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 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.
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.
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.
16. BEFORE
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.
17. NOW
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.
18. BEFORE
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.
19. NOW
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.