The youngest Gold Shirt was the same one Sonia had been hanging out with at the movies. He seemed surprised to see her, and not happy. His face was sour.
“You know her?” the ranking Gold Shirt said.
Chris nodded, staring at Sonia with questions. “You’re here for Mr. Wales?” He sounded so glum that Kendra almost felt sorry for him.
Sonia’s smile looked apologetic. “He promised me a special tour. I want to know more … just like you did.”
The other Gold Shirt checked a handwritten list, and his face brightened with recognition. “Right at the top! Sonia Petansu. I’ve also got Kendra. But …”
He peered at Ursulina, who gave him an Oscar-caliber smile. “Call me Lina.”
Sonia and Kendra glanced at each other: Lina?
Kendra was sweating beneath her carefully-prepared clothes. Her scalp itched. The Gold Shirt wrote down Ursulina’s name and spoke into a radio, using codes.
“Copy that,” he said, and turned back to them. “Good news: he’s on his way.”
“Who?” Ursulina said.
The guard dipped his chin to dramatize his announcement: “Mr. Wales.”
Sonia bounced up and down, practically squealing, and Kendra didn’t bother to hide her surge of excitement. If they were groupies, why not be happy to see Wales?
“You mean he’s coming here to us?” Sonia said, in full character. “Right now?”
The guard’s wink to Sonia made Kendra’s stomach turn. “You must have made an impression,” the guard said. A few nearby Gold Shirts gathered as if the girls were a fashion show. “Gotta love the newbies!” one of them said, and another whistled softly.
In less than a minute, a large luxury golf cart sped up; a Gold Shirt was driving Wales, who was in the passenger seat in a denim jacket with a fleece collar, and plaid wool pajama pants underneath.
“I thought I was taking a quick ride before bed,” Wales said. “But I must already be dreaming.” He stared at Sonia, then Kendra, with a nearly manic churning in his eyes that would have been more frightening without his grin … but not by much. “What an unexpected and delightful surprise!”
Kendra’s heart knocked so loudly in her chest that the vibration seemed to fill the car. They were doing it! Is life really this easy for girls who know how to work it?
At Wales’s invitation, one by one they climbed into the plush empty rear row of the golf cart, taking their time, crossing their legs, tossing their heads back to laugh at Wales’s trite remarks. When the cart drove, they passed a small, elevated stage. Workers had draped it in tarp, and massive, shiny red-and-gold ribbons peeked out.
“Is that for the ambassadors?” Kendra said.
Wales peered over his shoulder to look at her. “Yes!” he said. “I figured that’s why you’re here, Kendra. But you’re not ready to go out yet. Your training hasn’t begun. But it can begin tonight.”
“I don’t want to waste any time,” Kendra said. “I’m dying to start researching your Special Collections.”
“She doesn’t believe in waiting,” Ursulina said. “Likes to jump right in.”
“I don’t believe in waiting either,” Sonia said, driving her eyes into Wales’s. She moved closer to him.
Wales’s smile sharpened as he stared. “Is that so?”
“That’s very so,” Sonia said, and smoothed Wales’s jacket collar.
Kendra was glad again that she didn’t have Sonia’s job. Ursulina’s lip almost dropped to a touch-her-and-I’ll-kill-you sneer as she watched Wales’s heavy gaze on Sonia. She caught herself, but if the Gold Shirt had noticed, someone might have tried to slap Ursulina in handcuffs.
“You’re all here for my personal tour?” Wales said.
“Uhm … just me,” Sonia said, sliding closer still to his seat. “If that’s okay.”
“Oh, we can manage.” Wales’s breathing was already heavy. “I think your friends should get to know my friends.”
Kendra and Ursulina winked at each other, as if ready to make a Threadie sandwich together.
Wales chuckled. “Gonna be a good night. A damned good night. Well, Sonia, ready for your very special tour?”
The golf cart dropped Kendra and Ursulina off at the bunkhouse, and Wales moved to the cart’s backseat to slide next to Sonia. Before the cart drove away, he was twirling Sonia’s hair with his index finger. Gross.
Sonia giggled. “Be good, but not too good!” she called to them, and gave them a thumbs-up sign as the cart sped away. When Sonia rested her head on Wales’s shoulder, her smile faded just long enough for Kendra to remember that her friend was only acting.
Kendra’s escort had been the one with the walrus mustache and long golden coat who reminded Ursulina of a crazy neighbor she’d had once, always overdressed for the weather. But at least he looked about sixty and hadn’t seemed interested in Kendra the same way Wales was, pawing Sonia.
The guy who came for Ursulina was much younger, in his late twenties, stout, and pimple-faced. He could also use deodorant. It would be hard not to stare at his pimples, much less pretend she liked him. Judging from his plain Gold Shirt, he didn’t have nearly the rank of Kendra’s escort. Whatever. She wasn’t trying to make friends. She just needed to stay close to Kendra and Sonia, and possibly find Rianne.
Ursulina tried to keep her eyes focused on Pimple Face while he walked her through the main house, but whenever she had a chance, she mentally mapped it, trying to figure out where the tunnel was. Hey, dude, so I hear there’s a tunnel here…
“I bet lots of girls come through here,” Ursulina said.
“A buttload,” he said, nodding with a grin. Charming, she thought. Too late, he tried to be suave, extending his hand for a shake. “I’m Josh.”
“Lina,” she said, the nickname she’d hated since kindergarten. She tested a smile on him, and his eyes fogged over. Bull’s-eye. Lipstick had its uses.
“Well, ask me anything, Lina,” he said, deepening his voice. “I’m here for you.”
“What’s the ceremony about tomorrow morning?” she said. Josh looked excited. “It’s mind-blowing. Most people are still scrambling to outrun the biters or find a safe shelter, and we’re already sending out ambassadors.”
“For what?”
“Trade, recruiting, spreading the Threads that bind,” he said. “What else?”
You don’t have room for the people already coming, she thought, remembering the camp, but she didn’t press it. Threadville seemed to have a strong labor pool. Why did an overcrowded settlement recruit more people?
“How do you get chosen to do that?” she said.
“Wales has to like you. You get an orientation, like your friend. When you’re ready, you get sent away with a Gold Shirt crew to protect you. Like the Secret Service.”
“What happens in the orientation?”
Josh wagged a finger at her. “That’s a secret,” he stage-whispered. “Hell, even I don’t know. But lemme tell you, those girls come out believers. ”
“Do you know a chick named Rianne?” She’d be stupid not to ask.
“Sure, Rianne’s going out tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I heard,” Ursulina said, nodding casually. If she could only get what she needed, she could pull out Sonia and Kendra before they got in too deep. “Where is she? Maybe I could talk to her about being an ambassador.”
Josh laughed. “Nah,” he said. “Those girls only talk to each other. In fact, I’m not supposed to talk about the ambassadors, so …”
He shrugged. End of subject. Ursulina decided to try to circle back around.
“Is it always girls?” she said.
“Mostly for Threadie stuff. Trade could be anyone who can cut a good deal for our produce and stuff,” Josh said. “But more girls than guys. Guys usually want to be Gold Shirts.”
“So … were you always a Threadie?” Ursulina said, walking closer to him, her hand brushing his.
“Huh?” Josh’s eyes were stuck midway between Ursulina’
s small, firm breasts. “Uh … sort of. I grew up around here, so everybody knew Wales. Threadism was just in the air, I guess. My parents and brothers are still here. My grandparents.”
Suddenly, Ursulina loathed Josh. The feeling startled her with its intensity. Why were some families destroyed and others untouched? Why were other old people huddled outside in camps while his grandparents were safe inside?
Ursulina stopped walking, her face only two inches from his. Slowly, she wriggled out of Deirdre’s lacy black shawl, draping it across her bent arm. Her bare shoulder glistened with lotion. “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen?” she asked him. “Since the biters. The one thing you’ll never forget?”
Ursulina heard Josh’s breathing accelerate, could practically feel his pulse climb. He was searching for an answer to impress her, so he thought a long time.
“I can think of the stupidest thing,” he said.
He might as well be talking about her. “That’ll work.”
Josh swallowed hard, trying to keep moisture in his mouth. Onions from his dinner wafted into Ursulina’s face, but she didn’t blink or lose her intrigued smile.
“I need to start at the beginning,” Josh said. “Remember how Wales was all about gaming? The Sega Threadrunner game made him richer than the movies ever did. He built a modular gaming facility here on his property that was un-be-lievable. And I used to hang out with the hard-core gamers. By hard-core, I mean they never wanted to play as humans. Hell, sometimes they slept outside in character, moaning and staggering, eating raw steaks, the whole routine. Totally out there.
“Then, after it happened for real and monsters started showing up, this one guy cracked or something. He didn’t bathe. He splashed himself with blood—I don’t know what kind, and I never asked. If you got too close to him, he’d bite you. Crazy, right?”
“Pretty crazy so far,” Ursulina said.
“So we get word there’s a swarm coming—the bad one, when a few got inside the fences—but this guy is still outside shambling around. A biter chick gets through. Instead of running away from her, the crazy jerk runs toward her, arms stretched out like they’re Romeo and Juliet. I guess he figured a biter would think he was one of the boys.”
“What happened?” Ursulina said.
Josh winked. “He was wrong,” he said. “Very, very wrong.”
“So he got bit?” Ursulina said.
Josh nodded. “You play with the bull, you get the horns.”
A long silence followed, and Ursulina realized it was easier to stare into Josh’s eyes than she had believed it would be. “Not bad,” she said. “But I’ve seen Suicide by Freak. That the best you’ve got?”
Josh’s eyes were slits as he fought his awareness of how close he stood to her. His warm breath blew across the bridge of her nose.
“I wasn’t done yet,” Josh said. “I tried to help him, but he got bit five, six times. Hell, she took off his ear before I dropped her. I offered to put one in his brain, but he said no. He begged me to let him feel what it was like. Not that he didn’t fight like anybody else,” Josh said. “Hell, he fought better. He lived on coffee and didn’t sleep for fifty hours, give or take. Some of us took bets. I thought he’d made it to sixty, but he didn’t.” He pursed his lips with annoyance at the memory of losing the bet.
“And?” Ursulina said.
“Everybody has to sleep sooner or later,” Josh said. “One second, the guy’s standing there drinking coffee … then he closes his eyes, and … bam. It happened so fast, I almost missed it. He was still talking, see? Mumbling. He wasn’t making sense, but who makes sense when they’ve been awake that long? When his eyes turned bright as blood, I whispered, ‘Was it everything you wanted, Ralphie?’ Then I shot him in the face.” Josh inched closer, brushing against her. Ursulina forced herself not to pull away from him. He was just getting warmed up.
“That’s pretty good,” she said. “Anything else?”
Josh grinned, smug. His lips nearly touched hers. “Want to see him?”
Twenty-Six
Without a word, Josh led her by hand through the empty, sparkling chef’s kitchen to a door at the far end with no fewer than three dead bolts. Josh unlocked them all with his key ring and opened the door.
The stairs headed down into a basement. She tensed with excitement. Now maybe she could find out if Rianne was locked in the tunnel, or map out a route for a quick escape. Could she find a way to make Josh forget to lock the door on the way back out? Probably.
Josh flicked a switch and fluorescent lights buzzed on from one end of the ceiling to the other. The basement walls were covered in murals. Ursulina had visited her grandmother in Spain when she was twelve, and she’d seen the El Prado Museum. All Ursulina remembered were the paintings by an artist named Francisco Goya, whose images seemed demonic to her. There were no screaming faces like Goya’s on the basement walls, but the clashing colors and misshapen features looked like someone whose brain was inside-out. Were these Wales’s paintings? Most of the colors were shades of red.
This place looks like the doorstep to hell, she thought.
“Do you get scared easy?” Josh asked her. “Are you prone to heart attacks?”
“Not so far.”
“O-kay,” Josh singsonged, his grin wider. “Follow me.”
He led her to another door, which had only one deadbolt instead of two. Josh jingled his key ring like he was king of the custodians before he opened the door.
“Be vewy, vewy quiet,” he said.
The next door opened, leading to a dimly lighted corridor and concrete block walls without murals. Ursulina nearly stopped in her tracks when the sweet-sour citrus smell hit her like napalm. Kendra had been right! The corridor stretched into looming darkness. Was this the route to the tunnel exit?
“What’s—”
Ursulina never had a chance to finish her question. All of her senses fixed to the movement from beyond her left shoulder, and a stench that whisked her back to the gas station where her life had ended soon after Freak Day. She only thought Oh, sh— before the freak was upon her. An ambush!
The creature was a shambler, moving in slow motion, but Ursulina could only watch with horror as a blur of stringy blond hair told her she was already too late.
The freak was biting her shoulder. She felt its mouth clamp across her clavicle hard, and cold slime sprayed her skin.
Ursulina yelled out and kicked, losing her balance, and found herself flat on the floor staring up. Only then did she see its face: rotted red, recessed nostrils, a missing ear, a bullet-shattered cheek bone, and sunken eyes. Not remotely human.
A fighting instinct surged in Ursulina, drowning out all sound. She was bitten, but she only had to survive long enough to chase Josh down and break his neck. Then she would take his gun and shoot herself in the head, because unlike good ol’ Ralphie, she wasn’t the least curious about what it would be like to turn into a living ghoul.
Then Ursulina blinked, and the world snapped back into focus.
First, she heard raucous laughter. The soon-to-be-very-dead Josh.
Next, she heard a loudly clanking chain, and only then did she realize that the freak hadn’t pounced on her because it was chained around both ankles, its progress stopped. If she had been a yard closer to the door, he couldn’t have reached her. But Josh had made sure she’d been surprised.
“You should see the look on your face!” Josh said, and collapsed against the wall in uncontrollable fits of laughter. The look on her face must have changed, because Josh swallowed his laughter and backed away from her. “Wait … check out your shoulder!”
Instinctively, Ursulina wiped the drool from her shoulder, peering to see how bad the bite was. She was in too much shock to feel pain yet, or …
With the help of Josh’s flashlight beam, she got a better look. The freak hadn’t broken her skin! He’d only drenched her with pink slobber. If Ursulina hadn’t been so relieved, she would have puked in relief.
/> “Gimme that light!” she told Josh in a husky voice.
She shined the beam herself to be sure, checking every angle. There had to be at least a scratch! How could—
“He’s been neutered,” Josh said. “He just gummed you.”
Ursulina shined the light on the freak, who was moaning his disappointment, still reaching for her. His mouth was a toothless cavern.
“I know that was a messed-up thing to do,” Josh said. Dimly, it seemed to occur to him that she might hold a grudge. “But now you can say you survived a freak attack, see? Don’t be mad.” The room stopped its spinning. Ursulina saw herself through Josh’s eyes, splayed with her legs wide open in a cocktail dress on the floor. He offered his hand, but she ignored him and climbed to her feet.
“What if I’d had a cut, ass-wipe? An open sore? If it gets in my mouth, my eyes—”
“Don’t worry,” he said, an inexplicable smile still plastered across his pimple-ravaged face. He gave her a yellow handkerchief. “I’ve seen him do that a hundred times, and he’s never infected anybody. Come on—funny, right?”
“Funny?” Ursulina said.
She remembered her previous plan, surveying Josh’s neck for the best fracture point. Instead, she pivoted and smashed the heel of her hand under his jaw, a blow the guys in her unit like to call the Terminator. His toes actually left the ground as he slammed back against the wall. Josh’s eyes crossed and he slumped to the floor like a sack of wet sand.
“Now that’s funny,” Ursulina said. “And this is hysterical.” She kicked him once in the crotch so he’d have a little something to think about when he woke up. Then she patted down his pant leg and took the .38 in the ankle holster she’d noticed as soon as she saw him.
Ursulina faced the freak and its soulless, darting eyes. Although she knew he was chained and toothless, her hindbrain didn’t want to let him out of her sight.
He was so thin he was skeletal, swaying in place as if his legs might fold. His only human remnants were his ratty Led Zeppelin T-shirt and stringy blond hair curled where his ear would be. Ralphie moaned hopefully to her, wracked by endless hunger.
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