Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  “He’s right,” he called down to us. “Florian, the incredible shrinking man? The fucking coward who shows up for nothing and can’t say shit? He’s right. He can’t stop what’s coming. You can’t. Nobody can. It’s heading straight for us, coming right down the road.”

  He laughed aloud, a sound of genuine, almost sweet-natured joy. “And I can’t wait.”

  FIFTEEN

  NATALIE

  Head hurt. Back hurt. Everything hurt.

  I was in the gray house with the red mailbox, me and Janey who was in a bed beside me, curled up and quiet. The palsied old man, the one who’d shouted at Billy, he was in the bedroom across the hall; the girl with the baby kept going in and out, talking to him, from the faint bits I’d heard I’d guessed he was her grandfather and he was dying. His heart, they couldn’t find any more medication for it even though Russell and the others went looking. He seemed calm and resigned to it all and his granddaughter wasn’t wailing or carrying on either—she was smart enough to realize he was lucky. That she was lucky too, whether she wanted to admit it or not, only one dependent mouth left for her to feed.

  What would it be like, having family that looked like you and sounded like you, that was always just there? Who were all part of each other because part of their mutual flesh was one and the same, shared, divided? The thought of it was like longing, but gave way just as fast to a shiver of true disgust. Flesh shared, split, a lot of walking talking groups of amoebas—our way, creating our own new species one by one from a clean undivided source, that was better.

  Head hurt. Back hurt. I pulled myself upright in bed and then that Tina came in, tray in her hands and a bruise ringing one eye, and went over to where Janey lay awake, bruised up herself, not talking.

  “It’s just canned soup,” she was saying to Janey, as the scent reached my nose. “But it’s good. Chicken vegetable. Have some.”

  Janey rolled slowly from her side to her back, used her heels to push at the mattress and raise her head. Without that red lipstick she used to smear on in a puddle of wet, her whole face was washed out and fading, skin pale and muddy all at once, dull dirty blonde hair falling dejected into her eyes. I could tell from watching her how much effort it took to move, after how Billy worked her over. She sniffed the soup and looked up at Tina, all polite anxiety.

  “I’m not sure Don would want me to have this,” she explained.

  Tina had probably heard crazier than that, plenty of times, because she just nodded. That ridiculous cross, slung on its chain so it looked poised to dive off one of her big breasts, bobbed and shook with the gesture. “Just a little bit,” she urged Janey. “A few spoonfuls.”

  “Oh, that’s how it starts,” Janey said. Dark and knowing. “That’s how it always starts.”

  But she ate the soup anyway and when Tina put the spoon down, Janey picked it up herself, working her way steadily to the bottom of the bowl. All this time neither of them had said a word to me, not so much as glanced in my direction: I was the blight on the town, the troublemaker, the one who’d brought Billy in their midst even if he did beat my ass just as bad as theirs. Janey, they just assumed he’d dragged her along with him, but I was the one even Ms. Super-Christian couldn’t stomach. I hate humans, ordinary unchanged human beings. I seriously hate them.

  “Are you hungry?” Tina asked me. Her voice was even and steady like that’d make me think she didn’t hate me, like she could trick me just that easily. “There’s some more of this, or canned pork and beans—”

  She looked like she could use a lot less pork and beans. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, pushing through the little jolts of pain it sent up my back, and found my sneakers she’d lined up at the foot. Sukie my doll had sat beside me on the pillow, she was the first thing I’d looked for when I woke up, and I stuffed her back in my jacket pocket, shuffled out the bedroom door without talking.

  The front room, what must’ve been the living room once, there were stacked-up cartons, a desk with papers on it and another bed in the corner, someone else huddled in it under a nest of blankets and coughing nonstop. Battered spiral notebook on the desktop and when I picked it up and leafed through, it was like Stephen’s from Paradise City, lists of names, food and medicine inventories, a subdivided page marked “Special Needs”: Medical, Religious, Psychological. Food Allergies. I couldn’t find my name or Janey’s, they must not have had time to write them down. The coughing was congested and wet and made me shudder to hear it so I dropped the notebook, went in stocking feet out the front door and sat to do up my laces on the porch.

  It was still sunny outside, but a veiled-over sunny, light shining through a thin gray scrim of clouds; I wasn’t sure if it was the same day we’d arrived here or not. Soft breeze, pretty view of all the gardens, that big oak in the middle of town—this must’ve been a nice place to live, before. Maybe once I had the lab really up and running we could move some operations out here, get rid of the humans and then this could be my house. I knotted up the left laces and then the right in hard little buds, they’d have to slice them off my feet if they wanted to take them, and when I looked up again someone was standing not a yard away staring at the red mailbox, and at the elephant ears of chard growing where there’d once been a lawn, and at me.

  Stephen. I played it cool, staring back and waiting for Amy and that crybaby mother of hers to come up behind him and start acting like they owned the place, but it was just him. By himself.

  He looked down at me and laughed. “Figures,” he said.

  “So where’s Amy?” I asked.

  He sat on the edge of the porch step, as far away from me as he could get, and huddled up so furious and wretched I could’ve felt sorry for him, he was one of us after all, but after how he and Miss Mystic left me in the dirt I couldn’t care less. All alone. Trouble in paradise? What a joke. He wasn’t even looking at me anyway, just like nobody ever did. He lifted his head and took in the houses, the haphazard gardens with only a very few patches of dry dead amid the green, the thick-trunked looming living oak.

  “Things look okay here,” he said. Not really to me, just aloud. “Maybe that was all a mistake, it’s not everything and everybody that’s—it’s sort of okay here.”

  “It wasn’t half okay getting here.” I didn’t want to talk to him, he certainly wasn’t inviting me to, but he looked too pleased with himself and I didn’t mind messing that up with the truth. Just like I did with Amy. “Dead plants. Dead animals. People, someone I knew at the lab, dropping dead right in front of me. You can ask Janey, she’s here too—I think the same thing happened to Don.” I reached down to my laces again, tugging them smooth, tightening them so I’d have something to do. “And him—you know. Him. The one I’ve been waiting for. He came. He was angry at me.”

  When was he going to show up here anyway, long last, now that Billy had done his job and got me here and thank God he was gone to go cry over Mags for eternity? He was supposed to be here. I was supposed to be feeling as acute and as now as I could, just like how all the living things left were supposed to be upended and flung into chaos by his coming: leaves swelling up with moisture until they burst, stones rumbling and cracking from the inside as their lava stirred back to boiling life, flowers killing themselves in the rush to offer him that single, perfect culminating bloom. People screaming, crying, screwing, fighting, knowing that this was the last chance, the last they’d ever have, just like how things were back at the height of the plague—and instead everything was just limp and drab and sad, the living things creeping away almost apologetically departing this life while my back was turned. Even when it happened right next to me. It wasn’t a fitting tribute. Life should be sacrificing itself to Death in the open all around me, proudly, happily, knowing that after this last time it’d never have to fight again. Because I was going to win. I’d fight him and use all the lab’s secrets against him and I would save everyone, everything, all the life left. It had to happen now, I had to fight him now—


  But all I had was the porch and the oak and Stephen, useless Stephen, for company. He was looking at me now, at least, gracious of him. The way he looked at everything, like he were an artist, a painter, wandering around his own first big exhibition and realizing too late he couldn’t draw for crap.

  “The one you’ve been waiting for,” he repeated. “And who’d that be?”

  Oh, God. “Don’t act like you don’t already know.” I laughed, because the truth of it just came to me. “Because if you didn’t, and you weren’t freaking out about it, you wouldn’t even be here. You ran away from the rest of them because they can’t see it, and you can—or maybe because they can see it, and since they do, you can’t pretend you don’t anymore. So you ran away. Didn’t you.”

  Stephen gazed at me in silence, big dark eyes not the least caught-out uncomfortable like I’d wanted, and then looked away. He wasn’t handsome but he had nice eyes, a lot of dark hair, I’d seen Amy looking at him back at Paradise when she thought nobody noticed. Always has to have everything for herself. The other one, why wasn’t he here? Why wasn’t he here. If he were off behind my back with her, again, I wouldn’t be kind about it.

  “Back at the lab,” Stephen said, out of nowhere so I jumped. “You said, when I threatened to hurt you to try and get something about the experiments out of you—you said I’d probably enjoy that. You made it sound like I’d done things like that before.” He ran a hand through his hair and it stood halfway on end, bristly and snarled. “Is it true? Or did you just say that to try and throw me off?”

  Each of us had our own file, back at the lab, all the particulars anyone knew of our former lives, and if someone was a feeder from the juvie hall—the lab used a lot of them—his criminal records were included, the only fabrication in them the part about how he’d killed himself or run away from custody. Medical, Psychological, Special Needs, Allergies. The lab paid upfront for a lot of kids from juvie and psychiatric facilities, they needed them, but they didn’t care what any of them had actually done—it could be anything at all, from armed robbery to shoplifting. Trespass on protected research areas. Vandalizing buildings. Kid stuff. Nobody wanted to put up with it, not when they were pouring all that tax money into making sure the right towns and cities were safe and guarded and nothing dangerous anywhere could sneak through the cracks. But the lab didn’t care. I’d seen Stephen’s record, I read the whole thing. It didn’t take long. He stole a candy bar and a lighter, and mouthed off to the security guard who grabbed him. That’s it.

  “You were in juvie,” I said. “I saw the file, I read it. I read everybody’s file who was left. They were in a special room, I found the key.” I laughed. “You don’t want to know what Amy’s mother did.”

  Prostitution, that’s all Amy’s mother did. A few “solicitation” arrests. But he wouldn’t know that. Amy’s file, nothing criminal in it at all. Little Miss Saintly. “You attacked another kid,” I continued. “He was blasting his car radio too loud, or something like that, and you dragged him straight out of his car and nearly killed him. All because he made too much noise. He had to have surgery on his eye. And you hurt animals too. For fun.” I pulled the knots on my righthand laces as tight as I could. “And you stole things. It’s all right there, in your file.”

  I bet he would’ve done stuff like that, for real, if he’d ever had the chance. And he did steal something, so it wasn’t a total lie. I sat there waiting, hoping for him to sag in cut-string shame and defeat, like Billy, for his face to distort and drag itself down in the knowledge of what he thought he really was. Instead he just sat there, almost delicately contemplative with chin on hand and hair falling into his eyes to veil them, gazing at the oak tree with its big welcoming sign. There was a creak of wood behind us and when I looked around, there was Janey, still bruised and unsteady but out of bed, her face lighting up with incongruous pleasure when she realized who was sitting beside me. Stephen didn’t bother turning to see.

  “Oh, good,” Janey said. She sat down between us, in the empty space filled with tension and dislike. “Now everyone’s coming back again. I was sure that would happen but not just when.”

  “That old man,” said Stephen. I couldn’t tell if he were talking to me, Janey, himself. “Ghostly old man following us. He told us this whole story about the world breaking up and disappearing, how we’d all—like there was nothing we could do about it, just sit and wait. I don’t believe that. It’s not true.” His free hand, by his side, slowly contracted to a fist. “None of that is true.”

  There was movement on another of the front porches: a woman, the bent-over elderly one who’d watched us arrive, she was out there again staring at us from the other side of the oak. I guess that’s something that never changes either, how old people have nothing better to do ever than stare at everyone else living their lives. Janey rubbed her forehead, angled her chin toward Stephen with a fond look like you give a little kid, a baby brother.

  “He has a dark coat,” she said. Her old Janey-voice, so pat and cheerful like she’d gotten it pre-packaged from a box, but there was an undercurrent of real longing beneath, a wind just barely rustling a tree’s thinnest, lowest branches. “And white hair, and pale blue eyes that look at you like they see everything inside, but even if you have a terrible secret you think you’re hiding, it’s all right. Because he killed somebody. Once.”

  That got Stephen to look at her, astonished. She smiled at him, wide happy smile even without her red lipstick. “You’ve seen him,” Stephen said.

  Janey shook her head. “But I dreamed about him. Sometimes, lately, ever since Don—” She gnawed at her lip. “Lately, it’s like there’s this weight on my eyes, my chest, and it pushes down so hard I can’t think. Or breathe. But when I think about him, I feel a little better. I don’t know how I know he’s real, when I only had him in my head, but I do.” She reached over and patted Stephen’s hand, slow thought-out pat like she was rehearsing choreography. The Dance of the Big Sister. “So you can talk about him as much as you want.”

  I bit my own lip to keep from laughing. Another thing that never changes, Janey being completely insane. Stephen was always nice to her back at Paradise, more patient with all that than I ever felt, and now he just nodded and patted her hand back and sat there not talking anymore. The old woman across the way was walking toward us now, slow and hesitant, stopping to rest when she reached the oak tree.

  “Janey?” Tina’s voice, calling from inside before she poked her head out the doorway. “There you are. Do you want some cheese crackers?”

  Janey smiled up at Tina and shook her head. Tina came shuffling onto the porch, her big stupid cross still bouncing on her big stupid chest, and offered the little plastic-wrapped cracker pack to Stephen in silence, like a consolation prize; he took them, split the wrapping down the seam, stuck the tiny red plastic paddle in the cheese tub with the same frowning concentration he gave everything. Cheese crackers to dog fights.

  Of course, nobody even thought to offer me any.

  “Russell said you came here by yourself,” Tina said to him. All casual, like she didn’t already have his name written down in one of her notebooks. Miss Social Worker. “Are you okay?”

  Stephen shook his head.

  Of course, nobody thought to ask after me.

  The old woman by the oak tree was coming toward us again, stumbling a little on the uneven ground; Russell, the man with the red hair nearly gone gray, he’d come walking across the green and now he was helping her cross like it were a busy city street. Shouldn’t they be shunning me, like the rest of them were? Because somehow Billy was all my fault? I reached into my pocket and pulled out the lake stones I’d carried with me, their weight and flat smoothness in my hand and the memories they carried with them an instant comfort; they felt hot, like they sometimes did, hot and almost humming like something inside them vibrated but maybe it was just me, just that nervous, flushed skin and tremors in my hands. Even Sukie where she was pressed secret against my
side felt warm through the jacket cloth, like she was a real baby.

  “Are you sure you don’t want any lunch?” Tina was saying. “At least some cheese crackers?”

  It took me a second to realize Tina was talking to me. So I existed all of a sudden? Don’t do me any favors.

  Russell and the old lady came and sat on the lower step and I ignored Tina just like everyone else ignored me, toying with the stones hand to hand, gripping one hard and still in my fist to try and see if it really were it trembling from inside, and not me.

  “You can’t be angry with us forever, you know,” Tina said. Never shut up, just like the shiny overenthused new lab recruits, you could tell the woman just never shut up. “I’m sorry about the circumstances of how you got here, but—”

  “Leave her be,” Russell said. “She’s not hurting anyone.” He looked up at Janey. “You all right? Get something to eat?”

  Janey nodded. “I’m not sure it’s what Don would have wanted me to eat,” she said, “but he always said, Jeanette Isabella, starvation is simply not permitted. So I tried my best.” A little cloud crossed her face and she sighed. “I just wish I knew when I was going to see him again.”

  Stephen glanced at her and his eyes were troubled, almost fearful even, but he didn’t say anything. Just shoved the empty cracker pack into his pocket.

  The stones in my hands were growing hotter. I could feel the old woman looking at me but I ignored her, we had nothing to say to each other and she looked ready to keel over in two hours anyway. The old man in the back room, maybe she was his wife. Maybe Russell had brought her for a hospital visit.

  Tina kept watching me too, like she was waiting for me to cry and hug her and make friends forever. “The stones will sing,” she mused aloud. “That Bible verse, do you know it?”