The Weight of the Dead (6 page)

They'll be nice to him, and someday he'll be glad.

“These aren't really people, are they?” His voice had gone higher and tighter. “People don't move like that.”

Okay, so they could still make some noise after all. They could still grunt.

“You're not looking,
you're not looking!
” he cried, all accusations now, and he whirled on the stump, practically on top of her back, throwing both arms around her shoulders and burying his face against her neck, his breath scorching.

“You've got to go with them. You just do.” Her voice was barely there. “They'll take you to where Dad is, and I have to stay here.”

But he knew,
knew
something was wrong but couldn't understand what. Or why. At least Patches never wondered why, and this made it ten times worse. She kept her head down so she wouldn't see any of it happen, then squeezed her eyes shut so she wouldn't see the shadows. But she felt them, whatever they were, a presence, a pressure like waves of heat and hunger, as they gathered on either side of the stump, and while her brother squealed, they gently, very gently, peeled his arms free of her and lifted him away, and he was gone, the weight of him, the wet of him, just gone.

She wasn't going to move, not as long as Jeremy was crying, not even to cover her ears, and he cried for a long time. The sound receded behind her as slow as ice melted, faint fainter faintest, his each and every wail yanking at her heart, ever more violently the farther away it got, until even the echo of him was gone, fading like a last wisp of smoke that dissipated among the trees. But at least it never cut off abruptly, and she supposed that this, too, was a good sign.

*   *   *

He died anyway.

Her father. Dead.

There was no body to find, but what other conclusion was she supposed to draw? She could take a hint. She was a woman now, and women knew things. She could feel it as surely as the coming winter: that hole in the world, in the shape of her father, turned permanent. He was never coming back to refill it.

And, within the village walls, the wolves circled and eyed her whenever she passed.

The tally of loss was getting worse all the time: down one dog, one father, one little brother, and one big bag of stupid gadgets that she'd never have gotten to work again anyway. Women knew things, all right. Everything except how to realize they were being lied to when it mattered most.

She tried to locate her father anyway and roved among his campsites. She found his blanket covered with fallen leaves, wrinkled her nose at the rotting residue of Tom Harkin scraped onto trees and logs. Found the last two platefuls of food, eaten, but so messily she couldn't imagine they'd been eaten by anything human. Found, finally, the thing that convinced her he must be dead, because he would never have left it behind: a square of paper folded and unfolded ten thousand times before being nailed to one of the trees with a thorn. A pencil drawing of her and Jeremy, just their faces, younger by two or three summers, his beneath hers and her hair sweeping down around him like protective arms. She'd forgotten her father had drawn it. Forgotten he even could.

She kept it. But knew it would be years years years before she could unfold it to look at again.

She felt worst of all for her grandfather. He never wanted to leave his post on the wall at all now. Little runaway boys had to come home sometime.

As, within the village, the wolves gathered, biding their time for attack.

She watched them from the windows and locked doors of the trailer where she no longer lived, where nobody lived anymore, a home that had fed its people one by one to the ground and the woods until she was the last one left, and if the men had their way, she probably wouldn't be long in following. One way or another. She watched them go about their days, rough and unshaven, their hands like tree bark and cruelty in their laughter. They breathed with the arrogance of men who knew exactly how much they could get away with. They celebrated it in every step.

Even the tiniest victory over them had to be better than nothing.

She found Miles McGee before any of the rest of them had a chance to split her apart from the herd. Miles was still a year older than she was, and still most of his life the closest thing she had to a big brother, and still starting to look at her differently. Which she was now glad of, finally liking it more than not, because what choice did she have? Nothing was more futile than wanting things to stay the same when you knew nothing ever did.

“There's something I've got that I can only give away once,” she told him, standing on tiptoe, leaning into this tall boy who looked like pole beans should be growing on him; who had brought her books from faraway places. “And if I do, that means nobody else gets to take it.”

It was a minute before he understood what she meant.

Apparently they started going dumb pretty early.

*   *   *

Unlike Miles, she didn't sleep that night afterward, or if she did it was the kind of sleep where all you did was dream you were wide-awake, so they cancelled each other out. Both states felt the same, lying there a little sore, sort of throbbing, kind of warm, a lot scared.

Tara wouldn't be scared, she thought. Tara would move right along and go back to tampering with the balance of nature.

Melody knew she had to have slept some, though, sliding awake a little at a time. How else could she explain only gradually becoming aware there was screaming going on outside, and that it must've been going on for a while, because her dreams had been making it their own.

Her eyes popped open in what passed for dark on a night with this much moon showing. She listened to the echoing sound of a shriek that built and built and seemed to whiz from one side of the village to the center, a man's but faster than a man could run, ending with a guttural crescendo, as if the last scream exploded out of him with terrible violence, then abrupt stillness.

Fully awake now, she listened for more, like listening for a crack of thunder from a passing storm, and for a moment doubted she'd really heard anything at all.

At her side, Miles turtled his head from beneath the covers and propped himself back on his elbows and peered around in the gloom. “Were you having a bad dream? Was that you mak—”

“Shush yourself.” She popped a fingertip to his lips like she'd been doing it all her life, as she heard the hubbub of the village coming awake around them, jumpy and panicked and full of fraying nerves. “You think we should…?”

“Melody,” he whispered through his teeth, not moving his mouth, the way you sound when you don't want to move anything at all. “What's that at the window?”

The trailer's bedroom had only one. She flicked her gaze toward it and tried to put it together, something sensible out of the pieces that, on their own, may have been familiar, but not like this. Her breath locked in her throat when she saw the face tilt to one side, its ragged beard scraping the glass like wire bristles. Hands were clutching the window, four of them, one high on each side and two more below. Pinpoints of moonlight glinted as it blinked.

She followed where its baleful gaze seemed directed, not at her but at her side.
Miles.
It was looking at Miles. The shadows on its face deepened as it scowled and its brow furrowed with wrath, and then there was a grimace full of teeth, twice as many teeth as she'd ever seen in even the broadest smile, and the nails of one hand screeched along the glass. The hand withdrew and she was sure it turned into a fist then, and she knew what was going to happen next. Because women knew the worst kinds of things.

Before it could go any farther, she threw both arms around Miles, pulling him tight to what on any other girl might have been called a bosom.
No,
she said to the window, a word without sound, a silent word and pleading eyes.
No. It's not like that. Don't.

After a moment the oversized face relaxed, the shadows lightening and the grimace disappearing and the eyes content to stare. It pressed a hand to the glass, then all of it was gone, the face rising up and away,
rising,
and that was the most impossible thing of all, because the window was, what, seven feet off the ground. Which meant that this visitor was stooping.

Her father, whatever he was now, had been stooping.

You could never throw on clothes fast enough when you really needed to. Melody made do with as little as she could get away with and let a blanket cover the rest. Then she was out the door, the frosty ground cold on the soles of her feet, sprinting around behind the trailer and finding nothing, hearing only the crash of hurried footsteps. She followed the ruckus of them to a lonely eastern stretch of the wall, got there only in time to see something slipping over the top, a leg, one freakishly long leg, there, then gone.

As a galaxy of stars spun slowly overhead, she stared after this interloper as though it would return, but things like that never came back for a better look. They did what they did, then let the night swallow them whole.

And to find out what it had done, what it had truly come for, all she had to do was follow the voices and lanterns' glows to the heart of the village. Miles was there already, because he said that's where he thought he would find her, except he hadn't, and there was such relief on his face that she thought maybe there was a chance she could love him, because when he looked at her she could tell that the last thing he was seeing was just a body.

With a gliding sense of disbelief, she walked around and around the Thieves Pole, Miles at her side, no trouble keeping up, because most of her energy went to trying to comprehend. Just trying to fathom the sight. She had trouble enough keeping her jaw closed.

It was all a blood-slick tangle of arms and legs, some clothed, some bare, others so soaked and mangled she honestly couldn't tell. She found it impossible to discern how many there were until she counted the heads jutting from the stack in different places. Seven. Seven men, skewered one by one over the Thieves Pole, like fish that had been speared and left to accumulate along the shaft.

Except the Thieves Pole was eight feet high if it was an inch, meaning that whatever had done this was … well, tall enough to have to stoop when looking into trailer windows. And climb over their wall without much bother.

Hunsicker? He was there. He was on the bottom, had been the first to go.

Turning her attention to the living, she glanced from face to face, friends and neighbors every one, their features distorted in the whirling light of the lanterns, dumbfounded, sick, and horrified.

I guess you've got your limits after all,
she told them from her heart's deepest chamber.
And if you've got a problem with this, you already know what to do. Just turn your heads and pretend you don't see a thing. You're so good at it.

The only ones whose faces were harder to read were young and female, girls like her. At some point in her orbit around the Thieves Pole, Miles dogging her steps, she found herself next to Jenna Harkin, huddling inside a worn, old parka that had lost half its goose down. Melody stopped, finally, and their shoulders knocked, and Melody wiggled her fingers at her side until Jenna clasped her hand.

“It's right they're there,” Jenna said, just loud enough for Melody to hear, and no one else. “They were thieves too. Same as anybody who took something while another person's back was turned.”

But by the time she spat at the corpses, she didn't seem to care who saw.

Later, when the crowd began to break up and people started talking about ladders and the best way to lift the bodies off the pole, Melody told Miles to go on back to the trailer,
their
trailer—right, he could consider it
theirs
if he wanted to—and that she would be following soon enough. But first there was something she needed to do.

And bless his heart, she felt his eyes watching her back until she turned a corner and knew she was lost from sight.

Along the northern stretch of wall, she climbed the steps to the watchtower where her grandfather sat waiting. She didn't come without guilt, tons of it, because she'd caused him more grief lately than a grandfather should have to bear. But she couldn't think about that now. He smiled at her and fed a few hunks of wood into the stove and held his hands to the crackles and sparks before leaving the iron door open. A fire was nice to watch sometimes.

“You up here all eagle-eyed and everything, and you didn't see a thing?” she said. “You expect me to believe that?”

“The mind plays tricks sometimes. Makes you think you see a thing that just can't be. So you have to write it off. You start raising the alarm about every little thing like that, people think you've gone soft in the head.”

She gazed toward the woods, where she imagined something with her father's face and her father's heart, only immensely tall, was striding among the trees beyond the reach of anyone fool enough to try and track him. Maybe later she would puzzle over how it had all come to be, but there was magic in the night, and women knew things, and for now it was enough to remember what they all said, every chance that suited them:

Out of the death of the old arises the new.

Even when all you had was a dying man and another one dead already, and enough bones to make something …

Miraculous. Yes—miraculous. That about covered it.

She was sorry she'd ever doubted. Sorry, too, for the price she'd paid, but maybe there was a plan in that, as well. So for now her greatest hope was that someday Jeremy, whatever he was to become in this world, would thank her for doing him the greatest favor of his life.

But it would be a long, unsettled wait until she knew.

This world
 … For the first time she realized she'd spent so much time mourning a world that had ended ages ago, hoping to resurrect it, that she'd never paid attention to what it was becoming. Or returning to again, now that it was unfettered. Where were the centaurs, she might have asked instead. Where were the gorgons, the furies, the giants and the gods?