Zombies vs. Unicorns (11 page)

Except for once. Except for the one who somehow got into the
landhuizen
. No one ever explained to Iza what happened—not even Beihito—and eventually she stopped begging for information when she saw the shadows in his eyes every time she brought it up.

All Iza knew was that the
homber mata
killed the
mudo
, but it was her father himself who killed her mother. She never saw her mother Return, and once, a few days after her death, she overheard one of the maids whisper to another that her mother had never actually been infected.

Sometimes Iza believes the rumor that her mother was never
bitten. Sometimes she wants to slit their throats for saying such a thing.

Her father added three more layers of fences to the land sides of the
landhuizen
and replaced the wide staircase to the floating dock at the base of the cliffs with a narrow ladder the
mudo
could never climb. For months after the uprising Iza was terrified of the water and imagined them coming for her, their fingers curling from the surface, their flesh prickled and gray.

She missed the taste of salt on her skin, the way it made her feel tight and itchy when she dried in the burning sun. She even missed the sting of fire coral. Her father ordered his men to dig a pool for her, but it wasn’t the same.

8. NOW

“Please,” the man whispers again. The muscles cording around his arms flex and shake. Dozens of tiny white lines fleck across his chest like cracks in glass.

Iza’s father has instilled in her the need for discipline and order; every day of her life has been about rules and restrictions. “It’s how we’ll survive this,” her father always says. “It’s the only way.”

She can sometimes remember the man he used to be before the Return, but only barely. He used to mow the lawn on summer Saturday afternoons, and on Sundays in the fall he would crack open a can of beer and eat chips and salsa as he watched football games. He used to always let her drink the first sip if she’d fetch it for him from the refrigerator, and she can
still remember the sharp sting of metallic carbonation, the crisp clack of the can snapping open.

All Iza has to do is push the blade against the man’s throat just a little more and it will either cut him or he’ll be forced to let go of the dock and fall back into the water.

Her father would never have hesitated. She can hear his voice in her head screaming at her to kill this man, that he’s dangerous and she’s stupid to even consider letting him live.

But Iza thinks of the romance novels she loves and the pirates splashed across their covers. She thinks of all the times she stood at the edge of the cliffs and wanted someone to whisk out of the sea and rescue her.

Swallowing, Iza pulls the knife away from his throat and scoots down the dock a little, giving him room to climb the rest of the way up. He crouches on his hands and knees, his back arching as he draws in long deep breaths.

“Thank you,” he says softly.

Iza shakes her head and stands. “Don’t,” she says, still holding the machete out in front of her. “The
homber mata
will kill you if they find you.”

He looks up at her, deep green eyes in a sea of darkness. Something pulls inside Iza, making her want to help him. To know him and believe that things can be different from how they are. The flutter of desire and hope inside her aches so hard that she presses a hand to her chest to quench it.

“But there are caves,” she says, waving the machete toward the limestone walls. “Hidden tunnels that will take you up beyond the
landhuizen
. You might have a chance that way.”
She says it quickly, rushing to get the words out.

His eyebrows twitch, just barely. “Thank you,” he says again.

Her father’s training scrapes through her mind. She should kill this man. She squeezes her hand around the handle of the machete, imagining the blood dripping from his neck and seeping through the cracks of the dock into the waves—perfect petals of dissipating scarlet.

The image reminds Iza of when her mother used to toss bougainvillea blossoms from the cliffs, and she releases her grip on the wide-bladed knife. Before she can change her mind, as her father’s rules dig through her skull, she turns and walks down the dock to climb up the narrow ladder. Behind her she hears the man’s breathing, the small shudders of water dropping to the old beaten wood as he watches her fade away.

9. BEFORE

Iza stopped going to the little Curaçao school two years ago when her father declared it useless. There were too many tasks to be done to keep the island running for the children to spend wasted days in a classroom learning about the history of Holland or the life cycle of the barrier reef.

Instead he put them to work—everyone on the island worked for the right to remain a citizen and to enjoy the relative peace and safety. Even the people who’d lived there much longer than Iza and her family.

Of course, everyone worked except for Iza. As the governor’s only daughter, she was left alone to do what she wanted. Most often she was nothing more than her mother’s ghost, weaving
from room to room, trying to stay out of the way of the gardeners, the housekeepers, the
homber mata
, the guards, and the rest of her father’s men.

Iza chose instead to read, and discovered a love for books. To indulge her, or to keep her from complaining, Iza’s father let it be known he was looking for books and that captains hoping to curry his favor and find access to Curaçao’s ports could start by stocking his library.

The captain of an old gleaming cruise ship was the first to bring Iza boxes of romance novels with faded covers and pages soft with age. Iza devoured every one.

It was the pirate stories that gave her the biggest thrill. She’d spend countless afternoons sitting at the edge of the limestone cliff bordering her father’s
landhuizen
, staring out toward the horizon and hoping for a dashing captain to come rescue her. He’d take her away from her father’s rules, her mother’s insanity, and the constant threat of death. He’d rescue her and they’d sail away to a place forgotten in time, a place that the Return never touched.

But that was before she learned that real pirates lashed
mudo
to their hulls. Or that they infected prisoners and forced them into cages that they dropped into the water so that the infected would die and come back to life as
lihémorto
—the fast-moving
mudo
.

10. NOW

Every evening Iza stands on the edge of the cliff and stares down into the water, heat lightning exploding in the clouds on the horizon.

“Are we safe?” she asks Beihito. It’s the question she asked her mother every night before she died.

Iza’s mother always told her yes and promised the world would recover. They’d kill off the hordes of undead, and soon enough everyone would be going home. One day she’d taste snow on her lips again.

The first time Iza asked Beihito this question he’d asked, “Do you want the truth?”

She’d said no, and he’d told her that yes, they were safe.

Tonight she says, “I want the truth.”

Beihito pauses. “I don’t know,” he finally admits. The wrinkles at the edges of his eyes are heavier than usual, tugging his face down in a slow slide. Gravity pulls harder on troubles than on anything else.

Iza wants to ask him if it will end, if the
mudo
will ever go away. But she doesn’t. Instead she watches the waves drive against the cliffs like the hands that pushed against the fences around the
landhuizen
during the previous wave of infection—never stopping, always needing. Fingers of lightning claw through the clouds. The water is so clear that she wonders if the
mudo
in their depths can see her and Beihito. If they can look through the surface and beg for their lives.

Beihito places his hand on Iza’s shoulder.
“Spera,”
he says.

But she’s not sure she wants to hope.

11. NOW

Tonight in the darkness before sleep, when the stars shine the brightest, Iza remembers the snow. She recalls standing in the
front yard of their old house in the states before the Return, staring up at the sky and seeing nothing but puffs of white floating over and around her.

She remembers taking her mother’s hand. Remembers everything being so white and pure and soft and quiet.

It’s one of her only memories that doesn’t have the moans of the
mudo
as a constant background hum. One of the few not tinged with the relentless heat of Curaçao.

She lets it pull her into sleep, falling deeper and deeper into the folds of the blinding cold whiteness.

Iza wakes up knowing something’s wrong. She’s been dreaming about the pirate ship. This time, though, rather than being the spirited damsel in distress getting rescued by the pirate, she’d been lashed to the ship with the
mudo
. She could feel the spray of the water as the ship cut through the seas, the salt stinging the gouges in her arms where the ropes and chains held her tight to the barnacled hull. All around her writhed the dead, sharp edges of bones cracking through skin and raking the waves. But she was not one of them; she was still somehow alive. In her dream Iza opened her mouth to scream and beg for mercy, but all that dripped from her mouth were moans.

In the heartbeat when she bolts upright in her bed, everything is muddled and Iza can’t tell what’s her dream and what’s reality. It takes her too long to realize that the moans from her dream are still reverberating through the house. That’s when she hears the pounding of feet running on the wooden floor outside in the hallway. That’s when she hears the first scream streak through the darkness.

Iza’s father has trained them for this, and she jumps out of bed. Her fingers shake as she tries to remember what to do first. She runs to the door. Panic begins to chew through her body and she swallows again and again. She flicks the light, but nothing happens. She snaps the switch up and down, up and down, and still nothing happens.

Even if the island’s electricity is out, the
landhuizen
can be run by generators. Iza doesn’t understand why they haven’t turned over, why she can’t hear their humming outside her window. The night becomes too dark and close and claustrophobic. She feels like she’s underwater and can’t breathe. She’s about to throw open the door, needing the air, when something slams against it.

Fingernails crack as something, or someone, on the other side scratches to get in. Moans bore through the wood. Iza stumbles back into the room, tripping over the brass corner of the trunk at the end of her bed, and feeling a slice of pain shoot up from her shin. She looks down at the blood seeping into her white nightgown, knowing it will attract the
mudo
.

The banging and clawing grates against her as she fumbles with her dresser. She finally opens the drawer and pulls out the gun inside. She grabs a belt from the floor and loops it around her waist, sliding the machete Beihito gave her that afternoon into it.

And then she stands there. In the darkness. In the middle of her room. Listening to the screams and moans, and feeling the panic crushing her lungs.

The window
, she thinks as the door begins to buckle
under the force of someone trying desperately to get inside. She pushes aside the fluttering curtains and crawls out onto the roof, scuttling to the side and hiding in the shadow of the dormer.

Overhead, heat lightning shoots the clouds with green and blue and orange, flashing open the world around her. With shaking fingers Iza switches the safety off her gun and tries to steady herself. She can’t tell if the rumbling around her is thunder or gunshots.

Inside, the door bangs open. Feet pound against the floor. Iza’s breath becomes a roar in her ears. They’re
lihémorto
, the fast moving dead, not the slow, plodding
mudo
. This is the problem with living on an island cleared of the undead: If infection breaks out, the first to turn are always
lihémorto
until they reach that critical mass that renders the new ones
mudo
. It will be almost impossible for her father’s men to kill the
lihémorto
before they infect half the plantation.

Iza feels rather than hears when the first one hits the window from inside. It’s one of the groundskeepers, and most of his left arm is missing. He’d probably tried to cut it off after being bitten, which of course only served to hasten the Return.

He swings at Iza, reaching into the darkness with his teeth bared, eyes wild and moans rampaging. He smells like orange rinds and sweat and tobacco, and it reminds Iza of Beihito.

She holds out the gun as close to the man as she can while still outside his reach, and pulls the trigger.

It’s not a clean shot. It wouldn’t impress her father. But it still hits the man’s head, tearing through his face. Iza can’t take the time to let reality set in. She can’t pause while the realization that she’s just shot a man ripples through her. He slumps
over the windowsill just as another
lihémorto
, a maid, lunges through the opening. This one tries to climb after Iza and slips from the roof, falling to the ground two stories below. Shards of bone jut through her leg, their tips glistening white in the echoes of heat lightning.

The maid hauls herself to her feet, the bad leg crunching under her, and limps to the wall, reaching for Iza still. Her fingers scrape and scratch against the stucco as she tries to climb, but she just keeps sinking back to the ground, the bones grinding farther out of her leg.

Iza digs her toes into the warm tiles of the roof already slick with her sweat. She wipes a trembling hand over her mouth, the smell of gunpowder hot and sweet. She tries to think of what to do next.

12. BEFORE

Iza’s father was a businessman before the Return, an executive with access to the company jet and a yacht anchored in Miami. When news of the Return began to filter through the news channels, he didn’t hesitate like everyone else.