Lucy shook her head. “Nothing like that. Nothing that would ever make it into a history book.”
“Then what happened to you? Tell me.”
“You sure you want to see?”
Vern would always prefer a difficult truth to an easy lie. “Please.”
Lucy faded away, only to return in a flash in a new set of clothes, a backpack over her shoulders, a smile on her face as she ran back past Vern toward the Cainland gates. This wasn’t Lucy-Lucy. This was a haunting proper. A memory.
Lucy cast a glance backward when she heard something behind her. Her father was there. Lucy’s face fell, caught, and she catapulted herself toward the gate, trying to outrun him. Her father gave chase, snatching her by the back of her collar when he caught up to her and sending her to the ground.
This part Vern closed her eyes for, knowing where it would lead. She could not watch as Lucy’s father killed her, could not watch him land a blow against a soft part of her head. Could not watch him cry once he’d realized what he had done, sobbing over her corpse, begging her to wake up as if it weren’t him who put her to sleep for good. He buried her in a shallow grave near the woods like that was a kindness, even though he’d stolen the future she was supposed to have with her mother off the compound.
Lucy had never left. That last night she’d had with Vern, the both of them eating that cake before Lucy’s dad came and dragged her away, was her last night altogether. It wasn’t even Cainland that had killed her. It was her dad, the same dad she’d’ve had anywhere else.
“Don’t get too weepy,” said Lucy. “Like I said before, I like living in you.”
28
VERN’S MIRACLES up to now had been happenstance. She’d snapped the straps that bound her to Cainland. She’d walked ten days straight carrying her babes, no sleep, no rest. She’d survived the cold. She’d healed herself, and Gogo, too. By accident, she’d learned the extent of her abilities.
The next thing she’d do would be purposeful, she decided. I know everything, Vern, and so do you, Lucy had said.
“I don’t know if we have any reason to believe it will work,” said Gogo. “The science doesn’t necessarily make sense.”
“There’s no reason to believe I should exist at all,” Vern said, squeezing Gogo’s hand. This was beyond medicine or science. Life couldn’t be broken into discrete parts and studied like counters in a child’s math toy. It felt to Vern like the whole universe was inside of her. Whatever this fungus was, she couldn’t say for sure it was from this realm, bound by its physics.
Vern could do more than destroy. She could do more than kill. She could heal. And she could bring the people inside her hauntings to life.
If that was the case, maybe she could make them flesh and blood.
It was morning on the former compound of the Blessed Acres of Cain, and everything was ready. Bridget had come in the wee hours with the children, and Gogo had forced Vern to eat a small breakfast. She was prepared as she ever was going to be to face the bodies in broad daylight.
Journalists roamed the area, but Vern had made it clear that there would be no police and no military. Those who tried to test her were warned violently not to do so again, and heeded. She didn’t know how long they’d give her carte blanche, but when they stopped, she’d be ready with a defense, an army. Gogo would help her build it.
Last night, a reporter interviewing her had asked if she thought she should be arrested and face charges and a trial. Vern had said, “Why should I, when they never would?” Then, on live television, she declared war against all that was.
Gogo had taken solace in the fact that the tragedy at least had been recorded. It would not be able to be buried. But that didn’t matter to Vern. The United States was a catalogue of known wrongs. Cainland was just another Tulsa, another Operation Paperclip, another Tuskegee. Who cared who knew if the knowing didn’t prevent future occurrences?
Gogo didn’t disagree, of course, but she would always be a woman who appreciated history, who found value in the keeping of it.
“You ready?” asked Gogo. Vern walked over to her.
A medical team sorted the bodies, identifying them, zipping Cainites into black bags. Carmichael looked like a full-grown man, big as he was, his glasses on, holes in his forehead.
“I need you all to leave,” said Vern to the milling paramedics, walking to her mother’s corpse. She touched her hand to Ruthanne’s forehead, though that didn’t seem a necessary part of making her plan work. It felt like the right thing to do, though. Touch was essential. It was how she and the mycelia communicated.