Sadie Walker Is Stranded (16 page)

And then, with almost nonchalant ease, he clubbed the zombie to death with its own arm.

I stood five yards away and watched, openmouthed, feet blazing with the fury of Satan and all his fiery minions. When he was done, the zombie didn’t have much more than a meaty stump on its shoulders.

A burst of painfully obvious inspiration told me it would be best to get out of the water. There could be more of those things. I waded back to the beach, cursing every step. Suddenly, I was exhausted. I wished with all my heart that I could magically transport back to our camp and lay next to the fire. Andrea would have painkillers—beautiful, beautiful painkillers. Just the thought of them made me swoon. I made the mistake of looking down at my feet. A trail of blood followed me up onto the rocky beach, my blood. I could see raw, angry pink flesh curving up around the outside of my toes. Jesus.

I would never make it back to camp on my own at this rate.

I’m not proud of it, but at the sight of my own blood I lost some time. I blacked out.

When I came to I was bouncing along in the air. Upon further and scrabling examination, I realized I was being carried. It wasn’t a pleasant way to wake up. After all, I didn’t exactly trust this man, whoever he was. He had nearly gotten us both killed, and for what? For all I knew he could’ve been a cannibal and I was the main course. The water bobbed along over his left shoulder. We were traveling down the beach.

“Put me down!”

He started at my outburst and then grinned. It was blinding.

“Welcome back,” he said. His voice was low and relaxed, amused. It rumbled against me where my arm touched his chest. For someone who had just beaten a zombie to re-death with its own arm he seemed remarkably calm.

“Put me down.” I wriggled and kicked.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!” I started batting at his arms. If he was a cannibal then he was being awfully casual about his next meal.

“Are you
sure
you’re sure?”

“For God’s sake, yes!”

He swung out his left hand and I dropped down to the ground. As soon as my feet skimmed the pebbles I was jumping back into his arms.

“No!” I shouted. “Okay, okay, pick me up!”

He did so without argument and smiled again. I was hoisted into the air like a sack of feathers. He had tied my shoes together and slung them over his shoulder. My sweater was wrapped tightly around my middle. Something clinked against his side, a big mesh bag filled with what looked like stones.

It was embarrassing to be carried like that. Husbands and wives did this on the threshold of their wedding night, and at that moment I couldn’t imagine a scenario more inappropriate. There are, of course, worse things than being lofted around by a big strong man. But he was a stranger, I reminded myself, even if he was an obliging one. And it was his fault I could no longer walk. I thought about slapping him again, on behalf of my feet, but decided to save that for another time. If he dropped me I wasn’t sure I could stand the pain.

Running back to camp and raising the alarm was the right thing to do—the
only
thing to do—but with my feet ripped to shreds I wasn’t going anywhere without, well, being carried. Or crawling. Being carried was the slightly less repugnant option. An image of Shane, frightened and alone, nagged, vivid enough to make my cheeks flame with shame. I had abandoned him. That wouldn’t stand.

“Stop! Just stop and let me think.” My head lolled back on my shoulders as he came to a halt. “Fuck! Goddamn it…”

“You’ll walk again,” he said matter-of-factly.

“It’s not that,” I said, although that was weighing heavily on my mind, too. “My nephew … My friends will think I’m dead. I have to get back. You have to take me back.”

“There are more of you?”

The knife. Their only protection against zombies. It was gone. I didn’t need to look to know that. Somewhere in the tidal pool the knife sat, forgotten and never to be found again. I noticed a taught string around his shoulder right next to my shoes. He had brought my bow.

“My friends are at the southern beach. I have to go back, tonight. You have to take me there.”

“So that’s where you came from,” he said. “I thought we might have riled the natives.”

“I know this is going to sound idiotic in every conceivable way,” I said, drawing a deep breath, “but I will kill you with my bare hands if you don’t turn around right now and take me back.”

“Sorry,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve got to get back to my own camp.”

“Then put me down,” I said, sighing. I didn’t like how sad and resigned my voice sounded. It was probably going to kill me, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to leave Shane defenseless. Crawling might be the only option if he continued to refuse, but then I would just have to find some way to survive that. He gave me a studying look.

“I thought we established that was not a wise idea.”

“Says the boy who cried zombie.” I didn’t exactly have the upper hand in the conversation, being luggage and all. I tried a different tactic. “I know, and it sucks, but I can’t leave them without a knife. They’re expecting me back, and if I don’t show up they’ll really start to worry. Please … You don’t know me, that’s fine, you can leave me here. I just have to go back. Tonight.”

“Listen, Sacajawea, I’m not the kind of person to tell you your business, but I don’t think you’re going anywhere
tonight
,” he said tartly, nodding toward my feet. “Not like that. If I let you hobble all the way back to your camp on those bloody stumps it’s as good as killing you myself. And, hey, guess what? I’m not going to argue about it.”

He was right, but I felt cold all over. I had let my friends down, sure, but letting Shane down was worse. What if they went looking for me? Now that I knew the real truth of the island, of what lurked around every tree and sandbar, I could do things differently. But they didn’t know because I hadn’t told them.

My feet hurt like hell but I still had a bit of strength left in my arms. Do it for Shane, I thought, do what you have to.

I hit him on the cheek with my right elbow, fast and sudden enough that he swayed and dropped me. Ground. Ground bad. Ground hard and fucking
painful
. The pain could be ignored, I insisted, shrieking as I got to my feet and limped through the sand, huffing and puffing and paddling my arms. I fancied I could feel every particulate grain sticking to my bloodied feet. Crawling actually sounded more appealing in comparison to this …

“You are really,
really
stubborn, you know that?”

Apparently I hadn’t hit him quite hard enough. He caught up before I could make it a few yards, scooping me back up into his arms as I flailed against him, sapped of coordination and energy by the pain radiating in my legs.

“Fuck you! No! Put me down!”

“Can you just—just hang on for one damn minute, okay? Jesus. Don’t
hit
me again either.” He frowned, veering his head away preemptively. “Can we talk about this? I think you could use some food and bandages before going on any long journeys, all right?”

“You don’t get it.” I sighed, realizing that hitting him again probably wouldn’t work. A bruise was starting to form along his cheekbone. “My nephew is just a kid. They don’t have any way to defend themselves at my camp. I can’t
leave
them like that…”

“How long d’you figure it would take to get back on those things?” He nodded toward my feet.

“A few hours…”

“Try
many
hours, slugger, and come nightfall you’d be snapped up before you can say ‘appetizer.’ Either way, you wouldn’t be making it back to camp tonight.”

“That’s not the point, I—”

“I wasn’t finished.” He sighed, hoisting me a little higher. “In my scenario, you have a bite to eat and I take a look at your feet and then in the morning I take you back to your people. What’s better about my way is that you make it back to them at all. Got it?”

“No, I don’t. What if it’s too late?”

“Then it’s too late, but at least you’re alive.”

I hated it but he was right. That one taste of walking was enough to prove that I was in no condition to strike out on my own. The undead hadn’t come the night before, but that didn’t banish the anxiety that made me trembly all over. How many times did I have to promise to be a good protector for Shane and then fuck that up?

“Promise you’ll take me back?”

“Yes.” He smirked, just a little. “I promise.”

There was not much to do but grit my teeth and try to stay distracted. I got a clear look at his face. He was closer now and the sunshine fell on us equally. His soft dark hair had been swept back from his forehead, piling into a casually rakish coiffure. Spanish, I thought, or something like it, with a blade-straight nose and lips that wouldn’t have been out of place on a woman. His eyes were blue, tucked under two thick smudges of eyebrows tented in perpetual amusement. The all-around effect was, I’m afraid to admit, dreamy.

It was hard to pin down his age. There were tiny flecks of gray in his hair, but he had the continuously sunburned good looks of a teenager. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to guess, I would’ve said late thirties or early forties. Early forties and as strong as an ox. I thought about him beating that zombie with its arm and wondered—for a brief, deeply shameful and adolescent instant—what he would look like with his tight wet T-shirt off.

Right. Time to look at something else. I stared out at the horizon, horrified: the day had come and gone and now a bright orange streak signaled sundown.

The beach angled right and we rounded a corner that opened up into a bay, a real honest-to-God harbor, with docks and squat cabins and several fires cheerfully burning away into the twilight. There was a huge sailboat floating off shore and a smaller canoe roped to one of the docks. It looked, quite frankly, like heaven.

“
This
is your camp?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s not much but it’s getting better.”

Not much? I gaped. This wasn’t roughing it by anyone’s standards. I’d seen dirtier gas station bathrooms. I wondered how much food they had, how much water. A person could make a living in a place like this. A home.

He turned up a hill, passed the docks on our left, and into a wooded clearing. There was a row of five cabins set back from the water, and a fire pit in front of each building. Buckets were strewn here and there with plastic coverings. I glanced inside one as we walked by. It was filled with black, shiny mussels. They were practically living the high life. It didn’t seem so strange now that Boy Who Cried Zombie was clean shaven—here they had the basic amenities of real, normal life. I wondered who “they” were.

“We’ll get you something to eat,” he said brusquely. “And then I’ll get to work on your feet.”

Food sounded good. The other thing? I could take or leave it. Then I thought maybe there was something seriously wrong with my feet and decided to keep my mouth shut. Getting back to Shane—that was the focus here, and having my feet bandaged was one step on the road back to him. As we approached the cabins, heads poked out to greet us. Boy Who Cried Zombie nodded to each one. A tall, slender black man came out of one cabin with a net in his hands. He was in the midst of mending it. He had a shaggy beard and large, round eyes. There was no suspicion in his expression; in fact, he grinned at us and belly laughed.

“You find a mermaid washed up on shore?”

“Not exactly, Nate,” BWCZ replied. He carried me around a fire pit and to the door of the middle cabin. “Could you get the door for me?”

Nate rushed out in front of us and let us in. He gave me a friendly little wave. I tried to smile, but even the muscles in my face were beginning to feel tired and useless. The cabin was small, probably meant for one family or just two people. There was a simple cot in the back right corner, low to the ground, with a woolly brown blanket. I couldn’t even remember what a bed felt like. In the opposite corner was a pottery basin with a jug. It was clearly a man’s cabin. And BWCZ looked as if he had lived there all his life. He tossed things and left them where they landed—no intention of picking up after himself, no concern.

Nate followed us in and took a matchbook from his pocket. He lit a glass lantern with a red base and placed it next to the cot.

I hissed through my teeth to keep from screaming as BWCZ deposited me on the cot. He was careful, but even so, it was impossible not to bump my feet eventually. He dropped all of my things on the floor and then sprinted out the door with the mesh bag of stones. Nate poured me a tin cup of water from the earthenware jug. I must have looked like a real winner with my feet gashed and bleeding and my hair matted to my head with salt water. But Nate didn’t say anything about that.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Sadie.”

“I’m Nate.”

BWCZ rushed back inside during the introductions with another lantern (already lit) and a felt pouch. His mesh bag was gone. He went to the basin and rinsed his hands and face.

“Could you grab me a stool from outside?” he asked.

Nate ducked out and reappeared quickly with a rustic-looking stool, like the kind of thing you make at summer camp for your parents, the tree bark still rough around the outside.

“Her name is Sadie,” Nate supplied helpfully.

“Sadie? I’m Whelan,” he said. He smiled again and it touched his eyes. “Pleased to meet you—I’d shake your hand but I need to keep them clean.” The implication being that I was filthy and covered in grit. I couldn’t actually argue with that, I smelled like I had just come from a lifetime spent in the briny deep.

“Nate, could we have some privacy?”

Nate waved at me again and whistled as he shuffled back out the door. Whelan placed the lantern near my feet. It had the unexpected and pleasant side effect of warming my toes, which were getting chill in the fading daylight. He pulled a squeezy bottle of clear liquid out of the felt pouch and a slender black case. It was a first-aid kit. Inside was a pair of tweezers. Oh, lordy.

“I can get someone to hold your hand,” Whelan offered. He looked genuinely concerned for my comfort. “It might help.”