Within These Walls: Series Box Set

by Tracey Ward

  Jordan doesn’t cut the engine right away and we are heading farther in toward the falls. I turn to look at him, exasperated, and see his face scanning the buildings.

  “Jordan!” I shout, and his eyes snap to me, surprised. “Cut the engine. This is our stop.”

  As he kills it, I grab my pack and sling it onto my back then pull my knife roughly out of the infected’s jaw. She immediately slides down into the water and a hiss begins to sound from the cut I made in the side of the boat. I swish my knife in the water quickly then check Jordan and see he has his pack on as well. I point to the left, to the rock wall I want to climb and when he looks it over he nods at me.

  We jump into the knee deep water and run for the wall. Some of the infected are coming up behind us now, having either navigated their way off the catwalks or deciding to just launch themselves off of them and head straight toward us. They really have no self-preservation and I wonder that so many of them are ambulatory. Jordan shoves something between me and my pack and I look back to see the handle of one of the black plastic oars sticking up behind my head where I can easily reach it.

  “You need a melee weapon,” he explains quickly, and I nod in understanding. “Also,” he says, and reaches for my shirt sleeve. He grips the sleeve and upper shoulder of my shirt and rips them away from each other at the seam.

  “Hey!” I cry automatically. “It’s my only shirt, Jordan.”

  “Give me your hand,” he demands, and begins wrapping the sleeve around my wounded palm. “We can replace the shirt, I can’t replace you. No open wounds around them, got it? We don’t know what transmits The Fever, but I’m willing to bet that if it’s in the saliva in their bite, it’s in their blood as well. You can’t get any in you.”

  He pulls a knot tight on the back of my hand and I wince but I don’t make a sound. Once he’s satisfied I’m bandaged enough, we attack the hill.

  It’s not a huge hill and on a good day with two good legs and two good hands, it would be no sweat. Today, however, I’m slightly panicked and I’m already hurting, so this thing is a beast. I struggle to keep up with Jordan and more than once he has to pause and offer me a helping hand to pull me up to his level. I’m lagging behind, holding him back, and if I thought it would do a bit of good, I would tell him to leave me and save himself. I’ve already been warned once about that, though, and I’m nothing if not a fast learner.

  The infected at the top of the hill see us coming and aren’t content to wait for us to arrive. They start trying to walk down the hill to get to us and they are surprisingly less coordinated than I am. Several of them go sliding by us, one almost taking Jordan’s legs out from under him. For once today I’m useful, and I grab him with my good hand and hold on tight until he’s steady again. We start watching above us for falling zombies and it feels kind of like I’m in an old school video game, dodging obstacles and trying desperately to reach the top so I can recharge my health and level up.

  I’m amazed by the fact that the infected are so incredibly stupid. I know that they’re “dead” and their brains are melted by The Fever, but it’s shocking how much their stupidity almost gets us killed on a regular basis. If they would wait at the top of the hill like a sensible person, we could fight them on even ground with our weapons in hand instead of dodging their gnashing teeth as they go tumbling by. Their idiocy and sheer numbers are what will kill us in the end.

  We crest the hill and find only five infected left there waiting for us at that point, but there are plenty more coming up behind us. I pull the oar over my head and see Jordan grab his bat from its holster. I won’t be as strong with this as he is, and most likely I won’t do much but knock the infected down, but I promise myself that I won’t let them touch me.

  Jordan takes out the first two, swinging the bat at the temples, before I even connect with the one closest to me. I whack him with the oar, but there’s not much weight to it and all it does is make a slapping sound when it hits the side of his face. He doesn’t even falter. I rear back and shove upward, forcing the blade of the oar into his throat, crunching behind his jaw bone, and it sends him flailing to his back. I don’t bother waiting to see if I’ve disabled him, I know I haven’t, but out of my way and on his back is enough for me. I do the same to the next infected as Jordan dispatches the fifth. He looks at me and I nod, signaling I’m alright, and we make a break for the concrete walkways that will lead us out of this maze of buildings and up to the road. We’re on the walkway in the homestretch when two infected lumber around a corner and block our patch.

  I see Jordan’s hands shaking with exhaustion but he raises the bat anyway and starts slowly toward them. I touch his shoulder and pull him gently back.

  “I got this,” I tell him with a small smile.

  I hand him the oar and pull out my bow.

  I take aim at the head, put my faith in the bone crushing tip and let it fly. He’s not far away, but I’m still pretty proud when I bulls eye him directly between the eyes and he drops instantly.

  “Whoa,” Jordan says behind me, his voice hushed.

  I smile at what I’m taking as a compliment and take down the next infected in the same fashion. I’m in love with these new arrows.

  Jordan jogs ahead of me and pulls the arrows out of the skulls, one with a little difficulty that requires a shoe on the face and a two hand pull. When I catch up, he hands them to me with a smile and surprises me with a quick yet firm kiss on the mouth.

  “You are lethal.”

  “And that does it for you, doesn’t it?”

  “You have no idea,” he says, taking my hand.

  We run away from the warehouses and head east, still following the river, but Jordan says we’re not looking for a boat right now.

  “I want a car,” he says, checking in windows as we pass abandoned vehicles.

  There aren’t as many here seeing as it’s not a main road, but we check properly parked cars as well, pulling door handles on everything. There are infected absolutely everywhere here, and more than once Jordan pulls his bat out to take one down. I try to spare him the energy by using my bow, but the little bastards keeping popping out of nowhere when they hear us coming, as though they had been lying in wait. My heart is either going to explode or get used to it and calm down. Either way, I wish it’d hurry up and make a decision.

  “Since when do you want a car? Not that I’m complaining, but it’s a big 180 for you.”

  “I want a car since it’s about to rain,” he says, and when I look at the sky I know he’s right. The temperature is dropping with the sun and when the rain hits and the night comes, it’s going to be very cold. “I want a car since your leg is hurt. I want a car since we don’t have time to look for keys for a boat and I doubt we’ll find another dinghy here.”

  I glance around at the train tracks running nearby and the industrial buildings lining the streets.

  “It’s not exactly yacht country here, is it?”

  “No, but it is truck country,” he replies, slowly approaching a big black pickup truck parked at an odd angle on the sidewalk.

  “They were either drunk or a zombie,” I mutter, checking the street to make sure we’re clear.

  “There’s someone in there.”

  “Are they dead?”

  “Undead, but yeah.” He takes my arm and leads me closer to the truck. “You open the door, but keep it between you and them. They’re going to try and come out once it’s open and I’ll take care of them, you just keep behind that door, okay?”

  “Okay, but, Jordan, I can help. I’m not crippled,” I protest, my pride hurt a little that I’m being encouraged to hide.

  “I know that, Ali.”

  As Jordan takes a batter’s stance a few paces away from the truck to lure the infected from me, I take my position and on his signal, swing the door open. It’s pretty anticlimactic. The infected takes a moment to even notice we’re there and then he stumbles out of the truck, slipping off the seat, his uncoordinated feet bounc
ing off the running boards as he staggers to the ground. He takes a couple of uncertain steps, barely clearing the doorway, when I don’t know what happens to me. Maybe I’m annoyed I’m not supposed to help ‘cause I’m so very, very injured or maybe I’m annoyed that these things have run my life for the last couple weeks and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Or maybe I’m just bored.

  Whatever the reason, I put my gimp leg out in front of the thing and trip it like I’m a fifth grader. It hits the ground hard, falling straight on its face on the pavement with no reaction. No arms out to protect itself, no stumbling attempt to regain its balance. Nothing but face on asphalt.

  Jordan lowers his bat and relaxes his stance, glancing at me.

  “Really?”

  I shrug.

  Jordan beats its head in, destroying the brain, then comes around and opens the passenger door for me. When he hoists himself inside and the engine turns over, deafening punk rock starts blaring through the speakers. I smash my hand onto the stereo and eventually get it to shut up, but not before it takes another ten years off my life. If I get scared one more time today, I’m probably peeing myself.

  Jordan points the truck east and we follow the river, making our way out of town.

  “We have a decision to make,” he says as he dodges a cluster of abandoned cars and rides up on the sidewalk.

  “What’s that?”

  “Do we stay in the car and drive it until it runs out of gas, which,” he lifts his arm and looks at the gas gauge. “Will be long before we make it to Corvallis, even if we could take I-5. Or do we abandon it in Wilsonville, the last major city on the river until Salem, and try to score a boat there? They probably have a marina and we’d have a shot at another dinghy.”

  Personally, riding in the comfort of the car sounds like heaven to me, even if I have to walk at the end of it, but I know being confined to the roads makes Jordan uncomfortable and I’ve already asked so much of him already. He spent a week trapped between four walls waiting for me to heal and I’m still not well, not as well as I should be. I owe him this.

  “River,” I say firmly.

  He glances at me, his face openly surprised. “Really? I was sure you’d vote car.”

  I shrug and look out the window away from him. “The river has grown on me.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Maybe, but it doesn’t change the fact that a boat is what we should do. They’re following the roads, following the trail of the living. Being on the river is the best way to fly under their radar.”

  “Even after the bridge incident?”

  Raindrops start to fall, and I listen to the rhythm of the rain and the beat of the windshield wipers before answering him. The sky has begun to grow dark with both clouds and the coming night, and the warmth of the truck cab combined with the coziness you feel when inside during a rainstorm makes me feel relaxed and almost a little happy. I look over at Jordan and his face is being illuminated by the lights of the dashboard, softening the features that have looked so hard and determined all day. He looks relaxed as well and I wish I saw him like this more often. I commit it to memory so the image is mine whenever I want it.

  “Ali?” he asks, and I realize I haven’t answered his question. He looks over at me and I let him catch me staring. He smiles, and it hits his blue eyes, melting everything in me. “What are you looking at?”

  He knows what I’m looking at so I don’t answer that question. “Yes, even after the bridge incident. I vote boat. I vote river.”

  He nods his head, thinking. “With the rain falling now and night coming in, how about we run the truck out of gas but stay on roads close to the river. We can’t touch the interstate but we can use the country roads. Hopefully they aren’t all clogged as well.”

  “We’ll have to head west for a bit to follow the river anyway. I doubt many people ran that direction. Nothing out that way but the ocean which is basically a wall at your back.”

  “Exactly. So, truck until the rain stops and morning comes?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I agree happily, and I’m genuinely thrilled I’m not getting out of this truck in this rain.

  “The gas won’t get us far and I don’t want to stop and refill, too dangerous. But we’ll lock ourselves in and sleep when it stops, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  We cruise in silence for a bit before Jordan asks me to check out the owner’s music collection. I come across some country mix and he asks me to put it in, which I do grudgingly. I suddenly remember that when we first started this journey it was supposed to be in his truck and I examine how at ease he is, his left knee raised slightly and hitched out so it leans against the door, his left elbow resting on the bottom of the window and his fingers barely touching the wheel.

  “Oh my God,” I whisper and he glances at me, his face concerned. “You’re a good ole boy, aren’t you?”

  He laughs. Genuinely, full on laughs, and the sound makes me smile.

  “Maybe a little, yeah,” he confesses.

  “You can’t hunt, though.”

  “But I do fish. And I own a four wheeler.”

  “And a truck.”

  “Which I take mudding.”

  “Do you own a beer cozy?”

  “Ali, I own several.”

  “I thought you were from Boston.”

  He raises his eyebrow at me. “We can’t have hillbillies in Boston?”

  I sigh heavily and lean my head back against the seat.

  “Do you wanna know the best part about being a little country?” he asks quietly, his eyes on the road.

  “What’s that?”

  He takes full hold of the wheel with his left hand, drapes his right arm across the back of the bench seat and smiles invitingly at me. I blush for some reason and slide over until I’m nestled into his side, his arm curling around me and his fingers start running lazy lines up and down my arm.

  We ride through the falling night this way, the rain pounding on the roof but never able to reach us. I know the infected are out there. Our headlights catch them every now and then as they wander the side of the road. Some see us coming and lunge toward the car, but Jordan easily avoids them, and like the rain, they can’t touch us.

  The road will run out, the gas will run out, the night will run out, and in the morning there will be a world of worry waiting at my door, but right now with Jordan’s arm loose around me and his handsome heat and life pressing against my side, I am safe and sound and smiling again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Walking isn’t as painful as I thought it would be. I think my leg is getting stronger now that I’m using it, and even after a night of sleeping two deep in the limited cab of a pickup truck, I feel great. We’re running out of food, which is probably a good thing because what we have is junk anyway. We ate a breakfast of Nacho Cheese Doritos and shared our last water bottle as we walk along the river. The morning is wet and cold from the rain last night, but the sky is a beautiful blue without a single cloud in sight and I’m thankful for small favors. I miss the sleeve of my shirt that Jordan tore off, my bare arm feeling chilled in the cool air, but I’d rather be cold than running a brain melting fever and trying to eat Jordan for breakfast.

  He rewrapped my hand last night with anti-bacterial swabs and sterile gauze, found a rough stadium blanket shoved behind the seat, and wrapped me in his arms and the blanket around the two of us. It was hard to fall asleep because I know we were both nervous of waking up surrounded by infected. We stopped driving with a little bit of gas left just in case that happened and we needed to run. I felt really vulnerable parked out in the middle of a field without a house in sight. There are almost no infected here, we left them behind in Wilsonville where they were marching slowly down I-5. Some stragglers were out here in the country as we drove but they were wandering aimlessly, probably trying to pick up a scent of something. We hoped they never caught ours. I wanted to crack a window when the air in the truck became too warm and stale, b
ut I didn’t say anything because I knew we were both afraid of letting anything catch a whiff of us.

  Now, though, we’re searching for any signs of civilization that will lead us to a boat. We were happy last night to be out in the middle of nowhere, but now it’s posing a bit of a problem. This is all farmland running the south side of the river without any houses, docks or, more importantly, boats. On the north side, though, we see the occasional landing and small country home, and while we both feel we could easily swim the width of the river, which has widened considerably here, we still don’t want to get our packs wet. There may not be much food left but the med supplies are too valuable to risk and the last of my pills are in there as well.

  “We’ll have to walk to Newberg,” Jordan says, giving up on finding a boat for a while. “There’ll be a bridge we can cross and we’ll be able to reach the other shore.”

  “Big city though.”

  “I know. And it will be overrun just like the last few were, but what choice do we have?”

  “None.”

  “And we need to loot more food.”

  I know it’s true, but it still makes me chuckle hearing him suggest it. He looks over at me, his expression questioning.

  “I don’t even know who you are anymore,” I tell him lightly. “Driving cars, going into cities, looting. You’re breaking all your rules.”

  He stops in front of me, forcing me to stop as well, and leans forward. I close my eyes and sigh when his lips meet mine. He doesn’t touch me other than the small press of his lips on mine, but it lights me up inside. I knew I was getting a crush on him, I’ve known it for a while, but when he shows me that he feels that way too, it feels so surreal it makes me dizzy. If I wasn’t sure my pills were working, I would think he was my first good hallucination.