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“Kit?” I say carefully.
He’s already moving off and looks back. “Hmm?”
I don’t speak. I just stare. As I do, one of the bodies twitches.
“You didn’t see that?” I say.
“See what?” He moves back over and follows my gaze. The same body twitches again, and he jerks back with a curse.
Relief washes through me… followed by the realization that actually seeing the dead move is not a cause for relief.
“It twitched, right?” I say.
“Um, yes.” He takes a deep breath and then gags as the smell fills his lungs.
“Don’t inhale,” I say.
“No kidding.” His voice is shaky. “Tell me there’s a logical explanation.”
“Hey, I’m the horror buff, remember? My answer to moving corpses will always be zombies.”
I say it lightly—still riding that high from realizing I’m nothallucinating—but when another rat twitches, I nearly fall off the ceiling beam. Then I spot something.
I look around and find a piece of wood, left over from the deconstruction. Using the end of it, I flip over the rat that moved first.
“I could have done that,” Kit says. “Note that I said thatafteryou did it.”
“Oh, I noted it.”
The rat twitches again, but this time, the cause is clear. Pale maggots crawl through the decomposing flesh.
“Logical explanation supplied,” I say, shuddering as I inch away. “Which means I’m not hallucinating, and we don’t have zombie rats.”
“Just Sadie, the missing frenemy.”
“Your childhood called. It wants its vocabulary back.”
He sticks out his tongue, only to catch a taste of the stench, judging by his horrified expression. I laugh and motion for us to retreat.
“No Sadie,” he says. “She’d never hide up here with this smell.”
We make our way back down to the ground level.
“You don’t think she’s on the island, do you?” he says as our flashlight beams skim the interior.
“No.”
“You think she was on board the boat. That she’s… dead.”
I consider telling him what I saw, but I don’t see how that helps, especially when I no longer think I could have seen what I thought I did. I also have a better explanation for what happened to Sadie, one that is going to let us set this aside and move on, at least for now.
“No,” I say. “I just don’t think she was on the boat when it blew up. If she’s the one who set the bomb, does it make any sense to trap herself on the island with us?”
“Get to shore and then set the bomb… after sending the boat on a general course back to the island so we find the pieces.”
“That’s overly complicated, isn’t it?”
He says nothing, and we head outside.
