A Living Dead Love Story Series (46 page)

Vera finally nods, cracking a vaguely sinister, almost pleased, smile.

“Bones?” I sit at the edge of my seat. “You mean Bones was Val's brother?”

W
hy do you
think we took so many risks before trying to apprehend her?” Vera says, suddenly seeming to take an interest in my damp clothes and mascara-streaked face.

“Trying?” I blurt, beyond myself with disbelief. “You mean the witch got away?” I shake my head. God, Sentinels suck. Seriously.

“Unfortunately, yes, she was able to escape before the extraction team was fully prepared to apprehend her and—”

I slam the table, if only to stop her excuses.

The folder pops closed, and some of the pictures shift.

“She's five feet nothing. Weighs 90 pounds soaking wet, and I just rode here with about 2,000 tons of Sentinel fun. Couldn't anyone stop her? Hell, the way she was teasing us from that DJ booth, she was practically begging to be caught. What's the use of tailing us, using us
as bait, if you're not even going to catch the Zerker who's been stalking us?”

Vera shakes her head, absently sliding the old photos back into the thick file. “As I said, we have procedures—”

“Then your procedures got Stamp killed. All those Sentinels waiting outside Splash Zone, and the whole time Val was letting the sharks loose. Dozens of men with their Tasers and big muscles, and they just stood by while those sharks tore him to pieces.”

I stop, not because I don't have more to say but because I can see the wheels going round in her head, waiting for my mouth to stop moving.

“Maddy, I know you're upset. I don't blame you. But you don't know the full story. We didn't have dozens of Sentinels in place while Stamp was, was—”

“Save it.” I spare her the trouble of making excuses I'm not going to believe anyway. “What's done is done. My question is what are you doing
now
to catch her?”

“We have teams on the ground combing through her abandoned warehouse, checking her cell phones. We'll find her.”

“Before she gets to Barracuda Bay? Before she finds my father? Before she tears him apart?”

“I said we'll find her.”

“Not if I find her first,” I say grimly, avoiding her gaze.

Vera slips her shiny pen out from her breast pocket and studies it. “First you'll have to get through me, dear.”

I can't tell if she's challenging or threatening me.
Does she mean literally get through her, like knock her down and run over her back? Or metaphorically, like she's going to have to approve my discharge or something? I guess I don't much care, since both seem pretty far out of reach at the moment anyway.

“Then tell me what I have to do, Vera. What do you want? I'll do it.”

Vera stands. “All in good time.”

I picture my dad sitting in our cozy breakfast nook, drinking instant coffee out of his cracked Christmas mug, thinking he's safe when all the while Bones' sister is heading straight his way, hell-bent on revenge.

Vera grabs the folder from the table and waits, looking down at me while tapping one booted toe as she stands there, looking triumphant and regal in her uniform.

“I don't have time.” I hate the helpless sound in my voice, but I'm just as helpless to stop it. “Val said … she said … she said she's going to—”

“Your father is safe. Whether he knows it or not, we have him surrounded. Even more so than usual. Now get up or—”

“Or what?” I grip the table, ready for a fight. Why not? She said we were safe, and look what happened to Stamp. She said they were using us as bait but then couldn't even catch Val when she was sitting there, seducing Stamp for two whole weeks. Why shouldn't we fight after all that?

I can take this chick. She's old and thin and wearing
that powder-blue Sentinel uniform. How tough can she be?

She smiles placidly, holding the thick file in one hand and her silver pen in the other. She flicks the pen's top up and down, up and down, almost … menacingly.

“You don't want to make me move you, Maddy. Trust me.”

“Please.” I chuckle. “I've fought bigger and badder and—”

Vera clicks her pen one last time, then jabs it in my neck as I'm bragging. I have just enough time to think,
The hell?
before a whiff of ozone, a sizzle of electricity, the smell of burnt meat, and
whoosh!
I fly like a Mack truck from the chair, across the room and into the wall, sliding down cinder block to the linoleum floor.

Heaped in a corner, every joint tense and brain fried, I try to speak but my tongue just kind of vibrates.

“Give yourself a minute, dear,” Vera says as if she's just served me iced lemonade and sugar cookies. “The juice from my electric pen is still flowing through you. Now you were saying something about, what was it? Oh yeah, bigger and badder?”

She smiles down at me, eyes not entirely unkind despite the use of her magic, ass-kicking pen, as the juice runs its course through my body.

Stupid. I was stupid not to know that pen was some kind of weapon with all the clicking and clacking right in front of my face the entire time.

She helps me stand on wobbly legs, then waits as I steady myself with one trembling hand pressed flat against the nearest wall.

“I'm sorry, Maddy,” she whispers before she opens the door. “But you left me no choice. I can help you, you know, if you let me.”

I can't tell if she's being serious or luring me in with some good Sentinel/bad Sentinel crap, but I keep my distance until she pockets the pen. I try to unclench my jaw. It takes awhile.

Electricity is to zombies what silver is to werewolves, what garlic and holy water are to vampires. All we have left, the only juice still running through our veins, is electric current. It's why brains, which are full of electricity even after they're dead, are all we need, all we want, to survive. So when something conducts electricity, like the copper at the end of Dane's stake or a Sentinel's Taser or Vera's James Bond electric pen, well, it doesn't play fair with our zombie insides.

So forgive me if I'm still a little clumsy on my two left feet as I stumble to the door. Vera walks through and says to the guards, “I'll escort Ms. Swift to her cell, gentleman. That is all.”

Her voice is crisp and not at all how she talked to me inside the room. It almost sounds, though I know it can't be true, like Vera's their boss. But if there's one thing Sentinels hate more than Zerkers, it's women. I've
never seen a female Sentinel and, according to Dane, there's never been one.

So how can Vera be their boss?

They grumble and make a move to follow, but apparently that powder-blue suit isn't as lame as it appears, because one cluck of Vera's tongue and the Sentinels scatter as if she's just stuck her pen in both of their necks at the same time. I watch them go, wishing I could see the looks on their faces.

I can see Vera's, though. She smiles and leads me down another hall.

At the end of it is a hulking Sentinel sitting at a cheap, metal desk like you'd see in any high school counselor's office. There is nothing on it except his hands, which he raises in a
stop, do not proceed
motion.

Vera says, “I'm here with the detainee.”

Hmm, that sounds kind of … innocent. Not prisoner, not customer, not client, not inmate. Detainee. Kind of like detention but with a zombie guard keeping watch over the door instead of, you know, some pudgy assistant principal.

But then I wonder, is detainee better than prisoner? Or worse?

The Sentinel grumbles and starts to rise, but Vera says, “I have a key.”

He sits heavily, as if relieved.

From a hip pocket Vera slides out a key and quickly
slips it into a round metal lock. There's a resounding click, and the tan-colored door hisses open.

Inside is a long hall. It's brightly lit with flickering bulbs but narrow. A yellow line—I can't tell if it's painted on or just really good tape—stretches in front of a row of cells, maybe eight in all.

Like, real cells.

Jail.

Cells.

Detainee or no, it's clear I'm a prisoner of some sort.

Vera and I stop in front of one.

“I thought you were joking.”

“Why would I be joking, Maddy?”

“Isn't this”—I rack my brain for the name on the sign we saw while pulling in earlier—”the Crestview Rehabilitation Center?”

“That? That's just so Normals keep on driving by and don't get in our hair. This is one of a dozen containment facilities the Sentinels operate around the country. It houses detainees from the southeast region mostly: Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, a few from Tennessee.”

“Detainees?” I say—anything to stall going inside that cell.

She nods, reaching in one of her pockets for the same key she used to open the door at the end of the hall. “Sentinels that have gone rogue, zombies who refuse to meet with the Council of Elders, zombies who have been
caught eating human flesh—that kind of thing. And Zerkers, of course. If we rehabilitate anything here, it's them.”

“You can do that?” I say, and not just to stall. “Rehabilitate Zerkers?”

Vera bites her lower lip, the way Dane will when he's not sure whether to tell me the truth. “Not all. But we're working on some interesting techniques that may hold out hope for the future.”

I try to picture a future where someone like Bones or Dahlia or even Val could be rehabilitated. “Is that something we even want?”

Vera looks at me with something like respect or at least interest. “I'm not sure. But … don't you think we should at least try?”

I start to answer, but the thought of Stamp's black-and-white hoodie floating among the circling sharks closes my mouth. How do you rehabilitate someone who could do something like that?

She takes my nonanswer as an answer and reaches into a pocket.

I flinch, expecting to get a jolt from the pen again.

Instead she flashes the key to make sure it's the right one.

To buy myself another minute or two, I say, “W-w-well, for such a big place, it sure seems empty.”

“It is empty.” She slides the key in the last lock and eases the cell door open on smooth, oiled hinges. “Except for you.”

She steps aside, and I walk in. What's the point of delaying the inevitable any longer, right?

The cell is wide, if not long. There is no cot, like in the movies, or toilet or even sink. Because, well, what do I need with any of those things? One table and two chairs stand in the corner. That's it. They're steel and bolted into the cinder block wall, so I can't even pick one up and clobber a guard over the head with it.

I turn from exploring the room to find Vera closing the door gently, then pocketing the key. She stands there, file in hand, key and pen in pocket.

I say what's been on my mind since we parted:

“What about Dane?”

“Don't worry about Dane right now. There is you, there is me, and that's all you need to worry about right now.”

I shake my head. “So what now? I'm supposed to rot in some cell while a crazy-ass Zerker makes tracks for Barracuda Bay, and you think I'm going to stand for that?”

“What choice do you have?”

T
here are no
windows in the cell, naturally, but none in the hall either. I've been pacing for, I dunno, hours or days since Vera walked away.

I keep waiting for her to come back, to bring Dane along with her, to drag me to the Council of Elders, to experiment on me, to question me, to execute me—something. Anything would be better than this.

This not knowing, this not doing? Florida is a big state but not that big. Anyone with a lead foot and a dead bladder could make it from one end to the other in a day, easy. Someone like Val, a motivated, deadly, cunning, and gleeful killer? She's probably already there.

And after the Sentinels dropped the ball with Stamp, how am I supposed to believe Dad's safe, as Vera said? Fact is, I don't. The thought of Val in the same town, in the same state, as my dad makes my dead skin crawl.
But for all my zombie strength, the bars are too thick to bend and walk through. So I'm stuck for now. Perhaps even for awhile.

The cell is exactly 14 paces wide, and I walk them over and over again as I fume. I picture Dane, black T-shirt still damp from trying to save Stamp, and how he knocked me out in order to save me.

I think of his missing pinky and the gaping gash in his calf and the dreadful look on his face as he waited for me to come to. How long had he sat there, dripping wet, black goo oozing from his missing digit, surrounded by dead sharks and pieces of Stamp? One minute? Ten minutes? Twenty?

I drift back to Barracuda Bay and remember the first two Zerkers I ever encountered. I can clearly picture Bones, so tall in his shiny white tracksuit, so crafty and clever. His partner in crime, Dahlia, so petite and full of fury. They were a good match, the two of them combining their strengths to be double the trouble for the good zombies who lived in my hometown.

In Val, it's like both were reincarnated on crack with a PhD in mean and a black belt in bitchery.

I shake my head, clench my fists, and pace, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm in here and she's out there. It was a mistake to run. I know that now. I wonder if Dane does. I wonder if Stamp did all along. We should have stayed and taken the heat. For better or worse.

We were stronger together back then. Dane and
Chloe were a force to be reckoned with, like Bones and Dahlia. Two heads were better than one. Dane with his hard angles and rough edges and complete lack of empathy for anything Zerker. Chloe with her utter badassery. Nothing and nobody could get by her. Until, of course, someone—or something—did.