DALE BAILEY

THE ANENCEPHALIC FIELDS

The prolific Mr. Bailey continues to send us stories from his Tennessee home at a good clip. This latest one (his fifteenth story for us in seven years) is a dark, lush tale that turns Kentucky into something creepy, fabulous, and new.

Enjoy.

DADDY LEFT WITH A BIG-CITY dollymop when I wasn’t but six years old, and Mama got a job tending the corpse gardens outside of Scary, Kentucky. By the time I was twelve, a tow-headed not-quite boy in his daddy’s hand-me-down jeans, I remembered the dollymop better than I did the man himself. She was a loud, brash redhead with tits like jugs and a mouth like a wound, but Daddy had faded to a dull blur of memory. I couldn’t for the life of me remember how he looked and Mama said the resemblance was minimal; but I could remember how it felt when he touched me, and if I tried I could still smell his jackleg whiskey and the blackmarket smoke that always hung about him. Mostly, though, I could recollect his hands. I used to lie awake nights, fingering over that memory in my mind, like a miser with a bag full of gold—the memory of those big, callused hands against my face and the sound of his voice when he said, “You’re the man of the house now, Kemp. You’ve got to take care of your mama.” That was just before he left—I remember the dollymop waiting in her car, while Mama cussed them both in the background—and I hadn’t seen either one of them since.

Mama claimed this particular memory was a lie, but when it came to Daddy, Mama had her own issues, and I’d learned not to press her on them. I took what I had—the dollymop and her tits, Daddy and his hands—and let Mama do her own grieving.

Meanwhile we moved to Scary, Kentucky.

The good folks of Scary didn’t cotton to outsiders, so Mama and I were pretty much alone out there with six acres of the not-quite dead. Rust-dimpled No TRESPASSING signs hung on the razor-wire fence surrounding the compound.

DANGER!

BIOGENE RESEARCH FACILITY

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

BEWARE ATTACK DOCS

they read, but I never knew of any dogs. Not that it much mattered. Mostly this all happened during the crash and people had more important things on their minds, like food. Our land was too hardscrabble to make it worth stealing, and nobody wanted to eat what we were raising anyway. The rumors were enough to keep anyone else away. When I was little, I always expected to look out the front windows one night and see a line of torches winding out of the surrounding hills, like the villagers in a flat-screen Frankenstein, but the worst trouble we ever had was townies throwing rocks at the signs on Halloween—and even that came to an end when Mama accidentally left a gate open and a couple of the kids got a glimpse into one of the growing sheds.

Me, I’ve never been superstitious, so the meat didn’t bother me one way or the other. That was the word I used around the house, meat, mainly to bug Mama, who mostly used another term. I used to see it in the reports she sent to BioGene every month or two: anencephalic. Mama had an education—a lot of education—and I suppose that was one of the things I held against her. Mama never let me join up at the school in Scary; she said she wasn’t paying her hard-earned dollar to see some second-rate hillbilly corrupt her son with nonsense. I didn’t see how she reckoned her dollar hard-earned; she never did anything but tend the meat and zombie down the cyber-highways as far as I could see. But the long and short of it was that I was pretty much stuck out there in the corpse gardens with six acres of meat and one ball-busting bitch who didn’t have a use for any man, much less one that sprang from the loins of her dear departed.

The way I figured it, Daddy had a lot to answer for.

THE MAN NAMED SMEE came to our little corner of paradise in my twelfth summer. I watched the dust trail draw near from a ridge not far outside the fence-line.

Most of the vehicles that came that way—and there weren’t many in those days—took the branch that leads by an old logging road south to Beauty. But this one came straight on, and by the time I glimpsed the humvee itself, a dull metal flash motoring along through the trees below, I had worked out exactly what that meant.

Once upon a time Mama and I had entertained our fair share of visitors. There had been her friends from the college where she used to teach for one, and a worse bunch of cackling hens I never hope to see, but that pretty much came to an end during the crash, when it wasn’t a good idea for a woman to travel alone.

BioGene reps had stopped in three or four times a year as well, high profile corporate drones most of them, with faces impervious as glass and their big-city dollymops along for a squeeze. But that petered out during the crash, too. Mama said that BioGene had shifted into bio-warfare research big time by then, and we figured they’d forgotten all about their little experiment—though I suppose someone must have remembered because corporate continued to download Mama’s check regular as clockwork.

Mama thought we were safer in Scary than we might be in lots of other places, so we stayed put and tended the meat because that’s what we’d always done—or at least since Daddy had left, which was as close to always as I could figure when I was twelve years old. But BioGene hadn’t sent one of their drones around for over four years at this point, so when I saw the humvee rumbling through the trees below I figured the stranger to be a bandit, and I lit out for home.

Mama was a bitch all right, but I’d long since decided that if anyone was going to kill her, it was going to be me.

I nearly got myself killed instead. Mama stood on the front porch with Daddy’s old Mossberg in her arms and as I cornered the last of the growing sheds, she spun like a high-strung cat and leveled the shotgun right at me. Maybe I didn’t really sense her finger tightening about the trigger, but I sure thought I did, and for a single frozen heartbeat I couldn’t see a thing but the enormous barrel of that shotgun, hateful and deadly as a borehole to hell.

Then she kind of nodded. “Kemp,” she said, and all the air went out of me in a woosh.

“What’s going on?” I said. “Who’s—”

Already she’d swung the shotgun away from me. “Shut up, Kemp,” she said, and someone else added, conversationally,

“Yes, lad, do shut the hell up, would you?”

I glanced into the yard and that’s when I got my first look at Shamus Smee. He looked like nothing more than a drowned sewer rat, thin faced and delicate boned, with a three-day beard running to gray, and furtive eyes the color of lead. He wore combat boots and a sweat-stained camo jumper, and his corded hands hung at his thighs, flexing with nervous tension. He projected a sense of contained energy, like a coiled steel spring, and when he spoke again, his clipped northern accent sounded wheedling and hostile:

“Now then, you were saying—”

“I was explaining to you and your slut how you had taken a wrong turn in Scary,”

Mama said. “Less you have i.d.”

Said slut—a waif-like twenty-something with a close-cropped head of dirty blonde and a torso-hugging mood shirt—gasped. “Shamus—” she began, the T-shirt flaring an angry red, but Smee interrupted.

“Shut up, Lush. True is true. Back to the car with you.”

“Shamus—”

“Back to the car with you, I said!” He turned on her and something electric passed between them. I could feel it, sizzling in the August heat.

The blonde edged toward the humvee, parked carelessly fifteen meters from the house. Its doors stood open, internal alarms bleating like a sickly cow. Smee stood his ground.

“As I was telling you,” Smee said, “BioGene has—”

“Nobody informed me that you were coming.”

“I have come to relieve you. And frankly, I couldn’t give two shits whether you were informed.”

Mama didn’t answer. She just set her mouth in a grim line and started clown the steps, gesturing with the shotgun. Smee backed away, lifting his hands, palms outspread before him.

Then all hell broke loose. The blonde darted toward the humvee, her shirt flickering with anxiety, and Mama swung the Mossberg around. The shotgun jerked, spitting fire, and thunder smashed the air into millions of glittering shards.

Shot kicked up dust at the blonde’s heels as Smee surged toward Mama, his corded hands outstretched. Mama stepped up to meet him, reversing the shotgun like a club. And even as I realized that they’d forgotten all about me—all of them, Mama, Smee, even Smee’s slinky blonde dollymop—I was moving. Not toward Smee, but toward the blonde and the humvee and whatever it was that she might have hidden inside it.

She had the head start, I had speed. I got there maybe a split second behind her, but even as she lifted the pistol from between the seats, I hurled myself through the driver’s side door and grabbed for the barrel. In the enclosed space, the detonation was deafening. The barrel bulged and heat passed through my clenched fist. The bullet banged off the armored ceiling, ricocheting through the interior of the humveee like a speed-crazed bee. For a single instant, the blonde and I stared dumbfounded at one another, the pistol caught between us.

Everything seemed grotesquely heightened, super real. I could feel sweat tickling between my shoulder blades, I could see the wild pulse at her temple.

Mostly though, I could smell her perfume, so sweet it made my mouth water, like nothing in my life up to then.

Yanking the gun away from her, I jammed the barrel into her face and backed her out of the humvee, scrambling across the seats to follow her through the passenger-side door. My heart was racing, my breath ragged. I could hardly keep the gun steady on her.

“Don’t,” she whispered, and her shirt went gray with fear. She caught her lower lip beneath her teeth and her eyes widened in their orbits, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. I backed away a step, angling my body so that I could see the entire yard. Smee was climbing to his feet before Mama, cradling his jaw in one hand. Mama pumped a fresh shell into the empty chamber and leveled the shotgun at Shamus Smee with a pleasant smile. “Now, then,” she said, “I think you were fixing to show me some i.d.”

AT NIGHT I walked the rows.

During the day, the corpse gardens had nothing to offer me, just endless aisles of pale emerald bodies erupting from soil-sunk pods, slick and stinking with insecticides from the overhead sprinklers. The growing sheds themselves were long narrow buildings like covered bridges, banged together from corrugated tin with Plexiglas skylights open to the Kentucky sun. Within, the bodies grew in rows, the soft inhaling, exhaling, farting, moist life of them obscured by the clatter of machinery—air conditioners and wheezers, pumps and fans. But in the night…in the night, you could hear them—the not-quite-dead, anencephalic, brain-deprived vegetable (Oh, how rich a term!) corpse meat to which my mother had devoted her life—

You could hear them breathing.

Maybe that’s how it started—just a small boy, nine, ten years old, fleeing the Kentucky farmhouse where his father did not live and where his mother bent her every waking hour to the six acres of meat beyond the peeling clapboard walls. I used to move through the moon-splashed rows, gazing down at them, their breasts heaving with the half-lives Mama had thrust upon them. Just listening, comforted somehow by the steady sigh of respiration, the slow reflexive shiftings of their mindless slumber.

Transplants.

That had been Mama’s original plan, all those years ago when she had gotten the first BioGene grant—before the corpse gardens themselves took root, before the disorders and the crash that followed. Before Daddy abandoned her to feast on the juicy sweetmeats of his downtown whore. But no one had ever come to harvest the organs, and now, with the world winding down around us—Mama’s metaphor, not mine—maybe no one ever would.

In the meantime, I found another use for them.

And so we come to a part of my tale I don’t much like to think on. But I was twelve years old—think of it, twelve!—and my dreams burned like fever with half-imagined images of Daddy’s dollymop, and the pleasures such a woman might confer upon me. Oh yes, I took solace among the dead.

I found her in the spring of that year, in the strange half-light of a cloud-gauzed moon that hid the color of her flesh. I must have walked past her a thousand times without paying her any attention, but that night the play of light and shadow across her body drew me to her. I stood there looking down at her, heavy breasted with dark-rouged nipples, and farther below, beyond a sweet smooth curve of belly where no umbilical knot winked its solitary eye, the honey patch that hid her sex. Like Daddy’s jugmeloned grope, I remember thinking, and what I did next I did without a moment’s conscious thought. Bursting with the kind of groaning lust only a twelve-year-old can know, I shucked my clothes and stood engorged in the moon-washed silence. I felt as if I had stepped over the edge of an enormous precipice. Like I was falling.

On my knees, between her falling thighs, I drove myself to the hot, wet core of her. Her ripe vegetable scent enveloped me—the moist verdure of rich soil and green things growing and sweat—and her body moved beneath me reflexively. When I brushed away the tangle of leaves that lay across her face, I saw her vacant eyes snap open to stare into the still Kentucky night, and in the same moment I felt something give way inside me. I closed my eyes as I came, and when I opened them again, the world had changed forever.

After that I tried to stay away from there, but I could not. The growing sheds and their promise of sweet, slick sin drew me back; it left me gasping, that sin, my fingers tangled in the leaf-grown tubers which bore the meat life. But it left me full. And that moonlit August night when Shamus Smee arrived in Scary, Kentucky, I found myself drawn to my accustomed place, to the corpse that so reminded me of the brassy tart who had lured my Daddy into another life.

And, oh, my friends, it was sweet. It was velvet and roses, it was wine and song, and when I threw my head back and dug my fingers into the black, black loam to either side of her heaving breasts, caught in that moment of equipoise when the floodgates tremble within you—in that moment, it was sweeter still.

Then the floodgates burst. I cried aloud as the shudders tore through me and I emptied myself within her. Then I opened my eyes, and that was when I saw him, silhouetted against the moonlight, watching from the open door of the growing shed, his corded hands dangling beside him:

Smee. Shamus Smee.

“Smoke, boy?” said Shamus Smee.

He spun a home-rolled bone across his knuckles like a trick wizard and magicked it into nothing before my eyes; it reappeared between his grizzled lips, conjured from the very air. He dug out a lighter, and the tent —their tent, I’d watched them set it up a hundred meters from the house in the heat of the summer afternoon—filled with the heady tang of blackmarket smoke.

Shamus Smee exhaled a blistering cloud of gray, sipped bourbon from the neck of the bottle, and smiled gingerly. The smile was knowing and ironic, a smile of shared secrets, a smile between men. It reminded me of our encounter in the growing shed, his figure limned against the moonlit night.

“My name’s not boy.”

“Isn’t that cute, Lush? His name’s not boy. Pray tell, what could his name be?”

“What’s your name, kid?” said Lush, recumbent on a mattress of home-blown air, not looking at me, not looking at anything as far as I could see.

But I was looking.

I studied the lines of her body under her clothes. All sinew and bone, Lush was, with her helmet of bleached blonde hair and her tits mere bumps under the frayed green fabric of her T-shirt. The shirt said, Ask me, I might.

“Kemp,” I said, and I said it to her, but she only yawned.

Smee leaned toward me in his canvas chair. When I glanced at him, I could see the purple shadow Mama’s Mossberg had left across his stubbled jaw. “Well, if it’s not smoke,” he said, “and it’s not booze, then whatever have you come for, Kemp?” He drew the last word into a mocking parody.

I did not—I could not—speak.

“What do you want, lad? You want to ask me something, is that it? You want to talk?”

“Sure.”

Smee uttered an ugly little laugh, like stones trickling into a dry well. “To talk, Lush, you hear that?”

“Mmmm,” said Lush.

And Smee said, “So talk.”

He rubbed his bruised jaw with one hand. His hands were big and callused and didn’t go with the rest of him, like he’d been sewn together from leftover parts and someone had tried to make do.

“Nothing to say? Then let me ask you this: how do you like it here in hillbilly heaven?”

“I’m not a hillbilly. Mama—”

“I know about your mother. Your mother was a big-league brain once upon a time.

And I know where you came from and I know why. And I know your father left you and I know you’re here alone. And I know we’ve got a stalemate. Your mother has the guns, but Shamus Smee has all the time in the world. You hear that, Kemp Chamberlain? All the time in the world. And I’m. Not. Going. Anywhere.”

He winked at me and lifted the bottle. I watched his hands, those big hands, and smelled the smell of him—the stink of whiskey and smoke —and I tasted something ashen and hateful in my mouth.

“She won’t back down. Not unless the company tells her to, and maybe not then.”

“The company sent me. I am their trusted emissary.”

Lush snorted and turned her back to us.

“Alas,” said Smee, “Lush has grown cynical in the ways of corporate America.

Forgive her. My purpose here is not the point. The point is this: do you like Scary, Kemp?”

I hesitated. “All right, I guess.”

“Not much company is there? A young man like yourself, I think he might get lonely.” He gazed at me through a cloud of malodorous smoke, his eyes like flat and knowing stones. “Do you get lonely, Kemp?”

“Some—” I cleared my throat. “Sometimes.”

“The world has changed since your mother brought you here, you know. Chaos, but for a resourceful young man chaos presents opportunities. And you have proven that you’re resourceful. Lush can testify to that. You ever think about the world out there, Kemp?”

“Sometimes,” I said, and even as the word slipped away, I wanted to draw it back. I wanted to tell Shamus Smee the truth—that I was burning inside, that I was burning with a hunger for the great wide world beyond Mama and her precious dead, beyond the growing sheds and the meat that could not contain forever the cravings that consumed me. But I didn’t say another word.

Smee stubbed out his smoke and conjured up another. I watched his knowing fingers roll it and place it in his mouth unlit. “I thought so.”

“What kind of opportunities?”

He leaned forward, so close that his whiskey stench of breath washed over me, and when he spoke again, his voice fairly pulsed with intensity. “I can make it real for you, boy. No more play acting, no more pretend. I can make it real,” he said. He said, “Think about it,” and then he leaned back, lifted his lighter, and ignited the home-rolled butt. He puffed at it for a moment, and then he extended it toward me between two blunt nicotine-yellowed fingers. “It’s the real thing, lad,” he said, and almost against my will I reached out and plucked it from him. I took it and wedged it between lips that had gone so dry they felt like they would crack, and I inhaled it like a drowning man. And, oh, the taste was sweet.

“Now run along,” he said. “I have things to do.”

But I stood outside the tent and watched their shadows on the taut canvas—watched Lush pout and stare, and Smee smoke another cigarette before he rose to extinguish the lights, one by one, until only a single lamp burned within, like a beacon shining out at me from another world. Afterward, I watched their shadows tangle, Smee wiry and small with those big hands grasping, and Lush jerky with a kind of joyless haste, grinding her boyish hips atop their mattress of home-blown air. Toward the end she cried out, a muffled lament of grief and despair, somehow lonely, a cry a woodland creature might have uttered.

But Smee didn’t say a word. Me? I stood there watching long after the tent had gone dark. And when I turned away I spat into the grass. There was a foul taste in my mouth. I had smoked Shamus Smee’s blackmarket bone until it burned to a cindered roach between my fingers.

Mama had waited up. She sat in the black living room, smoking a denatured cigarette and gazing out the back window at the score or so of growing sheds, the rolling acres of the not-quite dead.

“Where have you been, Kemp?” she asked.

I stood by the stairwell and said nothing, my heart all tangled in the stink of Smee’s blackmarket smoke—in the burnt-wood fragrance of jackleg whiskey, the memory of corded hands.

She said, “You think I don’t know what you do nights?”

I flushed. “But I—”

She waved her hand as if to swat away a fly.

“You’ve been out there with Smee, have you? Listening to his lies.”

“Are they?”

“Lies?” She shrugged. “I’m checking into that.” She turned to look at me, the cigarette flaring, so that her face seemed to grow and shift and retreat into the gloom. “What’s he want, did he say?”

I shrugged. “Said he wasn’t leaving.”

“Didn’t think he would.”

“I told him you wouldn’t back down unless the company told you. Maybe not then.”

“What did he offer you, Kemp?”

And now I thought of her again, my pale green dollymop, my mindless, brain-stripped grope writhing underneath me, impaled on the shank of need. I can make it real, he’d said, and what had that meant? What could I ever say to Mama, how could I explain? He offered me the world, I could say, he offered me the whole wide world—and, oh, I long for it. But all I said was nothing.

“Well,” Mama said lightly. “Something, I’m sure.”

I turned and started up the stairs, but halfway to the top I turned around. “You ever want to get away? You ever want to see the world?”

“I’ve seen it, Kemp. It’s overrated.”

“That’s not what Daddy thought,” I told her, and then I started up again. When I reached the landing, I heard her speak again, hardly more than a whisper, but in the silence whispers carried. I thought there might be tears in her voice, but I didn’t think I was supposed to hear them. And besides, I didn’t care.

“Why do you hate me, Kemp?” she said.

But I could think of no reply.

Dreams fractured my sleep: nightmarish flights through endless dark, here and there punctuated by glimpses of eerily distorted faces, somehow more terrifying still—Mama, her lips set against some fate I could not yet perceive; narrow-faced Lush, her blue eyes hooded with mysterious intent; and the dead, acre after acre of the silent and accusing dead. And then, in one of those bizarre transformations that come to us in dreams, I found myself in the growing shed, found myself staring down at my Daddy’s redheaded squeeze, found myself kneeling between her parted thighs. My friends, I threw back my head and cried out loud for the joy of it, for the sweet, slick rapture of her body under mine.

And only at the end did I see what was happening to her face: it was changing, melting somehow, transforming itself into the rat-faced visage of Shamus Smee

—I can make it real for you—

—as I spurted in her depths. Horrified, I scuttled away. The body—Smee and not Smee, my Daddy’s jugmeloned dollymop and the verdant corpse into whom I emptied all my dreams—capered and howled, hurling itself against the medusa coils of foliage that bound it to the earth. I screamed and tried to wake, but there was no waking, only flight. Then not even flight, only an abrupt arresting surface against my back, unyielding as a stone.

All the world suspended in a single breath, I turned and gazed at the thing that had obstructed me: the scuffed combat boots and the sweat-stained camo jumper, the big and callused hands. They reached out to gentle me, those hands, and it was like a lock had opened in my heart. A rush of feeling overwhelmed me as I looked into his face. It was a face I had never once been able to recall, a face I had never even seen in dreams.

It was my Daddy’s face.

And then I woke. I lay there in the tangled sheets for the longest time, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t bring that face into my mind again. Nothing at all remained. Only the silent bedroom, the vacant mirror of my memory, the stain of hot Kentucky sun against my sleep-stunned eyes.

I found the house brain armed, the house itself locked down, with Mama hunkered at her board. A single glance at her sight-glazed orbs and I knew that she’d gone zombie, searching out the cyber-highways for answers to whatever questions haunted her. I breakfasted on a day-old crust of bread and let myself out, rearming the house behind me. Smee’s tent was empty, but out by the fence-line I saw Lush, clad in bone-colored rags and a T-shirt that flashed her vital signs in neon random. She stood with her back to me and her fingers laced in the links, gazing off through the woods at the road that wound south to Scary.

She glanced up when I stopped beside her. “Where’s the dogs?”

“Never was any. It’s just a sign.”

“Too bad,” she said. “I like dogs.”

She ambled along the fence-line, glancing off into the woods now and then. Heat shimmered over the ridges, and the whole world looked wilted. I gazed with numb fascination at a single bead of sweat glistening at Lush’s temple. Lush, I said to myself, and the name conjured up images of steaming jungle, of fevered efflorescence. I said it again, “Lush,” rolling the single syllable off my tongue, recollecting the way her eyes had widened when I pointed the gun at her, the scent of her perfume. Only this time I must have said it just above my breath, for she glanced over at me, lifting her eyebrows, and said, “How’s your hand?”

“My hand?”

She aimed her finger at me and dropped her thumb like the hammer of a gun.

“Bang” she said, and I thought of the pistol’s breathtaking concussion, the barrel bulging in my clenched fist as it spat the bullet into the humvee.

“Well?”

“Oh, it’s fine.” I hesitated. “I wouldn’t have shot you, you know.”

“I would have shot you.”

“You tried to shoot me.”

“Well, what’d you want me to do? Shamus was pissed, you know, said if I wasn’t such a lousy shot—” She shrugged.

“Where is he?”

“Out and about.” She gestured vaguely at a cluster of growing sheds. “You know, he’s more interested in all those bodies than in you and your mom. Or even me.”

She laughed, and added wryly, “He wants to give me to you. Thinks it’ll bring you around.”

“Do what?”

“Give me to you.” She thrust her index finger into the hollow cylinder of her left fist.

I could feel the heat behind my face.

“Jesus,” she said. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.” She began to grind her hips suggestively, and I turned on her, thrusting her away. She stumbled, and laughed aloud, her eyes aglitter with meanness.

“It’s not like that—”

“Then what’s it like? You think they enjoy it, kid? You think they’re having big screaming orgasms? Well, I got news for you, they’re just glorified fuck dolls.”

“Yeah, and what are you?”

She didn’t answer for a moment, and then she laughed again, a strange bitter little laugh. “Maybe you’re right.”

She turned her back and stalked away along the fence-line. She hadn’t gone far before she began to pick up speed, and finally she ran blindly, her coltish limbs falling into an aimless awkward gait, like she didn’t know whether she was running away from something or into the arms of something else, some mysterious fate she could not even imagine yet, let alone see.

The thing was, I knew how she felt. I’d felt that way about a thousand times myself, thinking about Mama and Daddy and the dairy-rich whore he’d followed over the far horizon, like a dog with a hard-on for a bitch in heat. See, I too had walked that fence, and this is what I learned: no matter how hard you run, you always end up in the same place you started. And so I thought of Lush, Lush and her stupid T-shirts and the way her eyes had widened when I leveled the pistol at her, Lush and the faint aroma of her perfume and the first word she had ever said to me—

—Don’t—

—and somehow I was running too.

“Wait!” I cried, but she did not wait, and my breath was coming hard when I saw her stumble at the crest of a knoll and tumble down the other side. She was still lying there, half laughing but mostly crying, when I arrived, sweaty and out of breath. I stood over her, watching her heartwave race across her T-shirt in a jagged line.

I wanted to apologize, but I couldn’t begin to guess how, so I settled for not saying anything at all. I only stood there, staring down at her and her idiot T-shirt, her pulse rate blinking like a moronic beacon over the bump of her left breast.

“Well?” she said.

“Do you like him?”

“You really don’t get it, do you? It’s not about liking him or disliking him, it’s about survival: long as he gets his dick wet, that’s how long he takes care of me. That’s the way the world goes round.”

“Why don’t you leave?”

“Where am I gonna go? Not all of us can live behind fences, Kemp. Who’s gonna take care of me? You?”

“I might.”

We were silent then. Lush sat up, her head hanging, her arms draped over her knees, her breath coming in shallow gasps. After a while, she glanced up at me from beneath her cap of dirty blonde hair. “You’re sweet,” she said. “Maybe I won’t shoot you after all.”

“Your mother let you out today?” said Shamus Smee.

“She going to stop me?”

He measured me with one eye, squinting away smoke from his blackmarket bone. “I think she might at that, lad.”

He pinched out the smoke, tucking the butt into his pocket before he turned back to his work. What that work was I couldn’t say, but his hands charmed me, so dexterous and quick. He brushed a flickering red jewel on the belly of a spidery-looking thing made of wire and chrome; its claws flexed, extruding filaments of shining silver. When he let it go, it scuttled off beneath the foliage, through the rows of meat.

Smee grunted thoughtfully, tapped at his wafer board for a moment, then fished another spiderclaw from a cardboard box. The growing shed seemed alien and strange, aswim in the emerald light of a failing sun, ripe with the stinks of fertilizer and sweat and greenhouse foliage healthy to the edge of rot. I could hear the faraway chuff of the wheezers and Smee’s pensive grunts whenever one of the spiderclaws stole humming into the rows. If I listened close, I could hear something else, too — the inspiration and expiration, the respiration of the slumbering dead. Like music, a siren song or symphony borne from a distant shore.

Said Smee, “So you’ve spoken to Lush, have you?”

“That’s right.”

“You like her?”

“Why? You planning to give her to me?”

“Does the idea offend you?” Smee asked.

He’d been hunkered over a supine spiderclaw, studying it through a jeweler’s loupe and using a tiny screwdriver to tinker with its guts. Now he flipped closed the little metal breastplate and lifted the loupe with its elastic band onto his forehead. “Well?”

But I had to think about his question. The fact was I did want Lush —the taste and scent and look of her, not the secondhand allure of her perfume or the dime-shop charm of the T-shirts she affected, but the spare, sinewy reality I sensed beneath the T-shirts, under the perfume, on the far side of her skin itself. Lush. Herself. But I had a notion that Smee couldn’t give me that, and probably hadn’t any right to try —that maybe only Lush could, and only if she were willing.

“It doesn’t seem right.”

“Right?” Smee threw his head back and laughed. “I couldn’t care less about that, my friend. The point is, I can. I can give her to you.”

He stood and nudged the squirming spiderclaw onto its feet with the toe of his boot. The thing scurried away into the failing light.

“Under certain terms,” Smee said. “You’ll enjoy Lush,” he added. “And I won’t mind, there’s a thousand like her.”

“Terms?”

“Terms. Guns, for one. I want the guns. And you’ll have to disarm the fucking house, won’t you?”

“What about Mama?”

“What about her?”

“You’ll hurt her.”

“Would you mind so much, Kemp?”

“Maybe,” I said. I said, “Maybe not.” And after a moment, I added: “She might hurt you instead.”

Smee laughed out loud. “Me? Hurt me? I don’t think so, boy. Your mother’s weak.

She has no taste for cruelty. So I’ll do as I please.”

“And what’s that? What is it that you’ve come for?”

“Ah,” Smee said, “that’s the question isn’t it?” And now he stopped before me, the jeweler’s loupe cocked atop his forehead like a third eye, his breath a reek of nicotine and whiskey. Tiny blisters of sweat clung to the gray stubble of his beard, and his teeth were mossy and crooked in his rat-like face. His eyes shone in their intensity, and when he reached out to lay a hand against my cheek, his touch was gentle. His touch was a caress. “We’re two of a kind, we are, my friend,” he whispered. “You want it to be real, and I — I’ve come to make it so.”

He laughed again and turned away from me, hunkered over his wafer board, his thick fingers flying across the keys. And what I felt was rage at Shamus Smee and at my mama, too, at my long-gone daddy and the smiling slut with her mouth like a wound and the gatefold tits who had stolen him away from me. At all of them, all of the adults and the complex world they had made for me to understand. “Mama beat you once,” I said. “She could beat you again.”

“Not again,” said Shamus Smee, and he punched a final key with one blunt finger.

Behind me, in the gloom of the growing shed, a rustle erupted among the rows of slumbering dead. My heart banged against the cage of my chest as I spun to face it, my mind abruptly flooded with the backwash from my dream in my pale green dollymop arisen from the dead. And friends, it was true, true —

I saw her heave herself up, saw her shrug away the life-bearing tubers that entangled her, smelled the ripe complaint of bruised foliage as she came toward me through the rows — erect, alive, real, my half-dead squeeze with her tits like jugs, my grope, my fuck doll, my goddess. Mine. Just as Smee had said. I stood there, rooted to the ground as surely as if I had grown there, companion to the numberless dead. Fear gripped my throat and heart, but I did not, I could not flee.

And then she took me in her arms and pressed her lips to mine. I could feel the swollen tips of her breasts through the thin fabric of my shirt, could smell her cloying green fragrance. I could even taste her, like raw spinach and spit and a faraway hint of fecund earth. My cock throbbed inside my Daddy’s cast-off jeans.

A stricken rat clawed in my constricted throat. Fear and desire, that’s all it came to, wound like snakes about the caduceus of my spine.

I thought of Lush, fraught and hurting Lush —

— you think they like it, kid? —

— chasing herself around the compound’s fence only to arrive back where she started, but then my half-dead dollymop pressed her groin against me, and friends, I could not say her no. I thrust my tongue deeper into her mouth, lifted my arms to embrace her, ran my fingers over the knobby, root-woven terrain of her sap-slick back. At last I pressed my hand to her neck to draw her face still closer to my own, and that’s when I felt it: the spiderclaw, pulsing with internal heat, its attenuated strands of silver plunged into the warm flesh that encased her spinal cord —

Smee laughed and from the corner of my eye, I saw his fingers dance across the wafer board.

Abruptly, my dollymop slumped against me, dead weight, her tongue an extruded chunk of flesh, slack between my lips. I screamed and stumbled back as she slid to the floor in a boneless heap, and knowledge pealed inside my brain like a bell:

Dead, dead, dead. Just so much meat.

“Sometimes,” said Shamus Smee, “cruelty is necessary.”

I FOUND MAMA in her study, a dark shape against the surrounding darkness, staring silently at her board. For a moment I thought she hadn’t returned, that she was still out there somewhere, another lost soul roaming the cyber-byways.

Then she moved, the slightest adjustment of her head and shoulders, but enough to show me that she was here after all, at home in her body. Awake. Crying. I don’t know how I knew that, but I didn’t doubt it for a moment: it was after midnight, and Mama was sitting in her study, weeping. The simple fact of it touched something in me that I had locked away six long ages past, when we first came to Scary, Kentucky. In all those years I’d never seen Mama cry; now I had seen it twice in as many days, and just that suddenly the whole cloth of my life had started to unravel. I could hardly imagine a change more disturbing — not if the sun had failed to rise that morning, not if all the stars had fallen from the midnight sky.

What would I do if I didn’t have Mama to hate?

But there it was, and maybe Mama sensed it, too, for when she spoke I heard a certain stillness in her voice, a gentleness I had not known before.

“So you’ve been out there again, have you?”

“Yes.”

“All day?”

“Most of it.”

“And what do you think of him, Kemp, our friend Shamus Smee?”

Once upon a time, I’d have replied with sarcasm if I bothered to answer her at all, but that strangely gentle tone gave me pause. After a moment, I said, “He scares me, Mama.”

“Me, too,” she said. She said, “And yet you’re drawn to him, aren’t you ?”

I said nothing.

“What does he want, Kemp?”

“I don’t know.”

Mama laughed. “You’re lying, but it doesn’t matter anymore.”

She touched a button on her board and a screen sprang alight, limning her face in shifting green. A numbing wave of memory crashed over me; involuntarily, I retreated into the shadowed doorway, my heart lurching as the green woman staggered toward me once again.

“Smee’s legit,” Mama said. “But he’s a lying sack of shit.”

“What do you mean?”

“I raided BioGene’s data banks. His records were buried, but I snuck past the data-sentry.”

“Who is he?”

“Just who he says he is, Shamus Smee, an ace BioGene brain. Six weeks ago he melted down — burned his project memory, threatened his supervisor. He claimed BioGene was trying to steal his work.”

“Were they?”

Mama thought for a moment. “Probably. But those are the terms going in. They bankroll you and give you free rein. In return, they get any commercial applications of your work.”

“What happened then?”

“He went freelance. He’s been heading south ever since, trying not to make his destination obvious. I backtracked him for a few weeks before I lost him, and BioGene’s probably doing the same. The Feds, too, but the Feds are spread too thin with the insurrections out west to do much good.” She paused, adding, “BioGene, though, they’ll be along.”

“Here?”

“Oh, yes.”

“But why?”

“Well, that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? I stole his project file, as much as BioGene could recover from the fried memory. You recognize this?”

She punched a button and the shifting green luminescence on the screen gave way to a three-dee diagram of pale blue lines. The board turned it this way and that, giving us the view from all angles. I didn’t have to watch but a minute before I knew what it was: a spiderclaw. I recognized the queerly elongated thorax, the razor-edged claws and their attenuated silver wires. A chill ran through me. My pale green anencephalic grope lurched from the swamp of memory, her full breasts bobbing, her lips warm against my own.

“Do you know what it is?”

“No,” I said through a throat so parched of moisture that it hurt to swallow.

Mama said, “I don’t suppose BioGene’s brains have sussed it out yet. But they’ll put it together soon enough and then they’ll know he’s here.”

“What is it?”

“God, I never would have imagined this, Kemp.” She shook her head. “Healthy, inexpensive organ donors, that’s all I ever intended. And then the crash came along and suddenly my research ground to a halt. Suddenly I’m just maintaining meat.”

“That’s my word for them.”

“I never liked it, either. But God knows it’s accurate. Anencephalic, right?

Brainless shells. Cheap life-support systems for donor organs, that’s all I ever had in mind.”

“The spider…. That thing, what’s it do/”

“It’s a brain. Smee can program the initial parameters, probably control it, but unless I’m mistaken, it has the capacity for growth. It can develop self-awareness. It’s pretty crude, but give it a generation or two and….”

We shared an uneasy silence and then Mama said, “What an ass I’ve been not to see this coming. Can you imagine the applications? Armies of cannon fodder.

Mining. Any shitty job we can’t bring ourselves to do…”

“But why’s that so bad? Why should we have to do that stuff?”

“Because we should, that’s why. We were just starting to come out of the dark ages, Kemp. We were just starting to grow up as a species.” She stabbed angrily at the board and the screen went black, plunging the room into darkness.

She said, “I know what you do out there at night.”

“Mama, I—”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s natural, I suppose. You’re twelve years old and that’s hard enough in the best of times. But that doesn’t make it right. You understand? It’s not right to use another living being w ,,

“Isn’t it? Is it so different from what you had in mind for them? Slicing them up and distributing their organs?”

“Maybe so,” she said, “but this changes everything. I won’t let him enslave them, Kemp.” Her voice held an adamantine anger like nothing I had ever heard before, not even when Daddy abandoned us for his jugmeloned whore.

“What are you going to do?”

“I did some damage to BioGene’s system. I burned Smee’s file and fried every record I could find of my own research. I won’t let them pervert my work, Kemp.

Smee and I, we’re just alike in that respect, I guess.”

“He asked me to disarm the house,” I said. “He asked me to steal back his guns.”

“And in return?”

“Lush. He said he would give me Lush.”

“Is that the kind of gift you want, Kemp?”

“I don’t know what I want.”

“I’ve got a feeling you don’t have the luxury of time. BioGene reps will be arriving here soon and they’ll scare you more than Smee does. You’re going to have to make some choices, and you’re going to have to live with them. It’s worth thinking about what they might be.”

She was silent for a long time after that, and then she started speaking in this strange, toneless voice. “I used to wonder if I made the right choice, coming out here and living in the middle of nowhere. You were a smart kid, and I figured we’d be okay together. But somewhere along the line you started hating me. And now it looks as though I’m going to lose the work, too. Smee’s come to take it away from me, and if he can’t, BioGene will.”

I wanted to answer her, but I didn’t know what to say. Mostly, I was just glad for the dark and the way it hid her from my sight. I felt stranger than I’d ever felt in my life — bloated with emptiness, disconnected from the world I’d known, but embarrassed at the same time, like I’d walked in and seen Mama naked.

“What I think now,” Mama said, “is that I was probably wrong. You can’t run away. You have to live in the world.” She repeated that, like it was something I ought to remember — “You have to live in the world, Kemp” — and then she sighed. I heard her fumbling in the dark, and a moment later the room flickered with the light of a denatured cigarette.

“Smee smokes real cigarettes,” I said.

“Coffin nails,” she said. “That’s what we used to call those things.”

“Daddy smoked them, too.”

Mama laughed. “So he did. Sometimes I wonder. Maybe if I hadn’t been so driven he wouldn’t have left. Maybe then you wouldn’t hate me. Do you think about him often, Kemp?”

I stood there for a long moment trying to decide, but I couldn’t seem to think on it clearly like I wanted to. Ail my thoughts kept getting tangled up in the smell of him, the woodsy aroma of jackleg whiskey and blackmarket smoke; that, and the feel of his big hands, gentle against my face, and the sound of his voice when he said it: “You’re the man of the house now, Kemp. You’ve got to take care of your mama.”

But for the life of me, I couldn’t recollect his face.

“All the time,” I said.

LUSH CAME TO ME that night, in a scattering of pebbles against my window. I threw aside the covers and gazed down at her, a small, pale figure in the clearing before the growing sheds, black and dimensionless against the blue hills beyond, like painted flats propped against the stars. I stole through the night rooms to the kitchen door, punching in the code to disarm the house.

In my silent bedroom, she stood naked before me, her body fuller than I had imagined, high-breasted and muscular, with a dearth of excess flesh. My hand trembled as I lifted it to touch her face, to trace the moonlit shadow of a bruise beneath her eye. She sighed, flinching, and I felt a swift rill of excitement tumble through me.

“Smee,” she whispered, and I could see him in the eye of my imagination. I could see those strong hands raining blows upon her.

“Did he send you to me?” I asked. “Because I wouldn’t want it, not that way.”

“I came because I wanted to,” she said. She said, “Are you gonna take care of me now, Kemp?”

The words detonated in my brain, triggering a flash of memory — his big hands against my face, his warm voice saying, “You’ve got to take care of your mama.”

That had been a vow, I knew, and I thought of Mama, forlorn in her darkened study, and I saw that I had failed in keeping it.

“I’ll try,” I said, knowing that this also was a vow, knowing too that I would fail in keeping it, knowing that I had to make it anyway. “We’ll take care of each other,” I said, and then the tears came, swift, silent tears for all that I had lost and all that I would lose, now or someday— my Daddy and my Mama and the only world I had ever known, the corpse gardens, the growing sheds and their acres of meat, all of it drifting inexorably out of my grasp in the moment I had finally reached out to embrace it.

Lush drew me to her breast. “Shhh,” she said, and she made some other sounds, wordless murmurs meant to solace me, and they did. We stayed that way for a long time, I don’t know how long, and then we found our way to the bed. Her mouth was warm and moist, her body flushed, her small breasts like ripe fruit, the nipples quickening beneath my tongue.

A strange and sudden hunger filled me up, and the first time I cried out before she even touched me. But Lush just laughed softly and cradled me in her arms, and after a while her hands found me. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “Slow down, don’t rush it.”

The second time was sweeter.

A foghorn called in the darkness. I plunged deeper into fathomless sleep, but the foghorn followed me, a note of panic in its broken voice; finally I rose to meet it, toward a faraway light. I broke the surface of consciousness with a shock as the foghorn’s cry metamorphosed into something else. A scream.

I sat up abruptly —

— Mama —

— aware of a touch, tentative as the wings of a moth. Glancing into Lush’s narrow-planed face, I suddenly came fully awake. A tsunami of guilt crashed over me — Lush, the kitchen, Shamus Smee. The house. I’d disarmed the house.

Mama screamed again, and I heard a gunshot, the sharp, abrupt crack of a pistol.

“Kemp—”

I spun on her. “What have you done?”

I didn’t stop to listen to her response. I stumbled up, reaching for my jeans, and that’s when I caught a glimpse of the scene beyond the window, lurid in the bloodred light of dawn. Time slipped out of sequence. For a moment, I could do nothing but gape at the nightmare below, the growing sheds vomiting forth their freight of meat. The dead, everywhere the dead — upright, aware, awake, dead no longer if not quite alive, and striding with dumb purpose toward the house, toward me, their bodies rootshrouded and shining with sap, their green locks adrift like seaweed about their naked shoulders. And silent. Oh my friends, that was the worst of it, their silence. Not a single shout of joy, nary a cry of hope or hatred or despair. Just icy, implacable silence, just nothing. That’s when I truly understood the vile miracle they had wrought between them, Mama and Shamus Smee. Light from the darkness, form from the abyss, they had conceived a new creation, they had served as midwives to its birth — and, my friends, I was a/raid.

“My God,” Lush said at my shoulder, and I turned in that timeless moment to gaze at her. I wanted to scream and strike her, to tear her limb from limb. She must have seen the violence in my eyes, for when she spoke again, her voice was hushed and pleading. “I didn’t know,” she said. “Kemp, I promise you I didn’t know.”

Then Mama’s pistol went off once again and I fell back into the moment.

“Don’t,” Lush said, but I shrugged away her grasping hands. The hall was full of corpses. Half a dozen of the things turned to stare at me, their eyes aglitter in their slack gray faces as the door banged against the outer wall.

Simultaneously, Mama appeared in the doorway of her bedroom, clutching the blue-steel automatic I had taken from Lush. The corpses wheeled between us for a moment, like cattle in a slaughter chute, and then, inexorable as compass needles seeking the magnetic pole, they swung back to Mama. “Get back!” she screamed, and a gout of orange flame leapt from the barrel of the pistol. A body dropped, convulsing in a fountain of sap and blood, and the spiderclaw astride the thing’s neck shorted out in a torrent of sparks. The stench of singed flesh — ripe eggplant shriveling in heat — permeated the narrow hallway.

Still they came on, two more in the hallway and a third mounting to the landing, with a shadowy fourth beyond. Mama squeezed off another shot and another body dropped in a spray of sparks and sap. I launched myself at the emerald shadow behind it, driving the thing over the railing. It tumbled in eerie silence to the floor below, but another of the things was already upon us.

Mama squeezed off a shot that went wide, blowing out a chunk of plaster; and still the thing advanced, stepping deliberately over the husks of its fallen comrades, charged with the implacable purpose of a machine. I slunk away, trying to conceal myself in the shadows, but the thing merely glanced at me, its flat eyes passing over me like I didn’t even exist.

And maybe I didn’t.

The thought triggered an eidetic montage, pregnant with mysterious significance, in my stunned brain. Again, I watched Smee finger his wafer board, again I saw my root-woven grope heave herself free of the foliage that bound her to the earth. Like I had slipped out of time, from the nightmare of one moment into the horror of another, I watched the scene replay— tasted once more the pressure of her lips against my own, caught a glimpse of Smee as his fingers flew across the wafer board, felt my pale green dollymop sag in my arms and fall boneless to the floor.

Dead, dead, dead. Just so much meat —

A gunshot shattered my reverie. I saw the bullet punch into the thing’s shoulder, staggering it, but leaving the spiderclaw astride its neck intact.

Regaining its balance, the creature advanced, first among a silent onslaught of the dead. Mama sighted down the barrel at it, her legs braced in a shooter’s stance, her face above the pistol’s bore like a strained white flag as she squeezed off another shot.

The hammer fell upon an empty chamber.

That sterile click reverberated in the gloomy hallway, loud as doom. I watched Mama pull the trigger again and saw the hammer fall on yet another empty chamber —

— click! —

— as the thing bore her screaming to the floor. And then she disappeared in a crashing tide of gray-green meat.

“Mama!” I stumbled toward her, my mind serving up an image of my Daddy, those big hands of his gentle against my face

— you’ve got to take care —

— as a red haze enveloped me. And then I was among the dead. I could hear her screaming as I clawed and scratched at the pliant flesh, dragging the things from her writhing body. I heard a sound like a length of stovewood being snapped, and I caught a glimpse of her face —still, pale, dead — through the tangled limbs of green, and I knew that it had ended, but the screaming did not stop. And then Lush was there, coaxing me from the squirming mass of the not-quite dead, from the hot vegetable stench of them, and their fingers grasping. I knew then that Mama wasn’t screaming — knew that Mama was forever past screaming, knew that maybe I never would be. But Lush held me, rocking me until my screaming did stop, and the enigma of that eidetic montage of images —Smee and his wafer board, my pale green dollymop boneless in my arms —at last snapped clear inside my head: You couldn’t stop the things. You had to stop the man behind them.

Too late. Too late.

I found the shotgun locked up in Mama’s study. The man himself I found inside one of the growing sheds, crouched over his wafer board and studying the projection of a spiderclaw that hung above it, dissolving into static and reconstituting itself with every whim of humid air. Prone beside him lay a shell of brain-deprived meat, its back and flaccid buttocks overgrown with soil-clotted roots. Every now and then, Smee turned and hunkered over the thing, peering through his jeweler’s loupe as he probed with a tiny screwdriver at the spiderclaw astride its neck.

Me? I just stood there in the doorway for the longest time, trying to decide how to feel. I had passed two dozen brain-stunned corpses in the yard, wandering aimlessly, most of them, now that Mama —

I closed my eyes, dragging in a breath of heavy morning air, trying not to remember. But there it was: the image of Mama’s broken body as the things drifted away from her, their eyes flickering without recognition over Lush and me, huddled there in the doorway to my bedroom. I thought I might be seeing that image for a long time yet, maybe every time I closed my eyes. But the dead —

they took no interest in me and Lush. Crude, Mama had called the spiderclaw brains, and I suppose they were, bereft of Smee’s ill-will. But I couldn’t help remembering something else she’d said, that they possessed the capacity for self-awareness. Maybe I could see the first vestiges of that, as well. For they didn’t just stop, did they, once they had finished with Mama? They wandered instead, aimless-like, but maybe not entirely aimless. Like a newborn baby, maybe, drinking in the whole wide world.

A pair of them drifted through the emerald reaches of the growing shed, cocking their heads when the wheezers kicked on to flush the interior with nutrient-enriched air. That was my chance.

I crossed the growing shed quickly, careful of the root-bound meat still growing there. I saw holes and mashed up foliage among the rows where the spiderclaws had done their work, waking the things from mindless slumber to do Smee’s bidding. But Smee himself never looked up, never turned to see me coming, didn’t even hear me over the whir and bluster of the wheezers.

I cocked the Mossberg and pressed the cold iron to his neck. About where a spiderclaw might sink its silver wires if one ever got the chance.

And Smee? Smee didn’t even flinch.

“Ah, my boy,” he said after a moment. “You’ve decided to join me. I’ve been wondering when you might happen by.”

“You killed Mama.”

“Did I, then? How unfortunate.”

Now he moved. Slowly, I thought, backing away a step and holding the shotgun steady. Slowly, I thought — and found that I had said it aloud.

“Oh, yes, slowly,” he said. “It wouldn’t do to blow my head off, would it?” His fingers skated across the wafer board, and the hologram spiderclaw sizzled into nothingness. “I wasn’t under the impression that you much cared for your mother, my boy.”

“You killed her.”

“Not me. They did it.” He jerked a thumb at the two corpses adrift in the twilight reaches of the growing shed. They had wandered closer, their green shades blurring into mere suggestions of motion, human shapes abroad the verdant green.

“Because you told them to.”

“Well, there’s that.” And he stood, those big hands clenching and unclenching at his thighs. In readiness, I thought. And I backed away another step. “Question is,” said Shamus Smee, “what do you intend to do about it, boy?”

My arms ached from holding the gun like that, but I never looked away from Shamus Smee. I saw his eyes drop, calculating his odds, and my finger tightened across the trigger. We hung there for a moment before Smee decided. I could see the tension go out of his body.

“I think I’m going to kill you,” I said.

“Will you, lad? I don’t think you’ve got the balls. You’re a little like your mother in that respect, I’d say.”

“I will —”

“Fine, then. Whatever.” He waved a hand dismissively. “What did you think of Lush, my young friend? How did it feel to fuck someone who could fuck you back for a change? Hmmm?”

“You hit her, she wanted to come to me, she —”

“Did she?”

I broke off, inundated with memory: Lush at my window and Lush inside the kitchen door, the way she had kissed me there…distracting me just long enough that I forgot to arm the house again. Lush, saying, I didn’t know, I promise you I didn’t know.

But did she?

I glanced up, caught a glimpse of the pair of dead men maybe twenty meters away, and turned back to Smee.

“Where is Lush, by the way?” he asked.

“This isn’t about Lu —”

“Not a pleasant one to have behind your’ back, I’d say. She’s a dream between the sheets, that one, but a vixen otherwise. And it’s worth remembering she has a reason to begrudge you.”

“Lush —”

“I always kept a weather eye when I was fucking her, but you, you’re different aren’t you? You think she gives a damn about you, don’t you? Boy?”

I’ll never know why I spun when I did. Maybe it was a shift in Smee’s eyes, though I don’t remember it happening that way. Or maybe it was a tiny sound, some infinitesimal change in the pressure of the air. Or maybe it was luck. I kind of think it was.

But spin I did, the name rising like an accusation to my lips –

— “Lush” —

— and dying there, for it was not Lush. It was my pale green dollymop, my root-woven, sap-slick fuck doll with her gatefold tits and her mouth like a wound, my anencephalic grope, with a spiderclaw brain programmed by Shamus Smee and murder in her flat, cold eyes.

At the same time, I realized that the pair of corpses had flanked me, moving now with purpose, and suddenly it all came clear in my mind —Smee caressing the wafer board, the spiderclaw projection winking into nothing, and something else.

He’d used the opportunity, hadn’t he? He had called them to him, one and all.

That’s when the whole interior of the growing shed exploded into movement —

dozens of the things, row after row of the unquiet dead, tearing themselves from their graves and standing erect, to stagger toward me.

I jerked the shotgun up and blasted a hole in the air half a meter above Smee’s head. He dropped to his knees, covering his head with his forearms; in the same motion I levered another round into the breech and stepped forward, leveling the shotgun a half a meter in front of his face. My voice, when I spoke, throbbed with terror.

“Call them off!”

But Smee’s gaze, when he met my own, was steady. “I would have let you go, you stupid child. You and that stupid whore. All you had to do was walk away.”

Foliage rustled as the closer of the pair of dead men closed upon me. I swung to face it, yanking the trigger hard. The spread took the thing square in the throat and threw it half a dozen meters. It hit the ground, expelling a verdant spray of sap and blood. Already I was spinning back to Smee —

Too late.

I sensed more than saw his corded hand dart out. I tried to step away, but he moved with the speed of a striking copperhead. In a crashing succession of moments his thick hand closed like a vise around my ankle, the growing shed whirled and tilted under me, my face smashed into the fragrant earth. I’d lost the shotgun somehow. Smee rose to his knees, those big hands opening to choke the life out of me. I rolled to my left, kicking. My foot caught him square in the face and he stumbled back, flailing for balance.

I clawed my way through the dirt on hands and knees, scanning the foliage for the fallen Mossberg. I could hear Smee cursing behind me as he stumbled to his feet, but I didn’t bother glancing back. Breath burned in my lungs. Sweat blistered my forehead, slipping down to blind me. Any minute I expected Smee to fall upon me, that vise-like grip to close around my neck.

And then I saw it, a glint of oiled gun-metal, a hint of walnut stock, half-hidden in the overlapping leaves. I dove forward, fingers scrabbling in the dirt —

And then she fell upon me.

Oh yes, my friends, my moss-green fuck doll, my tit-swollen anencephalic grope, a jealous lover to the last — she snapped me up. I felt her fingers close about my shoulders like iron bands. She dragged me up against her, so close that I could smell her, raw vegetables and sweat and earth. And then she started to squeeze, emptying my lungs. Breath exploded out of me in a gust. Wrenching my head around, I caught a glimpse of Smee, his face a blood-streaked mess beneath his shattered nose. I watched him stagger toward the shotgun as black dots began to swarm across my vision.

With the last of my strength I buried my hands in the thing’s hair and yanked, trying to snap her neck. My fingers trailed over something cold and hard —

— the spiderclaw —

— and I clutched at it desperately, tearing it from her flesh. Those attenuated silver strands whipped back and forth like the antennae of a crazed insect, and my dollymop collapsed. I caught a glimpse of her face as we went down, and for a single vertiginous moment I wasn’t sure where I was. Her face shifted, malleable, a quicksilver mirror of other faces, lost faces — my daddy’s big-city whore and my mother in the last moment I had seen her, just after that terrible wrenching snap, when her face went gray and restful.

Rage filled me as I scrambled away, scrabbling at the foliage-tangled earth with one hand and stumbling to my feet. Smee whirled to face me, holding the shotgun dead-level at my guts. I flung the spiderclaw in his face. He flinched, and I bowled into him at a dead run. We went over in a pile, the spiderclaw skittering away into the empty rows, and then I had slipped free of his grasping hands and rolled to my feet, clutching the Mossberg.

I backed away as the dead closed around me.

“Call them off!” I screamed, and what I saw before me in that moment was not Shamus Smee or the encircling legions of the not-quite dead, but only that strange overlay of faces — my brain-deprived anencephalic grope, my daddy’s redheaded whore, and my mama. Mama, her lips set as the dead things overwhelmed her. Mama, lying broken there in the hallway by her bedroom door, her face grim and gray and empty.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

Raw, red hatred enveloped me as I advanced upon him, screaming that he’d better call them off or I’d blow him straight to hell.

Smee backed away, but even then I think he knew it was too late. He must have seen the change in my eyes, he must have known that he had finally overreached himself. In the last moments, he stumbled to his knees, scooping up the wafer board in those big hands of his. His fingers skated across the keys as I closed on him, pumping a fresh round into the breech. I didn’t even realize I had pulled the trigger until the spread caught him in the chest. He jerked suddenly, bee-stung, and a bright arterial stain blossomed on his camo jumper. His mouth worked for a moment, but nothing came out. Then he collapsed into the pit of a vacant grave.

He must have keyed in the final command as the gunshot took him, for all about me the dead abruptly dropped into the fecund soil that had grown them. The sound of it, that soft boneless collapse, took me back. Superimposed across my tear-glaze vision, I saw her once again, my verdant green dollymop, my lovely, lovely grope, so like my daddy’s big-city whore. I felt her lips go slack against my own, I saw her slip away from between my clutching arms. And Smee’s words echoed in my head: Sometimes cruelty is necessary.

Maybe so, I wanted to tell him.

But that doesn’t make it right.

It took nearly a week to clean the place up. The whole time I kept my ears pricked for the thrum of engines winding up the ridge from Scary. I’d never known Mama to be wrong — not about something like that, anyway — and I figured it was only a matter of time before BioGene showed up in force, and maybe the Feds, too. I didn’t want to be around when that happened, but I didn’t want to leave anything behind if I could help it. Mama had given her life to keep Smee from enslaving the meat, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought she might have been right.

I guess I’d changed some.

Lush helped me gather the bodies. The ones Smee hadn’t got to yet, growing mindless in the rows Mama made for them, we saved for later. We found the others, two or three dozen of them, scattered in clumps about the yard, in the house, just everywhere, wherever Smee had dropped them. We dragged them one by one into the clearing in front of the house and made an enormous pile of them, fly-swarmed and stinking of rot beneath the August sun. Last of all, we threw Smee on the pile, his chest all ragged from the shot, but his rat-like face unchanged. Then we drained some diesel off the wheezers out back of the growing sheds and soaked the whole pile down. And then we watched them burn.

I dug Mama’s grave myself, off in a sun-drenched glade beyond the fence. You could see a whole stretch of purple ridges from there, winding south into the hazy distance of Tennessee, and I couldn’t think of a prettier spot. I didn’t reckon Mama would get much pleasure from the view, but I didn’t want to give her cause for sorrow on the off-chance I was wrong. It wouldn’t have been the first time, and God knows I had plenty to make up to her.

Lush and I, we had a little service over the grave and I tried to pray some, but I didn’t do much good at it. I drove a homemade cross into the mound because it seemed like I probably should, and then we just stood there for a while and watched the sky turn smoky and red as the swollen sun dropped behind the hills.

In the blue twilight, Lush said, “I didn’t betray you, Kemp. I came to you because I wanted to. Because I didn’t think I could take it anymore.”

I didn’t answer her for a while. I was thinking about something Mama had said, about how we make our choices and how we have to abide by them. I didn’t know whether or not Lush was telling the truth, but I decided to believe her, partly because nobody else was left, but mostly because she was wearing that stupid mood shirt once again, and as I studied her in the falling light it seemed to me that it really had gone black with sorrow. It seemed as good a reason as any other, and I guess it still does because Lush and I, we’re together yet, and this all happened ten years ago, plus change.

That night Lush and I slept together in my narrow bed, but neither of us felt much like fucking, so we just laid there in one another’s arms. I suppose I cried some, and then we talked and before we knew what happened it had gotten so late that even the moon had fallen. We dozed off, but I grew restless toward dawn. I opened my eyes and watched the morning steal across her face, all restful-like. I could taste her breath, sour with sleep, but kind of sweet at the same time, and it occurred to me that the thing I was feeling right then was pretty fine, better maybe than fucking after all. Then Lush woke up, too, and tried to convince me otherwise, and my friends, I have to tell you, she just about persuaded me.

Afterward, I cleaned up in Mama’s bathroom. I was still feeling weird inside, the way I’d been feeling for nigh a week now, and I drifted into a kind of daze.

Lush found me there, just staring at my face in the mirror.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I told her, but actually I was wondering who I looked like. If I turned my head just right I could see a hint of Mama’s lean, thin-lipped features, but I could see a hint of someone else, too, some stranger looking back at me. I couldn’t say whether that was the daddy I hadn’t seen in six long years or whether it was the man I was turning out to be. It doesn’t matter, I suppose, because I won’t ever know the truth. Almost no one ever does.

It took us most of the day to finish up there. I used a sledgehammer to smash Mama’s computer equipment into little pieces, and then I crushed those pieces into smaller pieces still. We carried a bunch of stuff out to the humvee, and then we soaked down the house with more diesel fuel. I never thought I’d be sad to see the place go, but it was only the thought of BioGene drones combing through our lives that made me follow through and set the place alight. That’s the way Mama would have wanted it, I suppose.

After that we hit the growing sheds, using the last of the diesel from the wheezers to soak down the structures themselves, not to mention the bodies —

the restless, farting, brain-deprived bodies that Smee had never got to. That was hard to do, but it was harder still to set the things alight. The whole sky lit up red with flames as evening fell, and I stood by the last of the sheds for the longest time before I could bring myself to strike the match. And then I stood there a while longer and watched it burn. The bodies writhed as the fire devoured them, and the heat lunged out at me, and for the first time I had some doubts about the course I’d chosen. Slaves can always get their freedom, but the dead — well, they’re just dead, aren’t they?

I’m still thinking on that one, and I doubt I’ll ever really suss it out. But the bodies writhing as they burn — well, that’s an image that haunts my dreams even now. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it always did.

And then we were done.

Lush and I stowed the last of our salvage and then I wandered off a piece into the burning compound and stood there for a time, just trying to say good-bye. As I walked back to the humvee, I couldn’t help thinking of Mama’s words to me on the night Smee and Lush had first arrived. It wasn’t more than a week ago, but it felt like centuries.

Back then, I’d asked Mama if she ever longed to see the world, and what she’d said in response had puzzled me. I’ve seen it, Kemp, she’d told me. It’s overrated.

I didn’t have much doubt that she was right. But all the same, I thought, I probably ought to find out for myself.

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