One of them flew up and hit the bars of my cage and broke into chunks of tough orange plastic.
A shard hit me and cut my arm.
I wasn't sure if that was supposed to be a yes or a no.
Alone, I sat down on the bed and leaned against the cold cement wall.
John the Ghost knew more about walkers than I did.
I wondered if he'd told the truth: there was a moral code I had to follow to keep my abilities--which now seemed to include some sort of ability to control ghosts.
Though, with my indifferent success at it, I suspected it was something that you had to practice to get right.
I tried to figure out how that talent might help me get all of us prisoners out of there safely.
I was still fretting when I heard people coming down the stairs: visitors.
I stood up to welcome them.
The visitors were fellow prisoners.
And a zombie.
Amber was chattering away about Chad's next softball game as she led Corban, still obviously under thrall to the vampire, and Chad, who was following because there was nothing else for him to do.
He had a bruise on the side of his face that he hadn't had when I left him in the dining room.
"Now you get a good night's sleep," she told them.
"Jim's going to bed, too, as soon as he gets that fae locked back up where he belongs.
We don't want you to be tired when it's time to get up and be doing." She held the door open as if it were something other than a cage--did she think it was a hotel room? Watching the zombie was like watching one of those tapes where they take bits that someone actually said and piece them together to make it sound like they were talking about something else entirely.
Sound bites of things Amber would have said came out of the dead woman's mouth with little or no relation to what she was doing.
Corban stumbled in and stopped in the middle of the cage.
Chad ran past his mother's animated corpse and stopped, wide-eyed and shaking next to the bed.
He was only ten, no matter how much courage he had.
If he survived this, he'd be in therapy for years.
Assuming he could find a therapist who'd believe him.
Your mother was a what? Have some Thorazine ...
Or whatever the newest drug of choice was for the mentally ill.
"Oops," said Amber, manically cheerful.
"I almost forgot." She looked around and shook her head sadly.
"Did you do this, Mercy? Char always said that you both suited each other because you were slobs at heart." As she was talking, she gathered up the buckets-- though she didn't bother cleaning up the broken one--and stacked most of them where they had been.
She took one and put it inside Chad and Corban's cage before removing the used one in the corner.
"I'll just take this up and clean it, shall I?" She locked the door.