Read Online Dust by Joan Frances Turner - Free Book Online Page B

herself as her breath softened, slowed and stopped. There was a shudder that seemed to come from somewhere else, an invisible boot kicking her in the chest, and she lay still.
    I touched her skin. It was sap-sticky, covered in congealed ooze, and cold.
    Florian bared his teeth, snapping them shut on invisible flesh. “Blessed hell,” he muttered, and turned her over and shook her and shouted at her trying to figure out if she were alive, dead, unconscious, what the hell had happened. I rubbed my fingers against the linden bark, scrubbing away that awful sweat; I didn’t want her stench on me. She didn’t move.
    “No heartbeat,” Florian said, pulling himself upright. “But she was trying to take in air. You think she’s one of us? You think there’s some . . . sickness out there, and she got it? That smell.”
    There isn’t a disease that gets us other than rot, even with those hoo-scientists out on the beach, supposedly, trying their best, allegedly, to create one. “One of us? She was trying to breathe, you just said so. And you saw her yesterday, nobody dies, wakes up and goes under again in less than a day—”
    “No hoo’s out eating squirrels with their bare hands and teeth. This isn’t nothing human.”
    “It’s nothing us either!”
    Florian stared down at her, confusion turning to anger, and let off a muttered epithet of good riddance as he kicked her. I held back. Whatever she was, whatever had killed her I didn’t want to touch her or know her, I just wanted her gone.
    The way she looked at me, just for that split second, staring like she knew me. Like I should know her. Nobody and nothing. That’s all hoos are to me. Not even meat.
    “So are we tellin’ Teresa?” Florian asked.
    For an answer I reached down and hoisted up the body, an awkward job working one-handed. Florian helped me get her slung over my shoulder, and we walked until the woods got thick and the ground hilly and we’d reached the concrete tunnel beneath the old highway underpass; we left her there, skull intact, a good warning for any of those old bums sheltering from rain. If Billy or Ben or whoever came this way, let them figure it out.
    By the time we retraced our steps Florian was pinched with exhaustion; he curled up and dozed all day in the grass while I hunted. I still wasn’t feeling so great either, hot and all tired, but I needed a good meal to distract myself from the nastiness I’d just seen and smelled. I didn’t spot any rabbits but I surprised some raccoons, a badger, a couple of ducks, there were still leavings fresh to eat when we got back, and Renee wept so much when I gave her some it was disgusting, she cried and ate and ate and cried and moaned about how wonderful I was, I was her best friend now, and when I punched her she still followed me around, mooning, like a groupie at a hotel room door. Joe couldn’t stop laughing. Neither could Teresa, who accepted the rest of the meat with the graciousness of a tsarina who’d finally got her serfs back in line. Florian, like he’d been doing so much lately, turned away and slept some more without offering a word.
    No, we weren’t telling Teresa. Because she had that same smell on her skin too, that dead hoocow’s awful sterile rot, and until I had some answers to throw in her face I was pretending everything was fine.

5
    Renee’s grave was already pristine, the birthing hole filled in and covered with grass too even and green to be real. There’s no gate guards, the alarm systems are defunct, the barbed wire’s busted full of holes, weeds everywhere, but by God they still get those gravesites looking swank and undisturbed as soon as they humanly can. Maybe it’s all people really care about, the handful that still come to visit. I hope the pay’s good, if you’ve got that job. I bet it is. Nearly as good as a thano lab guard’s. We crouched in a patch of woods above Calumet Memorial, waiting.
    I gave Renee a shove. “Why are you so sure