Beach Blanket Bloodbath (Amanda Feral Book 4) (10 page)

“Yes?” Gil said.

“I think better lubricated. We’ll check
into the inn and grab a drink.”

“Umm.” Gil shrugged. “Does this place
have wi-fi?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“Then, I’ll probably turn in for a bit
and then meet you later. I need to check on...something.”

Wendy scoffed. “He needs to see if anyone’s
sending him dick pics.” She twisted in her seat, throwing her arm around the
headrest. “The answer is: obviously. Even vampires are still just men. Cell
phone cameras were invented for you to take pictures of your junk. At this
point, they’ve all blurred together haven’t they? Just one long dick.”

Gil crossed his arms over his chest. “There
are subtle nuances.”

“Bullshit,” I said, laughing. “Cut.
Uncut. Long, short, fat, pencil-thin. Whatever. The problem is that they’re
usually attached to an asshole.”

“How about you?” I nudged Wendy. “I know
you’re up for a drink.”

She shook her head no.

“No?” I shuddered. Something was wrong
with my alcoholic world. “What?”

Her eyes widened to pissed-off saucers. “I
said, no.”

I glanced in the floorboard. Sure enough.
She’d eaten another of the Twix bars...so quickly I hadn’t even noticed. I
shook my head slowly. This was not going to end well.

The blacktop of Ocean Lane gave way to
gravel and sand, I didn’t notice the sharp tings and knocks battering the
undercarriage of the Volvo until a particularly large stone hit and the sound echoed
around inside forcing a blood-curdling scream from Wendy, who slammed on the
phantom brakes in the footwell of the passenger side, which caused me to
reflexively do the same until the SUV had sunk half a foot into the sand.

The wheels spun and spun.

“Really?” I glanced outside into a nighttime
that was much darker than Seattle ever was. No aura of artificial light. No
street lamps. Moonless.

Gil scrunched up between the seats,
scowling. “Why did you do that?”

“Wendy startled me.”

“I thought someone was shooting at us, of
course!”

“Out here?” Gil glanced around, a pale fog
bunting the windows. “In the middle of Bumfuck, Washington?”

“Does that happen to you a lot?” I asked.
“Gunfights?”

“Not as often as it should,” Gil snipped
from the backseat.

Wendy huffed and I hit the gas again only
to spin in the sandy divots of a rash decision.

“We’re stuck,” I said, grumbling. “Why
don’t you send your maid out to shove a board under the tire?”

“I am not a maid!” Abuelita shouted,
rolling up her telenovella magazine into a bat and lunging to whack me upside
the head.

Deflecting the assault with a wave of my
hand, I glared at Wendy. “You better call her off before I have a Panamanian
dinner.”

Abuelita pursed her lips and wound her
hands beneath her armpits, mumbling Spanish curses like a machine gun. I found
it best to ignore her when she went off like that for absolutely no reason, trying
to figure her out was as difficult as making sense of the character dressed as
a bee on those shows she watched incessantly in Wendy’s living room—seriously
and what’s up with the fake beauty marks? Those shows would lead anyone to
believe that there’s a mole epidemic in Mexico.

A facial blemish apocalypse.

While they are, without question, a
delicious people, their taste in TV is suspect.

“Stop it!” Wendy spat, glaring at me and
then behind her. “Both of you! I don’t want my two best friends fighting. You’ll
have to figure out a way to get along.”

“Wait,” Gil said, head cocking to one
side. “Two? Amanda and I aren’t fighting.”

She soured. “I meant Abuelita and Amanda,
you’ve been demoted, ever since…”

“Here we go,” I said, leaning into my
palm.

Wendy gripped the dash and sighed, long
and hard—too hard. Her breath turned to a milky fluid that hung in the
air, tentacles reaching around her head, zeroing in on Abuelita. The woman,
used to Wendy’s careless expulsion of zombie toxin, and already quite infected,
bit off some more of the zombie-making breath in big chomping bites. She might
not be a maid, but she was a made-in waiting. When she finally died, she’d
unfortunately join us for eternity, or until she couldn’t afford to keep her
body intact. Then she’d just fall apart and that’d be that. That she continued
to inhale the stuff was just plain weird. There wasn’t a viral load that would
make her a super-zombie or anything.

It was just wasteful.

I rolled down the window and waved the
thinning mass of breath out of the car like a haze of pot smoke before it
reached Gil’s undead lungs and embolized quicker than a stake through his
heart.

“Just keep it to yourself,” I said,
patting her thigh. “You do not want us to talk about that.”

Wendy sneered at him and I was certain
she was about to explode and blurt out her suspicions of Gil’s involvement in
her expulsion from the Undead Roller Derby League. Never mind the fact that she
never once left the bench because, honestly, if she couldn’t manage to operate
the four wheels on a car, how was she going to manage eight? Plus, I saw her
audition and she only did it because she’d had her thighs worked on at the
Reaper Clinic and wanted to show them off in satin short shorts.

I pushed open the door and sank my
red-soled Louboutin Pigalle Platos into the loose surface of the lane. We were
fucked for transport. The right rear tire was sunk so far into the sandy road
the fender had dug in.

“We’re going to have to leave it here and
go by foot.”

“And we hate that.” Wendy bristled.

“Yes. Let this be a reminder that if we
ever want to get anywhere, it’s best to have you sitting where you can do the
least damage.”

“At home?” Gil suggested.

“I didn’t have an actual brake, so…this
is all you.”

I waved her off.

While neither taxing nor nearly as fraught
with danger as their experience in the alley, the walk to the inn was
nonetheless annoying, but that had more to do with the luggage cutting grooves
in the sand behind them as though they were dragging their dead pets. Rolling
bag my ass. The wheels were as useless as a dramatic plastic surgery reveal
without a reality show to capitalize.

Ocean Lane dwindled to a beach path
surrounded by the sharpest pampas grass known to man. Once we’d battled our way
through it, the blades snagging on every piece of fabric and thankfully not my
flesh, it opened back up to reveal our lodgings.

So to speak.

I’d expected a manor befitting the name
Bed and Breakfast and not a fifties Ranch-style house that seemed to teeter atop
the grassy dunes that lined the windbreak off the wide beach. But sure enough,
a sign grew out of a dense patch of dying pampas grass.

The Dunes of Hazard Bed and Breakfast.

“Do you think that’s a reference to that
show about the hicks with Boss Hogg?” I asked, tossing a thumb in the sign’s
direction.

“Maybe?” was the consensus, though it
didn’t seem likely. What kind of a person named their business after a crappy
TV show?

Abuelita squeezed in between us, an even sourer
arch to her Sharpie-d chola brow. “I seen this kind of place on the TV,” she
said, pointing a crooked finger at the squatty B and B. “Gypsy family lives
there, twenty or thirty, maybe more, sleeping on floors and using basement for
combing out dirty stuffed animals they get from garage sales and dumpsters to
put in those claw machines. Kids say ‘I want to play claw, Mommy! Stuffed
animals are so cute!’” Abuelita paused to meet each of their eyes dramatically
before proclaiming, “End up with scabies.”

“Can’t be,” Wendy said, scanning the
yard. “I don’t see any goats.”

“Terrifying.” I yawned. “Skin conditions
are no joke. Huh, Wendy?”

“Shut up.”

The first thing I noticed about The Dunes
of Hazard’s owner, Mrs. Winterford, wasn’t her disability—the wheelchair
seemed more accessory than necessity—it’s that she lounged in it tragically
like a Victorian heroine, clutching her pearls, twirling them, as though caught
mid-stretch from the couch, reaching for a bon bon. The kind of woman who’d say
something like, “Could you just scoot those hard candies over a smidge? Cheers.
Thanks.”

The chair was electric and she operated
it with a glittery knob that she barely touched, poking it with the tip of her
finger as if she were waking a hobo on a bench. The contraption lurched backward.

“Right this way,” she said, eying each of
us curiously.

I shuffled in, careful not to get too
close to the treachery of her wheels.

“I’m Mrs. Marissa Winterford, of course.”
Her accent was southern and the face powdered white with three spots of red,
two pats on the cheeks and a smear on the lips. Strange but oddly familiar as
though I’d only recently been in her presence. She spread her arms wide as if a
round of hugs were in order.

They most definitely were not, so I shot
a hand out instead and she took it with a gracious suspicion. “Well, bless your
heart,” she said, pulling me down to her traveling boudoir and wrapping me in a
shriveled embrace. “You must be Amanda. I would have thought you’d arrive much
earlier.”

She leaned in even closer to my ear to
whisper, “You made me miss my pageant.”

That was it. I’d seen the woman in the
crowd outside the Felicity, busily jotting notes. I’d assumed she was a cub
reporter, or whatever the elderly equivalent was. Nag, perhaps. But here she
was chiding me for my lack of timeliness. What reason would she have to lie? A
better question was, why was she doing it from the comfort of an electric
wheelchair when clearly she was ambulatory? Laziness?

I decided it would be best to keep quiet
about her whereabouts since I didn’t have anywhere else to rest my rotting
corpse than her—hopefully—fresh sheets. Plus, maybe it was just one
of the old lady’s quirks, like how Gil sometimes spritzes his victim’s necks
with Formula 409 before he bites them.

“Oh. I’m terribly sorry,” I lied. “Wendy
back there had some intestinal issues that forced us to stop every few miles
and find a potty. I’m sure you understand.”

She hadn’t, of course. Not yet. But I’d
heard gurgling.

Wendy’s hand went to her stomach
suddenly, reminded of her liaison with the human candy making its way toward
the racetrack of her intestines. Her face took on the seething glower of the
recently convicted and, for once, I couldn’t take any pleasure in it.
The Twix
had been pure absentminded autopilot, the kind of thing I'd done hundreds of
times. A cruelty we shared for laughs. Well mostly it was me that laughed, but
you get the gist.

I was
reminded of my mother then and her accusation that I’d be the worst possible
friend. Was I? Was I still? It seemed the last few years as a zombie had been an
education in how to get along. Sure there’d been backsliding. I don’t always
enjoy the company of others, but how do you tell someone that? I found it best
to mock them incessantly until they achieved a healthy distance.

It just
never worked with Wendy or Gil. Again, too similar, I guess.

Mrs. Winterford threw up her hands in
sympathy. “Dear God, do I ever? Poor child. I’m lactose intolerant as the day
is long. And damn it if that stuff isn’t hidden away in everything that’s delicious.
You’re telling me there’s milk in a damn scone? God bless it.” She rolled
passed and wrapped Wendy up in her clutches. She brought her inside by the hand,
Wendy sneering the whole way and stumbling to avoid track marks across her tiny
feet.

 
The foyer door opened into a living room that hadn’t seen a
decorator since disco was young. A tired and saggy sectional sat in a sunken
conversation pit accessed by a short flight of stairs and surrounding a fire
orange metal fireplace that fed smoke through the vaulted ceiling through a
shiny pipe all lit by a spray of gigantic glass dandelions. The only thing the
room was missing was a gaggle of porn actors and actresses, that hard-working
dick and poon obscured by enough pubic hair to rid the world of childhood
propecia.

“You like?” Mrs. Winterford grinned with
pride.

Gil was first to respond. He lumbered in,
gaze nostalgic and a smile creeping onto his lips that told me he was reliving
a “moment.” “You’ve really captured a moment in time here, Mrs. Winterford.”

“We used to have some pretty wild times
here at the Dunes.”

“Which reminds me,” I said. “How did you
get the name for the place?”

“Hazard was my late husband’s name. Messy
business, Richard Hazard. Met his end right out there on the beach, all we found
were the lower plate of his dentures. A couple of months later, his feet showed
up in British Columbia. Still in the goddamn shoes. No one knew what to make of
it. But I did.”

She scrabbled away to a nearby bookshelf
and retrieved a dusty hardcover book which she wiped against her polyester
pants. I reached out to accept it.