Chapter 271: Back to the Boardwalk [3]

“W—Wait, Cindy…hyaa!”

The shriek that came out of Daisy was genuinely high pitched enough that a few heads turned along the beach.

“What was that, Daisy?” Cindy laughed, already scooping both hands through the water and launching another arc of it directly at her.

“That’s because you keep—haaah…no!*” Daisy threw both arms up in front of her face, flinching away from the incoming spray, her glasses going crooked from the movement. Her feet were planted knee-deep in the Atlantic, the hem of her skirt already damp at the edges despite her best efforts to keep it out of the water, and she was fighting a losing battle on every front.

Cindy was relentless. She’d dragged Daisy in with the cheerful unstoppable energy she deployed when she’d decided something was happening and wasn’t taking objections, and now she was making full use of the situation — scooping and launching, scooping and launching, laughing at Daisy’s every attempt to dodge.

Daisy was awful at dodging. She’d tense up right before each splash came, squeezing her eyes shut and turning her whole body sideways like that would help, and then the water would hit her anyway and she’d make another noise that had no business being as cute as it was. But underneath all the awkward flinching and the nervous yelping, something else was happening too — she was laughing. Quietly at first, trying to contain it, but it kept breaking through every time Cindy did something particularly ridiculous.

Daisy had almost certainly never done this before. Not properly. Clearly the kind of girl who spent her school years being shielded by Elena and Alisha from people who wanted to make her uncomfortable didn’t tend to accumulate a lot of easy beach memories. This was probably new in several directions at once.

Cindy knew exactly what she was doing. I’d give her that.

A handful of Marlon’s people were scattered along the sand nearby — not many, maybe six or seven, taking advantage of the August sun.

Most of them were watching the two girls in the water with varying degrees of amusement. The amusement on the men’s faces had a different quality to it than the women’s, but everyone was keeping their distance and not making it anyone’s problem, so I left it alone.

I was standing back on the dry sand with my hands in my pockets, watching.

Not the most dignified post in the world — standing on a beach like a bodyguard while two girls threw water at each other — but I felt better being there. Neither of them had come here to fight. Cindy had Dullahan and could handle herself if something turned sideways, but Daisy had nothing except the people around her, and in a community we didn’t fully know yet, surrounded by men who were looking at her the way some of them were, I’d rather be close.

“You’re not going in?”

Maribel appeared beside me, coming back from wherever she’d gone to speak to one of her people. She stopped at my shoulder and looked out at the water.

“Didn’t come here to splash around,” I said.

“You don’t sound fun at all,” she said.

“Right back at you,” I replied.

She looked at me sideways.

“You just thought something rude didn’t you,” she said. Flat. Not quite a question.

I glanced at her. “I thought you seemed more in your element dealing with Infected than standing on a beach. That’s all.”

“That’s—” She stopped and glared. “That’s still rude.”

“You nearly killed me the first time we met,” I said. “I think rude is relative at this point.”

“T…That was a misunderstanding and you know it,” she said, the tips of her ears going slightly red as she crossed her arms.

“Lucky I had quick reflexes or it would have been a very permanent misunderstanding,” I said.

She went visibly uncomfortable, pulling her arms tighter, looking out at the water instead of at me. “You weren’t exactly normal either. You moved like—”

“Like a monster,” I finished. “Yeah, you said.”

“I was going to say like nothing I’d seen before,” she corrected, though not very convincingly.

“And then I saved Shannon’s life,” I said looking at her with a meaningful glance. “And yours. And you even called me a superhero, remember?

“Forget about that!” She snapped, loud enough that one of the nearby Boardwalk residents glanced over briefly.

I smiled and let it go, shifting my eyes back toward the water.

Daisy had found her footing. She was scooping water back at Cindy now with considerably less technique but considerable enthusiasm, both hands working, laughing properly — the quiet self-consciousness she’d been dragging around all morning temporarily gone. Cindy stumbled back exaggeratedly from the counterattack, shrieking with laughter, and Daisy stood up straighter in the water looking genuinely pleased with herself for approximately three seconds before Cindy recovered and launched the biggest wave yet.

The shriek that followed was impressive.

“Did you speak to Marlon?” I asked, without looking away from them. “About us settling nearby, did you talk to him and the others like we discussed?”

Back then when I told here about Emily and our intentions of staying in Atlantic City actually I requested her to speak to Marlon ahead of time so the news would become less surprising for them eventually.

“As expected, you went ahead and settled right next to us,” Maribel said. “Bold move, putting yourselves right on our doorstep.”

“You noticed the movement?”

“Hard not to. Lot of activity, lot of noise. Some people here thought it might be Callighan pushing closer.” She paused. “There was talk about going to check it out armed.”

“Glad that didn’t happen,” I said. “I can already see you starting a massacre and asking next if we were with Callighan.”

“We’re not trigger happy,” she said, a note of defensiveness coming in.

“Rico nearly put a bullet in us the first time we knocked,” I said.

“Well…we’d just lost people to Callighan’s men.” Her voice lost some of its edge, replaced with something heavier. “Everyone was wound tight. Still are, honestly.”

“Still are,” I agreed, glancing at her.

She nodded slowly. Her eyes stayed on the water but she wasn’t really watching Cindy and Daisy anymore — she was somewhere else, turning something over behind her expression.

“It’s hard,” she said after a moment, quieter than before. “Sleeping here, living here, knowing they’re not far. Knowing that any night they could just come through and start shooting and we wouldn’t get much warning.” Her hands had come together, fingers pressing into her knuckles. “You stop sleeping properly. You stop relaxing properly. Even on a day like this—” she gestured at the beach, the sun, the water, “—some part of you is listening for something that isn’t there yet.”

I understood it completely.

Back in Jackson Township we’d lived under the same kind of weight — that constant background awareness of something dangerous existing just outside the walls, capable of coming through at any moment. Except our enemies had been Starakians with technology and Hybrid Infected that made everything we’d built look like it was made of cardboard. The kind of threat that didn’t negotiate and didn’t tire and didn’t care about anything we thought gave us an advantage.

And yet somewhere between then and now, something had shifted in us. The fear was still there — I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise — but it sat differently. Less sharp. More like background noise than a constant alarm. Maybe it was what Jackson Township had done to us, surviving something that catastrophic and still being standing on the other side of it. Maybe when you’ve already seen the worst thing happen and you’re still breathing, the anticipation of the next disaster loses some of its grip.

The Starakians themselves had gone quiet as well, which was its own kind of unsettling. Not even a week since Jackson Township fell and there’d been nothing — no movement, no pressure, no sign they were pushing toward any of us. Part of me wanted to read that as breathing room. The more honest part kept picking at it like a loose thread, because an enemy that goes silent after a failure isn’t necessarily an enemy that’s given up. Sometimes they’re just regrouping.

And the failure had been real. Wanda was still with us. None of the Dullahan hosts had been taken or killed. By any objective measure, their operation in Jackson Township had come apart.

But Emily was still out there. Still in danger. The Starakians hadn’t stopped wanting Dullahan, that hadn’t changed which meant they hadn’t stopped seeing her as the main target. Whatever the silence meant, it wasn’t safety for her.

I pushed it back down. Not the time.

“We’re not a threat to you,” I said to Maribel, keeping my voice easy. “Whatever people here are worried about, your neighbor isn’t going to come over that barricade in the middle of the night looking for trouble. I can promise you that.”

“Some here don’t believe it,” she said.

“What about you?” I asked.

She looked at me directly for a moment then she shook her head.

“No,” she said. “You saved Shannon. You saved me. And when you talked about that girl who got taken, you weren’t performing. That was real.” She paused. “I can’t speak for everyone in your group, but you specifically no. I don’t think you’re a threat.”

“All any of us want is peace,” I said. “Genuinely.”

“There won’t be any real peace in Atlantic City while Callighan’s still around here,” she said, raising an eyebrow at me. “You know that right?”

“Yeah,” I said, after a moment. “I know.”

She looked at me like that answer surprised her, like she’d expected deflection or some version of it not being our problem. Before, maybe it wouldn’t have been. When we’d first arrived in Atlantic City the priority had been simple, to not get get pulled into someone else’s war.

But that was before Mei got taken. Before one of Margaret’s people got killed. Before sixty civilians started sleeping under a roof that I’d had a hand in securing.

And i had a realization.

If I wanted to eventually leave this place with Margaret’s community intact and safe and go to Europe for Elena, I had to leave it actually safe. Not just less dangerous. Actually safe.

That meant without Callighan.

“Well well well.”

A voice rang from behind us.

Molly was walking toward us, her expression already set to amused. She looked between me and Maribel.

“Finally found yourself a man to talk to, Maribel?” she said.

“Oh, not this again,” Maribel muttered groaning.

“I’m just saying! I come down here and find you two standing together all quiet and serious like you’re in a drama—”

“We were having a conversation, Molly.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said.” Molly’s grin held and she shifted her eyes to me, something sharper moving through the amusement. “It hasn’t been that long, boy. But you look different already. Something happened?”

“A lot happened,” I said simply.

She studied me for another second, then nodded once — accepting the answer without pushing it.

“Come on then. Marlon’s ready for you.”

I turned toward the water and raised my hand.

“Cindy! Daisy!”

Two heads turned from the shallows. A beat, then both of them started wading back toward the shore, Daisy moving carefully to keep her balance, Cindy wringing water from her hair as she walked.

“Finally time to meet the man in charge?” Cindy grinned as she reached me, reaching down for her sandals.

Then I looked at her properly and my stomach dropped.

Her white summer top — thin fabric, summer weight — was completely soaked through. The wet material was pressed flat against everything underneath it, her bra clearly visible through it, the outline of her completely transparent in the direct sunlight. Not only her bra, we could see as if she was just wearing bikinis. She hadn’t noticed yet. She was still smiling at me, waiting for an answer.

“Ryan?” Daisy said, catching my expression first.

I was already moving. I took off my red checkered shirt, unbuttoning it, crossed the two steps between us, and wrapped it around Cindy’s shoulders before she’d fully processed what was happening.

“Ha?” She looked down.

Then she understood.

The color hit her face fast and hard, rushing from her neck upward, and she pulled the shirt tighter across her front with both hands. “Oh…oh god—”

“How long were you planning walking around like that?” I asked.

“I didn’t… I wasn’t paying attention…” She started.

“It’s fine,” I said quickly, reaching for the front of the shirt. “Just…hold still.”

I started doing the buttons up from the bottom, working my way up, Cindy standing very still with her chin slightly tucked, looking down at what my hands were doing. The shirt was mine so it hung well past her hips on her, the sleeves falling past her hands, and once the buttons were done up to about the middle it covered everything that needed covering and then some.

I did the last button I was planning to do and looked up.

She was already looking at me.

Close. Still. Her face still flushed, lips slightly parted, the shirt hanging loose around her with my hands resting on the front of it. Neither of us said anything for a second.

“J…Just… be careful,” I said, my own voice stuttering a bit.

I stepped back.

Cindy’s hand caught my arm before I’d fully cleared the distance.

“You don’t like other people seeing my body,” she said. Not a question. Her voice was low enough that it was just for me.

“Obviously,” I said, glancing briefly at Daisy, who was standing just behind Cindy and had clearly seen and heard the whole thing with her eyes slightly wide. “You and Daisy both. Anyone.”

“Hm,” Cindy said, and something in her expression shifted. “I don’t like it either.”

“Good,” I said. “You shouldn’t.”

“Not about me,” she said, dropping her voice further, her eyes flicking briefly down and back up. “About you.” She tilted her head toward my shoulders and arms, now only covered by the black tank top I had underneath. “We can see enough.”

I stared at her.

“I’m not… that’s completely different, Cindy—”

“Is it?” She said, and the corner of her mouth moved.

“Please,” I said. “I’m begging you.”

I was having hard time resisting her and just wanted to take her.

Cindy held the expression for another two full seconds, enjoying it thoroughly then smiled and released my arm and stepped back. “Okay.”

I exhaled.

The tension broke and I turned before my face could give anything else away.

“You’re alright, Daisy?” I asked, shifting my voice back to normal.

“Y—Yes!” Daisy said immediately, pulling her attention back from wherever it had been. “I have a shirt underneath so I’m fine, nothing showing.”

“Good,” I said. I turned toward Molly and Maribel.

Both of them were looking at me.

Molly had one eyebrow raised and an expression that suggested she was actively revising her understanding of the situation she’d walked into.

Maribel was harder to read but she was definitely looking.

Maybe I should have just thrown the shirt to Cindy from a distance…

“We’re ready,” I said, as normally as I could manage. “Lead the way.”

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