Stepping past the seals took a little more work. She’d stood on the sidewalk with the tips of her sneakers against the invisible line for almost five minutes, staring at the circular symbol ahead and to the right. Inside the Wall it was easy to tell herself she was safe, but out here, with chunks of meat and pale limbs scattered across the ward, she’d found herself wondering what it would feel like to catch fire and explode.
It was just like a high dive, she’d told herself. Just like being on the board. A hundred things could go wrong, but none of them really would. She could do it. Her team was counting on her to do it.
“I’m the Corpse Girl,” she told the exes around her. “It can’t see me. It can’t touch me.”
She closed her eyes and took three quick steps. There’d been a brief moment of panic, the knowledge she couldn’t go back. She squeezed her hands into fists, ready to fight however she could.
Nothing happened. An ex bumped against her and wandered past, its teeth clicking away. Another one tripped over the curb in front of her and sprawled on the sidewalk.
She’d found a bike with a rattling chain a block and a half from the Big Wall. Most of the bike’s owner was a few feet away, but she’d decided to skip the helmet. It took her an hour to get to the address.
Denny Avenue looked like a pleasant place. Yeah, there were a couple of dead bodies and a burned-out pickup truck, but the houses were nice and there were lots of trees. Even the exes shuffling in the street looked a little cleaner.
Hector’s grandfather lived in a cottage behind the main house. She followed the driveway around the building and found a garage and a tall wooden fence with a matching gate. There was a mailbox on the fence with the street number on it. She checked the address on her arm again and knocked the bike’s kickstand down.
Something thudded against the far side of the fence. It made Madelyn jump back from the gate, but she didn’t flinch at the second or third sound. She was getting into the whole “invisible to exes” thing. She stepped forward and flipped the latch.
An ex staggered out of the gate. It stumbled past her without a look and crashed into the parked bicycle. The bike fell over, but the ex managed to stay on its feet.
It had been an older man, an inch or two shorter than Madelyn. The bristly hair was the same gray as its skin. It was dried out and leathery, but still weighed twice as much as she did.
The dead thing had the same jaw and cheekbones as Hector. She decided right then to say she hadn’t seen any sign of the old man. She wouldn’t want to know her family was still walking around.
She left the ex standing in the driveway and walked through the gate. There was a flowerbed that had grown out into the small yard. A few cobblestones in the grass led up to the big wooden door. It swung open when she pushed on it.
She was looking for a wooden box three feet long and eight or nine inches square. It was padlocked shut. Hector thought it might have a little plaque on the lid, but he couldn’t remember for sure.
The cottage was small, and there weren’t too many places to hide something that size. Madelyn looked in both closets, under the bed, then went through each drawer of the dresser. She checked under the couch and behind the washer and dryer.
There was a loft above the washer, but it was just filled with dusty paperbacks. Hector’s grandfather had loved science fiction. She wondered how he’d felt when the dead started to walk.
The fridge was disgusting. The kitchen cabinets were jammed full of pots and pans of every size and a huge selection of dishes. She even looked in the dishwasher. Someone had run it before the end of the world. The glasses and silverware were still sparkling clean.
The cottage didn’t have a basement, which seemed weird to her. Growing up on the East Coast, almost everybody had a cellar. It just felt like the old man’s home was missing something important.
There wasn’t a real attic, either. She found a small hatch in the ceiling of the bedroom and got up into it with a footstool from the kitchen. Twenty minutes convinced her there was nothing but old clothes and Christmas decorations up there.
Madelyn checked her watches. She’d spent an hour biking into the Valley, and another hour searching the house so far. According to watch number two, sundown was in ninety-three minutes. And Max’s deadline was in four hours.
There was a small shed in the backyard, one of the ones that looked like a big Tupperware container, but it was nothing but garden tools and a lawn mower. She even tipped over a few bags of potting soil and fertilizer to make sure the box wasn’t hidden behind them. Nothing in the tight gap between the shed and the backyard fence, either.
Even though the garage was connected to the cottage, it didn’t have a connecting door. She tugged on the big door but it was locked. Or maybe the motor was holding it shut. She walked around the garage and found a side door opposite the cottage. It was also locked.
A quick trip back inside let her find the basket by the door. It had a very overdue parking ticket, some loose change, two key rings, and a small remote with a single button on it. Madelyn squeezed the remote a few times before she remembered the power had been off for a few years at this point.
Back outside she started testing the key
