variations on Don’t Go Out There, You Idiots. Nothing stopping me now, of course, though no swimming unless I wanted to be reduced to a skeleton within minutes. Decaying flesh plus a steady water bath, it’s like parboiling.
There were rumors of government facilities out on the beaches, research labs, in the Prairie Beach part of Gary and Burns Harbor and the other lake coast towns. Some out in the prairie preserves too. Thanatology labs, studying us in the belly of the beast. I knew a girl whose dad supposedly was a guard out there, though you weren’t meant to know about it. Or that they were out there at all. He made way too much money, everyone said, for any ordinary security guard. There were rumors that my kind never killed the kids that disappeared, that they stumbled into a restricted lab area, got shot, left out for us or the birds and coyotes. Who knew. I’ve never heard much tell of it, but then it’s not like I go out looking.
“So why’d you ever leave?” I asked. “If it was all so great.”
Florian just shrugged. He reached into the little leather pouch he kept looped around his waist, as creased and worn down as Joe’s jacket, and shook out a couple of old stones: Lake Michigan beach stones, flat and smooth and soft greenish-gray, pale pearl. He had more of them he’d dragged with him everywhere he went, hidden somewhere in the woods. Another old person’s eccentricity.
“Can’t stay in any one place forever,” he said, running the bones that had once been fleshy fingers over the stones’ surfaces. “No matter how much you like it. Gotta keep moving. I been everywhere. Everywhere I could walk.” His fingers curled around the pearly gray stone. “And no matter where I been, no matter how bad things was there, if I had these with me I always felt like I was safe, that I’d come out of it alive and fighting. Even in Pittsburgh, back in the uprising. I got bit hard by a young feeder, I shoulda lost my arm. Didn’t. So much damn luck. And these, right here, they’re my lucky tokens. Ain’t never been without them.”
He put the stones back in their pouch with a happy little look in his eyes, like he’d just had a private conversation with them I didn’t know anything about. I guess when you’re verging on your three-hundredth birthday or so you’ve earned the right to be loopy. I nudged a clump of snowdrops with my foot, fresh salady green against twenty shades of dirty brown. The tree leaves were just coming in, lighter greens tinged with yellow.
“This is pretty beautiful too,” I said. “Just like your beach.”
No answer. I poked around an old duck’s nest, found nothing and was set to head another mile down the river when the smell hit me. Florian caught it too, raising a hand for silence though there was no sound but birdsong. Human flesh, definitely, but also a note of something chemical that I couldn’t place: like deodorant gone stale, cheap lotion turned metallic with sweat, but stronger and stranger than that. We kept staring and sniffing and finally saw a shadow zigzagging through the spindly trees, too fleet-footed to be an undead. Every now and then you see a few vagrant guys out on the forest edge, though if Ben or Billy or Joe’s feeling hungry you never see them for very long. This one, though, was female, lolloping fast toward us, all hunched-over nervous speed like a little ape; she paused, raising her blond head to sniff, came stumbling barefoot along the riverbank and, just yards away from us, smacked straight into a linden tree and clung to it stunned. Her breath rattled, lungs fighting each other for the last gulp of air, and drool snaked from her open mouth.
It was the hoocow from last night, the one who’d come on a drunken tear through the parking lot. Her skin had gone from blue-tinged to outright blue, one huge fast-spreading bruise: Cyanotic, I thought, a word I remembered from health classes. There was a weird sheen on it too, like sweat if
There were rumors of government facilities out on the beaches, research labs, in the Prairie Beach part of Gary and Burns Harbor and the other lake coast towns. Some out in the prairie preserves too. Thanatology labs, studying us in the belly of the beast. I knew a girl whose dad supposedly was a guard out there, though you weren’t meant to know about it. Or that they were out there at all. He made way too much money, everyone said, for any ordinary security guard. There were rumors that my kind never killed the kids that disappeared, that they stumbled into a restricted lab area, got shot, left out for us or the birds and coyotes. Who knew. I’ve never heard much tell of it, but then it’s not like I go out looking.
“So why’d you ever leave?” I asked. “If it was all so great.”
Florian just shrugged. He reached into the little leather pouch he kept looped around his waist, as creased and worn down as Joe’s jacket, and shook out a couple of old stones: Lake Michigan beach stones, flat and smooth and soft greenish-gray, pale pearl. He had more of them he’d dragged with him everywhere he went, hidden somewhere in the woods. Another old person’s eccentricity.
“Can’t stay in any one place forever,” he said, running the bones that had once been fleshy fingers over the stones’ surfaces. “No matter how much you like it. Gotta keep moving. I been everywhere. Everywhere I could walk.” His fingers curled around the pearly gray stone. “And no matter where I been, no matter how bad things was there, if I had these with me I always felt like I was safe, that I’d come out of it alive and fighting. Even in Pittsburgh, back in the uprising. I got bit hard by a young feeder, I shoulda lost my arm. Didn’t. So much damn luck. And these, right here, they’re my lucky tokens. Ain’t never been without them.”
He put the stones back in their pouch with a happy little look in his eyes, like he’d just had a private conversation with them I didn’t know anything about. I guess when you’re verging on your three-hundredth birthday or so you’ve earned the right to be loopy. I nudged a clump of snowdrops with my foot, fresh salady green against twenty shades of dirty brown. The tree leaves were just coming in, lighter greens tinged with yellow.
“This is pretty beautiful too,” I said. “Just like your beach.”
No answer. I poked around an old duck’s nest, found nothing and was set to head another mile down the river when the smell hit me. Florian caught it too, raising a hand for silence though there was no sound but birdsong. Human flesh, definitely, but also a note of something chemical that I couldn’t place: like deodorant gone stale, cheap lotion turned metallic with sweat, but stronger and stranger than that. We kept staring and sniffing and finally saw a shadow zigzagging through the spindly trees, too fleet-footed to be an undead. Every now and then you see a few vagrant guys out on the forest edge, though if Ben or Billy or Joe’s feeling hungry you never see them for very long. This one, though, was female, lolloping fast toward us, all hunched-over nervous speed like a little ape; she paused, raising her blond head to sniff, came stumbling barefoot along the riverbank and, just yards away from us, smacked straight into a linden tree and clung to it stunned. Her breath rattled, lungs fighting each other for the last gulp of air, and drool snaked from her open mouth.
It was the hoocow from last night, the one who’d come on a drunken tear through the parking lot. Her skin had gone from blue-tinged to outright blue, one huge fast-spreading bruise: Cyanotic, I thought, a word I remembered from health classes. There was a weird sheen on it too, like sweat if
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