The flaky charring on his face was gone too—he might never have been burned at all. He might never have died at all. I didn’t realize I was backing away until Joe’s arm tightened around my shoulders.
“I was going to kill you, and then myself,” Joe said, quiet like we were still alone. “So we wouldn’t be the only ones stuck and unchanged—and then you kept talking about being tired and there was something in your eyes, something all glassy and strange like you had a fever, and I thought, it’s happening to her too. The Rat were getting hungry, Jessie. This thing, whatever it is, it makes you strong and it makes you hungry—they’re hunting down the unchanged, killing and eating them, like deer, like hoos, and I thought, if she fights them, if she fights Teresa, and she dies, she’s out of this misery. If she lives, she’s becoming one of them—and there’s a place for her in this hellhole.” He gripped even harder. “You guessed right, Jessie. That’s what we do when we love each other, Jessie, we make sure we’re not left to the wolves. We agreed on that. Just like you said. That’s why I wanted you to kill me out here, but then I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t ask, because you’d never forgive yourself if you said yes—”
Ben let out a phlegmy, choking cough of a laugh. “Holy Christ, Joe,” he said, wiping clear, human tears from his eyes, “but you really are one passive-aggressive son of a bitch.”
“Well, I’m just sorry you never did get her to fight me,” said a new voice, emerging from the trees. “I can always use a good laugh.”
It was only by the long black hair that I recognized her. Teresa’s face was smooth and whole as any real human’s, her skin satiny with renewed life and her voice, her hoo-talking voice, pouring syrupy good cheer over a bed of ice. Trailing behind her, crouched down and cringing like a beggar tugging on a millionaire’s sleeve, was something with ashen, blue-tinged skin and trembling muscles and swollen hands and a stench pouring off him strong enough to choke, a slurry of sulfur and acetate and motor oil and pure putrescence overlaying human, barely human, formerly human flesh. It looked up at me, its gray hair greasy and lank, its eyes filled with the desperation of the starving.
“I’m so hungry,” it said, in Jim’s voice. Grabbing at Teresa’s arm in earnest now, barely seeming to notice as she shook him off. “Please.”
Teresa laughed, then patted him like a little misbehaving pet. “You hoos don’t do all that well when you get this, do you?” she mused, lips twitching and curving in a smile like a paring knife’s path through a peach. “Guess you should’ve thought of that before you went and bug-sprayed it everywhere you could—”
I pulled at Joe’s arm, insistent as a panicked toddler. “What is this? Joe?”
“I told you, Jessie,” he said, staring down at Jim like a reproachful zoo animal at its keeper. “The world’s not ours anymore. There’s something loose out there, and it’s changing everyone. I don’t know how it started, or who started it—”
“Please just give me something to eat.” Jim was stumbling toward me now, the cornfield rot in his eyes, his skin, his quavering desperate voice. “You owe me, Jessie, I’m your brother, you owe—”
“Don’t you talk to me!” I bared my teeth at him, pulling free of Joe’s grasp to shove him from my path. “You did this? You made this disease, in your damned lab, just like the Rat said you did? You turned them and Ben and Teresa into
humans
?”
I spat the word, making it the epithet it had always been among our kind. Teresa laughed, the same hoarse mucousy laugh as Ben, and Jim cradled himself in his own shaking arms.
“I don’t understand you,” he said, rocking back and forth where he stood. “You don’t talk right. You’ve got this too, I can tell. I can see it in your eyes. But you still don’t talk right yet. I need a branch.” He started laughing, hollow and frantic. “I need a branch—”
“Tell her what happened,” Teresa ordered him, singsong, glee dancing in her eyes. Her human talk. Her human tongue and teeth. “She wants to know. Tell her, and you can have something to eat.”
“Lisa saw you.” Jim looked from me to Joe to Ben, eyes full of sorrow, seeking someone, anyone, to offer him meat and pity. “That day, visiting your grave. She came back crying, she threw up, she said it was horrible, that it was
you
staring at her out of this rotted shell and how much you must be suffering, how much pain—”
“I was never in pain.” I had to keep control of myself, had to keep him talking, to have any chance at all of learning why we were all standing here right now, but even knowing he couldn’t hear a word of it I couldn’t stop. “I had somewhere to go, somewhere to be. I had people like me. I had myself. I had a life, my own life, I had friends, I had someone who loved—”
I couldn’t finish that sentence.
Had, had, had
. All going. All gone.
“I don’t understand you.” Jim shook his head. “You’re still trapped inside a corpse. But you recognized Lisa, me—I always knew you all kept your minds, your memories, I
knew
it, and they wanted me to kill you. My own sister. My father. My mother. All over again.” He doubled over suddenly, clutching his stomach, and when he raised his head again he had the glassy-eyed glitter of barely suppressed agony. “I wouldn’t do it. I was going to bring you back. All of you. Make you human again. Alive. Bring you back from the dead.” He doubled over again, his head whipping back even as his body pitched forward. “And it worked,” he gasped. “It worked.”
He started laughing all over again, laughing like Ben, like Teresa, hoarse and thick like he was choking up a lung. The glassy, glittery sheen of his eyes was the same as theirs now too, exactly the same. Not just pain, but madness.
“You owe me,” he repeated with a feverish conviction, even as he made those shallow, gulping sounds of someone trying desperately not to be sick. “You owe me. I did this for you, Jessie, I did—”
“You did shit,” Ben sneered, folding his arms. “Another nasty little hoo with his rotten little stories—”
Jim shook his head fervently. “Teresa’s right. I told you the truth, we collected bodies, your bodies—oh, God, please, I need to eat, I’m so hungry—”
“Talk,” Teresa said, her voice hard and smooth as gun-metal. “Let her hear it. Why shouldn’t she? We all love a good story, helps pass the time of night. And hoos pissing in their own soup is the best story ever.”
“Zoonotic infection.” Jim grabbed at a low-hanging tree branch, clutching and swaying to keep himself upright. “Contracted from another species. Somehow. This strange, mutated
H. pylori
.” He licked his lips, steadying himself, that old science-lecturer look sparking for the briefest of moments on his face. “The lab got ideas, started tinkering. If they could mutate it more, make it an active contagion, wreak havoc with your digestive tracts, maybe they could somehow starve you out. Just seed your habitats with it, watch you wither and drop—nothing else had worked, nothing. Tried everything. They even had smallpox samples, Jessie, what the hell, it worked on the Indians, right? You have no idea what we’ve been doing out there, another reason no unauthorized humans are—”
He let go of the branch, crouched down and was violently sick all over the ground. Teresa watched him, impassive, mildly amused.
“So they invented something to eat us up from the inside,” she said, grabbing Jim’s shoulder and hauling him, moaning, upright. “Make our guts one big ulcer. But this one here had his own experiments, his own ideas—”
“I saved you,” Jim whispered, a hand with skin like a deflated balloon sawing back and forth, back and forth over his dirtied mouth, and his voice rose higher and louder in a croon of thwarted fury. “I was part of that lab team, I worked on this and I monkey-wrenched it! I sabotaged it! I altered the bacterium again, I switched it out, our lab infected the woods, the beaches, every habitat, every place we knew you were with
my
bacterium, and it worked! All those undead bodies with holes all inside, but it didn’t matter, they were stronger! They could eat anything, they stopped decaying, they grew new flesh—I did it!”
He rocked back and forth, back and forth, crouching with a palm pressed to his stomach like it might split open. “
I made you what you are!
I saved you! I brought you back to life! I saved you, Jessie. I loved you so much it’s killing me, it’s killing all of us, I’ve made you human again and we’re all dying because of it and, Jessie, oh my God do you owe me. You
owe
me.”
His face was flickering, wavering, changing like the great bruise of Ben’s arm, tenderness and revulsion and gentleness and hatred coming and going too fast to pin down. Too quick to distinguish each from each. Ben, supremely unimpressed, leaned against a cottonwood with the old fedora pulled over his eyes and the blood visibly pounding through his veins. Joe just nodded, like none of this surprised him at all.
“I told you, Jessie,” he said. “I told you. Everything’s changing. Everyone.”
“Except for you,” said Teresa, grinning.
Joe’s eyes looked dull. “Except for me.”
“Contagious,” Teresa noted, grinning wider as she gazed at me. “Contagious as the common cold. And it’s still mutating, getting faster, getting more wicked, and turns out humans aren’t the least immune. You have no idea what it’s like out there, Jessie, out where the hoos—”
She stopped for a moment, her face contorting like Jim’s, then with visible effort thrust her shaking hands into her pockets. She looked like she had that day in the park, with the matches, when she’d been trembling all over with hunger. Like Rommel had, when he screamed at Carny for more food. “No idea,” she said, still twitchy. “Jonas Salk over here, he got it. Up to his tongue in it, no surprise. Whole damned lab brought it home to all their families—your family. Those idiot hoo-kiddies, sneaking around the beaches, they brought it back too. You’ve seen ’em, the sick hoos. Rotten inside and out, falling apart, starving for food but can’t keep a damned thing down—”
“How much of this did you know?” I asked Joe, like Teresa wasn’t even there. Maybe if I concentrated hard enough, she and what was left of Jim and this whole horrible dazed-up nightmare would just melt like flesh in the fire, disappear. Only Joe and Ben would be left, the real Ben, the old Joe, shitting themselves laughing at their giant-ass prank. I’d beat them until they were oozing from every pore. It’d all be okay.
Shit, Jessie, you shoulda
seen
your face.
“Not everything,” Joe said. “Not enough. All the little bits and pieces, they just . . . didn’t make sense.” He stared hard at Ben. “I didn’t want to see it.”
Jim was crawling near our feet, shoving dirt in his famished mouth, spitting it out again with sounds like crying. “I told them. I told them just like you said, I told them, now you have to give me—”
“It’s a hoo-epidemic now,” Teresa said, watching him in barely veiled delight. “Can’t just toss them outside the town gates anymore, say good riddance, it’s everywhere. Rotting, starving, crazy, all of them. There’s meat riots. Hoos eating their pets, their children, forming hunting gangs, devouring anything they can find. Eating garbage. Eating filth. Eating everything. But none of it stays down. They just keep getting sick. They just keep dying.”
“I’m hungry,” Jim wailed. “I’m starving, I can’t stand it—”
“That germ of theirs just keeps mutating.” Teresa kicked him in the side, watching him convulse and retch. “And the hoos just keep dying. And me, I just keep laughing.”
She sucked air between her front teeth, an idle whistling sound, like cannibalism and extinction were just a dull end to a rainy afternoon. Air between her teeth. Breathing like a human breathes. All to bring me back. To make me live again. All this, all this deception, all this sickness, all this horror, those cornfield hoos, Ben, everything, it was my fault, it was about me, it was all to try to make
me
human. Because I couldn’t have just watched Lisa from as far away as I made Renee watch her family—not me, because I’m so fucking special and the rules just don’t apply to me, I had to try to talk to her, I had to tell her I was there, she had to tell Jim. I was the original contagion. Me. My grief for Florian, my constant companion like a sharp lake stone pressing into my side, drained instantly away: I was so glad he was gone, that he never lived to see this. Never lived to see what I’d done.
Jim was by the sand pile now, digging around its edges, letting out choking, sobbing breaths. The pile moved again, shifted. It shouldn’t have been moving. There wasn’t even a breeze.
“What’s in there?” I said. But I knew, I already knew.
Teresa snorted in derision and Ben smiled, rather gently. “Poor, loyal old Sam,” he said. “I knew he’d come looking for me, all along I knew he would. So I waited. I thought he didn’t make it, when I bit him, so I buried him. Shoulda been more patient, let the magic do its work—like now. See? Go on. Watch.”
As we watched, the lumpy, stinking sand shifted and roiled. A hand came out, and another, and a pair of flailing arms in a sand-caked, moldy suit jacket and then a pair of old dusty eyes, still squeezed tightly shut.
Ben crouched by Sam’s side, shoving Jim away. “I was hoping he’d wake up in time,” he whispered. “See? Nothing scary, it’s just ol’ Ben and ol’ Sam out on the town—”
“You killed him,” I said, and the nest of knots that was my gut tightened into hard little buds of fear. “His best friend that he loved, and you—”
Ben laughed, a gentle indulgent sound. “I didn’t kill him, Jessie—anything but. Look at this. Watch. Wait.”
Sam’s eyes clicked open, wide and startled and lit up with hunger.
“Now watch
this
,” Ben said. And he reached down to poor dazed, trembling Sam, and ripped a hand through his guts like a saw tearing through a down pillow. Blood gushed over the sand—pure red human blood spraying our feet and legs. I jumped, shouting. Teresa laughed. Jim grabbed at the fouled bits of sand, frantic, sucking them dry. Sam shuddered, moaned, collapsed back into the sand pile—