Free Grave by Joan Frances Turner Page A

stopped in his tracks and pointed a few feet in front of us, down in the dandelions.
    “Okay,” I said. “So what?”
    The bodies weren’t torn or bitten up like what Stephen and Amy’s mother had done, when they fought everybody off. These just lay there staring sightless at the sky, intact, dead. I squatted down to touch one and she was cold and stiff, clothes soaked through from the saturated grass and last night’s rain. “So what am I supposed to do with this?” I asked him, as he paced back and forth with fingers curled tight over his gun holster. “So you guys were stupid enough to get into another fight yesterday, before they left, you should’ve just let them go—”
    “This is nothing to do with those frea—with yesterday, okay, you get it? Do I have to spell it out?” He halted in his tracks and stood there big and bristling angry, but with hunched-up shoulders like he was cringing away from some invisible hand about to slap him sideways. “This just happened now. It just happened, what, half an hour ago. We were out here, talking shit over, and I turn around—I mean, literally, I turn around ‘cause I think I hear someone coming out the back—and when I turn my head again, boom. Gone.” He waved a hand at the bodies. “All dead. Right in front of me. Or, in back of me.”
    Why are the people who work for me so stupid? “They’re stiff,” I said. “Full-blown rigor, they’ve been dead for—”
    “I know they’re stiff. I know they’re cold. I know what it looks like—and whatever it looks like, it was just a half hour ago.”
    He was pacing around again, walking a perimeter of the bodies like a dog sniffing tracks, that filthy dog of Amy’s who hated me most of all. “You gotta do something,” he said. “You think you’re in charge of this shithole now, they’re supposed to have taught you all kinds of medical shit, you’ve gotta do something. You’ve gotta bring them back.”
    Like it was that easy, you just snap your fingers and whoever you decide to bring back—even under the very best conditions, the best test subjects, it didn’t work anything like that. Like I’d even waste my time bringing one of his stupid friends back, if it did. “I can’t do that,” I said. “How long did you work here, anyway? You know it’s not that simple, a lot of times you do everything right and dead people just stay—”
    “You have to do something!” He had my arms now, digging in the fingertips hard and abrading like how it’d felt when that drawer kept slamming, all inside my bones. “They were right here, we were all right there, then I turn my head and they all just fucking drop like something flipped a switch—you think you’re in charge around here, you gotta get your ass in there and figure out what happened, how to—”
    “Let go of me.”
    “This is just like before.” Still had his hands on me, the grinding pressure of his fingers boring straight through to my bones, stuck drawer slam-slam-slam. His eyes were big and luminous with panic. “Just like before, when everyone here started getting sick and then everyone else, everywhere. You fuckers went and did it again.”
    “You let go of me,” I said, quiet, calm as you please, “or I won’t ‘figure out’ a damn thing.”
    He let go. The hatred smoking and heating him up all inside like a brazier felt good to see—it didn’t bother me at all when weak little humans or plague-dogs hated me because they were so jealous. Because the world was mine now, not theirs—and not my man’s either, I didn’t care how much he tried to scare me. He was a liar. “I don’t have time for this,” I said, and turned right around to go back inside. “You bring them inside if you want, I can’t stop you, and I’ll look at them if I get a chance, but I’m not promising—”
    “Oh, shit.”
    His voice sounded torn in two, pain and shock and fear all twisted up and made into sound, and that’s what made me turn around