The hand on Rede’s paddle was white and skeletal and knobby-knuckled and just a little too small. A chill seemed to travel up the paddle and root her in place. Murky green waters obscured everything more than six inches below the surface, but Rede knew that arm could only be attached to a body she knew better than her own, shriveled by months underwater and pale from lack of sunlight, reanimated somehow and sent to find her. She hadn’t kept Lacey from drowning herself and now the thing she used to love would drag Rede down to the river bottom where she belonged.
A second hand erupted from the water to grasp the canoe’s gunnel. Rede stared, slack-jawed, muscles heavy as cement.
Another gunshot, another splash in the water. Mimi shied away from the entry site, but somehow she managed to keep paddling. Judging from the erratic rocking of the boat, the rest of the paddlers were attempting to do the same and failing miserably.
“We’re hanging right!” Mara yelled. “What the hell is going on?”
The nose of the canoe passed the edge of the roof ahead just in time to stop another bullet. Shards of brick fell into the bottom of the canoe as the shot struck the corner of the wall.
Mimi dropped her paddle and whirled on her bench. “Rede! Who the fuck is that?” Her eyes looked ready to pop out of her head.
The hand on the gunnel tightened, knuckles bulging under paper-white skin. Rede watched tendons tighten, muscles contract, and the elbow crook as Lacey’s ghost hauled itself into the canoe.
Except Lacey wasn’t blonde or paper-pale, and she would rather die than wear a pair of pink and orange children’s swimming goggles.
Rede stared at Lacey’s ghost. Lacey’s ghost stared back.
Mimi screamed.
Lacey’s ghost lurched into motion. She knelt facing the motorboat and drew a black handgun from her waistband, taking just a moment to aim before firing three shots in quick succession.
The ghost whipped her shooting arm back into the canoe moments before it was sheared off by the approaching roof. She cursed and pushed her goggles back onto her head. “Stop the boat! You’re blocking my shot!”
“We are not stopping the boat,” Thanh yelled back, “because we have no idea who the fuck you are!”
Lacey’s ghost rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on.” She lurched into a half-crouch and gestured for Rede to move aside. “I need to get a clear shot. Come on, move.”
Rede did not move. She wasn’t sure she could.
“They’re turning around,” Mara called.
“Aw, man.” Lacey’s ghost sat down hard. She crossed her arms and stuck out her lip like an upset toddler.
“What the fuck is happening?” Thanh demanded.
Lacey’s ghost laughed. “Long story. How about you guys just paddle on over to my house and I can explain?” She put the safety on her handgun and stuck it back into her belt. “I’m Shay, by the way.”
Mimi introduced herself as if by reflex. She stared at Shay’s obnoxious goggles the way one would stare at a UFO.
“Okay, sure.” Mara’s voice was distant and shaken, yet it carried an undercurrent of strength. “Direct us. Everyone else, paddles up.”
#
It didn’t take long to get to Shay’s house. The place squatted in a mere six inches of water: far too shallow for the canoe. The team had to get out and push the canoe alongside the building, where they were able to tie it steady.
“If anyone steals our canoe,” Thanh said, “I will eat your eyeballs like popcorn.”
Shay threw her hands up in surrender. “No one is going to bother you, promise. No one comes here anyway.”
“Yeah, I can see why,” Thanh muttered. She took a long look around and shook her head.
Rede couldn’t help but agree. Shay may have called the building a house, but it looked like anything but. Red paint flaked off crumbling cement walls. The remnants of a roof — mostly scaffolding and a few stray tiles — covered just over half of the building; the remainder was blocked off by a tarp. The stench of rot and mold permeated the air. Most importantly, the whole thing was situated dangerously close to a collapsed highway overpass. Even by post-quake standards, this place was rough.
“This way,” Shay ordered. She hopped around the corner to the front of her house, crew shambling along behind her. A set of stairs led up to what might be called a porch, or maybe just the floor of what was once an entrance room. The door was hanging from rusty hinges and bolted with six different locks.
As Rede ascended the stairs, she tripped over a stack of tomato cans. She stumbled; Inna held out his arm for her to steady herself.
“Hey.” Mara frowned at the cans, then looked up at the red-painted walls. “Isn’t this…?”
Shay grinned. “The place you were supposed to deliver my package? Yeah, this is the one.”
Inna’s muscles twitched beneath Rede’s hand. “I feel like that raises more questions.”
“I told you I’d explain.” Shay crossed the porch, water-worn boards whining beneath her feet, to undo all six bolts.
Rede was still too shocked to do much of anything. Luckily, Mara seemed alert enough for both of them. She glanced over each shoulder and scanned the wreckage of the overpass with hawk-sharp eyes. Distantly, Rede knew she should feel relief: at least someone was watching out for them. As it was, her mind was still reeling too much to permit any real emotion.
Shay undid the last lock and pushed the door open. She stepped aside with a grand sweeping gesture. “Entrez-vous.”
Mara and Mimi shared a nervous glance before leading the team into Shay’s house.
Inside, the smell grew exponentially more intense. Thanh wrinkled her nose; Inna actually coughed. Seemingly heedless of her guests’ discomfort, Shay followed them inside and closed the door behind her, plunging the building into near-darkness. The only light came from the edges of the tarp where it met the boundaries of the broken roof.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Oh, shoot. You can't see.” Shay clucked her tongue. “Hold on a second.” There was a series of frantic scrapes and thuds as she locked the door, followed a brief clatter and the smell of smoke. A light bloomed from behind the team.
Shay moved past Rede, a candle in one hand and a burning match in the other. “Someone hold this,” she said, and thrusted the candle forward. “Quick, before I get burned.”
Mimi hurriedly took hold of the candle. She and the others watched Shay scamper, squirrel-like, to a patch of shadow which Rede assumed to be a table. Shay held the match to the wicks of several more candles, cursing as the flame licked her fingertips. Her layers of baggy clothing were definitely a fire hazard, Rede thought absently. Good thing she was wet.
“This one would have lit the others just fine,” Mimi muttered, eyeing the candle in her hand.
“I don’t want to drip wax on the floor.” Shay turned and blew out her match, then promptly stuck her burned fingers in her mouth.
Rede’s eyes flicked around the room. Now that it was properly lit, she could fully absorb the state of the place. Mold streaked the walls like some parody of a child’s finger painting. Plants grew from between the floorboards, nourished by water that dripped in steady streams from the open roof.
The space was fairly open and sparsely furnished. Like the crew, Shay seemed to have thrown various items into the room based on utilitarian value and ignored any sort of aestheticism. Home decor wasn’t exactly most people’s first priority after what was essentially an apocalypse, but most had eventually begun to make their homes more…homey. It had taken a while, but once they realized that this was just what life would be like from now on, they decided to make the most of it. It was just another way to make survival bearable. At the very least, most people disinfected their furniture and blocked up most of the leaks so their things didn’t rot. Shay had made no such effort.
Rede’s eyes meandered toward the far wall where two cots sat side by side. There were two chairs beside the table on which the candles rested. A plastic box on the floor held two tin camping cups, two plates, two bowls.
“Who lives with you?” Mara asked.
Finally, Shay’s relentlessly casual demeanor faded into something more situationally appropriate. Mara’s words shriveled her like a weed in the sun. “I live alone,” she said.
Mara held her gaze. An unspoken question lingered in the air.
“All this stuff was my brother’s.” Shay looked at her feet. Damp blonde curls tumbled in front of her face; she shoved them back impatiently. “He’s the reason you’re here.”
The floorboards groaned as Mara shifted her weight. “You promised us an explanation.”
“You’re getting one,” Shay snapped. “It’s a long story. I wasn’t just saying that earlier. I’ll give you the short version.” She took a steadying breath. “My brother’s name was Drew Beatty.”
In her periphery, Rede could see the blank expressions on her teammates’ faces. Like her, none of them seemed to recognize the name.
“A few months ago, Drew hired you to take him somewhere,” Shay continued. “He found out things that were supposed to be secret. He was going to tell everyone, but before he could, the people he was going to expose found him out. They took him away and then they brought me back what was left of him.”
Thanh hugged her stomach. Inna put a comforting hand on her shoulder. Rede caught the reflexive flicker of anger in Thanh’s eyes and the subsequent calm as she remembered who was touching her. Some of Rede’s exhaustion melted away.
“I don’t know what he found,” Shay said. “No one I’ve talked to seems to know, either. I’ve been looking for things that might lead me to him. It’s been months. Do you know how hard it is to do something like this in this place?” Shay tossed her head to indicate what seemed to be the whole city. “Everything I’ve tried has been a dead end. I decided the best thing to do would be to find you directly.” There it was again: that inappropriate toothy grin.
“Wait.” Rede straightened. Her mind ground and faltered, but she forced herself to push through her lingering shock. “That package is empty, isn’t it?”
Impossibly, Shay’s grin widened.
Rede spluttered wordlessly for a moment. “Someone shot at us!”
“Yeah, I wasn’t counting on that.” Shay pursed her lips. “I definitely pissed off some people, but I didn’t think they would know that you were coming for me.” Her eyes widened. “Joey! God, that jerk ratted me out, didn’t he? Even after I paid him to hire you all, too. Jesus. What a stinker. He’d seriously do anything for a free tank…”
“You must’ve done something seriously bad if jackers are shooting at us in broad daylight,” Mara persisted.
If Mara was wrong to conclude that their assailants were jackers, Shay didn’t correct her. “Yeah, I definitely went a little…you know.” She twirled a finger around her ear. “Drew dying messed me up just a tiny bit.”
“Look, no offense,” Thanh started, and Rede was already cringing, “but do you think a crazy person should have a gun?”
“I don’t just have ‘a’ gun,” Shay said, emphasizing the article with air quotes. “I have many guns. This is just my favorite. It’s got police-grade waterproofing,” she added with pride, and patted the bulge on her hip.
“Let’s stop the gun talk, maybe?” Inna said anxiously.
“Right.” Mara crossed her arms. “Let’s focus on what’s important, which is the fact that you bribed someone to send us into an active fucking shooter zone with zero warning.”
Shay sighed. “Well, to be fair, I didn’t know there would be shooting. Anyway, this is a lot more fun than some boring message.”
Thanh was turning purple.
“You did all of that and you’re telling us you want us to bring you to the place we took your brother?” Mara snorted. “Are you actually stupid?”
“You guys are way meaner than I thought.” Shay pouted. “I thought you’d want to find out who killed Lacey.”
Rede’s stomach dropped. That same paralytic fear returned, that same waterlogged ghost flickering in the edge of her mind’s eye.
“No one killed Lacey,” said Inna. “It was an accident.”
Shay seemed genuinely confused. “You don’t have to lie to me.”
“We’re not lying.” Inna’s brow crinkled. “Why would you think she was killed?”
“I thought it was obvious.” Shay shrugged.
“She killed herself,” Rede blurted.
Shay raised her eyebrows. “Are you serious?”
“She left a note,” Rede insisted.
Somehow, Shay’s eyebrows managed to climb even higher. “For real?” She shook her head. “You guys give a ride to someone who makes someone else mad, that someone else threatens you, she sticks up for you and takes the fall for everything, they go after her, no more problem. I figured that bullshit accident story you spread around was just to cover your backs.”
Rede looked at Inna and thought, absurdly, of a character in a laggy video game.
Mara was the one to break the silence. “We didn’t know anything about your brother,” she said. “I remember giving a ride to someone named Drew, but I don’t know where we went. Honestly, I don’t even remember what he looked like.”
“None of our passengers seemed suspicious,” Mimi said softly. “No one threatened us. We had no idea anything was wrong.”
“Oh, something was definitely wrong.” Shay nodded to herself. “Whatever Drew found, people weren’t happy. Someone would have talked to Lacey, at least. Maybe she didn’t tell you, but someone came to her, for sure.”
Thanh puffed out her chest and looked down her nose at Shay. “Lacey wouldn’t keep something like that from us.”
Lacey also wouldn’t kill herself for no reason, Rede wanted to say, but her leaden tongue wouldn’t cooperate. The Lacey she knew had never lied to the team — but maybe, if she thought she was protecting her friends. Maybe, if she didn’t see another way out…
“I’m sorry,” Shay said. “It wasn’t easy for me, either. Drew didn’t tell me anything. I found out about all of this after he died. It’s…well. It’s hard.”
“There’s nothing for us to have found out about,” Thanh said, her tone brittle. “Lacey didn’t lie. She probably just blamed herself for Drew dying and had a breakdown about it.”
“How would she have found out about Drew if no one besides me and his killers knew he was dead?” Shay countered.
Thanh snapped like an angry Rottweiler. Inna tried to stop her midway through her tirade; his voice was drowned out by Mara’s call for order.The room dissolved into a cacophony of sound and motion. Words and gestures flew like bullets, ricocheted off the walls.
Rede’s knees collapsed in on themselves. She let her weight fall onto Inna’s arm. Her chest throbbed with a bone-deep ache that had plagued her for weeks after Lacey left. No — after Lacey died. No, wrong again. After Lacey was killed. Because she had been. Shay was right. The knowledge should have hurt, but all Rede could feel was elation. Finally, there would be justice.