Backs Against the Wall (Survival Series)

by Tracey Ward

  “And he just got himself a weapon,” Trent muses proudly.

  I don’t dare look at him because I’m pretty sure from his tone that he’s smiling and no part of me can handle that right now.

  The second Risen is creeping up on Ryan’s back. I can see the third as well, coming around the far side of the Arena. It’s distracted by the people around the edges. It keeps grabbing at them, lunging to get through the barrier but the people are too quick for it.

  Ryan takes firm hold of the ankle on the lower leg he’s holding, spins around and smacks the Risen behind him in the face. It stumbles but doesn’t go down. Reaching out with its gray hands, it grabs for Ryan. He feels its touch, jumps back a step, crouching low again. I watch in horror as he puts the leg on the ground beside him and waits, defenseless again.

  The Risen comes at him, lumbering toward him with surprising speed. Ryan immediately tackles it at the knees, standing up and bringing it into the air. Then he spins, bringing the Risen back down to the ground. Hard. Its head bounces off the cement floor, then smacks down again. Ryan lands on top of it, quickly groping for the arms, then pinning them down with his knees. He’s straddling the chest as the Risen snaps at him, its arms flailing uselessly to get ahold of him. Ryan moves his hand to the top of the head, carefully feels down the sides until he has hold of the ears, then he jerks the head forward and slams it into the cement again. He rears back, bringing the head with him, then throws all of the weight of his upper body into the movement of smashing the Risen’s skull down again. He does it three more times, quick as anything I’ve ever seen, and the Risen goes slack. Motionless. Completely dead.

  One down.

  Or actually, two down but one is coming toward him, dragging itself over the ground. A Crawler. I hate Crawlers. Ryan ignores it or doesn’t remember it’s there, something I don’t believe possible after what I’ve seen so far. Instead of attacking it, he feels around the ground until he finds the leg he dropped. He removes the shoe from the foot and slips it on his own.

  I cringe thinking of what the inside of that thing feels or smells like.

  With the new, disgusting shoe on his foot, Ryan feels for the Crawler on the ground. His hand gets dangerously close to its mouth, making me gasp.

  Trent shoots me a warning look. I glare back.

  “Sorry, cyborg. I’m a little worried, it slipped out.”

  He puts his finger to his lips, silently signaling for me to be quiet.

  “Like he could hear me,” I say defensively, looking away.

  Ryan is now dragging the Crawler to a bench, moving with sure feet as though he can see where he’s going. He has the thing by the head and wastes no time putting its face on the edge of the bench. Then he rears back.

  “Oh no,” I mutter.

  “Shhh,”

  Ryan stomps on the back of the Risen’s head. There’s a crack that can’t be heard but it’s definitely seen. The Risen goes down, lifeless.

  One left.

  The only problem is, Ryan obviously doesn’t know where it is. He tosses aside the Risen he’s just finished off, probably to get it’s scent away so he smell the next one coming, but it’s not working. It’s close to him and getting closer. He stays crouched down low beside the bench, using it for some cover and probably to orient himself, but it’s making him vulnerable. The Risen is coming up on the other side of the bench, getting ready to lean over it. To grab Ryan by the shoulder.

  And he has no idea it’s coming.

  A shrill whistle sounds beside my ear, making me drop to the ground to defend myself. My left ear, the one beside Trent, is ringing painfully. It sounds again, two short, sharp shrieks. I look up to find Trent watching Ryan closely, his hand over his mouth. I jump up to look for Ryan but nearly drop down again when Trent moves his hand slightly and there’s another whistle, this time more pronounced. The two shrieks are slightly longer, more emphatic.

  My eyes shoot to the Arena just in time to see Ryan reacting to the Risen closing on his left. He’s too late. It gets ahold of his shoulder, it’s vice like hands digging its fingers into his flesh. I worry he’ll cry out or panic. That he’ll lose his bearings because of the pain and it will all be over. But he only slouches slightly, instinctively trying to escape the pain. The he grabs the hand, pulls it toward him and topples the Risen over the bench. He breaks the hold it has on him. With his body free, with his blood pouring bright red and angry down his body, he slides the Risen onto the bench, feeling behind its head until the surface disappears and it’s dangling off the edge. Then he lifts his shoed foot and steps down hard. The neck snaps. The Risen is dead.

  And with the wound he’s taken, there’s every chance Ryan will be too.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Gentleman!” the announcer calls out, appearing in the Arena beside Ryan. “I give you your champion of the Blind! Ryan Hyperion!!!”

  There are scattered cheers, losers grudgingly accepting that their winnings are lost but their favorite fighter is still alive. Mostly there’s a tense, angry quiet. One that makes my muscles tighten and my skin crawl.

  “Time to move,” Trent tells me.

  He takes my upper arm as he ushers me quickly through the crowd. We jump down off the risers into the dark and head for the exit. He leads me away from the stairs, this time taking me through a different door that leads down an industrial looking hallway with brick walls and exposed wiring in the ceiling.

  “Hey, wait,” a voice calls quietly from behind us.

  I turn to see Elise hurrying toward us, her eyes nervously scanning the hallway.

  “Here, take this. You’ll need it for his shoulder.” She holds out a small bottle and a jar with white paste in it. “Get him out of here now.”

  “We’re already going,” Trent tells her, pulling me forward again.

  “Thank you,” I call over my shoulder, holding up the jar and bottle.

  She’s turned to leave. If she hears my gratitude, she doesn’t acknowledge it.

  We jog down the hall until a door slams open ahead of us. The heavy metal door swings noisily, flying out, banging against the brick wall and rebounding back. Trent halts, his body going stiff as he watches. As he waits.

  Ryan stumbles out into the hall. He’s still in the shorts, no shirt, but luckily the shoe is gone and he’s carrying his own pair in his hand along with the rest of his clothes.

  “Go, man,” a guy says gruffly from inside the door. “Get out before it gets nuts in here. Don’t come back for a while either. People will forget but not any time soon.”

  Ryan leans back against the wall, his head falling forward as he nods. “Hopefully I’m never coming back.”

  “That’s what everyone says. Ask me how many times it happens?”

  “Thanks for the help,” Ryan says in reply, wearily leaning forward and extending his hand.

  A guy steps out to slap it once quickly with his. He spots us, his eyes locking on mine and I realize it’s the guy that led us inside Marlow’s office. The second bouncer. He hesitates for a second looking like he wants to say something, but then he quickly pulls the door closed and slams it behind him.

  “Good show,” Trent tells Ryan.

  He looks up at us with a wan smile, his face flushed and his hair flying wet and dark in every direction. I’m wound so tight, so freaked out and so relieved to see him alive that I lose my mind a little. Maybe a lot.

  I run at him down the hall, pushing past Trent. Ryan sees me coming. His eyes go wide with surprise but he stands up straight, opening his arms to me. I’m a jerk because I know he’s tired. I know he’s hurt. But I’m selfish. I jump at him, wrapping my arms around his neck, my legs around his waist and I cling to him hard. If I don’t do this, if I don’t hold on to him and reassure myself that he’s alright, I’ll cry. And I am sick to death of that feeling. As it is, I bury my face in his neck, worried the tears will come anyway.

  “I’m bleeding on you,” he says softly, his arms wound tightly around me, huggin
g me to him.

  “Good. It means you have a heartbeat.”

  I need to let him go. We need to get out of here now, but first we have to deal with his shoulder. Who knows what fluids the Risen might have gotten inside him. The sickness doesn’t move nearly as fast as it used to, but an infection is still an infection. You shouldn’t mess with a corpse, whether it’s lying in a pine box or trying to sink its teeth into your eye.

  “I have stuff for your shoulder.”

  “It can wait.” He squeezes me tighter.

  “No, it can’t.”

  “Joss, how often do you let me hold you?”

  I sigh against his skin. “Never.”

  “Then let me have this.”

  So I do. And it doesn’t hurt me to do it. It doesn’t make me anxious or twitchy. I don’t feel smothered even as I rebreathe my own hot air rebounding off his neck. He smells exactly as his bed did. Soap, sweat and dude. Like a man. A man who isn’t afraid to fight with me. For me. Who’d risk his life to keep safe something sacred that I very rarely thought about, not beyond keeping it hidden. Not until this moment when so much of his skin is hot against mine, when my body is wound around him like it was built to be here, made to hold to him. To be held against him. Now I’m wondering what better way there is to make sure it’s never stolen, never taken away like everything else that was ever mine, than to give it to someone. Someone who’s patient. Strong. Understanding. Someone who knows it’s worth so much more than a Benjamin, that you could never put a price on it, that it’s not rare because it’s hard to come by. It’s rare because it’s me. The last of me.

  “Ryan,” Trent says, his voice a warning.

  “I know,” he replies reluctantly.

  He loosens his hold on me, lets me slide down his body slowly until I’m on my own two foot but I’m looking up at him with everything I’ve been thinking on my face. I could hide it. I know how. But I don’t. I let him see it and I watch his breathing change as he does. As he understands. And I know he’s thinking about it now too.

  “Shoulder,” I say firmly, pulling away.

  I hand him the stuff Elise gave me. He quickly uncorks the bottle and downs the entire thing in one long gulp.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  He grimaces as he finishes it, swiping the back of his hand across his mouth.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  He tosses the bottle aside, letting it shatter on the brick wall farther down the hall.

  “Oh, okay. That’s… littering.”

  “Are you going to write me a ticket? Screw this place. Let’s get out of here.”

  He leads us out a door that takes us up a flight of stairs to a blackened hallway. No lights at all in here. Ryan and Trent must know the layout, though, because when Ryan takes my hand, he leads me quickly through the dark without banging us into anything. I’m starting to wonder how much time these two have spent in this place.

  Finally we burst out a side door into the cold night. The sky is dark, cloudy. The wind coming off the water is frigid and I worry about Ryan in just the shorts they put him in as he runs us down the worn, gray boards of the pier to the end of the building.

  “Let’s see if Marlow is true to his word,” he says as we reach the end.

  When we look down, we all stare silently.

  There in the water tied to the pier is a small sailboat. Mast, sails and all.

  “Captain Hook boned us!” I exclaim.

  “What?” Ryan asks.

  “It’s the Jolly friggin’ Roger.”

  “It’s a daysailer,” Trent says sadly, looking it over.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I read.”

  “What? Back issues of Yacht Club Weekly while you’re on the toilet?”

  He grins at me. “I like sailing adventures. Pirates. Buccaneers. I got your Jolly Roger joke. Peter Pan. It was funny.”

  I sigh. “I’m still mad at you.”

  “For what?”

  “For knowing everything,” Ryan says, glaring down at our boat.

  It’s just over ten feet long and can’t be more than five feet wide. The three of us in this boat is going to be interesting. The fact that I doubt any of us know how to sail a sailboat is going to be a tragedy.

  “Can you sail one, Trent?” Ryan asks hopefully.

  He chuckles. “No.”

  “Yeah, me either.”

  “Well, whatever,” I say, throwing my hands in the air. “Marlow’s a dick, but it is a boat so let’s at least see if we can figure it out. How hard can it be? You hoist the sails, they catch the wind, and we cruise across the water. There’s a rudder, I think. We steer with that? We’ll figure it out once we’re out on open water.”

  “Sounds solid and not at all suicidal. Let’s do it.”

  Once we untie the boat, or cast off or whatever it is, Trent gets to work figuring out the riggings and sails while I apply the white paste to Ryan’s shoulder. He’s changed back into his own pants and shoes, tossing the shorts into the water as we drift.

  “How worried should I be?” I ask as I smear a huge glob on the worst of his wounds. This stuff smells like it stings.

  “Not very,” he replies tightly. “I saw the Risen when they took the hood off. Its fingers were nothing but dry bone. That’s why it was able to dig into my skin so deep.”

  “Did they do that to it on purpose?”

  “I don’t think so. They keep them locked up in cages or cells in the building until they need them for a fight. That’s days or weeks of the Risen wandering around an empty room looking for a way out. They claw at the walls and if those walls are brick or cement, the skin will give out first.”

  “I got it,” Trent says triumphantly.

  He yanks a cord and I watch in amazement as a brilliant white sail raises sharply. It whips in the wind, fluttering bright against the dark sky until Trent pulls another cord, tying it off quickly while he grabs the rudder. There’s a snap above us as the sheet takes hold of the wind and then we’re off, jerking back toward the docks and the aquarium.

  Trent curses, adjusts the rudder and another line. Soon we’re changing course, heading out into the Sound and dipping south. We’ll have to pass by the docks just outside the stadiums, but I’m sure Trent will swing us wide. Though our bright white sail makes us a little hard to miss, even in the dark.

  I pat Ryan on the back twice, letting him know I’m done and he puts his shirt back on.

  “Trent, you looked at the map. What is this island really? What was it before?” I ask. Now that all of the other threats (Marlow, his men, the Risen in the Arena) are fading small behind us, I’m focusing on the biggest, newest one. The unknown.

  “It used to be called Vashon Island, thus the group’s name. People lived there. It was mostly residential with small farming. There are no bridges to it which is probably why the Vashons chose it. It was always isolated with good farm land. Easily self-sufficient in the right hands.”

  “Crenshaw’s kind of people would be the right hands, I guess.”

  “Why did you ask me what it really is? What did Crenshaw say it was? Narnia?”

  I grin, happy I get the reference. “Elysium.”

  Trent nods, the wind whipping his hair across his eyes. He squints against it and leans casually on the rudder. He looks every bit the sailor then. I think I should tell him that, that it might make him happy to know he’s living his dream, but then I sees several flashes of light behind him and my heart begins to race.

  “Hey, guys,” I whisper. “I think I saw something.”

  Ryan turns to see what I’m looking at. Trent keeps his eyes forward.

  “What was it?” Ryan asks, his voice also hushed.

  “There was light on the bank. Right there.”

  I point to the shore a little bit south of the stadiums.

  “What kind of light? Like a fire?”

  “More like a signal.” I look at Trent, catching his eye. “Organized. Like they knew w
hat they were doing.”

  Not like they were desperate, grasping at straws in a last ditch attempt not to die on a roof surrounded by Risen.

  “It’s probably the Colonies,” he tells me calmly. “They run constant patrols around the perimeter of the stadiums. Someone may have been signaling the all clear.”

  “Or they could have been telling someone there’s a boat cruising through the Sound.”

  He shrugs. “And?”

  “And they could come after us,” I snap, my voice rising.

  “Gasoline is gone. They’ll have to row or sail like we are. They won’t catch up to us. You worry too much.”

  “Is that a joke?”

  He smiles, but I don’t know if that means yes, that’s a joke or that he’s happy he pushed my buttons. Either way, he’s annoying me.

  “We’ll be alright, Joss,” Ryan tells me. “If they come after us, we’ll go ashore and hide.”

  “We’ll lose Marlow’s boat.”

  Ryan snorts. “I’m planning on burning it when we’re done with it anyway.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Why do you hate Pretty in Pink?” Ryan asks me out of nowhere, his quiet voice breaking the silence we’ve been sailing in.

  I grin, my eyes staying lazily fixed on the rippling surface of the water in the moonlight. It’s hypnotic, like fire.

  “Because the girl is an idiot.”

  “We’re all idiots when it comes to love,” Trent says philosophically.

  I glance back at him, surprised. He smiles at me with is creepy, real boy smile on his Pinocchio face.

  “Why was she an idiot?” Ryan asks, ignoring Trent.

  “Because she chose the wrong guy to love. It makes me angry.”