
Bougainvillea
A Forest of Hands and Teeth Story
Carrie Ryan
From the Anthology Zombies vs. Unicorns Edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier
Last year, Iza turned fifteen and her father threw a massive quinceañera. It was the largest party anyone on the island had seen since the Return, lasting an entire week. Every captain who wanted to curry favor with Iza's father and gain access to Curaçao and its port or dry dock paid a visit at some point. They pushed beribboned boxes into Iza's hands, their eyes always on her father to see if he approved of their offerings.
They brought Iza jewelry that she shuddered to look at, wondering which bracelets had once adorned reanimated arms. They brought scraps of useless money from various countries for her to collect. Many brought books that Iza couldn't wait to devour, all covered with raven-haired men and redheaded heroines.
But one of the men, a dark old Venezuelan with impossibly green eyes, brought Iza a game that belonged to his son. She knew it was the son's because the old man made him be the one to hand it to her. The boy did so with a rage in his eyes that seemed too violent an emotion to be contained in his skinny teenage boy body.
The game came in a box with edges worn white, the cardboard slightly warped, and the name "Risk" in faded red. There were no instructions, and the old man spent a sweltering afternoon teaching Iza how to play before he had to get back to his leaky boat. His son refused to join them, and instead spent the afternoon standing at the edge of the cliffs, staring out at the ocean.
Iza spent weeks begging anyone to play with her. Some of the men and women who worked the landhuizen tried to play the game, torn between the fear of angering her father by not doing their jobs and the fear of his anger if they ignored his daughter. But they always let her win, and finally Iza would send them on their way.
Still, every afternoon Iza set the board up on the table in the shade of a divi-divi tree, the little red, yellow, blue, green, black, and gray men arranged in tight rows according to rank. She once asked her father if he could make the old Venezuelan come back and play with her, but he told her it was impossible.
"Why?" she asked, brushing away the yellow-breasted bird picking at the crumbs of her lunch.
"I had his ship banished from Curaçao," her father said.
Iza's eyebrows tilted into a frown. "Why?" she asked. The bird swooped in, nabbing a crust of bread, but she didn't care.
"Because you told me the son refused to play with you," her father said. He didn't even look at her as he rose from the table and walked away before Iza could respond. She felt slightly unsettled, her stomach twisted and queasy.
Hadn't she known that her father would take action if she told him about the boy refusing to play with her? Isn't that why she'd done it? The bird hopped over to the abandoned plate to scoop up the remains left by her father, and she didn't bother waving it away.
Alone, Iza was left to trace her fingers from continent to continent on the game board, memorizing the shape of countries that no longer existed. Before he'd left, the Venezuelan had taken out an old marker and drawn an X in the blue expanse of the Caribbean sea where Curaçao was supposed to be. Iza would press her thumb over it, wondering if it really was that easy to wipe out an entire world.
"You should be more careful when you leave the landhuizen, Iza," Beihito says to her one afternoon. Even after so many years on the island, she's not used to the way he says her name, like the word "pizza" without the p. Sometimes it reminds her of when she was a little girl before the Return, when she'd pull hot thin slices of greasy cheese out of a cardboard box. She closes her eyes, unable to remember the taste and burn of it.
She's lying on her stomach on the large dock at the base of the cliff and staring into the water. She used to have a snorkel and mask and loved to swim around and explore the reef, but her father took them away when he felt she'd grown too comfortable.
Iza grits her teeth, thinking about the way he stood in his office, long finger crooked through the chapped old rubber of the mask strap, telling her she was old enough to know better than to take such risks. She imagines herself stalking across that wide wooden floor and snatching it from his hands.
But of course she didn't, couldn't, and never would do such a thing.
Iza lets her fingers trail off the dock and brush the tips of the waves that glide under the warped old wood. "I'm technically still on my father's property," she tells Beihito. But the day is hot, the sun at a harsh angle, and she doesn't put much force behind her words. She watches as three flying fish leap out of the water, and she holds her breath, counting until the last splashes down again. Bulladóe, she thinks, and closes her eyes, trying to remember what it felt like to fly.
"Your father worries about the pirates," Beihito tells Iza. "They've been coming closer, making threats. He wants you to be safe."
Iza smiles just a little. Her father has barely spoken to her in a month; she hears his words only through others. Iza wonders if she should make it a game: How long can she go without speaking to him?
Beihito's knees crack a little as he bends over, setting a machete on the dock next to Iza. She opens her eyes and stares at the way the sun sparks off the edge of the blade. "At least until your father's men kill the pirates," Beihito says. "Permití."
Iza makes him stand here, a sigh building in him as he waits for her to promise. Beihito has many other things to do, and while he loves Iza like un yiu muhé, having no children of his own that survived the Return, she's old enough now that his day no longer includes watching her like a tired old babysitter.
Iza nods her head, deciding that it's not lying if she doesn't say the words.
She always heard when the pirate ships passed by the island at night. She could feel them in her bones, a shiver soft and sweet along her skin. The moans of the mudo slithered into her dreams, a tinge at the edge of her memory.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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 eventually 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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 first 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.
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.
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.
"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 away 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.
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.
Iza feels the ground shudder as something falls next to her. She sees her father point the gun at her. She wants to tell him she's sorry, but she can't find the air. She wonders then if the rumors are true. If her father really did use the previous outbreak to kill her mother. If Iza has let him down as well.
Fingers wrap around her wrist, and she turns her head. His face isn't far from hers. It's Beihito, and his mouth opens and closes desperately. He tries to drag Iza's hand to his lips, but his arm is too broken. He tries to roll toward her, but half of his body refuses to move. She stares at his hand on her arm.
"Danki," she tries to tell him, because she'd refused to say it all those years before. Iza's staring into Beihito's eyes when her father's bullet rips into his head. The wisps of his moans still twine through her ears.
A few weeks after Iza lost her mother, Beihito brought her a stray kitten.
"Pushi," he said, handing it to her, always trying to urge her to learn the local language. She'd shrugged, and Pushi became the cat's name. Pushi was black and white, his legs too long for his body and his tail crooked. He was mean and spiteful, and Iza spent weeks coaxing him to like her, to be loyal to her.
Iza trained Pushi to follow her like a dog and to eat from her hand. Iza loved that cat more fiercely than she'd ever loved anything else in the world.
And then one night, Pushi didn't come to sleep with her. She found him in her father's bed, curled against his snores. She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, trying to call the cat to her, but he refused to move.
Iza's father was the lodestone everyone else was drawn to; everything in this world was his. Iza wanted to slam the door, shut off the sight of him and Pushi. She wanted to run to the cliffs and fling herself into the water and dive so deep that sound and light and everything about her disappeared.
But instead she stood in the doorway while in the flashes of green gray dawn her father woke up and stroked his hand down Pushi's back.
Sensation returns to Iza's body like the sting of fire coral. She can't tell what's hot, what's cold, what burns, and what's torn. She only knows pain. She pushes herself to her feet, and the world spins and blinks. All around her is nothing but sound: moans, screams, gunshots, wails, thunder. The lightning is almost constant now, flashing scenes of men running, lihémorto chasing.
The rain comes at once, dousing everything in the thick taste of water. Iza looks back up at her father's window, but he's not there anymore. She thinks she can see shadows careening against the wall. Before she can figure out what's going on, someone is grabbing her.
She rears back, the blood and sweat and rain on her skin making her slick enough that she's able to pull away. She slips on the ground and throws up a hand as she's about to fall. Someone seizes it and steadies her. She recognizes him, the young man from the water that afternoon. The man she didn't kill. Iza winces, waiting to feel the tinge of teeth.
But it doesn't come. Instead he pulls her to him, wrapping her arm over his shoulder, sliding his other arm around her waist, helping her stand. Behind them is an explosion of wood and glass. They both look over their shoulders, their cheeks grazing. A lihémorto bursts from the house but is caught in the curtain, twisting and clawing at the fabric like the mudo under the tarps on the pirate ship.
They start to run, the man half-carrying Iza as they slip through the mud, the rain a blanket of water covering the world. Iza has so much blood on her from the broken window and the fall that even in the rain the lihémorto scents her and begins to chase, ripping free of the curtain, its moan grating through the darkness.
When they hit the edge of the cliff, Iza doesn't even hesitate. She just jumps, using everything left in her body to propel her as far away from the limestone wall as she can. The man's hand still grips hers, but as they fall, his hold falters and his fingers slip through her own.
In that moment, while Iza hangs suspended in the air, nothing hurts. Nothing shatters the stillness of the night, the cradling gentleness of the rain-soaked air.
And then she hits the waves, bubbles careening around her as the salt invades every scrape and cut. Iza claws at the water, scrabbling for the surface. The man finds her arm and yanks, pulling her up until she can breathe again. She kicks her feet to stay afloat and watches the water froth and churn closer to the cliff, where the lihémorto hit.
"My father," Iza says, still trying to catch her breath. "He has ships. Just around in the next cove." She points to the south, but the man shakes his head.
"We can make it," she tells him. "We'll be safe." She coughs as a wave slaps water into her face. "My father was prepared for this."
The man grabs Iza's arm, pulling it back into the water. "Your father's boats are gone," he says. She can barely hear anything beyond the sound of the rain slapping the ocean's surface like a hundred million children clapping at once.
Iza doesn't even know how to form the question, but she doesn't have to. "The breach wasn't an accident, Iza. All of this was planned from the beginning. Even saving you."
"I don't understand," Iza says. The world around them hushes in that moment, a gap in the rain. And that's when Iza hears the moans, but not from the direction of the cliffs. She looks back into the darkness beyond the breaking waves and in a flash of lightning sees the pirate ship. Its tarps have been pulled back, and the writhing mass of mudo strapped to the hull surge at the night.
Iza's mother wasn't built for the heat, even though she'd been born and raised in Curaçao, and she certainly wasn't raised to serve as a dictator's wife. She missed the snow, the university where she worked, and Starbucks coffee. She missed turning on the boiler in the winter and building a wood-fueled fire. She missed traffic and NPR and the buzz of Internet gossip.
In the beginning she told Iza to be grateful they were alive. Iza knew her mother tried not to think about all the friends she'd left behind, or wonder if they'd survived the Return. She tried especially hard not to think about them being undead. But at night, when her mother lay in bed and her father met with captains and the homber mata, Iza knew her mother thought about her ex-boyfriends and wondered if they'd died and come back.
Iza's mother joked with her husband that if only the Internet were working reliably, she'd be able to log onto Facebook or Twitter, and she was sure they'd have added a "Check here if zombie" box so she could catch up on the status of her friends.
Iza noticed her father never laughed when she wanted him to.
But both Iza and her mother knew that they were alive because of Iza's father. And everyone on the island also knew this. They knew that it was because of him they were surviving, and they treated him with deference, respect, and awe, until he came to expect it, even from his family, who'd known him from the before time. Who could remember what he looked like sheepishly rumpled and unshaven on a long weekend morning.
After a while, after the fences were set up around the beaches and port, and the homber mata secured the coastline, it became rare for people to die and Return.
Iza's father began to think that maybe he'd established one of the few pockets of sustainability in the world and that they could outlast the Return. He began to think that maybe Iza could be raised with a normal life. But her mother despaired even more. Because she couldn't stand a life that was close to normal. It only reminded her of what she'd lost.
That's when the ships began to arrive. Desperate, limping, starving, and often rife with infection, these huge floating cities would throw themselves upon Curaçao's shores. Men, women, and children would jump from the rails and swim for the cliffs, climbing old ladders, and huddling on tattered docks.
Everyone on the island, including Iza, could hear their screams for mercy. For help and water and food and shelter and life---everything that Iza had without a second thought.
Iza's father was ruthless. He knew that in order to survive, they had to keep the population of the island in check, and they had to be militant about keeping the infection from breaching the border. He set up patrols. He sent shiny white speedboats loaded with armed men to buzz around the island. Iza always thought of them as albino bees guarding an angry nest. Her afternoons were filled with the lazy drone of motorboats in the distance, puckered with snaps and pops as the homber mata killed the infected or anyone else not willing to follow her father's rules.
Before long Iza's mother would stand at the edge of the cliffs and watch the homber mata. In her hands she'd hold branches of bougainvillea, and one by one she'd pluck their petals and drop them to the water. Some days the waves at the base of the cliff would blaze red with their bright blossoms, and other days with the blood of people who'd been seeking any chance to survive.
Iza's father would remind them that this is what it took to survive, but Iza could tell, looking into her mother's eyes, that this was no way to live.
Iza sometimes wondered if her father's need for order and utmost loyalty had killed her mother. If somehow her mother had fallen outside her father's tightly ordered rules and that was what had led to her infection. If she'd actually been infected.
Tacked to the limestone cliff is a small battered sign that reads THE BLUE ROOM in a black scrawl with a jagged red arrow pointing down into the water, the sole reminder of the old tourist site, now abandoned. Only in the lowest of tides does the mouth of the cave breach the surface of the water. Tonight the tide is high, and Iza and her savior have to heave in a deep breath and search against the cliff for the opening.
Iza's fingers brush the jagged edges of the limestone as she swims into the darkness. She kicks as hard as she can, her lungs beginning to buck. She purses her lips tight, her chest burning as her body chants, Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!
Her shoulder scrapes against the top of the tunnel leading into the cave, and she pushes at the wall until finally she feels her ears pop and her fingers touch air. The young man helps pull her onto a large flat rock in the middle of the cave.
On a bright day the sun dances through the water, throwing the entire room the most brilliant shade of blue Iza's ever seen, brighter than the bluest parrot fish in the reef. Now, as the storm begins to clear off, every now and then moonlight bubbles through.
Iza pushes herself to her feet and reaches out a hand until she can touch the wall to steady herself. The light bouncing through the water seems to make the entire cave dance and twirl and spin, and it makes her feel off balance.
She stares at the man, who just stands there. He glances at Iza's body, and then sharply away into the darkness. Iza looks down and realizes what he must have seen---her thin white nightgown almost transparent, the richness of her skin shining through it. With each breath it pulls tight against her.
For a heartbeat she wonders what it would have been like for them before the Return. If this had been some other night so many years ago and they'd both ended up in a hidden cave of blue light. Iza wonders how many lovers have rendezvoused here in the reflection of waves.
She tries to pluck the fabric away from her body, but it gets tangled in her belt, and so she unbuckles it, holding the machete in her hand. She has no idea what happened to her gun.
Iza crosses her arms over her chest. "The pirates," she finally says. Her voice sounds dull in the cave, and she shakes her head to dislodge the water from her ears. "You told me you escaped from them."
"I told you I jumped from their boat in the night and swam to the island. That was true," he says.
She curls her hands into fists, clenching the machete tighter. "You're one of them."
"No," he says. "I am them. The ship is my ship. The men are my men. I have made all this happen."
"Why?" Iza can barely even whisper the word.
"Your father is a ruthless man," the pirate says. "And this isla is too valuable."
"My father is fair---," Iza tells him, always his greatest defender.
"He uses his power to control people!" The pirate cuts Iza off, shouting so that his words echo around her.
"You have to be ruthless to survive," Iza says, her voice low. It's her father's mantra.
"If that's true, then why do you blame me for attacking? For being just as ruthless?"
Iza opens her mouth, and then closes it. "There were innocent people," she finally says. "You're going to end up killing the entire island."
"No, I'm not," the pirate says. "My men won't let the infection spread past the landhuizen. In a few days they'll kill the lihémorto, and Curaçao will return to normal."
"My father will never allow it."
"Your father will be dead!" the pirate yells, his breath hot against Iza's face like a slap. She stumbles under the weight of it. He seems to regret the words as soon as they leave his mouth, and he reaches for her hand, wrapping his fingers around her.
"I am not like your father," he says, stepping closer to her. "You have to understand," he continues. "I don't like this. I don't want this. I want the world to go back to the way it was before. I want it to be fair. That's all I'm trying to do is make it fair again."
Iza thinks about her mother tossing bougainvillea petals into the waves. All she wanted was for life to go back to the way it was before the Return, and Iza realizes that's what she's been waiting for as well.
And it's never going to happen.
"My father's men are loyal to him. The homber mata won't follow you. They'll avenge his death," Iza growls, ripping her hand free and pushing back against the cave wall.
"The homber mata will follow your father's heir," the pirate says, stepping forward. "They will follow you. And you will follow me. And in return I will keep you safe."
The pirate takes another step forward. He brushes his fingers against her chin. Iza feels his chest against hers. "Mi bunita," he whispers.
Iza's toes curl against the ragged edges of the rock. The water in the cave pulses like a dull heartbeat---in and out, in and out. She thinks about all the old romance novels she's read. All the times the pirate rescued the damsel in distress and she learned to love him for it.
"You don't know how long I've waited to make you my own," he says, twining his hand in her hair and pulling her head back. Prickles of pain itch against her scalp. Her throat feels awkward and bare.
Iza tries her best to pull away from his kiss. "How long?" she asks. "How do you know me?"
The pirate grins. He leans toward her, the heat of his mouth barely brushing Iza's forehead, her temple, her ear. "You don't remember me, do you?"
"Look," her father said. He took Iza's smaller hand in his and gently pushed her fingertips into the warm salty water. They were at an aquarium, standing with the other tourists around a low shallow tank filled with starfish and anemone and sea urchins.
He'd taken the day off just to spend it with her, to point out all the different types of fish weaving through the large exhibits. Together they'd sat in a huge amphitheater and watched a whale shark lumber around the graceful eagle rays.
Iza spent hours with her eyes wide open, leaning into the pipe-tobacco warmth of her father and listening to him explain how to tell a nurse shark from a hammerhead and a grouper from a jack.
But now that she was close enough to touch the creatures, she wanted to pull her hand back. She was too afraid of the spines and prickles of the sea urchins that looked as sharp as needles.
"It's okay," her father said, a laughing rumble to his voice she could feel in her chest. "Trust me."
Iza tasted the salt in the back of her throat, but whether it was from her tears or the open tanks she didn't know. She sniffed and pressed her lips together, holding her breath as she let her father brush her hand over the different creatures.
She jumped when she felt the sea urchin, expecting the sharp pinch of pain and not the soft bristle instead. Iza turned her head up to him then. He was smiling at her, and she knew he was proud of her bravery and strength.
She understood then that she wanted to be that little girl in his eyes forever. She would do anything for that feeling again, and she'd spent years chasing after it since.
"The game," Iza whispers. "Risk. It was yours."
The pirate smiles even larger. "Strategy," he says. "That's how I learned it. Your father should've paid attention."
Iza should have remembered his eyes, but the pirate was so skinny then. So young and full of rage that he hides so well now.
It becomes so clear to Iza how everything is her fault. Her knees go weak, so that the pirate has to loosen his grip on her hair in order to hold her body up. She pushes her fingers to her lips, tasting the dusky saltiness she'd tasted when the old woman had fallen off the dock because of her.
Her father always said Iza needed to be ruthless, but she hadn't believed him. She'd thought that the world could be something more. And she'd been the one to give the pirate access to the landhuizen. She'd had a knife at his throat and let him live. All because Iza wanted to believe that her father was wrong.
The pirate wraps his hand around Iza's wrist, and she glances down at where his dark fingers splay over her pulse. In her head all she can see is Beihito. At the way he looked at her when they fell, as if she were nothing to him. As if he'd never loved her as djé yiu muhé---his daughter.
She looks up at the pirate. He's wiped out the only man who'd ever found something inside Iza worthy of love.
Iza reaches one hand up and places it behind the pirate's head. His skin feels like the summer sun, damp with sweat and rough like a tribon's body. "And my father's men will follow you because of me?" she asks. Her mouth hovers just against his. "And you'll protect me?"
He mumbles a yes as she presses her lips to his. Just this once Iza wants to know what it tastes like, this idea that the world can be beautiful and different.
She thinks about the old Risk board, about how the Venezuelan marked an X where Curaçao would have been. She remembers how she would put her thumb over it, wiping out her world. She wonders at how easy it is to erase everything you've ever known. Everything you've ever thought you were or wanted to be or should be.
As the pirate lets himself go against Iza, as he breathes her in, she pulls Beihito's machete up and presses it against his neck. Iza digs the blade in deep like she should have done before.
"Then they'll follow me," she says as the pirate clutches a hand to his throat, falling backward into the moon-drenched water. "And I'll protect myself."
Iza watches his body sink through the waves, his blood like bougainvillea blossoms blooming on the surface. She could do what it takes to survive. She could do what's necessary to rule her father's island.
Iza could be ruthless. Just like her father.

