Page 35 of Deader than Dead

I studied her, searching for the telltale signs that she was lying. A slight muscle twitch? An inability to maintain eye contact? Fidgeting? They were all absent, O’Reilly looking as relaxed as if she were spending the day at the beach. She was lying, though. I had no doubt about that. Once they’d found out what they wanted to know, they’d kill us. Both of us.

Bellamy lowered his gaze to the ground, his chest rising and falling rapidly. Did he believe her? When he lifted his head, there was a stubborn glint in his eye. “I can’t do that. I can’t be responsible for whatever you’re planning to do with it.”

O’Reilly crossed her arms over her chest and sighed. “I see. In that case.”

She must have given some sort of nod to her men. However, given that my head had been wrenched back, I didn’t get to witness it myself. Sharp pain brought the nausea rushing back full force as my hair follicles were tested to their limits, my neck at an unnatural angle. I tried to fight it, tried to resist, and show that they couldn’t bully me that easily, but the grip was too tight. And that damn gun was pressed hard enough against my head to leave a dent.

The only thing in my line of sight in this contorted position was a cabbage, a fat green caterpillar crawling along one of its leaves. A damn cabbage. I couldn’t think of anyone whose last moments wanted to be spent looking at a cabbage. Not even the most devout of gardeners. A click had my blood running cold with the knowledge that all it would take would be one twitch of Gold Tooth’s finger on the trigger and it would be game over for me. I said a silent apology to all the men I hadn’t given a chance to because they weren’t Bellamy. And I added another one to my mother for not having called her back yesterday. There were probably more people I owed apologies to, but my mind wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders. Cade wasn’t getting an apology. It was his damn fault I was in this position. He’d better sob at my funeral. No, he’d better wail and throw himself on my casket.

“Wait!” Bellamy’s voice, the tone high-pitched and full of desperation.

The grip on my scalp didn’t ease in the slightest, my nerve-endings screaming. And if anything, the gun pressed harder like Gold Tooth couldn’t wait to pull the trigger. Fucking sadist.

“Do you have something to say?” O’Reilly asked. Her lack of emotion was really starting to rankle as I watched the caterpillar inch its way across the cabbage leaf. “The only words I want to hear from you are, I’ll tell you where the mask is. Nothing else is of any interest to me.”

There was a long pause, Gold Tooth’s fingers tightening even more and forcing a squeal of pain from my lips that I couldn’t hold back.

“I can’t tell you,” Bellamy said, “but I can show you. Let him go and I’ll take you there.”

“You realize,” O’Reilly said, “that if you’re bluffing, you’ll only postpone your friend’s death, don’t you? And, what’s more, we were going to be generous and give him a pain-free bullet in the brain. That offer expires as of now. Next time, we’ll take a knife to his pretty face. You said you wouldn’t talk even if we carved pieces off you. I wonder what would happen if we did it to him. Bear that in mind before you think about leading us on a merry dance.”

I was suddenly shoved forward, falling to my hands and knees in the dirt. Once I was certain of my balance, I lifted a hand to probe my scalp gingerly, pleased to discover that despite its soreness, the most I’d experienced was a small bald patch.

“Put him back in the shed,” O’Reilly ordered.

My moment of relief was short-lived as a man on either side of me, presumably Crocodile and Gold Tooth, yanked me to my feet.

“No,” Bellamy said, his voice ringing out across the allotment with an admirable amount of steel in it. “He comes with us. I don’t trust you to keep your word unless I can see him.”

“Fine,” O’Reilly said with a shrug. “It makes very little difference to me.” She jerked her head toward where they’d parked the van. “Let’s go.”

Just like before, she designated Crocodile and Gold Tooth as our escorts in the back of the van. Bellamy looked so pale and drawn that he was almost the same color as when he’d been a corpse. I suspected I didn’t look much better. Since we were seated too far from each other to hold hands, we made do with locking eyes, deriving strength from each other that way. One way or another, this would be over soon.

Bellamy directed the driver of the van to the north side of Acton cemetery on Chase Road. Although I’d never been here, I was familiar with its history, the graveyard dating back to Victorian times and sporting some impressive headstones characteristic of that era.

Crocodile eyed the cemetery with distaste as he climbed out of the van, directing a disparaging look Bellamy’s way. “You couldn’t have hidden it somewhere nicer, like a restaurant or the cinema.” Gold Tooth laughed, the presence of passers-by meaning that his gun was back in the holster hidden beneath his jacket, which made a pleasant change from it being pointed at my head. It made running away tempting, though.

Except that would only be a temporary fix. They’d find us, and then there was the small matter of them having taken my bag, which had contained not only my wallet, but my passport, too. Without my passport, I wasn’t going far. Plus, I wasn’t going anywhere without Bellamy, and his attention was firmly fixed on the cemetery. O’Reilly joined us and the opportunity—if there’d ever really been one—was gone as we walked through the gate together, like the world’s most unsavory bunch of mourners.

Once we were off the street, the cemetery was empty enough that the guns came out again. They might have held the guns low instead of pointing them straight at us, but it was enough of a reminder to behave ourselves. O’Reilly motioned for Bellamy to go ahead and we tailed him through the twisting paths that zig-zagged through the gravestones, over to where a wall of trees blocked us from view. That made sense. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see him hiding the mask, in case they waited until after he’d left and investigated what he’d left there.

Bellamy drew to a halt, the rest of us also coming to a stop and watching him as he scrutinized his surroundings before setting off again toward a tall, stone angel that towered above the stone path. There was a tomb to the right of it, Bellamy hunkering down and crouching next to it. “I buried it here,” he announced. “I have to dig it up.”

“I would suggest you do that, then,” O’Reilly said, “and be quick about it.”

Although she was trying to be calm, there was no mistaking the gleam in her eye. It was the first hint of genuine emotion I’d seen from her during our brief acquaintance. She couldn’t wait to get her grubby hands on that mask. And presumably her next step after that would be world domination.

All eyes were on Bellamy as he dug with his bare hands. I took a slow step back, only taking another when I was sure no one had registered the movement. In that slow, faltering way I made it over to the next tomb before lowering myself to the ground and propping my back against the stone, my body language hopefully screaming exhaustion should anyone glance my way. Not that it took much effort, given the few hours of sleep I’d had, the time spent in the baking hot shed sweating, and the amount of adrenaline I’d had coursing through my body in the last twenty-four hours. I tipped my head back against the tomb and closed my eyes. My left hand—the hand farthest away from O’Reilly and the group of men—was busy, though. Just as Bellamy was digging, I was digging, too. Only, I wasn’t trying to find anything. I was simply immersing my hand in the soil as deep as I could get it and waiting for the right moment. Thankfully, the soil was loose enough that progress was rapid. The deeper my fingers went, the colder it got.

“This is taking too long,” Gold Tooth said. “He can’t have buried it that deep, surely?”

With my hand buried up to the elbow, I paused. That would have to do. When I’d shared this plan with Bellamy after he’d told me where the mask was, he’d stared at me with wide-eyed wonder and asked whether that was really something I was capable of. I’d told him I hoped so, that it was the only chance we had. Well, now it was time for action instead of words. It was time to even the odds in the only place I could do that. Like I’d said, it was fate that of all places to hide the mask Bellamy had chosen a graveyard.

Everything up to this point had gone perfectly to plan: Bellamy only agreeing to lead them here once they’d threatened my life so they wouldn’t be suspicious about him giving in too easily, and his insistence that they bring me along. And then this, Bellamy buying me time by taking them to the wrong place where no matter how deep he dug, there was no mask.

I poured energy into the soil, exploring its vast network until I found what I was looking for. There. And there. Hundreds of them. Maybe even thousands. You see, I might tell people that corpses could only be brought back within a certain time frame, but that wasn’t strictly true. The ability to have brain capacity within the regenerated body expired quickly, but there was always something to bring back if you didn’t care about things like speech and conscious thought. I suppose the common term would be a zombie. A zombie that if I didn’t cut the tether between us, I maintained control of.

Like all teens, I’d experimented. Only while my peers were smoking cigarettes and getting drunk, I’d hung out at the graveyard, my experiments more about the realms of what was possible with the abilities I’d been born with. I’d never gone further than raising three people at a time, though. And the intention here was to raise more than three. How many would be enough? Ten? Twenty? I only had one shot at this, so I couldn’t risk it not being enough. Thirty, it was then. Thirty against six. The odds had to be in our favor.

---