Sadie Walker Is Stranded (26 page)

“Yeah, okay, creepy as it is, I prefer Andrea’s theory.” And I did. But I couldn’t help but glance around, thinking suddenly that there might actually be a murderer in our midst. It wasn’t impossible—the girls go missing and then Cassandra. But why?

Mmhmm. As if unrepentant psychopaths need a reason.

Craning my neck, I peered into the bowels of the shed and caught a glimpse of rough black skull. Chills. Chills, I tell you. I wish I were being flip.

I felt a tiny hand slip into mine. Shane. I knelt and pulled him up into my arms, ignoring the strain in my biceps that reminded me I wasn’t exactly in shape for hefting a young child around. He curled into my neck, his breath warm and almost comforting.

“It might be Cassandra,” I told him in a whisper. “But we’re not sure.”

He nodded, his curls brushing against my ear.

“Nate and I will pull her out of there, somebody start digging a grave for her. We need to restock. Anybody good with a rod should hit the docks and see what they can fish up.” Whelan delegated with a slight hunch to his shoulders, a heaviness that told me he felt responsible for this loss too.

Stefano and Noah volunteered to dig while Moritz hung around in his shirtsleeves to help Nate and Whelan dismantle the shed without it destroying the burned body inside. That left Andrea, Shane and—goody—Danielle to do the fishing. Andrea dawdled at the fire pit making coffee for us. She hated fishing, calling it “the favored pastime of narcoleptics and hoboes,” but I got the impression she preferred it to pulling charred bone matter out of a charred maze of oozing bean cans and ashen fish carcasses.

Danielle, still pink and bottle-tan and smelling strongly of freesia even at the fucking crack of dawn, sat an insultingly safe distance away on the dock, dangling her legs over the edge. Familiar with the sensation of having a zombie tug on my feet, I kept my legs crossed and instructed Shane to do the same. Ah hell, Whelan was right. Danielle might have made questionable choices when it came to her plastic surgeons, but she didn’t deserve my disdain or my suspicion. Not yet.

And, after all, she wasn’t the yellow hat. There wasn’t even a reason to be catty.

“You might want to pull your legs up,” I ventured, clearing my throat when it came out all froggy. “They can come up out of the water.”

There. Now do I get my fucking gold star for maturity?

“Oh, duh,” she said, mimicking a little punch to the side of her head. Sighing, she rearranged her legs, sitting with them slightly to the side. “I guess I blocked that.”

“S’okay.”

“I shouldn’t have blown up at you like a tard. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me too. We’re all … feeling it.”

“Cassie really liked you and Shane,” Danielle said after a brief silence. I heard the soft
bloop
of Shane dropping his line into the water. I watched closely for any unwanted faces lurking beneath the surface. “She said he was the perfect little boy.”

“I should have tried harder with her,” I said. Shane listened, silently, not even looking up as his name was mentioned. “I thought giving her space was the right thing but … fuck me, dude, I didn’t know how to handle her. She just … seemed like a time bomb.”

“The shelter I fled to after The Outbreak had a lot of girls like her. I was kinda like her once—shut up, clammed up, all crazy and paranoid and still hating everything. I guess I got used to it or maybe I just give off some weird vibe.” Danielle shifted, her sweats scraping quietly across the untreated wood. She must have flipped her hair, because another little waft of freesia rolled over us. “Cassie said she lost kids. That must have … God, that must have really fucking
sucked
.”

Indeed.

“Maybe it’s not her,” I said, trying to lighten the dour mood. Disturbingly enough, that was happening with troubling frequency recently. “Maybe some zombie wandered through the camp pit, set herself on fire and then tumbled into the shed and … stayed there.”

Danielle giggled. “You’re funny.”

“It wasn’t a joke.”

Nope, just wishful thinking. Again.

“Whelan said you were funny,” Danielle replied, a hitch in her voice. “And I thought he was stupid or making fun of me, I don’t know, I got fucked up over the girls. We were all a little cray-cray.”

Mm, yes. Real cray-cray.

Even footsteps echoed down the planks, a rich coffee perfume preceding Andrea’s late but most welcome arrival. My stomach greeted her, trumpeting my hunger and my resounding love of the roasty, bitter morning juice cradled in her hands.

“Enjoy it,” Andrea said, setting down the tin kettle between Danielle and me. “Only one canister survived and that’s because I was a forgetful moron and left it outside in the sand.”

“Thank God for your lazy ass,” I mumbled, diving into the coffee. And then later, when the initial joy wore off and the chatter simmered to nothing but a few quiet sighs over our cups, I asked, “So were the girls Stefano’s or…?”

“No,” Danielle said, her little girl voice dropping down to a restive whisper. “His cousins. Like, Shane isn’t your boy, right? I mean he’s yours, but he’s not like, your son…”

“He’s my nephew.”

“Yeah. Like that.”

“Teresa could still be out there,” I said. Andrea nudged my back and gave one of those frosty looks that were meant to scorn you into ashamed silence. It wasn’t worth fighting over and I wasn’t trying to reopen old wounds. She really could be alive, or worse, she was undead and wandering around like that. The right thing to do was to find her, rescue her or take her down. Even just one less zombie was one less body hunting us down.

“I’ve got something,” Danielle said, the water splashing below her as she tugged and reeled. Look, first I should just say that you would be distracted too if you were having heaven-sent coffee and trying to enjoy the company of your friends after a scary, unsettling morning. That’s my excuse for why I didn’t see it earlier. But then Danielle screamed and all of us leaped to our feet, the rod clutched in both her hands as she leaned far back. Surprisingly, the insane weight of her tits didn’t wrench the zombie clear up and out of the water—which was extremely lucky, because I didn’t like the idea of some big, wet undead
thing
soaring up out of the surf and wriggling around like a brain-starved orca on the dock.

The hook had caught on the zombie’s eyehole, and I’m sure there’s a scientific, less vulgar way to say that, but I’m not sure what it is. So we’re going with eyehole. Andrea shrieked, pushing Shane back toward the land. He got the idea, fleeing down the dock as fast as his little feet would carry him.

“Let go!” Andrea was screaming. “Let go of the fucking rod!”

But Danielle must have been really damn attached to that rod or paralyzed with shock, because she held on tight. One hand and then two appeared on the boards at her feet, gnarled, white, slivers of bone peeking through the decaying flesh. I stomped. While Andrea tried to pry Danielle away from the fishing rod and the edge of the dock, I went for the knuckles, yelping every time the heavy work boot came down and the bottom of my foot banged against the unforgiving sole.

If it wasn’t fucking zombies in the woods or zombies in the water, it was zombies on the dock.
I have had it with these motherfucking zombies on this motherfucking island.
Despicable reference aside, I think I’d really actually deal with snakes on a plane than a zombie period.

It became a sort of morbid dance—Danielle jumping up and down frantically, squealing while Andrea ripped at the rod and I switched from the scrabbling, bony hands to the now emerging skull, more or less curb stomping the thing while trying not to die from the pain shooting up my leg. Fear and pain mixed, firing up my heart rate until
that
was painful too. And the hook dislodged, helpfully, allowing Danielle and Andrea to reel back, nearly toppling off the other side of the dock as they were suddenly let free. All in all it involved an embarrassing amount of shrieking and ended with the work boot splattered in goo, shards of skull imbedded in the all-terrain treads.

Breathless, in agony, still doing internal somersaults from sheer shock, I hardly registered when Whelan and Nate came thundering up the dock together to see what all the commotion was about. I’m told they found me sitting on the ground, shaking, staring blankly at the destroyed head still on the dock and the arms and legs of the zombie twitching as its gray matter dripped down off my boot.

“I think I ruined these boots,” is the first thing I remember saying. Spilled coffee seeped into the wood near my hand.

“Aaand up we go,” Whelan mumbled, pulling me up by the armpits. “If I didn’t know better,” he said in a private undertone, slinging an arm under my shoulders and helping me hobble down the planks toward shore, “I’d say you were
trying
to keep those feet mangled just to have a reason to shove them in my face.”

“There will be no shoving, sir,” I whimpered, “no shoving of any kind.”

“Tender feets?”

“Mildly put, yes.”

“Thank you for helping Danielle,” he said. The hand against my right side squeezed in a sort of hug. The volcanic level of heat radiating off of his body was number three on my list of priorities, right after
ouch
and
yeesh
.

“It was my pleasure,” I wheezed.

“Yeah, I know it wasn’t. You didn’t have to do that.” His arm slid lower, to my hip, squeezing me there too.

“Yes,” I said, losing sensation in my right foot. “I did.”

FIFTEEN

Submitting to bed rest must be what a decorative throw-pillow feels like.

People start to treat you like vaguely amusing scenery. Oh, look, the settee is talking again! Which summarizes most of the next day—I wasn’t allowed to move much, my right foot banished of all footwear except for Whelan’s expertly applied bandages. I had at least one victory to gloat about—I had sworn not to end up carried in his arms again and had returned to the cabin on my own two feet. Hobbling on them, sure, but upright, which is the important part. (I maintain that the piggyback ride he gave me through the woods was spent on his
shoulders
and therefore does not technically qualify as being carried.)

Andrea helped me move from the cabin to the dreary, overcast clearing to stand with the others while they put what was left of Cassandra into a shallow grave. Whelan had been saddled with the unpleasant task of removing her head from her skeleton, a paranoid but thoughtful measure to make sure Cassandra didn’t rise again. Danielle assured us it was Cassie—she recognized a few scraps of pink T-shirt and insisted this was evidence enough. It was good enough for the rest of us, who didn’t want to admit that there was too little left to make an accurate identification.

Danielle did most of the talking, telling us that Cassandra was shy and troubled, but loved children. Nothing was said about the grisly way in which she had gone or her possible motivations for going all Human Torch on the food bin. I suggested we bury her carpet bag and old bloody scrubs with her but Whelan wasn’t thrilled about the idea of letting anything, even dirty old clothes, go to waste.

Everyone threw a bit of sand onto her corpse and waited while Nate and Whelan refilled the grave. Shane clung to my hand, giving a short pull. When I glanced down he was staring fixedly at the tree line. Then he pointed, indicating a moving shape in the canopy of trees. It was too dark to make out, but the lumbering stance made me think our watchers were already dead. Why they didn’t leave the safety of the woods and come for us left me shifty and nervous. It wasn’t like a zombie to pass up a chance at a meal. We were armed and could’ve easily defended ourselves, but still … why wait like that?

Whelan seemed to shrink when I explained later what I’d seen. “I’ll take a second watch,” he said, “I’m not sure what else we can do.”

The rest of that cruddy day was devoted to restocking the fish and clam supply. But we were having bad luck—first with Danielle’s unfortunate catch and then with a general lack of fish altogether. Whelan made assurances that it would get better and that if it didn’t he would take the rifle into the forest and rustle up some game. It was odd, I decided, to be taken care of. I wasn’t used to that. When it was just me out on my own I looked after myself, and then after The Outbreak it was me looking after Shane until Carl came along. It made all those organizations, all those whacko clubs and factions that sprung up more understandable. The Repops were crazy town, but I’m sure the feeling of a shared purpose made surviving each day easier. The few churches left standing in Seattle were flooded every Sunday, and other denominations not lucky enough to have a physical building would congregate in empty lots and pray over a shabby wooden cross or simply stand in a circle holding hands and praying. Having someone reliable and capable there to take charge and declare that everything would be all right made it seem, improbably, like it really would be. And quite possibly Shane thought of me that way. Oh lordy—no pressure.

Staring at the mounding sand and dirt, sand and dirt that soon turned into a legitimate grave site, I remembered that first instance of not-giving-a-fuckitis. It’s a common condition these days, the morose but ultimately numb sensation of just not caring. You know you should, you know that the mound in front of you holds a dead human body and that tears should be screaming down your face like coaster cars down Wild Thing, but they’re not. And you don’t know why. And it’s jarring and then flat-out scary. I didn’t know Cassandra. Pretending I did, pretending I knew more beyond “she was a nurse and she liked kids and had a thousand-yard stare” would be a lie. Everyone there, except Danielle, was feeling it too. Shane was the next closest to showing some raw empathy, but I suspect that’s only because of his uncanny ability to look severe and reflective at even the most lighthearted of moments.

Shiff, sheef, shiff …
Sand and dirt, then the thump of the shovels flattening and compacting the earth. Nothing. Not a single tear, and this coming from the person that still, as an adult woman, cried every single time she watched
Homeward Bound
. I swear I’m not callow, none of us are, but we had all seen so many strangers and brief acquaintances go to their doom that it just didn’t strike anymore. Heart strings that were once catgut are now hardened iron and you began to wonder just what it would take to make you human and emotional again.