Bougainvillea Read online

  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.

  The banging and clawing grates against her as she fumbles with her dresser. She finally opens the drawer and pulls out the gun inside. She grabs a belt from the floor and loops it around her waist, sliding the machete Beihito gave her that afternoon into it.

  And then she stands there. In the darkness. In the middle of her room. Listening to the screams and moans, and feeling the panic crushing her lungs.

  The window, she thinks as the door begins to buckle under the force of someone trying desperately to get inside. She pushes aside the fluttering curtains and crawls out onto the roof, scuttling to the side and hiding in the shadow of the dormer.

  Overhead, heat lightning shoots the clouds with green and blue and orange, flashing open the world around her. With shaking fingers Iza switches the safety off her gun and tries to steady herself. She can’t tell if the rumbling around her is thunder or gunshots.

  Inside, the door bangs open. Feet pound against the floor. Iza’s breath becomes a roar in her ears. They’re lihémorto, the fast moving dead, not the slow, plodding mudo. This is the problem with living on an island cleared of the undead: If infection breaks out, the fi
rst to turn are always lihémorto until they reach that critical mass that renders the new ones mudo. It will be almost impossible for her father’s men to kill the lihémorto before they infect half the plantation.

  Iza feels rather than hears when the first one hits the window from inside. It’s one of the groundskeepers, and most of his left arm is missing. He’d probably tried to cut it off after being bitten, which of course only served to hasten the Return.

  He swings at Iza, reaching into the darkness with his teeth bared, eyes wild and moans rampaging. He smells like orange rinds and sweat and tobacco, and it reminds Iza of Beihito.

  She holds out the gun as close to the man as she can while still outside his reach, and pulls the trigger.

  It’s not a clean shot. It wouldn’t impress her father. But it still hits the man’s head, tearing through his face. Iza can’t take the time to let reality set in. She can’t pause while the realization that she’s just shot a man ripples through her. He slumps over the windowsill just as another lihémorto, a maid, lunges through the opening. This one tries to climb after Iza and slips from the roof, falling to the ground two stories below. Shards of bone jut through her leg, their tips glistening white in the echoes of heat lightning.

  The maid hauls herself to her feet, the bad leg crunching under her, and limps to the wall, reaching for Iza still. Her fingers scrape and scratch against the stucco as she tries to climb, but she just keeps sinking back to the ground, the bones grinding farther out of her leg.

  Iza digs her toes into the warm tiles of the roof already slick with her sweat. She wipes a trembling hand over her mouth, the smell of gunpowder hot and sweet. She tries to think of what to do next.

  12. BEFORE

  Iza’s father was a businessman before the Return, an executive with access to the company jet and a yacht anchored in Miami. When news of the Return began to filter through the news channels, he didn’t hesitate like everyone else.

  He called the pilots, told them to ignore the flight ban, and took off for San Salvador Cay, a small Bahamian island with airport workers willing to take a bribe in the form of weaponry. From there he shuffled his wife and young daughter to the already waiting yacht, and they set sail for Curaçao, her mother’s home.

  While everyone else panicked in disbelief and denial as the Return unfolded, Iza’s father had done research. He’d figured that an island would offer the best chance of survival during the onslaught of the undead. Curaçao was small enough that it was easily containable. It had a nice port, an oil refinery and plenty of oil, and a water purifying station large enough for the entire population. And it had the largest dry dock in the Caribbean—a necessity for the ships that planned to spend any length of time in the water in order to avoid the dangers of landfall. Most important, Curaçao was an island made up mostly of limestone cliffs, impossible for the living dead to climb. It also helped that Iza’s mother had been born and raised on the island and still had family there with deep connections.

  By the time Iza’s father’s yacht docked, Curaçao, like most of the world, was edging toward chaos.

  Holland had abandoned it, and the local government wasn’t equipped for the situation. Iza’s father stepped in at the precise moment to take control, as he’d done with so many failing businesses in the past.

  Once Curaçao was cleared of the mudo, Iza’s father moved his family to the largest and most opulent landhuizen on the coast, erecting massive fences and gates around the plantation in case another wave of infection broke out. He used his wife’s connections to broker deals with the locals and created an army of men—the homber mata—to keep the family safe.

  That was when he began calling himself the governor and implementing his rules.

  13. NOW

  Of course Iza’s father has prepared for a breach. Ever since the Return, he learned to be hypervigilant about every eventuality. He had his men dig tunnels from the landhuis to caves in the cliffs that are stashed with supplies and close to ships moored and waiting.

  Iza knows that she just has to reach one of those tunnels and find her father and everything will be okay. She flips the safety back on the gun and tucks it into the belt with her machete. While on the ground lihémorto moan and men run, she edges her way with sweaty fingers along the slick tiled roof. She crawls until she’s perched against the dormer to her father’s room, but she’s afraid to look inside.

  Even though she knows they’ve breached the landhuis, she can’t imagine them getting to her father. She can’t think of him being one of them. Even the idea of it causes her stomach to cramp and bright spots to explode in front of her eyes. Iza isn’t sure she can survive without her father. She doesn’t know if she’s strong enough.

  A lizard slides over her toes, and she jumps, her fingernails raking against the tiles as she scrabbles to stay put. She feels like someone has planted a tree in her chest and then pressed fast-forward on the world, branches growing and twisting and pushing her apart from the inside. It’s hard to breathe in the thick night air, and she tastes the dampness of impending rain in the back of her throat.

  Iza holds her breath and pushes her head around the corner of the dormer until she’s looking through the window and into her father’s room. He’s standing by his wide bed, a pistol in one hand and the other reaching behind him toward the wall that hides an entrance to the tunnels. One foot is still raised as he walks backward, the pasty pale skin of his ankle jutting out of black pants.

  He must sense Iza’s movement, because he glances over at her. He swings toward her, his eyes widening at the same time as his finger twitches on the trigger. The window explodes. Iza recoils as tiny slivers of glass slice across her arms and face, the sound of the gunshot screaming in her head.

  Her balance is off. She clambers to jam her toes against the sharp gutter as she’s thrown backward. Blood seeps into her eyes, making everything blurry. But Iza can still see when the lihémorto rages into the room. She can tell the exact moment when it scents her blood and freshly flayed flesh.

  Iza’s father shouts her name, but nothing will stop the lihémorto. It bounds through the room toward her. Iza wants nothing more than to curl her hands around the windowsill, but she knows that her only chance is to let go. And so she does.

  For years after they came to the island, Iza used to watch movies using an old DVD player. She remembers being able to click a button and have everything turn into slow motion—the show unfolding in front of her frame by frame. This is what she thinks about as she falls, everything happening frame by frame.

  For just this moment Iza wishes she could stop everything, just pause the world and ask her father something—anything—to make her understand him. She feels like she can see every possible answer to her possible question on his face: regret, love, fear, shame, guilt, resignation, hope. And those emotions explode between them.

  Iza watches as her father pulls the gun around straight. As the lihémorto lunges through the window for her. As she gives in to gravity.

  14. BEFORE

  “Un momentu,” the men kept telling Iza, waving their hands in the air for her to get out of the way. Her father’s men were unloading supplies at the dock, and she knew there were treats hidden in all the boxes. They’d been bringing provisions to the landhuizen for weeks, and every day something different arrived. Today she was hoping for some new books—everything she’d found exploring the dusty library was written in Dutch.

  “What’s for me?” she kept asking. She’d just lost her other front tooth the day before, and every s she pronounced came out with a soft lisp.

  The men called her Muskita—little fly—because she buzzed around them, zipping between the boats. They brushed her away, passing the boxes over her head. She hadn’t been on the island long enough by then to understand anything they said as their chatter filled the air.

  Finally an older woman who smelled like baby powder and sweat dug around in one of the boxes until she found a stick of rock candy. She pulled Iza aw
ay from the boats where the men were working and handed her the treat. Iza was just touching her tongue to the dusky sweetness when a hand rose out of the water and grabbed the old woman’s ankle.

  She tried to pull away, tried to stay standing, her huge chest waving and the fat under her arms flapping as she clawed at the air. But the only thing she could have held on to was Iza, and she didn’t want to risk pulling the little girl into the water with her. The old woman had worked for Iza’s father for only a few weeks, but even so, she was like everyone else on the island: terrified of his wrath, and knowing she had a better chance against the mudo than she did against Iza’s father.

  The old woman didn’t even shout or scream or cry as she toppled back into the waves, into the arms and teeth of the mudo waiting for her. She just closed her eyes and sighed as the water crested over her face, as if she’d always been waiting for that moment and was relieved it had finally come.

  It was Beihito who grabbed Iza and carried her away from the dock, away from the men watching the frothing water where the old woman had fallen. He told her not to look, and so she stared into the sky and saw her father watching it all from the top of the cliffs. He didn’t blink or wave or say anything.

  Iza learned many things that day: that there was no such thing as being truly safe, that the ocean can change everything, that her father may have wanted her to live a normal life but it was Beihito who made it so.

  15. NOW

  Iza is drowning. She can’t breathe. She’s lying on her back on the ground and looks up to see her father in the shattered window of his room shouting down at her. She can’t hear anything he’s saying. Nothing penetrates the water around her. There is only silence and darkness, cut through by the lightning tearing apart the sky.