#MurderTrending

by Gretchen McNeil

  Ethan scrunched his mouth to the side, and held up his fingers, ticking them off like he was doing math in his head. “A lot.”

  So much for math.

  “That was my thought exactly.” He pushed a glass toward Dee, as if he wanted to make sure she had some. “I’m afraid this is going to require an extra-long workout this afternoon. A jog around the island, perhaps?”

  “Definitely,” Ethan replied.

  Nyles leaned in. “You’ll join, yes?”

  Running wasn’t exactly something Dee did voluntarily, but the sharp look in Nyles’s eyes practically begged her to say yes.

  “Um, sure?”

  “Excellent.” He polished off the rest of his milk shake, then rose from his chair. “Shall we say four o’clock at the gym?”

  Dee’s afternoon at I Scream was…weird.

  On some level, it felt like a normal job at a normal ice-cream parlor that any seventeen-year-old anywhere in the country might have. Griselda directed Dee through cleaning and restocking the cooler, checking inventory for the walk-in freezer in the back, polishing the floors, wiping down tables, washing dishes. It was all pretty mindless, bordering on mundane.

  But also totally bizarre. For instance, they had a steady stream of customers—thankfully, no Rodrigo—all of whom Griselda seemed to know. And though the tables were filled, aside from a quick hello before ordering and several clandestine glances in Dee’s direction (which she absolutely noticed), no one interacted. Everyone sat alone, avoided eye contact, and refused to strike up a conversation with Dee, Griselda, or any of the other patrons.

  Then there was the giant TV screen running nonstop replays of Blair’s murder. Dee couldn’t avoid the sounds—Gucci’s synth-pop sound track, his booming voice, Blair’s strangled response, and the repulsive sucking sound Blair’s head made when Gucci planted it on the cushion beside her body—but she tried to keep her eyes away from the screen.

  Sometimes she’d catch a glimpse of Blair’s head catapulting through the air like a diseased pig carcass flung over the walls of a besieged castle by a medieval trebuchet. It was uncanny how Dee always seemed to see the same clip: a super-slo-mo shot of the decapitation. The Postman ran it forward and backward and even had a version where the image toggled between frames as Blair’s head was severed. Arrows and diagrams pointed to various tendrils of gore protruding from her neck and her skull, like a fucked-up anatomy lesson in one of Nyles’s premed courses, and the fan art and GIFs trending in the comments sidebar were out of control.

  There was even one GIF showing Cinderella standing beside Blair’s head as it cascaded through the air, staring at its underside as if in disbelief. The implication was clear: Blair’s death was in retaliation for Dee’s “success” against Slycer.

  And then there was this cloud of secrets hanging over her head. About three dozen times during her shift, when the shop was momentarily empty, Dee was about to ask Griselda what the hell was going on. The cloak-and-dagger crap was wigging her out, and she had so many questions, she was about ready to explode.

  But she didn’t. Explode or ask Griselda. Instead she scooped and scrubbed and blended and counted, until her anxiety was too much to bear. Then she attempted small talk while Griselda took inventory during a lull.

  “It’s pretty quiet in here now.”

  “If being forced to listen to your boss getting murdered over and over again counts as quiet to you, then yes.”

  Point to Griselda. Dee tried again. “There are more people on Alcatraz two-point-oh than I realized.”

  “Only twenty-seven now,” Griselda replied, her eyes fixed on her clipboard. “There were forty-eight when I arrived. Over a hundred when Nyles got here.”

  More than a hundred down to twenty-seven? That seemed weird, but Dee wasn’t about to waste a question on it. Griselda’s patience with her was already wearing thin.

  “What did you do?” Dee asked, not even sure she wanted to know. “To get here.”

  Griselda snorted. Well, that was something. A reaction other than snark. She tossed her inventory clipboard down on the counter and planted her hands on her hips. “Six months ago, I supposedly murdered my college roommate and my boyfriend after I caught them having sex. It was a crime of passion and jealousy, full of kinky details.” She paused, leaning in. “I slit their throats while they were asleep.”

  “Oh.”

  She straightened up, grabbed her clipboard, and returned to her task. “Of course I didn’t do it. I mean, would I have slit their throats if I’d given a shit that they were banging? Totally. But I’m way hotter than Julie ever was, and besides, Jasper wasn’t even my boyfriend, just this dude I did some hacking with once in a while. He was pretty basic—library systems, low-security shit—not in my league at all. But he had a big dick, and sometimes a girl just needs a big dick. I definitely wasn’t in love with him like that bitchface shrink said I was during my trial. He wasn’t my type.”

  These were more words than Griselda had spoken to Dee in the almost twenty-four hours they’d known each other, and Dee didn’t know if Griselda was fucking with her or if she just really, really enjoyed talking about herself.

  Probably both.

  “Quarter to four,” Griselda said, changing topics abruptly. “Time for your workout, Princess.”

  Even though it was an hour until closing, Griselda locked up the shop, just as Blair had done the night before. Dee wondered if this was against the rules and whether it would be reflected in their weekly money rations, but at that moment she didn’t care. She was pretty sure this whole “go for a long jog” business was a cover, and she was ready to find out what Nyles, Griselda, and Ethan really knew about the island.

  The building that housed the gym looked as if it had once been a hardware store, with a raised step for a window display, low ceilings, and only a half dozen pieces of equipment including a set of rusty free weights, a treadmill that would probably fall apart at a slow walking pace, and a rowing machine that might have been made of wood. Not that Dee had been to many workout facilities in her days, but she was pretty sure this one sucked.

  Ethan lay on a weight bench doing chest presses. He anchored the bar and sat up as they entered. “Welcome to the party, pal.”

  “Party?” Dee asked.

  Nyles emerged from the back room, dressed in long warm-up pants and a zip-front hoodie. “It’s from an action movie,” he explained. “Remember? Ethan likes to quote them. Ad nauseam.”

  “Not ad nauseam,” Ethan said cheerfully. “That’s from Die Hard. My fave.”

  “Kill me,” Griselda muttered.

  Ethan beckoned Dee to the back room. “Come on, let’s get you suited up.”

  He managed to find Dee some workout clothes that almost fit. The skintight yoga pants were two sizes too small and hugged her thighs and butt so tightly she must have looked like a lumpy sausage shoved into an undersize casing. Thankfully, Ethan also found her a sweatshirt. An XXL sweatshirt. It required three rolls on each sleeve just to find her hands, and it hung like a tunic, hitting mid-quad. But at least the hideous pants sitch was hidden. The only thing that fit were the beat-up running shoes, sporting mismatched laces and a strip of duct tape along one shoe to keep the seams from splitting.

  Meanwhile, Griselda looked gorgeous, of course. She wore leggings and a long-sleeve runner’s shirt that fit her like they’d literally been custom-made for her body, highlighting every perfect curve and graceful angle, and the black shirt enhanced the blondness of her hair and the blueness of her eyes. Dee looked frumpy in comparison, but she reminded herself that it didn’t matter. Who was she trying to impress, anyway? Not Ethan, and certainly not Nyles.

  They started out on a slow jog from the gym, heading straight down Main Street toward the north end of the island. The gym was the last of the fake businesses on the strip, nestled beside several boarded-up storefronts: old-fashioned single-story buildings with rock siding and large windows. Beyond that was another open area, though unlike t
he soccer and baseball facilities near the Barracks, it looked more like an abandoned overgrown lot than a sports field.

  The cameras, per usual, were everywhere. Even the deserted storefronts were each adorned with a crow-shaped atrocity that slowly rotated as they passed, and Dee began to despair of ever finding a camera-free oasis on Alcatraz 2.0.

  She did her best to keep up with her obviously more athletic colleagues. Ethan jogged like a leashed puppy desperate to be untethered. He kicked his knees high in front of him, as if attempting to get more of a workout than the relatively slow pace would allow, and every few minutes he’d sprint a hundred yards ahead of them, then turn and jog back. If he’d been a different type of guy, Dee would have thought he was showing off, but Ethan was more of a hyperactive child than your average gym-obsessed twentysomething, and Dee really believed he just needed to burn off the energy.

  Nyles and Griselda paced each other, running side by side in Stepford-like unison, and Dee was more aware than ever how perfectly suited they were for each other. Tall, good-looking, in shape. They even had matching blond hair. She might have thought they were siblings if she hadn’t known better.

  Dee lagged behind, struggling with both the exercise and the ill-fitting clothes. The sweatshirt swamped her, the pants constricted, and with every step her legs felt heavier, like she was running through wet cement.

  The field gave way to industrial remains. A large pile of dirt rose like a hillock beside a row of cylindrical concrete silos that might once have been a water-treatment plant. The remains of metal trailers and shipping containers, rusted and ripped at the seams from wind and rain, lay scattered across this end of the island, which clearly had not been reclaimed as part of The Postman’s plans for Alcatraz 2.0, and Dee wondered if this section, like the warehouses to the east where she’d woken up in a Cinderella dress yesterday afternoon, housed the kill rooms of the Painiacs.

  Dee was too busy theorizing about her surroundings to realize that the road in front of her had come to an abrupt end until she plowed directly into Nyles’s back.

  “Sorry,” she said, panting and stumbling to regain her balance.

  Nyles looped a wiry but strong arm around her waist to keep her upright. “You’re grand. Might be good to keep your eyes in front of you, though.”

  “Right,” she said, steadying herself. “Good idea.” She looked around, and noticed that a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence blocked the road. A rusted and warped warning sign clung stubbornly to it.

  BIOHAZARD: QUARANTINE.

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  “Where are we?” Dee whispered.

  “This,” Ethan said, pulling aside a cutaway portion of chain link, “is the end of the world.”

  GRISELDA PUNCHED HIM IN the arm. “Stop being stupid.” Then, without waiting for a response, she ducked through the hole in the fence and jogged down the path on the other side.

  “After you, milady.” Ethan gestured for Dee to follow.

  Dee hesitated, remembering the unironic NO SWIMMING sign on the rock wall near the Barracks. “Um, quarantine? Biohazard? Those sound like really good reasons to stay the hell away.”

  Nyles laughed. “Are you afraid you might get cancer and die? I believe we’re in significantly more imminent danger on Alcatraz two-point-oh.”

  The Brit had a point.

  Still, there was the possibility that even if Hannah Ball or Cecil B. DeViolent wasn’t waiting for her on the other side of the fence, convicted killers Nyles, Griselda, and Ethan might have just as sinister a plan for her. Trusting people gets you killed faster. But without help, she couldn’t prove that she had been framed for Monica’s death, and convicted killers or not, Nyles, Griselda, and Ethan were her only lifelines.

  Dee took a deep breath and scurried through the fence.

  If most of Alcatraz 2.0 looked as if no one had inhabited it in twenty years, the northern tip of the island was positively prehistoric. The moment Dee reached the other side of the fence, even the asphalt felt old and crumbly beneath her feet. Tall grasses with white flowers sprouting from their tips had taken root in the cracks of the blacktop, some growing almost as tall as Dee’s five feet three inches. They swayed in the wind, obscuring the warped ridges in the road as their roots slowly displaced modern technology.

  Bushes spread out of control. Trees flourished, some so overgrown that their branches were sagging beneath their own weight. No power lines or cell-phone towers marred the landscape, and the only signs left that people had once inhabited this part of the island were the decrepit road and the foundational remains of a long-abandoned building, all but reclaimed by Mother Nature.

  The sound of waves crashing against the rock wall was louder at this end of the island, which took the full brunt of the current, and the wind felt colder without the barrier of San Francisco high-rises, or even the windbreak of the Barracks.

  “This was one of the old navy yards,” Nyles said. He stood close behind her, Griselda on one side, Ethan on the other. “Apparently, they sent radioactive ships here to be decontaminated and cocked up the job, so the area was quarantined.”

  “That sounds safe,” Dee said sarcastically.

  But Ethan took her comment at face value. “Only safe spot on the island.” He sucked in a deep breath, holding the cool air in his lungs for a second before letting it out with a whoosh. “That’s why Blair let us in on the secret.”

  “Blair found this place?” Was this what she’d meant when she said people had been surviving on Alcatraz 2.0 longer than Dee might realize?

  “Yes,” Nyles said. “Blair and a few others. They’re all gone now.”

  “And why are we here?”

  “Look around.” Nyles swept his arm in a circle. “What don’t you see?”

  It took Dee a moment to realize what he meant. “There are no cameras.”

  “She’s not as dumb as she looks,” Griselda said.

  “Funny,” Dee snapped back. “Can’t say the same for you.”

  “Ouch,” Ethan said, licking his forefinger. He jabbed it into his thigh and let out a hissing sound. “Burned.”

  “We shouldn’t have brought her here,” Griselda said. “I don’t trust Princess not to blab about our secrets.”

  She had no idea how good Dee was at keeping secrets. No idea at all.

  “I do,” Nyles said softly.

  “When this all blows up in your face,” Griselda countered, “just remember I told you so.”

  Nyles shot Griselda a look as if to say Cool it; then he turned to Dee, his countenance more serious than it had been since they met. “What did you want to tell us about Blair’s death?”

  “I…” Dee paused, scanning the sky. “What about the drones?”

  “They do occasional flybys, but nothing regular,” Nyles said with a shrug. “Besides, you can hear them coming. Duck under a tree and you’re out of sight.”

  “Okay.” No cameras meant no one was watching and listening, so any secret conversations, sharing of information, or plotting of escape attempts could be carried out beyond the prying eyes and ears of both The Postman and the world. If Nyles, Griselda, and Ethan knew about this place, maybe they had other secrets that they’d share too. Anything that kept her alive was a good thing. If she was dead, Monica’s real killer would never be brought to justice.

  “Gucci’s MO is pretty standard, right?” she began. “Elaborate sets, some version of a hanging, lots of Gucci scarves.”

  Nyles tilted his head. “Gucci fan, I take it?”

  “No way.” Dee wrinkled her nose, revolted by the thought. “But my stepsister was obsessed with him. Even ran one of Gucci’s fan forums.”

  Griselda wandered away. “She sounds like a charmer.”

  “Hey!” Outbursts weren’t her thing—she mostly internalized her emotions—but Griselda had gone too far. “Back off.”

  Griselda didn’t even flinch. “Fine, so she was sweet and kind and perfect in every way. Is that why you killed her?” />
  “I didn’t kill her!”

  “Sure you didn’t. You’re pure and innocent while the rest of us are assholes for killing our friends and families.”

  “Not everyone,” Dee said. “Just you.”

  “Sweet!” Ethan said, sitting down on the broken concrete. “Girl fight. Wish I had popcorn.”

  Griselda ignored him. “You think you’re so fucking special, huh?” She shoved her index finger in Dee’s face. “You’ve been here one day, Princess. One. I’ve been here for eighty-seven. And if you make it that long, you can act like you understand pain and suffering.”

  Dee clenched her jaw, so angry the world around her seemed to spin. “I’ve seen suffering you can’t even imagine.”

  Nyles stepped in front of Dee. “Look, it doesn’t matter, okay? Guilty or not, we’re all stuck here.”

  “But that’s just it,” Dee pleaded, pushing aside her anger. “It does matter.”

  “How?” Nyles asked.

  Time to explain. “The heart Gucci carved into Blair’s shoulder,” she said, speaking quickly. “My stepsister’s killer did the same thing to her body after she was strangled.”

  “Post-mortem body modification is hardly unusual around here,” Nyles said.

  “Yes, but the heart on the shoulder,” Dee began. “That’s exactly what Monica’s killer did after she was dead.”

  “Dude,” Ethan said, eyebrows scrunched together. “Who is Monica?”

  Griselda sighed. “Her stepsister.”

  “The one who died?” Ethan continued.

  “How does your body keep on breathing air,” Griselda said, “when your brain is that stupid?”

  Ethan tapped his temple. “Muscle beats import every time. Fast and Furious. Words to live by.”

  Griselda sank her forehead to her knees. “I can’t even with you.”

  “Dee,” Nyles said, his impatience evident. “I’m sure it seemed dramatic at the time, but I don’t see how Gucci’s desecration of Blair’s body has anything to do with you or your stepsister.”