“Looks like our girl Cassandra’s fitting in,” Andrea muttered. Danielle and Cassandra joined Nate in the search party going southwest along the beach. Andrea and I stuck close behind Whelan, letting him go first into the dense wall of trees. He did, after all, have the rifle. Moritz had been given Nate’s knife and helped cut a path through the bushes clustered around the trees.
“I’m gonna go ahead and say that’s a good thing,” I replied. I was all nerves, chattering aimlessly to keep from dwelling too much on the missing girls. “I was starting to worry about her. Building sand castles? Those nasty-ass scrubs? I sort of expected to return to camp and find her prancing around naked in the surf, wearing your guts as a fascinator.”
“That Danielle chick’s got a way with her, I guess.”
“The lord works in damn near confounding ways.”
Whelan shushed us over his shoulder. From the rigid line of his shoulders, arms and back I could tell that he was nervous too. He had volunteered to take us straight to the heart of the island and I was absolutely certain that was no coincidence. Still, there was no time to plumb his motivations. As I had discovered during my Will Scarlet phase, the forest had a way of eating up certain sounds and intensifying others. Birds shrieked and it sounded like they had swooped down right next to your ear. But footfalls disappeared, softer than they had any right to be. It made me feel tiny, at the mercy of so many cloaking leaves and clever hiding places.
But there was no sign of the girls, no crumb trail of shoes or ponytail binders. I hadn’t spotted one snagged piece of cloth or any of that other exciting bullshit that makes you think you’re on the right path. As we cut deeper into the forest, I felt a clammy sweat spring up around my neck and ears. It was hard work navigating the trees, fallen stumps and uneven, shifting ground. Nobody spoke. Our shoes trampled down the brittle grasses and Moritz’s knife slashed at branches here and there, but otherwise we said nothing and let Whelan lead the way.
I felt a small seed of insecurity in my brain, a seed that didn’t take long to sprout and flower. How well did I really know Whelan and his cohorts? Hadn’t he faked a zombie attack to get me in the water? Hadn’t that led to my feet being torn to pieces? And now those two girls were missing, but there was no trace of them at the camp. We had split up, going into the wild with Whelan and Nate, both of whom carried serious weaponry. What had begun as a search party, I realized with a jolt, could easily turn into a cold-blooded execution.
“They’re not out here,” I said, shuffling to a stop. Inside my boots, my feet were beginning to throb. Whelan turned at the waist, shooting me a look that said plainly: Keep moving.
“This doesn’t look good, Whelan,” I added, glancing around helplessly. “Shouldn’t we have found something by now? A shoe? Something? Maybe we’re going the wrong way, or … I don’t know. It’d be better if we fanned out but we shouldn’t get separated…”
“There’s something up ahead,” he said, drawing a damp hand across his forehead. His dark brown hair shined with sweat. “Something through the trees. If we don’t find anything there we’ll try a different direction.”
Andrea lifted her right foot to go on but I grabbed her hand and squeezed. When Whelan had his back to us again I slowly shifted my head from side to side. We hung back, Moritz and Whelan forging ahead while Andrea and I did our best to trail without being too obvious.
“What are you thinking?” she whispered. Her hand grew slick in my grasp.
“Split us up? Take us into the woods? What does that remind you of?” I asked in an undertone.
“Should we run?”
“No, not yet. Let’s wait it out.”
I hoped desperately that those wouldn’t be my last words. I had seen with my own eyes Whelan’s cop-trained skill with that gun. That SPD polo clearly wasn’t a hand-me-down. If he decided to turn on us we’d be dead in a heartbeat. Speaking of, my pulse had risen to the point where I was sure everyone, Whelan included, could hear the drumming. The forest, which moments ago had simply felt strange and vast, now felt oppressive. I nearly collapsed with fright as gunfire erupted in front of us. But Whelan was firing at something through the trees, a lone zombie. Our pace quickened. I could see now that there really was something beyond the trees, a clearing. I heard rushing water, like a fast-moving stream or waterfall. We four came to a stop just before breaking through the tree line.
“I don’t like it,” Moritz said firmly.
I couldn’t agree more.
Just beyond the branches and bushes lay a house, a blue clapboard house propped up on pilings. Underneath the deck, a stream rolled by and then bubbled and roiled into a waterfall. It was no Angel Falls, just a trickling by comparison, but a waterfall nonetheless. The house itself looked like something out of a fairy story, poised over the stream like a hunched beetle with a dulled blue shell. The windows were dark inside, some were boarded up. It didn’t look like anyone had lived in the house for ages. The white banisters around the porch sagged, threatening to snap and fall right into the brook at the next strong wind.
“I don’t like it,” Moritz said again, this time in a quieter voice with more conviction.
It did look incredibly like the perfect place for a bunch of zombies to congregate. Whoever had lived in that house might have been attacked and now their flesh-hungry legacy waited inside. I knew it would take more than a polite suggestion to get me to go through the rotting door. The cheerful blue paint did absolutely nothing to convince me; the darkened windows and cold, cold quiet of the place filled me with dread.
“I don’t care how brave or stupid kids are,” Whelan muttered, “they wouldn’t go in a place like that.”
“You feel it too, then?” I whispered.
“Of course,” he said, scratching at the back of his neck. “But I think for Stefano’s sake, we have to look anyway. Goddamn it.”
I wondered if he was right. Maybe when Hansel and Gretel looked at that gingerbread house they could only see the gumdrop doorbell and not the evil behind the icing. Still, try as I might, I couldn’t imagine two sweet little girls, even after escalating dares, working up the courage to peek inside.
“If they were lost they might have needed shelter,” Whelan went on. “It got cold last night.”
“Fine,” I said, pushing through into the clearing, “then let’s get it over with.”
A hand clamped over my wrist, shaking me back. I looked up into Moritz’s face. I had never seen him looking so panicked or so sick. Even two horrific bouts of seasickness had been kinder to his expression. The frank, canine sparkle in his blue eyes had vanished.
“Don’t go in there,” he said.
“We have to.”
I didn’t add that, were it Shane and not Isabella and Teresa, I would have charged into that house without a moment’s hesitation. If their places were reversed, I would want my friends doing everything they could to find him. That thought gave me courage.
“Sadie!” It was Whelan. “Sadie, duck!”
I trusted. I ducked. The bullets flew close over my head. I could hear the unmistakable squishing pop of meat imploding. I scuttled forward onto my knees, crawling back toward the tree line. When I flipped onto my back I found that there were more of them, way more of them than I had thought. This wasn’t just one errant creature trying to snag me for a meal—there were dozens of them emerging now from the trees. It was almost, I thought with a gurgle in my stomach, like the undead were protecting the house. They wandered into the clearing, their heads turning in unsettling unison toward the sound of Whelan’s rifle.
“Run,” Whelan said in a quiet, steely voice. “Leave now before I run out of bullets.”
There went that theory. I felt like a grade-A idiot for mistrusting him. An executioner wouldn’t stay to provide cover for his victims. I had now mentally accused him of being a cannibal and a murderer. I really had to work on being more charitable.
Andrea and Moritz disappeared into the forest but I hesitated, staying behind.
&nb
sp; “You’re coming too,” I said, grabbing Whelan by the sleeve.
“They’ll follow us.”
“So fucking what? Come on!”
He relented and turned to follow, but not before taking the time to shoot up a few of the closest zombies. Their moist rotting smell choked the clearing. Andrea and Moritz were already far ahead, flat-out sprinting.
“Taking us straight to hell,” I muttered as he ran and I hobbled to keep up. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Balls. I know. I should have been more clear last night.” He was out of breath and getting impatient with my pace. My feet had gone completely numb. The pins-and-needles feeling seeped up toward my knees. The groaning filtering through the trees behind us forced me to ignore the throbbing pain.
“Whatever,” I said. Whelan might have been out of breath but I was wheezing like an asthmatic at a cat show. “It’s too late for that now.”
Whelan slowed down, turning a circle in place as he waited for me to catch up. When I finally did, he swept me up into his arms and swung me over onto his back. I didn’t appreciate being the C-3PO to his Chewbacca but my feet wouldn’t have lasted much longer. He started running again, using the side of the rifle to bat stray branches out of the way. The smaller branches thwap-thwapped at my face as we threaded through the trees.
“I could have chimed in,” I added in a murmur.
“You had a chance to undermine my authority”—pant—pant—“and make me look like an asshole in front of everyone and you didn’t take it?”
I pinched his ear. He growled something, but it helped him swerve just in time to avoid a low-hanging pine bough.
“Every nice thing I’ve ever thought or said about you? I take it back. Do that again and so help me, I will drag you back to camp by your pinky toe.”
“What was that house?” I asked. It was easy to ignore his threats—which were only playful, I hoped—when I didn’t have to look at his face. I ducked my head down close to his shoulder, wary of the scraping needles on the branches that dipped down from above. The leaves rushed by in my ears, punctuated now and then with a particularly loud moan from behind us.
“I don’t know,” Whelan said. “I’ve never gone that far into the woods. It looked old, maybe a smuggler’s den.”
“Why did I feel like it was something out of The Twilight Zone?”
We were nearing the camp. I could make out Andrea and Moritz not far ahead of us and hear the distant rushing of the waves on shore.
“Because there’s something inside it,” he said, gasping for breath, “and I don’t think it’s those two little girls.”
“But you can’t actually feel evil.”
“When you’ve been around death as much as we have, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could.”
Whelan let his run turn into a jog and then a fast walk. We broke through the thicket and onto the beach. The familiar sight of the cabins and fires sent a tingling shudder of relief through my spine. Whelan helped me down and both of us turned quickly in opposite directions. I wasn’t going to dwell on the feeling of being wrapped around his back or the sensation of sliding down over his taut backside. Not that I noticed.
The other parties had already returned. They met us with solemn, searching faces … except for Danielle, who clearly didn’t believe I was draped all over Whelan’s bodacious bod due to my feet and not for more nefarious reasons. Stefano’s cheeks were streaked with fresh tears.
“Nothing,” Whelan said. He glanced my way and I shrugged. Did they really need to know about the creepy house? “We didn’t find anything.”
“Nothing?” Andrea cried. She pointed to the south. “Yeah, we didn’t find a single thing—oh wait, we found a whole fuck-load of zombies!”
“What?” Nate asked. He shouldered his way through to the front of the crowd. A few dry leaves had stuck in his tightly coiled hair.
“Reload,” Whelan said. “They’ll make the beach soon.”
Danielle and Cassandra swept Stefano away, bringing him to sit down on one of the logs in front of the fire pit. I wasn’t surprised to see that Cassandra was still glued to Danielle’s side, but it was a bit unusual to see Cassandra acting like such a grown up. Her days of making sand castles were, apparently, behind her.
Since those of us without weapons were more or less useless, I took Andrea by the hand again and pulled her into our cabin. Shane was still with Banana, sitting with her on the logs outside by the fire pit. I didn’t want to see the carnage and I didn’t want to have my ears assaulted by the rifle fire. Despite the fact that we shared the cabin, nobody was inside. I shut the door and immediately felt my pulse relax. I needed to think. I needed her help.
“Something is fucked up here,” I said. Brilliant. That was pretty much the long and short of the rousing speech I’d thought up.
“What tipped you off? The missing girls, the horde of undead, or the fucking death shack in the middle of the island?”
“Christ,” I muttered. Andrea slid down onto the cot. She pushed aside Noah’s copy of The Big Sleep and I almost snapped at her to be careful with it. But snapping wouldn’t help. My hands shook. Pacing felt like the right thing to do so I went about stomping a trench into the floor. “I actually thought for a minute there that Whelan was going to kill us. Whelan! What is wrong with me?”
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” she said. She was straining to keep her voice down. I had forgotten that the walls were thin. “Remember, Sadie? We don’t know these people. You’re the only one here I really trust. We’ve been through some shit together—real life, The Outbreak, Carl.”
“Please don’t—”
“My point is that we have no reason to trust these shitbirds.”
“I think Whelan is all right,” I said. Andrea rolled her eyes. Earlier she had taken off her floppy hat and stuffed it into her hoodie pocket. She took the hat out now and pinched and pulled it between her fingers, working it like a slab of dough.
“Don’t give me that look. He stayed behind, Andrea. He was prepared to sacrifice his life for us.” If she couldn’t see the significance of that then I wasn’t sure I wanted her as an ally. She finally nodded, her long brown hair swishing over her shoulder.
“Okay,” she said. “So Whelan we trust. Who else? Moritz?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I stopped suddenly, wondering why the response had come so quickly and without my meaning it to. “I mean … He was looking at me weird yesterday. I don’t know if that actually means anything…”
“But it gave you the creeps?” Andrea asked.
“Yeah,” I said. I had the good grace to at least sound reluctant. I felt disgusting, like a betrayer. “And today when we found that cabin … He just seemed really … intense, you know? His eyes … Ugh.” I shivered.
“Right. Then Moritz is out. Noah?”
“This is ridiculous,” I muttered. “There’s no way to know these things. It seems so unfair.”
“So what? Survival, remember? You’re not a cutesy illustrator anymore, you’re a survivor. Hoppy bunnies aren’t your business now, being ruthless is,” she said. “Whatever we have to do to stay alive, we’re going to do it. If that means using our instincts and our brains then I say so be it.”
She was right, but I couldn’t help but wish that Pink Bear and his fuzzy friends still were my business.
“I like Noah,” I said, getting back on track. “He seems like a good kid. And I trust Banana. She held my hand for two excruciating hours and didn’t complain once. She shared booze with me. I think we can rely on her.”
“I agree,” Andrea said, “and I like Nate.” She blushed. “He read my palm last night. He said I have a great life line.”
“I’ll bet he did. So you like Nate? Or you love him long time?”
“Shut up. He’s just … He’s goddamn reliable. It’s in the eyes. Count him in.”
“That leaves Tits McGee, Cassandra and Stefano. I wouldn’t trust any of them.”
“You rea
lly do hate Danielle,” Andrea said with a chuckle. “Can I ask why?”
“Really? I need reasons? Her poisonous personality isn’t enough?”
“Cassandra’s actually turning into a person because of Danielle and—no offense, doll—she obviously had or has something going with Whelan. So she can’t be all bad, am I right?”
“Look, you can cover a shit sandwich with caviar all you want, but guess what? It’s still a shit sandwich.” Andrea rolled her eyes. Twice. Once to the right and then back again to the left. “Why do I feel eight years old again, getting sent to time-out for bullying someone on the playground?” I hated that Andrea might be right. And the thought of Whelan going anywhere near that plastic swamp donkey and her hateful little eyes made me furious … made me hateful. I winced. That was strong medicine. I’d make an effort to be kinder to Danielle in the future, assuming she hadn’t chopped up Isabella and Teresa and put them in a soup.
Neither of us pointed out that, though we trusted almost everyone, we still felt besieged. I decided to return to that thought later, when I could be alone. And I needed to talk to Shane, let him know what we were up against and to be vigilant. Maybe the zombies were making us paranoid. Maybe they were our only true enemy.
“So say Isabella and Teresa are gone—that takes care of everyone,” I said, breezing over our small disagreement. Whether or not Danielle was going to be my future bestest friend didn’t matter; even if I detested her, I couldn’t imagine she’d do anything to Isabella or Teresa. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t picture any of the people on the island hurting those girls.
“I wouldn’t count them out,” Andrea whispered. She was worrying a hole in her hat. “It’s a small island. They’ll turn up. One way or another, they’ll turn up.”
THIRTEEN
Give her a turban and call her a swami—Andrea was proven right the next morning. Well, half right.
Isabella turned up, but not Teresa.
Everybody was up early, Stefano going from cabin to cabin, rousing us to make up more search parties. Shane and I were just stumbling out of the cabin together, he lamenting the early wake-up and me mumbling about coffee, when Whelan rushed up to us.