Within These Walls: Series Box Set

by Tracey Ward

  “You don’t know everything!” I repeat, and I don’t know exactly what my problem is, but I’m yelling now.

  Jordan frowns and looks at me hard. “First of all, lower your damn voice. Second, what’s your deal?”

  “It’s not the pills,” I blurt out, and again, I have no idea why. “I know that’s what you’re thinking, but it’s not. Sometimes I’m just in a bad mood.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that, actually,” he says in that annoyingly calm voice he gets in the face of emotions. “But since you brought it up, it makes me wonder if that’s what you are thinking.”

  I groan and rub my hands over my face roughly. “Don’t do that. You sound like my therapist. Don’t analyze me.”

  “I wouldn’t even know where to begin to do that.”

  I drop my hands and glare at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that I don’t know what the issue is. You’ve never told me, not really. So how would I even start to pick it apart?”

  “Why would you want to pick it apart?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then what are we talking about?” I ask, exasperated and desperately trying to keep my voice low.

  He grins slightly. “I have no idea. You picked the fight with me. I assumed you knew why.”

  I roll my head away from him and stare up at the soft, yellow glow of the sunlight through the beige boat cover. The small windows in the boathouse allow in very little light, but what light is making it through is giving our cocoon a lovely glow and I feel myself begin to calm. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, not entirely, but whatever it is boils down to one very obvious thing; fear. I’m afraid of the world outside this honey colored glow, I’m afraid of the world at the end of my pills and I’m afraid of the warmth and strength of the man lying beside me. He’s the greatest friend I’ve ever had, though in truth, I haven’t really had that many. But he’s real and kind and calm, and he means the world to me… plus a little more. And that more has me freaked out. My other fears could so easily take that simple, smiling more and tear it to shreds. Or eat its brains.

  “I do know,” I mutter grudgingly.

  “You want to tell me what it is? What we’re fighting about?”

  “No,” I reply firmly, but I roll my head back over to look at him, making sure my voice is softer. “But I don’t want to fight about it anymore either.”

  “Alright, we won’t fight. But tell me one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Did I win?” he asks with a smile.

  I think of the first night we met when we argued about the living or dead status of the zombies and the sexist shoes and the men ignoring my bathrooms.

  I smile. “Don’t you always?”

  ***

  “How’s the leg?” Jordan asks as we prepare to disembark the boat.

  He swings his legs over easily and leaps down onto the dock with athletic grace, and I’m reminded of his bat. He still keeps it strapped across his chest in a holster he and Taylor designed, but when we were on the street, he had his bow in his hands. I haven’t seen him swing the bat since we arrived at the settlement and I sort of miss it in a weird way.

  I jump down from the boat the same way he does and luckily he’s standing there waiting for me, otherwise I would toppled backwards into the water. When my weight lands on my bad leg, it lights up in flames and all of the strength leaches out of it. A small, pathetic cry escapes my lips as the pain radiates out and I’m more embarrassed by that cry than by the way I got the injury. Jordan reaches out and snags my elbows in his hands, holding me up and pulling me away from the water.

  “That good, huh?” he grunts as he swings me around to the plastic chair I used to climb up on last night.

  I collapse into the chair and curse, stretching the leg out. This sucks. First I wake up and act like all emo at him and now I’m too jacked up to even stand on my own.

  “Jordan, you need to go. Those truckers are close and dangerous, there’s a huge hive out there just waiting to sniff us out. You need to run and I don’t want to hold you back.”

  “Don’t start this shit, Ali.” His voice is legitimately angry and I look up to see the annoyance on his face. It’s foreign on him, these livid emotions, and I’m taken aback by his tone. “You got a pass on the weirdness this morning, but I’m not dealing with this too. You got me?”

  I seriously feel like I just got spanked. I look up at him, dumbfounded, but I shut my mouth and nod my head quickly, effectively pulling it together.

  “Got it,” I say, my voice sure and strong.

  “Good. Now let’s go. I’ve gotta find us a car or rickshaw, hell, even a baby stroller would work.”

  “How are we getting past them?” I ask, taking a shot at standing and ignoring the comment about a stroller. I’m not sitting in a friggin’ stroller. I can’t put much weight on the leg, but I can hobble about on my own. If I need to run, though, I’m dead. With this leg as it is, I’m not much faster than an infected.

  “Well,” he says throwing his pack on his back and strapping mine to his front. “Ideally, we’d steal a boat and float across the lake, find our boat still hidden at the shore and head off down the river happily.”

  “Like Huckleberry Finn and Jim.”

  “Like that, yeah, but with fewer N-bombs.”

  “I promise nothing.”

  His eyes meet mine and he grins. “I thought I was the racist.”

  “You’re also a terrible influence.”

  “It’s a miracle you put up with me.”

  I shrug. “You have a few redeeming qualities.”

  “Such as?” he asks as he steps beside me and gently takes hold of my upper arm, helping to support my weight on my bad side.

  “Can’t think of any right now,” I lie. “I’ll let you know if any occur to me.”

  When we get outside we hug the building, being careful not to expose ourselves to the view of the mansion across the lake. Jordan pokes his head around and makes a quick check of the water, ensuring the patrols aren’t running in our neighborhood at the moment. When the coast is declared clear, we make a break for the trees in the yard next door. It’s quite a distance away but we’re provided the best coverage from the boathouse and the sprint is on flat ground instead of up the slope of the hill, which my leg appreciates greatly. Jordan steers us up the side of the house then to the right, toward a huge building that looks like a house, but I imagine is a garage. He tries the door, finds it locked and takes a deep breath. Just when I’m going to suggest going in through a window, he rears back and kicks at the knob hard. The door swings open and I hear him whistle in relief.

  He smiles nervously over his shoulder at me. “I was worried there’d be an alarm.”

  I can’t imagine putting an alarm system on a garage. Not until I step inside this one, then I’m wondering why they don’t have one. Of course there’s a shiny red Corvette sitting right beside the door because, honestly, what’s a mid-life crisis without one? In the next slot of the three available, there’s a gleaming black H2 Hummer, the car that screams ‘My wife says size doesn’t matter!’ In the third slot, though, is the redemption of the entire garage. Parked at the end, peeking out at me like a mysterious, sly devil at the end of the bar, is a pumpkin orange Yenko Camaro.

  “Whoa,” I say as I hobble over to it and reverently run my hand over its shiny hood.

  “Is that a Camaro?” Jordan asks absently as he searches for keys.

  “It’s more than a Camaro. It is the granddaddy of all Camaros. It has 423 horsepower, only 50 or so of them made. It’s not one of the originals, but it’s still a beast.”

  Jordan pauses and I look over at him hopefully.

  He frowns and shakes his head. “No keys, can’t take it. Also, terrible idea. With that much horsepower, I doubt she’s quiet.”

  “No one would ever catch us, though.”

  He chuckles and points above my head. “Sorry, Ali, but that’s our ride.”r />
  I look up and flinch. Hanging above me is a cruiser bike. One of those models with the big, wide handle bars and a basket on the front.

  “Am I sitting in the basket? Like E.T.?”

  “Nope. You’re riding toddler style.”

  I frown and glance at him to find him pulling something out of a corner of the massive garage. My heart sinks and I shake my head.

  “I am not riding in that.”

  He wheels out a bike trailer. A powder pink one with a pair of safety harnesses meant to strap your infants in.

  “No way,” I say. “I’ll walk, I’ll be fine. I’m not getting in that.”

  “We don’t have a choice.”

  What he means is I don’t have a choice.

  His shirt pulls up as he reaches up to bring the bike down, and I can see his stomach and the faint outline of his hip bones just above his belted jeans. Suddenly I’m doing the math on how much pride I’ll have left if I agree to sit in this glorified stroller and let him pull me about town like an invalid. Probably not enough to ever wrap myself around him like a vine on a tree again and that’s a sad prospect.

  He takes a few minutes figuring out how to attach the trailer to the bike then leads it and me out the door. I grumble about a weight limit on the trailer and he asks how much I weigh so I shut the hell up and end that conversation. I feel like he did that on purpose because he’s smart, something that is both incredibly attractive and intensely annoying. I find a lot of things about Jordan attractive because there’s genuinely a lot to like about the guy. Luckily, though, there are plenty of things that send me from zero to pissed in no seconds flat, and I feel like that evens things out, putting me in a good place where I can appreciate him but I’m not stuck in blind lust.

  Except when I’m asleep, apparently.

  When we reach the road, Jordan looks at me expectantly, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. He’s laughing at me. Great. I take a deep breath, swallow my pride and sit down in the thing, feeling instantly foolish. Jordan doesn’t say a word though, and he mounts the bike to start peddling. We head away from the swarm and the trucker’s mansion, swinging wide around the north side of the lake. It’s not ideal because it will take a lot longer and land us a little upriver of where we left our boat, but it’s our only option. If we took the south side of the lake, we’d have to swing wide there as well to avoid the swarm and it would take just as long and probably be far more dangerous. No, this way we get to leisurely enjoy a sun soaked morning bike ride around the crystal clear lake.

  The only signs of tarnish on this perfectly lovely morning are the bow and arrow in my hand, ever at the ready, and the nerve racking sound of the jet ski patrols crisscrossing the water at regular intervals. We listen to them closely and when we hear one closing in Jordan stops behind a house or hedge, anything to block us from the view of the water, and we wait it out. Those are nervous minutes for us and my palms sweat profusely every time we have to stop.

  By the afternoon, we’re almost fully around the lake and I’m itching to get in the boat and out of this insult on wheels. There are a few infected along the way, none in our direct path, but I softly call out to Jordan each time and insist he take a shot at them. It’s a pain and it makes for slower progress because each time he has to go retrieve his arrow, but it’s important for him to practice and I know by the way he doesn’t protest that he understands why I ask him to do it. It’s sad to say it, but right now, the infected are the least of our worries. We’re both solidly focused on avoiding the other living humans in the area, we barely spare a second thought for the droves of murderous infected that could be lurking around every corner, behind every hedge. It’s a sad state of affairs, but it seems that even with the coming of the apocalypse, the dwindling of the human race and society as we know it, there are actually three things you can always count on.

  Death, zombies and assholes.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It’s only about five miles from where we started on the west side of the lake to the river and probably should only have taken us about forty-five minutes to make the journey. But factor in poor Jordan having to tow a full grown she-baby behind him, the constant stops for target practice and the threat of being discovered by the truckers, and you’ve got a nearly four hour trek on your hands. I feel useless, but as always, Jordan is without complaint and instead of pouring apologies on deaf ears, I keep vigilant and watch our backs as we roll forward. During the last stretch we stop hearing the patrols and assume they either don’t care to patrol this far east or they are taking an afternoon siesta. I make a joke about a mai tai and it turns out it’s not funny because now I really want one. Cal was very strict at the settlement about never bringing liquor back from the Safeway, said it would make us sloppy and careless, and he’s right. But that’s the point.

  Finally we make it as far as our little bike can carry us and Jordan helps me disembark my Shame Mobile. I carry my own pack now and ask to carry his since he just got quite a workout, but he laughs at me and carefully takes my arm to support me as we walk. We hid the boat in a small inlet just off the river, next to a sprawling, open park area. Jordan immediately moves us to the trees for cover and we start the search for the spot where we hid our dinghy. It doesn’t take long to find it considering we didn’t hide it thinking we would be gone as long as we were, and also, it’s glaring white. Spray paint might not have been a bad item to loot while we were out, but not much we can do about it now. Jordan helps me and I sit down with our packs around me, leaving him as much room to row as possible. Again, I offer to row first since he biked us here, but he shakes his head and starts us off. I know he’s anxious to get away, to get out on the open water, and my slower rowing makes him jittery.

  The world is still though. Very still. There are no birds or other animal sounds, and I suddenly realize that this has been true for the entire journey from the boathouse. Not a single squirrel, bird or even barking dog to be seen or heard. I was so consumed with listening for sounds that I didn’t want to hear that I failed to notice the normal sounds that were missing. I’ve always heard it said that animals can sense illness or danger, and if there was ever a time to have that handy super power, it’d be now. I suppose we’re lying low and disappearing as well and something about following suit with the animals makes me feel better about our decision to leave the city.

  My phone rings in my bag and I know who it is without looking.

  “I’m on my way,” I tell my uncle.

  “’Bout time. How’s the leg?”

  “Hurts, but it still works. We’re on the river again so I’m giving it a break.”

  “Giving it a break? Has he had you running all over hell and back on a bum leg?”

  “No, actually he… um…’

  “He what? Did he carry you? How big is this boy?”

  “Okay, that implies that I’m a heavy load to carry.”

  “Well, you aren’t light,” he says matter of fact.

  “Thanks, Uncle Syd. No, he didn’t carry me. He… ugh, he towed me around behind a bike in a toddler carriage. A pink one.”

  I can hear chuckling on the phone and chuckling from in front of me. It’s in surround sound and it’s at my expense.

  “Stop laughing!” I exclaim at both of them, a smile tugging at my lips.

  “I would have paid to see that,” Uncle Syd says happily.

  “Sorry, no repeat performances. We should be out of the city today and into the more rural areas soon. I’ll call if I can, but I’ll probably lose reception. What does the rest of the world look like? Is Corvallis still clear?”

  “So far, yeah, we haven’t seen any infected. It’s only a matter of time, though.”

  I frown. “I would have thought they’d try to contain it. Maybe you’re on the outside and we won’t be able to get to you.”

  “Nah,” he says, sounding tired. “They are containing it. We’re on the inside with you.”

  “What? Why? If there’s no infec
ted then why?”

  “I imagine they’re casting a wide net, making sure they catch every one of them. All of the news broadcasting is happening only as far north as Eugene. That must be where the net ends. You can go as far west as you want to, run right up to the ocean, but every port and dock has been locked down. No one is allowed to leave. Same thing heading out of the valley. You get far enough east and you’ll hit road blocks. All of the interstates are guarded.”

  “What about going north? How far did it get after Portland and Vancouver?”

  “Olympia,” he says with certainty. “There’s a big military base in Tacoma just north of there that might have something to do with it. Plus, they’ve been saying Canada has been pitching in with guard duty up there. I imagine seeing it hit Seattle would be a little too close for comfort for them.”

  “So from Eugene to Olympia? How big of a stretch is that?”

  “Over 200 miles. Not as big as it could have been. The rest of the world is still doing fine. No infections anywhere else.”

  “What are they going to do with this area once they’re sure they’ve locked it down?” I ask warily, scared of the answer. One solution pops to mind and I hope and pray it’s not the one the powers that be are considering.

  “That I don’t know and I don’t want to speculate. My mind goes to dark places,” he says, his voice grim.

  “Yeah, mine too.”

  He pauses, then asks softly, “How are you doin’? You hanging on?”

  I grin affectionately. “Yeah, I’m hanging on.”

  “How’s the friend?” he asks sarcastically. “He behaving himself.”

  “Perfect gentleman.”

  “Tell him to stay that way.”

  I roll my eyes. “How about you? How are you doing?”

  Uncle Syd laughs, and the sound is so familiar and every sense of home that I love, that my eyes burn with tears.

  “I’ve fought in a war and with your mom. I can handle anything.”

  We say our goodbyes and hang up, and I have mixed feelings about the call. I relay all the information he gave me to Jordan who continues to row as I speak, but I know he’s thoughtfully working on what I’ve said.