Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  “I don’t think I’m human,” I said.

  It just slipped out. This place did that to you.

  “Not just since Natalie killed me. Maybe not even since I was born. My mother died and was brought back and died again a good dozen times before she got pregnant—can a dead woman have a living baby? The lab wasn’t very sure, that’s why they were so excited about me, Natalie said. That’s why they let her go when she ran away—my mother, I mean—so they could watch us both. See how we integrated.” My hands, thrust in my pockets, curled slowly into fists. “See what kind of human beings we made, if we really could pass as the real thing.”

  Jessie shook her head and laughed. “All that time, they were terrified we undead would start breeding—never mind we never had sex, or wanted it, and couldn’t have had it if we did want it. Just the idea spooked them. And then they turn right around and deliberately make an experiment of it anyway. They were that stupid.” Her voice was a harsh, scratchy chuckle. “That relentlessly stupid. Every damned time, hoos manage to surprise me.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t care about whether zombies had ever had sex, any more than I cared about the dodo’s zoology.

  “So,” Jessie asked, “how did you ‘integrate’?”

  I thought about it. I’d had no friends. My mother had no friends. But human beings, we—they—liked to go on about loneliness being our, their, given condition, so that couldn’t be the measure. Anyway, my dad had loved her and she him. Other than blowing off school sometimes, I never caused any trouble, not until everything fell apart and I killed someone else. Human beings feel lonely and they feel isolated and they feel alienated, but the sensation inside me that I was thinking about was far beyond that; I didn’t need anyone to tell me it was, because I just knew it since I was a child. Hollow walls all inside me, their plaster so thin any random fist could punch right through them, that’s all I’d ever been and all I knew of myself and what was behind those walls, waiting to reveal itself, it unnerved me so much to imagine that it was best I’d never tried. I’d never thought anyone else felt this way, not even my mother, because we never talked about it and I never knew the reasons she might feel the same. Stephen, he was the very first who knew what that feeling was. Who knew it with me.

  And if it wasn’t as strange a feeling as I’d thought, if there were thousands of people secretly walking around feeling just like me, maybe that just meant the lab had been our wonder-working providence for longer, more often, than anyone ever imagined.

  And now this place, this weakened decayed place disappearing all around us, was seeping into those hollow spaces like a winter wind whistling through the gaps around a windowframe, filling them with a harsh, bracing, shockingly newfound love. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand the thought that that was what really sustained me, and that soon it wouldn’t exist anymore.

  The figures onscreen were slowing, winding down, still in rhythm yet somehow I sensed a collective exhaustion overtaking them. Dance night was nearly at an end. I wished it wouldn’t stop. I wished I could see pictures of my young mother again. Of her with my dad, who loved her and me but I barely remembered him now.

  “I’m sorry you went deaf,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  The movie was going spotty, big white patches eating up the picture like the film had started to melt. Without planning it or really thinking about it, we joined hands, she and I, and we headed down the thin-carpeted aisle as dusty and grimy and faintly lit as any real movie theater’s and we kept on going, squinting into that brighter and brighter projected white light. She wouldn’t have stopped, not even for a moment, if I hadn’t tugged on her hand and made her.

  “Come with us,” I called, to Stephen, my mother, Lisa, everyone still in their seats. “You have to come with us. Please.”

  Were they supposed to stay here? Was it wrong of me to want them? I couldn’t leave them behind, I couldn’t leave everything and everyone behind like it didn’t even matter if it all got taken away. It wasn’t fair. I expected them to stay curled up comfortably in their seats, to nod off and fall asleep and break my heart in earnest. But they got up, they all got up right away and filed through the rows like they remembered just enough to know I was someone they listened to—sometimes, when they felt like it—and as he came closer, Stephen smiled at me like he almost knew who I was. Almost. My mother stayed close to him and me, sensing somehow that she should. Lisa hovered at the periphery, bewildered and lost.

  We walked right through the screen. It yielded to us like the surface of a jelly, that faint sensation of a cool wobbliness as you press a finger straight down, and then we were where we really had been all along, in the realm of those things that weren’t alive anymore but could still run, skip, waltz in film, in pictures, in memory. On the other side of the great white screen.

  TWENTY-TWO

  NATALIE

  I didn’t really know where I was. Not that it mattered. Stephen left us here to die and there weren’t any woods anymore, just every now and then remnants of grass or dead bush twigs sticking straight up from the ground like broken fingernails, and the sun was gone, wetly smothered, like someone had spilled a huge bowl of oatmeal all over where there once had been a sky. The damp that wasn’t clouds had all the weak failing light that was left, contained inside itself, and soon enough that would fade away, too.

  Stephen left. The other one, he left too. Everyone always left me, in the end. It wasn’t fair. Janey had even left me; her body lying there with one arm flung out wide and her pale hair coated and tarnished, dim with what looked like dust in the horrible oatmeal light, that had vanished too. It happened right in front of me, inches from my nose while I lay right there watching, but somehow I never actually saw it. Left me behind without even trying to say goodbye. Just like everyone else. Everyone.

  The old woman, the one who’d invited herself along with us, she was crouching over me where I lay on the ground but I shoved her away, dug my heels into the dry dust, used the leverage to slowly raise up my knees and press my palms to the dead dirt and pull myself up sitting. Inch by inch. Every punch and kick from Billy, from Stephen, roared and echoed burning hot through me and I wanted to cry but I just gritted my teeth, made myself be as tough and indifferent as any good lab rat. When I was finally able to sit up, we were face to face, right up close.

  “At least that awful darkness is gone,” she said.

  Then she looked around for a second, scared like she’d just tempted fate, and that made me think even less of her so I looked away. The problem was there was nothing left to look at, everything so desolate I really could’ve cried. We could breathe but the air was burning, unpleasant, like catching constant lungfuls of someone else’s stale cigarette. I decided to keep looking at my shoes instead.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  Her voice shook and quavered like someone much older, she couldn’t have been more than seventy or even that, and that somehow made me dislike her even more. “Do I look all right?” I spat. “Seriously? And if you are, with all this, you’re completely crazy. Of course, everyone is, lately. Including that stupid Amy. So I guess you’ve got an excuse.”

  Janey’s dead foot only half-inside her shoe had been curved and pretty, the line of her toes snaking at just the right angle from the arch. Stephen, when I’d seen him wheeled in from experiments robed and barefoot, he had strange feet, like someone had snuck in during the night and moved all his toes a half-inch upward for a joke. Bad shoes, Grandma once explained to me, malforming his feet when he was young and the bones were more pliable. Babies should never wear hard shoes. My feet, as I studied them, just looked like plain old feet. Plain old shoes.

  Something popped and crackled in me, a memory. “You look like her,” I said slowly. “A little bit like her. You have her eyes, and her voice except it’s cracked and too old and awful, and it should be her face except it’s so old and worn out it can’t be hers. Grandma wasn’t half as ol
d as you. You’re her.” I looked up then because I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t help but feel wild hope now that everything else had gone. “It is you, isn’t it?”

  She flung her arms around me and I smelled dirt, sweat, horrible bone-breaking weariness and I almost cried a little, I couldn’t help it because I’d thought I’d never see her again. But only almost. She still had that lab smell just like I did somewhere deep in her pores, that lingering not quite medicinal something that got in your skin and even now wouldn’t get out, nothing could ever scrub it away. I closed my eyes and took in breaths of it, for familiarity, but I didn’t hug her back.

  She pulled away and I was glad of it, even though I didn’t want her to leave. “I’m not surprised you didn’t know me,” she said. In that quavering, all-wrong old woman’s voice. “At first. The last year’s been...” She broke off, something flitting across her face like terror, then caught herself. “I’m not what I was. I’ve paid for all this as much or more than anyone, Natalie, you have to believe me.”

  “What happened to you? Where did you even go?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  The big things were all hers and not mine, same as always. Same as when she was director-in-chief of the whole entire lab, even though she was nothing now but a dried-up stick thing crouching in the dust. But that would all change, I had it in me to change all of it. I clutched Sukie where she was curled up safe in my jacket and smiled. It was disgusting, what happened to people when they’d stopped being young and there was nothing keeping them from drying up and blowing away just like everything around us, every flowering thing, and nothing convinced me of how right the lab’s work had been like the sight of her. Her hair gone dust-gray, strands all uneven and broken off and great salmon ribbons of scalp, dry scaly scalp, showing through. Lines all over her face that hadn’t been there at all, just a year ago. Shaking in her hands. Shaking in her throat. I had it in me to change all that. And everything else.

  “I didn’t leave you there on purpose,” she was saying. Nattering, chattering, like old people do, about stuff far in the past that didn’t matter a damn. “I—you don’t want to know what it’s been like for me, Natalie, since all this happened, I wouldn’t want you to know. I’m here now, anyway.” She gave me one of those smiles, those awful determined smiles people only paint on their faces when they’re neck-deep in crap and need to believe they can sing and dance their way out of it. “We’re here.”

  We were there, all right. What did that have to do with any-thing? She used to be so efficient, Grandma was, all brisk and no-nonsense and she told you right out what she was going to do to you, why she was doing it, you understood when you were in her hands that you were part of something big and important. I understood, anyway, Stephen just screamed and screamed but that was his lookout. He didn’t even remember it now, I bet. Grandma had places to go. None of that arms-around-you nonsense either, a little pat on the cheek if she were happy with you but that one touch was like a scent, it lingered with you for days.

  I didn’t like this woman. I wanted Grandma back.

  “I never told you my name,” she was saying. Rocking back and forth where she sat, like stupid Lisa in one of her hair-pulling moods, what happened to her? Why did I need to know her name? “Ellen. I’m Ellen.” She laughed, a cracked crooning sound. “Of course, that used to be classified information too. But what wasn’t. What wasn’t? Call me Ellen, Natalie. Doctor, Grandma, after what we’ve made of the world, honorifics are a little beside the point, don’t you think?”

  It was just way things were right then that was making her sound crazy, the horrible air and the drifting, disintegrating specters of dead people. So many of them, pushed so tightly into such little bits of space that they were more like solid blocky columns of air than people; you might see one little hand reaching out from the mass, a lonely reproachful pair of eyes staring back at you from the nothingness, but they were all just there and so you didn’t really see them. And then, even as you were looking at them, there was nothing left to look at anymore. It was probably too late for me to save them, by the time I got things right side up again they’d probably all be gone. First, though, to get Grandma back to her old self. I was pretty smart and she’d taught me a lot, but I could only do what I could do. I needed her. The old her, not whoever this was.

  “I know something that was Death’s secret,” I said.

  I felt a little jump and skitter inside me, saying that out loud without a whisper, and that bit of cowardice irritated me so I spoke louder. “I know how to get around Death, how the lab used to defeat him all those times. All those times with me and all the others. And none of... thisÖ matters, because the secret’s out and there’s nothing he can do about it.”

  There were only a few stones still left in my jacket pocket but it didn’t matter, right down the road from us there were more and you couldn’t kill rocks, not like you could trees and birds and people. I pulled one out, a plain gray one I held out in my palm for Grandma to see. Vibrating at my touch, shuddering, growing hotter and hotter there in my palm until I cried out between my teeth, I couldn’t help it, and then just like before it split open. Tarry blackness inside, spilling out, turning sugar-brown and sandy when it mixed with the oxygen in the air—except in this air it took longer, slower, not such a pretty candy-sandy color but the tarnished brown of a bad apple. It didn’t matter. I could still feel it inside me, a wonderful ache inside my own bones as the tarry stuff changed and turned dry. Growing pains. I cupped my hands so the sand wouldn’t spill, and smiled at Grandma.

  “It’s a rare thing,” she said. Putting a fingertip to the sand. “When this happens spontaneously. Extremely rare. But hardly unprecedented.”

  That didn’t bother me because for a moment she actually looked like her old self, quizzical and knowing and impossible to please. She still thought I had to please her. But that was all right, because when I explained it all to her she’d realize she had to please me.

  “It doesn’t just happen,” I said. “I make it happen. I can make them break open. It’s because of me.”

  “It happened spontaneously at the lab, once or twice—not with experimental participants like you, just random workers who were handling them and got a surprise. As I recall, we could never work out just why it happened, or how, without our having to break them open mechanically...” Her face grew thoughtful. “They meant to try and run studies but we could never get the funding, too much outlay for too little potential result. Always, the fights for funding. If they had only understood what we were trying to do, so much would’ve been different.”

  One or two others at the lab. Whatever. “Well, I don’t see your ‘random workers’ here now,” I said. I studied the bad-apple-colored stuff cradled in my palm. It wasn’t painfully hot anymore, but holding it was still like having a tiny little flame all my own, flickering stubbornly against the bleakness around us; it made me feel better, it reminded me who was really in charge of things now. All of this could be fixed. The clustering ghosts seemed to draw back when they saw me split the stone open, clearing a space, watching to see what could possibly happen next. Good. They were Death’s and already I had what was his on the run.

  “You’re right, of course,” Grandma said. Ellen. I just can’t think of her as “Ellen” but that’s what you called a working colleague, their first name, that was how you showed you were equals. Ellen. “That stuff you’ve got, right there, the stones—that was how we did it. That was what we used in our experiments, to bring the dead back. We were trying to replicate its chemical properties, create a serum or—”

  “I know what it’s for,” I said. Airy and casual, just to show her she wasn’t the only one who knew things. Had she forgotten just how much she’d taught me, on purpose, before the sickness came? “I’ve used it. I used it to bring two people back, two people I killed myself, I—” I bent my head down and before she could stop me, blew the bad-apple powder gently from one palm to anot
her. Some got scattered and lost, but not all of it. “Into their mouths, their nostrils. Breath of life. It worked. Both times, it worked.”

  “Then you were lucky,” Ellen said.

  She didn’t look nearly as impressed as she should’ve, just drew her knees closer up to her chest and folded her arms in their huge flapping men’s sweatshirt even tighter. “First, you were lucky the stones opened up at all. Even with our best equipment, no matter what we tried, sometimes nothing could make them crack, it drove us—”

  “It’s got nothing to do with luck,” I snapped. Lectures, always the lectures, she never just talked like an ordinary person—she did realize I didn’t work for her anymore, right? Didn’t she? We worked together now. “It’s control. It’s power. It’s being the right person, trying to open them. It’s never not worked, for me. Ever. It just took me a while to realize what that meant.”

  She kept shaking her head but she liked that idea, she liked thinking it was all control and power and will and I could see that in her eyes. Too bad for her that it was me who had all that, not her, she’d have to treat me differently now. “Well, we couldn’t always do it, and couldn’t work out why. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the process—we found the substance by accident, we found out what it could do by accident. Whether or not we could make it do that seemed entirely arbitrary, and not really up to us. And even when we could, and we used it—it didn’t always do what it was supposed to do. It didn’t always bring the dead back. Or bring them back as themselves.”

  Still shaking her head, dry flyaway cotton-wool hair floating away from her cheeks, like a palsy or nervous tic. “So many experimental participants brought back damaged, useless, all the neurological—we were always so careful never to say research subjects, that word was forbidden. Subject to. Subjection. Not good. You were participants.” She stared me with eyes suddenly fierce, piercing, like I’d sneered at her, demanded she justify herself. “And you were. Weren’t you? Didn’t I start teaching you what I knew, before... all this? You would’ve risen very high, Natalie. You were one of our most significant successes and you would’ve been one of our best scientists, when you were older. I’d have personally seen to it.”