Sadie Walker Is Stranded (35 page)

“Who’s first?” Cassandra asked. She made a soft, thoughtful sound, twisting her head to look at Teresa. The little girl had completely devoured Whelan’s tattoo.

“Sadie,” Whelan said hoarsely. More noise from the outside, most of it coming from the window behind me, but nothing I could make out. The gallons of blood thundering in my ears didn’t help. Whelan’s Adam’s apple dipped perilously behind the knife. “They’re soft … soft around the neck…”

The neck? I wasn’t exactly armed for a headshot and, hello, had he forgotten about the knife under his chin?

“You first, I think.” Cassandra said, clamping a hand down on Whelan’s shoulder. “You’ll be better company once you stop talking. You’ll be the daddy. Teresa needs a daddy.”

She pulled the knife away, showing it to me as she shuffled toward the end of Teresa’s chain, never putting her back to us. A shovel … I just
had
to bring a fucking shovel to a knife fight.

“Now,” Whelan said, risking one last try. “Now. The
neck
.”

Frantic, I did the first thing that came to mind. I wound up, hoping my sweaty hand would keep a decent grip, and let ’er rip. I think hurl is the right word, though there was really no technique to it. The shovel flew out of my hand like a javelin, nailing poor little Teresa in the throat. It didn’t quite sever her head, but it was enough to send Cassandra into a panicked flurry. She shrieked and whirled on Whelan, slashing at him with the knife. He threw his body weight to the side, hitting the ground with his injured arm and a short grunt of pain. But he was quick to toss his weight back the other way, rolling onto his and the chair’s back. He Van Damme kicked with both legs, catching Cassandra square in the stomach. She coughed, sputtered, clutching her gut as she reeled back against the far wall.

I saw the knife fall as if time had stopped altogether, watching it drop down toward Whelan’s face.

He dodged to the side at the last second, the blade twanging as it stuck in the floorboards beside his cheek.

Gunfire from outside, shouts, screams … Cassandra recovered from Whelan’s kick, spinning and disappearing out the doorway to her left. I darted forward, reaching the shovel first and the knife second.

“Go after her,” Whelan grunted, struggling with his bonds.

“Not without you.”

“Nice toss, by the way.”

“
Lucky
toss. I think you mean lucky…”

The house was suddenly filled with dragging footfalls and the droning song of the undead. I heard the back door bang on its hinges, the smell of decay preceding the zombies that Cassandra had let in through the back.

“Faster,” Whelan whispered as I sawed at the ropes. “
Much
faster…”

Even with the ropes off they were on us too quickly. The first one in the door almost made me forget to breathe. It was Danielle, her upper body little more than a ragged, oozing cavity. Someone had tried to put her shirt back on but it was only hanging on halfway, looped over her neck like a cowl.

“Holy shit,” Whelan hissed, backing up on the floor like a crab.

I stayed in a defensive crouch, jabbing at her with the shovel. Whelan had no useful range with the knife, and more flooded in behind Danielle. Teresa thrashed against the wall, her head hanging on by a few stringy sinews, her chain keeping her from joining the action. The smell of death, of rot, was overpowering as more and more creatures poured into the room. The shovel wasn’t enough, only long enough to keep them temporarily at bay.

“I’m sorry, Whelan,” I murmured behind a sudden sob.

“Don’t cry, babe. Not yet.”

“I can’t … h-help it … the
smell
.”

He laughed. It was sort of sweet, I thought, that we’d at least go down giggling madly. Not sweet, however, was the thought of leaving Shane to fend for himself. This wasn’t over. Not nearly.

I felt his breath on my neck and then a kiss beneath my jaw. “Friends?”

“Friends.”

The glass window above and behind us imploded from gunfire, glass raining down in sparkling shards. I tossed myself over Whelan, shielding his face from the glass. Most of it fell harmlessly onto my thick jacket; my leg wasn’t quite so lucky. The pain was intense and sudden, spearing up from my ankle. One of the bigger shards had fallen there and stuck. Blood brightened in a lobed flower from where the glass stuck out of my leg at a ninety-degree angle. I peered out from behind my arm, watching as Danielle rocked backward, rifle fire hitting her skull, shattering the bone and zipping through to the creature behind her.

“Get your asses out of there!” Banana yelled.

“My leg,” I muttered. “I don’t know how bad…”

Whelan leapt to his feet, bending down and scooping me into his arms before sprinting for the front door. “Oh, walk it off,” he mumbled, and I laughed, sniffling. Banana held the zombies back while we dashed out onto the porch. Shane had crouched down at Banana’s feet, covering his ears and scowling as she fired into the house.

“Andrea and Nate?” I asked, breathless.

I heard Whelan make a little grunt in his throat and then my leg erupted with another burst of pain. He had pulled the shard out of my leg.

“They’re looking for a way off this fucking place,” Banana yelled back. She had pulled down her bandana over her ears to muffle the noise.

Whelan set me down, but only briefly, ripping off a strip of the thermal shirt below my jacket. He looped it around my leg and pulled, making a quick tourniquet.

“Too tight,” I murmured dizzily.

“That’s the point.”

“You know the way back to your old boat?” Banana stopped firing, yanking Shane to his feet.

“Arturo’s? It’s beached,” I replied. Whelan tossed me back up into the cradle of his arms. “It’ll never get us out of here.”

“You got a better idea, baby cakes?” Banana replied.

Good point.

“I think I can get us there.”

“Show us the way,” Whelan added, shifting me into a more comfortable position.

“Shane,” I said, peering down at him as he sidled up to Whelan’s shin. “Stay close. You’ve got to stay close. Hold onto us, okay?”

He nodded. His chin quivered but he was trying to be strong. He was a fighter, and I was confident he had learned
that
from me.

We were no longer alone in the clearing. The trees seemed to come alive, the branches shivering and dancing as the undead dragged themselves out from behind the house and the surrounding woods. Those that Banana hadn’t managed to pick off in the house filtered out from the front door.

“I’ll cover us,” she said, waving. “Haul ass.”

“Shane, can you keep up?” Whelan asked, turning and striding toward the opposite side of the clearing.

“Yes.”

“Okay. You holler if we’re going too fast, understand?”

“Yes.”

Shane grabbed onto Whelan’s belt loops. Banana kept pace with us, popping off a few rounds every few feet to stop the closest zombies. Their stench and their howling followed. One voice was loudest, a human voice, screeching and wailing as we reached the other side of the clearing and ducked into the cover of trees.

“I swore,” I said softly, “to never end up in your arms like this again.”

Whelan laughed, pressing his nose into my temple. “Admit it—you don’t mind.”

“Not really, no.”

That’s one small step for feminism …

Fuck it. I really
didn’t
mind, not when we were struggling to outrun our deaths.

We wove through the trees, mindful of the poky underbrush and swooping branches. This was much less traveled than the sort of path between the camp and the blue house.

“What about Cassandra?” Banana asked. A
rat-cla-tac
of rifle fire came close on the heels of her question. Shane ran as hard as his legs would carry him, clutching Whelan’s belt loops.

“She’s ill,” I said. “Let her have her zombie paradise.”

“You serious? After everything she did?” Banana stopped, though Whelan didn’t seem to notice.

“We can’t go back, not now. Let’s just get out of here.”

“Sadie…”

“Listen, Banana.” I dug around in my back pocket, risking an uncomfortable fall to find the crusty key I had been given. I held it up until Banana began to walk again, trotting to catch up and see it. Shane gazed up from where he held onto Whelan’s belt. “Moritz gave me this. It’s the key to his vault in Seattle. I want to see what’s in it. I don’t want to die here.”

“Fuck,” Banana murmured, whirling to watch our retreat. A spray of glossy blond curls fell free of her bandana. “I liked that mousy little dude.”

“So did I.”

“I hate to break up the Kodak moment,” Whelan mumbled, “but we’ve got company up ahead.”

Banana breezed by, the shoulder of her sweatshirt slipping down as she lifted a low-hanging bough to survey the way forward. The leaves rattled; moaning that was almost certainly not Andrea and Nate drifting toward us from the direction of the water.

“Unless those two stopped for some afternoon delight…”

“No, Whelan,” I pointed. Wind and tide had pushed the ketch off the sand bar. So that was one thing going our way. There was the boat, its mast bobbing as it idled in the cove—a flash of blue, the water, and a shifting along the sand. Then gunfire—not ours, but Nate’s. “We’re almost there,” I added softly, sadly.

“Almost there,” Banana said, “and surrounded.”

Whelan pushed forward, through the trees, his arms squeezing around me more tightly as if in preparation for the trouble ahead. We burst through the edge of the forest, stumbling out into an embankment of pebbly sand that lead down a steep hill to the shore. The tide was high enough to cover most of the sand at the bottom of the embankment, allowing Arturo’s Ketch to find water. I shielded my eyes from the sun, staring at the Ketch, at Nate and Andrea on board and the ring of undead closing in on them. A few had peeled off, trying to climb up the embankment toward us. They clamored at roots and rocks, but none had actually managed to find their way up the hill.

“What now?” Banana asked, firing into the trees behind us. The groaning from that direction was growing disconcertingly near. My leg throbbed, numb now from the knee down.

“Go!” Whelan shouted, waving one hand when Nate and Andrea looked up at us. “Start out!”

“What are you doing? There are too many of them in the water.” Not that I had a better plan.

Even more undead crept up out of the water, foam streaming down off of their pale flesh and gleaming skulls as they alternately turned toward the boat in the shallows or us.

“Go!”

The Ketch teetered, the hull looking scratched and battered in places. The outboard motor sputtered, caught. Fuck. If they couldn’t get the motor going then there would be no possible way to get out of the cove—the mast was crooked, and might not fly a sail. The motor whirred again, clicking like an empty gun.

“Come on,” Whelan mumbled, glancing nervously over his shoulder. “We only get one chance at this…”

“They’re here,” Banana warned, firing into the trees again.

The motor purred to life, a cheer going up on the boat and on the embankment.

Whelan began gesturing to the north. On board, Nate and Andrea seemed to conference, then she went to steer the motor, guiding them down the beach while Nate continued firing at the undead from the deck.

“Here we go,” Whelan said, veering right and down the embankment. “Hold them off as best you can, Nan.” He knelt carefully, turning his back to Shane. “Hop on, bud.”

The way down was almost too quick to be nauseating, which was fortunate, because if Whelan had given me even the tiniest hint of what he was about to do, I probably would have choked him out rather than endure it.

He sprinted against the tree line and then toward the water, careening down the hill to the shore. It wasn’t as steep as the embankment, but it was steep enough to give me a heart attack. We gathered speed, Banana behind us, her gun silenced for the moment as she and Whelan concentrated on not plummeting straight into a zombie.

Which isn’t an exaggeration. We hit the bottom of the hill, and a zombie. Whelan kicked it in the jaw as it tried to scamper up out of the surf. Banana finished it off with a spray of bullets to the face. I listened to her change out the clip behind us as Whelan jogged down the beach, following the Ketch as it slowly slid south.

“We’re going to swim, aren’t we?” I asked.

“It’s going to sting your leg like hell,” he warned.

“I can do it.”

The undead that had followed us from the house reached the embankment. They slid willy-nilly down the hill, some of them losing their footing and tumbling like rag dolls down into the water. A few were so mangled by the fall that they simply stayed put, twitching and groaning. The others were luckier, joining their brethren down on the beach.

“Start swimming,” Banana grunted, slamming a fresh clip home. “I’ll give you a head start.”

“You’re coming with us,” Whelan replied curtly, wading out into the water.

“I know that, dummy. Don’t you think I know that?”

Wet, floating, I started to paddle, ignoring the persistent throb in my leg and the burning of the saltwater as it soaked the bandage and the fresh wound below. Whelan couldn’t have felt any better, his throat nicked and his arm slashed. I said nothing, fighting the little squeaks of agony that died in my throat on each stroke. Whelan swam closer, Shane on his back, and brushed a kiss across my cheekbone.

“Could be worse,” he said breathlessly. “Could be sea urchins.”

The boat drifted, less than half a mile from shore. It looked like an ungodly mess, that boat, but it was
our
ungodly mess and, more importantly, our one shot at escaping. Nate seemed to be watching us through the scope of the rifle, Andrea poised at the aft beside the motor.

Behind us, the rifle fire came in a constant, deafening stream. Banana taunted the undead as she mowed them down, laughing like some crazed Amazonian war goddess as she poured bullets into them. Each stroke began to hurt, the canoe paddling catching up to me, the lack of food catching up to me … Shit, damn near everything catching up to me. Whelan broke out ahead of me, a stronger swimmer even with Shane on his back.