Buried Secrets. Evelyn Vaughn

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СКАЧАТЬ under something heavy, it turned out to be Gil—I think he must have thrown himself on top of me. I turned on my helmet-lamp and got loose and tried to help him, but…” She stopped again.

      “He died,” Zack finished.

      “And then Frank, and farther down the shaft…”

      Great. Resenting his chivalrous impulse, he still tried to nudge her past that particular catalog of corpses. “Did you find anyone alive?”

      “Diego.” But she didn’t look happy about that, either. “Just Diego. And he was badly hurt, though he pretended not to be. He kept insisting that the Safety Response Team would be pulling us out any minute. Then we both heard something. I turned to look—with the helmet light, I could only see one direction at a time—and it was Frank. His fingers were…they…”

      And she curled and uncurled her own small, solid fingers, to illustrate. Even without long nails or polish or rings, her hands were clearly female, too. Strong, but small.

      “Rigor mortis?” Zack suggested hopefully.

      “Except he got up. His neck was broken, and his skull was crushed. He shouldn’t have been able to get up, but he did. I told you that I probably imagined it….”

      It occurred to Zack that, if he wasn’t watching Josephine James tell this, he might agree. Even after four years of learning to see this stuff, looking for answers. Maybe she was making it up, or had imagined it all. The line between reality and perception was thinner than most folks admitted. And yet…

      He didn’t think so. Her face was pale, her jaw set, her eyes really still like she was focusing on the memory. “So at first I thought, Hey, Frank’s okay! Stupid, I know, but…I really wanted him to be okay. I went to him and took his arm, told him he needed to lie down and wait for emergency response. But his hand felt funny…fake. And his eyes were blank, blank like I’ve only seen on road-kill. It wasn’t Frank, anymore. And he…it tried to bite me….”

      She took a deep breath, still pale but otherwise determined. “I pulled loose and grabbed a pickax, and I told it to stay back, but it came at us—at Diego—so I swung. And…” Again, she shrugged. Clearly, she’d made sure Frank wouldn’t be getting up again, friend or not.

      Tough broad.

      “I think I would’ve thrown up,” she said, “but then Diego shouted a warning, and Gil grabbed me, so I…stopped him, too. Then I just sat there with Diego, waiting, talking about stupid, everyday stuff. He seemed worse, but I heard digging, so I knew we were being rescued.”

      Zack took a deep breath as he made more notes, then frowned at a thought and looked up at her. “Newspaper said you were pulled out unconscious.”

      Josephine James met his gaze evenly, “I was wrong. The digging wasn’t them coming to pull us out.”

      Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Zack stood, started to pace. “You had to fight more?” This was why women weren’t supposed to do dangerous stuff. This was why they should stay safe at home, like his mother and Nona did.

      Like Gabriella should have done. She’d died at home, but maybe if she hadn’t been going out, without him knowing…

      “One, mainly,” the sheriff insisted. “We had a strange driller working with us that summer—everyone called him Tio. Rumor was, he was some kind of mayombero, into the bad magic. Some of our crew quit rather than work for him. He wasn’t the one doing the digging, but I realized he was in control of them.”

      Them. “More zombies?” Zack asked, standing still now.

      “If that’s what they were. If it even really happened. They were things, not people. Not alive. I somehow knew Tio was the one who wouldn’t let them die. Don’t ask me how, but I did. I started to fight them off, and Diego managed to get up and stand in front of me, trying to protect me. I thought he’d recovered enough to help. But I was wrong about that, too.”

      Merciful God. “He died.” And turned on her.

      “I wasn’t thinking real clearly by then, but I knew I had to stop Tio. Even then I didn’t completely believe what he was doing, but there were so many….”

      “But you were just a girl.” Zack sank onto the bed at the idea of it. He felt sick. He hated hearing stories like this, watching innocents—women—suffer, unable to reach back in time and help or protect them.

      But damned if Sheriff Jo’s chin didn’t come up, if the agony didn’t ease from her gaze in place of grim pride. “A girl with explosives in her pack.”

      “You blew them up?”

      Jo kind of liked the way Zack Lorenzo stared at her—awed. Maybe finally telling the story, after so many years, robbed it of some of its power. Maybe having someone believe her was what did it. But suddenly, instead of the nightmare owning her, Jo owned the nightmare. She had survived, after all. No matter how awful, even if it had been real—and had it?—she’d survived.

      “I didn’t blow them up, exactly,” she clarified. “I dodged through the tunnel they’d come in, and I blew the wall.”

      Then she’d lost consciousness, buried in rubble. She hadn’t expected to survive—not the blast, not the toxic gas that explosives emit after detonation, not the…zombies. But miraculously, she’d come-to in the hospital, her older brother asleep in a chair beside her. Since he’d been in D.C. before the accident, she could only imagine how long she’d been out. At first she wondered if she was in an asylum, but no.

      Nobody but her seemed to realize that the corpses had died twice.

      Sitting here with Zack Lorenzo, the rest of the details—an uncle somehow killed while helping with the rescue, a reporter who appeared while she was still dopey from painkillers—finally eased, far more than when she’d just told herself she’d imagined it all. Jo didn’t believe she was done with the nightmares, of course. But maybe, just maybe, she might sleep for real, now.

      For the first time since she could remember.

      Except, of course, that there was a big Chicago detective sitting on the only bed in the room, his weight making it dip. His bed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d thought about a man and a bed in the same moment…Diego, she guessed. She wasn’t sure she appreciated the awareness that fluttered deep in her stomach. She didn’t trust the sharpness of her breath. It felt dangerous in its own right.

      Was it possible that she could ever handle dangerous again?

      Lorenzo rose from the bed and came back to the table. She took another deep breath as he passed her, big and warm and solid. Some risks were probably better than others. And he didn’t feel dangerous, just the awareness of him did.

      Zack Lorenzo still felt remarkably safe, for a stranger.

      When he sat on his plastic chair and began scribbling, she waited for him to glance up at her, wanting to see his eyes again. She couldn’t remember what color the detective’s eyes were. He seemed to be avoiding her gaze deliberately.

      “I don’t think I even used the word zombies, the reporter did,” Jo admitted, reaching for the partially eaten piece of pie he’d pushed away from him earlier. He’d offered it once, after all. And he didn’t seem to want СКАЧАТЬ