“I’m not about to participate in your schemes.” Mártira pointed to the door. “You know what, Miss Hagens? I don’t think you belong here after all. I think you should get your things and leave.”
Hagens stared at my sister for the longest time, rage building behind her eyes. “While you’ve been planning parties, I’ve been worrying about the fate of zombiekind. This morning, while you were asleep, I was coming up with a plan that didn’t have to end in bloodshed. And after spending weeks trying to get you to stop acting like some kind of resurrected saint and to move your people somewhere safe! Who doesn’t belong here, again? Make it fast, because I won’t waste any more time!”
Mártira looked long and hard at Hagens, but in the end said only, “When I took you in, you sang a different song. I don’t know what’s happened to you, in the space of a month, to make you so angry. But it’s unwanted here. Leave.”
“Have the men gone out?” Bruno asked suddenly. Without the red makeup he wore onstage, his skin was visible, marked by constellations of acne scars. “Maybe we won’t even need the girl.”
“Yeah,” Claudia said, her voice softening. “They have.”
Mártira turned her attention swiftly to Claudia. “Men? What men? What is he talking about?”
I thought for a moment that Claudia looked unsure. “Hopefully Smoke will return today. Late last night …” She looked at Hagens, as if for a cue, before recovering. “One of the drunk humans started talking about a plan to move him into the city again, so we sent a bunch of men to stop them. We told them the orders were yours. But it was last minute. A chance we had to take. So if that doesn’t work, we need the girl as a backup plan.”
Mártira reached out and caught the curtain. “What?” She glared at Hagens. “What have you done?”
“Zombies could raise money and picket for his release until their flesh started falling off in hunks, but the humans wouldn’t turn him over.” Hagens shook her head. “We can get him back using a relatively peaceful way, or a violent way, but we have to get him back.”
“You come to ask for a vote, and you’re already ordering my people around? Speaking for me? You forget your place!”
“I don’t have a ‘place,’ ” Hagens sneered. “Why do you think I’ve been hanging out with you guys, in a city I loathe?”
“We have to vote,” Claudia argued. “We don’t want to do things behind your back. We want you in on this. But we have to get Smoke back, no matter the cost.”
“Absolutely not!” Mártira turned toward her. “Are you insane? What game are you two trying to play?”
“A game that’s changing, like she said,” Claudia yelled. “You’re never going to convince the humans to get along with us. They’ll always be afraid of us!”
“The living come here every night! Things have gone badly the last few weeks, yes, but everyone can get back on track. Soon we’ll be able to shelter even more zombies—”
Mother Perfore spoke up. “ ‘Badly’? Were you not at the docks t’other day? I was fine with being an outlaw, bein’ hunted for what I done—but I won’t be hunted for what I am.”
“Aye,” Invierno agreed. “And it’s time to teach ’em that. I say Hagens has the right of it. The humans need to learn a lesson. Get knocked down a peg. We got to avenge our dead, and you won’t let us. You won’t even let us work. Hagens speaks sense.”
“Stop using that word!” Mártira drew herself up majestically. “We are the same species, the human living and the human dead.”
“And so Smoke means nothing to you?” Claudia said hatefully, her eyes cutting over Mártira’s shoulder, boring into my own. “What about the zombies killed on the docks? What about the rest of us? Do you not hear what we are saying? Do you not see how Smoke could even keep us safe by making the living afraid to mess with us?”
“Is that why you want him?” Mártira asked of Hagens.
“One of ten thousand reasons,” Hagens replied. “But the less you know, the better off you’ll be.”
I looked away. Still, something in me wanted to speak. “The people on the ships helped us,” I said softly, hoping only Mártira would hear. “Claudia said they wouldn’t, but they did. The living doctor there, he helped Dog. Another living doctor came with Mr. Griswold. They’re not all bad.”
“Of course they’re not, dove.” Mártira tilted her head. “But what do you mean, ‘came with Mr. Griswold’?”
I could feel the others glaring at me as I answered, “He was here last night. To see Dog. Hagens told him to leave.” My fingers started to tremble as I said it, but I knew I had to. “The girl’s his doll. I think. The girl they want to … kidnap.”
“I see.” Stiffening, Mártira faced Claudia again. “Of course Smoke means something to me. We will take him back if they free him, just as we will show mercy to any zombie who tastes madness and then repents—but we will not cause more fear, more destruction. We can only change attitudes through love. And you need to stop listening to those who would tell you otherwise.”
Oh, how I loved to hear Mártira speak. Her words were warm, inspirational, dear as gold buttons plucked from the costume of a rich woman—like the stories she always told.
“Where are you getting this stuff?” Allende said. “When we were the Grave House Gang, we were feared. That’s why we were so large—everyone wanted in. Because we could offer protection, organization … we could kill, if we had to. We could defend our turf.” For a moment Allende almost looked despairing. “You’ve changed. The rest of us haven’t.”
“That was before I died.” Mártira looked ashamed, but her voice remained strong.
“Sister, listen.” Claudia laid her hand on Mártira’s arm, a strange light filling her eyes. “You have to help us. This is your one chance. Tell us to get the girl.”
Mártira took her arm back. “No. It is I who must help you. Don’t you see what you’re talking about, Claudia? Don’t you see this is madness?” She turned to Hagens. “How dare you come here, to my home, and twist things the way you have? Confuse people? You have no right.”
Hagens studied my sister, her expression hardening. “I thought you might say that.”
I heard the muffled but oddly sharp sound, even jerked in response to it, long before I realized what it meant. I saw Mártira fall to the floor, almost like a piece of fruit drifting through halfset aspic. I saw the hole in her forehead, a dark and unseeing third eye.
“Mártira?” I said, rising to my feet. Around me I knew the leaders were rising, yelling, but they might’ve been miles away. I pushed through them and fell to my knees at my fallen sister’s side, clutched her ice-cold arms.
She was silenced. Forever.
“No!” Claudia screamed. “We were going to convince her, vote her out as leader! You goddamn bitch, you didn’t say you’d kill her!”
Before I could even look up, before I could think of doing anything, another shot rang out. To my left, inches away, Claudia landed in a heap, something oozing from her temple and her eyes horribly wide.
“Get up.” I heard Hagens cock the gun again, felt the shadow of her arm pass over my body. Lifting my eyes with a tearless sob, I found her own, so damningly placid. The leaders hadn’t taken her down. Instead they were all standing, watching the scene with a resignation that made me want to scream. “I won’t kill someone kneeling.”
“No.” Bruno stepped forward and got in Hagens’s physical space, baring his teeth, forcing her back. “She’s just a girl.”
“She’s a Cicatriz.” Hagens aimed her silenced pistol upward and let Bruno have a bit of ground. Still, she was firm. “Isn’t this how a regime change is done in your world? How a new leader is chosen? Like a pack of wolves?”
“It is.” Mr. Invierno came forward and took Bruno by the pants leg. “Leave it be, Allende. We been talkin’ about this before Hagens even showed up. Mártira had to go. Only reason she lasted this long, what with her rule about not bringin’ in ill-got money, is ’cause none of us need
t’eat now.”
Mártira. Claudia. My family. As if nothing was going on around me, as if people weren’t calmly debating whether they should let me live or die as I sat between my sisters’ bodies, I bent over them, my own body trying to weep. The last time I’d heaved and choked like that had been the night I’d turned her, at her request—turned Mártira, lovely Mártira, my only protector against Claudia’s cruelty, into the most beautiful of zombies by letting her sip delicately from my wrist, as one might from a glass of wine. No bite. No fear. Only acceptance.
Let Hagens shoot. Let it happen.
Silence took over. After a moment I dared to look up. I found no shock, no wonder, no fear among the leaders. Instead, I was the spectacle.
Hagens relented, clicking her safety on. “Take her back to the tent, then. Make sure she doesn’t talk.”
Bruno did as she ordered. I tried to struggle as he lifted me, tried vainly to cling to Mártira’s cold body, but he pried my fingers free and hefted me over his broad shoulder, hissing into my hair, “I saved your life. Don’t make me regret it.”
He might as well have said nothing. As he carried me outside, ignoring my wails, I stretched out like an imbecile for the bodies on the ground. As if my arms were long enough to reach them, as if my heart were large enough to fold both of them into and keep.
By nightfall, everyone knew.
When the cloud of fairy lights was aglow and the fires were roaring, Hagens and the leaders took the stage. By then the zombies sent to fetch Smoke had come back to report on their failure. They brought the bodies of the fallen with them.
Hagens told the rank and file that they’d gone to the tent that afternoon, only to find Mártira dead. Shot through the head, cleanly and once, as only a human would think to do. That the sight had caused Claudia to kill herself before anyone could stop her.
“One of the human visitors must have slain her as she slept. Slain two of them—one through grief.”
“We can’t go to the police,” someone said. “They’ll arrest half of us just for standing there. Some of us got rap sheets that could wind inside a player piano.”
“That’s why we take matters into our own hands!” Hagens shouted. “Starting now. In Mártira and Claudia’s memory, we free the zombie known as Smoke. It was Mártira’s final wish. He’s too precious to leave in human control. We take him north and form our own tribe! We’re already dead—what have we got to lose?”
“Mártira! Claudia! Martyrs for the cause!” Mr. Invierno yelled. Lied.
Even in my benumbed, grief-stricken state, I knew they were all going to tell the same lie. They would make it so no one would believe me, even if I dared to speak. It was like I’d never been in the tent at all. The Changed were apparently content to have Hagens as their leader. So many of them were new, they didn’t know any better—they only knew that Mártira had taken them in, loved everyone, and that her kindness had gotten her killed. Hagens could do anything she liked.
God, what were they going to do? What was I going to do?
That night the music was angry. That night the living who tried to join in the festivities were turned away, shadowed by the dead until they got back into their carriages and took off. Everyone was bitter, raging, full of fire.
If I felt anything at all, it was fear.
Unable to sleep, unsure where to go, I walked. I knew I ought to keep walking, leave the camp behind, but I also knew I wouldn’t get very far on my own. The dead around me danced, and ballooned their collapsed lungs to sing and scream, and played cards and knife games to forget, and I walked, seeing nothing, hearing nothing.
At least, not until I saw the three young zombies from the night before. The ones who’d come with Mr. Griswold. Perhaps it was the girl’s metallic voice, the sleekness of the noseless boy’s head, or the sturdy size of the short-haired, one-eyed lad that caught my attention, I don’t know—but my dead heart contracted as I recalled Hagens’s anger at them and those with them.
A forbidding feeling took hold of me. They had to get out of here. It wasn’t safe for them. And if Mártira had been alive, she would have told them so. She, who had saved so many.
The girl and the shorter boy were engrossed by the performers on the stage, but the taller boy was actively surveying the crowd. He wore a hearing aid hooked over his left ear and he kept reaching up to scratch at it, as if it bothered him. It was him I decided to approach. “Pardon me?”
He looked down at the sound of my voice. His one good eye was a warm shade of brown, which the glare from the glittering lights turned into gold. “You.”
Without thinking, I half bowed my head. “Yes. I was there last night … when Hagens …” Just saying her name made my voice seize up.
“Yeah, I remember you.” He didn’t look at his friends, but stepped forward, forcing me to move back. He was quite wide and well muscled. “Laura, right?”
“Yes,” I told him as I tripped on my hem. I caught myself before I could stumble and shut my eyes, launching into it. “But that’s not important. You have to go. At least, if your friend is here, the girl with the black hair—she has to go. Now.”
“Go?” I opened my eyes and saw that the boy was staring at me intently. “Why?”
Picking up my skirt, I lowered my voice and took a risk. “Because Hagens is in charge now. And …” How could I put it? “Hagens doesn’t like her.”
His expression altered, becoming more serious. “What happened?”
“Bad things,” was all I could think of to say. In my own voice, I could hear the tears that would never fall. “You should all go. Just go. You’re in danger.”
The boy held steady for a moment, before leaning very close to me. “Listen,” he said, and something in his voice compelled me to. “We’re here to figure a few things out. We actually need to talk to Hagens. If you honestly think she’d shoot us on sight, we’ll leave, and owe you a big one. But if there’s a chance we can meet up with her, we have to take it. Maybe you can help us.”
“Coalhouse?” The short boy came to join us. “What’s up?”
“Today, she …” I clamped my jaw shut. I didn’t want to say it. I was afraid it would come back to haunt me.
“Waaarn us about who?” the girl asked, stepping up beside the other male zombie.
“Hagens,” Coalhouse said, his eye never leaving my face. The tall girl hushed.
There were too many people. Too many strangers. I didn’t want to deal with this—I’d just wanted to whisper my warning and run. “I hate her for all she’s done and wants to do,” I said, keeping my phrasing vague, like Mártira had taught me to do when being interrogated by the cops. My books and her stories had always helped with that skill. It felt weirdly theatrical; I was filled with the sudden desire to laugh derisively at myself.
Coalhouse nodded slowly. “Okay, then. Good.”
“But you can’t do anything tonight.” I rubbed at my cheek. “Trust me. You should just leave. I greatly fear for your friend …”
“She’s not here,” Coalhouse assured me. “Neither is Griswold. It’s just Tom, and Chas, and me.”
“What about the road attack?” Tom looked at me, his gaze sharper than Coalhouse’s. “We were attacked on the road near Drike’s earlier. Your people have anything to do with that?”
They knew. They’d been there. “They’re not my people,” I said, putting no heat into the words. He seemed to understand, uttering a curse.
“Do you know why they were sent?” Coalhouse asked.
“To get Smoke. Hagens wants him back for some reason.”
“Smoke?” Chas wondered.
“The prisoner with the new illness.” I decided I had to tell. “Today she was talking about getting the black-haired girl, too, trading her for him. Or her father. I’m not sure.”
“Getting Nora?” Tom asked, his black eyes widening. “Jesus.”
Chas looked to the camp, her eyes narrowing. “We can’t take them alone.” She returned her attention to
me. “Come with us. We’ll geeett you out of here.”
For an instant, I thought of going with them—then I recalled Dog and Abuelo, and all the people Hagens had lied to, and I knew I couldn’t leave them. Not without knowing for certain I could come back. And I couldn’t tell the entire camp, not without throwing it into chaos, possibly turning it against the three offering me their help. “I can’t. Go. Come back with more people. I could help you then.”
“Okay.” A pause, and Coalhouse added, “Thank you.”
“C’mon, man. We can cut through those trees. We gotta get back.”
I watched the other zombies as they walked away, their feet heavy on the grass and fallen leaves. After a few seconds I found myself standing alone, feeling hollow.
What had I just done?
Fueled by a sudden fear, I hurried across the field, doing my best to skirt the crowd. I wasn’t a strong runner in death; my legs were slow to listen to my brain. Once in the tent, I threw myself onto my pallet and buried my face in my pillow, my heart and mind a mess of turbulent, unconnected feelings and thoughts. Above all, I thought perhaps I’d made a monumental mistake. I didn’t know for certain whether those people were potential allies or something else. Not without Mártira to put it in words I could understand, to guide me through it.
She was gone. She was really gone, and I felt like I couldn’t move, couldn’t think. I just wanted to close my eyes and join her. Even Claudia. I would have given my own pathetic second life to have Claudia back.
Later that night, they fed the bodies to the flames. Mártira’s body popped and sputtered—undignified sounds, sounds she never should have made. Even when she drank my diseased blood she was neat and dainty about it. Bruno and several buskers stood at the open tent door to view the pyre, terror or dark anger muting their lips. I could feel Bruno’s eyes on me.
I stared beyond them, my own rotting eyes calling magical shapes out of the raging fires, wondering if I would ever see Coalhouse and the others again—and unsure if it even mattered.
I wished desperately that the flames were eating me instead.