Sadie Walker Is Stranded (25 page)

“It was a setup,” Whelan remarked softly, chuckling.

“You don’t seem terribly broken up about that.”

“I’m not.”

“Banana gave me paper and pencil so … she asked that I hear you out.” He’d been told that my feet were still in bad shape and needed to be looked at. And yes, I’m adult enough to admit that it was a silly lie and pretty flimsy to begin with, but apparently he believed it or wanted to show up. Secretly, I hoped for the latter. In preparation for perpetuating the story I sucked it up and unwrapped the bandages and peeked, nervously, at the undersides of my feet. Just then I held them up for inspection and Whelan pulled in a breath through his teeth.

“Remember when I said you should stay off these as much as possible?”

“I’m not a very good listener,” I said with a shrug. I had to turn, canting my hips slightly to the side and lifting my feet. Whelan grabbed for my ankles and gingerly settled my heels onto his thighs. It was warm there. He forced a smile, which was kind of him considering my feet looked raw and shredded enough to fit in behind a deli counter.

Now would not be a good time to point out that Whelan’s lips, which some might call girly, were, in fact, what laymen refer to as “fucking hot”—as in “holy shit, your lips are fucking hot and I want to kiss them.” The whole puffer fish comparison was almost apt, but a little vulgar and mean, really, and something a more mature person would take back.

And now would not be a good time to also point out that puffer fish are delicious on the inside, a delicacy, but incredibly poisonous on the outside. Their skin causes vomiting, paralysis and usually death within twenty-four hours. What? I eat a lot of sushi.
Ate
. With that cheering thought in mind, I stared at his funny ears.

“I didn’t know you were an artist,” Whelan said. He pulled a packet of cotton balls and a tube of medicated gel from the pocket on his work shirt.

“
Am
an artist,” I corrected gently. The gel stung.
Yowzers
. “Shane and I don’t connect on much, but he likes my pictures.”

“Can I see them?”

“I’ll think about it.”

Another smile, another reason to gaze stonily at his ears. “I don’t know the first damn thing about art, so I won’t know what to criticize.”

“Assuming that would be the natural response,” I said with a snorty laugh. “Criticism.”

“Hey, whoa, I can praise, praise, praise if that’s what you want.”

The gel had almost numbed the feeling of the cotton balls dabbing at the torn skin. Still, the pain was there, dulled, but there. I hadn’t been noticing it, thanks to his distracting
mouth
conversation.

“Shane doesn’t talk much, does he?”

“No,” I admitted softly. The glow of fire caught on the cotton in Whelan’s fingers, making them look like cloud-soft puffs of flame … they burned like ’em too. “He’s always been a quiet kid. Serious. I never have any idea what’s going on in his head.”

“He seems pretty well-adjusted to me. I mean, by comparison. I saw a lot of sad kids after The Outbreak. A buddy of mine at the precinct had a boy about Shane’s age. He stopped talking altogether … just stopped. Nothing. Mute.” Whelan frowned, the thick dashes of his brows tugging down simultaneously.

“What happened to him?” I asked. You never wanted to know the endings to these stories, but curiosity compelled that you ask anyway.

“I lost track of them. Queen Anne exploded … almost … It was a nightmare. Fires everywhere, people everywhere … death everywhere.” He paused, the latest clean cotton ball still touched to the big toe on my right foot. “I had a nervous breakdown … Stayed in my apartment for a week with the doors and windows barred.”

“The first time or the second time?” I asked.

“Hm?”

“Was that during The Outbreak or this last time?”

Whelan frowned, sitting up and fixing me with a dark, uneasy look. “The Outbreak. I told you, we left before the Citadel fell.”

“Right,” I replied. “I forgot for a second there.”

His expression eased, his smile returning as he hunched over my feet and went back to work. “Christ, you have the ugliest pinky toes I have ever seen, Sadie.”

“I blame the sea urchins.”

“I would too.”

Scrambling for an appropriately juvenile comeback, I settled triumphantly on, “Well, your ears are stupid.”

Smirking, Whelan sat up again, bringing that one incorrigible dimple with him. He dropped a dirtied cotton puff onto the ground. It landed among its brethren and rolled to a stop just before the stones marking the fire pit. “I’m glad I survived measles, twelve years on the force and a zombie outbreak to have you remind me of what a special hell fifth grade was.” He laughed, bitterly, shaking back the dark strands of his hair. At some point he had shaved, his jaw gleaming tan and smooth in the flames. “Curious George,” Whelan added, shuddering.

A loud, spontaneous burst of laughter probably wasn’t the sympathetic response he was hoping for, but that’s what he got. “I wield the cotton balls, you heartless bully,” he said, pretending to jab at my raw toes. “I could easily slip and
oops
and—”

“All right, all right,” I said, breathless with laughter, “I get the idea. I’ll be good! I’m sorry I made fun of your monkey ears … I mean, they’re not monkey ears—they’re regular ears, just a bit sticky-outy, I mean…”

“You know,” Whelan began, smiling lazily and threatening me with that cotton ball again, “you and your ilk are the reason I almost paid through the nose for ear-pinning surgery.”

“When was this?” I asked, relaxing when his next swipe with the cotton was gentle and forgiving.

“In the dreaded bowl-cut phase of seventy-nine, a bleak time for many. That was before I realized the magical powers of a good haircut. Ugh, I looked like a
chalice
.”

“You looked like a chalice and I wore sandals on the playground and wondered why everyone pointed and laughed.” Either from the gel or the flames or the cotton balls, my feet no longer burned so badly.

“And childhood is supposed to be the happiest years of your life…”

“So … did you ever find the Man With the Yellow Hat to your Curious George?”

Yeah, that netted the blank stare it deserved.

“That … sounded so much wittier in my head,” I mumbled, waving the offending question away as if it were a physical vapor hanging around us.

Whelan gathered up the cotton balls and pitched them into the fire. I pulled my feet away, reluctantly, knowing there was no reason to keep them there, especially with my gangle toes freaking him out. “Amber hat … orange hat … close … but no, no yellow hat.”

“Danielle’s not the yellow hat, then?”

“Uh, no. No, she isn’t.” Whelan smiled, tipping his head to the side as that smile eased into a far more nefarious, devious sort of half-grin. Even his dimple looked ominous. “You really don’t like her, do you? It’s the boobs, right? Makes you uncomfortable?”

“No, no, it has nothing to do with the fucking Hindenburgs hanging off her chest and everything to do with her … glaring. She’s like a Shih Tzu, all beady eyes and crazy little snappy teeth.”

“Danielle danced at a nice place,” Whelan replied, lowering his voice. I could tell a sad, sad story was coming on. “Or so she said. The point is, she was the only one to make it out of there. One girl out of, what, thirty? I know it’s tempting to laugh at the mental image of all those sweaty-fisted businessmen being decimated by a horde of ravenous undead, but she came out of it really … jumpy. She doesn’t trust anyone but Stefano … and maybe the girls, but … you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Fuck.

“I should probably be nicer to her,” I said. This was sounding like déjà vu. “I should be a lot nicer in general.”

“You’re doing all right,” Whelan assured me lightly. “Danielle’s just like the rest of us, coping as best she can—which, granted, might mean she’s turned into a Shih Tzu, but it might also mean she’s seen a lot of bad shit and doesn’t quite know what to make of it. She’s like you and me, Hindenburgs or no.”

“Are you calling me flat-chested?”

“There’s no correct way to answer that and you know it.”

He was right, but I wanted him to try and dig his way out anyway.

“I should get some sleep,” I said. “Sounds like the snore chorus have died down a little.”

“Banana and I have room,” he replied so casually that it was not casual at all. The firelight was playing tricks, making him even tanner than usual, smoothing out the slight wrinkles at his eyes, emphasizing the pronounced curve of that dimple. Tricks. Shenanigans. Inconveniently torn, I glanced at the water. The little boat lights had gone out.

“I should stick with my people,” I said. “And you stick with yours.”

FOURTEEN

Two nights later I slept like the dead—the truly dead, not the living dead—exhausted from an embarrassing fancy. Spending the day shooting arrows into the water, trying to kill fish that way is … not to be repeated. I don’t recommend it unless you have actual hand-eye coordination or a bag full of Jedi mind tricks.

With calluses the size of donut holes forming on my fingertips and palms, I listened to the dulcet tones of Andrea sniping in my ear, hissing at me for being a prude and not enslaving Whelan with my womanly wiles. No amount of reminding her that survival and not
procreation
was our number one priority would get her to shut up. The last thing I heard before drifting to sleep was Andrea’s voice buzzing in my ear as she muttered, “Flash forward, Sadie, here’s your life in ten years: You, a sad, hunched spinster blitzed on vodka gimlets at a karaoke bar singing ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ to a room of like-minded, sawdust repositories.”

“I don’t think we’ll have karaoke machines on the island,” I sleepily replied. “Not even in ten years.”

I wouldn’t have gone to sleep smiling if I had known I’d wake up to flames.

This time I was up at the first call of alarm, stumbling over Andrea and Shane on the cot and tossing on Banana’s burlesque sweatshirt, backward, over a pair of thermal leggings and somebody’s work boots. In this fetching ensemble, I stumbled out into the wan sunshine, finding at once that the air on the beach choked with smoke and the faint burning smell I had detected inside the cabin was not, in fact, the result of someone cooking breakfast.

“Holy shit,” I mumbled, drifting numbly toward the food hut. It was all but blackened, crisp and ashen, pieces of it crumbling inward from the smallest, gentlest hint of a breeze. I couldn’t talk, couldn’t breathe, staring at what had once been a sturdy if crooked monument to our survival. Fish had been stored in there after drying, and cans of food, bags of cookies, chips, all of the salvaged goods Whelan and his folks had brought from the mainland. Noah and Andrea came up behind me, their gasps joining the sound of Nate and Whelan furiously throwing seawater on the smoldering ruins. Stefano and Danielle stood apart, huddling together in matching pink sweatshirts. Noticeably absent was Cassandra, and for a shameful moment, I almost hoped she was the culprit. She certainly did act unbalanced enough to have gone pyro. Through the tears, I saw Danielle glaring at us, an accusation no doubt forming on her lips as she looked at us, the outsiders, the obvious suspects.

All the blanket dampening and seawater in the world wasn’t going to reverse the damage, and as soon as the rest of us came in speaking distance, the accusations started to fly.

“Way to go, Whelan,” Danielle burst out, shoving Stefano away as she stalked toward us. “Bring a bunch of outsiders here and this is what happens!” She whirled, aiming her bile at Whelan this time. “They’re not like us! They’re … whatever they are! The girls and now this…”

“Hey!” I yelled, feeling a little less than purely authoritative in my harebrained outfit. “Hey, we didn’t do anything to those girls. That’s not on us.”

“Oh, but the fire is?” she shrilled back.

“Why would we burn our own food?” Moritz asked, carefully modulating his voice. “That does not make any sense. We were nearly starving before. Why would we come here only to destroy your food?”

“Yeah!” Noah added, punctuating his yell with a finger pointed at Danielle. “We all sleep in one place. Do you have any idea how hard it is to move an inch in that cabin without stepping on someone’s face?”

“Everybody shut the fuck up,” Whelan thundered. We obeyed. You obey a tone like that. “There’s something in there,” he added in a much more subdued, uneasy voice.

“What kind of something?” Stefano asked, cuddling up next to Danielle and holding onto her arm like an anchor. His voice shivered around the words. “Can … Can you tell?”

“Oh, my good Jesus,” Nate muttered. He and Whelan were the closest, standing just inches from the shed. They clapped their hands over their mouths in almost perfect unison.

“It’s too small,” Whelan said, just loud enough for the rest of us to make out. Nate nodded. “It can’t be Teresa.”

“Can’t be…” Danielle marched up in between Whelan and Nate, leaning over and squinting into the charred wreckage. “Is that … oh, God. Oh, God, it’s Cassie.”

“Cassie?” Andrea repeated, a little tartly. I elbowed her.

“
Cassandra
,” Danielle hissed. “Ya know, the one you all ignored because you thought she was crazy.”

“Does that mean she set the fire?” Moritz asked.

“Hard to say,” Whelan replied. He stood back, hands on hips, and swore under his breath. “If she used a lighter it might still be in there, melted. If she used a torch … it would’ve burned up with the rest of the wood.”

Right. Cop. I was hoping those skills of his would never come in handy. Wishful thinking, as usual.

“I don’t mean to get all Benson and Stabler on you here, but wouldn’t we have heard her screaming?” I should’ve just kept my mouth shut, but Whelan turned, frowning.

“Damn it. I didn’t think of that,” he said quietly, thoughtfully.

“That is fucking creepy as shit,” Andrea whispered, inching closer to me. “She just … sat in there? Silently? And burned to death?”

“Unless someone killed her, put her in the shed and lit it on fire,” Whelan replied.