“Addis,” she says, looking her brother in the eyes. “Mom and Dad left because they couldn’t take care of us. It was hard to find enough food and they wanted drugs and we were slowing them down, so they left.”
Addis stares at her. “Didn’t they care what happened to us?”
“Maybe they cared a lot. Maybe they were really sad about it.”
“But they still did it.”
“Yeah.”
“They left ‘cause they cared more about food and drugs than us. ‘Cause staying with us was hard.”
Nora winces a little but doesn’t back down. “Well…yeah. Pretty much.”
Addis looks at the ground, his face slowly tensing into a scowl. “Mom and Dad are bad people.”
She begins to worry. Is this right? Should a seven-year-old be swallowing a truth this jagged?
“Good people care more about people than food,” he mutters. “They try to help people and don’t give up even when they get hungry.” There is a strange intensity in his voice. His child falsetto sounds lower, rougher. “Only bad people give up.”
“Addis…” she says uneasily. “Mom and Dad are f**ked up and selfish but they’re not ‘bad people.’ There’s not really such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people, there’s just like…humanity. And it gets broken sometimes.”
“But good people fix things. Good people stay good even when it’s hard to.” He is gripping the railing so tightly his brown knuckles have turned white. His face is filling with a rage Nora has never seen before. “Even if they’re sick or sad or they have to lose their favorite stuff. Even if they have to die.”
“Addis—”
“Good people see past their own f**king lives.”
Nora freezes and her eyes go wide. The air around her feels strange.
“They aren’t just hunger and math. They aren’t just animals.”
She grabs her brother’s shoulder and tries to pull him away from the railing but his muscles are stiff as wood.
“Good people are part of the Higher,” he says in that deep growl, and for a brief moment, Nora swears the color of his eyes is changing. “Good people are fuel for the sun.”
“Addis!” she shrieks and shakes him hard.
He turns and frowns at her. “What?”
His eyes are brown. His voice is mousy. The faint rustle of wind in the trees reclaims the night, muffled by the blood throbbing in her ears.
“What…what were you just saying?”
He turns his sullen gaze back to the moon. “Mom and Dad are mean.”
Nora stares at the joint in her fingers. Addis reaches for it and she reflexively flicks it off the balcony.
“Why’d you do that?” he whines, frowning at her. “It made me feel really good.”
“I don’t think it’s…” She’s too rattled to finish. She shakes her head. “No more.”
“Fine.”
They both study the moon, Addis pouting, Nora wondering where the cop got this baggie and if perhaps there were a few other spices mixed into those herbs. That eerie sensation of charged air is gone now, leaving only the familiar fog of a standard high. She settles into it, trying to erase the image of her brother’s eyes flashing like two gold rings in the moonlight.
She aims her flashlight at the moon. She imaginen. trying to s her beam touching its powdery deserts and takes some whimsical comfort from the thought. A small taste of escape from this awful place. Then she swings the beam back to Earth, and it glints off the silver eyes of a rotting bald giant.
She manages not to drop the flashlight and stifles most of her scream. The man is standing in the middle of the yard looking dumbly up at her, his eyes unsquinting in the flashlight’s beam.
“I told you to leave us alone,” she says in a shaky whisper.
The man makes no response. Just stares. He has barely rotted at all since his death. He is grey all over, but the only other sign of decay is his lips, which have gone from full and sensuous to blue and slightly shriveled. It’s a shame. They were his best feature.
“Nora?” Addis says, his eyes wide with fear.
“It’s okay,” she says, scanning the yard with her flashlight and running mental checks on all the doors. “We’re safe up here.” She shines the light back into the big man’s eyes like a cop interrogating a suspect. “Where’s the new guy?” she yells at him in her toughest cop-voice, trying to force some steel into her nerves.
The man looks over his shoulder; Nora follows his gaze with her light and notices the top of a head peeking over the wall of shrubbery that surrounds the fence. She can’t help a little chuckle.
“What’s with him? Shy?”
“Nora…” Addis whimpers, tugging on her shirt.
“I told you it’s okay, Addy, they can’t get up here. Hey,” she calls to the big man. “Where’s your girlfriend?”
He raises his arm and points at the sky.
Nora looks up, frowns, looks back at him. “What’s that mean?”
He continues to point.
“She’s flying?”
He lowers his arm, raises it again.
“Maybe he means she went to Heaven,” Addis offers.
“Do you mean she died?” Nora asks the man.
He lowers his arm and makes no further comment.
“Well hey, I’m real sorry for your loss, but go the f**k away. We’re not letting you eat us.”
He doesn’t respond for a moment, then a low moan rises in his throat. The tone is unmistakably mournful, so resonant with despair it makes Nora shiver. When she shines her light into his eyes she sees pain, and it disturbs her in a way she can’t explain. She feels an urge to comfort him. She remembers all the pamphlets she’s read, the stories on the news and the warnings from her parents telling her what these creatures are. The tests done on them, declaring them nothing more than corpses experiencing bizarrely prolonged death spasms. But looking into this corpse’s eyes, she can see that there’s a man in there. And he’s suffering.