He fell quiet. “All right, Angel,” he said after a moment. “What’s done is done. You’ve seen the heads and satisfied that curiosity, so we can just move on from here. I can’t imagine that you’d have anything else to call him about, so it really is a moot point now.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. “Marcus, I’ve been really nice and respectful to your uncle, even after everything that happened.” I tried to keep my voice even and calm, but it still shook a bit despite my best efforts. “Pietro told me I could call him anytime I needed something, and y’know what? If I have another reason to call him, I fucking will.” My hand tightened on the phone. “I was locked in an animal cage because of him. Strip searched by McKinney while four men stood and watched. So if I want to call him for the goddamn time and weather, I fucking will, and I’m not gonna worry about annoying him.”

I heard him exhale. “I know,” he said. “You had a horrible experience, and a lot of it was Uncle Pietro’s fault. It’s still crazy to push it. But never mind, you don’t want my opinion, and this isn’t getting us anywhere.”

I was crying now. How could he still not understand? “No, it’s not getting us anywhere. And you don’t want to hear how bad it was. So forget it. I’ll talk to you later.”

I hung up before he could say anything else then buried my face in the couch pillow and gave in to a sob fest. For the first time I realized that I really didn’t have anyone I could talk to about what happened to me. I sure as hell couldn’t tell any non-zombie. Marcus had held me and listened to the whole story after my escape, but after that one time it was clear the subject upset him, and so I’d stopped saying anything about it.

My phone rang. It was Marcus, but I wasn’t ready to talk to him yet. After a moment the ringing stopped and it dinged with the missed call alert. But he didn’t leave a voicemail, and I didn’t call him back.

Chapter 17

A sound woke me, a dull thumping, but without any particular rhythm or cadence. Early morning light filtered through the blinds, and I sat up, blinking away the remnants of uneasy sleep. The thumping sound repeated, and I looked down at the floor.

Water. Water everywhere. For a few precious seconds I thought that a water pipe had busted in the house. When I was about ten the pipe leading to the water heater had finally rotted through, and the entire back of the house ended up with an inch of water until my dad could shut it off.

But this was way more than an inch. At least a half foot of water covered the floor, lifting anything that could float. A shoebox rocked on its surface, bumping repeatedly into the dresser with a hollow thud.

Fear slashed through me as the implications sunk in. I jumped up out of bed and splashed through the ankle-deep water, then ran down the hall. “Dad! DAD!” Oh, please don’t let him be sleeping off a bender, I silently prayed. He’d be damn near impossible to wake up. “Dad!” I yelled. I shoved his door open, sending a wave rolling across the floor.

He jerked, blinked muzzily at me. “Wha…?”

“Wake up!” I slogged to the bed, grabbed his arm. “The house is flooding!” The water was halfway up my shin now.

He came fully awake in an instant, jerked upright. “Shit!”

“It’s rising fast,” I told him, still tugging at him. “Something must’ve happened to the spillway.”

“Hold on,” he said. “Keep your head together now. Go grab anything you can’t stand to lose.”

“That would be you,” I snarled.

He met my eyes, gaze clear and focused. Not sleeping off a bender at all, I realized. “I’m good, Angelkins.” He stood and began to paw through his nightstand. “Gimme a minute. I gotta get some stuff.”

I wanted to scream at him that we needed to go now, but I realized there was some stuff I needed to get, too. I splashed back to my bedroom, water up to my knees and halfway up the side of the mini-fridge in my room. Willing my hands not to shake, I spun the lock and put the combination in. Dad had been cool the past few months, but after the one horrible experience of him destroying my stash, I’d kept a lock on the fridge, just in case. But, damn, I hated it now.

On the second try I got the damn thing open, grabbed the five bottles of brain smoothie and tossed them onto the bed. Still at least a foot to go before that was underwater. My cargo pants were in the top drawer of my dresser, thankfully. Trying to pull on wet pants would’ve been a nightmare, and I didn’t really want to try and escape the flood in my pink underwear. I snagged a pair of pants out of the drawer, jumped onto the bed to tug them on, then shoved two bottles into each side pocket and zipped them shut. The fifth I slugged down as fast as I could. Best place to store brains right now was inside of me. Shoes were a lost cause though. I always dropped them on the floor, so who the hell knew where they were now. And the water had risen another half-foot at least in the two minutes I’d spent getting pants and brains. My phone was on top of the dresser, to my relief. I dumped out the contents of a Walmart bag and wrapped my phone in it as best I could, then shoved it in a front pocket. Finally I pulled on a jacket and headed out into the hallway.

“Dad!” I shoved my way through the now-thigh-high water. “We need to go!”

He was already by the door, pants on and also wearing a thin jacket. “C’mon,” he said, motioning me toward him and the door, urgency thick in his voice. “Maybe we can—”

“Dad,” I choked out, cutting him off, my eyes locked on the view out the window. He followed my gaze and sucked in a breath. The front yard and street beyond was a turbulent rush of water. If we went out there we’d be at the mercy of the vicious current. I was an okay swimmer and could most certainly survive drowning, but not my dad. No zombie parasite to get him through it, and he wasn’t a good swimmer at all.

I seized his hand. “Attic,” I told him, pulse racing a mile a minute. “We need to get to the roof.”

We shoved through the still-rising water, and then he had to boost me up to reach the broken cord for the attic access. The fold-down ladder was a scary and rickety thing, and, after a brief screaming match about who should go first, my dad made it almost to the top before it gave way on one side. He managed to get up the rest of the way, then I used a bit of zombie power to haul myself up the broken ladder and into the attic.

I expected it to be pitch dark up there, but my dad had a flashlight he now shone around.

“There was a flashlight up here?” I asked.

“Grabbed it from the kitchen,” he said. “Glad I did, but now I’m wishing I’d grabbed a crowbar or hatchet.”

“Only crowbar is in the shed out back,” I reminded him. Which was probably completely underwater at this point.

He scowled, but deep lines of worry framed his eyes. The water was still rising, steadily creeping up the ladder, and we both knew stories of people who’d drowned because they fled into their attics during Hurricane Katrina only to find themselves trapped. I knew people who lived in flood-prone areas who kept hatchets or axes in their attics so they could cut their way through the roof in a worst case scenario, but we’d never bothered to do anything like that. Why the hell would we? That sort of thing happened to other people. Not us.

Right.

My dad continued to sweep the flashlight beam around as if hoping a crowbar or hatchet would magically appear. “Damn flood coulda waited another couple of hours so I could get some damn sleep,” he grumbled.

I snorted in agreement, then moved to the slope of the roof and rapped my knuckles against the wood. The house was at least fifty years old, and hadn’t been reroofed within my memory, so maybe there was some nice convenient weak spot I could bust through.

I moved a bit farther down the attic, then flicked a quick glance back at my dad. He was crouched, pawing through boxes that had probably been up here for decades. While his back was turned, I took a deep breath, braced myself with a grip on a rafter, and kicked the plywood of the roof as hard as I could.

I felt a snap in my foot, and pain flared, but I managed to make a splintery dent in the plywood. Gritting my teeth against the pain, I kicked again, and succeeded in breaking through enough to see daylight, though I had to stop and take several deep breaths while I waited for the pain to dull. The third kick didn’t hurt nearly as much, though I felt something else break in my foot. Yet now a definite hole rewarded my efforts. I gave a feral smile of triumph and grabbed at the edge of the slight gap, pushing and ripping plywood and tar paper away. The sound of rushing water filtered through the hole, and a glance back at the attic entrance showed me that the water was almost to the top of the ladder.

It also showed my dad staring at me in shock. “Angel,” he said with a distinct tremor in his voice. “What the hell are you doing?”

For a brief moment I considered coming up with a lie. There was a hole in the roof already. Or It was a weak spot, super easy to get through. Aren’t we lucky? But instead I simply turned back to the hole. “Getting us out of here,” I said. I took hold of the edge of the plywood, ripped a long section away and tossed it aside. Light streamed into the attic, and now I saw blood smeared along the wood.

“Your hands,” he choked out.

I looked down. They were shredded and bleeding. A three-inch long splinter protruded from the edge of my left palm, and with a calm air I didn’t really feel, I pulled it out and dropped it to the attic floor while I tried to ignore the fact that it had been embedded well over an inch deep.

“What the hell’s going on, Angel?” he asked me, eyes meeting mine, silently pleading for a reasonable, sensible answer. Too bad I didn’t have one for him.

“It’s sort of a medical condition,” I said. That was almost the truth, right? I unzipped a side pocket of my pants and pulled a bottle out, slugged the contents down. I didn’t look at my dad, but I felt his eyes on me, watching, wary.

“That’s the shit you keep locked up in your room,” he stated. “What is it? Some kinda steroids?”