Frankly, I'd rather let him take the chances with the lawn.
Hazel's hand darts out to encircle my wrist in a tight grip. Even without filling her in on the sordid details of what Morris's security system must entail, Hazel's encountered Morris at the cafe more than enough times for his sharp wits and impetuous moods to sink in. I dare a quick glance down at her, but she's not looking at me. I'm not the one she's worried about at the moment.
Nate's path across the grass is unbalanced and wobbly, once you combine the high heels with the soft unpaved ground. Even without the high heels, he lurches forward in slow determined steps, his mouth set in a thin nervous line as he approaches the trailer.
By the time he stomps up onto the porch steps, his face brightens with a wide smile. He hoots and hollers in such a Nate sort of way I almost forget it's my body he's currently occupying. “Hot damn!” he yells, and even Hazel's annoyed sniff covers up a low chuckle.
“Unlock the door, you idiot,” I yell.
He waves me off, then leans close to the door to jam the key in the lock.
A moment later, a row of flat squares of sod lift up from the lawn and flip over, settling back down to form a simple but effective stone walkway.
“Oh, now you gotta give a girl a sidewalk?” Nate says to the door as we catch up to him.
I dodge around him to open the door. “You are enjoying this far too much.”
“Which part,” he says, “the danger of death or the breasts?”
Hazel shoots him a dark look. “Please stop fixating on her chest.”
“You're not supposed to, either, if memory serves.”
Her frown turns on me, and deepens as well.
I turn the doorknob and throw open the door, allowing Nate and Hazel to enter ahead of me. I have a sneaking suspicion if I gave them the chance, they'd never just follow me in. Considering the current state of affairs, I don't want either one of them out of my sight for any longer than they have to be.
Hazel and Nate waste too much time being awed by the compact but technologically advanced interior of Morris's lair. Neither one of them pays me much mind as I weave around them to rush over to the main control panel. The monitors refuse to spark to life, possibly tweaked by Dad before he left for the city. It has to be Dad who did this, or whoever is inside of him at any rate. He's the only other one alive who knows about this place, and zombies make for a simple distraction. He tried to buy himself some time, but whatever he needed it for he obviously didn't need that much of it.
Thankfully, much like most other supervillains, Morris has never been one to forget a failsafe. Sure enough, flipping up what appears to be a wireless keyboard secured to the desk reveals three large unlabeled buttons hidden underneath; one red, one blue, and one green.
He's always got to make things so very complicated,
I think with a sigh.
Or least he tries.
I know Morris and his stupid psychological games too well to even bother debating which one is the failsafe. I slam my palm down on the blue button harder than necessary.
Three shrill beeps echo through the lair before the lights dim, and the computers lose their soothing hum. The antenna on the roof slaps against it as it whirs to a halt and flips down, sounding vaguely like retracting landing gear on an airplane.
At least, I believe that's what it sounds like. Needless to say, my experience flying anywhere on a plane is severely lacking bordering on nonexistent. Why waste hundreds of dollars on a ticket and hours crammed into an airplane seat when a single thought can pop me to France or Japan or Mars or anywhere else I want to go?
When I turn back around again, I find Hazel digging through drawers bulging with lab equipment and Nate running his fingers over the blueprints scattered across the counters. I hope Morris wasn't counting on keeping his precious privacy after death, that's all I've got to say.
“I can't believe Morris managed to hide all this in here,” Nate says.
Hazel laughs. “I can.”
Making a face, Nate tugs at the dress again, an odd discomfort sparking behind his eyes. “Well, I've had buckets of fun being dead and all, but it did one hell of a number on me, so if you ladies will excuse me, I'm just off to powder my nose,” he says, barely able to hide his growing smirk.
“Oh, you do not,” I blurt out.
He shoots me a pointed look. “Peaches, you can't tell me you didn't hit a rest stop on the way here.”
“I had a body in my passenger seat,” I say, growling out the words past clenched teeth.
“Side of some nice secluded rural road, then?”
My glare could melt glaciers. “I hate you.”
Nate just beams in triumph and saunters off in the general direction of the facilities, presumably to linger in the bathroom for a bit longer than expected in a concerted effort to make me paranoid. I almost wish I could give him the satisfaction of being truly worried that he'll do something that will push the boundaries of propriety, but Nate won't touch anything more than he needs to. Love-'em-and-leave-'em nature aside, the man's got enough decency not to play with toys that aren't his without asking nice first. It puts him one up on a lot of people, sad to say.
“I wonder if I should warn him about the nuclear weaponry in there,” I whisper to Hazel.
“Please be joking.”
I flash her a wily grin and wink, feeling a bit more like Nate at the moment than I care for.
A moment later, Nate hurries back into the room, fumbling in a dizzy sway towards us with a worried look on his face.
“That's not a bathroom,” he declares.
Hazel and I exchange a confused look, then trail after him towards the door to the bathroom. He flings it open, then gestures at the interior with an insistent wave.
We all peer inside. I can already feel Hazel's confusion brewing beside me at what looks like the expected cramped bathroom. The toilet features a fuzzy seat cover and the walls sport mock wood paneling. It's so painfully innocuous, it shouldn't look as sinister as it does, and doesn't if you're someone like Hazel. Except it's normal, a tacky sort of normal in a crisp modern world.
Any average person would suppose Morris had simply not cared enough to match a bathroom to the rest of the décor. As though Morris Kemp would suffer the indignity of a fuzzy pink toilet seat cover for longer than necessary. Much like the bedroom, if he really planned to use the bathroom for his own personal use and nothing more, he would have remodeled it into something a bit more modern.
Nate and I know better.
“Go on,” Nate says, nudging me with one elbow.
I narrow my eyes in his direction, and he raises his hands in surrender.
“Don't look at me. You're the one with the immortality, peaches.”
I shoot him a look that could melt kittens – well, it could if I were Lady Eyesore, in any event – then walk into the bathroom and shut the door behind me.
It takes a moment. There must be fantastic soundproofing of intergalactic origins in the walls, the bathroom stifling even the sounds of my breath and the steady drip of rusty water from the tap. No matter how unlikely it might be that Morris would use this pathetic excuse for a bathroom with its chintzy décor and musty air, he wouldn't leave the water unfiltered when he'd need it for his precious experiments.
I'm unsurprised when after a long drawn-out silence there's a demanding lock and a click followed by the whirr of unseen gears and pulleys. The entire bathroom twists and falls at the same time, the slow descent of an elevator combined with the slightly dizzying disorientation of a roller coaster.
When it finally stops and the door slides open, the revealed room contains something I definitely had not expected.
A tiny black girl sits at a child-sized table cluttered with crayons and picture books, her feet barely reaching the floor. Her clothes are clean and her hair has been arranged into two round dark puffs pulled tight on top of her head. The room appears tidy and well-kept but soulless, a nice bed with clean white bedding and a small television not making up for the lack of color or windows.
It's a cell,
I think.
My mind can't drudge up anything much more coherent than that at the moment.
She lifts her head to look at me, and her wide sweet eyes hide behind thick glasses.
“Hi,” I croak.
The little girl smiles.
“Hi,” she says. Her voice is low and raspy. Maybe she's had a cold. “Are you here to take me home?”
My stomach sinks, a dark cold weight in my midsection.
I nod and open my arms wide, and she launches herself into them.
22.
Shutting down the antenna on the roof of Morris's lair succeeds in lowering the previously-raised dead, but unfortunately it doesn't quite lower them back into the ground where they belong. During the ride back to town, Nate weaves his way at a respectable speed around prone corpses crumpled in the road. His face twists into a frustrated pout I recognize from catching it in the occasional reflective surface during trying times.
The little girl – she murmurs her name, Sierra, not long after latching onto me and refusing to let go – nods off in my lap almost as soon as we cross from dirt road to paved. Her head tucks into the curve of my neck, her tiny body snuggled close. Hazel's gaze connects with mine in the rear view, her eyes occasionally dipping to take in the little girl in my arms.
When she catches me watching her study Sierra, she flushes a healthy shade of pink behind her freckles and fidgets in the back seat. “You need a bigger car, Nate.”
“Yeah, well, I don't usually carpool for the Ladies' Auxiliary League. Next time I'll plan ahead.”
Hazel raises a hand to flip him off, but stops herself with a quick glance at Sierra and lowers her arm back into her lap.
Nate swerves around another limp body in the road before peering over at the little girl sleeping in my arms. “She okay?”
My voice is low enough that my scoffing laugh doesn't wake Sierra. “Do you want me to tell you how moronic that question is, or would you rather I just let that dawn on you all on your own?”
He frowns, his eyes drifting back to the road.
“Nah, you can leave me to it.”
Hazel makes a noise in the back seat that might have been a snort of laughter, but I'm too mentally exhausted to call her on that.
The ride to town threads along a rain-dampened country road littered with the occasional awkwardly slumped corpse. They spot the road like the sudden and inexplicable influx of roadkill they quite literally are, taking up valuable space stiffened possums and squished squirrels should be occupying instead. We maneuver around them without comment. Sierra, in all of her silent slumber, is lucky enough to miss most of it.
The town itself is no better. We turn the corner off Route 17 onto Main Street to confront the gruesome and depressing sight of my friends and neighbors loading misplaced bodies onto a flatbed truck, disregarding any semblance of respect for the dead. I imagine a fair bit of property damage and life-threatening manhandling is bound to turn anyone off basic manners.
Boys from the middle school toss abandoned body parts onto the truck before racing around to find more scattered here and there under benches and mailboxes. Mrs. Santamaria sits in a cheap lawn chair she's unfolded on the yellow line in the middle of Main Street next to the slowly rotting corpse of her long-dead husband, fending off all comers with the end of her metal cane.
Surprisingly, no one appears to be in the cafe. The heavy curtains have been firmly shut, the lights turned off, the “Closed” sign on display. It probably hasn't even opened today, the regular stream of customers understandably turned off by the walking dead clogging the streets. The front windows made it through the invasion intact, thank God. If they're safe, I doubt my apartment's been toyed with either.
Nate parks the Cooper in front of Tea and Strumpets, the zombie-mangled parking meter out front ignored as we spill out of the car. I doubt the cops in this town will be issuing parking tickets, although it wouldn't be a total shock if they ignored a zombie invasion to bill us two whole dollars for not filling the meter.
What does shock me is rounding the building to find Troy propped up in a crouch against my front door. His hair frays in an untamed tangle around his head, and his gray T-shirt is torn and smeared with something that looks suspiciously like freshly chewed brain matter. He nervously clicks a spring-loaded ballpoint open and closed, the tick-tick-tick an irritating greeting.
The three of us stop, the sudden jolt shifting Sierra in my arms, and I blurt out, “Troy?” in a choked voice, snagging his attention.
“Vera,” he sighs.
His worried eyes lock on Nate as he scrambles to his feet.
I can't throw up in this body, but considering the way Troy's gaze sweeps over Nate in my body, I'm sure I can make an admirable effort.
He almost skids to a stop before reaching Nate, his clenched fists jamming into his pockets before he can reach out and do something he's going to regret in about a minute. “I know you can take care of yourself, especially against something this –“
“Troy?”
His head snaps in my direction, and his brow furrows with a distinct lack of recognition. I force a weak smile I don't really feel and say, “Wrong Vera.”
Troy's gaze darts back to Nate, who smirks before sashaying towards the door to the apartment. He leaves the four of us behind, me with Sierra asleep in my arms, Troy clearly discombobulated from this new information, and Hazel hovering nearby, still debating with herself whether to stay or to go.
After a moment, Troy stares at me, at the distinctively masculine shell in which I've taken up temporary residence. When he speaks, his voice is tired. “Bodyswapping?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Bummer.”
I make a face. “You're a true wordsmith, Troy.”
“I've spent the entire day wrangling zombies,” he says. He rubs a hand over his face, scratching at his beard as he adds, “My capacity for wit and sympathy only goes so far and neither really intersects with the other.”
“All right, I give. Your vocabulary's more impressive than I thought.”
Something sparks in his eyes, a glinting light behind the deep blue. I almost expect him to laugh then, to burst out in hysterical giggles of the sort you can't suppress when you think things can't possibly get any stranger or worse. As it stands, the smile that stretches oddly across his face forces a sympathetic cringe out of me. “I'd ask what happened,” he says, “but I'm guessing I won't get an answer.”
“What, my mental dislocation isn't answer enough?”
Sierra shifts sleepily, and I move my arms to get a better grip on her.
“I can take her,” Hazel blurts out.
She and I share a quick look before I pass the sleepy child to her, unsurprised when she has no trouble supporting the warm limp weight in her wiry arms. She trails after Nate through the open front door of my apartment, leaving Troy and I alone without a single complaint or snarky comment on her end. I almost feel the urge to call after her and congratulate her for not starting an argument or displaying a flare of jealousy. Maybe I should bake her cookies after all of this is over just for behaving.
Troy and I wait in awkward silence, the deafening absence of words in the air filled instead with someone sobbing and wailing out by the flatbed truck. We both fumble for whatever thread of conversation we're supposed to latch onto and tie around us.
Instead my frustration boils over, somewhere between Sierra and the zombies and this disastrous reveal. Once I figure out just how long we can stand here being awkward with one another, I stomp past Troy to follow the others into the apartment.
A moment later, he catches up to me on the stairs.
“Can I ask you a question?”
I continue clomping up the stairs in Nate's thick-soled boots. “Am I going to be able to stop you without a muzzle?”
“I can fix this,” he claims, and I slow so abruptly he nearly walks into my back at the top of the stairs. “If you want, I mean.”
I'm not the only one who turns to gape at Troy like he's just declared he's the new king of the lizard people of Venus. Hazel peeks in from settling Sierra down on the couch to pierce Troy with a confused glare. Nate pauses in the middle of splashing water on his face in the kitchen, grimy hands halfway through a vigorous scrub as he stares over the ragged tips of his fingernails.
My brow furrows. “You could?”
“You don't believe me?” he says, offended.
I resist the instinctive urge to massage away a headache that can't exist in this body from where it might usually be dwelling behind my temples. “Please don't be that person who goes off on the entirely wrong tangent on me when you know full well what I mean. I imagine you're not having any more enjoyable of a day than I am considering you're covered in zombie guts and I have somebody else's penis.”
A choked sound erupts behind me, but I don't turn around to find out whether the source is Nate or Hazel. I'm not sure I want to know, quite frankly, and Lord knows it could be either one, but my money's on Hazel. Nate's getting far more amusement out of the whole situation than anything else.
Troy fidgets in place, rumples already wild hair and scratches at the back of his neck. “Fair enough,” he allows.
The two of us share a quiet moment, this one much less discomforting than the one that stretched in pained seconds outside the building. But something catches his gaze, and his eyes narrow on something over my shoulder as he asks, “Is he supposed to be reading that?”
I whirl around in sudden realization, unsurprised to find Nate standing before the wall of notes with his hands resting on his full hips.
Nate's not stupid. Taking idiotic risks with your life isn't stupid if you've got nothing to lose. No, Nate's more than sharp enough to pick up the important bits out of the tangled jungle of my compact chicken-scratch scrawl.
Throwing a fit and scrambling to cover my notes as if it will keep him from realizing the relationship between Morris and my dad will help no one. Mostly it'll just make me look ridiculous. Instead I sidle up beside him, slow and quiet, and bump an elbow against his to draw Nate's attention to me.
He doesn't look over at me, doesn't say anything, but he shifts his weight just so in a silent greeting.
It's enough to wring the anxiety from me in an instant.
After a long moment, the words sigh out of him. “Aw, hell, Vera,” he says. “You can't keep shit like this lying around. You don't see me writing all about your daddy's sordid sexcapades in my diary, do you?”
I make a face. “That is disgusting, you know that?”
“Hell, it's apt, as far as I'm concerned. Just 'cause I already knew Everett's banging Morris –“
I shoot him an admittedly shocked look. “You already knew?”
He exhales, heavy and long and tired. It strikes me just how often he must play stupid, like he's not hundreds of years old, like he doesn't know where all of the bodies are buried, and their ancestors as well. “I don't miss as much as you think I do, peaches.”
I nod absently. If anybody could hide his knowledge from my father's probing mind, it'd be Nate.
Or, I think to myself with a secret smile, maybe Dad let it slide.
Nate grimaces and tosses limp black hair in desperate need of washing, clearly getting far more settled into my body than any normal person would. “Time to hit the shower,” he says. “I smell like I died and went to heaven in the worst way possible.”
He heads off towards the bathroom, heels clicking against the hardwood floor. When the door shuts, it leaves the three of us alone with a sleeping child and a world of worry. Troy scrubs at his shirt with a wet paper towel as he peers out the living room window at everything going on down below. Hazel arranges a throw blanket over Sierra, who snuggles underneath it like a warm happy puppy.
“She wake up yet?”
Hazel shakes her head as she tucks the green throw blanket from the back of the couch around Sierra's napping form. “She's had a long day,” she murmurs.
I choke back a derisive laugh at that. It's one hell of an understatement.
She eases herself to her feet as gently as possible to avoid disturbing Sierra, tilting her head towards the kitchen in a silent prompt to follow. I'm not surprised by her ease with a kid. My impatience with rescued citizens extends to most small children. If they're not cute and sweet within the first thirty seconds, I'll admit they've usually lost my good attitude, and even then my patience wears thin quickly. There's a reason I'm counting on Graham to supply my parents with grandchildren.
Hazel, on the other hand, was never quite weaned off the mythical adorability of small children like I was. Whether or not we wanted kids in the future was just another arena where we fought in armed verbal combat and came out bloody.
Hazel splashes water on her face from the sink, scrubbing her hands with the gingerbread hand soap I keep on the kitchen counter. “I feel like I should call you on how this is the weirdest thing I've ever had to deal with when it comes to you, but I really don't want to hear what you'd have to shell out afterward.”
“I'm sorry for dragging you into this.”
She shakes her head as she dries her hands on her ink-stained pants. “Yeah, well, trust me, baby, if it hadn't been you, I think the zombie invasion would have disrupted my life pretty well all on its own.”
“I still owe you for all of this,” I say, my voice deliberately soft.
“Oh, yeah?” She reaches out and takes my hands. She's already threaded her pale fingers through mine by the time it occurs to me that we're not dating, that I'm not in my own body, that there's more than one reason for the gesture to make me feel vastly uncomfortable, but none which seems to want to stick. I shouldn't let this go on, shouldn't encourage her by allowing her to latch onto me like this, but I can't bring myself to let go.