Grave (2 page)

But it’s a little late for that now, and there’s a deserted Shop-Wel sitting there right for the foraging and I was hungry. Starving, in fact, my stomach a sour shriveled pumpkin-seed in that way I’d never grown used to, even last winter after the plague, so when we stumbled into what remained of Sandy Shores and I saw the big red-mortar-blue-pestle sign, I turned straight off the road. My mother marched right behind me, skirting the door’s shattered glass, and my dog, my ghost dog, Old Nick Drake, sniffed and picked his way inside. Stephen, Lisa, Naomi clinging to Lisa’s hand—they peered frowning into the broad, intact side windows, looking for squatters and interlopers who’d got here before us, but the whole place, the whole town, was empty. You get a feeling after a while for when a place is truly deserted, for when that heavy-hanging sense of an aborted, interrupted
presence
around you, like rain thick in the air, has passed: not a sound turned echo, like just after a death, but an echo dispersed to failing memory, indistinguishable shadow.

Some store shelves were overturned, a few cans of something bean-thick yet runny exploded all over the floor, but it was half-hearted looting at best and we all fanned out, grabbing bagged boxed pull-top snacks, warm sodas still in the chill case (we left the milk strictly alone), bottles of antacids, arthritis tablets, aspirin. My ravioli was right there waiting on a collapsed metal shelf, a good dozen little containers or more; I sat down in the aisle, wrenched the plastic top off one and finger-spooned it in, licking the side of my hand clean of gummy sugared tomato. Cheese-filled, this kind, coating my tongue in a thick salty paste.

Once upon a time, not long ago, there
were
zombies; this was their time, the sunset, this was when they all came out to play—I’d be looking over my shoulder with every bite. But not anymore. The labs sprayed something, like a pesticide, that was supposed to kill zombies dead for good. It killed them, all right. And most of humankind, too. A man-made plague. The only survivors were the few immune, like me, Naomi, Stephen, my mother, and the few others like my friend Lisa who got sick unto death, passed through the other side of illness, became something inhuman and impervious to disease, injury, mortality. Exes, I called them: ex-humans, ex-zombies. They were supposed to be untouchable, something that could never die, but we’d killed them, me and my mother and Stephen, they were coming for us and somehow we tore up their untouchable flesh and—

“Nick?” I said, and held out the little plastic tub for him to lick the sauce. “Don’t you want any?”

Nick sniffed and declined it when I opened another one just for him, keeping his eyes on my fast-moving fingers—not like begging but like my hand was strange, dangerous, a thing needing vigilant inspection. That thick fur too deep black to carry a sheen, those watery sulphur-pisshole eyes taking every bit of me in...surely even ghost dogs needed to eat, but he hadn’t since he first started following me, all those weeks ago. Not one bite, not that I’d ever seen. I picked up his can and started in, soft wet pasta like waterlogged paper, stringy bits of beef drowned in sweet tomato.

Once upon a time, there was a dog who’d been a spirit, a chimera, a ghost sent by Death itself to track a murderer. Casper the Unfriendly Bloodhound. Then, sometime between Ms. Acosta’s death and my own, he became true, living flesh. I didn’t know how, wouldn’t ask why, because he’d defended us, gotten us out of Prairie Beach alive; whether he meant to be or not, he was maybe the truest friend I’d ever had. The others didn’t want to hear that, not for a second. The others had no idea just what they defied, when they tried to pretend Nick wasn’t there.

“Anti-inflammatory,” Stephen read from the side of a bottle, standing at the end of the aisle while the others hit the dry goods. “Might help your eye—”

“Nothing’s gonna help this eye,” I said, but I stretched out my sauce-smeared hand anyway for two pills, swallowed them barely checking what they were. Stephen didn’t look any great shakes himself, face bruised, cut throat scabbing over just like mine, blood not all his own dried stiff on his clothes and mouth, the fingers clutching a half-drunk Coke trembling with fatigue. I reached for a third ravioli and Stephen handed me a pull-top can of peaches and the rest of his bag of Hott Stix, as good a lunch as any I’d got in a long time; in Paradise City, the human settlement where he and I had met, where we both sang, tap-danced, and rolled over playing dead for our supper, they didn’t bother with midday meals at all. The exes who ran the place, they only fed us human serfs just enough to keep us going, keep us distracted. The other humans, the frails, they rioted and set the place on fire after we left, that’s what Lisa said and she had the singed smell all in her hair and clothes to prove it. I wanted to ask her about that, just what she saw and did before it all went up, but I knew she’d never give me a straight answer.

“Is there a pet aisle here?” I asked. I hadn’t looked. “Dog food or kibble or something? Nick—”

“Can fend for himself just fine,” Stephen said, gulping down more Coke and clutching the bottle like it might grow legs and run away. He and Nick—they’d met only hours ago, but already Stephen’s unease, his strange faltering hesitance in Nick’s presence, snaked up between the two of them like a smell. “We don’t need him getting used to one kind of food we might never find again. Dogs can eat anything.”

“This dog
won’t
eat anything,” I retorted, and Nick just stared impassive at us both as I licked Hott Stix traces from my fingers, deep radioactive red against the orangey traces of tomato. I stuck powdery fingertips in the ravioli and stirred, a little cayenne for the sauce. “He’s never eaten anything, even those squirrels he chased in the woods he just let go—”

“Then we hardly need to start worrying about him now, do we?”

The little edge to Stephen’s voice was something I was growing used to, the prick and jab of a rusty safety pin that slipped loose whenever he was nervous, tired, felt the absence of memory inside him acute as the emptiness of a room: the diffuse, bleak emptiness of a room where someone died. We’d both died that day, he and I, but it’d happened to him, to my mother, again and again, the very act of it an acid eating through their memories, their selves—dead today. Because the lab didn’t just study zombies, back before the plague. They also lured in or kidnapped human beings: addicts, prostitutes, homeless people, prisoners, anyone and everyone filed under Riddance, Good. Like my mother. Like Stephen. They experimented on them, killing them over and over, bringing them back to life again and again. It destroyed their memories, their sense of who they once were, their minds’ avenues stretching back only to the lab’s own sandy-shore backyard. Most test subjects just plain died.

And now, even though there were meant to be no more labs, they’d done it to him again. And to me. We’d died, this very day, and come back again this very day, and real human beings, like I’d thought I was for so long, they couldn’t do that. I thought that over like I’d been trying not to and then grabbed another can of fruit, even though I had the distended, slightly ill feeling I’d already eaten too much.

“Nick got me this far,” I said, and left it there because I didn’t want a fight. “But I guess he’s not sick. He doesn’t look sick, anyway. Take some of those things for your own face, your jaw looks awful.”

“You look worse,” he replied. Rancor faded, easily as it flared, his fingers so light at my temple pulling strands of hair away from my swollen eye. “Billy packs a nasty punch, I should know.”

“I don’t want to talk about Billy,” I said, and flexed my sore stained fingers that Billy and Mags, the king and queen of Paradise City, tried to break, to bite right off like the zombies they still were inside. Mags that I’d killed, when her kind—those who got the plague, survived it, and came out transformed—were meant to be impervious, immortal, when their flesh knitted together in seconds right before your eyes and nothing in this life could kill them. But I’d killed her. And killed something inside Billy, who loved her and only her, when I did it. Ms. Acosta, back in Lepingville, she and I were the town’s only human survivors and she’d had no family, but maybe there was someone else, a Billy to her Mags. Maybe now that spring had come, a friend, a long-lost someone, would go looking for her and find her body how I’d left it and—

I don’t want to talk about Billy. Ever.

Stephen sat in the aisle next to me, gulping the rest of his Coke with his back half-turned on Nick. Lisa came over, sway-footed with the faint bruising of exhaustion beneath her eyes, stepping gingerly over a splat puddle of exploded chili cans.

“I propose we stop here, for the evening,” she announced, spitting out the words harsh and hard like her plague-twisted tongue couldn’t help doing. “Maybe the night. Naomi’s worn out—”

“No, I’m not,” Naomi said, from the other end of the aisle. Kids her age—I’m only seventeen and the energy shooting from their ears still makes me feel old. She was cradling a flimsy coloring book, a little box of crayons, a bag of potato chips half her height. “Can I color while you sleep?”

Lisa actually glared at her, the unique feverish hostility of love all in her eyes. Just like she’d looked at me, back in the woods this morning when she came for me. Rescued me. Naomi was another of her rescues, motherless and fatherless and thrown on Paradise’s awful mercies before Lisa stepped in; she’d lost a daughter of her own, Lisa had, long before all of this started. Leukemia. Only three, four years old. Sometimes I thought Lisa tried, a lot harder than she should, to forget Naomi wasn’t really Karen, her dead little girl. Just like she tried so hard to forget I wasn’t really Judy, Jenny, whatshername, her little sister.

“If you even think of wandering off by yourself,” Lisa told Naomi, “while we’re sleeping? If you even vaguely contemplate considering it? I will kill you. I’m not kidding, I will take both my hands and wring your little scrawny neck—”

It shouldn’t have been funny to hear her talking like that, an ex-human with all her strength to an actual little girl, but Stephen laughed and I laughed and Naomi, unafraid, just swelled with indignation. “I’m not wandering anywhere!” she declared, swiftly setting down her chips and toys like we were about to accuse her of shoplifting. “I want to stay with the doggy.”

The doggy, quite politely, wanted nothing to do with her, but she was a stubborn kid and Nick was patient enough that she kept trying. He looked up from where he sat with paws pressing at my thigh and gave her a searching stare that lit her up with false hope, made her run over to clutch him round the neck and bury her face in its furry crook. He suffered it in silence, like he always did. Stephen, a little flicker of disquiet crossing his face at the sight, bent his head and finished off my ravioli.

Soft rustlings, a shuffling sound, as my mother came dragging down the aisle; she had backpacks slung over her arm, plain utilitarian red and blue, plus sparkle-flowered pink nylon stuffed with cans, pills, boxes, bottles tenting and spiking the thin porous cloth. An armful of those cheap six-a-pack white cotton socks, fleece blankets, jars of vitamins. I remembered the safehouse back in Leyton, the kit bags of ready supplies I’d had to toss aside when I thought something was after me (and it was), and regretted all over again the tornado Lisa and I got caught in leaving town, everything we took as our own flung into the trees and smashed beyond repair. Nick, though, Nick had been there all along, whether I saw him or not; following us, following me, making sure we got where we were going. Following me like he had since I’d killed Ms. Acosta. Leading me toward my own, briefest of deaths.

The thing that had followed me here, flushing me out and chasing me miles across the county until I ended up in Prairie Beach, the lab’s backyard—my birthplace, my new birthplace—maybe it had planned the tornado, another obstacle to push me closer into its path. You should’ve warned me, Nick, I know you
verr only follow-ink orrd-uhs
but your master... you should’ve warned me how vicious he can get. Your master. My master. I reached an arm up silently to my mother and she sank down cross-legged beside us, deflated and fading fast.

“Bedding,” she said, nodding toward the blankets as she set them down. “There’s travel pillows too. I can’t go any farther than this. Just now.” She glanced toward Lisa. “Sorry.”

“Why apologize?” Lisa asked, in the same careful, measured tone, the formality of two friends mending fences after a horrible, friendship-ending fight. Only hours they’d known each other, and already this guarded intimacy that could shatter at the slightest push. “I need to sleep, too. Whatever they say, nobody here’s superhuman.”

Her eyes flitted to Nick, still suffering Naomi’s petting with a dignified indifference, then she looked away. I pretended I didn’t see it, getting up to help lay out our makeshift bedding. I brushed my mother’s shoulder reaching over her and she raised her hand like I had, stroking idly at my arm; I combed fingers through her hair, tugging out tangles as though she were my little girl instead. Checking, constantly, like we had been since the lab, to make sure we really were both still there.

Before the plague, before I found out why she didn’t have and never talked about family, my mother was a security worker, an anti-zombie patroller. A good job, important, great pay for a single mom. That’s when she killed my own father, even though he was already dead. Undead. Stretching his hand out to her, trying to say her name. She killed him not because he was something different, outside us all, but because on the inside, where it counted, he was exactly like her. She like him. And all of us, together, only human-shaped shells around a—