Within These Walls: Series Box Set

by Tracey Ward

  We all pile out slowly. Alissa and I follow Syd’s lead in removing any jackets or holsters, empty or no. We get rid of anything that could imply a hidden weapon. We even roll up our sleeves to expose more skin and prove we have no bite marks. Then we wait.

  When the Jeeps arrive they stop a good distance from the fence. Men and woman pile out, I count 5 total though there may be more inside, and approach the gate slowly.

  “Evening!” a woman calls out. She’s tall with chestnut hair hinting at gray and sharp eyes that scan over every inch of each of us. “How can we help you?”

  “That’s what we’ve come to find out,” Syd calls back.

  “That depends what you’re looking for.”

  “Someplace safe.”

  The woman and her crew have reached the fence. They stand about 20 feet from us, each one of them holding a weapon. They’re all pointed at the ground, just as Syd carries his, but I can’t help but notice how comfortable they all appear. Holding these guns, that’s second nature to them. They’re all experienced, which explains why they’re on the welcoming committee.

  The woman chuckles. “No such thing anymore. But we’ve got something close here. Close as anyone else out there can get.”

  “Just about anything is better than what we’ve got now.”

  “Well then you’ve come to the right place. I assume you read the sign at the border?”

  “No riffraff, no troublemakers,” Syd quotes with a quick nod. “We’re neither, I promise you that.”

  The woman gestures to Alissa and I. “Are these your kids?”

  “The girl is. The boy is her… friend.”

  I see the woman’s lips twitch but she doesn’t smile. “Anyone else with you?”

  “No, it’s just the three of us.”

  “Anyone sick?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll have to go on quarantine anyway.”

  Syd chuckles darkly. “I thought we already were.”

  “Hmmm,” she hums, not enjoying the joke. “You’ll have to suffer another one inside the fence but outside the city. If anyone runs a fever, we’ll shoot them. On the spot. So I’ll ask again, is anyone sick? With anything at all?”

  “No, ma’am,” I say politely. I’m eager to smooth over whatever feathers have been ruffled. Syd casts a glare at me, warning me not to speak again.

  “Good,” she says curtly. “Now let me tell me what goes on in here before we let you in. I don’t want to waste my time searching you and your vehicle and setting you up in quarantine if you’re going to turn around and run off. You wouldn’t be the first and I’ve learned my lesson. First, if you come in here you have to work. Plain and simple. Everyone does, no exceptions. Second, there will be no trouble inside these walls. You don’t carry a weapon unless you’re on guard or leaving the perimeter. Any fights or disputes that turn violent in any way will be dealt with quickly, meaning both parties will be thrown out. We don’t care who started it, we don’t have time for that nonsense. Same goes for stealing. We share what we have evenly. End of story.”

  When she finishes talking she simply stares at us expectantly. Alissa is the first to break the silence.

  “Is that all?”

  “For now. There are more rules but they don’t matter yet. These are the important ones. If you can’t follow these to the letter, you’re not making it in this gate.”

  “We can follow those rules,” Syd tells her seriously.

  “Wait,” I blurt out, feeling my pulse racing. This all feels dangerously fast.

  Syd looks at me sharply but I ignore him.

  “How many of you are there?”

  The woman eyes me shrewdly but eventually answers. “Over 3,000.”

  My heart is now in my throat, threatening to make me vomit. “That’s a lot.”

  “It is. We’re proud of that number. We’ve saved a lot of souls.”

  I nod, my mind racing. “But that’s a lot of people in what I assume is a small town. You must be packed in tight.”

  “No.”

  I raise a surprised eyebrow. “No?”

  “We’re very spread out. We’re careful not to let the area become too populated. I assume you’re worried about an outbreak within our walls. It could happen. But then it could happen anywhere. We’re very careful to keep the Fever victims out. Anyone who goes outside for anything is quarantined for a full day when they return.”

  “That’s a long time considering the Fever presents itself within what? Five to ten minutes?” Alissa asks.

  The woman cracks a faint grin. “As I said, we’re very careful.”

  “Do you have medical supplies? A doctor?” I ask, thinking of the main reason we’re contemplating even doing this; Alissa and her meds.

  “We do. Is there something you need to see a doctor for?”

  “One of us, yes,” Syd says cryptically. “We’d need a very specific medication. One we’ve had no success finding out here. We were hoping to find it in Madras or Bend but obviously we can’t get there.”

  “If you’re looking for pot we don’t have it and we never will.”

  “No, it’s not an illegal drug.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’d rather not say, but—“

  “Zyprexa,” Alissa calls out, unashamed. “Olanzapine.”

  “Al, they don’t all need to know.”

  “Yes, they do,” she tells him before turning back to the woman. “It’s for—“

  “I don’t need to know what it’s for,” she interrupts softly. “It’s a medication you’ve been on before?”

  “For years.”

  “We can get it for you.”

  I frown. “How?”

  “I’m afraid the answer to that won’t come until you’ve passed quarantine and are on the inside.” She glances between Syd and I. “Assuming you decide to come in.”

  “We need to discuss it.”

  Alissa nods in agreement. Syd glares at me.

  “That’s fine,” the woman says. She gives some kind of signal to her crew and they head back toward the Jeeps. “It’s good to be sure. For all of our sakes.”

  “Thank you,” I reply awkwardly. “Sorry to drag you out here.”

  She grins warmly, surprising me. “We’re here to help. You folks stay safe out there.”

  “We will.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “If they hadn’t said no fights, I’d have punched you in the face right then and there!” Syd shouts at me.

  I take it all in stride because honestly I’m used to him yelling at me by now. He’s been doing it for weeks. I also remain calm because I won’t be made to feel like a villain for wanting to be sure. It doesn’t hurt that Alissa is disagreeing with him for once, either. She’s not exactly siding with me, but I’ll take what I can get. Syd has been yelling at her as well, probably worse than me, and I’m proud of her for sticking to her guns. Even if they’re not exactly mine.

  “We need to talk about it, not yell about it,” she scolds Syd. I watch her pull her coat tighter around herself as she shivers briefly.

  We didn’t go far from the fence when we left. We found a good spot beside a small lake to make camp for the night but it’s more out in the open than we’ve been before. We’re surrounded by open terrain on three sides and with the wind picking up across the water it’s getting pretty cold out. Not far off in the distance, we can see a small spattering of lights where Warm Springs lies. In the other direction, down south across the river, I expected to see a huge show of lights inside the makeshift village at the barricade but there’s nothing. Not even a flashlight.

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Yes, there is,” Alissa insists patiently. “Jordan doesn’t want to go in there and I think his reasons are really valid.”

  “What? That he’s scared?”

  I shrug calmly, my hands stuffed into my jacket pockets. “If worrying about surviving a second outbreak makes me scared, then yeah. I’m scared.
I’m terrified.”

  “They’ve lasted this long without an outbreak.”

  “And they’ve been growing in numbers, increasing the risk. 3,000 people, Syd. That’s a lot of potential in a pretty small area. Have you ever even heard of Warm Springs before?”

  “No,” Alissa answers.

  Syd shakes his head silently. Grudgingly.

  “Exactly. They probably had a standing population of maybe 2,000 before the outbreak. The town has swollen. It’s probably bursting at the seams. I don’t want to be locked in there when all hell breaks loose.”

  “We don’t know that it will,” Alissa argues.

  “We also don’t know that it won’t.”

  “We can’t know anything for sure,” Syd tells me, sounding surprisingly calm. I take it to mean he’s changing tack. Working me from a different angle since aggression doesn’t rile me anymore. “But if we go in there, we can get Al her meds. That’s the most important thing. It’s the biggest need we have and they can fill it.”

  “But we can’t know anything for sure,” I retort, parroting his argument. “They say they can get her meds but how? Where are they going to get it? That woman wasn’t a doctor, she didn’t know what it was. How do we know they can actually get it?”

  Alissa tosses a stone in the fire, muttering, “We don’t.”

  “The only true silver lining I see is that we would go off these horrible shifts we’re keeping. And we would have space to get away from each other. I think that would benefit all of us, but is it reason enough to go there?”

  I’m almost looking for them to convince me. My gut still says no, absolutely not, but I can see the benefits of it. I see the needs we all have, individually and as a group, which this place could fill. But it’s risky. I have to wonder, is it worth it?

  “What do you think?” I ask Ali.

  “I think,” she says quietly, looking directly at Syd, “that Jordan and I need a minute to talk about this alone.”

  “I’m not leaving the two of you alone,” Syd says plainly.

  “I didn’t think so. That’s fine,” Alissa tells him happily. “Stick around. We can all chat. Maybe about how you banged my high school English teacher.”

  “Did you just say banged to your dad?” I whisper.

  She ignores me. “I would love to talk about that. How was that? Did she stay grammatically correct throughout? Was it all ‘oh yes’ instead of ‘oh yeah’?”

  “Al,” Syd warns her. The firelight is playing tricks with shadows, but I swear he’s blushing.

  “Did she give you an A for effort? Or did you earn that A with extra credit?”

  “That’s enough.”

  “Agreed,” I say, feeling monumentally uncomfortable.

  “She was too young for you. What was she? 30?”

  “I’m 42, not dead,” he protests.

  “So you admit it?”

  Syd looks from Alissa to me, then avoids both our eyes.

  “I’ll be over here,” he mutters.

  “Wow,” I say once he’s out of earshot. “He slept with your teacher?”

  “Banged her, Jordan. He banged my teacher.”

  “That word brings up a much more graphic image of your dad than I can cope with. Can you not keep saying that?”

  “Prude.”

  “Crude.”

  Alissa chuckles.

  I’m put on edge by how good it feels just talking to her. Joking around with her. It feels normal and fun, the way it did when we first met and the world fell apart around us. When all we had was each other. I wish I could change it all. Take it all back, every harsh word and tone I’ve used in the last few weeks. But life isn’t like that. You can’t undo what’s already been done. You can only try to do better in the future.

  “Ali, I’m sorry,” I say softly.

  She shakes her head. “Don’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cause then I have to apologize too and I hate admitting I’m wrong.”

  I smile. “What sins do you need to confess?”

  “I think the worst one is always making you break your rules for me.” She looks at me earnestly. “That’s what I want to talk to you about. I don’t want you to go in there for my sake, no matter what we promised each other. Dad and I could go in, get my medications, get some rest so I’m me again and then we could find you.”

  My smile fades. “Ali, wherever I would go from here without you guys, you wouldn’t be able to find me again. No one would. That’d be the point.”

  “Ugh,” she groans, dropping her head against my chest. I drape my arms over her shoulders loosely. “I don’t want you to go in there for me but I don’t want you to go away either.”

  “You want me to want to go in there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ali?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t want to go in there.”

  “I know.”

  “But I don’t want to leave you either.”

  I feel her sigh heavily, her shoulders lifting the weight of my arms up and down with her breath.

  “So what do we do?”

  I sigh as well. I already know what I’m going to do. I can fight it as hard as I like, I can dig my heels in deep and kick and scream till I’m hoarse, I can hate it with my whole heart, but it won’t change anything. It won’t change what I know through and through to my marrow. What I’ve known since the night in the storage aisle when I wrapped her pinky around mine and swore to her that I’d stay with her. No matter what.

  “My mom has a gluten allergy,” I tell her.

  She lifts her head from my chest, her face confused. “I’m sorry to hear that?”

  “She can’t eat anything with gluten in it. Suck thing is, everything on God’s green earth has gluten. It’s really annoying. She hates it but what are you going to do?”

  “Not eat gluten?”

  “Right, yeah. So that’s what she does. She avoids it. Drives her crazy. My dad hates it too, but that’s what they have to do. They avoid it like the plague.”

  “Wait? Your dad has the same allergy?”

  “Nope. He avoids it anyway.”

  Alissa smiles. “He does it for her.”

  I nod. “Because he loves her and he made a promise to her, for better or worse.”

  “Gluten or no.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re going in there even though you don’t want to, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I tell her quietly, looking down into her brilliant, bright eyes. “I’m doing it for you. Because I made you a promise.”

  Her brow pinches. “But I don’t want you to go just f—“

  “This is my gluten, Ali. I don’t want to go in there, I don’t want to give up gluteny goodness, but I’ll do it because I love you.”

  She stares at me in shock. My heart has stopped in my chest. I didn’t mean to say those words. It’s not that I don’t mean them, but I definitely didn’t intend to say them.

  “So let it go,” I tell her quickly, moving us past this heavy, awkward moment. “I’m doing it. Just know this – I reserve the right to piss and moan about it every step of the way.”

  She grins at me, her eyes glistening in the firelight. “You do what you gotta do.”

  “Alright.”

  “So we’re going?” Syd asks from behind the camper.

  “Dad, are you kidding me?” Alissa cries. She rounds the back bumper of the RV to glare at him in the dark. “Have you been listening the entire time?”

  “Yes,” he says shamelessly.

  “You’re insane.”

  “But we’re going. That’s good news. I didn’t have to break any arms.”

  When he steps out of the shadows, he’s smiling.

  “The saying is ‘Twist any arms’.”

  “What saying?”

  “Insane,” she repeats.

  “Regardless, let’s get some shut eye. I’ll take first watch. We’ll do short 4 hours just for the night.�
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  “You guys want to do bathroom breaks first?” Alissa asks. She’s still glaring at her dad but she’s also down to business, pulling a roll of TP out of her bag.

  “Yeah, we’ll be quick,” I tell her.

  Syd and I head out toward our campsite’s designated Business Bushes. We fall into step together in silence, me with my handy hatchet and a roll of TP, him with his gun. He heard what I said but he stays silent on the topic. I’m sure he has all sorts of thoughts and opinions about me, my feelings toward Alissa, her feelings towards me, the physical representations of those feelings. But he doesn’t say a word about any of them. His silence is insanely golden.

  I tell Syd where I’m going to go, make my awkward temporary farewell to him and drop anchor behind a row of bushes. I’m crouching down, pants around my ankles, whistling the theme song to SpongeBob (we all have our bathroom rituals, respect mine) when I hear a rustling behind me. It could be a bird, it could be a squirrel, it could be Bambi. Hell, it could be a Deliverance style yokel but odds are firmly in favor that it’s a zombie.

  I reach for my hatchet, cursing myself for putting it down in the first place, but my pants weren’t going to unzip themselves. I spin on my heels to face the noise. I have just enough time to see him coming. Just enough heads up to get in position for him to burst through the bushes and launch himself at me. The good news is that I’m low to the ground, crouched into a ball, and most of me isn’t out there for the taking, begging to get bit. He almost flies over me, but he grabs onto me at the last second. We both go tumbling back, landing in the small clearing outside my makeshift commode where my head hits the compact dirt hard. I see stars flare out across my eyes, blotting out the tree tops swaying over the night sky. I blink furiously, the skin of my palm slippery with fear sweat as it holds tight to the hatchet.

  “Syd!” I cry out.

  I hear his feet immediately pound toward me and I know he’ll be here any second.

  He may as well be on the other side of the moon.

  The infected has recovered before me because he didn’t hit his head, he isn’t relying on sight in this darkness and he just doesn’t care. Not about anything other than me and my flesh. I hear him scuttle over the sticks and leaves on the forest floor between us, closing the gap that was never big enough. My eyes are adjusting. I’m groaning and trying to rise or run or roll, but it doesn’t matter. He gets ahold of me anyway.