Shadow Walkers (2 page)

I stepped behind one giant rock, then another, then another. The waves splashing against the beach seemed bigger now—a fishing boat must’ve passed by just off-shore, but I hadn’t seen or heard it go by.

I was in a full-fledged panic now. I remembered the chill, the certainty that something terrible was about to occur, and it made me gasp all over again.

I stepped behind one more boulder.

And there was Gilbert, sitting on his haunches staring into a tidal pool. The tide pool itself was completely still even as a wave crashed against a rock not five feet away.

He barely looked up at me. “There’s a crab with only one claw,” he said.

I was so relieved I couldn’t bring myself to speak, much less yell at him. Instead, I turned toward the open water, looking out at the darkening sky.

A cold breeze suddenly blew in off the bay, but I didn’t shiver. Whatever had caused the chill I’d felt before, it had been a lot colder than this.

The first thing that strikes you about being on an island like Hinder is the sounds. There are a lot fewer of them, so you notice more of the ones you hear.

As Gilbert and I rode our bikes back home from Trumble Point, I couldn’t help but listen to the sounds of the island.

Unseen squirrels chirped in the woods.

A breeze rustled through the leaves of the trees.

A horn blasted from an approaching ferry.

I could never figure out why the sound of the ferry carried the way it did. The landing was way at the north end of the island. As a result, that’s where most of the people lived. But Gilbert and I lived with our grandparents in an old farmhouse toward the south end of the island, a ten-minute bike ride from Trumble Point. The whole area had once been an apple orchard. Most of it had been reclaimed by forest, but many of the old apple trees lived on, their trunks getting knottier, their unpruned branches growing ever more wild. Some of them still grew apples in the fall, but they were now too small and too sour to eat.

I still hadn’t forgotten that strange chill I’d felt back at the point—or the scare I’d had when I’d thought Gilbert was missing. But the closer we got to home, the more that all seemed like a distant memory.

A dock creaked down along the water beyond the trees.

A hummingbird buzzed by right in front of my bike.

And angry voices rose up from the front porch of the house across the street from our grandparents.

“Margaret!” one voice said, a man. “Be reasonable. Do you have any idea how much that thing cost?”

“So buy him a new one!” another voice said, a woman. “If he wants to keep it here, he’s keeping it here, and that’s final.”

“At this point, I’ve lost track of how many ways you’re violating the terms of our custody agreement!”

“You’re one to talk about violating agreements.”

You could count the houses of our neighbors on one hand. These voices were coming from the house of Gilbert’s best friend, a six-year-old boy named Billy who lived there with his mother. His parents were divorced, and his father didn’t live on the island anymore. But due to some weird wording on the custody agreement, the mother had worked it so that if the father wanted to see his son, he had to take the ferry all the way out to the island to pick Billy up at her house, then later bring him all the way back home again.

For this and many other reasons, they now hated each other with a passion—and that hatred often dissolved into screaming matches on the front porch of the house.

Like I said, everyone on the island knew everyone else’s business, including me.

———

At least I had the Internet.

If an island was a place of endless dead ends, the Internet was the exact opposite: a world without limits. You could go anywhere at any time. Better still, you could do it from the comfort of your own bedroom.

The first thing I did when I got home, even before I took off my shoes, was to go up to my bedroom so I could update my profile status. I’d have done it out at Trumble Point with my phone, but there wasn’t any service that far south.

I thought about writing about that weird chill I’d felt, that premonition or whatever. But a bigger part of me was determined to forget all about it. Besides, I could never write it in such a way that people would truly understand.

I also thought about writing what had happened to Gilbert, but I didn’t particularly want to be reminded about that either.

Gilbert and I just got back from the beach
, I wrote.
Wounded Wolf was there fishing. Shirtless. OMFG.

Wounded Wolf was the nickname I’d given Matt. I wasn’t about to call him by his real name, not where someone on the island might see. The first time I’d mentioned him, I’d said he reminded me of a wolf caught in a trap, and the name had just kind of stuck. Plus, there was that whole piercing-brown-eyes thing.

Then I started uploading a video Gilbert and I had taken of some centipedes scurrying around under this rotten stump. Most of the people I knew online lived in the city, so I figured if I was forced to live on Hinder Island, I could at least share a little bit of nature with them. It was just one of my “things.”

By the time the video was uploaded, the comments started coming in fast and furious about my profile update.

Photos!
Kelsey commented.
We wanna see Wounded Wolf shirtless!

LOL,
I wrote.
Didn’t take any. I may be a perv, but not that much of one.

A text box popped up in my window.

Details!
Smuggler16 wrote.
We want details!

I laughed out loud for real this time.

I take back what I said about not having any friends. Maybe I didn’t have any on Hinder Island, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have any friends at all. They were just the online kind. True, I’d never met any of them in person, but I’d known a couple of them since before my parents died.

These were people who accepted me the way I was, including the whole gay thing. My grandparents weren’t Neanderthals, but they were in their seventies, and that was a conversation I just did not want to be having with them any time soon. And the rest of Hinder Island? Please. The island was only a couple of miles from the mainland, from the south end of Tacoma, with Seattle thirty miles to the north. But it might as well have been a whole ocean.

Sometimes it was like the life I lived online was the real one, and my life on Hinder Island, that was the fake one.

I started filling in the requested details about Matt’s body—I still hadn’t gotten a chance to upload some photos I’d taken of a starfish eating a clam—when there was a knock on my door.

“Come in,” I said.

It was my grandparents. Together. That was a little weird. But even so, I barely glanced over at them.

“Zach?” my grandpa said.

“We need to talk to you,” my grandma said.

“Go for it,” I said.

“We need to you to stop typing,” my grandpa said.

“And give us your full attention,” my grandma said.

My grandparents said this a lot. They hated how much time I spent on the computer. They were always saying how there were all these bad people online.

“There’s so much evil in the world,” my grandmother would say. “Why would you want to bring that into your bedroom?”

My grandfather would always agree. “That’s why we live here on Hinder,” he’d say. “So we don’t have to worry about that kind of stuff.”

When it came to anything off-island, my grandparents had always been the nervous types, but ever since my parents had been killed, they’d been more paranoid than ever. It had been over a year since I’d bothered arguing with them about any of this.

I stopped typing. I didn’t want my grandparents seeing anything suspicious on my profile, so I turned off the monitor. Then I turned and gave them my full attention.

As grandparents go, mine were okay. I’m sure they hadn’t expected to be raising kids again, not in their seventies. Still, they were fit and active. After a lifetime of being together, they’d even started to look like each other. They now had just about the same amount of thinning white hair. And over the years, my grandma had put on some pounds and my grandpa had lost a few inches of height, so they were now both almost the same size. If you didn’t know any better, you might think they were twins—maybe even twins of the same sex.

Just like twins, they also had this habit of finishing each other’s sentences.

“It’s Thursday, Zachary,” my grandpa said.

“Garbage day,” my grandma said.

I forgot to take the garbage out
, I thought. We had to keep the garbage in the garage because of raccoons, and on garbage day, it was my job to haul it down to the curb for the collectors. Today had been garbage day, but Gilbert and I had left for Trumble Point on our bikes before I’d gotten around to it.

“We don’t ask you to do a lot around here,” my grandma said.

“But it’s really important that you do that,” my grandpa said.

“Because you didn’t do it today, your grandfather had to,” my grandma said. “And it’s far too heavy for him, and he fell down and skinned his knee.”

“Mary, I’m fine,” my grandpa said.

“That’s not the point!” my grandma said.

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I totally forgot. Gilbert and I rode our bikes out to—”

“It seems like you forget a lot,” my grandpa said.

“Not that much,” I said.

“We’re at our wits end trying to get you to remember,” my grandma said.

“But we think you might be more likely to if you’re punished,” my grandpa said.

“As of tonight, we want you off your computer for one week,” my grandma said.

It took a second for the words to sink in. No computer? For a whole week? They couldn’t be serious.

“And your phone too,” my grandpa said. “If you need to make a call, you can use the line in the house.”

“But—” How did I explain to them what a big deal this was to me? Without the computer, without contact with my friends, being on Hinder Island would be like being in prison.

“It’s just as well,” my grandma said. “It’s just not right, how you’re always on that thing. It’s going to lead to something bad, I just know it.”

That’s when I knew there was nothing I could say to change their minds. They’d been looking for an excuse to take my computer away anyway.

“And if this kind of thing ever happens again,” my grandpa said, “we’ll take your phone and your computer away for good.”

———

But just because my grandparents had made up their minds, that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to
try
to change them. Of course no matter how I tried to talk them into a different punishment, they wouldn’t listen. All my arguing was just proof that they’d stumbled upon a punishment that might really have an impact on me.

After a while, even Gilbert pulled me aside. “Zach?” he said to me, with all the maturity of his seven years. “Give it up. You’re just making it worse.”

To make things even more dire, we didn’t have a television—it had been hard enough talking them into getting me an Internet connection. I’d never really cared that we didn’t have TV because I watched everything online or on my phone, but what was I going to do now for the next week?

“Why don’t we all play a game of hearts?” my grandma said after dinner.

The offline world can’t be
that
boring
, I thought.

On Hinder Island, it could.

“I’m going up to my room,” I said, which is exactly what I did.

But once I got there, I realized there wasn’t anything more interesting there either, not with my computer out. My bedroom had been my dad’s when he was a kid, and it hadn’t really changed since then. It had the same saggy bed he’d slept in, with a couple of torn STP stickers stuck to the headboard. There was a matching nightstand and dresser, but a different desk, much older with darker wood, some kind of antique. And he’d tacked a poster from the 1980s movie
Poltergeist
to the wall, though it was now pretty faded.

It was funny. I’d never really noticed how little I’d changed the room since moving in with my grandparents two years earlier. Partly it was the fact that I spent most of my life online, so I didn’t really care what my room looked like. But it was also the way Gilbert and I had ended up here after our parents had been killed. My grandparents had never really talked about it, never officially said to us, “We’re going to raise you now. This is your new home.” As a result, it had always kind of felt like I was living in one of their spare bedrooms. I’d never really thought about it before, but maybe this was part of the reason why I spent so much time online.

I paced around my bedroom for a while until I was almost desperate enough to go back and join my grandparents for that game of hearts, but then I heard the creaking of old pipes and squeaking of old floorboards as my grandpa started getting a bath ready for Gilbert.

Shortly after that, my grandparents got themselves ready for bed, too. A few minutes later, the squeaks and creaks stopped. It wasn’t even nine o’clock at night, and the rest of the house had already gone to bed. Did they do this every night? I’d never noticed.