Missy and the Nephew Return to the Cave

Continued from Part 1

It has been two days, and nobody has said anything about any of it.

Nobody asked me where my pliers went. I borrowed Fred’s. They’re green and too big for my hand. When I asked him he said take them, then went back to the radio. Nobody asked Missy why she was walking on the side of her foot. Nobody asked about her sneaker. Aunt Michelle asked me if I slept all right. I said yes. That was true, because I did sleep after.

Two days isn’t very many. In Earth Saviors, the Silent Quarter goes eleven whole issues before anybody finds out what Major Falcon did on the moon base.

I’m at the gap with Fred’s pliers when she comes around the alternator pile. I wove the wire in two days ago on the morning we got back. Aunt Gina has to come with the torch and burn it shut before it counts, and she hasn’t come yet. If you pull the bottom strand where I finished it, it opens.

Missy has her book with her. Her dad found it for her on a run, and it’s about a girl named Ashley Hopper who solves things. She’s been reading it at meals.

“I’m going back to the cave,” she says. “I’m going to investigate it.”

I put the wire down. “There isn’t anything to investigate.”

“Ashley Hopper investigates.”

“Ashley Hopper investigates when nobody knows what happened yet. That is what the word means. We know what happened, because we were there, and we saw all of it. You can’t investigate something you already watched.”

“My sneaker is out there.”

“You told me you had other pairs. You said they were better ones.”

She moves the book to her other hand. “It’s still mine.”

“It has a hole in it now anyway. It got pulled off your foot by a dead person.”

“You should come with me,” she says. “I’m going after lunch.”

“No, Missy. You can't leave again.”

Missy stops with her thumb still in the book. “What do you mean, no?”

“There are two things that can happen if we go out there. One is we get hurt, and there is nobody to come get us, because nobody knows. The other one is somebody finds out, and then we don’t get to do anything by ourselves again for a year, maybe more than a year. Both of them are bad, so I am not going.”

She turns her whole body to look at me. “Fine. I’ll go by myself. But listen to me, Logan. You better not tell anyone. If you do, that makes you a tattletale, and that's worse than being a baby. I'll never talk to you again, and there will be no one to ever play with you.”

*

She goes after lunch. I watch her from the top of the tire pile until she’s around the back of the main house.

There are three things I can do. I can go tell Aunt Michelle, and then somebody goes and gets Missy. But Missy knows it was me, and she already said what happens then. I can stay here, finish the wire, and not think about it, which is the one she wants. Or I can go too.

The first and second ones are both of me being in here while she’s out there. In issue forty, Major Falcon says a plan you’re not in is not a plan. It’s a wish.

I get down and go to the trailer for my bag. It has one strap now. The zipper only closes partway. I put the first aid kit in the side pocket where it goes, and my flashlight, and her flashlight, which I’ve had since the pine needles. She hasn’t asked me for it.

Fred’s pliers are on the crate by the door. I stand there and look at them for a while. They’re Fred’s. I already lost one pair out there, and those were mine to lose. These aren’t mine, so I leave them on the crate.

I walk around the back of the main house, past the flat place by the water barrels where Gina had the post-hole digger yesterday.

I asked her a question there. What would happen if kids went outside the fence, like, say, Missy and me? She said the fence is the whole reason any of us are still here. She said a kid on the outside of it is a kid nobody can reach in time. The answer is no. Two kids don’t go outside the fence for any reason at all. Then she asked me if that was from a book. I said it was just a question. She went back to the digger.

Reilly has the tower. I wait behind the barrels where the stack is crooked. Reilly stands up and turns around. He undoes his belt and goes off the back rail instead of climbing down. His back is to the whole west fence.

I go while his back is turned.

The gap is behind the alternator pile in the corner. I pull the bottom strand where I finished the weave, and it opens up because I’m the one who put it there. Going through, the wire catches my arm in the same place it caught me both times before. It doesn’t bleed.

Then I’m in the trees. The sun is all the way up over the top of them. I can see the trail without any help. I can see how far away I can see.

*

I stay back in the trees when the ground starts to open up. I'm going to follow her to make sure she's safe, but if she knows I'm there, she's going to be really mad.

In the dark, you can walk closely behind somebody because the dark is the same everywhere. In the daytime, if I get close enough to say something to her, all she has to do is turn her head. I stop at the last good row of trees. That’s where I have to stay. From there she’s small.

The trail is the same trail, but it’s not as long in the daytime. Two days ago, Missy's flashlight only showed one step at a time, and I tripped on the same anthill twice and did not realize it was an anthill until now. Today I can see the whole trail at once and duck the branches before they get to me. It takes eleven minutes. I count it, because if anybody ever has to come out here fast, somebody should know the number.

The one we killed is still in front of the cave. Two days have happened to it. There are flies buzzing around it. The body has gone flat in some places, and its color isn’t the color of a person. It wasn't when it died either, but now it looks even worse, like an unwrapped mummy that I once saw in my history book.

Her sneaker is about a foot from its hand, where it came off. Missy picks the sneaker up, hits it twice against her leg to get the dirt out, and carries it. She doesn’t look at the zombie at all.

Then she goes into the cave without a light. The sun is behind her and goes in part of the way with her. She stops walking exactly where it stops.

My mouth goes dry, and I wish I'd packed a canteen. It's a mistake, but I didn't have a chance to plan.

While she’s in the cave, I go to the pine needles where my bag came apart. My pliers are under the needles, about one step from where I was on my knees. The yellow handles are the reason I can find them. I put them in my back pocket.

The plan is there too. It rained the first night, and the colored pencil has run down into the lines, but CAVE MISSION is still at the top because I pressed hard on that part. I fold it and put it in my pocket with the pliers.

“They’re not here!” Missy shouts out of the cave and stamps her foot.

I come up to the mouth and peek inside with just one eye. The smell in there is wet now instead of dried out. It's like the locker room in the showers back in school.

There is a coyote on the floor of the cave, and it’s dead. I know it is a coyote because of the ears. Its back legs are still together, but the front of it is opened up and pulled apart, and its insides are outside of it now. It looks like the deer in the woods looked, except worse, because something opened it up instead of just dragging it. The dirt underneath is dark in a circle bigger than the coyote.

The two infected were against the back wall before, but they're not there anymore.  There are two long smears in the dirt that start back there and come out to the middle where the coyote is. They’re wide, and they’re not footprints. They’re the shape Uncle Jaime’s mop makes when he drags it and doesn’t pick it up.

I put it together the way I put the deer together. The deer had one line going away from it into the trees. These two come toward the middle instead of away, and whatever made them was down flat on the ground the whole time. They were at the back and couldn’t get up.

"They're gone," Missy says.

She says it the way Uncle Jaime says it when the truck will not start.

Then she kicks the wall of the cave. She kicks it hard enough that dust comes off it, and she does it again, and the second time she says a word I’m not allowed to say, and neither is she. She turns in a circle, looks at the back wall, then the left side, then the back wall again, as if they might be behind something.

Her hands keep opening and closing on the things she is holding. That is when I see what she brought.

One of them is an ice pick. I know what it is because Woody has one for the block ice, and he lets me hold it when he chips. It’s as long as my arm from my wrist to my elbow, and it comes down to a sharp point.

The other thing is a rope. It’s wound up around her hand and her elbow the way you wind a hose. It’s the white kind off a clothesline. I keep looking at the rope.

Missy turns around to come out and sees me standing in the mouth of the cave.

*

“You said you weren’t coming,” she says.

“I didn’t come with you. I came after you.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“It is not the same thing. Coming with you is when you know about it.”

“You followed me the whole way. That’s spying.”

“I know it is.”

She starts walking toward the mouth and stops about halfway. Her cheeks are red but not like she's been crying.

“You didn’t come out here for your shoe,” I say.

“I got my shoe. It’s in my bag.”

“You brought Woody’s ice pick with you.”

“I can bring whatever I want to bring, and it's not his anyway.”

My mouth goes dry. “You came out here to kill them.”

She doesn’t say anything to that for a second. She just stares at me like she didn't want me to say it.

Then she yells at me. I’ve never one time yelled at Missy. I yell back at her. The cave gives all of it back louder than we say it.

“You don’t get to say what I came out here for!”

“You said you were investigating! Investigating is looking at things! Nobody needs a pick to look at things!”

“It’s my cave! I found it, and it’s mine!”

“It is a hole with dead people in it! That is all it is!”

“I am not going to let a hole in the ground make me scared!” she says. “I’m not going to be like that.”

I have my mouth open for the next part when she quits.

She is not looking at me anymore. She is looking past my shoulder, out the mouth of the cave, at the trees over on the left where the ground goes soft.

I do not turn around. She can see out and I can’t, so I watch her instead.

Then I hear it. It is the sound the needles make when you drag something over them without picking it up, and it lasts a couple of seconds before it quits. Then it does it again. The second time, it is closer than the first, and it is not in the same place, and that is how I know there are two.

Neither one of us moves. Missy's eyes go out to the trees and over to me and back out to the trees. Her tongue comes out, and she puts it on her top lip and takes it back in.

Then she turns the ice pick over in her hand so the point comes out the bottom of her fist instead of the top and closes her fingers on it again.

***

It comes in through the mouth of the cave. It’s coming faster than the ones on the road ever came. I am already against the rock, and it goes past me with its arm out. Its hand closes on the air. It has on a work coat with a name patch, JOHN, and there is a streak of blood down the front and little patches of fur the same color as the coyote.

Behind it, out in the light, the other one is coming too. One of its legs is wrong at the knee. It swings the whole leg around from the hip to get it out in front, and then it has to do it again. It’s a long way off, for that.

Missy does not run, and there is no place to run to, because the way out has the first one in it.

She swings before it gets all the way to her. She swings the way you swing a hammer when nobody has ever taught you, with both hands and her whole side. The pick goes into its face under the eye, comes out through the side of its head, and stops there.

She yanks her arm back, but the pick does not go with it. The zombie grabs her shoulder, but she pulls away and falls with her back against the cave.

The zombie hobbles toward her. Its jaw is off on one side and hangs open. Its tongue comes out like it's trying to lick the air, and it's growling at her.

Missy doesn't move. She is on the ground with her back against the rock. The zombie’s coming at her, and she’s looking up at it with her mouth a little bit open. She does not put her hands up.

I have my pliers out of my back pocket and don’t remember taking them out.

The zombie falls on her, its hands trying to grab her, but Missy keeps kicking at it. Every time it has a hold on her, her foot hits its face. Its mouth comes down on her arm, and nothing happens, because the two halves of it don't come together anymore.

I hit it in the back of the head with the pliers. It’s like hitting a bag of wet sand. I hit it again, and my hand slides down the handle, and the next one comes down on my own knuckles against its head.

“Leave it, Logan!” Missy shouts.

I don’t know all of what happens after that. I’m on the floor for part of it. Missy has both hands in the back of its coat, pulling. I know I have the pliers in both of mine. I am hitting the same place on its head over and over.

The place on its head gets soft.

The first time I ever did this, Rachel had to tell me when to stop.

Then it is not moving. Missy is not pulling on it anymore. It is quiet enough that I can hear my flashlight buzzing where it landed.

I get up off the floor. My arms are shaking the way they shook the first time, so I put them down against my sides and hold them there.

Out in the light, the other one has come about half the way.

*

Missy looks down at the one on the floor. "That was mine. I was supposed to be the one."

My face goes hot. "It had you against the wall."

"I hit it first. It was mine."

She puts her foot on the side of its head, takes hold of the ice pick with both hands, and pulls. It takes her three tries. When it comes out, it makes a sound like ripping lettuce.

Then she goes past me and out into the light. When she gets to the edge of the cave, she looks back at me and keeps walking.

The one with the bad leg is out among the needles, closer than it was. It has come maybe halfway from the trees since I last looked at it. It sees her and hobbles forward. Missy walks straight at it.

"Missy, don't! We can go around it. It can’t even walk."

She keeps walking like she doesn't hear me, even though I know she does.

This zombie looks meaner than the other, even though I know that's not how it works. There’s a piece of its cheek gone so I can see the teeth on that side without it opening its mouth. Its eyes are yellow, with red lines running through them. There is coyote on its chin, down its neck, and dried into the front of its shirt, and it smells like the meat drawer smelled the time the power was off for four days.

It puts its hands up at her before she is even there. Its fingers are bent over at the ends and don’t straighten out all the way. Its mouth opens, and its tongue is little and dried up and falls out over its bottom teeth. It’s growling the whole time it’s reaching for her.

It swipes at the air in front of her. She goes back one step into the needles. Its fingernails are black, and they scrape across the toe of her sneaker.

Now it has to get itself turned around. The bad leg doesn’t come with it. It swings the whole leg out from the hip, puts it down, and pushes off it. Whenever it moves, there's a popping noise like when Tommy cracks his knuckles. The knee goes sideways under the weight every time.

Missy raises the ice pick with both hands. She hits it in the side of the head with the pick and pulls the pick back out. Then she does it again in the same spot. Its arm comes up, and she steps back and waits for the arm to go down. She hits the spot again. The infected drops to its knees in the needles. Then it goes over onto its side, and after that she does not have to step back anymore.

“Missy!”

She yanks the pick out and stabs it again. This time it seems to go in easier. She twists her wrists and yanks it back out. The pick is covered in dark red, and Missy frowns and wipes it on the dead zombie’s shirt.

Then she comes back to where I am. She looks at my face for a second, like she is checking something on it. Then she takes my hand.

We start walking.

There is blood on both of us. Mine is down the front of my shirt and up both arms past the elbow, and some is on my neck where I wiped it with my wrist. Hers is worse, because she was closer to it for longer. It’s on her chin, down the front of her jacket, and in her hair on one side. She doesn’t wipe it.

I do arithmetic for the whole quarter mile. The lake is nine minutes past the north corner, and that is too far, and there is no cover between here and there in the afternoon. There is the rain barrel behind the workshop, except Woody fills bottles out of that one. It’s about four o'clock, which means Jaime is at the grill pit, Fred is under the truck, and Aunt Michelle is back from her run by now. If they see us like this, we’ll be in big trouble.

My bag has a first-aid kit, my flashlight, her flashlight, and Volume Two of Earth Saviors. There is nothing in there that gets blood off of two people.

Her hand stays in mine the whole way. She doesn’t say anything about the cave, or about the one on the floor, or about what she did to the other one after. I don’t let go of her hand either.

At the last row of trees we stop, because we can't go inside like this. The tower is over on the far side. My gap is in the corner behind the alternator pile where it has been the whole time, with the bottom strand pulled back exactly the way I left it.

I hold my arm up to see how much of the blood on it is going to come off with water. The wire has caught me in the same place three times now. It’s open, and it’s bleeding.