“Stop,” I said, holding out my palm because I couldn’t listen to it anymore, all that begging and pleading and cringing pouring from the tap embarrassed me so much I wanted to hurt him to make him stop, make him back into the Jim who never begged anyone anywhere for anything.
Make
him be what he was supposed to be. Just look at him, right now, thinking the exact same thing about me.
Florian couldn’t eat, right before he died. I’d thought it was just old age, but a new possibility crawled beetlelike into my head and latched on with deep, sharp pincers. That girl in the woods. That girl he got so close to, right before. The sick one. Contagious? We don’t know. We don’t know a damned thing.
“Jessie,” Linc murmured, gently rubbing my back. “There’s nothing we can do here. There’s nothing we can do for any human. I’m sorry. We need to go.”
Sometimes I missed being human so horribly, shamefully much. I could talk about that with Florian, stupid things like missing what human food tasted like: strawberries, potato chips, ice cream. He would get upset about his children sometimes, all dead and never revived, and distract himself humming soothing bits of nonsense as we walked the woods, over and over until it had the cadence of a real song. Lisa sang to me too, a lifetime ago. Nonsensical made-up songs as she braided my hair, snuck me Corn Pops from the forbidden giant box. I could have lived on dry Corn Pops when I was three or four. Couldn’t imagine the taste of Corn Pops or strawberries or any of it anymore. Or having enough hair to braid. Or a home.
I took the branch back from Linc.
Yes
, I wrote, there at Jim’s feet. Laid the branch aside.
Linc sighed aloud, but his hand soothed my shoulder blades just the same. Jim pulled himself to his feet, shaking again with fear or gratitude or both, and rooted around in his jacket pockets.
“A mouth swab,” he repeated, unscrewing a slender cylindrical tube and taking out what looked like a long Q-tip. “I have them from Lisa and myself too. I can compare them side by side. It might help.”
I opened my mouth and he swiped quickly, daintily at the inside, dropped the sticky inky-tipped swab back in the plastic tube. I saw him shudder as he got a close glimpse of my teeth. I didn’t mind. I was relying on his cowardice to keep further trouble away.
“Thank you,” he said softly, as he returned the tube to his pocket. He turned to Linc. “And thank you, for . . . hearing me out.”
Linc just stared back at him. There was a flash of defiance in Jim as he locked eyes with Linc and for that split second I saw the real Jim, my Jim, shooting the finger at all of us from a car going eighty-five down an abandoned road, doubling over laughing at everyone else’s silent, complicit fright. Hitting back, all kinds of ways.
You don’t have to listen to them, Jessie,
he told me when I was ten, after I broke town curfew for the first time just riding my bike around and Mom and Dad screamed at me for hours.
All they do is believe what they’re told. In their heads you’re dead right now, because someone told them if you break curfew that’s it, you die. But here you are. Alive. So who’re the idiots here?
I could have been a scientist. An animal rights scientist. Find new ways to do tests without lab animals. I liked chemistry, when I was alive. Jim would’ve been thrilled. Did he work with rats and monkeys and all of that, not just old dead fight-stomps? I bet he wouldn’t tell me if I asked. He used to lecture me about how getting insulin for diabetics was more than worth a few dead dogs. We’d argue. But he actually listened to me, heard me out before telling me I was wrong, he didn’t just stand there and scream. Or pretend to agree with everything I said, like Lisa did, just to avoid even the chance of a fight.
I reached out, saw him brace himself for a blow. Touched his hand and drew back. He reached out, clasped my swollen, darkened fingers in his so delicately I knew he was imagining they’d come right off in his palm, that he’d end up holding a handful of rot and there’d be me left with only finger bones. He works enough with us to know we’re not that fragile, or he should, but still there’s that fear right there in his eyes. Just like everyone thinking those cornfield people are us, that they can bite you and gotcha, you’re nicked, even when they know perfectly well undeath isn’t catching. Just like the sad sacks, the crazies, the tireds of life, who know guns won’t work and still try shooting us anyway.
“So, are you okay?” Thoroughly embarrassed, like he could hear just how absurd he sounded but couldn’t help himself. “Is . . . do you need anything?”
You tell me, Jim—some real answers? A plan? A clue? Some genetically engineered cow-sized deer? How about you work on wiping out your cornfield buddies, if your bosses really want to do some pest control? I wanted to laugh but I just shook my head. Linc was gazing fixedly at a clump of catmint, waiting for this to be over.
“Will I see you again?” Jim asked.
I shrugged, pulled my hand away and pointed at him.
Up to you.
He looked sad for a minute, then just nodded. “Well . . . good-bye then, Jessie.” He managed an awkward smile. “Not for good.”
We watched until he was a speck against the trees and then a pinpoint. Linc took my arm and we headed for the woods.
“He’d better watch himself,” he said. “Getting back wherever he’s going. Billy’s been sounding hungry lately.”
I kept walking. Linc seemed unfazed by my silence. “Well, that doesn’t happen every day, does it? Fortunately enough.” He looked thoughtful. “We should’ve asked him just how far this has supposedly spread, shouldn’t we? I know hoos get hysterical and exaggerate everything but still, he sounded like—”
“I know he could be lying, Linc, okay? You don’t need to say it, I’m not stupid.”
“I didn’t say that, Jessie.” He glanced at me. “He’s hardly making up what we saw back there, is he? And if this is all an elaborate scheme to wipe us out, which we already could’ve guessed they wanted to do, it’s a pretty weird way to go about—”
“You know I’m not stupid, Linc.” I curled my arm tighter in his. “I know he could be lying about Lisa, it’s not like she’s gonna come barreling out here to tell me he’s full of shit, I’m not completely—”
“Jessie, don’t look for me to say you did the right thing, okay? I wouldn’t have done it, but it wasn’t my brother. Or my sister. Little late now, anyway.” We were back in the concrete tunnel, stopping every few steps to rub our feet clean of cornfield stink; he scraped his toes hard against the rough gray cement, enjoying a sound scratch. “Those things in the cornfield knew him, and it explains Teresa and all the rest of it, so maybe he isn’t lying . . .” Linc flung out a hand, helpless confusion creasing his face. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe it explains it too well.”
I glanced down at the tunnel floor, the fleshy footprint streaks like smears of blistery butter. What was I supposed to do, break Jim’s neck because he said stuff I didn’t want to hear? They lie, the hoos, when they say we don’t care if we turn on our own flesh and blood (unlike
them
, all their revulsion, their screaming, their hate)—it’s our nightmare, just like theirs, only sometimes the hunger is just too strong to resist. And then, it’s too late.
Linc pushed through the trees with an odd urgency, and it wasn’t until we were on top of it that I realized what he’d been looking for. My arm, eaten and rotted down to chipped-polish nails and too-white bone, lay at the river’s bend where it always had. I doffed an imaginary hat in tribute. He didn’t crack a smile.
“Okay,” he said, “at least he doesn’t know about this. He being so specimen happy and all—”
“Linc, you saw him back there, the forest might as well be radioactive. He’s not coming in here. He knows what’s waiting for him.”
“What did he say about the sick-stomps? That they had more muscle mass? Teresa tossed Joe halfway across the damned park. You saw her.”
I saw her. We all did. Did Joe know any of this, after all that yelling and carrying on? Didn’t know squat, I’d bet, because there was no way he’d keep any of this to himself after what Teresa did to him, after everything else between them—unless he’d meant to tell me, before we’d fought, and then said fuck it. But I hated Teresa too, he knew that, neither of us had ever forgiven her for Lillian; was he really pissed enough to shove something this big under his hat? Joe’s anger was a flash fire, flaring up huge and bright and scorching everything in his path but when it was over, it was over: He’d give you his hand, a good word, the last of the deer liver seconds later and mean it, what Linc and everyone else didn’t understand was that it really, truly wasn’t personal. That hoo-hunting fight was the only time, ever, I’d seen him carry a grudge.
“Does anyone else know about this?” Linc asked me, gazing down at my arm like it might arc up on its fingers and scuttle away. “In the gang?”
“I’m not sure.” I imagined the arm as some sort of deep-water creature, the remnants of decay on the bones the barnacles. The dry waving grass stems around it as seaweed. “I don’t think so.”
Linc nodded. “It might be better that way. Maybe.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have just walked away from Joe, during the dance. He’d been sorry. I could tell. But what the hell was I supposed to do, lie about what I’d seen because he felt stupid he hadn’t seen it first? I’d seen Lisa do that placating crap with Dad while we were alive, all the time, and it never helped. Screw all his stewing in it, when he was ready to listen he knew where I was; he wasn’t getting any begging and pleading from me. And Linc wasn’t getting any vows of silence either.
I reached into the pouch at my waist, stroked the surface of one of the lake stones; its solid smoothness felt restlessly alive somehow, all pins-and-needles, like the prickly sensation of touching a magnet covered in clusters of iron filings. I felt strangely better, a bit restored, cradling it in my palm. I was still so tired so much lately, no matter how I slept. Linc took a stone from his own pocket, tossed it idly from hand to hand, dove for it quickly when it dropped.
“Do you think we’ll get sick?” I asked Linc. “I mean, sick like those things? Jim said he didn’t know how the disease works in us, what if we just get a few good weeks or months and then—”
“If I do, if I get sick like that, I want you to kill me. Just knock me down and stomp until the job’s done. I mean it, Jessie, no joke.” He shuddered. “I’m not hanging around to turn into that.”
“Only if you do the same for me.”
Instead of answering Linc flung his arms around me, an insanely beatific look on his face, and when I realized he was only lampooning Jim we were already punching and kicking in the dirt, laughing but still fighting, raggedy hostile waves of shock and exhaustion oozing out like asphalt tar in the summer heat. My lost arm went to powder under our weight, whitish-gray ash smeared all over our legs and backs. We backtracked and found a little hollow of mossy dirt among the oaks, fell asleep in it clutching lake stones in our fists. At some point I was half-awake thinking how Florian would never believe any of this, and then I thought,
Oh, yes, that’s right, never mind,
and I squeezed my eyes shut around thick inky tears and went to sleep.
The next night, I went back by myself to see. Jim was nowhere to be found and no more singing, no more moaning and begging, all the cornfield hoos were dead. A couple looked like they’d dropped where they stood, but most had broken necks, stomped skulls, guts neatly torn open but none of it eaten. A pile of smaller skinned dead things lay near them, untouched. The stench rose from their bodies without stopping, not rot but a smothering, sweaty miasma like a damp toxin-steeped fog, and I had to stop to be sick before I could get away.
Who’d done this? Teresa? She was too strong to be sick, much too strong. I didn’t know what to believe. Like Linc had said, now it was too late.
10
Renee didn’t even thank me for the lake stones. Why had I bothered? She kept them, though, ignoring Billy’s taunts about hoo-wannabes and their two-bit tombstones, and started following me everywhere, asking to be hunt buddies, wanting to go with me on watch. So whatever happened to I don’t waaaaaanna learn to hunt, I can’t haaaaaaaandle it today, I’m traaaauuumatized? I had no time for all this, let her go be Teresa’s new best friend—if Teresa ever showed up long enough to accept the honor. The others were getting restless too, missing even the onerous nightly fetching of flesh too long dead: At least it was a routine, like something normal, though it wasn’t normal at all. This new feeling, it was just a void.
Me, I kept my mouth shut because there wasn’t any chance to talk. Less than a dozen of us, over fifteen hundred acres of space, and still there was no place to go without someone tagging behind you, Ben shouting, Billy bellowing, Renee pleading, Mags picking fights, everyone in everyone’s business every single night and when had we all grown so damned loud? Only Joe was quiet, sullen and turning his back whenever I approached, and with no way to get away without someone dogging our steps Linc and I kept mum, quiet as he’d ever said we should be. Then one night as we were stripping a deer to the bones along came Teresa, walking in from the north road with a tin bucket swinging from one hand and something clenched tightly in the other.
“So, the prodigal leader smells fatted calf and comes scurrying back.” Billy deliberately took another large bite of the liver, Teresa’s favorite. “Sorry, we really woulda saved the best bits but there’s just not enough to . . .”
He trailed off, startled, when he saw the box of matches in her palm, then laughed. “Well, souvenirs now. Some hoo must’ve dropped them. They already wet, or should I toss ’em in the drink?”
Teresa headed right past him across the old baseball field, little tremors coming and going along her arms as if the bucket were weighted with bricks. We followed, all of us, as she stopped at a cluster of benches near the riverbank. There was an old fire pit built in the center, a bare dirt square bordered by bricks; she put the bucket down and with her free hand yanked branches from the nearest trees, tooth-stripped them straight and bare, threw them into the pit until she had a good-sized pile of kindling. We just kept watching, certain this was some kind of stunt or joke.