Sadie Walker Is Stranded

  “I lost track of them. Queen Anne exploded … almost … It was a nightmare. Fires everywhere, people everywhere … death everywhere.” He paused, the latest clean cotton ball still touched to the big toe on my right foot. “I had a nervous breakdown … Stayed in my apartment for a week with the doors and windows barred.”

  “The first time or the second time?” I asked.

  “Hm?”

  “Was that during The Outbreak or this last time?”

  Whelan frowned, sitting up and fixing me with a dark, uneasy look. “The Outbreak. I told you, we left before the Citadel fell.”

  “Right,” I replied. “I forgot for a second there.”

  His expression eased, his smile returning as he hunched over my feet and went back to work. “Christ, you have the ugliest pinky toes I have ever seen, Sadie.”

  “I blame the sea urchins.”

  “I would too.”

  Scrambling for an appropriately juvenile comeback, I settled triumphantly on, “Well, your ears are stupid.”

  Smirking, Whelan sat up again, bringing that one incorrigible dimple with him. He dropped a dirtied cotton puff onto the ground. It landed among its brethren and rolled to a stop just before the stones marking the fire pit. “I’m glad I survived measles, twelve years on the force and a zombie outbreak to have you remind me of what a special hell fifth grade was.” He laughed, bitterly, shaking back the dark strands of his hair. At some point he had shaved, his jaw gleaming tan and smooth in the flames. “Curious George,” Whelan added, shuddering.

  A loud, spontaneous burst of laughter probably wasn’t the sympathetic response he was hoping for, but that’s what he got. “I wield the cotton balls, you heartless bully,” he said, pretending to jab at my raw toes. “I could easily slip and oops and—”

  “All right, all right,” I said, breathless with laughter, “I get the idea. I’ll be good! I’m sorry I made fun of your monkey ears … I mean, they’re not monkey ears—they’re regular ears, just a bit sticky-outy, I mean…”

  “You know,” Whelan began, smiling lazily and threatening me with that cotton ball again, “you and your ilk are the reason I almost paid through the nose for ear-pinning surgery.”

  “When was this?” I asked, relaxing when his next swipe with the cotton was gentle and forgiving.

  “In the dreaded bowl-cut phase of seventy-nine, a bleak time for many. That was before I realized the magical powers of a good haircut. Ugh, I looked like a chalice.”

  “You looked like a chalice and I wore sandals on the playground and wondered why everyone pointed and laughed.” Either from the gel or the flames or the cotton balls, my feet no longer burned so badly.

  “And childhood is supposed to be the happiest years of your life…”

  “So … did you ever find the Man With the Yellow Hat to your Curious George?”

  Yeah, that netted the blank stare it deserved.

  “That … sounded so much wittier in my head,” I mumbled, waving the offending question away as if it were a physical vapor hanging around us.

  Whelan gathered up the cotton balls and pitched them into the fire. I pulled my feet away, reluctantly, knowing there was no reason to keep them there, especially with my gangle toes freaking him out. “Amber hat … orange hat … close … but no, no yellow hat.”

  “Danielle’s not the yellow hat, then?”

  “Uh, no. No, she isn’t.” Whelan smiled, tipping his head to the side as that smile eased into a far more nefarious, devious sort of half-grin. Even his dimple looked ominous. “You really don’t like her, do you? It’s the boobs, right? Makes you uncomfortable?”

  “No, no, it has nothing to do with the fucking Hindenburgs hanging off her chest and everything to do with her … glaring. She’s like a Shih Tzu, all beady eyes and crazy little snappy teeth.”

  “Danielle danced at a nice place,” Whelan replied, lowering his voice. I could tell a sad, sad story was coming on. “Or so she said. The point is, she was the only one to make it out of there. One girl out of, what, thirty? I know it’s tempting to laugh at the mental image of all those sweaty-fisted businessmen being decimated by a horde of ravenous undead, but she came out of it really … jumpy. She doesn’t trust anyone but Stefano … and maybe the girls, but … you know.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Fuck.

  “I should probably be nicer to her,” I said. This was sounding like déjà vu. “I should be a lot nicer in general.”

  “You’re doing all right,” Whelan assured me lightly. “Danielle’s just like the rest of us, coping as best she can—which, granted, might mean she’s turned into a Shih Tzu, but it might also mean she’s seen a lot of bad shit and doesn’t quite know what to make of it. She’s like you and me, Hindenburgs or no.”

  “Are you calling me flat-chested?”

  “There’s no correct way to answer that and you know it.”

  He was right, but I wanted him to try and dig his way out anyway.

  “I should get some sleep,” I said. “Sounds like the snore chorus have died down a little.”

  “Banana and I have room,” he replied so casually that it was not casual at all. The firelight was playing tricks, making him even tanner than usual, smoothing out the slight wrinkles at his eyes, emphasizing the pronounced curve of that dimple. Tricks. Shenanigans. Inconveniently torn, I glanced at the water. The little boat lights had gone out.

  “I should stick with my people,” I said. “And you stick with yours.”

  FOURTEEN

  Two nights later I slept like the dead—the truly dead, not the living dead—exhausted from an embarrassing fancy. Spending the day shooting arrows into the water, trying to kill fish that way is … not to be repeated. I don’t recommend it unless you have actual hand-eye coordination or a bag full of Jedi mind tricks.

  With calluses the size of donut holes forming on my fingertips and palms, I listened to the dulcet tones of Andrea sniping in my ear, hissing at me for being a prude and not enslaving Whelan with my womanly wiles. No amount of reminding her that survival and not procreation was our number one priority would get her to shut up. The last thing I heard before drifting to sleep was Andrea’s voice buzzing in my ear as she muttered, “Flash forward, Sadie, here’s your life in ten years: You, a sad, hunched spinster blitzed on vodka gimlets at a karaoke bar singing ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ to a room of like-minded, sawdust repositories.”

  “I don’t think we’ll have karaoke machines on the island,” I sleepily replied. “Not even in ten years.”

  I wouldn’t have gone to sleep smiling if I had known I’d wake up to flames.

  This time I was up at the first call of alarm, stumbling over Andrea and Shane on the cot and tossing on Banana’s burlesque sweatshirt, backward, over a pair of thermal leggings and somebody’s work boots. In this fetching ensemble, I stumbled out into the wan sunshine, finding at once that the air on the beach choked with smoke and the faint burning smell I had detected inside the cabin was not, in fact, the result of someone cooking breakfast.

  “Holy shit,” I mumbled, drifting numbly toward the food hut. It was all but blackened, crisp and ashen, pieces of it crumbling inward from the smallest, gentlest hint of a breeze. I couldn’t talk, couldn’t breathe, staring at what had once been a sturdy if crooked monument to our survival. Fish had been stored in there after drying, and cans of food, bags of cookies, chips, all of the salvaged goods Whelan and his folks had brought from the mainland. Noah and Andrea came up behind me, their gasps joining the sound of Nate and Whelan furiously throwing seawater on the smoldering ruins. Stefano and Danielle stood apart, huddling together in matching pink sweatshirts. Noticeably absent was Cassandra, and for a shameful moment, I almost hoped she was the culprit. She certainly did act unbalanced enough to have gone pyro. Through the tears, I saw Danielle glaring at us, an accusation no doubt forming on her lips as she looked at us, the outsiders, the obvious suspects.

  All the blanket dampening and se
awater in the world wasn’t going to reverse the damage, and as soon as the rest of us came in speaking distance, the accusations started to fly.

  “Way to go, Whelan,” Danielle burst out, shoving Stefano away as she stalked toward us. “Bring a bunch of outsiders here and this is what happens!” She whirled, aiming her bile at Whelan this time. “They’re not like us! They’re … whatever they are! The girls and now this…”

  “Hey!” I yelled, feeling a little less than purely authoritative in my harebrained outfit. “Hey, we didn’t do anything to those girls. That’s not on us.”

  “Oh, but the fire is?” she shrilled back.

  “Why would we burn our own food?” Moritz asked, carefully modulating his voice. “That does not make any sense. We were nearly starving before. Why would we come here only to destroy your food?”

  “Yeah!” Noah added, punctuating his yell with a finger pointed at Danielle. “We all sleep in one place. Do you have any idea how hard it is to move an inch in that cabin without stepping on someone’s face?”

  “Everybody shut the fuck up,” Whelan thundered. We obeyed. You obey a tone like that. “There’s something in there,” he added in a much more subdued, uneasy voice.

  “What kind of something?” Stefano asked, cuddling up next to Danielle and holding onto her arm like an anchor. His voice shivered around the words. “Can … Can you tell?”

  “Oh, my good Jesus,” Nate muttered. He and Whelan were the closest, standing just inches from the shed. They clapped their hands over their mouths in almost perfect unison.

  “It’s too small,” Whelan said, just loud enough for the rest of us to make out. Nate nodded. “It can’t be Teresa.”

  “Can’t be…” Danielle marched up in between Whelan and Nate, leaning over and squinting into the charred wreckage. “Is that … oh, God. Oh, God, it’s Cassie.”

  “Cassie?” Andrea repeated, a little tartly. I elbowed her.

  “Cassandra,” Danielle hissed. “Ya know, the one you all ignored because you thought she was crazy.”

  “Does that mean she set the fire?” Moritz asked.

  “Hard to say,” Whelan replied. He stood back, hands on hips, and swore under his breath. “If she used a lighter it might still be in there, melted. If she used a torch … it would’ve burned up with the rest of the wood.”

  Right. Cop. I was hoping those skills of his would never come in handy. Wishful thinking, as usual.

  “I don’t mean to get all Benson and Stabler on you here, but wouldn’t we have heard her screaming?” I should’ve just kept my mouth shut, but Whelan turned, frowning.

  “Damn it. I didn’t think of that,” he said quietly, thoughtfully.

  “That is fucking creepy as shit,” Andrea whispered, inching closer to me. “She just … sat in there? Silently? And burned to death?”

  “Unless someone killed her, put her in the shed and lit it on fire,” Whelan replied.

  “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 r
estive 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.