Into the Shadows

by Jason D. Morrow

  “Remi, I never meant for things to be this way,” he says.

  “And yet, you were the one who made the choices,” I tell him.

  I get up from the table, wincing as pain shoots up and down my leg. I grab Evie’s hand and she starts to walk with me out of the room.

  “Where are you going?” Paxton asks.

  “We’re going to try and find a way out of here,” I tell him. I look at Evie and tell her to wait in the hallway. I stand in the doorway just a few feet away from her. She can’t see Paxton, and he can’t see her. “Evie’s destiny is important. It’s my job to make sure that she’s safe, no matter the cost.”

  “Let me talk to her,” he pleads. “I want her to know that she has family—that her grandfather loves her.”

  I shake my head. “I can’t let you do that.”

  Paxton’s face turns very grim. “Why not?”

  “Why confuse her? She doesn’t know you. She won’t understand.”

  “But she’s my granddaughter.”

  His brow is sweating, his hands shaking. He seems nervous except for his face. His face seems calm. Even after all the things he has put me through, it’s hard for me to see him like this. Only a man faced with his own mortality knows exactly what he wants.

  This is what Paxton wants.

  I let out a deep breath and turn to Evie in the hallway. I would crouch down to meet her eyes, but the pain in my leg already makes me want to scream. “Evie. The man in here wants to say something to you.”

  She looks up at me, almost as if to ask what he wants, but she then looks forward and takes a few bold steps until she’s in the room. Tears return to Paxton’s eyes.

  “Hey there, little one,” he says. He looks up at me briefly and swallows. I want to tell him to keep it brief, but how can I deprive a dying man of seeing his granddaughter for the first and last time? “I know you don’t know who I am,” he says, “but I want to let you know that you are someone very special to me. Ever since I learned about you, I’ve wanted to meet you.”

  Evie stares at him. I know he wants her to say something back, but what could she say? She doesn’t know him or trust him. To her, he’s just another grownup out of all the other grownups that have been around her.

  “I love you, Evie,” Paxton says.

  He wants to hug her, but he knows I won’t allow it. I know the greyskin virus can only be passed through fluids, but I’m not taking a chance.

  “Okay, Evie,” I say. “We have to go.”

  She turns to me and takes me by the hand.

  “Thank you for helping me with the wound,” I say. I feel so weird about this. I thought the next time I saw Paxton we’d be shooting at each other again.

  I turn to leave when he stops me.

  “Remi, wait,” he says. He bites at his lower lip and looks away from me. “I don’t want to be thought of as a coward, but I wish you’d do it for me.”

  “Do what?” I ask.

  He holds up his pistol and shakes his head. “I can’t do it to myself. But I don’t want to turn into one of those things.”

  I’ve been there, though I’ve never been infected. Over a month ago I found myself in a place where the greyskins had me trapped. I was less than a second from pulling the trigger and blowing my brains out. But I was rescued.

  There is no rescue for the infected.

  I take a deep breath and look down at Evie. “Go out into the hallway,” I tell her. “I want you to close your eyes tight, and hold your ears, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you know how to hold your ears where you don’t hear anything?” I ask.

  Evie nods.

  “Do that, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Evie walks out into the hallway as I asked. Her eyes close tightly and she puts two fingers in her ears. The life she has to live as a child sickens me. I want to throw up. When I turn to look at Paxton, he’s kneeling on the floor, his back straight. He stares straight ahead into the hallway at Evie.

  “I never thought I’d see her,” he says. “Shadowface told me that when I killed you and Gabe, Evie would be brought to me. Next time I talked to Shadowface, I was told that Evie had been killed in Elkhorn before they could get to her.” He shakes his head. “I wish I would have listened to you, Remi. If I would have, I wouldn’t be kneeling on the ground like this.”

  I pull back the chamber of the pistol, and Paxton jumps at the clicking noise, shutting his eyes quickly. He opens them to look up at me.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I was wrong and I’m sorry.”

  Standing about a foot away from him, I hold the gun in front of his forehead.

  “If you think I want to do this, you’re wrong,” I say.

  “You wouldn’t be wrong to feel that way.”

  “I don’t.”

  “If I weren’t infected, I would help in the fight against Shadowface. I swear I would now.”

  “I believe you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you ready?”

  His body is shaking as sweat drips down his face and neck.

  “Yes,” he says, taking one last look at Evie before closing his eyes.

  Before I pull the trigger, I close my eyes too.

  Chapter 23 - Waverly

  The sewers are not meant for traveling. That’s why we’re taking them. We get to the pool easily enough—the one where I saw Amber shot to death. It makes me shiver to think that her body could still be underneath the black water, rotting away. The four of us—Jeremiah, Stephen, Ethan, and I—are waist-deep in the mucky water, safely away from the greyskins and soldiers that are making a wreck of Anchorage.

  Jeremiah holds a bag over his head as he sloshes forward. He said it is full of charges in case we need to blow something up. I look at the pipe that I had crawled through in my escape, thinking he might have to use a charge to blow up the metal grate that Amber and I had to squeeze through. But when I see it, I can tell that someone must have already sawed through the grate, or blown it up already because it’s no longer there. Perhaps it happened when the guards were looking for me.

  Filthy, stinking water gushes out as we climb up into the long, metal pipe. Once inside, I stand up straight but everyone else has to dip their heads a little.

  “How many turns will we have to make?” Jeremiah asks, strapping the bag to his back.

  “Just one,” I say. “And then we have to climb up. You might have to use your explosives to blow up the hatch that leads into the building.”

  He nods at me, motioning me with his gun to lead the way. I grip my own handgun tightly, as nervous shaking starting to take over my limbs. I glance at Ethan, but he only stares straight ahead almost like he doesn’t want to look at me.

  As the dirty water gushes at our feet, we move forward slowly. Images from last week flash through my brain. Greyskins. Amber. This is the last place in the world that I want to be. The month I spent here was horrible, though it wasn’t nearly as hard on me as it was on Amber. It would have been better, even just, had Amber survived rather than I. She suffered so much in this place—the constant beatings, the torture. I wish there was something I could have done to save her. Most of all I wish I had never gained this power within me. Strangely enough, I miss the old way of life—before I knew about Shadowface, before I ran into those raiders. I miss Lucas. I miss surviving together. Life was much more simple when we were searching for a place to settle, though it seemed just as uncertain as now. I suppose we would have run into Shadowface at some point anyway. But if my powers really reside in my blood as Jeremiah says, then I guess it would have manifested itself eventually.

  At least now I’m in a position to finish this. Somehow I’m going to change the future. Mike and Jenna are gone now. I suppose that means I changed something—that I altered that particular future. Maybe it was when I lied to Olivia about what I saw. If I would have just told her the truth about the vision, things would have played out differently. Then again, I can�
��t beat myself up over it because I don’t know if that’s the case. I might never know. But I still have a chance to change what I saw. Somehow I can kill Jeremiah and Olivia. Evie won’t have to give up her life one day to try and stop Jeremiah. She and many others will be spared his treacherous plans; his cannibalistic tendencies. There will be no need for an uprising.

  Several long minutes pass by, as the sound of gunfire and wailing is replaced by rushing water. Stephen uses his flashlight to help us see a few feet ahead and it isn’t long before we spot the first set of greyskins. Five of them. They charge at the light, but quick gunshots bring them down. When they fall, we’ve got to step over them as their bodies float toward us. I can’t help but think that one of them might not have been shot in the head and will grab my foot to take a bite as I walk by, but this doesn’t happen.

  We walk in silence for several minutes. I know that we’re looking for a landing joining two tunnels. There will be a red light above the floor. Once there, we will cross it and head the opposite direction until we come to a hatch. We are either going at a very slow pace or something is wrong. I haven’t seen the landing yet and I feel like we should have been there by now. How could I have missed it?

  Jeremiah questions me about it a couple of times, but I am only able to tell him that we are nearly there and that he needs to be patient.

  “Patience isn’t a luxury I can afford,” he snaps.

  If he is the kind of man that I have seen in the visions, then I know I have to be careful once we’re into the main part of the building. Once he figures out where Olivia is, he will no doubt try to kill me. It might be easier to just kill him now, but honestly, I don’t know what sort of influence he might have over Ethan or Stephen. Once upon a time I could trust both of them, but Ethan has been determined to help Jeremiah from the beginning and Stephen has been walking around as numb as a greyskin. I don’t think Ethan would try to hurt me, but I can’t risk it. Once we’re close, I can point my gun at them. Until then, I just have to watch my back and make sure Jeremiah lets me get that far before he tries to kill me.

  I finally see the red light in the distance. “There,” I say. “We’ll go on the landing and into the next tunnel. Then we should see the hatch soon.”

  “Good,” Jeremiah says.

  “This stench is giving me a headache,” Stephen says.

  “Come on,” Jeremiah says.

  After we pass the landing, we seem to get to the hatch quickly. We reach the ladder and my stomach feels like it’s tumbling over itself. Coming down to try and escape was hard enough. Going back up almost feels impossible.

  Jeremiah looks at me and then at the ladder. “This is where you were kept for a month?”

  I nod at him. “In one of the rooms up above.”

  “You’re not going back to your cell,” he says. “Look at today as revenge for your mistreatment here.”

  I’ve seen the future. I’ve seen who gets revenge. I’ve seen that Olivia shoots Jeremiah through the chest. I know that I’m supposed to rush in after the noise and that she will then shoot me. What he doesn’t know is that I know how my ability works because of this place. Because of my time here, I can be confident in trying to change the intended future. For a month, that is all I have done every single day. I know we are going to make it to Shadowface. He knows he’s going to make it to Shadowface. But what he doesn’t know is that he is marching to his death.

  But I have to be careful. I can’t wait to step in after she kills Jeremiah because that will mean I will die too. But if I can stop her from killing him, then it will be up to me to finish them both. By keeping Jeremiah alive, I am assured to have both of them in the same room. Then I will have a better chance of ending all of this.

  “After you,” Jeremiah says.

  I look at Ethan for some encouragement but am offered none. I shake my head and turn away from him, looking up the ladder. With each rung, I feel like I’m ascending to my end. When I get to the top, it is as I feared. The latch is sealed.

  “No matter,” Jeremiah says when I get back down to the bottom. “That’s what I brought the charges for.”

  “Well, you better hurry,” Stephen says, looking down toward the hall. He looks back at the rest of us, his face white. “Greyskins are coming this way.”

  Jeremiah wastes no time as Ethan, Stephen, and I stand guard at the bottom, flashlights and guns held high.

  “Wait until they get close,” Stephen says. “We can’t waste ammo.”

  Their grunts and biting teeth are almost too much for me to bear right now. As they clamber forward, I take aim at one’s head, firing off a round and dropping it into the water. The sound of gunfire is deafening in the tunnels. We kill about seven of them before we hear Jeremiah coming down the ladder behind us.

  “Everybody take cover!” he yells.

  All of us slam up against the side of the tunnel, hands over our ears until the blast rocks us. A few of the greyskins that were coming after us are knocked off their feet, but there is no time to see if they will get back up. Jeremiah yells for me to get up the ladder first and he follows closely behind with Ethan and Stephen still shooting beneath us. Once in the room and out of the tunnel, I instantly pull my gun in front of me as the door on the other side of the room swings open. The guard starts to take aim at me, but I shoot him through the chest before he can pull his gun up.

  “We don’t have much time,” Jeremiah says through gritted teeth.

  Ethan is the last one out of the hatch and he slams the door shut once we’re all in. Jeremiah turns to me. “Now what room is she in?”

  “In my vision I remember what the room looked like,” I say. “She wasn’t in the bunker so we need to get to the elevator.”

  “Get us there.”

  I go to the other side of the room where the dead guard lay, and I peek through the small opening of the door. “I’m not sure we will have a lot of company,” I say. “Most are probably fighting off the greyskins.”

  “Lucky for us,” Jeremiah says.

  I take a step out into the hallway. Red lights illuminate it, and our footsteps are loud on the metal. I try my best to remember the way to the elevator. That day when Olivia called on me to meet with her feels like ages ago. I feel like I’m visiting a place that I haven’t seen in years, yet it was only a few days ago that I fled these walls.

  There are several twists and turns along the metal, ship-like corridors, but finally we come to a set of doors that is nothing like the rest of its surroundings. If this is the same set of doors (and I’m sure it is) then the hallway on the other side will be bright and look like a hospital. I reach for the doorknob, but it’s locked.

  I look back at the other three and tell them to stand back. I point the gun at the door handle and cover my eyes with my other arm. The bullet shatters the lock to pieces and the door swings open for us. This is where I hesitate.

  “Waverly, what are you doing?” Jeremiah asks. “We’ve got to move.”

  “I don’t remember,” I say. “There are about six or seven turns, I think. I’m not sure where the elevators are.”

  “You’ve got to think,” he says.

  “Let’s just go,” Stephen says. “We can find a guard or something that will tell us.”

  Jeremiah likes Stephen’s idea. I lead the way, gun up in the air, but I feel vulnerable. The fact that I’m leading the way almost feels like I’m helping too much. What if I can’t kill Jeremiah? What if he escapes me? It will be because of me that he becomes the new leader.

  I can’t let that happen. I won’t let that happen.

  We are vigilant as we walk, and Jeremiah stays right behind me. We make a few turns, and I’m not sure they are the right ones. But Stephen was right about finding a guard. On the other side of the hallway, a guard stands with a rifle in his hands. He’s talking on the radio to someone. The four of us press our backs against the wall.

  Jeremiah leans in and whispers in my ear. “Wait here. I’ll take care of this.
”

  He stands from his crouch and walks slowly toward the guard. There seems to be no sound from his footsteps, and the guard keeps his back to us. The man doesn’t even move before Jeremiah presses his gun against the back of his head.

  “Drop the gun and radio,” he says.

  The man does so without hesitation. “Please don’t kill me.”

  “Shut up!” Jeremiah yells. “Where is Shadowface staying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jeremiah points the gun at the guard’s foot and pulls the trigger. Blood splatters across the floor as the man falls backward, screaming in horror.

  “I expect an answer this time!”

  “Fifth floor!” the guard cries. “It’s the room with all the guards surrounding it.”

  “Where’s the elevator?”

  “Down the hall. Two left turns.”

  “Thank you,” Jeremiah says, pointing the gun at the man’s head and finishing the job.

  I shut my eyes tightly as the second shot rings out. I hate the sight…the feeling. Death surrounds us. Seeing Jeremiah able to just kill the man so callously makes me sick to my stomach. But it also makes me wonder if I have the guts to do the same to him and Olivia in just a couple of minutes. I’m not sure I can do it. I can’t sit here and say that I’ve never killed anyone, but it’s not an easy thing to do. I killed Scarecrow because it was ‘kill or be killed.’ I can kill greyskins because they are already dead. But can I actually look Olivia in the eyes and shoot her? Can I do that to Jeremiah?

  I’ve got to think of Evie. If I don’t end this, she will one day die because of this man. I couldn’t live with myself knowing that I could have killed Jeremiah and Olivia and didn’t do it.

  Just as the guard described, the elevator appears after two more left turns down the hallway. Luckily, we see no more guards. When we press for the elevator, we wait for it as it ascends from the bottom floor. When we get in, Jeremiah presses the fifth floor button. He takes a deep breath as the doors close. He looks at me.