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grass. I’d never be warm again, I’d never—I threaded my hands into my sleeves, sweatshirt fleece spotted and ruined with dog’s blood and mine, and cringing and shivering in all my love and fear, I turned around.
    Death can take on any face he wants, when he calls on you, the face of any dead person he’s already claimed as his. Gray hair, this time. Little wire-rimmed glasses. Khakis and neatly tucked-in flannel shirt, the clothes of a lab man heading out for field work. A nasty, torn-up nylon backpack, bulging and stained dark brown with something’s old blood, slung easy over one shoulder. He smiled at me and my skin went numb with the encroaching ice.
    “Hey, kiddo,” he said.
    Feeling your heart leap up and dance for someone you’d sworn to hate is like hurting so much you pass out, your own insides tormenting you into oblivion, and then getting hauled upright and forced awake so the torture can start all over again. His colorless eyes saw straight through me and into my jumped-up heart and my fingers were tinged blue; it wasn’t him doing that, this part of the world was well used to frost in May. I shoved my hands in my pockets and clenched my fingers, rubbing against the cloth to try and coax them back to life.
    “Hell of a greeting,” he said, “after so long away.”
    His voice had a weight that stretched out its softness, distorted it, like fistfuls of coins in a sock. “I called and called for you and you never came,” I said, backed against the warped desk drawer like he’d come for my papers, Amy’s papers. Like he gave a damn about things like that. “When I was younger, and they were still experimenting on me. After the plague, when I was the only one left here. After I started our experiments again. All that time.” I laughed. “We’re getting rid of you, that’s the whole point. We’re figuring out how to control when life ends, how to keep folks from dying at all. And I, me, I’ve found out how to make it happen, what the real secret is to cheat death—and it’s right here, on this beach. It’s right here. So I don’t need you anymore.”
    He was standing across the room and then suddenly he was right next to me, inches away, and I never saw him move. Nose to nose, no human breath from him to warm my freezing face, and his raised-up hands didn’t touch me but somehow I still went stumbling backwards grabbing at the air, clutching the desk for balance as he pulled the broken drawer out so smooth and light. He didn’t touch my papers but they spilled out anyway, of their own accord, fluttering all over the floor in a dry drifting snow.
    “Well?” he said, and slammed the drawer shut so hard the whole desk, my arms gripping it, shuddered. “Aren’t you happy you’ve got your Friendly Man back? Here-boy good-boy coming running whenever you want him?” Smiling, smiling wider, his words a throaty hiss. “Baby cried and cried for papa, now baby’s got him back.”
    This wasn’t his house, he couldn’t talk to me like this. This was my house, all my laboratory now. He’d always been so nice to me before. “I told you, I know what you’re about.” Stronger, louder than that, dammit, Grandma who ran all the scientific testing on me always said to straighten up and look people in the eye. I’m using my loudest straighten-up voice right now and I still sound like a weak little girl. “I know what your secret is, I know why this beach is so important to you. We found it, all of us here, the lab found out how to control life and death. It’s right here in the sands. I’ve killed two people, with my own hands, and brought them back alive. I don’t need you anymore—”
    “Baby’s got papa back and if she’s very, very good, he’ll swear never, ever to leave her again, no matter what she does. Isn’t that just what you always wanted, deep down in your rotten dragged-back stinking dead insides? Or maybe there’s some second thoughts now, rattling around that tiny