Rommel hit me and I fell, Linc jumping to the rescue a second too late. “—weak little hoos,” I repeated, wiping the black ooze from my mouth. “Lotta folks looking and acting all human lately, all of a sudden. Like Teresa. Doesn’t make sense at all, you know?” Was any of this working? Not exactly a shock if they kept me in the dark, but I didn’t need a busted jaw on top of it. “Or didn’t you know about Teresa? Joe could tell you—”
“Aaaahhh, Joe.” Stosh quit fondling Renee’s hair long enough to spit in my direction. “Mr. Genius, Mr. Superspy, your old man. He came sniffing round here the other day, wouldn’t even come inside he was so a-skeered—always did think he could piss in the big kids’ sandbox without anyone else smellin’ it. Your old man charity case. I remember him from the old days, all tongue no teeth, talk talk talk then turn tail and run—ain’t even a damned hoo, he’s what a hoo craps out!”
Stosh and Carny and Adriana hooted like he’d told an actual joke. I smiled at Stosh. “That’s real nice,” I said, “but it’s not an answer. So you don’t know anything? Then I guess for all the talk, you’re as backassward ignorant as he is.”
Stosh just sat there, letting the silence build up around us like steam in a shower. His face, once so charred Ben was a beauty next to him, was filling in again, cheeks and chin regrowing beneath the huge scab of blackened burns.
“Do you know what we can do to you now?” he said, softly.
“I saw someone die that way tonight,” I said. “I know.”
The steam heat kept building. Then Rommel whistled, and I saw the balcony above us slowly fill up as more Rat emerged from the shadows: rotten faces, half-eaten faces, faces once stripped to the bone by drowning or burning or decades aboveground and even from a floor down they all looked restored, skin taut and plumped up and all rosy and amber and brown. Almost human-looking, some of them; if not for that smell of death and motor oil, they could have passed. They leaned on the broken railings with newly fleshy arms, waiting for their signal to jump. Or just enjoying the show.
“Boo,” said Rommel.
“So is it true?” I asked, taking one of the pews. “The plague, the sickness. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. Did they inject you with something, those labs? Use you for research? Or did this all start spreading on its own?”
Rommel sat down beside me and smiled, the smile you give a toddler who just used a word the wrong way trying to sound grown up. “Y’know, Jessie, you wouldn’t know it stuck out in Cloudcuckooland like you are, out of touch with everything, but this is way beyond what any damned lab can control.”
“I’m not sure their scientists know that either,” Linc said.
“No, they probably don’t. Typical hoo antics.” He leaned closer, the badges strung round his neck—police, fire, a state trooper or two—clinking like wind chimes. “Can’t follow an eight ball into the corner pocket, the lot of them. Okay. So, if you really wanna know so bad—a month or two ago, see, we start seein’ undeads walking around looking a little funny, kinda tired, kinda draggy, skin all hot and clammy like they’re running a fucking hoo-fever. Dusty, young rotter, didn’t seem to matter. So, whatever, suck it up and keep on going. Then they started looking kinda—Ron, for Chrissake hand that over, I’m starving.” He grabbed part of the too-old arm from Ron, started munching away. “Looking kinda funny. Sorta clammy, and then like the flesh was growing on ’em, not decaying. New muscle. New fat. New skin. Then, little while after that, we start finding these hoos walking around looking messed up bad, rotted from the inside out. Can’t figure out what the hell it is. The undeads are looking more alive. And the living are walking around looking dead. Hmmmm, we say, what signify this?”
He tapped a finger against the soft hollow of my nose. “Interesting coincidence, both those things happening so close together, don’tcha think? ’Specially round these parts, all those damned scientists prowling around the beaches, the woods, those fortresses of labs they got set up? Maybe whatever it is was always out there, like, latent, and something made it start to spread. Maybe it’s one of their experiments gone wrong—they spray it all over where they know we are, like pesticide, and then we end up bringing it back home to them.”
He snapped his fingers at Stosh, who scowled, shuffled over to the pile of hoo-remnants near the altar, brought him back hunks of dead flesh Rommel nearly swallowed whole. Just like Teresa, wanting her little snacks. “
One
of their experiments?” I said. “Or many? How d’you even know it’s the same disease that—”
“Don’t.” Rommel shrugged, mumbling around another mouthful. “No idea. Couldn’t tell ya. More to the point, dear sweet Jessica, who the hell cares?” He gulped down the last of his meal, licked his fingers, smiled. “ ’Cause I mean, as you can clearly see, our own prognosis is a little bit better than any damn human’s.”
He flexed a bicep, letting me see the solidly forming muscle under pinky pale skin, the slow throb of a vein snaking underneath. The blood in them was darker than a hoo’s but it was still real bluish blood, not the tarry black mess a true undead bled when cut, and up close under the chemical stink was the smell of human flesh, cooked to a turn. Ben’s death smell. As if he saw my thoughts—and maybe he did—Rommel smiled wider.
“Getting cozy with the meat?” someone shouted from the balcony. “C’mon, Rommel, you promised us a show.”
“Rommel’s
all
show,” drawled another, unfamiliar voice. “Strut here, strut there, promise all that good mayhem and leave us spitting out pieces of steel-town chicken crap—”
Rommel made a wet, crunching screech like a tiger splitting through thighbone, and the crowd retreated from the railing.
Linc sat down and slipped his fingers around my arm. “Rotted from the inside out,” he repeated. “We heard it’s spreading pretty fast—”
Rommel threw his head back and roared with laughter, Dembones barking in excited response. “Pretty fast? Yeah, unless you think a forest fire moves slow—the hoos are shitting themselves, they don’t know where the fuck this came from either, though I
hear tell
the trouble started at that lab over in Gary, by Chanute Beach. Me, I wouldn’t know, I just go to the beach to hang out, keep the rot from setting in too fast. It’s true what they say about the sands up there, y’know, they keep you young—but then it’s our own Mother Earth, isn’t it, the beaches. They say. Not that you hoobillies out here would know anything about that either.”
The story’s always been that something happened on the shores of Lake Michigan, thousands of years ago, something that altered the sands or the nearby soil or the atmosphere to make the dead start coming back to life. They say. Another reason the scientists swarm around the beaches like blowflies on feeders. Maybe it was a meteor, crapping out extraterrestrial bits and pieces that hitched a ride here on the Ice Age glaciers, then penetrated deep into the dunes themselves. Or meteoric debris or radiation, infecting the air, making things mutate. Hoos used to think everything about us was down to radiation. If they’re right, who knows how it spread. Who knows why whatever was in that meteor, if it was that, yanked us all out of a sound sleep and up from underground—the scientists sure as shit don’t and you were never allowed to ask. We never talked about it in earth science, never did a damned thing but sit there listening to meandering blitherblather about igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic rocks.
“I know all about it,” I said. “Just like you. I just don’t know what the half of it means. And you don’t either.”
Rommel kept on grinning, his teeth still just like ours even if the rest of him wasn’t. “Yeah? Well, we’re both still one up on Hooville either way. Can you imagine if they did this to themselves? Seriously? Trying to get rid of us? That’s what I’ll never understand about humans, how they waste everything. Themselves included. I mean, it’s just pathetic, how they all walk around acting like they actually got world enough and time.”
Renee slid down her pew away from Stosh. Adriana was waiting on the other side, all gleaming teeth and bladelike joints. Dembones licked Renee’s hand, then tamped his teeth down just hard enough to make her jump back. The lab at Chanute Beach. Where Jim worked.
Us humans are in trouble, Jessie. It’s mutating like crazy. Mutating like it just got blasted by a meteor.
So just how much help did you all give it, Jim?
“So how’d you get it?” I asked.
“Fuck knows,” said Ron, lounging on the altar steps. “Rommel here, he got it first. Big leader, like always. Then Irina, and Phoebe”—he jerked his chin toward the ceiling, at a couple of Rat I’d never met—“then Adriana, then a couple more of us, and pretty soon we were all staggering around tired, hot, hoo-shitty, and then, just like that, it all got better. A lot better. Seriously, I tell you, kid, I feel . . .” He flung out his arms. “Magnificent.”
Mag-nif-i-cent. Perfectly pronounced, every consonant needle-sharp, just to show me his tongue and larynx had made a triumphant return even if he still deigned to speak our dialect. “Teresa’s got it,” I said.
Ron shrugged. “Bully for her.”
“She killed one of us,” I said. “Just by biting him. She did that.”
Rommel smiled again, slow and sharky. “Yeah,” he said, looking happy, looking proud, his eyes boring straight through me. “We do that.”
He twitched a little, looking strangely worn out all of a sudden, his smile fading. “Carny, get me more of that meat, I’m hungry.”
“You’re always hungry,” Carny snarled, stomping over to the altar again and hefting an entire corpse over his shoulder. Walking too swift, too easy, no more stumbling and staggering on half-rotted legs; his calves were solid, thick, as wholly restored as Rommel’s arms. “Don’t know what the hell’s wrong with you, ate two whole goddamned deer by yourself just three hours ago, fuck-all for the rest of us, and—”
“I’m hungry!”
Rommel roared, teeth clenched and fists shaking like they ached to split Carny’s face straight open. “Fucking bring it here
now!”
Dembones snapped at Carny’s hand as he threw Rommel the meat and Carny spat in disgust, at which of them I couldn’t have said. Rommel dove straight in, tearing off ribbons of gut that smelled like they’d been sitting there for days; Renee watched him in transfixed queasiness and then turned away. I saw a split second of what looked almost like worry pass over Ron’s face, a quick brow-furrow and dark little glance. Linc’s hand tightened on my arm.
“Joe said Teresa wants to join up with you again,” Linc said.
“Like I said, bully for her.” Ron chortled. “We got no use for that bitch. Not anymore. Too damned stuck on herself—”
“Has
he
got this?” I asked.
Ron started laughing harder, almost rocking back and forth in mirth right where he sat.
“Him?
Your half a boy? That piece of shit washout that couldn’t track a hoo a mile without losing him, couldn’t get in fifty yards of a city gate without pissing himself about the flamethrowers—”
“Ron, for the love of Christ just kill them already.” Adriana tugged on Dembones’s chain, her voice all guttural grunts; her throat had been cut clean through, the windpipe bone-white and pristine against the mess of her neck. Her brain radio was a double bass slowly splintering under a hammer. “I don’t wanna be stuck out here all night.”
“—or getting all no, no,
I
can’t kill a bitty kiddie, I’m too sweet and good to go after an old grandma, I can’t do this I can’t do that I’m no goddamned use to anyone except dumbass new-rotters who’ll believe anything I tell them about myself, fuck no, Jessie, that loser ain’t got it.” Ron threw a few uneaten fingers at Adriana, who hissed in reply, then gave me a downright gentle smile. “He thinks you do, though. He said so.”
“There’s a lie.” Linc was bristling, a terrier trying to intimidate a Doberman; less than no interest in defending Joe, but he’d seen the look on my face. “Like you’d ever even listen to him, give him the time of night outside his dreams—”
“Oh, we listen when we feel like it, bone-bag—don’t matter who it is, where they’re from, we’ll listen to anyone who’s got an interesting story to tell.” Sated, for the moment at least, Rommel clasped his hands comfortably behind his head. “We ain’t prejudiced. We like everybody’s fairy tales. We really like this one. We like the ones we can test for ourselves, see if they’re true or not.”
They were grinning at me now, Dembones included, because we’d all known from the start how this little interview would end. Ron pulled himself from the altar. Rommel rose from his pew. I looked up to the balcony, for respite, and saw another row of eager faces and fixed smiles like masks on sticks.
“You been tired lately, Jessie?” Ron asked. “Kinda hot? Kinda feverish? Like Teresa was? That’s the first phase of it. Then your appetite starts shifting—”
“Fuck you,” I snarled back. “I can’t eat that age-old shit.” I jerked my head toward the altar, the pillaged hoo-remains. “I’m normal, I’m not sick, I’m not some half-hoo laboratory freak—”
“You sure?” Rommel said. “You too, ’maldie? Bone-bag? You really sure?”
“Then your appetite starts shifting,” said Ron, like he’d never been interrupted. He was rolling up his sleeves, slowly, revealing the new flesh easing out old rot. “And you get strong, even before the muscle starts showing you get so damned strong. Pound anybody into the pavement, the dust, that you wanna. Anybody getting on your nerves. Standing in your way.”
A slow foot-tapping rhythm started against the balcony floor, and they all took it up one by one until the gallery was dancing for our flesh. Whose bright idea had this been? Oh, right, mine. All that new hoo-muscle. A one-armer, a stringbean, a ’maldie know-nothing. Renee gulped and tried to crouch down in her pew. Carny, who’d been pacing back and forth seething for the talk to stop, strutted up to Linc and punched him square in the chest. Linc flew backward, clutching a pew arm to keep from falling.
“Hey!” Carny shouted. “
Hey!
This Horton here? Huh? You Horton?”