To Ocean, a new game was almost as much of a treat as the squares of dark food her father sometimes found, the kind that seemed to melt into sweetness upon her tongue. She’d jumped up and down, and wanted to clap her hands but, since she didn’t know the rules yet, she was afraid that dropping the rope might mean that she would lose. Instead, she chose to nod her head.
“You pull on your end of the rope, and I pull on mine. The first person who gets the flag over their line wins. Got it?”
Her father grunted and groaned as his face screwed up into an exaggerated grimace, and Ocean had pulled on her end of the rope so hard that she would have went tumbling backward if he’d suddenly let go. The heels of her shoes dug into the concrete and, even though she now realized her father hadn’t been pulling with all of his strength, her eyes were focused on that little white flag. She watched it inch toward her father’s line and set her jaw in grim determination as she edged it back toward her own. For close to ten minutes, the white strip of fabric shifted, back and forth, between the two. Finally, he let her win.
Now, so many years later, she knew exactly how that white flag would have felt, if it could. To be pulled in two opposite directions with the fate of the game hanging in the balance; to know that, sooner or later, one side would exert more force, destined to win out over the other. The only difference was, this wasn’t some silly little game her father had taught her. This was real. This was life.
A shuffling sound behind her made Ocean’s breath catch in her throat and, despite her attempts to feign sleep, her body stiffened.
Corduroy, she thought. It’s him.
At first, the burned man had been nothing more than an oddity. The fact that he didn’t eat meat was enough to make him stick out like a human in a pack of rotters. But he also had these fits, which Gauge called seizures. He would collapse to the ground or slump over the table, his eyes would roll back in their sockets so that only the whites were visible. Every muscle in his body would twitch and jerk so violently that his head and shoulders lurched and flopped.
One time, during a particularly violent storm, Ocean had seen one of the undead walk through a pool of water as lightning sizzled through the air and struck the street. The way Corduroy moved when in the grip of these seizures was very similar to the jerky dance that rotter had performed.
Over time, his curiosity had deepened into something far more sinister. Ocean noticed the way his good eye seemed to follow her no matter where she went. If she was rocking Baby, he was watching. When she came out of the bathroom, he was watching—always with a stare that seemed as cold and hard as the brick floor beneath their feet.
Soon, he began trying to approach her… but only when she was alone. He’d glance over his shoulder almost nervously, as if half expecting to see Levi or Gauge creeping up behind him. There was something sneaky and furtive about the way he walked toward her, something that always made her immediately dart away to the company of others, a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach.
It was natural that her reaction to the sound behind her was the skin on the back of her neck to feel as if it was creeping toward her scalp. Fear even twitched her eyelid, and Ocean chastised herself for behaving like a child. Instinct may have told her that the wariness she felt around Corduroy was justified, but that didn’t mean that every unexplained sound was him sneaking up on her. The noises she heard behind her were much too soft for a large man. Even if he’d slipped off his shoes, he would make more noise than that. Since she could still hear Gauge and Levi in the kitchen, it stood to reason that the shuffling was coming from Pebble.
That was what logic told her, but fear has a way of overriding even the most rational of arguments and Ocean knew she wouldn’t breathe easy until she saw with her own eyes that there was nothing to worry about. At the same time, though, she wasn’t quite ready to give up her ruse. She wanted the others to think she was asleep for as long as she could possibly get away with it. Once she was able to calm that tinge of unease, she’d be able to think more clearly, to figure out exactly what she needed to do or say to ensure Gauge never knew that she’d broken the only real rule he’d set down. She’d have to play this off as carefully as a famished rat approaching a sleeping child.
She smacked her lips several times and mumbled thickly, in what she hoped was a reasonable impersonation of the sounds her mother used to make during the night, and rolled over to her other side, pulling the thin sheet closer around her. She mumbled again, forming nothing more than random words. Slowly, she lifted her eyelids until she could just peek out through the lashes.
Pebble scampered around the room. Ocean could tell by his flaring nostrils and pouting lip that something had upset him. He moved quickly, sorting through mounds of dirty clothes, getting down on his hands and knees to peer beneath the shelves, and even looking into the glass containers that housed the flickering candles. The more he searched, the more frustrated he became. He stamped his foot on the ground and balled his fists as he clenched his teeth in aggravation. The shuffling turned into angry stomps as he spun in a slow circle, his eyes scanning every shadow in the room.
It was funny how often things went missing down there. With everyone living, sleeping, and going about the business of life in one large chamber connected to a handful of small rooms, it would seem like nothing could be misplaced for long. As Ocean had come to discover, that simply wasn’t the case.
The first thing she’d noticed had gone missing were the dirty rags she’d been wearing on the day she’d first been brought here. After Levi had given her some clean clothes and shown her how she could use rope and string to make them fit better, her old garments had simply disappeared. She wanted to look at them one last time, to try to see past the bloodstains that darkened the fabric. To remember a more innocent time, back when her mother had pulled the needle and thread through the cloth, smiling at Ocean as she explained that someday she would learn to sew, and be able to make her own clothes.
When she hadn’t been able to find her things, she assumed one of the others had simply thrown them out. But when she asked, each person claimed not to have seen them, either.
After that, some of her newer clothes went missing as well. Not to mention the random candles, pieces of flint, and even several pairs of her underwear. It happened so often that Gauge had begun to tease Pebble, telling the little boy that their home was haunted by the ghosts of The Butchers of the New Dawn and that, even in death, they couldn’t stop stealing.
Judging from the way the color drained from the boy’s face when he heard this, it was obvious that Pebble didn’t doubt it for one second. And now, it seemed, those same ghosts had spirited away something of his.
Ocean’s eyes followed Pebble as he moved about the room. Each of them had one corner of the room that served as their own, personal area. Ocean’s was just outside the nursery, Gauge and Levi were positioned away from her feet and beside the North tunnel. Directly across the room from them was Pebble’s area and, this morning, his normally neat piles of belongings looked as if a tornado had touched down in the center of them. Clothes and toys were strewn about, his bedroll was in such disarray that it looked like it had been thrown into the air at some point. This didn’t stop the child from rooting through the wreckage again. When this additional search proved fruitless, he marched across the room toward the entrance to the South tunnel.
This was where Corduroy kept his things, and was directly across from Ocean’s sleeping area. As her half-closed eyes followed Pebble’s trajectory, they came to an abrupt stop. She immediately closed her eyelids, feeling as if something in her stomach had just leapt to the side.