Within These Walls: Series Box Set

by Tracey Ward

  “She died in the kitchen.”

  I remember. I remember bursting in through the door with my bat. I remember taking that bat to Dee’s head over and over again until she stopped moving. Until she was a mess of tissue, blood and bone at my feet. I remember thinking it’s what I should have done before. When I looked at Alissa lying there silently crying like she is now, I thought I’d finally done something right. That I had a second shot at saving… someone.

  There’s a commotion outside. A man is shouting. Crying.

  I cast Alissa one last worried look before removing my gun and bursting out of the RV. Syd is there with the boy. He’s pulling him through the parking lot toward the minivan. He’s fighting and crying, trying to get back inside to his mother. Syd finally gets him to the white van, pushes him up against the side of it and bends down to speak to him face to face. From inside the store I can hear the male shouting that brought me outside. It tapers off, the wailing dying out to a moan that eventually becomes inaudible. I hold back, guarding the door of the RV and scanning the parking lot for infected. It’s clear so far but I’m beginning to wonder how long that will hold true. I’m anxious to get out of here. Mostly I’m anxious to get Alissa out of her because she feels defenseless right now.

  Syd stands as the man comes staggering out of the building. He approaches Syd and the boy slowly. They speak for a brief moment, Syd points to the north then the man and the boy pile into the van and it revs to life. Syd begins jogging toward us as the van pulls quickly out of the parking lot, fishtailing as it takes to the empty lane heading north. Tearing down the road toward the south is car after car, completely oblivious to what’s happened in this store and to what they’re rushing into in the south.

  “Who was that?” I ask Syd as he approaches.

  “The father,” he replies gruffly. “The husband.”

  “Where the hell was he while all of this was happening?” I demand angrily.

  Syd jumps into the driver’s seat as I do the same on the passenger side. He glances briefly at Alissa in the back, a knot forming between his brows.

  “He was in the car with the baby,” he replies quietly.

  “What?”

  “They had an infant with them. The mother went in with the boy while the husband stayed outside with the infant. He promised her no matter what he heard or saw that he would not leave that baby.” Syd throws the RV angrily into drive. We peel out onto the road much the way the van did. “He kept that promise.”

  “Shit,” I whisper.

  Syd nods silently in agreement.

  Chapter Six

  Syd drives us farther north but eventually we cut down a country road and park in a field at my request. The fact that he listens to me is staggering but I can’t waste time being amazed by it. Alissa is coming around but she’s still stressing me out. She’s very quiet, very slow in her movements, but she is talking again. When she looks at you she sees you. It’s a good sign.

  “What happened back there?” I ask Syd quietly. “How scared should I be right now because I’m freaking out?”

  Alissa has gone to bed in the back with the divider pulled while Syd and I sit up front looking over the map. He scans through the radio stations looking for any broadcasts that might give us a better idea of where to go, of what areas are being swarmed, but there’s nothing. He stops it on a static filled station and turns up the volume slightly.

  “Do you know how her mother died?” he asks, his voice barely audible over the static.

  “Yeah.”

  He looks at me in surprise. This was not the answer he was expecting.

  “She told you?”

  “Yes. Her mom killed herself with a gun. Ali found her.”

  He stares at me for a long moment. I don’t fidget. I don’t flinch.

  “Huh,” he mutters. “Yeah, that’s what happened. And what happened back there with the mom…”

  I nod in understanding. “It reminded her of her mom.”

  “Yup. Sent her into a little tailspin.”

  “Little?” I ask incredulously, thinking of Ali’s unseeing eyes and slurred speech. This feels worse than what happened between her and I just yesterday when she put a gun to my face. When I very literally peed myself a little. She was confused but she was lucid. Present. What happened to her today felt vacant and… well, she felt like a zombie.

  Syd chuckles darkly. He rests his head back on the seat and shakes it. “You have no idea what she’s been through. Yeah, this was a little spell. She’s already coming around. Her meds are kicking back in slowly but surely. We have to be careful with her while that happens. That’s why I stopped us so early tonight. I want her to sleep.”

  I stare into the falling dusk, at the world turning gray and murky around us. I’m so far out of my element with all of this, it makes me sick to my stomach. I’m not great with what I can’t understand and this is something intangible which makes it so much worse. It’s like fighting a friggin’ ghost.

  “You can bail,” Syd says suddenly.

  I jerk my head over to find him looking at me placidly.

  “You could leave,” he offers. “Break out on your own without worrying about any of this. I’ve got her, she’s safe. No guilt, no worry. Just freedom from this.”

  I shake my head firmly. “No. I promised her.”

  Syd snorts. “That’s sweet but be realistic. Romantics aside, wouldn’t you be better off leaving? Wouldn’t it be easier for you?”

  I swallow the urge to say yes. To admit that it would undoubtedly be easier to not deal with any of this. Offensive as it may be, I want to call it what it feels like – crazy. There’s enough crazy out there with zombies and people turned rabid killing each other over nothing. Add this thing that I don’t understand on top of it and it’s almost too much to handle.

  Almost.

  I inhale deeply. “Romantics aside, I promised her. I gave her my word. Keeping my word doesn’t make me sweet, it makes me honorable. After the social breakdown we’ve all just witnessed, being a man of my word means more now than ever, don’t you think?”

  Syd gives me the ghost of a grin, the most endearing and friendly expression he’s bestowed on me yet.

  “I guess you’re right,” he agrees quietly.

  ***

  Crossing the river could have been a dream or a nightmare. Dream situation meaning we’re alone and we cruise right across. Hello, hills! Hide us in your dark depths from the monsters that stalk us and drool over our frontal lobes.

  Nightmare situation goes more like this; zombies, zombies everywhere. And that’s pretty much what we get. The only upswing is that there are no people. There easily could have been cars piled up across the bridge either in bumper to bumper traffic or sitting abandoned in the center of the road. Luckily, aside from the writhing mass of undead standing shoulder to bloody shoulder, the bridge is clear.

  We cross it exactly the way we made it through the tiny, overrun town; slowly. Painfully slowly. It’s packed tighter than the town was and there’s a constant hum groaning from outside. It’s accented by their bumbling bodies banging against the sides the RV. I watch Alissa out of the corner of my eye, wondering what she’s feeling. She woke up this morning acting as though nothing had happened yesterday. She was bright, sarcastic and completely herself. For some reason it bothered me more than if she’d come shambling out of the bedroom silently. These swings, these drastic changes, are giving me whiplash. Syd takes them all in stride but I’m on pins and needles waiting for the next change. It’s nerve-wracking.

  I hear a splash outside, making me nearly jump out of my skin. This is isn’t helping. We’re already living in a world full of unexpected sounds (gunshots and groaning being the most common) and it’s wearing on me. Not for the first time, I miss my boat. I miss the lapping of the water against the hull. I miss the sun on my shoulders and the width of the water protecting me like a moving moat. Right now, though, I have to fight the urge to jump up and run to a window to see
what made the splash. No sudden movements, I remind myself. Don’t let them know you’re in here.

  “What was that?” I ask quietly, fighting for the calm in my voice.

  “Infected,” Alissa whispers back. “There are so many on the bridge we’re knocking some into the water.”

  I hear another splash, then another. We roll on, pressing through the crowd slowly. I watch with dismay as my hands start shaking. I haven’t slept more than an hour here and there since we left the sporting goods store. It’s becoming a problem.

  “Almost there,” Syd mumbles. I think he’s talking to himself more than anything.

  “There are so many,” Alissa mutters miserably.

  “It’s because of Albany.” I remind her, distracting myself. “On this highway heading east like we are, Albany is directly behind us. It was a ghost town when we came through because most people must have fled before the swarm really hit. They headed south to Corvallis, west to the coast and east on this road to the mountains.”

  “And these infected are following them.”

  “Yep. Once they get going in a direction they’ll walk that way forever unless something better comes along to distract them.”

  “Something like us?” Syd asks, his voice tight.

  “No,” I tell him firmly. “Not us. Never us.”

  Alissa turns to look back at me. I’m surprised when she manages a small grin. “Because we have you.”

  I grin back at her.

  There’s a hard bang against the side of the RV. The noise goes off in our quiet space like a gunshot and I watch in shock and horror as Alissa makes a massive mistake.

  She screams.

  Just like that they know. Every zombie in our vicinity turns toward the noise. They take notice of our vehicle moving among them. They press their mangled, pasty faces against the glass of the windows. Internally I beg Alissa to be still but it isn’t going to happen and I know it. She’s panicking, something I haven’t really seen her do since the first moment I met her when her roommate had her pinned down. After that, she adjusted to the madness we were surrounded by with disturbing ease, ease that I understand better now. I understand this too, this mistake. She’s stressed beyond her limit, still recouping from yesterday, from her lapse in the dark with the lies, and she’s still not fully medicated yet. It was out of her system longer than it’s been back in and even with it, this is all too hard on her. It’s too hard on all of us.

  She leaps in her seat, grabbing at her bow even though it won’t do her any good in the confines of the RV.

  “Ali,” I say as calmly as I can.

  She doesn’t hear me. She’s counting the infected at the windows and talking at full volume.

  “We have to go, we have to move. Dad, they know. Go!”

  “Al, I am going. Calm down,” he says evenly.

  There’s another bang. Hands are grasping at the windows, covering the glass in grime and black blood. I can hear bodies pressing against the sides, grasping at them. Clawing.

  “Go,” I tell Syd.

  “I told you guys, I am going.”

  “No, I mean go fast. Now.” I watch as an infected starts to climb on the hood of the RV, heading for the windshield. “Our cover is blown, stealth is dead. Just go.”

  He hesitates.

  This is the sort of thing that is going to get us killed.

  “Syd, we don’t have time to argue about this,” I tell him, my voice tight with anger.

  He shakes his head but puts down his foot. Our speed increases. “Brace yourself. It’s going to get bumpy.”

  I hurry on my knees to the bench seat in the back. From here I can see out part of Ali’s window and half the windshield. It makes me wish I was driving. I don’t like not being in control.

  Syd hits the gas hard. We hit the infected harder. Bodies make thumping sounds as they bounce off the front bumper, tossed to the side and into their brothers only to be bounced back by them into the side of the RV again as it passes. Some aren’t so lucky. Some end up falling under the vehicle to either pass harmlessly beneath the undercarriage or to act as a speed bump under our wheels. The zombie on the hood that was coming for the windshield gets its wish. I watch as her face flies toward the glass, makes sharp contact and disappears to the right. Her nose broke on contact leaving a large spray of blood and tissue on the surface. Alissa, to her credit, doesn’t make a sound.

  As for me, I almost weep. The impact caused a crack in the glass. It’s small, but how big does it really need to be? Another hit like that anywhere on the windshield will cause it to spider web and then we can’t trust it at all. It’s a chink in our already shoddy armor. My shaking hands have suddenly stilled. I think that’s a worse sign than the shaking was.

  Syd plows ahead, bodies banging off the side of the RV as we move at what feels like breakneck speed but is probably 20 mph. We wouldn’t even get a ticket in a school zone and yet I feel like we’re flying. So much damage is going to be done by this. The windshield is already a liability and it’s only a matter of time—

  A tire blows. Luckily we’re not going as fast as it felt like, but the sound of the exploding tire and the subsequent veering of the vehicle sends us all into an instant panic. Hands, feet and faces stream by, every one of them threatening to crack the soft eggshell hull of our RV as we continue to hobble past them as fast as we can. I don’t believe this is how it will end for us, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to end well either.

  “We keep going!” Syd shouts. “We’ll deal with it later. When it’s clear.”

  Before I go into what’s wrong with that logic, I’ll preface it with this; he’s right. We keep going, no question, no complaint. Nothing is to be gained by stopping other than teeth in your flesh and that’s if you’re lucky enough to be eaten by this crowd and not pulled apart like a gingerbread man tossed into a crowd of Santa’s starving elves. It’s a no brainer (zombie pun!) and I totally agree with it.

  That being said, what the hell?! We’ll deal with what later? The fractured windshield? The mangled tire that is beyond repair? The wheel now meeting pavement and crying in sparking agony?

  It’s like the insanely slow speed at which we have to do almost everything. I understand it, I agree with it on some level, but that doesn’t mean a huge part of me is not absolutely rage stroking over it.

  Eventually we clear the bridge which means we’ve cleared the majority of the infected but it by no means actually puts us in the clear. I don’t think that exists anymore. It’s like the land of OZ or Narnia at this point – it’s a fairy tale. We can all feel it where the tire is blown and the wheel is becoming a hot, mangled mess, but we keep going, even after the bridge. There’s still no safe place to pull over and fix it, not yet. Maybe not ever. I’m starting to wonder if we aren’t going to have to abandon this thing.

  It’s then that I realize that’s exactly what we need to do.

  “Stop!” I shout. “Syd, stop, now!”

  “What? No,” he argues. “We’re still surrounded!”

  I’m hardly listening. I’m already grabbing my pack, tossing Alissa’s at her and heading for the side door.

  “We’ll have to run from them at high speeds to get far enough ahead to fix that tire. Can the wheel last that long without becoming useless? A tire is one, but the actual wheel is another. Do you know how to fix it? How to replace it?”

  His silence tells me the answer.

  “We’re ditching the RV for now. We’ll take what we can and come back for it when the swarm has passed it by. It’ll take a day, maybe two.”

  “Where are we going in the meantime?” Alissa asks. She climbs out of her seat to head to the back with me, her pack already on.

  “Anywhere but here.”

  Syd pulls over abruptly. “Al, grab the small tent. Jordan, secure that door behind you.”

  “It won’t keep looters out,” Alissa warns.

  “We’re not worried about other people, Al.”

  “Not yet,”
she whispers.

  Is it wrong for me to be proud of the cynicism there?

  Syd slams the car into park before glancing back at us. “Everybody have water in their pack?”

  “Got it.”

  “Yeah,” I agree.

  “Good. They’re coming so let’s do this fast. We’ll run into the trees here on the left, start heading north. Ready?”

  We nod, perched and ready to pounce.

  “Go!”

  We burst through the door, Alissa running ahead of me while I carefully lock the door before chasing after her. I’m with Syd, the door needs to be locked so the infected can’t sneak in and surprise us when we come back. If it keeps other people out too, so much the better, though I doubt it will. I fall in line behind Syd running across the highway after Alissa. To the right, I can see infected that were already heading east. They’ve caught wind of us. They’re turning, recalculating and honing in. I take a quick look at what’s at my left out on the bridge and wish I hadn’t. There aren’t that many close by, none that I immediately need to worry about, but there are so just many of them in general. We can’t run straight out into the woods and hope they’ll lose us. That’s their thing – they don’t lose you. They don’t forget you, they don’t lose interest in you. They’ll hunt us forever and our only hope of evading this swarm is outsmarting them. Shouldn’t be hard, right?

  Yeah, we’ll see. Dumb can be deceptively tricky.

  In the distance, I can see black smoke faintly rising into the sky and I wonder if it’s a town or another blown out airport. Could be both. Crabtree is supposed to be in that direction, out to the east on our route to the mountains. I briefly hope there are still people there. That there’s a human scent for the infected to pick up on to pull them away from us. Maybe it’s a messed up hope to have but it’s too late to take it back now.

  Alissa darts into the trees, Syd following close behind. I could almost kiss her when I see what she’s doing. She’s not heading straight into the trees. She’s not even heading toward what could be a town. What she’s doing is running us straight toward the riverbank.