Sadie Walker Is Stranded (29 page)

“That’s my guess,” Whelan muttered.

Our footsteps slowed yet further, caution and fear silencing even our breathing. Through the heavy branches up ahead I could see a peek of blue. The house. No amount of thermal underwear, sweatshirts or jackets could keep the cold from descending right into my marrow. The wind whistled above us, careening over the tops of the trees, creating a shrill, dry music that came and went at unpredictable intervals. The blood underfoot continued, spread, and I gasped, breaking our silence, when I saw it come up with my boot.

Wet. Fresh.

We never made it to the house.

SEVENTEEN

“What am I looking at?” Nate mumbled. We gathered in a circle, all of us staring down in horrified awe at the greatest concentration of blood and …
stuff
yet. It was mostly confined to one particular spot, a messy circle just on the edge of the clearing and quiet brook where the blue house waited. It was impossible to escape the feeling of the place watching us,
studying
us.

“Blood,” Whelan replied flatly. “And some other shit—what the…”

He toed aside a few clumps of blood-matted leaves.

“… Christ.”

Two misshapen silvery lumps lay in the dirt, blood smeared over the sides. I gagged, turning away to heave, realizing what exactly I was looking at. Silicone sacks. Implants. Big ones. Apparently the zombies hadn’t cared for that bit.

Banana stifled a cry. “Oh, my sainted aunt.”

“You didn’t see her this morning?” Whelan demanded, grabbing Banana by the shoulder and shaking.

“No! They … they overslept. I thought she was just hungover. Oh, God.”

Banana turned to me and dove for my arms. She began sobbing, huge, full-bodied cries that shook us both.

“This is some serious
Ten Little Indians
bullshit,” Nate said as I pulled Banana away.

“I have no idea what that means,” Whelan muttered.

“That’s probably for the best, man.”

When Banana had calmed, her sobs diminishing to throat snorts as she tried to breathe without weeping, Whelan whipped off his top layer, a nylon jacket, and gathered up what was left of Danielle. I had never really considered that zombies would distinguish flesh from fake but … of course they would.

Whelan stomped by me at a clip and the rest of us hurried to keep up. Nobody was eager to be left behind in that cursed place.

“What the
fuck
! What the fuck was she doing out here?” Whelan trounced across the underbrush, batting leaves and twigs out of his way haphazardly. I could feel the temper rolling off of him from two yards back. “She … It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any
goddamn sense
!”

“We know she was dragged.” I was trying to be reasonable, trying to work through the scenario without sounding disrespectful or crass. “Those blood drops start close to the camp. Have you ever seen that before? Do zombies even
do
that?”

“No,” Whelan hissed. “They don’t.”

Stefano was, understandably, a wreck. He wouldn’t accept consolations from anybody. He didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to see us. He took the wrapped up jacket from Whelan and stumbled down toward the water, his head bobbing like the top of a buoy as he sank down in front of the waterline. For a long while he stayed there on his knees, the rest of us waiting by the huts while Whelan paced and swore.

It was different now. This was more than just the undead. We were fighting something we couldn’t see. I had never believed in ghosts or demons, but the coincidences were now too coincidental to ignore. Nobody wanted to accept that people could be the greater threat. I’d seen it in Seattle, with the way people climbed over each other to eat and drink and then with the Rabbits. I’d heard about it from Allison’s blog—mothers driven to horrifying extremes, their sanity savaged by losing their children and their stability; militia that looked out only for themselves, resorting to violence when it suited them. We had to start thinking that way. Allison had outsmarted them, confronted them, and now we would have to do the same. Damn it. I just wanted to be Shane’s surrogate mom, but that wasn’t enough now. I would have to be a hell of a lot more.

Something was hunting us. Something
worse
than zombies.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that my instincts were right—they were human. It would take human strength, human dexterity, to drag a body through the forest like that. But then the remains were gone … skull and all, decimated, which pointed to zombies. Whelan was right. It didn’t make any goddamn sense.

*   *   *

“I’m so fucking sick of funerals,” Andrea grunted. She collapsed down beside me on the cot inside our hut. I was busy trying to forget what I had seen, hoping Noah’s books would be adequate brain bleach. “And then there were nine.”

“Why would you say shit like that?” I let the book drop out of my hands, twisting around to glare at her. She finished tying off her hair in a tail, smashing down her floppy hat with a disconsolate little sigh.

“Sorry, I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to say.”

“You’re damn right it was.”

“Just … hear me out, okay?” She drew her knees up onto the bed, boring the dark blue of her eyes into the far wall. We hadn’t been alone in a while, her time split between the chores we were all saddled with and spending time with Nate. “What kidnaps little girls, turns them into zombies, then burns a human in a food storage bin, and then kills a stripper but leaves her fun bags for us to find?”

“Is this an actual riddle? Like, do you have an answer in mind or are we brainstorming?”

“The answer is: not a zombie.” I rolled onto my back, relieved that—for once—my feet weren’t pounding like tiny spikes were still being driven into them.

“Christ, I need a valium,” Andrea murmured, rolling her eyes and flopping down onto the bed beside me. “Anyway, what’s the plan, toots?”

“We need to get in that house,” I replied.

“Wouldn’t it be hilarious if you finally got inside and it was, like, empty and covered in cobwebs? Oooh, spooky!”

“No, actually, that would be a fucking nightmare because we’d be no closer to figuring out what the hell is going on.”

“So when are you going back?” She rolled onto her side, propping her chin up on her palm as she gazed down at me. Fidgeting, she picked a piece of lint from my sweater.

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to go back.”

“But you just said it’s the only thing to do…”

“I’m just … afraid of what we’ll find.” I just wanted to read … forget … sleep. It wasn’t just the increasing cold that was making us all irritable, but the dread that came along with the casualties. If Cassandra hadn’t been one of them then I wouldn’t blame Whelan for running us out of camp. But there were no consistencies, which made it worse … There was no way to plan for what you couldn’t even understand.

“Is it just me or are we both ignoring the enormous elephant in the room?”

“Which would be?”

“They have a boat, Sadie. And it’s nice. We could go. Why don’t we just pack up, leave, and find an island that isn’t hell-bent on killing us?”

That was, in a way, an elegant solution, but what was the guarantee the next place we landed would be any better? And it was getting colder by the day, real winter weather, nothing to play with. The security of actually having sturdy shelters wasn’t one I could easily ignore.

“That’s a legit idea,” I said, taking hold of her hand and squeezing. “I knew we kept you around for a reason.”

“Just don’t sit on this, okay? We should go. This place gives me the fucking creeps.”

That valium was sounding pretty damn tempting right about now. “Why do I feel like everything is going to hell?”

“Probably because it is.”

Just then I started to understand why those idiots in horror movies
don’t
get out of the house. Part of you wants to know—
has
to know—and various other parts of you are screaming for vengeance, resolution, nagging at you to fight back. Just leave the island. Get out of the house. But even if we did go, and I agreed with Andrea that it was most likely the safest solution, some piece of me would always stay here. I could just imagine laying awake nights, trying to figure out what went wrong, what was out to get us, and the not knowing might be worse than the staying. Then again, I had Shane to think about.

Survival.

As if to slam home that I was being selfish by letting my curiosity get the better of me, Shane tiptoed into the cabin. Wordlessly, he crept up onto the cot with us and curled up to go to sleep. Danielle’s passing hadn’t seemed to affect him much. I hated guessing, entertaining the thought that maybe he was deeply torn up about it but didn’t know what to say or who to turn to. Andrea left us alone, begging off to find Nate and fuck the fear away. Good for her.

Shane declined my offer of a story, half-asleep even as I asked.

Reading it was. By now I was well into
The Big Sleep
, putting up with horrible lighting, innumerable distractions and Noah’s notes scribbled all over the margins to stay with Philip Marlowe and Vivian Sternwood. We could use a little Philip Marlowe ourselves. Maybe the disappearances and deaths wouldn’t look like a jumbled, disjointed mess to him. Maybe I was missing something right in front of my eyes.

The girls, the fire, Cassandra, Danielle … If someone was living in that blue house and stalking us, then perhaps they were just crazy. Dangerous. At first they might have been trying to make everything look like it could be blamed on zombies. Dangerous and at least passably smart. But then how did they survive in that house? Wouldn’t we have heard gunfire as they tried to defend themselves? There were zombies everywhere there and the forest was the perfect place for them to hunt and hide. I was missing something. I could feel it, and like a joke you just don’t get or a rumor whispered out of earshot, it needled and jabbed.

Sighing, I slammed the book shut a little harder than I meant to. It fell, splaying open on the floor, the spine crooked and awkward. I grabbed it, feeling ridiculous for letting my temper take over. Reading would clear my head, calm me down.

So I cracked the book again and maybe because I was tired or maybe for some other, luckier reason, my eyes roved and caught, snagging on words scribbled in red ink in the margins.

They Burn

And then beneath it, underlined so hard it had almost ripped the page:

They All Burn
.

EIGHTEEN

“Faced with this I’d probably be defensive too.”

I felt wrong. Dirty. He was just a kid. But I couldn’t find something like that in his book and not say anything. In all honesty, I just couldn’t imagine Noah doing such evil things. He was sweet, always helpful, always willing to look after Shane.
Oh, God
.

“You don’t … you don’t get it!” Noah was flailing, his arms sailing above his head as he tried to articulate just what exactly he had meant by
They All Burn
. It was looking pretty bad for him. “I like to look for patterns. It soothes me. It’s like … it’s like a mental game I play with myself when I’m reading something. I just … connect words, letters…”

Those heartthrob good looks I had predicted were emerging, the chubbiness in his cheeks whittled away by a spare diet and too much manual labor. Now that handsomeness only leant a sinister bent to his face, one that I’m sure he was regretting at that moment. Still, I couldn’t reconcile the nice kid who had leant me those books on the boat to cheer me up and the young man in front of me … Could he have done it? It just seemed odd.

“Noah … you have to admit, it looks really creepy.”

“Why would I show you those books in the first place if I … if I … if I was going to
do
those things? I wouldn’t! I
couldn’t
.”

A good point. I could concede that one.

“Maybe you … You’re not … schizophrenic or something, are you?”

“No! What the hell, Sadie? Look … look, I know how this seems, but I didn’t do it. You have to believe me!”

And I did, God, I did, but how could I just breeze by the Redrum shit in his books? There were more, other weird, unsettling phrases I had found. None of it really coalesced yet, but maybe those were future plans, crimes Noah had yet to commit. He was strong enough to drag a body through the woods. He was smart enough to try and make everything look like a simple zombie attack. The girls would have trusted him, with that nice face and unassuming air … If kids would get into a windowless van with a creepy mustachioed pedophile for a few sweaty Werther’s Originals then a nice-looking guy like Noah would have no trouble luring them at all.

“I haven’t said anything to the others.” Like that was some kind of fucking comfort. “I wanted to give you a chance to explain.”

“I
am
explaining!” He flailed his arms again, sighing and tossing his head. His boots wore deep ruts into the sand. His watery eyes shifted past me as he gazed down the shoreline toward the huts. I had asked him to come for a walk, deciding to confront him in an open, neutral place, one where a brutal murder would be noticed but also private enough that we could have a quiet word.

“What do you want me to say?” he murmured, deflating.

“I want you to give me a good reason for your serial killer doodles, Noah. And not just, ‘Oh, I like to look for random patterns!’ Can you see how that’s just … that’s just not good enough? People are
dying
.”

“And you really think I did that? You think I killed little girls?” His voice rose, growing frantic and squeaky as he took a step toward me. I backed up accordingly.

“Not … you, necessarily. But somebody got them away from the camp. Maybe you didn’t mean to kill them…”

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing! I can’t believe you would think of me like that.”

Suddenly I wanted Whelan there. He was a cop, for God’s sake. I was sure he’d be better at this whole interrogation thing. I was only antagonizing Noah and now, if he really was the one responsible for the deaths, I would be his number one target. And if he hadn’t done anything wrong then I had just alienated a good friend. God. Damn it.