The Hunted (6 page)

“You still think about her sometimes?” Carmen asked.

“Who?” Shy said.

“Don't be stupid, Sancho. You know who I'm talking about.”

He did. Addie. The girl he'd been stranded at sea with for several days in a broken lifeboat. “Sometimes, I guess. Why?”

Carmen shrugged. “Just wondering.”

They were standing across from each other in the small yard behind the DMV, digging into the earth with the shovels they'd found in the cellar. They both wore their new beanies and Windbreakers. Marcus and Shoeshine were several feet away, digging a second grave. The plan was to bury the bodies they'd just found, then spend the night in the motor home. Shoeshine believed the red circles warned where infected corpses lay. So the motor home was safe for them—everyone else would keep their distance.

Even Carmen, who'd been so anti–motor home earlier, agreed it was best to stay off the streets until morning.

Shy continued digging, occasionally glancing at Carmen. The more he thought about her question, though, the more it pissed him off.

Because he
did
think about Addie.

More than he wanted to admit.

He thought about how they'd started off hating each other on the cruise ship. They were from completely different worlds, living completely different lives. Addie, the rich blond chick from LA who thought she was better than everyone. Shy, the poor barrio kid who'd grown up in the shadow of the Mexican border. But when they were stranded together, something happened. Their desperation forced them to pull off their masks and show each other their fragile hearts. And how many people do you actually do that with over the course of a lifetime?

They started talking, started huddling together for warmth. And by their last night on the broken lifeboat, things had changed to the point that Addie actually meant something to him…at least until he found out what her dad had done.

Shy stopped digging and looked up at Carmen, though all he could see in the dark was her slow-moving form. The flashlight he'd placed on the ground only lit up the hole they were digging. And their feet.

Carmen stopped shoveling, too. “Look at you, Sancho. You're thinking about ol' girl right this second.”

Shy scoffed. “More like I'm thinking about how her old man's the devil. You know that company's gonna be looking for us, right?”

Carmen didn't say anything.

Just kept staring at him.

When her silence became awkward, Shy hopped into their hole. It was almost knee-deep now, but Shoeshine wanted it twice that depth so that the bodies would
stay
buried. “Addie's dad is the reason we're digging these graves,” he reminded Carmen. “You know that, right?”

“Exactly,” Carmen said. “Addie's
dad.
Not Addie herself.”

“They're blood, though, Carm.” Shy set down his shovel and wiped his sweaty palms on his pants. He could already feel blisters forming. “It's gotta fall on her some, too.”

“What if she was just as ignorant about all that shit as me and you? What then?”

“She wasn't, though,” Shy said.

“How do
you
know?”

Shy thought back to the Addie he'd grown close to on the lifeboat. Her tangled blond hair falling over the scared look on her face. She had seemed genuinely naive when they sat there brainstorming what her dad's company might have been trying to cover up. But something changed when they got back to the island. She no longer looked at him the same way.

Carmen stood upright outside their ditch. “Yeah, that's what I thought.”

Shy could vaguely make out Carmen smoothing strands of hair underneath her beanie. “First of all,” she went on, “you don't know shit about girls, all right? I looked in that
heina
's eyes when I took her to get cleaned up. She didn't know
nothin'.
Trust me. Second of all, I can't believe you got me sticking up for a
blanquita.
”

Shy started digging again.

He hated when Carmen stuck up for Addie. When a girl had zero jealousy it meant she also had zero feelings. Which Shy already sort of knew, but didn't
want
to know. “If you'd heard our last conversation,” he told her, “you'd see it differently.”

“What conversation?”

“On the island,” he said. “Outside the restaurant when she told me bye. She
knew
she was about to go on that helicopter with her dad. And you know what that means, right?”

Carmen didn't say anything.

“She probably knew what those supposed researchers were about to do to us, too.” Shy pictured the men pulling out their machine guns on the beach, gunning down all the innocent passengers who were lined up, waiting to be rescued.

Carmen was quiet for a long time. She just stood there in the dark, holding her shovel, staring into their hole.

“You got nothing to say about that part?” Shy finally asked her.

“If that shit's true,” she finally said, turning to him, “I swear to God, Shy. I'll find that bitch.”

Shy went back to digging.

He could still feel Carmen's eyes on him.

They'd been digging silently for a good ten, fifteen minutes, when Shy asked: “What about you, Carm? You think about your boy Brad a lot?”

“Brett,” Carmen corrected him.

“That's what I said.”

“No, you said Brad.” She stopped shoveling. “And of course I think about him.”

Shy wished he could see her eyes so he'd know how much sadness was there. Words didn't tell you anything compared to someone's eyes.

“We were supposed to get married in, what? Like two months? Now I don't even know if he's alive.”

Shy pushed his shovel into the earth, thinking about the crack in Carmen's voice. It seemed important. After a long silence he stopped and looked up at her. “Brett's alive,” he heard himself say.

Carmen wiped her face with the sleeve of her jacket. “Don't be a
chingado,
Shy.”

“I'm serious,” he said.

She was quiet for a few seconds. “And how would
you
know?”

Shy shrugged, though he was pretty sure she couldn't tell in the dark. “I just got this feeling he's okay.”

As Shy went back to digging, he made a decision. He would never wish something bad on this guy—Brad or Brett or whatever his name was—because if you tried to land a girl on the back of someone else's misfortune, it made you a punk. And Shy was maybe a lot of things, some good, some bad, but he definitely wasn't no punk.

“Thanks,” Carmen told him after a long pause. “Even if it's not true, it means a lot that you'd say that, Shy.”

He acted like he was too busy digging to hear her.

An hour later, the four of them were standing over the ditch Shy and Carmen had dug, staring down at the decomposing bodies of the two young girls they'd just carried awkwardly out of the motor home. The bodies lay side by side now, illuminated by the flashlight Carmen aimed into the grave, her silent tears falling onto them.

Shy's eyes were dry, but something in his brain had snapped. He couldn't stop thinking about what they were doing. Burying two innocent kids who'd been shot by their dad so they no longer had to suffer.

Shy felt sick to his stomach. Because he knew it wasn't just these girls, it was thousands of kids, all across the state. Kids like his nephew, Miguel. All of them dying horrific deaths because of a disease created in a lab. A disease created to make a pharmaceutical company billions of dollars.

And who was the mastermind of it all?

Addie's dad.

Mr. Miller.

Shy made himself a promise as he stared down into the grave. If he ever came face to face with Mr. Miller again, he'd put his ass in a grave, too. After making him suffer. Even if it meant being thrown into prison for the rest of his life. Even if it meant the electric chair. It would be worth it. Someone had to make him pay for what he'd done.

Shy was seething now, as he watched Shoeshine reach down into the grave and take one of the little girl's hands. The man gripped her cold palm between his two big, leathery black mitts and kissed it. He sucked on all of her fingers, one at a time. And then he began to hum.

Shy frowned and turned to Carmen and Marcus, who seemed just as baffled as he was.

The melody wasn't anything Shy recognized, but it was simple and sad and made him think of church hymns—though Shoeshine had told them on the sailboat that he wasn't the least bit religious.

As Shoeshine circled back through the song a second time, Shy found his vision getting blurry. He wiped away a tear on his cheek before anyone could see it. Maybe it was the sadness of the song. Or the sight of the girls piled together. Or the putrid smell coming off them in waves. Maybe it was the accumulation of all this and everything else he'd witnessed since boarding the cruise ship so many weeks ago.

He was seventeen.

Not yet a man because he was too soft. Because he still allowed everything to penetrate his skin. Because he didn't know how to suppress the crazy images circling inside his head.

Soon Shy found himself humming, too. He did so quietly at first. Blending his voice underneath Shoeshine's so that only he himself could hear it. And he pictured Mr. Miller. And Addie. And the feeling of revenge. But soon he was humming louder.

Carmen turned to look at him.

He didn't meet her eyes thinking she might laugh at him. She didn't laugh, though. She began humming, too.

So did Marcus.

The four of them crouched in the small yard, behind the ruined DMV building, humming down into a homemade grave where two dead girls lay.

Instead of feeling corny, the sound of their collective voices felt calming. Like Shy could breathe again underneath all the darkness.

At the end of the song, Shoeshine scooped both hands into the pile of loose soil Shy and Carmen had left, and dropped a handful onto the two small corpses.

Shy kneeled down beside him and scooped some soil of his own. He paused for a few seconds to glance at Carmen. Then he let the dirt pour through his fingers, into the grave.