friend I ever—”
I’d taken a step closer, then closer again to hear them better and I startled some large possum-like thing that went scuttling off in a crackling volley of dry twigs. And there I was, nothing between them and me but a half-dead lilac bush. They both turned swiftly and Amy’s face shut up fast and tight with suspicion, like in the old days whenever Mike’s sister tried kissing her hello; it shoved me farther away than the strongest set of hands. Lisa looked from Amy to me, then back again, waiting virtuously for her cue.
“I got worried about you,” I said, my voice hardening as I turned to Lisa. “When Naomi came back all by herself.”
Lisa gave me this tight little nod, her eyes searing me with a clean defiant heat of don’t even ask, and suddenly all I could think about was what Naomi said, about how Lisa’d had to shit. Had she dug a hole and buried it, like you were supposed to do camping, or was it lying somewhere away from here for the flies to find, or had this whole privileged conversation happened right in the same spot, Lisa’s shit sitting right at their feet? I couldn’t smell anything, but then Lisa’s shit didn’t stink anyway, now did it. My skin prickled harder and my heart was beating in a bad way, sharp and drum-tight, and as Amy got to her feet, I pivoted and turned away—
A possum. The thing that gave me away was a possum, I’d guessed right. Now it lay curled up not five feet away from me, dead. Playing possum. It had to be from how I’d startled it. But I’d seen so many dead things back at the lab and I just knew, I knew looking at it; it’d died quietly right beside me, and I hadn’t sensed a thing. It lay cradled in the mud and leaves and a damp gray netting of dead branches—so many, like someone had been gathering tinder and then dropped armfuls without ever building the fire. Something touched my arm as I stared at it and I jumped, then saw Amy standing beside me, her apprehension turning to fear.
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