Book One: The Ex
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Book Two: Topsy-Turvy
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Book Three: Underworld
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Once again the greatest thanks to my agent, Michelle Brower, and my editor, Michelle Vega, for their unflagging work on my behalf, and to everyone at The Berkley Publishing Group and Folio Literary Management. To Kenneth V. Iserson, whose Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies? was an invaluable research resource for both Frail and its predecessor. To staff and volunteers at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, with thanks for letting me overrun Lake Street Beach, Marquette Park Beach and Kemil Beach with imaginary corpses of all kinds. To Ann Larimer, Betsy Hanes Perry, Liz Barr, Eoghann Renfroe, Merri-Todd Webster and Minette Joseph for their friendship, moral support and reality checks administered whenever necessary. And as always, to my family for always believing in me.
When I was fourteen there was a security breach near the intersection of Seventy-Third and Klein and my mother killed her first intruder, and her last. She was on the six-to-three shift and I had guitar lessons a four-toll drive away in Leyton and she was supposed to pick me up straight from school, so we could hit U.S. 30 before the evening checkpoints started. But she didn’t show, wasn’t answering her cell, so I just sat there in the cafeteria, waiting, inhaling traces of stale crinkle-fry grease and watching the sky fade from drab blue to deep gray. Dave, one of the janitors, was mopping the floor like he wanted to slap its imaginary face and Ms. Acosta slipped and skidded in the wet and almost fell. I was glad to see it after all her clucking to my mother about slacking off and bad attitudes and “twoooo-antsy” (that’s how she pronounced it, all bird-whistle fluttery like a comedienne in some old movie). She saw my lips twitching and glared at me, got what my mother called a cough-syrup smile right back, and I was reaching for my phone again when the warning siren kicked to life.
Louder and louder, that singular cadence distinguishing it from tornado and fire alarms: aieeeow-oooo, woooo-owwwww, low and moaning like an animal in pain. A very particular animal, creature, inhuman thing, that one-note wail all it had left for a voice. Onomatopoeia, we’d just learned that in English: natural sound encapsulated into speech, like a captured insect buzzing in a new-made bottle. Onomatopoeia, onomatopoeia, the word kept winding and tongue-twisting through my head. Remain in your seats. This is only a test.
“Damn,” Ms. Acosta said, going pale under her orangey streaks of foundation.
“They’re just testing it!” Dave shouted over the noise, supremely bored, nails raking at an angry pink splotch on the side of his neck. “The sun hasn’t even set, those things are barely awake—”
The intercom snapped on. “Code Orange alert,” said a woman’s voice, prerecorded, urgent but serene. “Code Orange, located at—Klein—and—Seventy-Third—”
“Halfway across town.” Dave shrugged, and kept squeezing out his mop.
“Please lock all doors and windows and seek basement shelter until the all-clear sounds. If you are outside please seek the nearest safe house or other accessible building. It is a federal crime to deny shelter to any person seeking refuge from an environmental disturbance. Code Orange. Code Orange …”
“Just what I need. Haul it, Amy.” Ms. Acosta swept my backpack off the table, grabbed it like it’d burden me too much to run from the crippled hordes. “Dave? Move it! Let’s go!”
“They’re halfway across town,” I said, and folded my arms. No wonder I couldn’t reach my mom, there hadn’t been a Code Orange in years and never with her on shift. If I could somehow get over there I could watch her toast their asses, maybe flick one with my own lighter if it tried to run away—
“Amy, I swear to God I’m not in the mood—Dave? Dave! Put that mop down and let’s go!”
Dave just snorted. “Jesus Christ, Alicia, calm down. They move about two miles an hour and they ain’t gonna roller-skate over here—”
“Fine!” She flapped her bony bangled arms at an imaginary audience, the only one that’d applaud her dramatics. “Fine! I’m not your mother, you get a leg torn off like Cris Antczyk did don’t bother hopping over to me for sympathy—Amy!” The siren kept sounding, Dave nonchalantly fussing with his dirty yellow plastic bucket and CUIDADO: PISO MOJADO sign. “Get up. Follow me. Now.”
I got up. Shoved my hands in my pockets, feeling with fingertips for my school ID, town ID, curfew card, access gate e-pass. Followed her a few steps, sizing up her scuffed beige pumps with the one loose wobbly heel, my black flats. Then I ran, sailing over the damp linoleum, Ms. Acosta stumbling and screaming, “Amy, goddammit!” and Dave shaking his head laughing but I was already down the hall, out the steel double doors, the approaching sunset tinting Sycamore Street in a lurid orange wash and the sirens making the air tremble and throb.
My chest was a hot hollow husk but I was laughing as I ran, nobody can catch me, everyone else was basement-bound but I was going to see an honest-to-God living dead body get exactly what it deserved. I’d never seen one in the flesh, not even by the roadside, and even on the news all you ever saw was “dramatic re-creations” and shitty movie CGI—I was gunning for the real thing and to see my mother do the deed. She’d get a raise, a promotion, if she faced it down. She could do it without puking or fainting, not like so many of the men. All their big talk. I was proud of her, still one of the only women on the security squads, and this wasn’t just to gawk and rubberneck. It wasn’t just for me. After everything that happened you have to understand, I’m not lying, this wasn’t all just about—
I’m getting ahead of myself. Sorry. You start to ramble, blither, when there’s nothing left to talk to but the air. Ms. Acosta, she’d tell you all about that, if she were still alive.
The little white stucco house on the corner of Sycamore and Cypress had gone creamy pink, quivering like a slab as the sunlight went rich and deep; I tunneled through their lilacs and kept on going. Seventy-Third’s halfway across town, Dave was right, but Lepingville wasn’t that big a town. As I veered off Maplewood I could already see the police cars and fire engines and Lepingville Civic Security vans blocking the streets, great grape-like clusters of red, blue, bottle-green flashing lights. I picked through backyards and easements looking for the best vantage point and completely by accident I saw her, framed perfectly by the gnarled, curving tree branches around me: my mother, an ambulatory burnt marshmallow in thick padded charcoal-gray fatigues, coppery hair twisted up at the back of her head, waddling down Seventy-Third calm as you please as she fitted another cartridge to her flamethrower.
Everybody in town joked about intruders but they were still scared shitless. My mother, though, she’d grown up over in Gary with no alarms, no fencing unless you put it up yourself, nothing but a half-defunct PA system, your basement and you. Anything could happen, any time, and you had to keep cool or you’d go crazy. I wanted to be cool, sanguine, just like her. I wanted her to get that piece of walking ant bait, the raise, the promotion, she got so much shit from the men she worked with and she deserved this chance, it wasn’t just all about me—
There it was. All alone, standing there in front of the torn shrubbery and rusted, broken fence point it’d ripped down, arms dangling and limp, perfectly quiet but with its long pearl-gray teeth bared and grimacing. A bloated, brackish, muddy mess, a first-grader’s art project shaped with careless palm-slaps into a too-angular skull, a smeared nubbin of a nose and horribly thin fingers; something about those fingers, the way each one was a perfect sticky twig of tacky clay not yet softened to full rot, made a horrible shiver rush up my back, my chest going hot and tight in disgust.
It was a man, had been a man, its penis swung limp and useless from its gaping trouser holes but more indecent than the sight of that ever could be was the smell. You can’t imagine the smell, so strong and sharp and porridge-thick that I gagged, gasped as it rolled over me, my lungs squeezing shut under the assault: an overpowering gaseous stink that wasn’t even a proper smell of death but of life. Nasty, fetid, wriggly life, bursting in horrible exuberance from that thing once a man, fields of mold blooming on fabric and skin, grubs and bluebottles breeding, hatching, crawling from the crevices around eyes, nose, crotch, armpit, elbow crooks, eating and being eaten from the inside out—the police and firemen heaved and retched but not my mother, she didn’t even flinch, just pulled on her breath-mask and stood her ground. Kill it, Mom, for God’s sake kill that smell. All the rest of them just watching. Like me.
They stood aside, the other security guys, they left her to it all alone: The bitch thinks she can handle it? Yeah, we’ll just see about that. Cowards. She walked right up to it, there in the middle of the street. The cops raised their guns. Bullets wouldn’t kill an intruder, but wounding it might buy some time. My mother took her time. Why shouldn’t she? It couldn’t run, it could barely walk. Its kind relied on ambush and paralyzing panic.
I stuck a jacket fold to my nose and crept nearer, keeping to the trees. I never even considered how trees, bushes, dark shadowy overgrowths where they could lie in wait were their friends, how I’d never smell others coming over this one’s reek. Sanguine. That word sounds a lot better than reckless.
It made a sound, looking at my mother, and the noise it made sent a strange, prickly disquiet through me because it wasn’t like in the movies, it wasn’t the right sound. It was a low, full moan that bore an edge of surprise, a living human’s dismay and uncertainty turned to stretched-out toffee in that undead mouth. It kept staring at my mother, wide gaping eyes from the collapsed ruin of a face and make it stop, Mom, tell it to knock that off; it’s not hungry, I can tell it’s not. It’s like it thinks it knows you, somehow, from somewhere.
The stench was so awful my throat closed up; I was making little huhh, huhhh heaving sounds I couldn’t stifle, warm acidy puddles pooling in my mouth. Kill it, Mom. Make it stop.
She took off her mask. The cops, the security squadron muttered in confusion but nobody tried to stop her, they weren’t taking a single step closer than they had to. The thing moaned again, an oh-shit, what-now, what-do-I-do noise and some of the squadron snickered. My mother wasn’t laughing. Her eyes looked like that thing’s voice sounded.
“Get out,” she said, her voice shaking. If the smell was getting to her, you’d never guess it. “Go back through that fence and get out.”
Why was she talking to it? They didn’t understand us. They were beyond speech. She took a step forward, tugging her boot from the soft thick dirt. The thing didn’t move.
“You’re trespassing on human territory!” she shouted, a strange, strident agitation buoying her voice up over the squadron vans, into the trees, as she rattled off the black-book gobbledygook it couldn’t possibly understand. “As a civic security official I am authorized to use all necessary levels of force to address Class A environmental disturbances by Indiana Code Section 17, paragraph 8(d)—”
It made another sound. Oooooo, it went. Still looking my mother up and down, like it knew something about her and had no idea what to do with what it knew, and then ooooooosssss. Airy, hollow whistling, trying to make sounds a rotten tongue, lips, palate wouldn’t allow anymore. Ooooosssssss. And it took a step forward.
My mother didn’t move. The squadron snapped to attention; you could see it on their faces, fear, and some smirking, because they thought she’d frozen up. It wasn’t that, I knew it wasn’t, but something was very wrong and even over the horrible stink of living death you could smell, feel, hear the wrongness all concentrated in her voice as she raised the flamethrower and screamed, “Get out! Get out!”
It opened its mouth again, making softer, cow-lowing cries like it wanted to wheedle her into something. Coax her. It stumbled forward, slow as they all do, holding out its arms.
I don’t know what I was expecting to happen when it caught the flame. Maybe that it’d drop to the pavement and lie there like a proper corpse, a genteelly singed peaceful stinking dead body, or give a little pop like marshmallow char in a bonfire and collapse, instantly, into a sighing pile of shitty muddy ash. But instead it stood there with its puppet arms waving, each filthy rag of clothing a tattered fiery flag, and then its mouth opened and jaw came unhinged around a long, hard, sustained scream of agony. Not like the alarm siren, not like in the movies: It sounded human, the sound of those screams was a human being just like me or my mother or Ms. Acosta or anyone else in such awful, unimaginable pain they’d do, give, promise anything to make it stop but there was nowhere to go, no way out. It couldn’t run, not like a panicked human on fire. Instead it rotated in a slow tottering circle. It sank to its knees, groaning and sobbing. And it rolled on the ground. And it bubbled, and cooked, and slowly died.
The firefighters moved in to keep the grass from igniting; didn’t matter if they doused the flame, the heat would still keep working its way in, sloughing off rotten skin and bone. It was covered in sprayed-on extinguisher frost now, a grotesque Christmas window mannequin with arms curled into useless, foreshortened boxer’s fists, and the screaming wouldn’t stop.
The smell, as it burned. Kept burning, even without any fire. Mom. I need you to make it stop, now.
She sat down hard on the grass, watching it writhe and sob and burn, and someone grabbed her and dragged her to the vans. It was crying now, full-throated sobs of pain as its bones disintegrated, skin falling off in thick charred pieces like slivers of briquettes from a barbecue. The same sort of dirty gray ash. They’d surrounded my mother now, going Good job, Lucy, you did it, you fucking toasted it, just listen to it wail, and I ran from my hiding place because I couldn’t stand it anymore. It had to stop crying, she had to make all this stop happening and go away, tell me it wasn’t really a person and everything would be—and that’s when she saw me, and shoved them all aside to get to me.
“What are you doing here!” she shouted, pulling me out of the path, away from the sobbing howling skeleton lying in its own ash. “You’re at school, you’re in the shelter! Why aren’t you—goddammit, can’t you stay out of trouble longer than five minutes at a time, why are you here! What the hell are you doing here!”
I didn’t have any answer and my mother grabbed my arms in a pincer grip and shook me, yelling things I couldn’t hear, and Ms. Acosta was suddenly right there puffing and panting in white sneakers like nurse’s shoes, and my mother screamed at her to mind her own goddamned business for once in her life, and I wrenched free and ran fast as I could from the smell, the shouting, the cries of pain that just kept growing louder. It all got lower and fainter, faded out entirely around Hollister, and I sat there on the sidewalk like my mother had on the grass, letting my nose and ears fill up with the clean airy quiet. A good hour, maybe more. The color faded and retreated from the sky, everything bathed in the soft formless dark.
I went home and threw up and then sat in the basement, on the cots we had set up in case of tornadoes or what had just happened, and that’s where my mother found me. Staggering tired, she looked drained dry, a dried streak of something like blood except sticky and ashen smearing her cheek. She didn’t yell at me, we had the leftover baked beans for dinner and went straight to sleep. The next morning and all afternoon she just lay there, quiet, staring at the wall next to her bed. And the day after that. And the day after that.
My aunt Kate said later my mother hadn’t been right in the head since my father died, that even before that she’d been strange. Off. A lot of people said that, about my mother. But I knew her, and they didn’t, and all I’ll say is that after that evening something inside her seemed to bend and twist like that thing’s rotten twiggy fingers, tearing in two without making a sound. She never cried. She wasn’t the type. She never talked to anyone. She could take care of herself. She went to work. She came home. She asked me about school, how anyone smart as I was (ha) could be barely passing history, asked me about my music, cooked the pancake dinner we ate every Friday she was off-shift. No more lying around in bed. There was no time, and she liked to keep busy.
And then one winter morning a year later, when I was fifteen, I woke up and she was gone. No note.
She used to go out sometimes at night, long after dark, when she thought I was asleep; all she’d ever say was she was taking a walk. Walking for hours, sometimes not coming home until dawn. That was so reckless I got scared, even knowing I couldn’t stop her, that her job meant she knew “stranger”-danger better than I ever would, that like everyone else she never went anywhere without her lighter. I’d lie there half-awake, drifting, as the sky lit from iron to pearl, and sometimes I’d fall back into thick heavy sleep and when I woke she’d be lying beside me on the bed, fully dressed, snoring. We never talked about it. Always, no matter what, she came back.
They found her LCS jacket, folded neatly at the edge of a forest preserve a half-mile outside the town gates, her badge and ID in one pocket. The jacket’s too big, but it’s warm. I like to imagine it’s what got me through this past winter.
If you’re going to get anywhere in life—this is how I see it—it’s important to always show the truth of things, even when it doesn’t make you look good. Even when it makes you angry. You have to be honest, no matter what, or it all just goes to shit. So the truth is that she’s not forgiven, my mother, for what she did. I have the power of forgiveness in me and it’s the only power I have left; I wave it inside my head like a July sparkler, letting the little line of fiery floating light it traces in the dark mark out the saved, the damned, those forever left behind. She’s not forgiven. My father isn’t forgiven, for disappearing while coming home from the mill when I was five. Ms. Acosta isn’t forgiven, for … I’d thought we finally understood each other, when there was nothing else left. But we didn’t. That dead thing isn’t forgiven, ever, for spreading its filthy contagion of crying, pain, despair—
No, I change my mind. I forgive it because it hurt so much. Only for that. Just like I have to forgive my uncle and aunt, for getting so sick. The way everyone got so sick, the way everyone died—human, zombie, everyone. Everywhere. Except me. I’m one of the only ones left.
Last spring, a year after my mother disappeared, it started. A plague. A famine. Everyone around me got sick, a disease nobody had heard of, no doctor could diagnose. It made people hungry—no. It made them ravenous, insane with hunger and the more they ate, the more the disease ate at them, turning them to great gobbling mouths crammed with meat, drink, garbage, soap, grass, paper, tree bark, dirt, insects, vermin, antifreeze, glue, face cream, Styrofoam, gammon, spinach, anything, anything they could chew or swallow. They attacked and killed their pets, children, each other. For food. Everything they’d ever feared the intruders, the real flesh-eaters, might do to us—
But the undead too. Even them. They got sick too.
But not me. I don’t know why. I hid and kept hiding until the sickness burned itself out, hit a peak and a slope and finally the living, the undead, every eating thing couldn’t eat anymore, didn’t want to. After all that, they starved to death. The disease binged on them, gorged itself sick, and then it purged. And they all died.
No. Not everyone.
Some who got this sickness—living, undead, didn’t seem to matter—they survived the ceaseless hunger, the self-starvation afterward, and became something else. They look human, some of them used to be, but they’re not. Not anymore. As strong as zombies ever were, even stronger, but they don’t rot, they don’t decay and no matter if you stab, shoot, starve, freeze them, drown them, smother them, torch them with fire, they can’t die. They heal right before your eyes, and it’s the last thing you see before they kill you. Fast-moving, fast-talking, fast-thinking as humans. Strong as zombies. And no matter what, they can never, ever die. The intruders are dead, but they’ve left a new generation behind. So many of them. So few of us.
There were only four of us in Lepingville who stayed human, who never got sick, and I’m the only one who got through last winter. And it was a mild winter, this year.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve got no idea what I’m supposed to do now, and there’s nobody to tell me. One foot in front of the other, my mother always said. Step forward, keep going even as your feet sink into the soft lawn mire all around you, the shuuuck of your shoe yanked from a pocket of mud making you flinch like a starter pistol just went off by your ear. Keep going. Somewhere. You’ll figure it out. You’ve got no choice.
I think somehow, from all her years working cheek by jowl with death, my mother sensed this was coming, the way animals sniff out impending earthquakes and flee. She was going to take me with her, but it was too dangerous and she knew someone would take me in, they have to because it’s a felony otherwise, and once the sickness ceased she’d find me and we’d figure out, together, what to do next. I couldn’t die, we had to find each other. I didn’t kill myself. I didn’t starve. I didn’t freeze or get sick or butchered for my flesh, I didn’t ever mean to do what I—I stayed here. I have a right to be proud of that. I stayed.
That’s what they tell you, when you’re little. Right? If you’re lost, stay right where you are. Somebody will find you. It’s inevitable. Someone. Somewhere.
I’m still waiting.
Five days, since I left Lepingville. I counted. Six. Maybe seven. Everything was all blurred, that first day or two, like a drawing half-wiped from a chalkboard; my ears buzzed softly and I couldn’t quite see straight, didn’t really register where I was going. I stopped sometimes, sat down, pushed sticks of jerky or handfuls of nuts down my throat, pissed in ditches, found an empty tollbooth on U.S. 30 and slept in there dreamlessly with my weight against the door. I remembered to bring food. Water. Searched for more. I lost half a day sleeping in that tollbooth so split the difference, call it six.
I can’t afford to sleep half the day. I chart and graph all my time now, so much walking, resting, walking, picking through abandoned homes and broken tollbooths and cleared-out underground shelters, eyes before me for thieves and rapists, ears behind me for any soft-footed thing hunting fresh meat, always locating my exits first. I have to plan where I’ll sleep every night, somewhere small enough to defend or big enough to hide in. Exits first. I never checked like this, before.
There’s never anyone. Maybe there’s nobody else left.
Movie theaters are good. Sleeping in theaters settles me down for some reason, soft torn-up seats, carpet and concrete flooring lousy with streaks of grease and blood, dried pop puddles, ground-in popcorn kernels, rodent droppings. Signs of life. If everyone else hadn’t got to the concessions stand before me and smashed it to get to the popcorn, the glugs of fluorescent buttery grease and nacho cheese, every last Skittle in the candy display, I might’ve just stayed in that Cineplex out near Morewood. Forever.
I was actually doing okay, sort of, before yesterday. That’s the thing.
Warmer now. Good. It felt like it must be March, late March, the wind still slapped me full in the face but its knife-edge was going blunt. Days longer. Snow piles reduced to limp Styrofoam shavings. Relative barometric pressure and humidity of—I could figure out what month it was, counting back to September using Kristin’s pregnancy, except I think the baby came early anyway. All of a sudden, she was in labor. No warning.
Every night, before I sleep, I take inventory, the few things I brought with me that I really don’t want to lose. My sewing kit, not those useless store miniatures but my own bag with needles, big thread spools, scissors. Sunglasses. Aspirin. Hunting knife. Lighters, a whole collection: metal, plastic, monogrammed, filigreed, engraved, embossed, painted with pinup girls and cartoon characters and company logos and skulls and rainbows and pot plants and flowers. Kristin’s, this one, purple with forsythia sprays. She gave it to me before she died. Mine had a picture on it, a girl playing guitar with long red hair streaming over the strings. I lost it last fall when they broke into our house, all the sick folks looking for food. Sewing kit. Already mentioned that. I forgot.
Pocket atlas. This one has all my scribbled notes, places Dave went hunting and said later to avoid, landmarks to look out for. My cell phone. My last birthday present ever, from my mother, before she left. Defunct, of course, but they weren’t getting it, not after they got my lighter. I keep it in my front jeans pocket with her old LCS ID, her driver’s license, security clearance card, everything with her name and photograph. A record she really was here.
I think I’m going crazy. Taking inventory, reminding myself where I’ve been and what I have, it doesn’t help because last night I saw something that wasn’t really there. I was on Caldwell Road, that long stretch snaking through the industrial park outside Briceland, and I stopped to rest, squeezing my eyes shut against the fading afternoon sun; I opened them again, and I saw staring back at me a pair of disembodied eyes. Rheumy, sickly yellow pinpoints, smudged and faded like gaslights coated in soap, gazing steadily from the air, the sky, from nowhere. Dog’s eyes.
I slid to my feet, ready to run, but there was no dog there. Except there was. There in the air, a ghost, a chimera. I turned my back on it and the eyes were there again, following me past the little steel mill, the auto body shop, over the harmonica-cluster of railroad tracks. Afternoon became evening and when I lay down in the remains of an antique shop the deep gray night took shape around the eyes floating in it, scrabbling into outlines of a single cocked ear, a thick solid neck, a ridge of hair bristle-straight all down a phantom spine. Hard, sharp teeth, bared against me. Swift strong legs, ready to spring.
There aren’t as many stray dogs out there as you’d think: They were some of the first casualties, when everyone was going hungry. I’m not afraid. I can’t walk around afraid of everything. But this was different. It was like how when I was young I was afraid to look in the bathroom mirror at night, scared the face staring back wouldn’t be mine at all but something distorted, grinning, a melting predatory mouth about to swallow up the room’s darkness, and me. I turned my head to the shop wall, I closed my eyes and halfway toward sleep I felt it, there beneath my hand, the fleeting sensation of hunched-up muscle beneath rough, ungroomed fur. It’s not guarding me. It’s not guarding anything. It’s lying in wait, so I can’t get away.
It’s not there. I know it’s not. And I thought it’d go away, I thought my brain was just worn out and inventing its own cheap thrills, but today those eyes are still watching, waiting, melting right into the sunlight, magnifying to make a Panopticon of the air. Judging. Waiting. There’s nowhere for me to go where they’re not.
Then I blink, and shake my head, and they vanish.
Somebody needs to tell me I’m not crazy. But it’s like I said, there’s nobody left.
Taking inventory, that’s not helping. Or looking at my mother’s badges and cards. The only thing distracting me from that damned dog is my tribunals, when I think hard on everyone dead or lost and organize their fates as I see fit. I need to keep my mind occupied, and if I can pretend sorting out the whole endless mess of living and dying is my job, I feel calmer and I can sleep. So court’s always in session, day and night.
This is what I remember, the evidence the tribunal considers:
My uncle John, at my aunt’s funeral. Kate died in less than a week, breathing in guttural gasps until her throat swelled permanently shut, and at the reception John stood hunched over the funeral buffet, glassy-eyed, bloated with illness, and ate so fast that the egg salad oozed from one side of his mouth even as the teeth on the other side tore at chunks of ham. Stares of shock. Then others, fingers twitching, shoved the gapers aside to get at more ham, potato salad, handfuls of tortellini dripping sauce scooped straight from the steam tray into waiting, scalded palms.
Jenny Waldman from my English class, sitting at her desk blue-tinged and shivering, unable to keep her hands from the full grocery bag of lunch at her feet. Drippings of peanut butter smearing her copy of The Sound and the Fury. Cheese slices piled in teetering, gelatinous wedges on a half-loaf’s worth of bread. She gorged and shivered right in front of us and nobody knew what to do and then, still chewing, she started to cry, got sick everywhere. When Mr. Lowry dragged her to the nurse three other kids fought over the vomit-smeared bag, cramming what they could get in their mouths and then rocking back and forth, trembling, hands clutched into greasy fists.
Grocery store riots. An ashen-faced man lying in a pile of shattered display glass, blood welling up from beneath him like rainwater permeating a basement. The sick with puffy, softened skin and loosening nails sitting in the aisles, emptying cereal boxes and diving into the sugary sawdust piles, wrenching out teeth trying to gnaw frozen meat. We the supposed healthy ones shoving, pushing, screaming for a spare can of green beans, a crushed coffee cake, anything, anything at all. One of them grabbed me and I kicked him in the head so hard something crunched and gave way, I didn’t look down, I was hungry too. There was something dried on my shoe, I saw later, blood and something else. He was dying anyway. It’s not my fault.
The woman in the street, gnawing on something charred in the shape of a hand. Cats, dogs, anything small and snareable, disappearing. That last day, just before I left for good, when I—
Enough. Tonight’s verdict: innocent, forgiven, all of you. No matter what. You were sick, and hungry. Innocent. Except the pet killers, you can go to hell. Now let me go to sleep. I need to sleep.
I’ll reach Leyton tomorrow. A rich town, a lucky town, they got the plague early and died quick. The shelters will have food. That’ll distract me. You see things when you’re hungry. Everything will be better, in Leyton.
My first bona fide first-stage town! Let’s have a party. Most folks here died in the initial phases like my aunt, suffocating in a bruising diphtheria before the monstrous hunger hit them and emptied every last shelf of food. The beautiful turn-of-last-century brick homes were hardly touched, only a few gas-explosion craters here and there, and all those pretty parks, and a forest smack in the center of town. Vanderhoek Woods. A tiny Franciscan monastery right next door, signs advertising TRIDENTINE and POLISH MASSES. Pilgrims welcomed. Fancy. I wonder if they got into fights with the Ukrainian Catholic Church across the street, like rival high schools at homecoming. There were still infirmary cots set up in both of them, long rows. The smell hit you coming and going.
Lepingville, we were second-stage. Very secondary.
The things that took the zombies’ places don’t like it here, they like the beach. The shoreline. Which makes sense because the shoreline was always dangerous, off limits to everyone but the thanatological scientists; Dave, he used to insist the sickness, the exes—ex-humans, ex-zombies—it all had to do with the shoreline itself, with the sands. Fairy tales, if you ask me, just like the old stories about how a meteor hitting the Great Lakes basin started waking the dead in the first place. But listening to him rant helped pass the time.
Pale, hard blue sky this morning. I’d slept in a grotto in the monastery yard and woke up sweating, and to peel off all the malodorous layers of fleece and flannel was a luxury you can’t imagine; just airing out my feet, letting them soak up a warm, steady breeze, made me close my eyes with how good it felt. They stank, of course, just like every other part of me, and itched and burned incessantly between the toes but I let myself imagine sunlight really was the best disinfectant before I pulled my socks back on—turned inside out for the illusion of changing them—and grabbed for my mother’s charcoal jacket. Time to get what I came for.
If she were here now, my mother, she’d be ashamed of how bad I smelled, from a yard away, like a homeless person. I was a homeless person. But that’d been my choice. I kept going, following the grimy yellow signs with the DESIGNATED SHELTER logo. I didn’t need a home when I had safe houses.
They call them safe houses but they were actually built underground, like big tornado cellars; every town above a certain size had to have at least one, government-subsidized. Lots of private ones too, in a town this rich, but they were a dodgier bet: Builders cut corners and the walls cracked, seepage got in, ventilation systems didn’t work right and you went to sleep feeling all cozy inhaling pure carbon monoxide. A family of six, once, over in Taltree. You’d hear stories. The manhole-cover entrance was rusty and hard to turn but that was a promising sign, other hands hadn’t touched it in a good while. After an eternity of sweating and swearing I got it moving, felt the hinge creak and give way, climbed down the metal ladder, sawed my socked toes furiously back and forth against the ladder railing; scratching made it worse but sometimes I couldn’t stand it.
I don’t like basements. I don’t like windowless spaces underground. They scare me. Making this quick. If I could find enough bottled water I’d have a sponge bath, outside.
Almost no clothing. Disappointingly thin blankets. Very little bottled water. A whole lot of vodka. Vodka and buckets of pancake mix. Whoever supply-stocked this place was insane.
Dave wouldn’t like it, that I’m still foraging instead of hunting. While he was still strong enough he tried to show me how to build snares, use a rifle, field dress a carcass into meat. A new dawn, a new day. No whining. Adapt or die, Dave said.
Dave died. Diabetes. We foraged everywhere, Ms. Acosta and I, houses, safe houses, drugstores, pharmacies, hospitals but insulin doesn’t work right if it’s too cold, too old, and there were all these different types, fast-acting, slow-acting, we couldn’t measure it right, and we had Kristin to worry about too with her pregnancy and banging her head bloody on the floor for her dead husband, her dead daughter, her missing son. So Dave lay there gasping for breath, vomiting, heart thudding beneath our hands; he slipped away with breath stinking of fruit gone bad, apples and pears soft and brown and nauseously poison-sweet. We pretended he was sleeping.
Dave Myszak, janitor. Alicia Acosta, school administrator. Kristin Wilson, medical transcriptionist. Baby Boy or Girl Wilson, not yet born. Amy Holliday, nothing. The entire surviving human population of Lepingville, Indiana. And now, just me. Be proud of me, Dave, wherever you are. I’m adapting.
Canned pears, a whole shelf full. I took the can opener. Those are like gold.
Portable lighters. Very good. More D batteries. Excellent. Bandage scissors. Band-Aids. Q-Tips. Dental floss. Tissues. Tampons. Athlete’s foot powder. Aspirin. My backpack bulged, it was a supermarket sweep. I was about to strip my shoes right back off and powder my itching feet when I heard a scratching sound from the long, angular corridor connecting the safe house rooms, then rustling like something scuttling to a nest. Rodents. A stray cat, gone feral. But how could it get down here? Maybe it got trapped. Maybe it needed help.
A soft, slumping crash, like boxes full of fabric tipping over. I had Dave’s old hunting knife, a big drop point blade. It’d do me no good against a gun. But then guns did no good against one of them. I pulled the knife out, switched off the flashlight, kept it like a bludgeon in my other hand. A cat. A disoriented rabbit, wandering the wrong warren.
A hollow click, click of toenails against concrete, rounding the corridor, so loud but nowhere nearby. Not a rabbit. Not a cat.
Two rheumy pinpoints suffusing the room in dim, sickly light, like a candle about to gutter. No. Not again. This isn’t fair.
“What do you want?” I shouted. “You hungry? I don’t care! Get your own fucking food!”
The nail-clicking stopped, the pinpoint lights sputtered and faded out. Then something that wasn’t there growled low and ravenous straight into my ear and I threw the backpack down, scuttled up the ladder and ran.
You’re not there, I thought, my too-big boots slapping the ground as I ran through someone’s front yard, found the sidewalk bordering the preserve, headed counterclockwise toward the monastery. You’re not there, hurts to run, acid sickness all in me, could vomit up everything since last fall but what I did eight days ago maybe nine will sit inside me like a gravel sack until I die, and afterward, through all of eternity—
The sky was a cake of blue ice, clusters of thin tree trunks cutting across its surface like skate tracks as the dog emerged not from the manhole but from the woods, big and coffee-colored and baring long yellowed teeth, running toward me. Not my phantom but a genuine, living dog gone feral, the collar and tags still jingling round its neck. I skidded to a stop, dropped my eyes. If you looked them in the face it was a challenge. It braced its paws on the sidewalk and growled low in its throat, a great walking stomach gurgling at the sight of more food.
I couldn’t breathe. I don’t like dogs, never did, not after that Great Dane bit me when I was five. This was a boxer, mastiff, I don’t know what the hell the breeds are, something bullet-headed and muscular and huge. I took a step backward and it growled louder, drawing out victory as long as it could, and I was running again knowing it was the worst thing I could do but I couldn’t stop, it flew after me in a blur of deep brown with silvery sunlight glinting on those useless tags, so much faster, I couldn’t run any faster—
My boot caught on a torn-up crust of concrete and I pitched face-first onto my own skidding palms, the breath knocked out of me. It growled straight in my ear and I felt a stinking heat on my neck, my back, and I couldn’t lie still for my punishment. I thrashed and screamed, torn-up hands trying to shield my eyes, my face. Teeth sliced at my jacket, my mother’s jacket. My arm, searing, wrenched away, any second now it’d snap—
Feet thudded toward me and the hot murderous weight on my back suddenly lifted, a stone dragged from the mouth of a cave; I turned on my side and saw a woman, skinny, lank-haired, wrestling with the dog, rolling from the sidewalk to the dirt at the edge of the spindly inky trees. It tore at her in a frustrated frenzy and she was beneath it now, pinned and kicking as it ripped at her breast, arm, side of her face and there was blood everywhere, her blood, oozing onto the sidewalk like juice from an overripe fruit.
I was crying and grabbing for something to throw, shoe not heavy enough, hurt to hold anything in my hand—but if I did it’d run back at me and I was such a horrible coward, lying there bawling while they rolled and tussled on the fouled sidewalk. She clutched the dog in a bear hug, almost sliding along the pavement. It tore her open from shoulder to elbow, she lost her grip howling in pain, it got teeth hard and deep into her throat and I bawled harder, watching it savage her, watching her die—
But she didn’t go down. Her own blood sprayed thick over her face but she closed her eyes, arched up with a great roaring burst of strength and she pinned it, her broken bleeding hands gripping sticky brown fur so hard that I waited for, dreaded the crunch of snapping bones. But she pulled away like she didn’t want to hurt it, like screaming in its face to scare it was enough, and it whined and bawled in her grasp knowing it’d lost and then it was running, frantic, tail down, past the woods and the monastery and into the remains of a neighborhood that might once have been its home. Gone.
them