Deadman's Switch & Sunder the Hollow Ones (30 page)

Did her parents leave her here because they couldn't do it? Would they have if they'd known she was going to spend an eternity locked up in there? Or at least until the house crumbled to the ground around her?

Did they watch her die and reanimate?

Did they do this to her?

I grip his wrist harder, not allowing him to leave. He winces and looks down, but nods. “Okay. I won't leave you alone. But we still need to check. Together, okay?”

I don't move.

“We need to check, Jessie. You know that.”

I finally manage to nod, but he practically has to pull me out of the laundry room by brute force. Even once we're back out in the hallway and he's in front of me, my shoes feel like they're made of lead.

“You're going to have to let go of me, Jessie. It's cutting off my circulation. And I might need to use that hand later. Hell, I might need it now, so—”

“Okay, I get it,” I whisper. It's hard for me to breathe. It's hard to take in a breath big enough to even exhale. It takes everything I've got to loosen my fingers and let him go so we can walk down this darkened hallway.

He pulls his arm out of my grip and rubs it, cursing under his breath. “I think that's going to bruise.”

It almost makes me laugh, and I feel the ropes around my chest loosen.

He steps forward, stops, listens. There's not a sound. I step forward to match him, and I wait. We repeat the cycle until we're at the end of the hallway and coming around the corner. He quickly bobs his head out and then back in again, then slowly inches into the other room. I force myself not to look outside, out into the backyard. I don't want to see that forlorn swing set. I don't want to imagine her sitting on it again. I tell myself there's no such thing as ghosts, only zombies.

“Nothing in here,” Micah whispers. “Is the bathroom down the other hallway?” he asks, pointing.

I raise my eyes and nod.

“You didn't turn on any lights?”

“The light in the bathroom was out.”

We get to the second hallway and Micah reaches over and flips the light switch. Every shadow instantly flees back through the doorways of the adjoining bedrooms.

“Second door on the left,” I whisper.

“Did you shut it? ‘Cause it's closed now.”

“I don't remember.”

He straightens a bit, relaxing. “Stay here. I'll check the bedrooms first.”

“Screw that. I'm coming with you.”

“Fine, just… Give me a little room to back up if I have to, okay?”

I nod. He steps quickly down the hall and turns to the first room. His fingers find the switch and flip it on.

“Nothing,” he says, after quickly searching all the obvious places: closet, behind and under the bed. He even pulls back the moth-eaten sheets.

He repeats the procedure with each of the other rooms—an office and two unfinished rooms. All yield the same result: empty. Nothing but dust and old forgotten junk.

“I know what I felt, Micah,” I tell him, resentfully rubbing my arm where the fingers touched me.

“I know, Jessie,” he answers tiredly. “I'm not saying you didn't. We're all hyped up right now and it might not have been what you thought. Let's go back and check that bathroom.”

I don't argue. I just follow him out to the hallway and back to the closed door. It mocks me, taunting me with its unrelenting muteness. Micah raises his hand, looks at me, then quickly raps his knuckles on it. Somewhere in my mind, I hear an echo of his voice saying,
Olly olly oxen free. It's safe to come out now.

But there's only silence.

He tries again. I listen and—

“Be out in a second
,” a girl sings.

I practically jump through the wall behind me.

“Shit, Micah! I still have to pee!” I hit his arm. “Why'd you have to do that? You almost made me wet myself.”

He laughs. “There's no one here.” He turns the knob and kicks the door open and steps back, waiting. The light from the hallway floods in, illuminating the vanity along the one wall and the toilet in the back. He tries the switch and, sure enough, it doesn't work.

“You probably felt that,” he tells me. He moves over so I can step into the bathroom. He's pointing to the shower curtain behind the door. One end of the rod has broken free of the wall and is now dangling into the room. The fabric hangs limply from it, right about where I would've been standing.

“It's cool,” he says, turning and smiling. “I won't tell anyone you were attacked by a phantom shower curtain.”

“Yeah, well…” I sputter. But I'm so glad that relief floods through me like a rush of warm water. “Well, I've seen you naked.”

“A lot of people have seen me naked.”

“With a tube coming out of your Wee Willy Wokka Wokka.”

He snorts and takes my still-shaking hand and squeezes it. “Never heard it called that before.”

I yank my hand away. “Excuse me if my mind happens to be having a meltdown!”

He just stands there smiling like a dope.

“I still have to pee.”

“Oh, right.” He gestures with his thumb. “I'll be back in the laundry room. Just make sure you turn the lights off when you come back. No reason to attract any more attention than we probably already have.”

He leaves. I wake my Link and set it on the sink, then close the door and lock it—not because I think he'll come back, but because I know what I felt.

It wasn't a damn shower curtain.

I glance sourly at the offending thing, wondering if I'm just getting myself worked up again. I reach out and rip it off the wall and toss it into the tub, where the rod lands into the shadows with a clatter. I'm sick of being scared all the time. I wish I could be as carefree as Micah is. But I can't.

I sit down on the toilet and wait for my bladder to do its job, but it takes me a long time to get the valves to open up again.

Afterward, I step back out and hurry back to the laundry room, turning off the lights as I go: bedroom, hallway, family room. I'm just about to head up the other hallway when I feel a whisper of cool air on my cheek.

Ancient papers flutter to the floor from a coffee table.

The sliding door is wide open.

“Micah?”

The swing creaks quietly. A little Undead girl is sitting on it. In her arms is the mummified rabbit.

I'm frozen in shock. This is no vision, no displaced memory. She's really out there, the girl from the bathroom. The tattered remains of her hair covers her desiccated face. I don't have to see it to know what's hiding beneath it: dark, hollow eyes, burning cold with hunger, a mouth full of tiny rotten baby teeth.

As my mind finishes the final arc of its meltdown, it doesn't register the presence behind me until it's too late.

 

A ghost of Stephen rises up
in the glass of the sliding door and he reaches out to grab the girl standing before him. She looks vaguely familiar, a bit older, perhaps, than I remember her. The lines on her face are sharper, and the circles under her eyes are darker. He grabs her around the neck at the same moment I feel hard, cold fingers curl around my own. Both squeeze, the Stephen in the reflection and the one behind me, and neither version of me makes a sound. I watch myself fall to the floor.

Each finger is an iron vise, each digging into me and bearing me down with his inhuman weight and newfound strength. Stephen's turned. Despite the vaccination, the infection Tanya gave him has turned him into one of the Undead.

And then I feel his fetid breath on my cheek and I swear I hear him say, “Now we will be the same.”

But the Undead do not speak. They can't. They can only moan.

His teeth clack as they draw near to my face, a foot away, inches. I struggle to breathe. Darkness pushes in from all around me as my lungs scream for air that my body can't deliver to it, no matter how wide I open my mouth to invite it in. His body drops on me, pushing me to the floor, and I'm beneath him as his teeth clack and his lips smack and the smell of his contagion sweeps into my mouth where I am already choking. I can't even let out a whimper.

A sigh escapes from him. I know that this will be the last thing I will ever hear, this moan of longing and hunger, of hatred and agony. For me, it is a moan of despair for all of the things and all of the people lost in our lives.

My mother's voice comes to me then as my body crumples beneath the newly dead and risen. She whispers to me in words I haven't heard spoken in years, telling me empty promises, broken not once but repeatedly. I want to cry. I want to tell her that I forgive her, but I can't. I'll die in this forsaken land and reawaken to walk it myself as one of them, emptied out, devoid of everything except their unholy desire. I am already hollow.

I feel his lips on the skin behind my ear and I wait for the pain that will come with the first bite.
Please make it quick
, I pray.

But then his body judders and his grip tightens. I hear him draw in a breath of pain. He rises and a second shock passes through him to me. Then his hands are gone from around my neck and he collapses and rolls off. Another set of hands pulls me to my feet. And I can't see anything through the whiteness of my own dying. I can't hear through the tidal roar of the ocean of darkness. My body knows nothing of itself or where it is and what surrounds it, save for a vague sensation of movement, of being moved as if by tides, like a boat vaguely aware of its own sinking.

And then I'm on the floor and the lights are bright above me and I'm coughing and hacking and the air burns through my damaged throat and into my ravaged lungs, feeding my starving brain until it feels like I'll never be able to satisfy its hunger. My body jerks with the effort of my breathing, and pain floods in and through me, infusing every cell until I can feel every single part of me. I feel it all with a sense so keen that I fear every single part of me will soon fly away. I am torn asunder. My mind is fractured and my body is broken and my soul

…jessie…

spills

Jessie

out.

“Jessie!”

Micah's face appears above me, shredding the clouds of oblivion. I cough and turn my head and a bolt of lightning sears through me.

I feel Micah leave my presence. I hear him off somewhere and a door slams and feet stomp. I hear him yelling. Something hits the floor somewhere near me—or maybe far away, I can't tell—and then there's more running and all I can do is gasp, grasping at tendrils of air while a freight train attempts to emerge from the tunnel of my lungs.

“Jessie, sit up!”

Micah grabs me and pulls me up and leans me up against the wall. He reaches over and grabs a bottle of water and I can see a pair of feet behind him. And legs. A body.

It's Stephen.

“He's dead for good this time,” Micah says, noticing where I'm looking.

“He…reani—”

Micah waits for me to stop coughing before shaking his head. “No, he was still alive. Barely. He must've followed you. He came in through the back door.”

“The girl?” I manage to croak out. My throat is a mountain, crumbling into gravel. Swallowing is an agony. Talking feels like sand dunes shifting, piling up in the desert.

“What girl, Jess? Tanya?”

I push him away and lurch to my feet, slamming into the wall before slipping down it again. He protests, but I ignore him and stand again. I step over Stephen's lifeless body—
Are we sure he's dead?
—and I see that the back of his head is caved in. A bronze statuette of Lady Liberty lies nearby, the base stained with a thick, red goo.

Are we sure?

But then I see it: the knife handle protruding from the base of his skull, half hidden by the tangles of hair. It makes me think of Micah's bandage for some reason. But the memory flies from me as I let out a shuddering exhale and stumble to the back of the house. I wrench open the sliding door.

Micah calls after me. I can hear his feet pounding after me, but he's too slow and I'm too far for him to stop me.

I stagger down the steps, grasping the railing, reeling across the yard, my left hand finding the trunk of a small tree, my right hand grasping empty air.

I come to the swings. The silent, empty swings. They glisten with the evening dew and the light that spills from the house and the swing gently rocks in the gentle breeze and makes a quiet creak.

There is no girl here. The grass is trampled, and she's gone into the night.

But there, buried in the tall grass by my feet, lies the bundle of white fur.

I pick it up and clutch it to my chest, my sobs wrenching the sorrow from my heart—sorrow for little girls lost, for families rent apart by this humanmade madness, for the innocent with names like Tanya and Kelly and Ashley—and my tears fall upon the dark, empty eyes of the tiny, dead figure in my hands, of the plush toy rabbit that lost the loving embrace of a little girl so many years ago.

 

I won't let it happen.

I have to fix the things that are broken. I
need
to fix everything.

Only then will I be able to go home.

 

“You're not going
anywhere, Jessie,” Micah tells me. “You need to rest.”

He guides me back to the laundry room where he's laid out some blankets for me to lie down on. I'm so shaky that I don't argue.

“Am I going crazy?” I ask, my voice still scratchy from the trauma it suffered.

He shakes his head. “No more crazy than any of the rest of us.”

He places a wet towel on my forehead and inspects my neck. “You're going to bruise something horrible from this.” His face twists with fury. “If I could, I'd kill that damn son of a bitch again.”