Grave by Joan Frances Turner Page B

didn’t smile back.
    “Long time,” she said, calm and measured, like all the others weren’t even there. “Good to see you again, Jessie.”
    “Is it?” I asked. Linc and Renee, the hoo strangers, they didn’t say anything. They just watched.
    “Yes,” she said quietly. Blinking hard, all of a sudden, a convulsive little muscle-twitch subsiding soon as it arrived. “It is.”
    I thought that one over. Long enough for the mother-red to start looking truly nervous, the kiddie to frown and give an anxious, instinctive tug on Lisa’s sleeve.
    “So put your goddamned luggage down, already,” I replied. “How the hell many miles did you walk around like that, anyway? You look like the hunchback of Notre Dame’s daughter.”
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    SIX
    NATALIE
     
     
     
    A ll my drawings. My desk with the special locked drawer, broken now, that Amy couldn’t open. My filing cabinet. My doll. I huddled in the far corner of my room, holding Sukie my doll I named after my favorite of the old lab staff clutched close to my chest, waiting. The residential doors only lock from the outside and the desk was too heavy for me to move by myself, nobody left to help me block the door, when he came to kill me that wouldn’t stop him anyway. When my man returned to kill me, like he was destroying everything else that was mine: the oak trees, the lilacs, the deer, anyone who could help me out. Before he comes back for me.
    Unless he was going to kill everything else and leave me here, all by myself, the only thing still alive. Temporarily.
    The windows here were too far up to look or climb through, so I didn’t have to see what was happening outside. Was it every-where now, all the dying, all the—I couldn’t be this afraid, it was ridiculous to be afraid when I had his secret . I knew exactly what brought dead things back to life, I’d brought them back, if I could do it with people there was no way I couldn’t figure out how with cottonwoods and anthills and rabbits. I had his secret right here, where nobody would think to look for it and even if they did, they couldn’t use it like I could. That’s why I was so important to Grandma, when she ran this whole lab; even among all the Homo novus , us new people their experiments created, I was special. He couldn’t do a thing to me. He had to know he couldn’t—
    There was a sound, beyond my closed door, faint but unmistakable, close down the hallway. A sort of moaning sound, laughing and moaning all at once.
    I missed Grandma. People laughed at me here, when I called her that, but she never did. She had this way of looking at someone, all level and unyielding just the same way she always carried her back, her long swoop of a neck perfectly straight and dignified, and when she gave them that stare—bright blue eyes that sparked and smoldered, when she was angry, like coals feeding a peculiar flame—people shut their mouths quick and scuttled to do what she’d told them. And she was always right, what she told them, if she hadn’t gotten sick and then vanished during those horrible few first weeks of the plague things around here would’ve been different, I wouldn’t have had to rebuild everything myself from the ground up. If she were here, right now, she’d stare Death himself straight in the face, just like she’d been doing through the experiments all along. She’d spark right back at him not the least afraid and he’d snivel and cringe for favor, oh did you think I wasn’t a Friendly Man anymore, how could you think that of me, or even better he’d just turn tail and run away—
    That sound was growing louder. Like a man singing, horrible slurred off-key singing like someone drunk, except without a single recognizable word. It was words to whoever was singing, though, it was words to him in some secret language or other long since dead. Somehow I knew that. Somehow I knew that without ever having seen him.
    If it were Death coming for me he’d