There was nothing for defense so I grabbed one of the shovels leaning against our former cabin. I headed toward the tree line, glimpsing a figure not far from the edge of the forest. It was a man, tall, bloodied, still dressed in tweed. Moritz.
“What happened?” His injuries looked manageable until I noticed the amazing amount of blood pooled around the end of his right sleeve. Not a glancing blow, that. And then there was the mark—known now to all—that had torn open his slender neck. Teeth.
A line of blood raced down from the edge his mouth. He coughed and more of it came up.
“You’re turning.”
He nodded, a milky haze obscuring the sparkle in his eyes. Oh, God, I promised myself I didn’t care about these people. I promised. He looked so helpless, flailing there, half eaten, his mortality sinking away to the dark place where it would become unnatural rebirth.
“The others?”
“Forest.” Another fountain of blood gushed over the side of his mouth. His left hand began to move and I backed up, instinctively, thinking he had already fully changed. But no, he dug into his trouser pocket, pressing a key, slippery with blood, into my hands.
“What is it?” I asked, staring down at it in bewilderment.
“Vault,” he grunted. He blinked. When his eyelids slid back up his pupils seemed to have spread like a broken yolk. “Paintings.”
“I’ll take care of them.”
If I ever get off this godforsaken island.
Moritz nodded. I don’t know why, but I reached into his coat. The pocket inside was lightly padded and when I slid my fingers along the edge I felt what I was searching for. I took it out, showed it to him. He seemed to smile. Then his eyes slid to the shovel. A plea. If I didn’t … But I would have to. Friends don’t let friends suffer.
“Shane,” I said, standing. “Turn around and cover your ears.”
I waited until he had, seconds inexorably slowing to agonizing minutes. Looking back at Moritz, his one hand had begun to convulse, as if he were physically fighting the urge to lash out for my ankle. I’d never done this before, send off a neighbor, someone with a face I knew and liked. I had seen my friends taken, we all had, watched them disappear into a sea of snarling, snapping faces … but Moritz was still smiling calmly, as if waiting for a bus and daydreaming, as if catching sight of an old friend.
The shovel went up, the shovel went down. It was easier than I expected—not the feeling of course, but the act itself. You can’t trust your hands after that. You have to just let them shake for a second. I looked away as soon as it was done, sickened and heartbroken. I glanced at the picture—there was Moritz, in a better time, his arms around a petite woman with crazy, cropped hair and a hooded sweatshirt, a tall, bearded man on the other side. They were all smiling, warm.
What would she do? I wondered. What would Allison do?
I tucked the Polaroid into my back pocket. She wouldn’t stand still. She wouldn’t turn her back on the people she had already left once.
“Shane,” I called, shouldering the shovel. “Come with me.”
TWENTY-TWO
It was the last time, I promised myself, that I would go into that horrible forest with its grabby bushes and whistling branches and birds that watched you like they were all in on a grand plan. I hated being there, hated taking Shane there, but running was not an option now. Trying to be his protector, stumbling through parenthood, meant setting an example. We wouldn’t run. We wouldn’t leave our friends behind when we had a chance to save them. Either I would come back out and stay out, or it would snatch me and hold onto me forever. The fact that Shane would be with me when that happened … But what could I do?
The forest was, unsurprisingly, free of the undead. They were where the action was and Shane and I discovered the unlucky hot spot almost immediately. I hardly felt the brambles tugging at my legs or the scratchy branches swiping for my face. I heard the gunfire up ahead and kept a steady, determined pace.
When the shots stopped I hurried us along. It’s unsettling in the worst way, when gunfire becomes something you actually want to hear. Andrea, Banana, Nate, Stefano, Whelan … I had to prepare myself. There was no telling what I would find once I reached the house and no way to predict how best to shield Shane. The others could be like Moritz, or they might be beyond even the point of draining humanity.
“Shane,” I whispered, squeezing his hand. “You have to do exactly what I tell you.”
“Okay. What happened to Moritz? Why was his head all funny?”
“He was going to turn into one of them, Shane.” I swallowed, hard, feeling it catch like a thistle in my throat. “That’s what you have to do for friends when they’re bitten.”
“Will you do that to me, Sadie?”
“No, sweetheart,” I said. “That won’t happen because I won’t let them near you.”
I wanted it to be true. I wanted it to be true so badly I even believed it.
Gunpowder and a vaporous fog lingered in the air when we stepped out into the house’s clearing. It was a war zone. A few undead corpses littered the ground, all of them unfamiliar bodies and faces. I heard voices from inside the house, angry ones raised to the point of arguing. At least there was a back and forth. Someone was still alive. The footprints in the dirt were too scattered and random to read. Not that I was some amazing tracker, but there wasn’t even a clear indication of direction. Just mayhem. Lots and lots of mayhem.
Now I was stuck. Taking Shane inside was dangerous, but I couldn’t risk leaving him alone, either. For better or worse I wanted to keep him in my sights.
“We’re going into that house, Shane. I know it’s scary but we have to stick together.”
He nodded, holding tighter to my hand.
I kicked the bodies and limbs out of the way for him and together we shuffled across the bloodstained clearing to the porch. It was rickety, creaking with even the gentlest footsteps. We may as well have rung the doorbell. The voices inside quieted. Maybe I was taking us directly into a trap. Decision time. Yes or no. Forward or backward. We could still turn back … but no, Moritz had said “forest.” This was the end of the line.
With one nudge, the door flew open and Shane and I tumbled inside. The hinges had almost rotted away completely. I raised the shovel, but the front room was empty, messy, smelling like ass, but empty. The house stood in complete disarray, the beachy wood floors dirtied with a spray of sand, mud and stains that looked suspiciously like blood. Worse, some of the stains had a pattern, form. Drawings. I could make out stick figures all in a jumbled row, their rudimentary line and circle bodies drawn in blood. A light, uneven and flickering, like a lantern, glowed from the open doorway to our left. This was insane, I didn’t even have a gun—we could be jumped the second we stepped through that portal. Then I heard a low, pained voice and my heart shuddered, expanding so rapidly it squeezed the air out of my lungs.
“Banana?” It was Whelan. He sounded awful.
“Be quiet.”
Oh, fuck me. I knew that voice. Part of me knew it was coming and had since the canoe, but hearing and knowing just weren’t the same. A prickle of fear started at the back of my neck, skipping down over my spine a second later.
Motioning for Shane to stay behind me, I inched slowly, carefully into the doorway, the shovel raised high over my head.
“Banana?” Whelan called again, just before I made it into the room.
“It’s me,” I said, darting inside. “It’s Sadie.”
His face, bruised, battered, but still lovely, fell.
“Oh, God, Sadie, no! Get out of here, now.”
I wish I had words.
Whelan was there, stripped to his jeans, rope wound several times tightly around his chest and arms, keeping him secured to a rusted metal chair. A bright bruise purpled his right eye, a cut there congealing. The rabbit tattoo on his left upper arm was missing, a raw, skinned patch still slowly trickling blood down over the ropes and onto the floor.
My co
nfidence turned quickly to despair and then horror as I saw the creature chained to the wall not far from Whelan. Teresa, her hair hanging on in stringy chunks, an iron chain looped around her neck like a leash. She was chewing on something. Either I was seeing things and the fear was fucking with my mind, or she was chewing on a decorated piece of human flesh.
And close by …
“Cassandra.” My voice shook.
The room reeked of death. It made you want to choke on your own breath.
“You came back,” Cassandra said brightly. A knife dangled from her left hand, no doubt the same one used to skin Whelan’s arm. She wasn’t wearing Danielle’s hot pink top. Instead, Whelan’s Tee hung loose and boxy on her bony shoulders. Whelan was shaking his head, his mouth tightly grimaced with pain. He was right. I should go, take Shane as far away from there as I could, but I wasn’t about to let her skin the rest of him and feed it to Teresa.
Behind me, Shane let out a tiny whimper.
“Heart failure,” I whispered. “Your heart stopped, didn’t it?”
Cassandra tilted her head to the side, her red curls rippling down onto her shoulder. I could barely look at her wild eyes, terrified she would hypnotize me with her crazy.
“How’d you know that?”
“It’s not important, Cassandra. For how long?”
“I was legally dead for two minutes.”
I looked at Whelan, seeing the exact moment when it hit him too.
“She’s already died once,” I told him in a whisper. “They can’t sense her.”
As if to illustrate, Cassandra reached out and brushed her fingers down Teresa’s cheek affectionately. The undead little girl had no reaction beyond a curious groan.
“She likes pictures,” Cassandra murmured fondly, giggling. “So I gave her one of Whelan’s.”
My stomach lurched.
I had to get her away from Whelan. That knife was too close to his neck for my liking, well within striking distance. Cutting a throat didn’t take much skill or accuracy. If I tried to bash her brains in now she would have his neck opened before I made it halfway across the room. “Where are the others, Cassandra?”
“Stefano and Danielle are out back,” Cassandra replied with a shrug. “I’m sure Moritz will be along soon.”
“I— What?”
“It’s too bad about Noah and Isabella. They can’t be part of our family now.”
Family? Good Lord.
“Cassandra…” What exactly does one say to someone so mind-bendingly lost? Noises from outside. Commotion. She had only mentioned Stefano and Danielle, maybe that meant Banana, Nate and Andrea were still safely out of her clutches. It wasn’t over. I just had to remember that. “You can stop this now. No one else has to get hurt.”
Like that ever worked in the movies. Cassandra laughed. Hell, it was worth a try.
“What do you want, Cassandra?”
“We can be a family, Sadie, all of us. All of us forever.” She heaved a tragic sigh. “I tried to explain it to Teresa and Isabella but they just wouldn’t listen.”
Whelan was trying to signal me, tell me something. His eyes flicked to Shane over and over again.
“So what?” I asked, stalling, trying to kick the gears in my head into overdrive. We needed a way out, a diversion, anything at all to give us time. “You imprinted on us like a baby duck?”
“I had a family once,” Cassandra replied sadly. “I’m going to have one again.”
“Shane,” I whispered, nudging him with my boot. “Run. Run outside and find Andrea.”
“Don’t do that, Shane,” Cassandra shouted, waving the knife in the air. But Shane ignored her, taking off like a shot, surprisingly agile in his puffy layered jackets. Cassandra darted forward, hooking the knife around Whelan’s head and holding it in front of his neck. He flinched, a thin trickle of blood racing down the column of his throat.
“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. Mos
t 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?”