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First published in the USA by The Berkley Publishing Group, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2010
First published in Great Britain by Berkley UK 2011
Copyright © Hilary Hall, 2010
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-71-815838-5
Acknowledgments
BOOK ONE: Dry Bones
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
BOOK TWO: Danse Macabre
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
BOOK THREE: Resurgam
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
BERKLEY UK
Joan Frances Turner was born in Rhode Island and grew up in the Calumet Region of northwest Indiana. A graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, she lives near the Indiana Dunes with her family and a garden full of spring onions and tiger lilies, weather permitting. Dust is her first novel.
To my mother, Marianne, who first said the magic words, “If you want to be a writer, quit talking about it and start writing,” and then said, “Do I think you can? I know you can.” And meant every word. And in loving memory of my grandparents John and Laura.
To my agent, Michelle Brower, and my editor, Michelle Vega, whose advice, advocacy and inspiration helped make this a far better book. To everyone at The Berkley Publishing Group, Wendy Sherman Associates and Folio Literary Management for all their hard work on my behalf. To Nick Mamatas, who read parts of an early draft and offered very insightful suggestions.
To the owners and management of the Town Theatre in Highland, Indiana, where I scribbled the first page of notes that eventually became this book. To the staff and volunteers at Deep River County Park in Hobart, Indiana, the Taltree Arborteum in Valparaiso and Marquette Park Beach in Gary, where all the knottiest plot points got wrestled into submission. To Roxann McGlumphy, Ann Larimer and Betsy Hanes Perry for encouragement, support and friendship above and beyond the call of duty. To Mary S. for love, fidelity, first draft read-throughs and every good thing. And to my mother, for everything and then some.
My right arm fell off today. Lucky for me, I’m left-handed.
In the accident that killed me I rocketed from the backseat straight through the windshield—no seat belt, yeah, I know—and the pavement sheared my arm to nothing below the shoulder. Not torn off, but dangling by thin, precious little bits of skin and bone and ligament. I had a closed casket, I’m sure of it, because they never wired the arm or glued it or any other pretty undertaker trick. I managed to crawl back out of the ground without its help anyway, and of course after nine perfectly uneventful years of fighting and dancing and hunting and getting by fine with the left arm, the right finally shuffles its coil right on the banks of the Great River County Park’s not-so-Great River, smack in the middle of a meat run. Joe, my boy, my backup, was not sympathetic in the least.
“You’re shaking,” he muttered, as he led the gang along the riverbank, through the clearing that used to be the park playground. “Your arm’s shaking, look. Is the big mean pointy-headed deer that scary?”
Mags snickered, waddling past the rusty remains of the jungle gym. Ben and Sam were right behind her, sniffing and sniffing for living meat; fat gas-bloated Billy pirouetted in their footsteps, and Linc brought up the rear with Florian, our oldest and dustiest. I gave Joe a shove.
“Shut it,” I warned him, “or I’ll set Teresa on you.” I’d have to find her first, to do that: Our big chief and cheese never seems to show up for hunts anymore. Maybe she’s sleeping in. Never mind that Florian, who’s got a couple of centuries on her, still hauls his ass without complaining. “Now she’s one mean pointy-headed thing I know you’re too hoo-yellow to fight—”
Then a phantom dog got its teeth deep into my right shoulder, shaking and shaking, and a tremor shot down to my knees and back up again. The tremor became a whip crack and something snapped painlessly in my shoulder, and my poor useless deadweight arm broke off for good, wet purplish skin sliding off in sheets as it hit the underbrush with a squish and a thud.
The deer we’d had in our sights, foolish thing too stupid to pick up the stench of death (ours and his), rocketed up and bounded away faster than any undead could chase it. Ben broke into the same slow, sarcastic applause I remembered from when I was alive, when someone dropped a full lunch tray in the middle of the cafeteria. An oak tree bowed under Billy’s back as he leaned against it grunting and growling with laughter; Florian’s dry, ancient mouth twitched, Sam and Ben snickered, Mags giggled from deep in what was left of her throat and Joe threw an arm around me, sprays of maggots shooting from the rips in his leather jacket like little grub-worm confetti.
“Congratulations!” he grunted around the smashed half of his jaw, eyes glinting with a mocking pride. “Nine years of hauling around that useless turd of an arm, and you finally drop it in the dirt where it belongs—she’s a genuine rotter now, how about it? Three cheers for little baby Jessica!”
The hip-hip-hoorays rained down and I booted his ass, or tried to, while he laughed and stumbled in a mocking little circle. My right shoulder still jerked and twitched. “I’ve been a genuine rotter since I climbed out of the ground—I’ve heard the stories Billy used to tell about you, ant farm!”
He just laughed harder, looping arms around my waist from behind and whirling me until those poor maggots were light-headed. “Ant farm?” He grinned. “That the best you can do? And you know Billy’s a gassed-up liar—”
“I told her you cried yourself to sleep every morning after you tunneled up, wailing for your mommmmmm-meeee.” Billy smirked, rubbing his swollen blackened hands together eagerly anticipating a fight. “Weeping and wailing like a worthless little ’maldie full of embalmer’s juice—”
“Yeah?” Joe just grinned wider. His brain radio, the waves of telepathic sound that help us talk around rotted throats and tongues, veered into a hard fast electric-guitar screech that could have been real anger, could have just been the need to fight. “We’ll see who’s spitting up formaldehyde by the time I—”
He grabbed me hard enough to snap bones, hauling me straight off my feet. I shrieked, groped behind me for his neck and throttled until I heard rattling teeth, felt blowflies and carrion beetles turn to mush and juice beneath my fingers. He wrenched my hand away and threw me in the damp riverbank dirt, trying to straddle me, but my legs are stronger and a few kicks sent him sprawling on a layer cake of dead leaves. The gang surrounded us to watch, the eagerness for good bone-breaking fun stronger than any flesh-hunger—all except Linc, who hung back drawn and worried. Linc’s a sweetheart, he is, but however book smart he was alive he’s got no clue about anything that matters. I turned to give him a little don’t-worry glance, and that distracted second was all Joe needed to flip me over and force-feed me a heaping mouthful of dirt.
“Y’fuggr!” I coughed and spat, horse-kicking as Joe tugged at my elbow like a sailor hauling anchor. “N’my urrm!”
“What’s that?” Joe laughed, a groaning guttural sound that would make a human crap bricks, and yanked harder. That dog-bite tremor was happening again, up and down my left side this time, and he was too excited to care. “Didn’t catch that—”
He tugged more and I kicked more, and he pulled so hard that I felt vibrations through my arm socket and something close to panic. “Nuh! Stuppit!”
I finally found my legs again, rolling onto my back and getting a foot so hard in his chest I heard something snap and deflate. He gasped in pain, growled and pulled back, ready to kick something loose inside me. The whole gang roared with glee.
“All right.” Linc stumbled over, gave Joe a shove. “That’s enough.”
Not the whole gang, then. Joe was on his feet again, looming over small skinny Linc like the biker bully he’d been while he was alive. “Says who, baby boy? You? Let’s hear it.” Silence. “Well? Let’s hear it!”
“Easy there,” murmured Florian, holding up a flesh-stripped hand, but with Teresa away or asleep we had no Fearless Leader, no rules to stop us. Not that she cared much either. Linc stood his ground, glaring. Joe let out a wet, congested hiss from deep in his throat, the warning of a worse beating than he’d ever given me or anyone else, and as he crouched ready to spring on Linc, I touched his shoulder.
“Joe.” I used my low growling voice, the one he liked. “Stop.”
We could all hear it in our heads, Joe’s brain radio cycling down from hard screeching electric guitar to a soothing acoustic strum; right off, when I touched him, his fists started uncurling. That’s what Linc just doesn’t get, never will, about Joe and me. Linc glanced at my remaining arm, making sure it was still attached, then buckled to Joe’s and my seniority and turned away. His own brain radio never changes: a lonely one-handed piano, each plink, plink a teardrop of notes splashing down. Awkward and silent now, a group blind date turned bad, we left my arm lying at the riverbank and wandered deeper into the trees.
We hadn’t gone two hundred yards when Linc let out a sudden excited arpeggio, still hollow and lonely, and we all caught the scent: Deer. Again.
Linc stood waiting, silently challenging Joe not to let him go chase it. An indifferent little skrrrrrit! on Joe’s guitar strings, hunger beating back rage, and the tension broke; Linc turned and vanished after that good meat smell. We stood there, shaking, waiting.
The hoos like to make fun of how we walk and it’s true, we can’t really run, can’t manage much past a stagger. But Linc is just that little bit faster, fleeter, than the rest of us, and he knows his business. We gathered in a tight semicircle, freeze-tagging shoulder to shoulder, still as winter trees. Waiting.
A big beautiful stag rushed terrified into the clearing, Linc right behind it as it bounded the wrong way in its panic. One great roar in all our ears, eight earsplitting dissonant brain-radio symphonies of triumph and we closed the circle tight around that deer, broke legs as it tried jumping over us, tore away antlers when it tried barreling through us, groaned triumph over its rising screams of pain before Joe wrapped a hand around the stag’s neck and stopped all sound with a single, effortless crack.
So hot they almost steamed, those good fresh deer guts, and warm dripping blood and the solid meaty muscle of a heart still beating as we tore the carcass open, venison like you never tasted it on your little hoo-barbecue with the charcoal smoke making it filthy. Linc snatched the first mouthful of the liver, the best and sweetest meat of all, and Joe kicked him away from the rest and Billy kicked Joe and why’s everyone fighting when it’s so good to feed, it’s so good, you can’t stop and you can’t think and you can’t do anything but chew and swallow and want to bust out sobbing you feel so wonderful? Sam grabbed at the bones, fought Ben over the marrow. Should we save some for Teresa? But by the time we got it out of the woods and across the field and past the old mill and out to the gazebo how fresh would it be, anyway? Snooze, lose.
I was a vegetarian when I was alive, not the fish-and-chicken kind either. No leather shoes, no honey. I drove my mom crazy. All those years of good rich meat going to fly-blown carcass waste, just remembering it now made me want to weep. How was I ever such a fool? There’s nothing in this world, nothing, that’s as honest or as beautiful as meat and blood, beautiful as this bone gnawed white and stripped clean, this shredded hide, those hanks of flesh and tooth scrapings of veined yellow fat still stuck to the fur—
Ben shoved me away and I sat down hard on the ground, panting, letting him have the remnants of the rib cage. Billy and Mags were still working on the guts, tearing off greasy handfuls and shoveling them in like potato chips; Florian nibbled at bits here and there, too old to have much appetite anymore. Sad-sack Sam gave me a big happy grin as he licked the fat from his fingers. Linc looked half asleep as he shoveled in leftover shreds of meat. There was a red haze over everything and a stench permeating the air, the heavy fast-moving odor of life bursting out and spilling away.
Joe, good humor restored, sidled up looking embarrassed. Like always. “Your arm okay?”
“Fine.” I wiggled my fingers. “No thanks to you.”
He touched the empty shoulder socket like it might shatter. The maggots and blowflies and watch beetles feeding off him head to toe pulsed with the hungry sucking and clicking of thousands of little mouths: shuck-shuck, in rhythm, and then crrnc-crrnc, biting down. They’ve been feeding off him for decades now, feeding on bits of nothing, between bouts of silent stasis. Do we attract a special kind of bug? It never takes dead hoos who stay dead this long to get flesh-stripped, and I never heard of hibernating maggots. He shrugged, his notion of apology. I glared at him.
“The next time you decide to rip me into kindling,” I said, “give me fair warning first so I can take out your eyes.”
He let off an angry guitar chord. Blinding isn’t funny—when Lillian, one of our seniors, lost her remaining eye in a gang fight, Teresa made me and Joe be the ones to take her into the woods and kick in her skull. Can’t hunt if you’re blinded, can’t do anything. Even Florian couldn’t argue with it, though he tried to. “You even try it,” Joe said, “you’ll end up with your teeth all over the ground. But you wouldn’t try it.”
“Because you’re so big and strong?”
“You said it, I didn’t.” He grinned and started rubbing my back, a soothing apology. “And you said yourself, your arm’s fine.”
“Try that again, Joe, I will gouge your eyes.”
“I’ll knock out your teeth.”
“I’ll smash what’s left of your skull.”
“I’ll pop these gasbags like balloons—” We wrestled again, shrieking, and this time good Samaritan Linc just gave us a lazy smile. When I shoved Joe away he just lay there, eyes closed. I wanted to drop off too, but it was close to dawn and if we stayed away during the big sleep we’d never hear the end of it: Teresa likes us where she can eyeball us. Too near her to hatch secret plots and plans, which is how she overthrew old Lillian and got to be gang head in the first place. I was trying to shove Joe to his feet when Sam stepped in, pulling himself upright with a grunt.
“C’mon, kids.” He was just a little older than Teresa but already as stripped-down as Florian, all exposed bones and dried-out leathery skin shreds that the bugs didn’t want anymore. “Time.”
Groans, jeers and mouthfuls of bloody spume didn’t dissuade him, and we retraced our steps in a ragged, complaining line back toward the riverbank. My arm lay in state on the boggy grass, jarringly clean white bone and soft, blackened distended flesh. If you looked closely, you could still see tiny chips of polish on the nails. Fuchsia pink.
“Wait’ll the hoos get a load of that.” Mags snickered, doing a lurching little dance around it. “They’ll faint.”
Even Linc laughed. “They’re not stupid enough to come here. Whose woods these are, I think they know.”
Ben muttered something under his breath. He hates it here or keeps saying he does, out in Hicksville with Fearless Leader dogging our steps, but he’s had a thousand chances to run off with a city gang and hunt humans every day of the week and he never does. Still too hoo for his own good, Billy says. That feeling, I think I know. I’d rather stay where things are wide open and quiet.
We marched beyond the sharp bend in the Great River, through the erstwhile playground, past a faded sign pointing to ye olde historic gristmill and sawmill and sugaring shack (maple syrup in Indiana, who knew?) and spilled into the parking lot, the late winter asphalt morgue-cold and soothing against swollen and bony feet. I was half asleep, wishing vaguely for a little marrow bone to suck on while I drifted off, and then suddenly wide awake as a pair of blaring headlights swung off the county road, knocked over the orange cones blocking their path, shot through the barricaded park entrance, peeled toward us in a wide screeching curve and came to a bucking-horse stop yards away, right there in the middle of the lot.
Unbelievable. The park is abandoned, the farms and subdivisions deserted, the roads strictly Drive At Your Own Risk, there’s no guards and no safe houses and no barrier gates and not a sane hoo for miles around and the assholes still come barreling through thinking they can be Big Mighty Zombie Hunters? Hasn’t happened in years, hasn’t happened since the unincorporated-county hicks finally lost enough Billy Bobs to realize we can do anything we want out here—as long as we stay out here—and there’s no National Guard to come raging in with machine guns like in the movies. This wasn’t a pickup truck though, just a crappy little white Honda, and before we could react the driver’s door flew open and a skinny blond hoocow crumpled onto the pavement and splattered herself with puke.
Correction: Mighty Zombie Hunters, and the occasional wrong-turn drunk. I fucking hate drunk drivers. I have my reasons.
If we weren’t already stuffed sausage-tight with meat and blood we would have tried rushing her, hope she’d run toward the woods in panic, but we just wanted a little fun. She was too busy groaning and pulling at vomit-caked hair strands to register our presence so we moved in a little closer, and a little closer, and when she finally realized that wasn’t more puke she smelled we were within easy stumble of dessert. She stared at us, bleary-eyed, face ashen. We stared back.
She dove head-first back into the car, slammed the locks shut and propelled the thing straight toward us. Sam just stood there, glowing and skeletal in the oncoming headlights, and put his hands out to the front grille; the tires squealed, turning over and over on themselves, and when his arms shook with the effort Billy and I stepped up too, our palms splayed side by side like a chart of fleshly decay. She gunned the accelerator, giving me a good bodily jolt but not moving the car an inch, and as Mags and Ben and Joe swarmed around the doors her whole body went slack with fear. Joe rapped on the windshield, a light little tap that made the glass blossom in a cobweb of cracks.
“You lost?” he shouted, looming in close so she could see his gnawed-up face. “Is somebody lost?”
Mags staggered around the car groaning, her drooling-retard undead act, fingers buried in the mush of her own flesh up to the knuckles. The smell of terror poured through the door seals like gas from a vent; Billy and Sam on one side, Joe and me on the other, we rocked the car gently back and forth, up and back down again, and the hoocow tore at her own hair and screamed and screamed. Linc and Florian held back, like they always hold back, but they were both wheezing with laughter.
“Come on,” Linc managed, “knock that off. Or I’ll tell Teresa.”
We ignored him, the car way off to the side, balanced on one set of furiously rotating tires, then back. The hoocow was puking again, from vertigo or fear anybody’s guess.
Florian spat, a thin depleted stream of coffin juice, and stamped his bony feet. “You all a lot of pussycats?” he asked, drawing out the first two syllables. “How long you gonna stand here playing? Either kill it and eat it or leave it alone.”
Killjoy. We rested the car gently on the asphalt, stepping backward with bows and curtsies. The hoocow just sat there, covered in sick, probably stunned. She had big bewildered brown eyes, actual cow eyes, that skin so pale it always looks bluish. Actually she looked plain old blue, a dark sickly tinge rising up and suffusing her skin like a blush. Billy made elaborate motions toward the park gate and she just sat there. Little chips of windshield had fallen out, bits of glitter sprinkling the ground.
“You better leave,” Linc called out, pointing at the gate. He can’t talk any better than the rest of us, lips and tongues and palates all moldered away, but his mishmash of syllables at least sounded friendly. “This place isn’t for humans. You better go.”
The hoocow drew her brows together, startled, then gazed in wonderment at the puke on her T-shirt, at her left hand grasping the wheel and the right pulling the brake. At me. Big, dark stupid eyes staring into mine, sidling on down to take in my face and the rags of my clothes and lingering on my one remaining hand and Jesus Christ, how drunk was she? I screamed at her through the windshield and she started awake, throwing herself into reverse and heading exitward at a downright leisurely pace. The car meandered from side to side, nearly wandering into a clump of trees, then righted itself and vanished slow and unsteady out the park gate.
“What the hell was that all about?” Joe demanded, like I would know.
Ben yanked the ragged remnants of his fedora further over his eyes. “So stoned she couldn’t tell which hand was which. Big deal.” He gazed across the parking lot, frowning. “I coulda used a little tasty treat, myself—if she wanted to stay that bad, you shoulda let her.”
It was halfhearted protest; his voice had the same lazy edge of satiety as Joe’s, and by the time we crossed into the wide, empty park field bordered by gristmill and sugaring shack and thick bands of cottonwoods Lady Hoocow was nearly forgotten. Uncut for years, the tall grass was choked by taller weeds, their stems sharp and crackling as we pushed through them to get home. Teresa’s gazebo, its white paint peeling and carved patches of roof rotting away, sat across a little footbridge in an enclave surrounded by rusting park benches and clusters of oaks; the “Great” River, narrow and slow-moving and perpetually clogged with mud, circled around the rear and disappeared back into the forest.
The queen’s throne, but of course Her Majesty was nowhere to be seen. Teresa loves to disappear for hours and days at a time, no saying where or why, no saying how she fed. Ben and Billy and some of the others wander off too, go human-hunting whenever deer and ducks and possum and coyotes stop tasting exciting, but they always bring back bones and stories for the rest of us, make it worth everyone’s while. Teresa, she’s just too good to share and of course we can’t have a walkabout if she’s having one; we all have to be right there, sitting tight, waiting for whenever she decides to stroll back home.
That act’s getting old, dusty and ancient in fact. But right then I was too tired to care.
Ben groaned, crawling under one of the benches; the ground was softening with the approach of spring, but still cold and firm enough for good sleeping. “All that fuss to get back and she ain’t here. Told you we should’ve stopped for a snack—”
Florian, curled up against the gazebo wood, was already sound asleep. Sam hauled himself up again, groaning. “Our turn for watch, Billy, c’mon.”
He and Billy left for watch duty, to tramp around the near perimeter of the park looking for any more interlopers until all the sun and daylight exhausted them and a new shift took over. Not my turn yet, thank God. I get sleepy now the way little kids do, big wild bursts of energy evaporating in a flash, and falling into the tall grass was a relief. Joe settled next to me, front to front, Linc on the other side back to back. Mags was flopped out snoring at my feet.
“Wait’ll she gets back home,” Joe muttered, already half-asleep. “Th’hoocow. Stories she’ll tell. Zombie this, zombie that—”
“Good.” I shifted away from a sharp rock. “Keep her kind away.”
The sunrise was full orange, striated with wide soft streaks of pink. Stomach full. It was time to go to sleep.
I remember, when I was alive, reading somewhere that Eskimos don’t call themselves that—white men did, a corruption of some word that meant “raw flesh eater.” They called each other “The People.” Raw flesh eater. There actually is a gang up in the Dakotas that calls itself The Eskimos, but a lot of folks don’t get the joke. My gang, Teresa and Joe and Sam and all the rest, is called the Fly-by-Nights. Our turf is what used to be the Great River County Park in Calumet County, right over the Illinois-Indiana border and just south of where the Lake Michigan beach dunes begin, and it’s been their place, our place, long before I tunneled up and they took me in as family.
We’re not the only gang around here, not by a long shot—there’s the Carnies over in Michigan City, the Bottom Feeders in South Bend, the Way of All Flesh that practically runs Cicero and the Rat Patrol that goes wherever the hell it wants whenever it wants—but this is my gang, the best gang, and so that’s what I call myself if you ask me, a Fly-by-Night. Undead, if you want something more basic. Jessie, if you’re not such an asshole you never ask my name.
What I never call myself, ever, is “zombie.” It’s racist, for one thing, just like “Eskimo.” I cared a lot about racism and animals and justice and all of that, when I was human. But I haven’t been human for a long time.
Nine years ago, I was alive. Nine years ago, Jessica Anne Porter was fifteen and lived in a nice house in the very well-guarded town of Lepingville, an hour out of Chicago, and got okay grades and wanted to do something someday with animal rights. Her hair was auburn dyed something brighter, I forget what. I don’t see bright colors well anymore. She had a mother, father, a sister in her first year of college, a brother in his last—neither of them could wait to get out of the house, they barely spoke to her parents. And her parents barely spoke to each other. Then one day they were in a rare good mood and took her out to dinner, and then there was the Toyota ride home.
Dad took the back roads home, the scenic tour. You weren’t supposed to do that, you were supposed to stay on the main highway with the blindingly sulfurous roadside lights (the “environmental hazards,” as we called them, you never put it more directly than that, supposedly hated bright light) and the toll booths. Each booth had a FUNDING COMMUNITY SAFETY sign so you wouldn’t throw a tantrum as you forked over your money, a sentry bearing an emergency flamethrower. See? Safety. Suck on that, you suburban cheapskates. The small, cramped booths could serve as safe houses in a pinch, if a “hazard” somehow surprised you on the road. They had to let you in, that was the law. But my dad had paid four tolls in eighteen miles just to get to the restaurant and my mom complained the road lights gave her headaches and it was a pretty night and for once nobody was screaming at each other so why not take the old road, the long way home? Rest your eyes. Have a bit of peace and quiet.
It was two miles from the county line, where the former industrial park gave way to beachy dune grass and rows of half-built condos sat empty along the roadside, silhouetted in weirdly dim, soft white road lights. The old-fashioned kind. This was after they finally passed the moratorium on residential building in rural areas, the one the developers held up as long as they could, until the “hazards” somehow got into that gated community near the Taltree Preserve; whose woods, fields and ex-farmlands these are, even they then managed to figure out. Nothing hazardous that night, though, just the dark sky and the low fuzzy whiteness and everything peaceful and sleepy until suddenly there were two blinding headlights bearing down on us from the wrong side of the road, howling brakes and screaming and then, like the lost breath from a hard stomach punch, everything gathered into a fist and struck, and then stopped.
I remember a pickup truck, yellow, gone faded saffron under the road lights. And a woman’s voice, not my mother’s, moaning over and over like some nauseated prayer while I lay on the pavement dying, Oh Christ, oh God, oh Christ oh Christ oh Christ oh my God and I thought, Lady, it’s a little late for that now isn’t it? Her voice was washed out, staticky with the buzz of a million angry flies eating her up, and the buzzing became louder and louder and there were new flashing lights, red ones, but it was too late, I was all eaten up, and I closed my eyes and fell asleep for a long time.
Then, days or weeks or months after the funeral, I woke up.
In old horror movies where someone gets buried alive, there’s always that moment where they blink into the darkness, pat and grope around the coffin walls and let out that big oxygen-wasting scream as the screen goes black. Me, though, I knew I was dead, really dead and not put away by mistake, and another giant fist was gripping my brain and nerves and shoving away shock, surprise, bewilderment, only letting me think one thing: Out. And I knew, with absolute certainty, that I would break free. I didn’t seem to need air anymore, so I could take my time.
I tried putting my hands out just like in the movies, to feel the force and weight I was fighting—six feet under, that’s a lot of piled-up dirt—and that’s how I found out my right arm was shot to pieces. The left could rattle the box a bit, but not enough. I raised my legs, each movement a good long achy stretch after the best nap in the world, and pressed my palm, knees, feet against the white satiny padding overhead. Felt a rattle. Pressed harder. Heard a creak.
Then I kicked.
The first blow tore through the satin lining and slammed into the wood without a moment’s pain; the second splintered it, cracked it, and I kicked and kneed and punched until I hit shards of timber and musty air and then, so hard my whole body rattled, a solid concrete ceiling overhead. A grave liner, Teresa explained to me later, another box for my box, but I felt real panic at the sight and had to make myself keep kicking, harder, harder, and that awful concrete became fine white dust that gave way to an avalanche of dirt. I was gulping down mouthfuls of mud and I was sad for my shirt, they’d buried me in my favorite T-shirt that read ANIMALS ARE NOT OURS TO EAT, WEAR, OR EXPERIMENT ON and now it was plastered mute with damp black dirt, but I kept swimming one-handed, kicking, tunneling upward through a crumbling sea. The moist tides of soil were endless, then I felt something finer and powdery-dry and my good hand found thin cords of grassroots, poked through the green carpet-weave and ripped a long jagged slit open to the air. The air—I didn’t need it, maybe, but as I lay there drained and exhausted and felt it cool on my dirt-caked back I almost cried.
The sunset was a needle-thrust in my eyes. I crouched in my own grave hole, retching up pebbles and earth, and gasped at the smells of the world: the turned soil, the broken grass stems I clutched in my fist, graveside flowers old and new, the trees and plants and the thousands of people and animals that’d left scents behind traversing the cemetery grounds. My own dead, dirty stink, and it still didn’t shock me, I was too distracted by the other million fits and starts of odor flooding my nostrils—this was how to experience the world, this note of mushrooms sprouting in damp grass, this trace of old rubber from a sneaker sole, compared to this banquet eyes and ears told you nothing! My head pounded, painlessly, like a great throbbing vein: the hard pulsations of my new brain, my undead brain, but I didn’t know that yet. I reached up, like someone would be there to lift me, and touched something rough and cold. A tombstone, my tombstone: AUGUST 14, 2001. I died on August 14, 2001, but what day was it now? Where was I now? Where would I go, where will I sleep, do I have to sleep—
I smelled it before I saw it, darting quick and confused across the grass. Rabbit. Fresh, living rabbit.
Every other scent and smell in the world instantly vanished. Hunger rattled my skull and shook my bones—pork chops, hamburgers, steaks rare and bloody, everything that would have made me vomit when I was alive but I had to have them now, I had to have them raw and oozing juice and if I didn’t get that rabbit, if I didn’t kill it and devour it now, I had nothing to live for at all. I staggered to my feet and stood there trembling, legs stiff and exhausted, but before I could even try to run for my food something bloated and rotten in the shape of a man, his dark suit jacket torn and spilling fat little white grubs, crawled on all fours from the pile of dirt that had been his grave. The grave next to mine. The rabbit had halted too soon, crouching frozen with fear by our collective tombstone, and as I watched it spasm and kick against death, as I watched my father sink long teeth into its skull and spit out soft tufts of brown fur, I was small again and only wanted to scream and cry, Daddy, why did you take my toy?
Something crawled from behind a yew tree, feverish and fast. A woman in the rags of my mother’s favorite blue sweater fell on him, grabbing the rabbit’s meaty hindquarters for herself, and held on tight and chewed no matter how hard he punched and kicked, so hard she sobbed between bites: Whap, cry, swallow, whap, cry, swallow.
But, Daddy, that’s my toy.
They rolled on the ground, snarling with rage.
And you. What are you doing in my mom’s favorite sweater?
But they’d dropped the rabbit carcass, fighting that hard, and I was so hungry and it was so good and I knew the answers to my questions, I already knew.
A garter snake slithered over my mother’s foot and they both went crazy, grabbing fistfuls of grass where it had shot out of reach. Arguing again, fighting forever, only with sounds now and no words—screeching violins, deafening pounding drums. I was gone already, walking away. I never saw them again.
I scraped a deep, gouging ridge in my back, crawling through a gap I’d torn in the cemetery fence, and felt only a paper cut. A pinprick. I ran my tongue along my teeth and almost screamed; the fence’s barbed wire was nothing, but my teeth had all grown long and blade-edged and when I pulled my hand from my mouth, there was something thick and syrupy from the new cut on my tongue and fingers, almost like blood but black. Coffin liquor, Florian told me later, my own putrefaction flowing through my veins. My hand was swollen and livid, the veins and arteries gone dark.
I could barely walk. I staggered, tried crawling like my mom had but with the bad arm that wasn’t any better. calumet county memorial park, read the sign; that told me I was in the middle of nowhere, if you insist on burying instead of burning they make you do it far away from everything and don’t come crying to us if the funeral procession gets attacked, but where this particular nowhere was I had no idea. Other than me and that garter snake, no sign of life. I crawled and stumbled and crawled again, pushing through grass, gravel, leaves and underbrush. Snapping branches scared me, a single car speeding by terrified me; it’d find me and run me down if it got a chance. I didn’t feel like a monster but I knew I looked like one. I cried from fear, wept from hunger, black syrupy tears splattering my muddy shirt.
I kept walking, deep into the countryside, no company but the animals I was too scared to stop and hunt. What the hell was I looking for? My throbbing skull started pounding in earnest, yielding to real pain, and my ears were flooded with a sudden off-kilter symphony of screeches, buzzes, trumpet squawks, strings sliced shrilly in half. The buzzing like flies, that sound I remembered from dying. I shook my head to get rid of it, like real flies stuck in my head, and it grew louder and sharper and became muffled disjointed words:
—another one—grave—Joe—see—
I started shaking. Never mind what had happened to me and my parents, never mind the guard posts along the highways and every Lepingville entrance and exit, never mind all the school safety drills and town committee handouts about the others, the “hazards,” the reasons you either burn like a Good Responsible Person or you get buried behind barbed wire in No Humans’ Land—never mind all that because it couldn’t be true, I couldn’t be true—
—circles—follow—
Circles, dizzy and hunger-sick around the same clump of trees, and I couldn’t find those voices or escape them but I tried to follow them not knowing why: hot-hotter-COLD—turn left—warmer-warmer-COLD—not so far left—so hungryhotter-COLD—straight ahead—too quiet—turn around. My guts twisted hot-hotter—ON FIRE with emptiness, no more meat, no nothing. Voices faded, returned in tinny crashes of music, then vanished. I was on the worst ice-cream truck chase in the history of the world, but if I kept going the voices would find me, they’d tell me where to go and feed me and take me in—but then I took a wrong turn and it was cold-colderabsolute zero, every sound gone. The clouds overhead seemed to burst and collapse like bubbles, inky night pouring in as I stood there covered in mud and black blood. All alone.
I doubled over, threw my head back and screamed. Frankenstein’s monster, roaring, and it felt so good that I crouched in the leaves and shouted louder, ripping myself inside out with hunger and fear. Something small and furry shot past me, terrified of the sounds I was making, and I could have chased it but my head pounded and throbbed and everything before my eyes melted, sliding off my plane of vision as I succumbed to the vertigo. A spoon heated seething red scraped my gut away piece by piece, slow starvation cauterizing my insides, and I pounded my forehead, my good fist, against the ground and wailed.
I don’t know how long I lay there. Silence, my horrible crying met with utter silence, and then I felt what I thought was an insect brushing my face. No, not an insect—soft swollen fingers. A stench pressed in on all sides, I was fresh and sweet in comparison, but I was too tired to move and it couldn’t mean anything. I was all alone.
The fingers touched my ruined right arm, lifted it. It fell back with a soft thud. Chit-chit, I heard, a strange wet-dry click like someone chewing a mouthful of popcorn kernels. I pulled myself upright, and looked.
The whole right side of his face was smashed in, concave forehead and crushed cheekbone and one eye bugging precariously from a broken socket. He was purplish-black, and dirty white: Maggots seethed from every pore and crawled across him in excited wriggly piles, blowflies waving and blooming and wilting, the bits of bone they’d scraped clean glinting like tiny mosaic tiles. Scraps of jeans and a leather jacket clung to the sticky seething mess of his flesh. He was big, big-shouldered, a good foot taller; chit-chitter, he went, even standing still.
Behind him were more stinking, seething masses shaped like people, their skin in the thin moonlight every color bruises go: some barely rotten at all, one shriveled and bony as an unwrapped mummy, one so bloated and gas-blackened it scared me. Standing right behind Bug Man was a half-skeleton with wild dark hair and silver rings clinking on her finger bones, eyes bulging nearly out of her head as she sized me up, grinned and let out a loud, belching guffaw. They all groaned with laughter. Their teeth looked the way mine felt, long and jagged and dull gray like tarnished blades.
I can’t explain it. You can be a monster yourself and still scream, puke, faint seeing what you are staring back at you, but none of it seemed monstrous. It was pretty, almost, the weirdest kind of pretty, seeing how they were all young or old in their own inhuman way, how slowly and methodically the bugs took care of everything, how clean bones and pulsating brains were underneath the skin. How natural it all was. But then those teeth, so dull and dirty but a glint at the tips, if you looked closely, the flash of a needle that could crunch through bones and penetrate to the marrow. Under their laughter a thrumming sound, not quite musical but not quite mere noise, and the longer I stared the more the shapeless sounds took on outlines, defined themselves, by whom I was looking at: That one there, with the bleary laugh, a trumpet; the one with the thin sad face, banjo; the black-haired scarecrow with the rings, shrill strings. Bug Man’s noise was louder and stronger than the rest, so I mistook him for the leader. Electric guitar, that would blast you flat to the ground if you got too close.
I reached out and touched his face. Chit-chit, said the bugs. He grunted, almost belched the crude shape of words, a caveman with a rotted tongue—but soon as all that hrruhhrruh-mmmuhhhhh shot through my head it became waves of sound, transformed radio waves, and then words precise and clear as pieces of glass glittering on the beach.
“I’m Joe,” he said. “Happy birthday.”
The others mumbled something in turn but I couldn’t hear them properly just yet, only their noises that were almost but not quite trumpets and banjos and strings. The smell of fresh flesh wafted over me, and Joe the Bug Man stepped aside as someone in a ragged black fedora emerged from the trees, something swinging from his hand, and dropped a warm furry just-dead thing right at my feet. A possum, its neck neatly snapped.
My stomach gurgled and Fedora Man snorted, walking away. Dark drops fell on the carcass, plink-plonk, and Joe laughed, reached out to wipe the black drool from my mouth. “Go on. Eat.”
I ate and ate and couldn’t stop. Rich raw meat. Warm blood. Leftovers from God’s refrigerator. When I looked up again, putting down the bones I’d been chewing to twigs to get at the marrow, they were all standing over me. The dark-haired one with the rings smiled.
“I’m Teresa,” she said. Jerked her head toward a soft, bloated gaseous mass with a lone lamplike eye and ragged remnants of red hair. “That’s Lillian. Remember her name, even if you don’t remember mine.”
Lillian, the chieftainess, though of course I didn’t know that yet. Teresa was her second in command back then, already planning, scheming. They both watched me crunch another bone down to splinters, then Teresa smiled.
“Good girl,” she said. “Now, time to earn your food.”
Her fists caught me in the jaw, chest, gut, and when they all piled on me at once, my gang induction, all that meat came rocketing straight up again. Dry bony feet kicked me, squelching rotting ones, and Joe sat there watching it all happen. I crawled through a gap in the fists and feet, even one-armed it was better than tottering on legs that would never work properly again, and I rose up and punched Joe hard in the gut and he gasped, laughed harder, and hit me back more viciously than all the others. I hung on. Bones cracked, his and mine. They only pulled me off when we were both dizzy and spitting out mouthfuls of bilious dark blood, and even one-armed I’d passed my test so well that Teresa, then Lillian, beat me up again so I’d remember who was in charge. I couldn’t move for three days. They brought me rabbit, squirrel, the dog-ends of deer. They’d been needing someone new who could really fight, they said, and didn’t hide their surprise that the someone was me.
But there wasn’t anyone to fight, not in the middle of nowhere in a former county park with only squirrels and deer and each other for company. They were the first gang for me, the only gang, and so I didn’t question why we all stayed out here when other gangs routinely marauded in the poorer, unguarded human areas, the ones whose property taxes just couldn’t float guard teams and electrified fences and infrared video security, it’s like they all want to be attacked, too bad, so sad, why don’t they all just quit their goddamned whining and move somewhere else?
“You broke six of my ribs,” Joe told me, when I could stand and walk again; he said it nose-to-nose clenching my good arm hard enough to snap but there was admiration in his eyes, that little hiss in his voice that someone gets when you’re not at all what they expected, when they realize they’re not gonna get what they want without a fight and they like it. That singular sound of: Damn, woman. “Six. You stomped me like a fucking cardboard box.”
“I’m hungry,” I told him, and there wasn’t any whining in my voice, no please-feed-me, just a hard flat-out demand for what I required. He liked demands, I could tell already. Hearing them, issuing them. “I’m always hungry.”
“You’re supposed to be.”
He pulled me aside from the group, from everyone smirking at us both. Florian, the walking skeleton with the watery blue eyes, he was the only other one of them I liked. “It’s time you learn to hunt,” Joe said. “I’ll show you how. Lillian’s a shit hunter, don’t let her tell you anything. You’ll be good at it. Put some of that crazy to use.”
Plenty to hunt. Plenty to hunt far outside our attenuated neck of the woods. Plenty of low-hanging two-legged fruit rotting on the vine in Gary and East Chicago and South Chicago and parts of Hammond and Whiting, plenty of what I kept being told, over and over again, secondhand, have heard, they say, everybody knows, is the only real meat. But turns out, I didn’t want brains, I didn’t need hoos; meat was meat, any fresh kill would do, and it did for all of us, for all their talk.
“So just what the hell are we looking for?” I asked Joe on our first watch patrol together at the wood’s very edge, sitting side by side against a tree trunk, not watching anything but the wind kicking up the dry dead stalks of a neighboring cornfield gone to weeds. “There’s nobody here. There’s never anybody, Ben said, nothing but feral cats and every now and then a crazy-ass bum—”
“Do they still go around saying you can shoot us?” Joe interrupted, squinting into the painfully blue sky. High noon, the whole rest of the gang deep asleep. “Guns don’t work. Not pistols, not machine guns, not automatic rifles, never be afraid of any little hoo who comes at you waving a gun—”
“So Sam said.” I’d started liking Sam too, not half so worn out and dusty as Florian but with so much wearier, sadder eyes. “But they don’t say that anymore. Didn’t.”
“Fire. That’s it. Or a good stomp to the head, till your skull’s kicked in.” He folded his arms, a little humorous glint in his eye. “Like a flattened cardboard box. Otherwise you’ll just crumble to dust, whenever it’s your time. Stomping, or fire. Ever seen a crazy hoo-vigilante wandering around the woods with a flamethrower, thinking he’s gonna toast our collective asses once and for all?”
“So what would we do then?” They don’t go for controlled rural burns anymore, once they realized all that does is send the surviving “hazards” crowding closer and closer to hooterritory. Gotta eat. Of course, hell with what the government does or doesn’t do, all it takes is one crazy redneck with a book of matches. It’s just been sheer luck. “By the time we see him, already too late.”
“What do we do then?” Joe chuckled, still gazing up at the sky. “Mostly we die. But at least we die knowing who got us, and we don’t die alone.” He raked one leather-jacketed shoulder against the tree bark, working away at the ceaseless bug-itch of his own rotten skin. “Died alone once. I’m not doing it again.” He turned to look at me, narrow dark eyes staring from a seething feeding sea. “Never. Ever.”