Hold the fucking phone.
“Me? Are you kidding? I’m the one who confronted him!”
“Which would make you look real innocent, no?” Stefano smiled but there was absolutely no joy in it. The urge to punch him in the throat or toss him down onto the sand reared almost too fast for me to curb. “Just sayin’.”
“You’re a real class act, Stefano,” I muttered, shaking my head in disbelief. “Why don’t you just point the finger at everyone to be sure? Cover all your bases, man. Don’t be shy.”
“Enough.” Whelan didn’t need to shout, not when a whisper like that did twice the work with half the volume. “You’re both out of line. I’ll talk to Noah; the two of you cool off. We’re on the same side here.”
Stefano marched away with his nose in the air and a little huff that quite clearly said: this isn’t over.
Meanwhile I felt like a dirtbag, hovering there trying to think of the right thing to say to both Whelan and Noah. He just couldn’t have done it, and the more I thought about it the surer I became and the worse I felt for bringing it up at all. I had only wanted to do the right thing and now I had started a shit storm that could easily build into a shit hurricane.
“How did Stefano find out?” I asked, grabbing Whelan’s elbow before he could walk away with Noah. His blue eyes looked duller, muted, as if the weight of dealing with this intertribal bullshit was sapping the energy right out of his body. I sympathized. “He didn’t just randomly go through Noah’s stuff…”
“We should talk about this later,” Whelan whispered.
“Tell me now, Whelan.”
He sighed, that heaviness in his eyes seeping out to his shoulders, dragging them down into a hunch. “Shane showed us.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, Sadie.”
“Shane … but he…” Had been right there in the bed with me when I read Noah’s book. He must not have been asleep. “This isn’t what I wanted to happen.”
“Go easy on Shane. I think he just wanted to help.” Whelan left then, walking back down the beach with Noah. Why wouldn’t Noah fight? Speak up? Maintaining that stubborn silence would only make him look guiltier than he already did. Clearly, in Stefano’s eyes, he was the culprit and of any of us, Stefano had lost the most—first his cousins and then his closest friend. He was out for blood and I couldn’t blame him.
And Shane … He just had to pick today to come out of his shell.
* * *
I found the little tattletale sitting at the fire picking apart a blackened piece of fish. He ate in tiny, precise bites, wiping his char-stained fingers off on his pants after every mouthful. Moritz and Andrea fell silent at my approach, giving me the classic big-eyed, straight-mouthed, deer-in-headlights expression, the one that meant they knew Shane was in for a tongue-lashing.
“Come with me please, Shane.”
He shook his head no. Did he actually want me to turn into Momzilla?
“You’re not in trouble.” Okay, maybe not entirely true. “I just want to talk.”
It was like coaxing a rabbit out of its warren. Eventually Shane stood, setting down his plate on the log bench and taking my hand, casting a forlorn, helpless look over his shoulder at Andrea and Moritz. I had seen that look many, many times. It no longer fooled me.
Shane dug his feet in stubbornly as I led him away, halting us every few seconds as he tried to drag to a stop. Discipline really isn’t my strong suit, but something like this had to be addressed. It was time to put on the mommy pants, whether I enjoyed it or not.
We stopped near the edge of the water, out of earshot of both the fire pit and the huts. I spied Banana on the docks fishing with Nate. Whelan and Noah were having their little heart-to-heart farther down the beach. Stefano stewed by the tied up canoe. Maybe he was thinking of leaving, I don’t know. Good riddance. Andrea and Moritz sat eating at the fire. That meant everyone was accounted for. I found myself doing that a lot now, taking a quick head-check every once in a while just to make sure dinner wouldn’t be interrupted with screams as another of us met an untimely end.
The tide, still low, had deposited a number of new shells and blobs of seaweed on the sand. A wet stripe ran along the beach, darker than the rest, marking where the water would creep up as the tide came in. Another windy day. The waves chopped, rising in jagged peaks as they rushed toward us, stopping just shy of already damp shoes. And for once Shane looked up at me, facing me squarely, not studying the myriad marine treasures still slick and foamy on the ground.
“I’m not upset, Shane,” I said. Also a half-truth, but I didn’t want to frighten the poor kid. Scared straight wasn’t really my style. “I’m just confused. Why didn’t you talk to me before going to the others?”
He shrugged.
“Not good enough, little man. Gonna need some words. So out with it.”
Shane regarded me quietly for a moment, canting his head this way and that, reminding me of a bird that’s sure you want to communicate, but can’t understand you or know how to talk back.
“This is serious, Shane. I’m not mad, okay? I just want you to explain yourself.”
“I didn’t know what to do,” he said.
Not much, but we could build on that.
“Noah stays in our cabin. I thought I … should show someone.”
“But I thought … He carved you that Pink Bear. Don’t you think he’s too nice to hurt someone?”
“I … guess.” Shane toed the ground. “It’s just a pig.”
“Were you afraid of him?” Oh, great. The damage had been done. Now, no matter what, Noah would carry the taint of that book and its fucking scribbles for the rest of his life. Even if he was guilty of nothing but poor judgment, he would be treated like a psycho.
“Yes,” Shane answered. “I thought I could show Whelan because he’s a policeman.”
That … was actually pretty logical.
“Next time come to me first, because now Noah is in trouble with everyone and that makes it much more complicated.” Clusterfuck probably wasn’t the right sort of language to use around him. “Do you get what I’m saying?”
“Yes. Show you first when I find weird things.”
“Right. I know Whelan is a policeman and that’s nice, but I’ll pass something on to him if I think it’s important, okay?”
Shane nodded.
“Go finish your food.”
I thought of making him apologize. But for what? For finding something that frightened him and showing a cop? That was positive behavior. That was the sort of thing you wanted to enforce, not chastise. It was almost heartening to think that, even if he was sort of strange and mute, Shane had his head screwed on right. I watched him trundle back to the fire, almost completely spherical in the number of coats Andrea had piled onto him. A cheerful cry went up from the docks—Banana and Nate had caught something. We might actually eat, then. Shane probably didn’t know it, but food was becoming scarce. Without the canned goods and cache of the food storage, we were almost entirely reliant on the food we caught each day. Scavenging for clams and mussels was becoming less and less viable as the temperature dropped and the water became icy. Whelan could no longer safely stay out in the sea for long periods of time. Fishing off the dock still yielded decent amounts of edibles, but we would need to diversify our diet. Plant life in the forest was a possibility, and insects, but foraging was dangerous, even just inside the tree line.
But whatever we had was divvied up and the first round of it went to Shane. The rest of us ate what we could, though my appetite was apparently inversely proportional to my fear level. Everything turned my stomach, even water. My guts were lined in razor wire and I couldn’t rightly say when the slicing would stop.
NINETEEN
“Shane is a good boy.”
I wanted to trust everybody, really I did, but ever since finding Noah’s margin notes, I’d become a suspicious, twitchy wreck. The good boy in question had just left, toddling into the cabin under his
usual superhuman weight of coats and blankets. I’d swear the kid was cold-blooded.
“Thanks, Moritz.” Fish for dinner again. What kind of fish, you ask? It didn’t matter. It all tasted the same once it’d been in our cast-iron pan, a cooking implement that really should no longer have been called a pan but an instrument of destruction. It actively de-flavored things. All you could taste when you bit into fish that’d been in that pan were all the burned fishy brethren that came before. Once upon a time I liked food. I had what overbearing type-A soccer moms in Crocs called “a passion.” You couldn’t live in the Northwest and not be some type of foodie. Sometimes I thought I still had that passion, but since I hadn’t eaten anything that qualified as food in weeks, it was hard to say.
“I feel like we never talk,” I said. The others had split off, pairing off for cards or sleeping or battling horrific indigestion.
“We don’t,” Moritz replied simply. “You and Officer Cabral have grown quite close.”
I wasn’t sure if that was an observation or a question. Why he couldn’t call Whelan by his first name, I couldn’t guess. Well, I could, but I didn’t.
“Officer…? Right, Whelan. You don’t have to call him that.”
Moritz’s greyhound face sharpened in the firelight, the darkness around us and the hot glow of the flames igniting the raised edges of his nose and cheekbones. He smiled, shrugging, the haggard remains of his tweed suit clinging to him like flayed strips of tree bark to a trunk.
“Do you think Noah is innocent?” I asked. Of all of us, Moritz probably knew Noah best. They spent a lot of time together, though I couldn’t imagine what a rustic Canadian teenager and a former art critic had in common. His expression softened again, almost melting like wax from the heat, his mouth drifting down into a ponderous frown.
“Art informs us that we all have monsters inside … hidden evils. A civilized man, a family man, can paint his demons and shock the world.”
Huh.
“So … that’s a no? You think he’s guilty?”
I thought of the little pig Noah had carved for Shane. It just didn’t seem right that he could do something so thoughtful and then … well, you know.
Moritz chuckled softly, brushing crumbs from his pants and depositing his plate on the ground. He rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, pursing his lips in a way that made me feel stupid and patronized.
“No, I do not believe he is capable of such crimes. Whoever or whatever hunts us is not smart but determined. There is savagery there, not planning. Noah is a bright boy. Were he our enemy I would perhaps feel better about it. At least then there might be a pattern, some sense of what’s to come.” Moritz redirected his gaze to the fire and the jumping sparks illuminated the dark reaches of his pupils.
“Hold on—whoever or whatever? You … think it might not be human?”
“Is that so hard to believe? Just a few months ago I did not believe that the dead could walk and kill, but I was proven wrong. I could be proven wrong in other fundamental ways.”
“You’re not making me feel any better here, Moritz.”
“My apologies. I didn’t know that was the goal.”
“It’s not. I just…” Suddenly the food on my plate was even less appetizing. I shoved it away, feeling guilty for being wasteful and then feeling stupid for feeling guilty because it was my damn stomach.
Silence and the flames. I wondered what Whelan might be up to. I wondered if Shane wanted a bedtime story. I wondered about the quiet, shuffling footsteps and the whispers that sounded oddly heavy and strained and why there were so damn many of them emerging out of the water-washed peace of the night.
“Whelan,” I muttered, jumping to my feet, leaving Moritz staring after me with his mouth hanging open. “Run,” I called back. “Come with me!”
And then the beach was filled with them. It was like someone had banged on a dinner triangle, summoning the local undead to rise up and hop on down to the buffet. Whelan and Banana were in their cabin, losing badly to Nate and Andrea at charades. At least that’s as much as I could glean while huffing and puffing and shrieking at them to get the guns.
Andrea rushed out by me, bee-lining for the cabin where Shane was napping.
The hard, metallic slide and lock chorus of faith-instilling badassery began, and Moritz and I were politely shoved out of the way as first Nate, then Banana and finally Whelan emerged from the cabin. Their arsenal never failed to impress.
“Stay near the fire,” Whelan instructed, tightening the buckles on his chest holster. “If anything gets too close, holler.”
Word to your fucking mother. Moritz and I clamored back toward the warmth of the fire. Stefano soon joined us and Andrea wasn’t far behind, tumbling out of the cabin with Shane on her back. Improvising, I grabbed a protruding branch from the fire, deciding that I could Jane of the Jungle it if anything broke through the gunfire.
“It’s okay,” I told Shane with a smile that stayed put only as long as I faced him. “Just stay close.”
That was most definitely the plan, as all of us huddled near the fire pit, standing as close as we could without actually bursting into flames. The darkness exploded, rifle fire illuminating the mayhem in yellow-white bursts of color and noise. Smoke drifted, gunpowder singeing my nostrils as our protectors fanned out, creating a tight triangle. Whelan shouted orders to them as they lit up in turn, glimpses of pale, gaunt faces appearing when the silence split again with a pulse of gunfire. It was like a disco club nightmare, the starless night swallowing up the coherent pictures of just what we were facing. How many? From what direction? It was impossible to tell, the only images quick, flashing there, too fast to be seen, surreal and violent.
But soon the undead had something to say about it, groaning and wheezing, their voices undercutting the pop, bark, rattle of the rifles. Shane’s whimpers became cries as he clung to Andrea’s neck, his wide eyes visible just above her shoulder, giving him the appearance of some terrified bush baby holding on to a branch for dear life. We circled the fire, panicked, every single one of us panting as we watched the perimeter, eyes peeled for any stragglers heading for us. One made it, shuffling toward us, naked, her left arm blown apart at the shoulder. You had to admire that kind of determination—limb torn off by bullets and still coming for us. She only had one hand to grab with, her mouth a perpetual snarl, the lower part of her jaw missing, torn away, leaving only a hollow scowl and lazily unhinged tongue.
I don’t think even humid, rancid garbage smells that fucking bad.
I dipped the burning branch into the flames again, swinging the torch at her with all the coordinated grace of someone trying to dance a bee out of their bra. But my spazzy swinging worked, pushing her back, giving Whelan the time to see the flame in my hand soaring back and forth. I saw his face in the sudden brightness thundering out of the rifle’s barrel. It didn’t make me feel any better, not when I could see an entire legion of those things behind him, coming from the water. It was just a flash, a millisecond of strobing lights where I saw his grimace, his furrowed brow, and then the wet, slimy faces creeping up behind him.
We were surrounded. There were way, way too many, and the thought of Whelan being dragged down into the surf with them paralyzed me. Moritz grabbed my elbow, guiding me back into the safety of the fire’s glow.
“Noah,” I mumbled. “He’s not here.”
“I fucking told you it was him!” Stefano shrieked. “What did I tell you?”
“Shut up and concentrate,” Andrea said, shoving him.
Impossible. It couldn’t have been Noah … but Stefano was right. He wasn’t with us. There was no time to consider the possibilities—that maybe he got caught off guard by the first wave of undead and had been killed before we even noticed. Or maybe he was orchestrating the whole thing. Maybe he had figured out some way to lure the dead to the camp, deciding that we were too close to the truth, too close to figuring out he was the killer …
Footsteps pelted t
oward us, heavy, fast footfall that couldn’t belong to a zombie. Noah careened into the light, stopping just inches from the flames themselves. He was flushed, out of breath, and before Stefano could chime in with some smart-ass accusation, Noah had torn the torch out of my hands.
“Hey!” I shouted, scrambling for it. “What are you doing? Where the hell have you been?”
“There’s too many.” His eyes were wild, huge, dirt streaked down his face and sand clotting his curls. “What’ll it take, Sadie, for you to believe me?”
I wanted to answer. “Nothing. I already do,” was ready on my lips. But Noah left us, sprinting out into the roiling war zone outside the circle of light. Dimly, as if I had lost all control of my body, I watched my arms go for him, my hands reach, but it was like he simply disappeared, there one minute, dissolved by darkness the next.
We watched the arc of the torch, the fire flickering, threatening to go out as Noah raced toward the water. He started shouting, jeering, raising holy hell. Whelan called back.
“Get back to the others!” Whelan roared, another burst of gunfire nearly drowning out his voice. “What the fuck? Noah! Noah?”
“Come get me, you fuckers,” Noah was shouting, taunting and dancing the fire back and forth. “Here—you want some blood? Have some fucking blood!”
I didn’t have to see to know what he was doing. And the blankness around us began to move, the horde enticed by Noah and whatever blood he had spilled. The moaning intensified, hungry and constant, a hum that became a drone that became a chorus. The torch moved, bouncing away toward the dock. Now Banana and Nate had joined in, trying to call Noah back. The torch lowered and a wavering, orange pool of light spread at Noah’s feet. He was being followed, not just by two or three undead, but by dozens. Their feet shuffled into the light, then hands. His taunting stopped, overtaken by panicked screams.
“Oh, my God,” Andrea whispered. “He can’t be serious.”
“Still think he’s guilty?” I hissed.
Sadie Walker Is Stranded Page 24