Grave (31 page)

Billy threw his head back in actual glee. It was the best joke in the world. We were all the biggest fools in the world. “Guess what?” he said, when he’d recovered himself, reduced to a congested whisper. “Wanna know what? You ain’t got a second’s sleep to lose. You ain’t got a minute to tear me blind. You ain’t got an hour to celebrate afterwards. It’s done. It’s all done.” He gazed around him at the water, the ridge, the trees and cabins above and the seagulls strutting merrily below, and shook his head in indulgent dismissal. “All this shit, all this nothing, it’s going away. Everything, everywhere—”

“
It’s all coming to an end
.”

It was a soft, insinuating voice, speaking straight into my ear, making a ticklish twitch run down the side of my neck. Only Amy was close enough to whisper into my ear, but it wasn’t her, it wasn’t Billy, it wasn’t any voice I recognized at all. It was the voice of a man who wasn’t there. And everyone else around me, I could tell from their faces, was hearing it right when I did, right then. Jessie turned ashen.

“Jim,” she whispered, and then her eyes cleared and she shook her head. Naomi bit her lip, stifling a whimper of fear. Nick put his ears back and whined, and then growled. Billy’s eyes were squeezed shut and he was muttering something under his breath, something whose words I couldn’t make out but the tone was loud and clear: a prayer, I thought, a prayer. Of hope.

“
Of course
,” the voice continued, teasing and playful and merciless, “
that means everyone, and everything. Here, there and everywhere. Even I can’t hope to escape it
.” The air around us contracted, tightened, swollen unbearably heavy with the weight of his words. “
But what does that matter? What that exists—here, there or anywhere—doesn’t ultimately dissolve into nothing
?”

Jessie was staring out toward the water. A noise left her throat and we all turned at once, we all saw him: a tiny, silhouetted figure, a man-shaped shadow out on the horizon, outlined inky dark against the pearlescent clouds. He walked toward us, over the lake, and every step he took from horizon to shore covered miles in a single moment. He, it, was a gray-haired man in jeans and workshirt, with a heavy rucksack slung over one shoulder; his face was so bland and ordinary you forgot it as soon as you saw it but his smile, his smile split his face open from ear to ear, like a cut throat. Like Amy’s or Stephen’s cut throats, never closed up. Never, in an eternity, could you ever forget that smile. He took another step, and was a translucent giant; he moved swift and calm over the face of the waters, and his form blotted out the clouds, the sun, the sky. You could lose yourself forever, in a single part of him: a patch of a shirtsleeve; a magnified bootlace; one great, lamplit, night-dark eye.

And I knew who it was. The second we’d heard his voice, seen this chosen face, we’d all known who he really was.

Nick howled to split the sky open, but it was too late. The sky was a gaping wound. We were swallowed. We were all consumed. Death found the sands, and we were all caught up inside him. He passed through us and inside us as he set feet upon the earth, and all the world around us went darker than blindness.

Air. There’s no air left. I can’t breathe, I can’t—the sun was just a shriveled wizened match barely holding a flicker of flame, then Death blew it out and it was gone. The clouds melted before us, moon and stars and every last light in the universe were laid bare before our eyes and then all snuffed out, all at once—or maybe they were still there and he’d just blinded us all once more, left us blinded and stumbling in an endless, asphyxiating darkness. There was no air left. My chest convulsed frantically, trying to draw in the oxygen that wasn’t there, and I flung my arms out in the black and touched nothingness, no breath left to scream for Amy, Lisa, Stephen, anyone—

I was on my knees in the sand, gasping, agonized, almost sobbing in relief and terror because now I could breathe. I could just make out Amy crawling choking through the sand trying to reach me, I held out my arms—

Darkness, again. No air. No light. A great invisible switch was being flicked off, on, off on a whim, and as I sank down and slowly suffocated I could hear him, it, chatting with merry mirthfulness right into my ear. Right into all our ears. Death was such a very friendly man.

“Imagine aging,” he said. He was genial as a traveling salesman, taking some marvelous new gadget from his briefcase. “As fast or slow as you wanted to.”

The air was back. The light switched on. Through a haze I saw Linc and Jessie, hanging onto each other as they retched for breath. I saw thin rows of sticks propped in dry dust that had been trees, oaks and elms and ashes once in the full flower of spring, toppling and falling to the bare gray dust of ground. They crumbled to powder, more thin gray grit blowing away with what had been their underbrush, and then everything was dark once again.

“Think if they could bring you back,” Death said. His voice was so full of wonder, he almost drew me in: yes, imagine that. Just imagine it. “Bring you back just like you were before you died. You could choose when you age, how you age. Choose when you die. Tomorrow, or a thousand years from now.”

Natalie’s words, back in the lab, when she dared and taunted Death to come and get us all. Then I was choking again, panicked for air, and her words died away in the darkness, a roar filling my ears like the buzzing of a thousand flies.

“Taking away what’s rightfully mine,” he whispered. “But then, haven’t all of you on this miserable little patch of sand done that, whether you meant to or not? Haven’t all of you snatched life back from my jaws? Death, the only master of everything that ever lived, for all of mankind’s existence—but now? Now, he’s to be humanity’s servant.”

A dry chuckle sounded from the blackness.

“Think again,” he said.

I was hurled back into air and light like something had flung me there on my face, and maybe it had. Facedown in the sand, I clutched handfuls of it and gulped mouthfuls of air, tears running down my cheeks. Renee lay next to me, half-fainted; Lisa and Naomi were both quietly sobbing and where were the others, I couldn’t find the others for—Amy. She was right next to me, she must have been right there all along. We grabbed each other’s hands and held on agonizingly tight, determined that the next time, when we went back under, we wouldn’t both drown alone. Our fingers were dead bones, dead tree roots, knotted round each other in rigor mortis, petrifaction.

The sands and stones still stood—for now—but there was nothing on the landscape, nothing anywhere, but the fallen kindling of dead trees; the sky, or what had been the sky, was gray, not the variegated gray of overcast and clouds but a thin dim paint-layer of nothingness, the farthest horizon of the land of the blind. The lake basin was empty, its waters drained dry, and an endless, sunken desert stretched as far as we could see. We were too scared and weak to move, but we saw it, we all saw it: the basin sands stirring and moving, a thousand little earthquakes roiling the surface of the desert like undeads crawling up from a great mass grave. The sands didn’t shift, though, the ground around them didn’t break open; instead, they just floated up from beneath the lake basin, floated from underground like the ghosts they were.

The lake bed was full of people. The lake bed was a teaming city of specters, thousands of them, crowding shoulder to shoulder where they once might have drowned. As they jostled one another, shoved right and left for a better look at the ruined landscape, shouted and called and reached out their arms, it was another great roar and crash of lake waves, an enormous undertow come to pull us all away. Their inchoate voices were deafening, a great rushing sea of sound, and over it I could just barely make out another, more familiar cry.

“Come and get me!” Billy. As he stood there on the shore he was almost wailing, his arms stretched out in hope and expectation and a near-transcendent joy. “No more light, goddammit! No more!”

Waves of the dead were washing up from the lake bed like an invading army, pushing past us and through us to claim their kingdom: the earth, the blighted ruined beach and forest and roadside and city, all the land of the living Death had seized back for his own. But that was disappearing, too. Whole patches of denuded forest and blighted sand suddenly weren’t
there
anymore at all, even as I looked straight at them, eaten instantaneously away like poor Florian’s face and body. Not emptiness, but nothingness. We all saw it, Stephen started seeing it before any of us—why hadn’t we
listened
to him, why? Why hadn’t I defended him, stopped him from leaving, when I had the chance? Amy and I crouched where the waves had once landed, and we heard it: a deep, low, relentless growling. A sound like the rumble of the strongest summer thunder that makes you wait, tense with expectation, for the jump-from-your-bed crash.

“They’re everywhere,” she whispered to me, her face drawn and white. “Everywhere.”

And they
were
everywhere, running from the lake basin, hot on dead humanity’s heels; they spilled over the sand in countless shades of black fur and brown and white, their eyes sulfur-yellow and full of sharp, penetrating light. Nick’s cousins, his grandparents, Death’s thousand billion ghost-dog familiars. Their bodies were solid muscle, their faces were lean and feral, and all their teeth were long and gleaming and bared to rip the living apart.

EIGHTEEN

STEPHEN

T
he air and the light were gone, and back, and gone again. Breath rushed into my throat in spasms and then, just as swiftly, I asphyxiated all over again. The sky went out and the world was dark as blindness, then it came on harsh and punishing as surgical lights, unbearable fluorescence, over and over as I coughed and retched for air and thought,
Amy, Amy’s mother, Naomi, I have to get out of here and find—

I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see at all. There was a great groaning sound like the earth itself was splitting open from pain, and a crash I felt shuddering through my legs, my chest, as something huge hit the ground. I was on hands and knees, groping through the dark, and as I crawled, my palms that had been on solid dirt suddenly hit a void, a blank, my arms dangling over a great cliff into nothingness. And then they were gone. My hands were
gone
, just like Florian’s, eaten up by the thing that ate up the ground and I shouted, dog-wild with panic, and no sound came out because I had no more throat. No more face. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. Sense and thought themselves were fading away. I was that great ravenous blank. I was nothing, I was not-being, nonexistent—

“Oh, Jesus!” someone screamed, as light and air and physical form rushed back in. It was me. I was lying on the rickety porch slats, lying there with a throat that could make sounds of terror, arms and hands that could touch my restored face. Everywhere around me people were running in panic and the great oak tree in the middle of the square had crushed someone to death, falling on its side as if a huge tornado had uprooted it. They were trapped beneath the mass of the trunk until nothingness ate the whole tree away, and all I could see of them was an arm, small bit of a sleeve, stuck under tons of powdery gray deadwood that had been a full-flower tree minutes, seconds before.

Every inch of ground was bare, flaking, lifeless bark, twigs and broken branches strewn far as anyone could see. He’d come back, at long last, Natalie’s Friendly Man was back. I’d never wanted to believe Amy when she talked about him, even after Nick went from hallucination to flesh, never wanted to even though I
knew
she told the truth. Death. Death had us all, he was crushing all living things to powder in the palm of his hand—

But Florian, that crazy old man who was supposed to be a ghost, he was being eaten up and spat out, too. His own world, Death’s world, was torn down and blown away, too. And that meant our worst most horrible fear was true, and Death was devouring not just everything living, but
everything
everywhere—and then what became of Death? What became of anything, ever, at all?

A voice that wasn’t mine let out a soft, derisive chuckle, right between my ears.

“
Death was alive once, too
,” it whispered. “
Didn’t you know that? Didn’t you understand? But everything ends, in the end. Everything. Ever. At all.”

The world went out. My breath was stolen. I toppled and teetered like that tree as my legs disappeared from beneath me; then, just as I hit the porch boards, the world came back. No time to gasp and retch for oxygen, no time to—I crawled across the boards, crawled on my elbows like an amputee even though my legs had returned. Janey was struggling to get to her feet, poor fucked-up Janey quiet as death, while goddamned fucked-up Natalie thrashed in Janey’s arms and wasted what breath she had screaming in panic.