Generation Dead: Stitches

  “Nice day for a walk,” Karen said. Mal didn’t even turn.

  “It sure is!” Margi called. And then, for Colette’s ears only, “Doesn’t she know you can totally see her bra through her shirt in this light?”

  “I think…she knows,” Colette said.

  On cue, Karen lifted her hands to her temples and waggled her fingers at them, sticking her tongue out and crossing her diamond eyes.

  Margi was shocked. “You don’t think she… ?”

  “Best not…to think…about it.”

  They walked up a little hill, leaving Karen and Mal behind, and at its crest the Oxoboxo was visible through a thick copse of trees about fifty yards downhill. The surface of the lake was covered with snow broken up by patches of dark ice like freckles on an immense oval face.

  Margi decided she was going to try not to be frightened. She tried to skid down the hill on the heels of her boots, pulling Colette along with her. They didn’t get very far before Colette tripped over a root and dragged Margi tumbling down with her for the next ten or twelve feet.

  Margi got a face full of snow, but was laughing as she came up for air. She rolled onto her back for a moment, breathless and giggling, her head pointed at the bottom of the hill.

  Colette was leaning against a tree, watching her. “What were you…trying…to say…to me? Before, I…mean?”

  “Huh?”

  “You were telling…me…what…you were doing…that day.”

  “Peeing,” Margi said. “I was peeing.”

  She laughed until tears came to her eyes, and then it wasn’t really laughter anymore.

  “Peeing,” Colette said. “Omz, what is…with you…and your…bodily…functions, anyway?”

  “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” Margi said, taking off her mittens so she wouldn’t rub snow in her eyes. Realizing the multiple meanings of what she’d just said, she sat up and looked at her friend. “Oh, Colette, I’m so sorry.”

  Colette waved her apology away. “Tell me. Tell me…what happened.”

  “Do you remember? You were already splashing around like a porpoise, and then I walked in up to my knees. The water was a little cool. Cold, actually.”

  “So that’s what…triggered…the pee…reflex.”

  “Or as I call it, the peeflex. Yes. It was the really chilly water that you were splashing all around in, and I said I gotta go.”

  “I guess…I remember…that,” Colette said, standing up.

  “I went out, and it took me like forever to find a spot where I could go. This one had poison ivy, that one had too many pricker bushes, this one was exposed to the free world, that one was all mushroomy.”

  “Mush…roomy?” Colette stood still as Margi brushed all the snow off her butt and back.

  They resumed walking toward the lake. “You get the idea. So then when I finally found a spot where I could go, it took forever and a day to actually go.”

  “The peeflex…had deserted you.”

  “Totally. But finally, finally my business was done, and then I realized that when I’d gone into the water before I still had all my bracelets on.”

  “Your…metal…bracelets.”

  “Exactly. I didn’t want them to rust, so I had to take them all off .”

  “And that took…twenty…minutes.”

  “Har har. But it did take a while. I do have a lot of them.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  They reached the shore of the lake. Margi placed an exploratory boot toe onto the ice and pressed down.

  “When I finally came back, you were gone.”

  She put her boot down flat on the ice and then tested her weight on it by bouncing up and down. Satisfied that it would hold her weight, she moved a few steps out onto the ice.

  “You think this will hold me?” she said. “Th is will hold me, right?”

  Colette shrugged. Margi stomped as hard as she could with her heel, twice. The dark ice barely looked dented. Stepping gingerly, she walked out a few more feet, imagining herself light as a feather. She felt good to be out on the ice, crazy good, like she knew that she was taking a risk but that it was a risk worth taking. Wet feet wouldn’t kill her, anyway.

  “Maybe…you shouldn’t,” Colette said. She was still standing on the shore.

  “It’s okay. The ice is pretty thick. Want to join me?”

  Colette shook her head, holding her left elbow to her body with her cupped right hand. Margi realized that her friend might be as scared as she was.

  “Okay. So I was looking for you, and I was starting to get frightened. But not frightened for you! Oh no! It was Pinky McKnockers I was scared for,” she said. “I was afraid that you used my bathroom break to find a good hiding place to jump out and scare me and give me heart failure. That’s what I was worried about.”

  Colette stepped out onto the ice. Her expression was completely unreadable, even to Margi, who considered herself to be Colette’s best friend on earth, and if anyone should be able to read Colette’s expression, it was Margi. But she couldn’t, and that made her a little nervous.

  When Margi was nervous, she talked. She talked at an increasingly rapid pace.

  “Then I saw something,” she said, walking ahead another three steps, forcing her movements to seem casual and nonchalant. What was she going to do, run across the lake, away from her friend?

  “Right about here,” she said, pointing down. “A wide web of floating black hair, like in all of those J-horror movies we used to watch all the time. The Grudges and the Ringus and all of those. I started moving into the water then because I knew. I knew immediately what it was that I was seeing, and I knew that you weren’t going to come leaping out of a bush at me. I got in up to my knees, no farther than I had before, and then I got scared and went back out. I was too scared, Colette. I was too scared to even check if you were still alive.”

  The last part of what she said came out of her mouth no more than a soft whisper.

  Colette was half the distance from the shore to her, her thin T-shirt flapping in the chill wind that was kicking up. Her arms were at her sides, and Margi could feel the fear welling up within her again. She took a couple of steps backward, not even aware that she was doing so.

  “I understand,” Colette said, moving toward her. “There was…nothing…you could…have done.”

  “I let you die,” Margi said, whispering, but her whispers seemed to echo and amplify across the lake. “You must hate me.”

  Colette turned her head from side to side, her movements looking to Margi even slower than they were before.

  “There was…nothing…you…could have…done, Margi. It wasn’t…your…fault.”

  “I might as well have killed you. And then…and then when your parents rejected you, I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything at all.”

  “Margi…”

  “I could have done…done…something! I let you die, and then I left you alone, and then…”

  “Margi,” Colette said, lifting her arms. “Listen…to me. I had…a weak…heart. When I was…in the…water…something…brushed…against my leg. A turtle or…a snake. Something…big.”

  Margi took another step backward. Colette’s tone was meant to be reassuring, but her expression was still blank.

  “I thought it was…a crocodile…or something. Margi, please…don’t go out…any farther. Please. Come…here.”

  Margi shook her head with the same slow movement that her dead friend had made a moment before, not even knowing if the gesture was meant to convey agreement or denial.

  Colette held out her hand. She was still ten feet away.

  “I…panicked. I got caught…on the branches…of that tree limb and I…thought…it was some…creature…dragging me…down. I think I had…a heart attack.”

  She took another step, and then they heard the sickening sound of cracking ice.

  “Margi,” Colette said, almost sounding panicked. “Please. Come here. Get off…the ice.”

 
Margi looked at her friend, her friend that she had let die. How Colette must hate her. She was vaguely aware that she was still moving her head back and forth like a child lost in darkness, wishing the monsters away.

  There was another sound like the cracking of wet bones. Margi couldn’t see them beneath the covering of snow, but she imagined an elaborate webbing of white cracks spreading out across the black ice beneath her feet.

  “Margi, please!”

  Margi looked at the hand her dead friend was offering her. She hadn’t been there to take it on the day Colette died. Fear had kept her away.

  There were more cracking sounds, and this time Margi could see a thick white crack appear in a patch of ice a few feet away. She felt too frightened to move. She held out her hand, but the distance between them was too great.

  Colette smiled with the half of her face that worked.

  Then there was a loud roar, a bellow, and then something—somethings—burst from behind the trees and brush near the shoreline, moving toward them. Margi, catching sight of stiff limbs and jerky movements, was startled. She moved too quickly, and both boots slid from under her. She landed hard on her backside, and the force of the impact drove all the air from her lungs, which was not a good thing at all because when she landed she didn’t just crack the ice, she shattered it, plunging through to the water below. She heard Colette shriek her name.

  Cold enclosed her like a fist. Dimly, she felt her body rising corklike toward the surface, but then her progress was halted by the ice shelf—somehow she’d drifted beyond the hole that her body had made, slipping under the hardened ceiling of the lake. She pressed her palms flat against the shelf, but the solid ice ceiling did not budge. She looked up, the freezing water stinging her eyes. She saw a blurry dark image directly above her and realized that it was Colette peering down. Their faces were less than a foot apart, but separated by the thickness of the ice. Colette’s mouth was opening and closing, but the ice filtered out the words’ meaning. She may have been screaming or she may have been laughing, Margi couldn’t tell.

  Margi felt like her heart was seizing up in her chest, and she wondered if that was what it had been like for Colette. She had no breath left in her body; her nice puffy jacket was waterlogged and like a suit of armor, pulling her down. The freezing water had most likely put her into shock.

  If you can’t beat them, join them, she thought. She’d considered her own mortality many times since Colette had drowned. She wasn’t nearly as frightened as she should have been.

  Except…there was no guarantee that she would join them, was there? Not every teen who died came back. What if she ended up truly dead instead of newly dead?

  She had the sensation of drifting down, down, sinking into a cold dark sea. She was peripherally aware of being pulled, and whatever was doing the pulling seemed to be below her, deeper in the water. She opened her eyes and saw that she was being tugged toward a light; she wasn’t sure if the sensation was one felt by her body or by her consciousness. She wasn’t certain if the light she saw represented the gap in the ice or something else entirely.

  Don’t go into the light, she thought, but the tugging, though gentle, was insistent, and then she was in the light, and where there was light, there was air. Her mouth yawned open as she broke through the surface, and she took a gasping breath. The hands were trying to push her out onto the ice, but the weight of her body cracked through, and then she was submerged in the water again.

  I’m like one of those beached whales people try pushing out to sea, she thought. But like in reverse. She was aware that there were more bodies in the water beside hers and Colette’s. The cold had drained her of energy and her blood; she couldn’t seem to move any of her extremities and so wasn’t able to help when the hands took her again and lifted her above the water.

  Something was smashing at the ice with heavy blows. Margi opened her eyes—her lids crackled like cellophane wrapping as they parted—and she saw Mal and the zomboid zombie she’d seen leaving the bathroom, George, whacking away at the ice with their fists and a tree limb, hacking out a path to shore for whoever was holding her up out of the water. She could feel hands at her back and others on the seat of her jeans.

  “You are such…an ass…Popeye!” she heard Colette say from right beneath her.

  “We just…wanted…to scare…you!” he replied.

  Margi, still not certain if she was in shock, smiled despite the dull ache she felt throughout her body. Popeye’s hand was pressing right on her tailbone where it had made abrupt contact with the ice, but the pain seemed to help clarify her thoughts, cutting through the numbness the way the zombies were cutting through the ice. She hoped that the name she’d christened him with, and that Colette had just invoked, stuck—although the jerk probably would think the name was cool.

  “You could…have…killed her,” Colette said. She had Margi under the arms now, and Popeye her legs. A moment later strong arms—Mal’s, no doubt—took her from both of them.

  “She might…still die,” another voice said over Popeye’s apologies and excuse-making. Tak’s, Margi thought. At some point on her trip back to shore her eyes had closed again, and she lacked the effort and the will to force them back open. He’d made the observation with no emotion whatsoever, like he was telling them that the pizza was burned.

  “You too, Tak?” Colette said, her words coming out at a rapid clip. “Don’t you…know better…than these idiots?”

  Popeye was saying that Tak had nothing to do with their prank, and that George had only come along because Popeye had told him to, running his mouth very similarly to the way Margi ran her own mouth when she was nervous. As Mal laid her down on the snowy shore, Margi thought she heard Colette slapping Popeye, but then she could hear her friend’s voice at her ear.

  “Omz, her lips…are blue.”

  “Hypothermia,” Tak said. “Does anyone…know…CPR?”

  Margi was a million miles away. Or a few feet away; she had the very odd sensation of standing outside her own body, looking down at herself, the center of a ring of dead kids. She hoped that Tak wouldn’t be the one to try, but then realized that he probably couldn’t, not with half his left cheek missing. His were about the last set of lips she wanted on hers.

  How could any of them give her mouth-to-mouth anyway, when they didn’t even breathe?

  “I’ll…try,” Colette said, and before Margi could summon the energy to protest, she felt cold lips—cold, but still warmer than her own—pressing down on her mouth. She was back inside her own body the moment their lips touched, but Margi wasn’t sure if her return was a causal effect of the touch of Colette’s lips or of the rather painful way Colette was pinching her nose closed. Margi felt Colette force three exhalations into her body. When she pulled up and began counting, Margi shoved her as hard as she could. Colette barely even moved.

  “What are you…trying…to do?” Margi said. “Finish…the job?”

  “Margi!” Colette said, grabbing her by her shoulders, causing her jacket to shed water like a squeezed sponge. “You’re…alive!” Then, “You are…alive…aren’t you?”

  “No thanks…to you,” Margi said. She hadn’t been certain at first, but then a moment later she could feel her pulse throbbing through her body like a raging river. The pauses in her speech were a result of her extreme cold, not undeath.

  She tried to smile, hoping to reassure Colette, who looked stricken, but her face was numb.

  “She needs…to get warm,” Tak said. “And out of…her wet…clothing.”

  Margi looked up at them then. The wind was whipping Tak’s long hair over his shoulder, and despite his words she could see no sympathy in his eyes. The bare skin on Popeye’s chest looked like it was coated with a thin sheet of ice, and frost had gathered in the places where he’d removed his skin. Mal and George seemed rooted to the earth, like statues. There were icicles threaded in Colette’s hair.

  The many faces of death, Margi thought. She realized that sh
e wasn’t afraid anymore.

  As though summoned by her thoughts, Karen arrived, looking as beautiful—more beautiful—than ever.

  “I went and got the blankets,” she said, holding the large stack of them in her outstretched arms.

  * * *

  Colette and Karen helped her get out of her wet things, while Tak, the only other zombie besides Karen who hadn’t gone into the water, stood at a respectful distance holding the blankets. Mal waited with him, while Popeye and George shuffled away into the woods.

  “Tak wants you to wear his coat,” Karen said once Margi was free from her soaked clothing. “It’s leather; it will help keep the heat in.”

  “I didn’t…know he…cared,” Margi said, her teeth chattering.

  “He feels responsible,” Karen explained. “Some of the newer zombies look up to him, some to Tommy. Chad and George are more…like Tak.”

  Margi pulled the jacket on, expecting it to smell like rot and grave dirt, but instead it smelled like leather with a hint of motor oil.

  Karen and Colette wrapped her up like a mummy from head to ankle, and when she was all cocooned, Mal came and hefted her up in his arms, and then they wrapped up her feet as well.

  “I’ll go…ahead…and build…a fire,” Tak said. Before moving, though, he took a look back at the Oxoboxo, as though it held new secrets and possibilities for him.

  “I’ll help you,” Karen said. She placed her hand, a decidedly warm hand, on Margi’s cheek before skipping ahead to join her coatless friend.

  “I feel like…an idiot,” Margi said. Colette had used one of the blankets to towel her off, and the friction seemed to have restored some life and feeling, but she was still shivering.

  “Don’t,” Colette told her. “We all…make…mistakes.”

  “Mal sure…is strong, isn’t he? Hey…Mal. Who would win…in a fight? You or…Adam?”

  Colette laughed. “Mal’s…pretty strong. Are you…warm enough?”