Carole watched with a wrenching mixture of horror and fascination as the Father Joe thing's fingers neared the cross. She noticed that his eyes were slit-ted and only partially averted, as if he were looking at the cross from the corner of his eye.
The undead couldn't stand to be anywhere near a cross, yet the Father Joe thing was reaching for this one.
Finally his scarred fingers reached it, touched the metal, and jerked back as if they'd been burned. But no flash, no sizzle of seared flesh. The fingers came forward again, and this time, like a striking snake, they snatched the cross from Lacey's hand.
"It's hot!" he said, looking up into the darkening sky as he switched it back and forth between his hands like a hot potato. "Oh, God, it's hot!"
But it wasn't searing his flesh, only reddening it.
Then with the cry of a damned soul he dropped it and fell to his knees on the sand.
"What have they done to me?" he sobbed as he looked at Carole with frightened, haunted eyes. "What am I?"
Carole closed the book bag.
She'd never seen the undead cry. This wasn't a vampire. But he wasn't the Father Joe she had known either. He was something in between. Was this an accident, or some sort of trick, some undead plot to further confuse and confound the living? She'd have to reserve judgment for now.
But she'd be watching his every move.
JOE . . .
Carole took his arm and tugged him toward the boardwalk, saying, "We need to find a place where we're not so exposed."
Joe went along with her, his mind numb, unable to string two coherent thoughts together.
The afterimage of the cross—his cross—still stained his vision, bouncing in the air before him. The blast of light had been intolerably bright, an explosion of brilliance, as if Carole had lifted a white hot star from her book bag. The light had caused him pain, but only in his eyes. It hadn't struck him like a physical blow the way it seemed to affect the undead, staggering them back as if they were being pummeled with a baseball bat. He could look at it as one might the sun, squinting from the corner of his eye.
He could touch the cross but couldn't hold it. He looked down at his palms. The skin was reddened there, but at least it was normal looking. Not like the ruined, thickened flesh on the back of his hands and on his arms and chest. He touched his face and found thickened and pitted skin there as well.
Joe felt as if his world were crumbling around him, then realized that it already had. The life he'd known was gone, ended. What lay ahead?
He pulled the damp sheet closer around him as Carole led him up the steps to the boardwalk. Had this been his shroud? As she turned him right, Joe heard Lacey's voice from behind.
"Aren't we going to the car?"
"Let's see if we can get into one of these houses," Carole said.
She led them past the dead arcades and along the boardwalk leading to the inlet. No one spoke. Lacey looked as dazed as Joe felt. They walked past the beachfront houses, some large with sun decks and huge seaward windows, others tiny, little more than plywood boxes, all nuzzling against the boardwalk. Most of the bigger ones had been vandalized.
Carole stopped before an old, minuscule bungalow that appeared intact. Despite the low light, Joe had no problem making out the faded blue-gray of its clapboard siding. Someone had painted the word SEAVIEW in black on the door and surrounded it with sun-bleached clamshells.
Carole tried the door. When it wouldn't open, she slammed her shoulder against it. When that didn't work, she opened her book bag and began to rummage through it.
Joe turned to the door and slammed his palm against it. The molding cracked like a gunshot and the door swung inward. He stared at his hand. He hadn't put a lot of effort into the blow, but it had broken the molding.
"How did I do that?" he muttered.
No one answered.
In a courteous reflex, he stood aside to let Carole and Lacey enter first. Only after they were inside did he realize that he should have gone ahead of them. No telling what might have been lying in wait there.
As he stepped across the threshold, he felt a curious resistance, as if the air inside had congealed to try to hold him back. He pressed forward and pushed through. The resistance evaporated once he was inside.
As he closed the door behind him, he sniffed the musty air and looked around. Typical beach house decor: rattan furniture with beachy-patterned cushions, driftwood and shells on the mantle, fishnets and starfish tacked to the tongue-and-groove knotty pine walls of the wide open living room/dining room/kitchen combo that ran the length of the house; photos of smiling people sitting on the beach or holding fishing rods. Joe wondered if any of them were still alive.
Carole pulled out her flashlight. "Let's see if we can find any candles."
"There's three in that little brass candelabra back there," he told her.
"Where?" She flashed her light around.
He pointed. "On the dining room table."
Carole shot him a strange look and moved toward the rear of the house where she retrieved a brass candelabra from the tiny dining room. She lit one of its three candles and set it on the small cocktail table situated before the picture window overlooking the beach and the ocean. Lacey pulled the curtains.
"Let's sit," Carole said.
"I can't sit," Joe told her. "I need to know what happened to me."
"We're about to tell you all we know," Carole said.
So he sat. Carole did most of the talking, with Lacey adding a comment or two. They told him how they'd found him, how his skin had started boiling in the morning sun, and how they'd buried him.
Joe rose and started pacing. He'd held himself still as he'd listened to them, not wanting to believe their tale, yet unable to deny it, and now he had to move. He felt too big for the room. Or was it getting smaller, the walls closing in on him? He didn't know what to do with himself—stand, sit, move about—or where to put his hands ... his body felt different, not quite his own. He'd sensed this since pulling himself out of the sand. He'd washed himself off in the ocean, hoping it would make a difference, but it hadn't. He still felt like a visitor in his own skin.
"So what am I then?" he said to no one on particular, perhaps to God Himself. "Some new sort of creature, some freakish hybrid?" He sure as hell felt like a freak.
"That is what we need to find out," Carole said.
He stared at her and she stared back, her eyes flat, unreadable. This was not the Carole he'd known, not the woman he'd been drawn to. He'd sensed a terrible change in her when he'd run into her outside the church, but now she seemed even further removed from her old self. Cold .. . and she'd been anything but cold in her other life. Had all the sweetness and warmth in her been burned away, or had she merely walled them off?
Unable to hold her gaze any longer, he looked down at himself. He was still wrapped in the damp, sandy sheet. He wasn't cold but he didn't like looking like something that had washed up from the sea.
"I'm going to see if I can find some clothes."
Anything to escape Carole's imprisoning stare. She made him feel like a specimen in a dissection tray.
He turned into the short hallway that was little more than an alcove that divided the bungalow's two bedrooms. A pang shot through his abdomen and he realized he was hungry. Clothes first, then food.
He entered the bedroom on the left and pulled open a dresser drawer. No good. Women's underwear. A thought struck him: What if two old spinsters kept this as a summer place? Under no circumstances was he putting on a house dress. He'd rather keep the sheet.
He tried the other bureau and found an assortment of shirts and Bermudas. He tried a pair of green plaid shorts first and, though a little loose in the waist, they fit. The top shirt on the pile was a yellow-flowered Hawaiian.
After he pulled it on he looked down at himself. Not a big improvement over that old sheet. He must look like the bennie from hell. He stepped to the mirror over the dresser to catch a full view. The mirror was blurred.
This place was in dire need of some spring cleaning.