“Why don’t you go bother Renee, and leave my sister alone?” I said. “You never cared before, as long as they were blond—”
Ron just laughed, glancing at Lisa with the old slyness. “I don’t see big sis here complaining—”
“You’re sweet, Jessie,” Lisa said, voice barely above a whisper, “but he’s all right.”
“He was happy about this,” I told her, wiping my mouth. “He was attacking anyone who wasn’t sick, a lot of folks who were, before it all went south, if that’s your idea of sweet—”
Ron just laughed, tossing a drained water bottle over his shoulder. “Hey, well, shit happens. I dragged a crate of these from the grocery store, back when I could still carry stuff, I’ll go get another. You’re gonna be sick for a while here.”
He walked off into the trees. I could see the effort it took for him to keep moving, the constant ripple of shivers and tremors gripping every muscle and how he had to stop every few yards just to rest. Then I was sick again, everywhere, my eyes watering and throat raw; there was no more relief in between bouts of vomiting, just the dread of when it would happen again. Lisa cradled my head against her arm, mop-ping the cold sweat from my face. I was starting to get cold, too. Soon I’d be Saint-Vitusing through the daisies just like everyone else.
“Could I ask you something?” I said. “And don’t go all nuts on me. Your daughter.” I hesitated, when I felt her shake a little bit harder, but I had to know. “Did you . . . kill her or something? Did you?”
Lisa actually laughed, an abrupt, constricted sound like someone spitting something solid from between their teeth. Then she stroked my head, sighing. “Karen had leukemia,” she told me. “She died before any of this. Her father couldn’t handle it and took off. I don’t know where he is. Was.” She cradled me a little closer. “Only three years old, my Karen. This family’s had more than its share of fun, let me tell you—but I’m glad. I’m so, so glad she’s dead.”
“Sorry. Stupid question, I guess—”
“No, it isn’t. Traveling the road out to you, I saw . . .” She shuddered, her body stiffening against mine. “Never mind what I saw. Even what we both saw, it was nothing like what I saw. But it’s a perfectly logical question.”
I brushed my hair out of my eyes and when I took my hand away, saw it covered in sweat-dampened strands: That was starting then, too. Sick all the time, hair falling out—maybe someone had set off a bomb or something and we didn’t know it. No dust clouds blotting out the sun, though, no silhouettes blossoming on the walls—just bodies everywhere, bodies in rows and piles and heaps and torn-up pieces for the birds and rats and dwindling ranks of the hungry. My own dying flesh. Six more corpses beside me, right now, losing their rigidity and swelling up with gas; Linc had stopped trying to move them, it was too much for him now. He, Ron, Lisa, Renee and I huddled in our own little group just like the others, half-dazed and moaning every now and then when the shivering or the bone-ache or the waves of nausea got to be too much. After Ron got back with our water, his last big burst of energy, he just curled up and trembled against Lisa’s shoulder for hours.
“I hope there isn’t really a hell,” he said around incessantly chattering teeth, “or I’m so fucked.”
“What do you call this?” I demanded, rocking back and forth against the aching in my legs, my back, my head. “If this isn’t hell?”
He let out a little bark of laughter. “Real life. That’s what I call it.”
He burrowed under his filthy blankets and quit talking altogether. I lay down on my side, shivering and rocking and sometimes crawling a few feet away to vomit up bile; the chewed-up grass and soft powdery dirt felt like ground glass against my palms and knees, my skin still intact but tender as a great spreading blister. Linc kept handing me water bottles from Ron’s half-empty carton, but I wasn’t the least thirsty anymore, didn’t care about the taste in my mouth anymore. My hair was coming out now in clumps.
“Over soon,” Linc whispered, his arms around me from the back and Renee’s from the front. “It’ll be all over. For all of us.”
It hurt horribly where their bones pressed against my skin, I winced and tried instinctively to ease away, but I was too scared to be alone. Other groups kept their own vigils, crouched on their own desert islands of misery, and I heard coughing, vomiting, crying, snatches of prayers, attempted jokes, dazed monologues of shock and loss. I lay there clutching one of Florian’s lake stones in my hand, pale pink with a silvery sheen like salmon skin, and that hurt too but I couldn’t let go of it, the thought of losing my grip on it filled me with a vague, nebulous panic that made me hold on even tighter even as the touch made my palm throb with pain. I was too exhausted to stand upright. I couldn’t sleep.
Mom, Dad, if you’re out there—no, I know you’re dead. I’m sure of it. I just know. Sam. Ben. Joe. My Joe. Billy, Mags? Maybe they made it to the next county, maybe it hasn’t spread there yet. Maybe chickens are penguins. Karen, my niece. Rommel. Maybe Jim, Teresa, how many more. All the Rats. All the Flies. No National Guardsmen coming to help us, no Red Cross, no Marines, no search-and-rescue teams, no paramedics, no government researchers, no special army divisions, no nothing. Just all of us, dying together, the county or the state or the whole country or the world. Well, why not? Why shouldn’t the world end now? Stranger things have happened. Like me, the should-be skeleton, being here to see the end at all.
I really thought there’d be some soldiers, at least. Secret government lab cooking up an antidote. Red-faced vigilante guys raiding the gun stores, whooping righteously as they pumped us full of rounds: “Humanity” 187, Mutants 0. That’s how it always happens in the movies. I used to like the movies. Maybe all of this is just a big movie, and I just have to wait for the credits to roll. Soon, very soon, we’ll all be safe and well, the screen will go black and all the lights will come up.
Linc curled up with his head in the crook of my elbow. I loved them, I thought as I held them and felt them tremble, I loved them both, and I loved Lisa, and I loved Joe no matter what he’d done to me, to us, it didn’t matter, he’d been as sad and lost as Sam ever was and I loved him, and I loved Sam too and I loved Billy and Mags enough to hope, against all common sense, that they really were safe. Even Ron, I could love just a little bit now. Teresa and Jim could go fuck themselves, I did have some limits, but it was amazing just what a love-number dying did on your brain. Useless, worthless sentiment, love—it didn’t do anything but make you feel weirdly gentle and benevolent in a way that meant your brain, your sharp, suspicious, protective brain that got you through two deaths and two rebirths in one piece, was shutting down and couldn’t do a thing for you anymore. Good-bye, brain, and thanks for thinking me out of a hell of a lot of trouble. This one, though, it’s way beyond us both.
My head dropped down and I floated quietly away.
I struggled to my feet and stood there weaving, dizzy. I was alone in our great chewed-up dying prairie patch, and at the same time I was on the shore of Lake Michigan watching the choppy gray waters roll and subside, looking like bumps and waves in a big blanket of plaster. Drying paste. Sand coated my feet and they stung terribly; I tried to brush it off, wincing as the grains adhered to my blistering skin, and when I looked up again Florian was standing there watching me stork-hop around the shoreline. Still skeletal, still with the old death’shead smile.
“I told you it was beautiful,” he said, gazing out happily at the granite-colored waves. “Missed my beach.”
The beach became the prairie became the woods, and the trees had regained all their eaten-away bark. I was hallucinating, then, just like I’d thought. I didn’t care. This might be my last chance to talk to him. “I’m dying,” I said, and started to laugh. “For once, I’m really, truly dying.”
“Could be,” he said, looking thoughtful. “Could be.”
“I don’t want to die.” Now I was nearly giggling. “I want to
be
dead, like I was. But I don’t want to die.”
Florian mulled that one over, the trees flickering and fading before my eyes and the underbrush again becoming sand. “That case,” he said, “you won’t.”
“How senile are you, old man?” I brandished another clump of fallen-out hair. “I mean, look at me—”
“World’s turning,” he said, as we walked along the empty shoreline. “Earth’s turning. The soil’s turning over and the earthworms are all wriggling out to play. Omega’s gone back to alpha and you and your friends, the ones still left? Soon you’ll all be coming back. Once you make it over here. Once you’re back to the start.”
I thought that over, shaking the strands from my fingers. “And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
He just stared at the water, toe bones digging idly at a clay-colored lake stone stuck fast in the wet sand. Enough. “What does that mean?” I repeated, and grabbed his shoulders and shook until I heard the rattle of dry sockets, felt dust caking my fingers. “What’s that mean?”
“Ain’t no need to get so riled,” he muttered, pulling himself free.
“Why do you keep coming back?” I shouted. “Why do you do this to me? Nothing’s been the same since you died, everything’s gone to hell and everyone’s so sick and I’m stuck in this horrible living body and everything we had is gone and I’m dying and I don’t have time for—”
“Time?” Florian laughed, a lighthearted consumptive wheeze. “You complaining about time now? You’re still dead to me, Jessie, whatever body you’re in, and us dead folk have all the time in the universe, all the time ever made. And you know it. So quit moaning.”
The old Florian, that was, kind even in scorn. My anger faded and I shrugged in reluctant agreement; he smiled even wider, that seamed skeletal dusty smile, and I felt a flash of nostalgia at the sight of his teeth, those long cylindrical undead-teeth that looked even longer in the absence of gums. Seeing them, you knew where hoos of old first got the idea of vampires. I wrapped my arms tightly around myself, though all my shivering had mysteriously stopped.
“I keep coming back,” Florian continued, “’cause I know you’ll listen.” He patted me on the arm. “No matter how mad you are. Ain’t no use in talking to anyone else, I was dead to them long before I ever crumbled into dust. But this ain’t a pleasure trip. I’m here to tell you what to expect, so you’ll know how to behave when it happens.”
“I love you,” I said, and blinked back actual saltwater tears, not coffin rot. That still startled me. “If you hadn’t died—”
“They’d have killed me.” He picked up the loosened stone, tossed it at the water. “Even without all them new diseases changing everything. I was useless to them, and we ain’t sentimental.”
“If my brother hadn’t—”
“The sickness would’ve come anyway,” he said, shaking his head impatiently. “Your brother ain’t so important to all this as he thinks. Quit wasting your energy on him, you seen he lived long enough to get his punishment. Things happen like that, ain’t no point in celebrating or getting sad about it. I’m here to tell you that I seen it all. Everything. And I know what’s coming next.”
The wind picked up, rustling the rags of my clothes and making the trees shake and bend; we were back in the forest, though still on the beach. “Where are you now?” I asked. “I mean, where are you, really?”
Florian looked confused. “Inside your mind,” he said, scratching his back against a tree. “Where else would I go?”
“Is it just here, this sickness? Or is it everywhere?”
He laughed, wriggling his shoulder bones more vigorously against the bark. “Everywhere. Some places worse than others, right around here it’s especially bad, but everywhere. Government’s broken down, military’s all dead or dying, not enough survivors to rebuild a damned thing—you seen it where you are, you should see what the bigger cities look like. Bodies all over, filth, typhus, hepatitis, rabies from all the rats. Gas explosions, fires, everything looted to the foundations. Folks walking around brain-snapped ’cause they turned cannibal. Well, you seen some of that yourself. Can’t even feel sorry for some of ’em, they keep trying to shoot stuff like in the movies even though they know guns don’t do a damned thing—” He sighed. “Well, hoos have simple brains that don’t take in new facts too easy, we knew that already. But they’re gonna have to get used to a whole lotta change now, real quick. A whole lotta forever change.”
I picked up another lake stone, a greenish one, pressing the smooth dampness hard against my palm. “Then it really is the end of the world.”
“It’s the end of this world.” Florian shrugged. “It’s the end of their world. But it ain’t the end of the
world
. There’s no real end to anything, you should know that by now.”
He reached a hand up to the fruit-laden branch of a pear tree, mysteriously materialized on the shoreline. “We’ve come close before, to having things like this, having a world without
them.
Other times, other epidemics. The Black Death, so-called.”
So-called, yes. I couldn’t help smiling because I realized I knew them all, knew them from the whispers when I was first alive, knew them from my very first days aboveground: all the wars, famines, natural disasters the hoos kept insisting were nothing to do with us, nothing at all, and they knew far better than us just what a lie that was. “The Great London Fire,” I replied. “So-called.”
“Chicago Fire too. I remember that one. Always trying to keep us down by burning us out.” Florian chuckled, tossing a pear from hand to hand like a baseball. “Didn’t work. The Thirty Years’ War. The ’68 Pittsburgh massacre. The 1918 ‘flu’ epidemic. All them supposed serial killers. We’ve made our mark, pet. But the hoos never expected to lose for real, to have to turn the whole earth over to us and our kind, and it’s actually happening.” He handed me the pear, solemn, like a gift. “Don’t really know what we’re meant to do with it, tell you the truth, but we’re stuck with it now.”