Within These Walls: Series Box Set

by Tracey Ward

  And it is. It is so intensely gross. The clothing sticks to the bodies in places and we have to tug and pull, sometimes rip to get it off of them. There is something so macabre and perverted about undressing the dead, I gag at least five times. Jordan remains his stoic self and I’m pretty sure he’s gone to his happy place and hasn’t even considered what his hands are doing right now.

  “Put the clothes on over your own,” Jordan cautions once we have the infected undressed.

  “Well, Christ yes, of course that’s what I’m doing. You thought I’d wear this stuff on my naked skin?”

  “I just want to make sure you don’t touch their… juices to your body too much. We don’t want it seeping into our pores.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Also, you’re going to have to put it in your hair.”

  I look up at him sharply. “What?”

  He nods and begins pulling the infected’s pants on over his. Luckily the guy had been big. If he’d been a skinny jean wearing hipster, Jordan would be SOL.

  “Your hair smells good. It smells clean and human. We have to cover that up.”

  “What about yours?”

  “Mine too.”

  “When you say ‘put it’ in my hair, what exactly does that mean?” I ask, eyeing him carefully and pulling a crusty cardigan on.

  He looks down at the infected at our feet, and by that simple gesture, I know exactly what he means.

  “Jordan, no.”

  “I’ll do yours. Your hand is still too fresh an injury, I don’t want anything seeping into the wound.”

  “But the goo could seep into my hair too,” I tell him, grasping at straws.

  I really do not want to die but I also, perhaps even equally, do not want zombie sludge caked in my hair. Walking around in these stiff, sticky, foul smelling clothes is going to be bad enough.

  “Your hair is dead, it won’t seep into it. And I’ll stay away from your scalp.”

  “I hate this,” I mutter, utterly defeated.

  “I know. Me too. I like the way you smell right now.”

  I chuckle. “You want to get one last whiff of me before I smell like death?”

  I was joking, but Jordan takes me up on it. He steps close, careful to touch me on my neck and in my hair, practically the only place on me now not covered in infected. I hold my breath as he dips his head down and presses his face into my neck, just below my ear. I feel his lips, warm and soft, press against the tender flesh behind my ear as he drags my hair off my shoulder and lets it fall down my back.

  “You’re doing a little more than smelling,” I whisper.

  He’s grinning when he brings his face back to mine. “This is going to be dangerous,” he whispers.

  “I know,” I whisper back.

  He takes a step back, and when he’s no longer touching me, I feel cold. I shiver suddenly and the outside world is inside again. I’m aware I’m wearing infected clothing and he’s going to rub infected blood into my hair, and suddenly the warm fuzzies I was feeling as he kissed me are long gone.

  He wears a pair of our latex gloves from the first aid kit to dip his hands into the wounds of the infected and rub the black tar blood over his hair. I cringe as I watch him do it and try to prep myself for my turn. He tells me to pull my hair into a ponytail so he can smooth the tar over my hair without worrying about hitting my scalp, and then saturate the long tail with it as well. As he does it, I can smell the infected and it’s such a rotten fruit, sickly sweet smell that I have to breathe through my mouth to get through it without passing out.

  “We’re not putting it on our faces, right?” I ask, hoping to God we aren’t because I will never feel clean again if we do.

  “No,” Jordan confirms as he pulls his fingers through my hair. “The face is way too porous. I don’t want to absorb any of it. I don’t know how long they have to be dead before the infection dies too, if it does at all. They weren’t exactly great incubators. The virus is probably still alive even after they stop moving.”

  “It’s just waiting for a new host.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So I’m hosting it in my hair right now.”

  “Sort of, yeah.”

  “Sick.”

  I hear the snap of the gloves being pulled off and I turn to face him. He’s smiling, amused, and I want to kiss him and punch him in equal measure.

  “You ready for this?” he asks, looking me up and down.

  I lean in and kiss him soundly, careful not to let anything but our lips touch.

  “Now I am.”

  “Then let’s see if this works.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Amazingly, it does work. Really well. We walk out of the bushes, Jordan loosely dangling his bat beside him, and I have my hunting knife gripped tightly in my hand. I ask him if we should mimic their gait by dragging a leg or moaning, but he chuckles at me and insists they aren’t that alert. There are fresh, fast zombies darting all around, and I suppose if we walk at a normal pace, we could be one of them on the tail end of their speed. I mention it to Jordan but he still brushes the notion off.

  “You could bust out dancing right now and they would still ignore you as long as you smelled like one of them,” he explained. “I’m telling you, they’re really single minded.”

  We walk slowly anyway, not wanting to build a sweat and leak our human stink out from under our camouflage. Once we get close to the swarms of infected wandering around the backyards along the river, Jordan insists we go silent. No more talking because that might actually draw attention. Apparently he feels the infected have amazing hearing as well as smell.

  I’m scared senseless. Infected are walking/stumbling past me, occasionally bumping into me, and every time they come near, I have to fight the overpowering urge to scream my lungs out and run. Or stab my knife into their temple, but the odds say that strategy is against me considering there are literally thirty or more in my general vicinity. Jordan looks calm and serene, of course, and it’s enough to make me want to trip him just to see if it startles him in the slightest. There’s something so unnerving about his lack of concern for the brain hungry shamblers surrounding us. I assume it’s his total faith in his zombie knowledge, but I see it as an untested science and feel a little like a rat in a maze at the moment. Will I make it to the cheese at the end? As another infected trips and almost knocks me to the ground, I’m thinking that’s a hard NO.

  We have to walk a long, long way along the riverbank before we even start to see docks, and so far they are all empty. It’s slow going at the pace we’re keeping and more than once I contemplate diving into the water just so I can get some breathing room. Zombies do not respect the personal bubble. They are all up in my grill, and at one point my heart jumps into my throat and freezes when an infected bumps into me, leans in and sniffs my neck. It reminds me of what

  Jordan did just an hour ago, and I pray to God Almighty that he doesn’t lick me too. His jaw is ripped almost clean off and I’m hoping that means he can’t bite me even if he wants to, but the open, dripping maw of his mouth is so grotesque, I have to fight my gag reflex. After a far too thorough inspection, he seems satisfied that I smell badly enough before he moves on, but not before I literally wet my pants a little.

  Finally, after what seems like an eternity, Jordan bumps into me. He pushes me slightly in the direction of the river bank and makes a very convincing grunting sound to get my attention. There at the end of a long dock, sitting in the sunlight like a gift from Heaven, is a fishing boat. It has a small outboard motor like the dinghy, only this one is slightly larger. All the better to escape with our lives. The boat is larger than the dinghy too, but from what I know of fishing, it’s also a shallow ride which will come in handy farther up river. I follow Jordan’s lead and we begin closing the distance between us and the dock. We’re careful to meander, sort of heading one direction, then randomly another, never cutting a clear path to our goal. Jordan is being a little more paranoid now and I th
ink it’s the promise of having the water as his buffer again that is bringing out the caution. Hope is a fickle and slippery bitch.

  I curse her as we close in on the first steps off the bank and onto the dock. We’re maybe five shambling steps away when the shots ring out. A zombie to my right takes a headshot and drops in a gory mess on the ground. He was only ten feet away, which means that whoever is shooting has me in their range as well. And Jordan.

  I glance over at Jordan, startled into a frozen position. His eyes meet mine, wide and sufficiently freaked out to tell me he’s not an emotionless alien after all. Jordan can become very, very scared.

  “What do we do?” I venture a whisper, figuring the gunshots make it permissible.

  Jordan shakes his head quickly, his eyes darting around to check our immediate surroundings.

  There are only three infected nearby; two women and one man. They all have stopped and begun to sniff the air hard, looking for the source of the gunshot. They know enough to know it’s the sound of the living, and suddenly I regret my whisper. We have two choices here. Either continue pretending to be infected and avoid fighting the three closest to us, but run the risk of being randomly picked off by the live shooter somewhere behind us, or own up to being alive, make a break for the boat at the end of the dock, and hope we can get it cast off and running before too many infected come after us. There are just three of them near us at the moment, but all of them in the area that heard the shot are suddenly on high alert for anything living and I’m worried taking off at a dead sprint upstream from where they are scenting more living is going to be pushing it. They’ll catch on and come after us. There’s also no guarantee that if we prove our humanity, the shooter won’t still pick us off. Maybe they are eyeing this boat as well and are clearing a path to it.

  Jordan is still frozen and looking panicked, so I make an executive decision in the interest of not being shot in the back of the head. The odds of this shooter being a marksman who can hit a quickly moving target are slim so I decide it’s time to run.

  “Jordan,” I say loudly, immediately grabbing his attention. “Run.”

  I take off at a dead sprint, and when I’m two steps onto the dock, I hear his feet hit the boards as well. More gunshots ring out and I see a bullet enter the water just to my left. I’m running as hard as I can and listening to the sound of Jordan running behind me, the sounds of his footfalls the only thing keeping my heart pumping. I take the front, leaving the motor for Jordan, and I use my knife to slice into the thin yellow ropes holding us to the docks. Jordan dives into the boat just seconds behind me and more gunshots explode around us. I stay low and shout at Jordan to do the same. I’m hoping that the shooter also wants the boat and won’t run the risk of putting a hole in the hull, rendering it useless.

  As I cut loose the first rope and jump to the rear by Jordan for the second, I hear more footsteps on the boards. They are slow and clumsy, and I know without looking up that they are the infected. For once, I’m not worried about them. I get my knife through the second rope and we’re free. Shoving off hard from the dock, I take a deep breath and hope we’re exiting the range of the shooter.

  But hope, if you’ll recall, is a bitch.

  One last shot is fired and I hear a cry behind me and a distinctive thump.

  Jordan’s down.

  I don’t look at him, not yet, because I know that if he’s dead, I won’t be able to move and we’ll both die out here in this boat just drifting aimlessly. Maybe the shooter will swim out and claim it, tossing our bodies into the river. I figure if he’s dead, I can’t help him now, and if he’s alive, I still can’t help him. Not sitting in the river like a target. I jump on the motor, pull the string hard and crank it to life. It is so much stronger than the dinghy, and when I open it up all the way, we are off like a shot up the river. If there are infected following us into the water or more gunshots, I don’t hear them. I keep my eyes focused straight ahead.

  “Jordan?” I say softly, too softly to be heard over the engine. I don’t know why I even bothered, but I’m shaking scared and I know I can’t do anything at all for him until we’re farther up river, even though it’s killing me.

  Tears stream down my face and are chilled by the wind whipping past me, and finally we reach a bend in the river. As we’re rounding it and I feel like we’ve put enough space between us and the danger, I take a shaky breath and cut the engine. I look down to see Jordan slumped against the side of the boat, his face ashen but his blue eyes bright and staring at me.

  “Ow,” he says weakly, holding onto his right bicep, which is bleeding profusely.

  I laugh/cry and fall down beside him, kissing him hard on the mouth and covering his face in my tears. He kisses me back even though he’s unable to touch me because of his injured arm and blood coated hand clutching it.

  “Oh no!” I exclaim, pulling away and ripping at the sleeve of his shirt. “You’re bleeding and you’re still wearing the infected shirt.”

  He removes his hand long enough for me to rip the sleeve off at the shoulder seam and peel it quickly down his arm. I pull him up into a sitting position and we lean him over the side of the boat to get his injury into the water and hopefully wash it clean. I don’t know if any of the infected’s goo from the shirt entered his wound, but my heart is pounding a mile a minute with the uncertainty. When Jordan is sitting again and I’m inspecting the wound, he voices my fears.

  “I’ll tell you if I get a fever,” he says solemnly. “And you’ll take the gun and—“

  “Shut up,” I interrupt, careful not to look at his face. The idea of putting a gun to his head, to anyone’s head, is so repugnant to me that I feel like I might vomit. “I’m not doing that so get it out of your head. You’re going to be fine.”

  “We should pull over and stop. Wait it out with you in the boat and me on the shore. And you with the gun,” he insists, ignoring my words.

  “The bullet went clean through, that’s good news,” I say, ignoring him right back. I pull out an extra shirt and rip a strip off the bottom to use as a bandage on his arm. I tie it tight, both because I need to stop the bleeding and because he’s pissing me off and I’m not above hurting him a little.

  “Ali,” Jordan says crossly.

  Still refusing to look at him, I pull out my phone and set the timer up for five minutes. I show it to him, hit the start button and curl up beside him. Five minutes for the Fever to take effect, twenty minutes of speed, strength and reasoning and then eternity of hunger for human flesh. I begin praying that in the next ten minutes Jordan’s temperature doesn’t spike. I’m praying that he doesn’t start writhing in agony as his muscles are attacked by the virus. I’m praying he doesn’t start to think I smell a little too good.

  I’m praying that I don’t have to see the inside of the skull of yet another person I care about.

  Three minutes.

  He wraps his arm around me and I smile.

  He wraps my hand around the gun and I frown.

  Does he feel it? Is he preparing me for what he feels must be done? I know he doesn’t want to be one of them, and if it comes down to it, I need to honor his wishes and put a bullet between his eyes. My meds are two days gone and losing him this way, being the one to put him down, will break me. No doubt in my mind about it. With what happened to Snickers, I’m already on my way out. If he goes, the depression can have me at that point, I won’t fight it. It’s not as though I need him to survive. I won’t shrivel up and die without him. It’s having to be the one to pull the trigger that will finish me off. I’ve already seen too much in my life and having to re-see the damage a bullet can do to a face, that’s not something even a healthy person is likely to make it through twice.

  Four minutes.

  His body feels hot against my skin, but I don’t know if I’m imagining it or if he really is starting to run a fever. I sit back slightly and look up at him, stifling a cry when I see his face is covered in sweat and his eyes are closed.


  “Jordan?” He opens his eyes and looks at me and I’m infinitely relieved to see they are their usual brilliant blue, even if they look dead tired at the moment. “How you feeling?”

  He groans deep in his throat and part of me shivers.

  “I’m thirsty.”

  I lift my hand to his forehead and press the backs of my fingers against his skin. It’s clammy, soaked in sweat, but not burning up and I sigh in relief.

  “I’ll get you water,” I say, moving to sit up and get his pack.

  He holds onto me and tugs me gently against him. “Let’s wait out the clock. No need to waste it if…”

  I stare at the clock on my phone and we wait until it runs out, the alarm sounding and telling us shrilly that he’s not going to try to eat me. I return it to my pocket, kiss him lightly on the lips, and go in search of water. As he drinks it, I wipe the sweat from his brow.

  “My body is mad I got shot,” he says, his voice rough.

  I smile. “I imagine, yeah.”

  “That’s what the sweating is about.”

  “Oh so you’re not turning into a brain hungry monster? Thank goodness for small favors.”

  “Would you have done it?” he asks, looking at the gun I left in his lap.

  I sit back and study his face; the square of his jaw, the round of his cheeks. I’m glad it’s all still in place and beautiful, as it should be.

  “I would have,” I say grudgingly. “Because that’s what you wanted.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t have to.”

  I chuckle and run the cloth over his face again. “I bet you are. We’re drifting back,” I tell him and hand him the cloth. “We better get our asses to Corvallis and out of this city.”

  Jordan nods and closes his eyes as I take a seat at the motor and rev it to life. I don’t see any oars in this boat and I’m grateful there will be no complaints from him about using the motor. I can still see smoke plumes rising up from the wreckage of Salem and there are infected all along this shore, on both sides. The sirens are wailing and I can hear screams and shouts in the distance as the Fever rages through the city. How it lasted this long without being overtaken is a mystery to me, though I imagine it has a lot to do with the slow roll of the infected. I wonder what Corvallis will look like. What I should be worrying about, though, is what Albany looks like. It’s the last big city on the river between us and our goal, and I’m hoping against hope that we can cruise down the river past it without trouble and get to my uncle. Jordan’s arm is going to need stitches, and while I doubt Uncle Syd has anything medicinal to numb the pain, I know from experience he has other means.