The Resurrected Compendium (20 page)

He slumped to the side far enough that she could get from beneath him. Nastiness ran down her face, and when she swiped it she could see it was blood and that black goop. Ty’s head was like a broken beehive full of honeycomb, except instead of dripping honey and wax there was splintered bones, gray matter, blood and spongy material, all infiltrated with that black mess.
 

He wasn’t dead.

Or maybe he was dead, he had to be dead, but he was still moving. Like Sheila, the human part of him had gone away but something remained. Ty had no face, nothing but a hollow where eyes, nose and mouth had been, and still he moved. Grabbed and clutched. His fingers barely missed her as she leaped out of they way.
 

She leaped over his outstretched legs. During the storm, the cabin had been wrecked, cabinets opened and the contents broken. She didn’t want to stay in there where she could be trapped, but she needed something.

Kelsey had no idea how to use a speargun, and when she pulled it from the wall there wasn’t time to read the instructions posted beneath it. She took it and pushed herself through the cabin door with it held in front of her. Ty had crawled around the side and swiped at her as she came out, but she easily dodged his grasp. The butt of the gun smashed the rest of his head into a pulp, and he didn’t move again.

There was no more waiting. She rounded the corner, gun held high. She aimed at Jeremy. She pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Shit. Safety? Batteries? Something was wrong. She didn’t know how to use it, how to shoot it. She pulled the trigger again and again, but nothing happened except that Jeremy and Duane both focused on her with their bloody, ruined eyes. Their ravaged mouths opened. They lurched at her, just like in every horror movie she’d ever seen where the monster fixates on the heroine, only she hadn’t gone into the basement carrying only a flashlight with dying batteries to investigate a suspicious noise. She’d fought back. She’d armed herself. She’d done everything she possibly could, and for what? The stupid gun wouldn’t go off, and she was stuck on a forty foot sailboat with a mashed-face corpse and two staggering, ravaged horrors.
 

Hell, no.
 

Kelsey didn’t wait for them to get to her. She lifted the speargun. She ran at them. She stabbed Jeremy first, in his open mouth. The spear popped out the back of his head in a spray of black and red. She yanked it free, and it brought his tongue and some other dangling bits of tissue with it. Without waiting, she shook off the flesh and stabbed him again. He went to his knees. She stabbed him again. He teetered, arms flailing, but in silence.

She stabbed him again.

By the time Duane reached her, she’d effectively made a mush of Jeremy’s head as nicely as she’d done with his brother. Duane’s scrabbling fingers tore down her arm, but Kelsey didn’t take the time to scream or even flinch. She tore the speargun free of Jeremy’s face and used it to stab Duane in the guts. It was enough to send him back a step, but not put him down. To do that, she had to stab him in the eye. This time when she yanked the speargun free, it came with his eyeball and the trailing bundle of nerves, and possibly some brain matter, it was hard to tell amongst all the gore.

She stabbed Duane thirteen times before he stayed down.

Breathing hard, she stared down at the corpses. Neither of them moved. Kelsey stabbed each of them another fifteen times between them.

“You’ll like it with the Smiths. You’ll meet new friends, get a fresh start. New school.” The social worker pauses, flipping through the files. She looks over her glasses. She has a sympathetic face, but she wouldn’t look like that if she knew the truth about what happened.

But if anyone knew the truth about what really happened, they’d lock her up forever, put her away in jail or worse, the crazy house. Probably the loony bin, because they’d have to ask her if she meant to do it, if she meant to mix the chemicals and poison all of them, and though she could lie, she was sure she wouldn’t want to. The truth, all of it, would come tumbling out of her because she wasn’t ashamed. She was in fact gleeful of what she’d done and how she’d managed it, because she knew enough to back away fast enough and get out before the gas could hit her, and that even though she passed out in the doorway there was just enough fresh air to keep her breathing even though it killed Grandma and Grandpa.
 
If anyone knew that, she would never be allowed to go to school, make friends, grow up. She’d never be free.

“So, Kathy, are you ready to meet your foster family?”

“My name,” the girl says as she stands, “is Kelsey.”

“My name is Kelsey. My name is Kelsey.”

She became aware of someone shaking her gently by the shoulder, and Kelsey came awake, startled. It was a man with a kind, concerned face. He backed up a step when she flailed.

“Miss? Are you okay?”

She scrubbed at her face. Mouth gummy, eyes crusty. So thirsty. She’d fallen asleep in the shade of the cabin, but how long ago?

“I’m thirsty.”

“We have water. Food. How long have you been out here?” The kind-faced man looked around the boat, the spotless white deck, the cushions that hadn’t been lost put back in their place, everything in the cabin returned to where it belonged. He looked back at Kelsey.

“I don’t know. A few days. We were staying at The Blockade Runner. My boyfriend rented this boat. It was supposed to be a weekend trip. There was a storm,” she said. “It broke the mast.”

He nodded, of course having seen the splintered mast already. “We can get you back there, but…well. There’s been some problems.”

“At the resort?” Forming the words was hard; forming the thoughts even more so. She was so tired, every muscle ached, she wanted a drink of water, a hot shower and a soft bed. In that order or maybe all at once. She wanted to get off this Godforsaken boat and never go sailing ever again.

He looked strained. Uncomfortable, which was weird, since hello, she was totally the one who’d been stranded here for days on end. He shook his head, just a little. Gave a half shrug. “Yeah. And on the mainland too.”

“What kind of trouble?” Kelsey asked, though she thought she knew.

“I’m not sure I can really say. Tell you what, you come aboard with me,” he gestured at the small yacht that had pulled up alongside the sailboat, “and we’ll get you all fixed up. Get you back on dry land. You can…figure out what’s going on then.”

He held out a hand to her to help her up, but paused with his fingers linked in hers. “Just one thing, miss. You said ‘we.’ What happened to the other people?”

“Oh,” Kelsey said. “They fell overboard during the storm. They all drowned.”

“All of them?”

“Yes,” she said and could tell by his relieved expression that she’d told the right lie. It made the hours she’d spent cleaning up after herself worthwhile. “All of them.”

FIVE

27

It started with the dancing.

Earlier, the floor had been pretty clear — just a few older men in Hawaiian shirts who’d already had a few too many drinks, their teeth gleaming white and bright under the black lights. “Heyyyyyy!” They cried, holding up their hands for high fives, leering, the liquid in their plastic cups sloshing as they moved in on Kathleen and Molly, circling the women like sharks. Kathleen and Molly held up their hands to be slapped and let the men dance up on them for a minute or two before turning back to each other, heads tossed back in laughter, shuffling on the floor already sticky from all the spilled booze.

It was girls’ weekend away.
 

They hadn’t gone out together in a while, the duties of husbands, children, pets, floors that needed to be swept and laundry that needed folding taking precedence over something as simple and giddy and decadent as a girlfriends’ trip. Still, they’d been friends since junior high and even though the effort of making time for each other was becoming more difficult as the years passed, they’d managed to book a room in a beachfront apartment, pack their bags with nothing but stuff for themselves, and just…go.

And now they were here in this huge nightclub with the whole night stretching out in front of them, full of nothing to do but drink and dance and have a good time. Kathleen loved to dance, and she didn’t much care what she looked like doing it. That saying — “dance like nobody’s watching,” well, she totally got that all right, except she danced alone in her kitchen while she unloaded the dishwasher the same way she kicked it out here on the dance floor. Hips bumping, arms lifted. Bounce, bounce. Bust a move. She looked like an idiot, and it didn’t matter because everything inside her was the thump and throb of the bass beat. The music took her.

Kathleen danced.

And Molly was right there with her, shaking her groove thang, the two of them consumed with the sort of laughter that bubbles up all the way from your toes. Some stumbling-drunk college girls beside them started grinding, ridiculous, making Kathleen’s lip curl. If you were going to do that sort of thing at least keep your feet, she thought as the taller girl fell back, taking her friend with her and stepping on Molly’s toes while Kathleen put out her hands to keep them from completely toppling her over.
 

“My bad! My bad,” the girl slurred, and wrapped her arms around Molly’s shoulders. “Sorrrrrry! Sorry, I looooove you!”

Molly shrugged her off and rolled her eyes. The girls stumbled away, and their spot was taken up by a matched set of young men in polo shorts and madras shorts. The song had changed, some woman shouting “err’body lift your drinks in the air,” and like lemmings, the entire dance floor did. The guys who’d surrounded Kathleen and Molly had identical cans of Bud Light. Cold beer splashed as they fist-pumped. One apologized, but it was with the blurry, weaving smile of a guy who wasn’t really sorry, since helping to wipe up the spill was a good excuse to get his hands all over Molly’s front. And yet…it didn’t matter, somehow, that he was handsy and a little out of control, that one of his friends had moved up on Kathleen’s ass like she’d put a neon sign on it that said “hands go here.” Somehow, all Kathleen could do was laugh and laugh as she twirled just out of reach.
 

It didn’t take long for the dance floor to get so crowded any sort of real dance became impossible. They’d started out in the center of the floor but had been slowly pushed toward the bar along the side of the room. Two steps led up to the bar level with a narrow countertop around the edge so people could stand there and have a place to put their drinks as they watched the crowd. It probably kept them from falling off, Kathleen thought as she and Molly found a space on one of the wide metal risers next to the railing. The advantage of this spot was that even though she had to be careful not to fall off, herself, she couldn’t be shoved from behind because the railing was there, and her feet were safe from being stabbed by stilettos because she was standing on the stair. It also meant that with a slightly raised viewpoint, she could more easily see out over the room.
 

“It’s like watching the nature channel,” Molly shouted, pointing out at the seething, writhing mass. “Look at them.”

Kathleen looked. She laughed. A bachelorette party that was dancing right in front of them, the bride resplendent in a penis tiara and blinking penis necklace, her girls beside her in matching t-shirts, were being freaked by… “Oh. My. God. A cowboy!”

The cowboy ripped open his shirt.

“Holy Shit.” This came simultaneously from both of them, and they dissolved into laughter again. Just like in the eighth grade when they’d giggle over posters torn from Teen Beat and Bop magazine, fingers tracing the hairless bare chests of pouting, pretty musicians and TV stars. In eighth grade, Kathleen wouldn’t have known what to do with a chest and belly like the one the cowboy was now encouraging the bride to rub…and…lick?

“I should ask him if you have to be a bride to get some of that action,” Kathleen said. “Jesus Christ, look at the abs.”

Bounce, bounce. The crowd got bigger, the music impossibly louder, the beats fast and the bass down low. The man standing next to Kathleen on the stairs that led to the bar area, the handrail separating them, grinned at her when she looked his way and said something she couldn’t catch until she leaned in close — which was, she realized, probably what he’d been going for. Again, it didn’t matter. At home she mopped floors and cleaned toilets, packed lunches and chauffeured dozens of children to an unending array of sports and activities but here, now, in this place, she was not a wife, mother, daughter, sister. Right now, with her best friend and a couple hundred strangers squeezing up against her, she was simply Kathleen.
 

It had been a long, long time since she’d been only that.

“What?” She cried, leaning in.
 

He was saying something she couldn’t make out, something about how he smelled good, offering his neck to take a sniff, and she did because why not? He did smell good, and he was blatantly cute, and as always when something like this happened she wondered why on earth he’d take the time to flirt with her when there was a handful of scantily clad, intoxicated and twenty-something bridesmaids shaking their asses not two steps in front of him. Not that she cared really, because the next thing that happened was that he was offering to buy she and Molly both drinks. It was totally a seller’s market for the ladies, and Kathleen wasn’t going to complain about that, even if in her real life she was just as likely to hold a door for someone as to expect it to be held for her.

This wasn’t real life.

The bridesmaid in front of her fell down.
 

There were so many people around her that she didn’t make it to the ground before grasping hands pulled her back onto her feet. Kathleen’s lip curled again and she moved onto the higher step, watching the girl bend over. If there was going to be puke, Kathleen wanted to be well out of the way. In the next moment, the girl came upright, not puking, though her mouth was wide open. She dove at the cowboy, and it really was like the nature channel, only Kathleen wasn’t sure if she was watching a mating ritual or a carnivore attacking its prey. The bridesmaid was either kissing him or eating his face, it was too hard to tell.