Buried Secrets. Evelyn Vaughn

Zack sat back in his chair. “I’m impressed.”

      She narrowed her eyes, suddenly less vulnerable. “I grew up with brothers, Mr. Lorenzo. I’m not exactly a frail flower. Anyway, it’s good money. Surface blasting pays well, underground blasting even better.”

      “And I said I’m impressed. So what happened?”

      “The insurance companies blamed it on an earthquake. I’m not sure what to believe. One minute I was walking along with Frank and Gil—and the second foreman, Diego—in the third-level tunnel. The next, we all just…stopped. Dead-still. It was eerie.” She swallowed, hard. “We looked at each other, without even knowing why. And then…”

      She shrugged, fidgeting with an unpainted fingernail, looking vulnerable again. And small. She was small—Zack had finally noticed that today. The sheriff didn’t walk small or talk small. But when she’d stood directly in front of him, at the door, the top of her white cowboy hat had barely reached his collarbone.

      He felt more comfortable when he thought of her as tough. As it was, when he prompted her—“And…?”—he felt like a bully.

      “And…” She narrowed her eyes, as though to recall the events as accurately as possible. Maybe she was tough after all. “I heard bits of dirt trickling onto our hardhats, and then the world exploded into this blast of dust, too dark to imagine….”

      He thought maybe he would shudder like a wet cat. Instead he suggested a less immediate description. “It caved in.”

      “Yeah,” she agreed gruffly. Her blunt lashes lifted long enough for her to meet his gaze with something like gratitude.

      Her eyes were blue. Pretty. Definitely a woman’s eyes.

      They both looked back at the table. “It was dark when I regained consciousness. Mr. Lorenzo, have you ever been underground with the lights out? The dark’s so thick, it’s as if you’ve been swallowed. You feel the weight of all that…that rock above you. I was trapped under something heavy, it turned out to be Gil—I think he must have thrown himself on top of me. I turned on my helmet-lamp and got loose and tried to help him, but…” She stopped again.

      “He died,” Zack finished.

      “And then Frank, and farther down the shaft…”

      Great. Resenting his chivalrous impulse, he still tried to nudge her past that particular catalog of corpses. “Did you find anyone alive?”

      “Diego.” But she didn’t look happy about that, either. “Just Diego. And he was badly hurt, though he pretended not to be. He kept insisting that the Safety Response Team would be pulling us out any minute. Then we both heard something. I turned to look—with the helmet light, I could only see one direction at a time—and it was Frank. His fingers were…they…”

      And she curled and uncurled her own small, solid fingers, to illustrate. Even without long nails or polish or rings, her hands were clearly female, too. Strong, but small.

      “Rigor mortis?” Zack suggested hopefully.

      “Except he got up. His neck was broken, and his skull was crushed. He shouldn’t have been able to get up, but he did. I told you that I probably imagined it….”

      It occurred to Zack that, if he wasn’t watching Josephine James tell this, he might agree. Even after four years of learning to see this stuff, looking for answers. Maybe she was making it up, or had imagined it all. The line between reality and perception was thinner than most folks admitted. And yet…

      He didn’t think so. Her face was pale, her jaw set, her eyes really still like she was focusing on the memory. “So at first I thought, Hey, Frank’s okay! Stupid, I know, but…I really wanted him to be okay. I went to him and took his arm, told him he needed to lie down and wait for emergency response. But his hand felt funny…fake. And his eyes were blank, blank like I’ve only seen on road-kill. It wasn’t Frank, anymore. And he…it tried to bite me….”

      She took a deep breath, still pale but otherwise determined. “I pulled loose and grabbed a pickax, and I told it to stay back, but it came at us—at Diego—so I swung. And…” Again, she shrugged. Clearly, she’d made sure Frank wouldn’t be getting up again, friend or not.

      Tough broad.

      “I think I would’ve thrown up,” she said, “but then Diego shouted a warning, and Gil grabbed me, so I…stopped him, too. Then I just sat there with Diego, waiting, talking about stupid, everyday stuff. He seemed worse, but I heard digging, so I knew we were being rescued.”

      Zack took a deep breath as he made more notes, then frowned at a thought and looked up at her. “Newspaper said you were pulled out unconscious.”

      Josephine James met his gaze evenly, “I was wrong. The digging wasn’t them coming to pull us out.”

      Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Zack stood, started to pace. “You had to fight more?” This was why women weren’t supposed to do dangerous stuff. This was why they should stay safe at home, like his mother and Nona did.

      Like Gabriella should have done. She’d died at home, but maybe if she hadn’t been going out, without him knowing…

      “One, mainly,” the sheriff insisted. “We had a strange driller working with us that summer—everyone called him Tio. Rumor was, he was some kind of mayombero, into the bad magic. Some of our crew quit rather than work for him. He wasn’t the one doing the digging, but I realized he was in control of them.”

      Them. “More zombies?” Zack asked, standing still now.

      “If that’s what they were. If it even really happened. They were things, not people. Not alive. I somehow knew Tio was the one who wouldn’t let them die. Don’t ask me how, but I did. I started to fight them off, and Diego managed to get up and stand in front of me, trying to protect me. I thought he’d recovered enough to help. But I was wrong about that, too.”

      Merciful God. “He died.” And turned on her.

      “I wasn’t thinking real clearly by then, but I knew I had to stop Tio. Even then I didn’t completely believe what he was doing, but there were so many….”

      “But you were just a girl.” Zack sank onto the bed at the idea of it. He felt sick. He hated hearing stories like this, watching innocents—women—suffer, unable to reach back in time and help or protect them.

      But damned if Sheriff Jo’s chin didn’t come up, if the agony didn’t ease from her gaze in place of grim pride. “A girl with explosives in her pack.”

      “You blew them up?”

      Jo kind of liked the way Zack Lorenzo stared at her—awed. Maybe finally telling the story, after so many years, robbed it of some of its power. Maybe having someone believe her was what did it. But suddenly, instead of the nightmare owning her, Jo owned the nightmare. She had survived, after all. No matter how awful, even if it had been real—and had it?—she’d survived.

      “I didn’t blow them up, exactly,” she clarified. “I dodged through the tunnel they’d come in, and I blew the wall.”

      Then she’d lost consciousness, buried in rubble. She hadn’t expected to survive—not the blast, not the toxic gas that explosives emit after detonation, not the…zombies. But miraculously, she’d come-to in the hospital, her older brother asleep in a chair beside her. Since he’d been in D.C. before the accident, she could only imagine how long she’d been out. At first she wondered if she was in an asylum, but no.

      Nobody but her seemed to realize that the corpses had died twice.

      Sitting here with Zack Lorenzo, the rest of the details—an uncle somehow killed while helping with the rescue, a reporter who appeared while she was still dopey from painkillers—finally eased, far more than when she’d just told herself she’d imagined it all. Jo didn’t believe she was done with the nightmares, of course. But maybe, just maybe, she might sleep for real,