Dust (34 page)

“I always knew I’d see you again,” said Jim.

I thrust my hands into my pockets. The stones sat there against my fingers, just ordinary rocks now, no tingling or humming or singing, but the touch of them reassured me just the same.

“Are there others with you?” I asked. I hadn’t seen anyone I knew, down in these sands, but that signified nothing. “How did you get here?”

“Two hands,” he said, like he hadn’t heard me. “Two hands, there in your pockets. I did that for you.” He weaved side to side, sliding on the miniature sand piles his feet had made, making wet hacking sounds every time he drew breath. “Lips, a tongue, a larynx. You can talk to me again like a civilized creature instead of grunting and drooling like your tongue got cut out,
I
did that for you, I—”

“I could talk to you before,” I pointed out. I was easy, quiet, a trainer facing a mad dog. “We talked a good long time, actually, it’s just you only bothered giving me half the truth—”

“You owe me,” he whispered, with the same feverish, glassy-eyed hatred I remembered from the woods. He yanked at his remaining hair and another handful came out, easy as a tuft of cotton candy off the stick. “Look what I’ve done for you! Look what I’ve done for all of them! Every one of you! And this is what I get for it!”

His shaking, jolting arms motioned furiously at the buried ones, at the sky growing lighter by the second, then he seemed to lose control of them and they dropped helpless, still trembling, to his sides. I stared out at Lake Michigan, that horizon line drawn so solid like it was underscoring the whole world:
And that, as they say, is that.
The ghost of the Chicago skyline floated out there, an unbroken distant blue-gray shadow so shockingly clear I could make out each individual skyscraper, the antenna on top of the Sears Tower. Some of the buildings looked shorter than they were supposed to, their top ends jagged and uneven. A dark haze, drifting from some of them, that might be ash or smoke.

“Lisa’s with me,” I told him. “She passed through the other side of this, like I did. She’s one of us now. But she’s sick again, like we all are—”

“Fuck Lisa.” He spat on the sand, scrubbing the drying blood from his mouth like he’d just realized it was there. “You’re sick?
You’re
all sick? Look at me! Look what you’ve done to me, look what all your kind did to—”

“You never told me she left.” I picked up a bit of driftwood, crumbly and fragile from all its time bobbing on the waves. I wanted to go back to speaking with a tree branch, back to when my own enforced silence, Linc’s and my ability to talk right over his head, still gave me the protection of distance. When I could pretend this dying man, my brother, was just a stranger in a foreign tongue. “You said she got sick. You said you locked her up. You never bothered telling me she got out.”

“Fuck all of you.” Jim spat again, aiming for my feet and missing. “Her too. All of you. All you that changed. You’re all monsters.”

The tide rushed in, soft, undisturbed, and back out again. Something bloated and missing an arm, a leg, came in with it, deposited like a cat’s gift of a dead mouse on the sands. I wanted to lie down so badly, never get up again.

“You said there was something strange about the sands here.” I took another step toward Jim, dropping the driftwood in case he thought it was a weapon, and he bared teeth that were long and grayish and visibly loose in the gum. “That we live longer here. That the sands make the dead revive. Your lab up there, you said it had geologists that—”

“She said I was scaring her.” Jim kept lurching foot to foot, stomping at the sands now, wasting his last energies trying to keep upright. “Before all this happened. I told her I could bring you back. You don’t know how she cried after she saw you, she said it was horrible, you trapped in that rotting body, that it was like watching you being tortured—I promised you to her. Her daughter, I promised her little girl back. Mom and Dad, I
promised
her, I made a promise, I—”

He started to cry. Snot-choked sobs out of honest grief for me, for Karen, Lisa, himself, crying like I’d only ever seen when the black Lab he’d had since he was six had to be put down and stop it, Jim, stop it, you’re evil, you’re crazy, don’t make me remember the person I really knew, stand here and watch yet another person I love wash away with the tides. Loved. Even worse. I reached out a hand, and he backed away from me like I was diseased. As, in fact, I was.

“Then she said I was scaring her.” He scrubbed at his mouth again, furious, sawing his hand back and forth like he could cleanse away his own words. “That it was wrong, thinking you could bring back zombies, monsters, make them human again, it was ‘wishful thinking,’ it was ‘against God,’ I should stop, I was so ‘obsessed’ I was scaring her—”

“The stories about a meteorite.” I reached into my pocket, showed him the cracked bits of stone, the dried-up sand from inside them. “I’ve heard them. Is it true? That something landed here, thousands of years back, and this stuff got into the sands? In the dirt? Is that what your geologist pals were—”

“She threatened to report me.” Jim was panting now, loose teeth grinding together, rage building big and swift beneath the teariness like Dad when he was feeling put-upon by the world, really angry. Exactly like Dad. “Can you believe it? I bust my hump for her, for
you
, for this whole fucking family, for half my goddamned life, and all I get in return is the bitch threatening to whistle-blow to my own boss, turn me in, after everything I’d done for—so I didn’t have any choice, Jessie, I had to lock her up. Okay? I had to lock her up, I didn’t want—and then she got sick.” He laughed. He actually laughed. “She got sick.”

I put the fragments of stone away.

“Did you make her sick?” My voice didn’t waver, I felt what was surely the same strange, unshakable calm I’d seen in Lisa’s face as she lay dying; that, and the cold certainty I already knew my answer. And I’d felt sorry for him. I’d
pitied
him. “Did you use her, after you locked her up, experiment on her like some sort of guinea—”

“She got sick!” Jim roared at me, all rage, Dad’s rage, eating up that weak rotting body from the inside worse than any disease. “She got sick, we all got sick, this wasn’t supposed to happen! It wasn’t supposed to be that there was a war, and your kind won it! You! The walking corpses, who already lived out your goddamned lives! You won! All without firing a fucking shot!”

The gulls cried out overhead, circling, sailing over the waters in the serene knowledge that none of this was at all bad for them. Something else was washing ashore, less recognizably human than the last one.

“We didn’t win anything,” I said. “We’re extinct now, the undead. Just like humans—worse than humans, I’ve seen living humans, I haven’t seen any more of us. You’ve wiped us out. Your bosses should be thrilled to—”

“I should have killed you.” He wrapped his arms around himself, clenching up with shivers. His discolored skin looked baggy and loose. “I should’ve gone back out there with a flamethrower and roasted all of you to ashes. Monsters. Monsters everywhere. Tell Lisa not to worry anymore, you had a good quick death.”

“We’re all sick,” I said. “Dying. But something about those stones I showed you? These sands? I think they’re why Florian, my friend, he was so old, they’re why he lived so long. Those stones I showed you, they were his. And I think they’re why I’m not dead now. That maybe, somehow, they’re making me better. Am I right?”

“You won. Congratulations. You all fucking won.”

“Am I just crazy, Jim? Or am I right?”

“You owe me. I gave you this, all this, you owe—”

“You experimented on Lisa, didn’t you?” I advanced on him, slow, easy. “To punish her, or because you were so panicked by then, because of all this, that you convinced yourself you were doing her some kind of favor. But she got away from you. Sick as you made her, she got away.” I started laughing too, I just couldn’t help it, as I looked around the beach, at the half-living burial mounds surrounding us. “We all did. The whole world got away from you—”

“We knew there was something here.” Jim sat down heavily on the sand, his last reserves draining away and gone. “Something that created your kind. Maybe something that cheats death itself, that—there was a meteorite that hit here, five, ten thousand years ago, when the lake was still forming. Some sort of protean matter in it. Got mixed up in everything, saturated with it, it changed the whole composition of—what’re you asking me all this for? Why? That was the geologists’ lookout! I was in biology! It was our mandate, I wouldn’t go along with it, they wanted us to wipe you all out—”

“And you have,” I reminded him.

He glared up at me, breathing hard, his fury draining away like filthy water down a sewer and leaving behind Jim again, Jim in those jaundiced eyes, that horrible sloughing cyanotic skin, full of the terrified bewilderment of any creature human or otherwise sick unto death. Like Lillian, belligerent but still sobbing, broken, begging me and Joe not to stomp her. And I’d had to—

Not this time. Whatever he’s done, to Lisa, to me, any of us, leave it. I loved him, once, and he made a mistake, and he’s dying because of it and I’m just too damned tired to want to punish anyone. Never mind everyone else who died because of him, I can’t help them. Can’t help anyone. And there’s nobody here to force me to hurt him now.

“I’m sorry,” I said. And I was. “Later days.”

I turned to walk away and sloughing rotten arms reached up, grabbed me hard around the knees and slammed me face-first into the sands.

I inhaled without thinking and I was choking, gasping, sucking in mouthfuls of grit; my throat was coated and caked with it and I flailed, panicking, then something in me remembered the deep-down gravesite dirt and that impenetrable concrete grave liner crumbling into powder and I stopped fighting it, I just lay there and tried to breathe it all in. Just like when I first tunneled up.
You’re still dead to me, Jessie, whatever body you’re in.
My head spun and chest seized, goddamned accursed dead-living body screaming for oxygen, but I made myself lie there still and just as Jim loosened his hold, thinking I’d stopped fighting, I broke free and found the open sky. Retched up sand, sucked in air, as I grabbed Jim’s arms and twisted them behind him. He kicked, legs shaking, and cursed as his feet flew wide.

“No,” he whispered, thick and congested with hate. “You don’t get to survive. It’s not fair. You’re coming with me—”

I was panting, dizzy, spots dancing before my eyes, and the sands we wrestled in were so soothing, so welcoming.
You’re still sick. Come lie down.
My eyes kept closing, my whole body screaming for rest, surcease, sleep, and weak as he was that let him twist free and grab me again, try to use his weight against my own wasted gaunt bones. He rolled me on my back and his mouth gripped my shoulder but his teeth couldn’t get purchase, too loose, too blunt; my hands reached around his neck and throttled, no pity left, nothing in his eyes now like Joe or Lillian or anyone else I could ever have loved. He flung an arm wide, convulsing, I could have laughed just then at the spasmodic helplessness of it, and then that hand reached into the sands and retrieved his knife and something thrust into my side like a fist blow to shatter bone, like my flesh was a greenstick branch being torn slowly in half with every nerve twisting, agonized twisting, refusing to snap. I arched up and I screamed, and screamed.

Jim shouted with laughter, triumphant, and as the hole in my side began tightening and knitting together quick as he’d torn it he stabbed me again, again, the chest, the stomach, what flesh was left on my arms. It wasn’t killing me and I barely had a chance to bleed into the sands before my body healed itself but it hurt so much, hurt like my hands in that meat-fire on the road never had; vomit pooled in my mouth, I howled in anger as much as pain and scrabbled for the blade, let it slice deep into my fingers as I finally got hold, and then Jim wrenched it away and thrust it straight through my throat.

I gurgled, a wet thickness bubbling from my lips and nostrils; my hands flew up frantic to pull the horrible suffocating thing out, I was gagging on blood, smothering, then I remembered Linc during the fight with Carny, so long ago, five or ten thousand years ago. Breathe it all in. I let my arms go limp, let the deep red spume ooze from my teeth, closed my eyes to Jim and the rising sun.

The sands were a great, gentle palm cradling me as I lay there, staining them deep red, and my instinctive panic receded like the tides; I wouldn’t actually drown in my own blood, just like I’d known back in my coffin I wouldn’t die needing breath. I waited. Let Jim keep me pinned until he was sure I’d stopped struggling, then felt him roll off my body. He put fingertips to my temple, brushed back a stray, broken strand of what remained of my hair.

“I’ll bury you,” he whispered. He was breathing hard, from satisfaction or fear or just the disease slowly shutting down his lungs. “Nobody’ll touch my sister. Not for food.” A wet strangled cough. “Good, quick death.”