Deadgirl

In front of us, past the tiny skyline of broken automobiles, the street wound out into a grey suburban wasteland. The sound of the moaning faded as we left the ramp.

Small shops, tiny streets—detached single-family houses huddled together, their paint long since stripped by weather and rot. Grass, long dead, brown and grey. Minivans and SUVs pulled to the curb, caked in grey dust. We passed by what looked like a desiccated 7-Eleven, its huge yawning windows caked in inches of dirt. I half-expected crude signs carved in the dust—maybe “Jacki wuz here” or a startling, graphic depiction of genitals. But there was nothing—it was empty, like everything else. Devoid of life. It reminded me of Terminator or Resident Evil—a world post-apocalypse. That’s what this whole damn place reminded me of, come to think of it.

What had happened here? Had anything happened here? Was there even a here? I wanted to ask Puck, but I had an idea he didn’t have the answers either.

I couldn’t stop looking behind us as we walked—every time I turned my back to the distant moaning, I pictured that thing on the hill, crawling toward us. From there, my mind conjured a pack of them—wild, snarling, and hungry. With legs that worked and teeth that chewed hungrily, and eyes like bronze coins, shot through with patina-green veins. The fifth time I tried to look behind us, Zack grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around.

“I’m watching,” he whispered. “Don’t turn around again. It won’t make you feel safer, trust me.”

I didn’t look behind me anymore.

We passed through three more intersections. I didn’t recognize any of the street names.

We passed the remains of a Taco Bell on the corner of Raymond and Willard. Zack looked up at its faded plastic sign and made a noise. He leaned in and whispered in my ear. I laughed.

“What’d he say?” Morgan asked.

I smiled at her. “‘Run for the Border.’”

Morgan’s lip twisted, and she let out a little snort.

I wasn’t sure, but it looked like we were moving into a rougher part of town. Distinguishing upper class from lower class in a rotting corpse of a suburb wasn’t an exact science. But the large rotting houses were making way for small rotting houses. We passed a high school with twelve-foot chain-link fences circling it on all sides. It reminded me of my school, actually, but with a rougher edge. E.J. Beryl High—I’d never heard of it.

“What is all this?” Morgan asked, echoing my thoughts.

When Morgan answered her own question in Puck’s voice, I felt a shiver ripple down my back.

“It’s just a dream,” Morgan said. “But not by the living.”

I frowned, but Zack asked the question for me.

“What does that mean?”

Puck’s shoulders popped up in a shrug. I stared at the back of his head, as if to draw answers from the tangled shock of gray hair.

“The Grey is where the dead dream,” Morgan/Puck said. “Or more accurately, it is the bed from which the dead dream of life.”

“Wait,” I said, and jogged up to him. “This is a dream?”

I could see, as I passed him, that Puck’s face was drawn. His mouth sketched a line on his face, and his eyes were narrow. He looked at me with sympathetic eyes. Over his shoulder, Morgan spoke for him.

“‘No. And yes,” Morgan/Puck sighed. “It is a dream from which there is no waking. As real as life, as inescapable as death. It is the home we chose.”

I grabbed the front of Puck’s shirt, and he stopped walking.

“I didn’t choose anything,” I said.

Puck shook his head, his sympathetic eyes unchanging.

“We all choose, Lucy,” he said, with Morgan’s voice. “We choose to accept, we choose to deny, or we choose to overcome.”

“Death?” I half-laughed it out, incredulous.

Puck and Morgan nodded. “There is always a choice.”

“Stop talking in fucking riddles.”

Puck stepped back, and the glint in his eyes changed. He drew up his thin frame and raised his chin. His long slender fingers re-wrapped the blood-red scarf around his slender throat. After a long beat, he pointed forward, over my shoulder. I didn’t bother turning to look.

“The longer we chat,” Morgan/Puck said in that monotone voice. “The more time the broken souls have to sniff out your friends. They’ll flock to us, and then they’ll take their memories, their lives, and their souls. They’ll devour them, for all eternity. And then they’ll feed on us, you and I, for the stolen essence. Do you understand that? Do you understand that if we don’t get out soon, we die? Forever?”

I backed up, my hands clutched together. My mouth went dry.

“Come on,” Morgan/Puck said, and brushed past me. “The train station isn’t far.”

I listened to the scrape of his shoes on the sidewalk for a few long moments, looking into the distance. Zack and Morgan, standing together, in the middle of a broken grey street. The remains of a grey abandoned suburb spiraling out behind and around them, framing them as solitary motes of color. I could feel them, I realized, as I took in slow breaths. The heat baking off of them, and the smell. Just breathing, softly, trying to calm the fear and the rage and the despair, I could taste them.

Like a pungent but delectable spice. Something I didn’t have a name for.

Morgan crossed the gap and wrapped me in her arms. She pressed me against her, and I relented. My face against her shoulder, rogue strands of golden hair tickling my ear. Her neck, just underneath my nose. Her skin burned, and as I breathed deep, I felt the cold trickle in my body ripple, like someone tossing a stone into a still pond.

I tasted the image of two little girls hugging in a sandbox surrounded by blacktop, one of them, the dark- haired one, cradling her hand. A splinter the size of a crochet needle, at least to a five-year-old, stuck out of her thumb. A little path of bright red blood streaking down her wrist, living little rubies in the tiny sand dunes. The blonde little girl shushed her, cradling her sobbing form.

I opened my eyes. I wasn’t surprised to feel tears on my cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

I felt Morgan tighten her grip around my back.

“What for?”

“Nothing,” I said, knowing I’d accidentally stolen that memory from her. Maybe forever. “Everything.”

“Let’s go, Luce,” she said, her fingers tangling in my hair. “We’ll get out of here and we’ll figure this all out.”

I smiled and wiped the tears self-consciously from my face. Zack, God bless him, looked far too interested in the dilapidated high school beyond. He only turned back to face us when I cleared my throat.

“So,” Zack said, his hands in his pocket. “Are we uh, going?”

“Yeah,” I said, and smiled at Morgan.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Morgan said, and marched after Puck. She raised her voice. “And no more talking through me unless you ask, got it?”

Puck flicked a hand over his shoulder. The gesture equivalent of whatever, I imagined.

We found the train tracks before long. They snaked off in opposite directions, long grey parallel lines against the grey earth. Most of the wooden ties looked intact, but more than a few had been crushed, cracked, or simply rotted through. On our right, the tracks streaked off, maybe forever. They became a dot in the distance, indecipherable from the landscape.

On the left, the tracks went maybe another half-mile before ending in what had to be a train station. A large, domed structure, squatting over the tracks. It looked to be in better shape than its surroundings—I could make out a mural on one of the high walls facing us. The colors hadn’t faded very much, but from that far away, the shapes were indistinguishable.

“I guess that’s the station,” Zack said, echoing my thoughts. “I don’t have any cash on me.”

“I don’t think it’s really a train station,” I said. “Right?”

Puck nodded and began walking left, down the tracks.

“I don’t like metaphors,” Morgan said, suddenly, rubbing her hands together.