Simon met him at the door. “Tell me you brought lunch. Your cupboards are bare.”
“I meant to.”
“I can’t eat intentions, idiot.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ll grab something while I’m out. I have an errand.”
“Here? In town?”
“Just keep an eye on the kid.”
By errand, Simon meant mission. He’d already put on his shoes, and his expression held his signature crinkle-browed irritation when delayed by questions.
Zac gestured to the door. “Have fun storming the castle.”
“I can’t believe you just— Never mind.”
“Classic.”
“Cheese. I’ll see you later.”
“As you wish.”
“Idiot.”
The door shut. Zac gave it a pat. “Curmudgeon.”
On his kitchen counter sat a mason jar filled with seashells. Scallops, spirals, cowries. Pinks, peaches, ivories, a few pale grays. A limpet showing its white underside. A pearlescent flat thing he didn’t recognize. As he picked up the jar, a knock came. Zac set it down and went to open the door.
“Forget something?”
Simon’s expression was withdrawn. Mission face, and not a taco run sort of mission. No jesting this time around.
“I was going to get it done and then tell you I’d done it,” Simon said. “But it should be your choice.”
“Okay.”
“I figured you didn’t have a good shovel, apartment living and all, so on my way from the airport I bought two. They’re in the rental.”
Shovels. A cold finger traced Zac’s spine. Folly to think Colm had orchestrated this from beyond the grave, yet the coincidence of Moira’s words followed by this … No, it was not a coincidence. No, Colm had nothing to do with it. Zac had to stop thinking in the old ways.
Okay, Father. I’m Yours.
The chill sluiced off him in a warm shower of kindness. His Father was here.
“’Course I didn’t know then how it’s been for you,” Simon said. “And why. You don’t have to go, man. But it needs to be done. I’m sure the grave’s settled by now. Could be obvious, if someone spotted it.”
“I’ll go,” Zac said.
“It might set you off.”
“I know.”
Simon shrugged. “Your call.”
“Rachel,” Zac said over his shoulder. “Field trip.”
Simon frowned.
“Can’t leave her here.”
“Guess not.”
She came into the room wearing leggings and a red tunic top. She’d always worn jeans before, and Zac hadn’t noticed how thin she was; the leggings clung and the tunic hung too obviously for him to miss it now. Her frame might have been recovering from long illness, might have belonged to the Dust Bowl days, survival on flour and grease. He had to find a way to ask. Money wasn’t likely the issue, given her hair and color contacts. Then again, people prioritized strange things sometimes.
Zac locked up, and they left. Rachel didn’t ask where they were going, seeming to pick up on the gravity of the trip. Simon’s face was hard as he motioned her to the back seat and Zac got in on the passenger side.
“You’re not doing this to verify anything, are you?” Zac said.
“Such as?”
“He’s not a zombie.”
Simon gave a mirthless laugh. “That hasn’t been one of my concerns.”
“This is about concealing the grave. Nothing else.”
“If you’ve got some other item on a Colm’s Corpse to-do list somewhere, say so now.”
“I talked to Moira.”
A long moment passed, and then Simon sighed. “Could’ve started there.”
“She said something,” Zac said. “About him. I had to tell her he’s dead. She said she knew, but some of what she said—I’m not sure she does.”
“And you’re surprised?”
“No, Simon, I don’t mean the way we don’t believe it. The surreal sense of it, the forgetting he’s not going to respond to group texts. I mean something in Moira still believes Colm is in Chicago, in his apartment, planning his next victim.”
Simon was staring at him, gearing up. “Where is she?”
“Eyes on the road,” Rachel said from the back seat.
Zac turned his face to look out his window and bit down his laugh. His shoulders shook with it.
Simon growled but refocused on the road. “Where is she?”
“She didn’t want to tell me.”
“Meaning she didn’t tell you? Or meaning she told you anyway?”
Zac shouldn’t have brought her into this. “Come on, man. You know it’s up to her.”
“Old custom. Those days ended.”
“Oh? And when did that happen?”
“When she withheld information that resulted in an untold number of murders.”
Zac pressed his palms to his eyes. Shook his head. Yeah, Simon deserved to know. But as long as he wasn’t endangering her or anyone else, Zac had to respect Moira’s confidence.
“Take me back to Zac’s,” Rachel said. “This is between you.”
“And you’ll stick around?” Simon said.
She flinched at his bark. “I’ll try to.”
“Not good enough.”
Her head bowed.
Maybe it was new tensions piling onto earlier ones that made Zac’s right hand clench with an urge to deck something. “Rachel.”
She looked up.
“I’m not risking coming home to an empty house.” For all he knew, she was skilled at hotwiring. It would fit.
“This is a murderer’s grave.”
“Yes.”
“A necessary grave.”
He started to turn in his seat to make eye contact, but he couldn’t manage it without urgent warnings from his ribs. He leaned a little to find her in the rearview mirror. “This grave exists to prevent more graves.”
“But you’ve shown me mercy. Why not Colm?”
He could parse the difference between the cure serum and Colm’s methods, but he didn’t know what those were. In his nightmares, Colm most often strangled his victims with his hands, but he’d also stabbed a few, shot a few. In the worst of the dreams, Colm tied up scores of mortals and threw them into mass graves, leered at Zac while he shoveled dirt onto them and Zac stood paralyzed beside him.
“You didn’t intend them to die,” Simon said.
“But they did. That’s the relevant fact.”
“To determine a sentence? No.” Zac straightened in his seat as they neared the park. “No court would convict you of first-degree murder, and that’s what Colm was guilty of. Many times over.”
“I see,” she whispered.
“What’re you going to do?” Simon said to Zac. “Take a picture of the settled ground and the weeds and text it to Moira?”
“I would if I had her number.”
“It would be overgrown by now even if a zombie dug its way out.”
Zac shuddered at the image.
“What was the burner’s area code?”
“Simon. No.”
“She wouldn’t have called you if she wanted to keep it from me.”
That held a certain logic.
The park backed up to Galloway’s Books, but Simon didn’t use David’s parking lot. Trekking through the park in the middle of the day was risky enough; they wouldn’t allow the possibility of David’s being connected to said trek if something went wrong. Instead they would leave the car at the lot behind the corner market. Still small but larger than David’s and unseen from the street.
When Simon turned the car off, Rachel said quietly, “I’m staying here.”
Simon scowled.
“I will not steal the car. I’ll be here waiting for you. But I’d be an intruder at the site, and you know it.”
Maybe she was right. “Your word?” Zac said.
“My word. I can pretty much always wait calmly in a car.”
S
imon hooked the keys to one of his belt loops. He and Zac set out, each carrying a shovel, Simon swinging from his other hand a ten-gallon plastic bucket he had bought as well.
Of course, as if they’d never been interrupted, Simon said, “So Moira’s location is need-to-know.”
“Yep.”
“Which means she isn’t in Europe. You think I’d hop in the car and drive after her.”
Zac grinned. “Nice try.”
“I’m right.”
“You could go after her just as easily in Europe. You’d book a flight as fast as you’d fill up a gas tank.”
From the market, their path followed the sidewalk for two blocks and then cut through a vacant residential lot. From here they would end up on the east end of the park, with the bookstore somewhere to the north. If they veered northeast, they would find the half-cleared area chosen for Colm’s grave. Burs and sap clung to their jeans. Zac didn’t bother to brush at them; he’d only collect more on his way back.
He knew the place the moment they emerged through knee-high weeds and brush. He stood looking over the sparse woods. Sunlight filtered through the canopy of foliage, catching the underside of cottonwood leaves and turning them silver as the breeze tossed them. None of this had been visible in the night.
Their mission was needed. The dirt over the grave had sunk, air pockets releasing from the disturbed earth as it settled. Weeds had sprouted, which helped but didn’t fully camouflage the six-foot length of ground. Did the serum’s organisms continue to live in that soil, feeding on plant nutrients as they’d once fed on Colm’s vitality, giving that vitality back to the microbes around them? Or had the death of the host organism precipitated their death as well?
“No evidence of zombie activity,” Simon said.
Zac shook his head. He saw this place the night he’d last been here—the only other time he had been here. Each of them pale in the flashlight beams. White hands wielding shovels, white faces with wide eyes. David’s somber, hushed voice: “It’s time.” Their nods. Permission. The glint of the saber coming down. The blood on the dirt.
And then the digging, and then the dirt turned over onto Colm, and Zac lay there in the grave and couldn’t get out—
“Zac,” Simon said.
He blinked again, but a gray haze crept over his mind. He was slipping as if the ground beneath him had tilted.
A quiet curse, a hand on his arm. “Idiot.”
Zac grasped his will in both hands and drew himself up from the depth of the haze. “The idiot can hear you.”
“Good,” Simon said. “I’ll get started. You just stand there.”
“No. Let’s do this.”
“That’s a terrible idea.”
“It’s not. Trust me, man.”
Simon’s scowl hadn’t let up since they’d gotten in the car. It didn’t now either, as they trekked deeper into the park and chose a place to fill the bucket.
“Should’ve brought a wheelbarrow,” Zac said as he shoveled.
“Yeah, I thought it might be a little conspicuous sticking out of the trunk.”
Zac grunted in what he hoped sounded like protest or agreement or anything other than what it was. His ribs were killing him.
The bucket didn’t take long to fill, but ten gallons wasn’t a lot of dirt. They team-carried it back and forth. Either could have lifted it himself, but something ceremonial had overtaken the moment. They were here together. They acted together.
When they had a satisfactory dirt pile beside the grave, Simon set aside the bucket and Zac angled for his first shovelful. And froze. He was already sweating; now he went cold. He couldn’t look away from the exposed soil, crumbling and brown-black and mingled with tiny rocks and earthworms and roots and weeds overturned by their digging. Digging. Clawing. Fighting for light and air. Fighting to see the sky again. He got a shovelful, swiveled, and dropped it onto the sunken grave. One down.
He kept shoveling. He didn’t know if Simon had joined him or not, if Simon had spoken to him in the last few minutes. He covered the grave with dirt and more dirt as the past played in front of his eyes and weighted his chest. The terror and the fight. And then the escape.
The second day. His fingers sinking into horizontal ground. Pulling himself up. Rolling limply onto his back. Coated in mud and blood, hungry, exhausted, but so anguished in soul he hadn’t noticed any of that for another twelve hours. Breathing and crying and breathing some more while the sun poured light down on him. Light that had guided him up, that had let him believe he wasn’t going to be trapped there for undying centuries.
The shovel fell from his hand.
The first sunny day in weeks. The promise of the sky if he could persevere long enough to reach it. If his second day in the grave had rained like so many before it, if the sun had never come out for him and the dirt had sunk on him like this and kept sinking while he despaired in darkness, might he still be there now? Would he have lost his will until it was too late?
He was on his hands and knees in front of the other grave. Colm’s grave. Firm hands held his shoulders. He tried to come back, but the past still hung on hard. Ground crumbled under his palms as he heaved himself up and out. To lie in sunshine.
“God.”
I will never leave you nor forsake you.
“You brought the light to bring me strength. To bring me out.”
His hands were covered in dirt, as if he’d been digging with them, scooping handfuls while he knelt there. Maybe he had.
“Come on, Zac. You need to come back, man.” Simon’s voice was shaking.
Zac looked up. Simon knelt at his side, both hands still gripping Zac’s shoulders. “Here.”
A hurricane gust of a sigh. “Don’t do that again.”
“That’s the goal.” He shut his eyes. “You’re right. I’m an idiot.”
“Should’ve stayed in the car.”
“I said I dug myself out alone. But it was grace. It’s all been grace.”
Simon shifted on his knees and looked away.
“God. He didn’t leave. He gave the sky back to me.”
“You’re not making sense, Zac.”
“With all that’s been messing with me, my head keeps forgetting I’m not still in the grave with those other bodies. Or with Colm. I got out, man.” He looked down at his hands, and the dirt caking them made his heart hammer. He scrubbed them on his jeans. “No. I got out.”
“Okay.” Simon’s voice was cautious. Worried.
Zac kept scrubbing at his hands. Dirt had worked in under the nails, which didn’t help his pulse. He tried to keep talking. “It’s like my mind stayed behind somehow. Here. It’s why I can’t sleep.”
“And why you blanked out that night.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Deep breaths. Aching ribs. Zac could have laughed. Those were grace too. Grace that grabbed him by the collar when nothing else would stop his prodigal stupidity. Because he had always been a son. The kind that relinquished a rebellion of silence only when pinned to the floor of a barn in the dark, yet still called a son by the Father.
“He did get me out.” Zac’s eyes burned. “If He hadn’t gotten me out, I’d still be there.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not going to make sense, Simon. Until you can see grace for what it is.”
His brother wouldn’t respond well to that, but it had to be said. Zac waited for the dismissive response, but Simon gave none at all. After a moment his hands lifted from Zac’s shoulders.
“You good? Not going to slip off somewhere again?”
Zac used his shovel to stand. “I’m good.”
“Maybe you should sit while I finish this.”
“No. I’ll be slow with the ribs, but I need to keep at it.”
They resumed their task. New dirt fell on the old and slowly covered it until only the new could be seen, level again with the burgeoning forest around it.
THIRTY-SEVEN
The car was still there when Zac and
Simon made it back to the market lot, and Rachel now sat in the passenger seat. She had locked the doors and tilted the seat back, and her eyes were closed. She must be as tired as they were, after all the upheaval of the last twenty-four hours. Asleep she looked no older than eighteen.
He tapped on the window, and she jarred awake then relaxed at the sight of him and Simon. She unlocked the car and stretched as they got in.
“Time?”
“For food,” Simon said.
“Oh, good,” Rachel said. “Zac, I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not, but the only edible things in your house are pancake mix, bacon, and assorted candy.”
He jabbed a finger at her. “Hyperbole.”
“Barely.”
They went to the Harbor Vale Family Diner because it was close and incapable of disappointing. Zac went straight to the men’s room and washed his hands. Twice. Back at their booth he was still hungry after his burger and fries, so he ordered a cup of chili. He rolled his eyes at Simon’s approving nod.
They talked little while they ate, and Zac mapped the rest of his day. He’d stop at the bookstore tonight, but he had a few hours before David and Tiana would close up shop. He needed to know Rachel was ready to be left alone. If so, he would drive out to his dunes. A yearning built in him to soak up the wide-open beauty for a few hours.
Before he had to ask, just outside the diner, Rachel halted and squared her shoulders, facing them both.
“Okay, guys, I need a break. I haven’t been by myself in almost eighteen hours—no, sleeping in the car doesn’t count—and it probably doesn’t sound long to you, but it’s taxing. For me.”
For Zac eighteen hours with people was only the beginning of the party. On the other hand, eighteen hours in a locked closet would leave him catatonic. He nodded his understanding. Simon frowned at him.
“My word isn’t worth much yet,” Rachel said, and Zac’s heart lifted at her use of the last word. “But I wish you’d let me drive around for a few hours.”
“You’ll come back?”
“I will.”
“And not head straight for Zac’s apartment to break in and steal the cure?” Simon said.
From Sky to Sky Page 29