Zombies vs. Unicorns Read online

  She woke up one night and stared into the darkness, the spin of the ceiling fan cutting the air. “Here,” the whispers called. She slipped out of bed and shuffled through the dew-damp grass to the edge of the cliffs.

  It used to be that she could never see the pirate ships, only hear them as they slid through the darkness, the mudo lashed to their hulls. But ever since her father closed the port, they’d been inching closer, circling like tribons, teasing and toying, ready to bump the island in a warning, with their masts cutting the air like fins.

  Iza wrapped her arms around her body as if she were holding who she was safe inside. Below her the waves crashed and crashed and crashed against the limestone, cutting away at her island.

  In the distance, under the haze of the moon, the hulk of the pirate ship drifted by like a ghost in a skirt, tarps and sheets draped over the edge of the railings and covering the hull. Shapes huddled and strained beneath the tarps, sharp edges raking against the graceful arc of fabric that rippled in the breeze.

  The corner of the tarp at the bow lifted, and Iza saw the bend of a bare knee, the curve of a shoulder. But it was the gaping mouths and desperate faces that she couldn’t bear, the sound of the moans cutting over the waves and bounding against the cliffs. The mudo strained against the boat, reaching—always reaching and needing.

  The tarp fluttered back into place, hiding the bodies lashed to the hull, concealing them until the pirates bore down on their prey. Iza saw dark shapes gathered on the deck of the ship, crowding at the railing. They watched her as they glided by in the night, and Iza wondered what was worse—the mudo, or the moon gleaming off the teeth of the pirates.

  4. NOW

  Iza is lying on her back on the dock, letting the sun burn her body, when the hand wraps around her ankle. She is at the edge of sleep and she’s slow to react. Her fingers fumble as she grabs for the handle of the machete Beihito left, and by the time she pulls her foot away and scrambles to her knees, the man’s already halfway out of the water.

  Iza knows that a mudo could never be coordinated enough to climb onto the dock. Still her first thought is to strike at his head, to slice the blade through his spinal column.

  “Wait,” the man gasps as her muscles tense.

  5. BEFORE

  “Why don’t we call them zombies?” Iza asked Beihito one day. It wasn’t long after her father had taken over the island and hired Beihito to run the plantation and keep an eye on his only child.

  “It’s not respectful,” Beihito said. They were standing near the edge of Curaçao’s limestone cliffs, watching a giant iguana try unsuccessfully to hide itself in a kadushi cactus.

  Iza kept tugging against the straps of her sundress where they left grooves in the baby fat on her shoulders. She’d outgrown almost everything shortly after arriving on the island and was tired of the way the tight clothes made her feel big and ungainly.

  “But it’s what they are,” Iza whined. She was just getting used to the idea of her father’s power. Just starting to understand that something about her father made her different. She tossed a strawberry at the iguana, seeing if she could temp him down.

  Beihito pointed to the animal and said, “Yuana.” Iza waved her hand in the air, brushing the word away.

  “What does ‘mudo’ mean, anyway?” She pronounced it like “mud,” thinking of the way the ground looked after the snow thawed at her old home. She wanted to see how far she could push Beihito. She threw another strawberry.

  “Mudo,” Beihito corrected her, saying it “mood-o,” no tinge of anger in his voice. “It means ‘mute.’”

  Iza rolled her eyes. “I know that,” she said, her hand on her hip. She hated being talked down to. She hadn’t been a child since the months-ago day when she’d turned seven and seen her first dead man rise and walk. “But they’re not mute, duh. They still moan.”

  Beihito stared at her, perhaps with pity or maybe with impatience. “It also means ‘speechless’—those who have lost their voice. They have nothing to say. They’ve lost who they are.”

  “They’re dead,” Iza grumbled. “They’re nothing.” She picked up a stick and walked closer to the iguana. She reached out to poke at it but Beihito closed his hot dry hand over her arm, stopping her.

  She stared at the spot where he touched her—his dark wrinkled skin against her own. Rage seared inside her that he would stop her from what she wanted to do. A rage that she knew her father would act upon if she told him.

  “There are things in this world greater than you or me,” Beihito said then, and she wondered if there was something in the mudo that she couldn’t see. Something about them that he understood and she didn’t.

  There was a crack then, and a loud hiss. The old man twisted Iza behind his back, standing between her and the kadushi. The branch holding the massive iguana cracked, and the iguana leapt into the air, thick tail swinging. It scrabbled on the edge of the cliff, its claws raking against the limestone until it finally found purchase. The cactus branch bounded down into the waves below.

  Beihito had protected her. Iza wondered then if he would always protect her. Her cheeks blazed, her entire body a feverish red burn welling with shame. She turned and stalked back to the plantation house without thanking him. She vowed then that she would learn to be more like her father. He never thanked anyone.

  6. NOW

  Iza lunges forward and holds the sharp edge of the machete to the young man’s throat just as he throws a knee over the edge of the dock. He freezes. They both pant and stare at each other. Time still hasn’t caught up to Iza, and she feels sleep-drugged and slow. She notices things about the man she shouldn’t—how water streaks down his face like tears, breaking over high cheekbones. How his eyes are a bright green that doesn’t seem to match the darkness of his skin.

  His nostrils flare with each breath, puffs of air skimming over Iza’s knuckles. His arms tremble with the effort of holding himself on the edge of the dock, half out of the water. He looks young, not still in his teens like Iza, but near to her in age.

  “Please,” he says. “Please, I promise I won’t do anything. Please.” He turns his head slightly as if glancing back to the open waves behind him. Iza doesn’t let her gaze on him waver.

  “Who are you?” she asks. Her voice shakes a little too much as the adrenaline from being startled works its way through her system. She clenches her teeth, knowing that her father’s voice would never shake like hers. “Are you one of my father’s men?” She’s fairly certain she doesn’t recognize him, and she’s also quite sure that if he worked on the landhuizen, she’d have seen him. She knows for sure that if she’d seen him before, she’d remember.

  Water drips from his chin onto her wrist and twines down her arm. “I was on a ship,” he says. “I saw the lights on the island as we sailed by last night. I ran away. I jumped.” He swallows, his throat pushing against the blade. Iza can hear the desperation in his voice, but that’s nothing new. The entire world is desperate.

  “They were pirates,” he says. “You can’t let them find me. They were going to infect me and lash me to the boat with the others.” He pauses, licks his tongue over his lips. Iza can almost taste the salt.

  “Please,” he whispers.

  7. BEFORE

  When Iza was young she had nightmares that the mudo were coming for her. She’d see the teeth of the woman who’d once been her babysitter and the hunger of the used-to-be gardeners. But more than anything she’d hear them, their pleading need for her. Iza always felt a deep ache at the moans and a desire to do anything to quench it.

  Her father’s men, the homber mata, were good at their tasks and always killed any mudo that washed ashore. There’d been small outbreaks on the island over the years, tales of lihémorto sprinting across the sticky dry desert inland, but they were always contained eventually.

  Except for once. Except for the one who somehow got into the landhuizen. No one ever explained to Iza what happened—not even Beihito—and eventua
lly she stopped begging for information when she saw the shadows in his eyes every time she brought it up.

  All Iza knew was that the homber mata killed the mudo, but it was her father himself who killed her mother. She never saw her mother Return, and once, a few days after her death, she overheard one of the maids whisper to another that her mother had never actually been infected.

  Sometimes Iza believes the rumor that her mother was never bitten. Sometimes she wants to slit their throats for saying such a thing.

  Her father added three more layers of fences to the land sides of the landhuizen and replaced the wide staircase to the floating dock at the base of the cliffs with a narrow ladder the mudo could never climb. For months after the uprising Iza was terrified of the water and imagined them coming for her, their fingers curling from the surface, their flesh prickled and gray.

  She missed the taste of salt on her skin, the way it made her feel tight and itchy when she dried in the burning sun. She even missed the sting of fire coral. Her father ordered his men to dig a pool for her, but it wasn’t the same.

  8. NOW

  “Please,” the man whispers again. The muscles cording around his arms flex and shake. Dozens of tiny white lines fleck across his chest like cracks in glass.

  Iza’s father has instilled in her the need for discipline and order; every day of her life has been about rules and restrictions. “It’s how we’ll survive this,” her father always says. “It’s the only way.”

  She can sometimes remember the man he used to be before the Return, but only barely. He used to mow the lawn on summer Saturday afternoons, and on Sundays in the fall he would crack open a can of beer and eat chips and salsa as he watched football games. He used to always let her drink the first sip if she’d fetch it for him from the refrigerator, and she can still remember the sharp sting of metallic carbonation, the crisp clack of the can snapping open.

  All Iza has to do is push the blade against the man’s throat just a little more and it will either cut him or he’ll be forced to let go of the dock and fall back into the water.

  Her father would never have hesitated. She can hear his voice in her head screaming at her to kill this man, that he’s dangerous and she’s stupid to even consider letting him live.

  But Iza thinks of the romance novels she loves and the pirates splashed across their covers. She thinks of all the times she stood at the edge of the cliffs and wanted someone to whisk out of the sea and rescue her.

  Swallowing, Iza pulls the knife away from his throat and scoots down the dock a little, giving him room to climb the rest of the way up. He crouches on his hands and knees, his back arching as he draws in long deep breaths.

  “Thank you,” he says softly.

  Iza shakes her head and stands. “Don’t,” she says, still holding the machete out in front of her. “The homber mata will kill you if they find you.”

  He looks up at her, deep green eyes in a sea of darkness. Something pulls inside Iza, making her want to help him. To know him and believe that things can be different from how they are. The flutter of desire and hope inside her aches so hard that she presses a hand to her chest to quench it.

  “But there are caves,” she says, waving the machete toward the limestone walls. “Hidden tunnels that will take you up beyond the landhuizen. You might have a chance that way.” She says it quickly, rushing to get the words out.

  His eyebrows twitch, just barely. “Thank you,” he says again.

  Her father’s training scrapes through her mind. She should kill this man. She squeezes her hand around the handle of the machete, imagining the blood dripping from his neck and seeping through the cracks of the dock into the waves—perfect petals of dissipating scarlet.

  The image reminds Iza of when her mother used to toss bougainvillea blossoms from the cliffs, and she releases her grip on the wide-bladed knife. Before she can change her mind, as her father’s rules dig through her skull, she turns and walks down the dock to climb up the narrow ladder. Behind her she hears the man’s breathing, the small shudders of water dropping to the old beaten wood as he watches her fade away.

  9. BEFORE

  Iza stopped going to the little Curaçao school two years ago when her father declared it useless. There were too many tasks to be done to keep the island running for the children to spend wasted days in a classroom learning about the history of Holland or the life cycle of the barrier reef.

  Instead he put them to work—everyone on the island worked for the right to remain a citizen and to enjoy the relative peace and safety. Even the people who’d lived there much longer than Iza and her family.

  Of course, everyone worked except for Iza. As the governor’s only daughter, she was left alone to do what she wanted. Most often she was nothing more than her mother’s ghost, weaving from room to room, trying to stay out of the way of the gardeners, the housekeepers, the homber mata, the guards, and the rest of her father’s men.

  Iza chose instead to read, and discovered a love for books. To indulge her, or to keep her from complaining, Iza’s father let it be known he was looking for books and that captains hoping to curry his favor and find access to Curaçao’s ports could start by stocking his library.

  The captain of an old gleaming cruise ship was the first to bring Iza boxes of romance novels with faded covers and pages soft with age. Iza devoured every one.

  It was the pirate stories that gave her the biggest thrill. She’d spend countless afternoons sitting at the edge of the limestone cliff bordering her father’s landhuizen, staring out toward the horizon and hoping for a dashing captain to come rescue her. He’d take her away from her father’s rules, her mother’s insanity, and the constant threat of death. He’d rescue her and they’d sail away to a place forgotten in time, a place that the Return never touched.

  But that was before she learned that real pirates lashed mudo to their hulls. Or that they infected prisoners and forced them into cages that they dropped into the water so that the infected would die and come back to life as lihémorto—the fast-moving mudo.

  10. NOW

  Every evening Iza stands on the edge of the cliff and stares down into the water, heat lightning exploding in the clouds on the horizon.

  “Are we safe?” she asks Beihito. It’s the question she asked her mother every night before she died.

  Iza’s mother always told her yes and promised the world would recover. They’d kill off the hordes of undead, and soon enough everyone would be going home. One day she’d taste snow on her lips again.

  The first time Iza asked Beihito this question he’d asked, “Do you want the truth?”

  She’d said no, and he’d told her that yes, they were safe.

  Tonight she says, “I want the truth.”

  Beihito pauses. “I don’t know,” he finally admits. The wrinkles at the edges of his eyes are heavier than usual, tugging his face down in a slow slide. Gravity pulls harder on troubles than on anything else.

  Iza wants to ask him if it will end, if the mudo will ever go away. But she doesn’t. Instead she watches the waves drive against the cliffs like the hands that pushed against the fences around the landhuizen during the previous wave of infection—never stopping, always needing. Fingers of lightning claw through the clouds. The water is so clear that she wonders if the mudo in their depths can see her and Beihito. If they can look through the surface and beg for their lives.

  Beihito places his hand on Iza’s shoulder. “Spera,” he says.

  But she’s not sure she wants to hope.

  11. NOW

  Tonight in the darkness before sleep, when the stars shine the brightest, Iza remembers the snow. She recalls standing in the front yard of their old house in the states before the Return, staring up at the sky and seeing nothing but puffs of white floating over and around her.

  She remembers taking her mother’s hand. Remembers everything being so white and pure and soft and quiet.

  It’s one of her only memories that doesn’t
have the moans of the mudo as a constant background hum. One of the few not tinged with the relentless heat of Curaçao.

  She lets it pull her into sleep, falling deeper and deeper into the folds of the blinding cold whiteness.

  Iza wakes up knowing something’s wrong. She’s been dreaming about the pirate ship. This time, though, rather than being the spirited damsel in distress getting rescued by the pirate, she’d been lashed to the ship with the mudo. She could feel the spray of the water as the ship cut through the seas, the salt stinging the gouges in her arms where the ropes and chains held her tight to the barnacled hull. All around her writhed the dead, sharp edges of bones cracking through skin and raking the waves. But she was not one of them; she was still somehow alive. In her dream Iza opened her mouth to scream and beg for mercy, but all that dripped from her mouth were moans.

  In the heartbeat when she bolts upright in her bed, everything is muddled and Iza can’t tell what’s her dream and what’s reality. It takes her too long to realize that the moans from her dream are still reverberating through the house. That’s when she hears the pounding of feet running on the wooden floor outside in the hallway. That’s when she hears the first scream streak through the darkness.

  Iza’s father has trained them for this, and she jumps out of bed. Her fingers shake as she tries to remember what to do first. She runs to the door. Panic begins to chew through her body and she swallows again and again. She flicks the light, but nothing happens. She snaps the switch up and down, up and down, and still nothing happens.

  Even if the island’s electricity is out, the landhuizen can be run by generators. Iza doesn’t understand why they haven’t turned over, why she can’t hear their humming outside her window. The night becomes too dark and close and claustrophobic. She feels like she’s underwater and can’t breathe. She’s about to throw open the door, needing the air, when something slams against it.

  Fingernails crack as something, or someone, on the other side scratches to get in. Moans bore through the wood. Iza stumbles back into the room, tripping over the brass corner of the trunk at the end of her bed, and feeling a slice of pain shoot up from her shin. She looks down at the blood seeping into her white nightgown, knowing it will attract the mudo.