Within These Walls: Series Box Set

by Tracey Ward

  “So you fought with him. Then what?”

  I lick my lips, stalling for time. Time to get away from this. To shut down the memory. To not relive it.

  “Jordan,” Dr. Finemen says firmly, insistently. “What happened next?”

  “He bit me.” My heart is in my throat but I swallow past it. “He bit my right hand and I knew… I knew I was dead. I didn’t really think. I reacted. I knew that whatever he’d bitten was worthless. It was poison and if I wanted to—to live, then I needed to do something about it.”

  “What did you do?”

  I open my eyes to glare at him. “You already know.”

  “I want to hear it from you,” he replies calmly.

  “Well I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You need to acknowledge it.”

  “I do acknowledge it. I’ll acknowledge it for the rest of my life, every time I use that hand I’ll know.”

  “What will you know?”

  I shake my head, looking back at the ceiling. I feel a tear slip hot and quick down the side of my face.

  “I’ll know—“

  “What, Jordan?”

  “I’ll know it’s gone,” I whisper.

  I hate him. I hate the zombies. I hate myself. I’m pretty sure I hate Syd, too, but who wouldn’t?

  “Good,” Dr. Finemen says softly. “Good for you.”

  I give an empty laugh. “I was just thinking that I hate you.”

  “That’s alright. We’ll build off that.”

  “What was that?”

  “What was what?”

  I turn to him. “This? The ‘say it’, ‘acknowledge it’ routine. What was that about? I know it’s gone.”

  “I see that now. But I’ll tell you something, Jordan. Something that may or may not help you in the long run but it really can’t hurt to know. People who lose a limb, often times they have a lot of trouble accepting it. They experience phantom pains where the limb used to be. Pains that can’t be dulled or cured even with heavy medication. I want to help you avoid that torture.”

  “You wanted me to admit that it’s gone so I don’t pretend it’s still there?”

  “Yes. The sooner you accept that your hand is gone, the better off you’ll be. Mourn it, of course, because it is a great loss. But don’t be consumed by that loss. Remember what you’ve gained.”

  I frown. “What could I possibly have gained from this?”

  “Life,” he replies as though it were the most obvious answer in the world. “You were bitten. If you’d kept that hand, you’d be dead right now. Or undead, apparently. I’m still getting used to the terminology. Either way, you’re alive.”

  “How long is that going to last?”

  Now he frowns. I’ve made Santa sad. “What are you referring to?”

  “Am I running a fever from the infection in my ha—“ I stop short of referring to an appendage that’s no longer there. “In my arm?”

  His face clears as he waves away my concerns. “No, no. You’re perfectly safe. Nurse Evans informed me of the situation. All of it, including Dr. Westbrook. Horrible things he said to your friend Alissa, weren’t they?” he asks with a wink.

  I manage a grin. “Disturbing. But isn’t he going to be angry about all of it? Won’t he tell people I’m a risk?”

  “Probably, but luckily everyone hates him. Who would listen?”

  “Why does everyone hate him?”

  “Did you meet him?” Dr. Finemen asks with raised eyebrows. “He’s a prick.”

  I laugh despite myself.

  “Anyway,” he continues merrily, “he’s lucky all he got was a black eye and bruised ego. The good news for you is that you’re a bit of a celebrity already. Word travels fast around here and everyone is dying to meet the man who survived a zombie bite.”

  “Aren’t they worried I could still turn?”

  Dr. Finemen shrugs carelessly. “A lot of them, yes. Might want to watch your back but we all do that nowadays anyway.”

  “Are you worried I’ll turn?”

  “I can’t know for sure, of course, because your situation is unique. But if I had to put money on it, and I’m a gambling man at heart, I would bet on you dying of old age in your bed someday. Not from The Fever.”

  I grin at him, feeling grateful for his levity. “Are you an optimist? Is that how you see us all dying?”

  “Oh, God no. I’ll die in bed, sure,” he says with a smile, “but it won’t be mine.”

  ***

  A few hours later (or a few years, I don’t know) Alissa comes to sit beside me.

  “What happened to your hair?” I mumble, trying to wake up.

  She laughs as she runs her hands through it. “It’s clean. There are bathrooms here and, get this…” She leans in close to whisper in my ear. “They work.”

  I stare at her in shock. “Running water and everything?”

  “Can you imagine?”

  “You in a shower?” I close my eyes. “I’m working on it.”

  “Perve.”

  “Shhh. I’m dreaming. Ow!” I cry, slapping her hand away from my stomach. “Did you pinch me?”

  “Stick with the real me, Jordan. It’s better.”

  “Full 3-D and surround sound better?”

  “I don’t even know how to answer that.”

  “Just say ‘yes’.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now say it low and husky.”

  “Like James Earl Jones?”

  I scowl at her. “What? No. Like Marilyn Mon— never mind, you killed it.”

  “Oops.” she says, sounding not even a little sorry. “But, hey, apart from working showers, do you notice what else they have that the outside world didn’t have?”

  “Power?”

  “Yes, but no.”

  “Medicine?”

  “Yeah, no.”

  “X-box?”

  “You’re hopeless. Who are we missing right now?”

  “No one.”

  “Exactly. I don’t miss him either.”

  It’s then that I realize Syd is gone. Dr. Finemen too. And no Nurse Evans. Alissa and I, as far as I know, are completely alone.

  “Wow,” I whisper reverently.

  “Right?”

  I glance around the empty, silent room. “This is weird.”

  “I know. It’s been forever.”

  “Yeah, we haven’t really been alone since… Wait,” I say, casting her a suspicious glare. “Did you drug people again?”

  “No!” she cries indignantly. “This is how it is here. This, the alone thing, happens on the regular.”

  “Weird,” I repeat.

  “Can I tell you what I’d like to do with this time?”

  I smile at her. “Is it dirty? I really don’t think I’m recovered enough for dirty.”

  “No.”

  “I can probably handle soiled. Maybe just untidy.”

  “Jordan.” The way she says it is like a warning. The way Syd always says ‘Al’ when she’s pushing his buttons. Her resemblance to her father kills my libido and good humor.

  “Alright, what’s up?”

  She looks away, her eyes intentionally skipping over my missing hand. It stings, making me self-conscious about my destroyed arm. I start to move it around, trying to find a place to hide it. I want to move it under the blanket but without fingers I can’t lift the material up to slide my arm under. I’m struggling, getting frustrated and angry when I feel her cool fingers come to rest on my forearm. She inches toward the bandage at the end. Toward the missing piece of me.

  We both watch her hand carefully as it slides down my arm. Her fingertips are feather light, barely touching the skin, but I can feel it. I’m very, very aware of it and it burns like fire everywhere she touches me. I jerk my arm away. The movement hurts but not like it did before when Dr. Finemen helped me. I don’t feel the massive ball of fire clenched in my palm. I’m looking at it and I know the hand is there. I’m willing myself not to feel the ache that can’t
exist. It’s still there, my brain evidently does whatever the hell it wants on some level, but it’s not nearly as bad this time.

  “I’m sorry,” Alissa mutters. She’s still looking down, her fingers hovering over where my arm used to lie. “I wanted you to know I’m not afraid of it. Of where you were bitten. I’m not shying away from what happened.”

  “Yeah, well,” I grumble, “I don’t exactly want attention drawn to it either.”

  “What do you want?”

  My hand back, I think uselessly.

  I reach out my hand to her, my real hand, and pull her around the small bed I’m lying in. She doesn’t hesitate to curl up beside me, wrapping herself around me the way she in the boat. But I’m already thinking of another time I laid beside her.

  “I want you to tell me a story.”

  I feel her chuckle against me, her breath bursting warm from her mouth across my bare skin. It gives me goose bumps.

  “There once was a man from Nantucket. He had a—“

  “My God, you’re a brat,” I groan. “Even now.”

  “You were hoping I’d change?”

  I turn until the top of her head is pressing against my face, the clean scent of soap, flowers and Alissa wafting into my nose. I press my dry, cracked lips to her soft hair.

  “Tell me a story,” I whisper.

  “I don’t remember it exactly.”

  “You remember enough.”

  I feel her sigh. I feel her body settle in against mine, fitting perfectly into the dips and curves. Into the empty places, filling them with her skin, her bones, her breaths. Her body weighs down on me heavily, pressing against me so closely nothing else can get near. She’s holding me fast so I can’t float away and forget where I am. What I want. What I need.

  “We’ll go out to the desert,” she begins softly, “and we’ll bring the hammock. The sky will be pure velvet blackness above us.”

  “Strewn with so many stars we’d never be able to count them in a million lifetimes.”

  She lightly pinches my stomach again. “Who’s telling this story?”

  “We are,” I whisper sleepily.

  When she starts speaking again, we’re almost there. We’re so close. It’s nearly perfect, nearly what it was supposed to be, but not quite. It’s a little more jagged. A little rough around the edges and a lot of what we had was lost along the way. But I’m thinking we should let it go because whether or not we needed it then, we don’t need it now. Right now, this is it. Her and I and the vast desert sky burning with stars spanning across the closest thing to eternity that we’ll ever know.

  “We’ll sleep dreamlessly through the night and wake up in the morning to cold air and the yellow, pink glow of the sun rising…”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I’m transferred from the house, which is apparently Dr. Finemen’s personal home, to the hospital. Finemen kept me close for observation because he was curious, concerned and also because he was pretty sure if he left me in the tent for anyone to see I’d be shot within an hour. I ran a pretty high fever for a couple of days as he and Leah tried a variety of antibiotics on me and worked to keep my wound clean and dry. It wasn’t an easy task. It was ugly, smelly and painful but most of all it was terrifying. They prepared me for the fact that I might lose the arm entirely. At least up to the elbow. Combine a tourniquet, dirty skillet cauterization and my dirt floor hatchet job and you’ve got a breeding ground for infection.

  Finally they found a combo that worked for me and my fever began to drop. They also worked on finding a mix of medicines to help me with the pain, but even with what they’re comfortable giving me, which turns out to be a lot, I’m still hurting all the time. I know Finemen thinks some of it is in my head. Maybe he’s right, but it feels pretty real to me.

  They kept talking about me going to the hospital and I thought it was just a term. An old word with a new definition. I expected to be moved into a gymnasium crowded with beds and patients, but it’s nothing like that. The hospital is a hospital. Nothing lost in translation. The fact that they have power is shocking enough. That they have enough consistent, reliant power to run a hospital is mind blowing.

  In fairness, the entire place isn’t functional. They’ve taken it down to one wing because they simply don’t have the trained staff to run it all. Dr. Finemen and Dr. Westbrook, the guy Alissa pistol whipped, are the only true, accredited doctors around. Once I’m in the real hospital with all of the nurses, it’s not long until I learn why Dr. Westbrook is so disrespected. Besides being a prick, he’s also a dentist. Finemen was a surgeon before this all happened, a good one too. Westbrook was a dentist in a nearby farming community. He did simple cleanings and handed out toothpaste. I hear he went as far as to outsource fillings to bigger offices in far flung towns. Needless to say, the nurses don’t exactly respect his medical opinion and neither do I. Not because he wanted to shoot me in the face, but because he’s a pompous jerkoff who wanted to shoot me in the face.

  Nurse Evans becomes a regular in my room in the hospital, probably checking in at the start and end of each shift to make sure I’m still alive. She’s the one who gives me the run down on how this place works. How they have power, running water, medical supplies, drugs on demand, provisions and tools. The list goes on and on. Things that are impossible to come by out there in the thick of it are seemingly plucked from tree branches here like apples in an orchard. When she tells me how it’s all possible I’m surprised. Stunned even.

  The government.

  On a plateau behind the town is a radio tower. Stationed beside that radio tower is another mini-village, one nearly identical to the one across the river by the barricade, only this one is smaller and doesn’t have helicopters. The one across the river has three. Those three helicopters transport practically any provision we radio to them for from the outside world to our front door. Or at least to the open, deserted plains outside the fence line. They make a scheduled drop of crates full of supplies, the Jeeps are sent out to retrieve the goods and the town rejoices. They even responded to a request for a birthday cake for a little girl who was turning 5. An Apache helicopter flew in the crate of supplies that week complete with birthday cake and cards from kids and adults, not just from around the country but across the globe, wishing her a wonderful day and many more in the future. The outside remembers us and they care. It’s a fact that rips me nearly in half, especially when Leah casually asks if I want to give a message to the village across the river to take to my parents letting them know I’m alive. My silence tells her no.

  What I find unreal is the fact that the same people who fire bombed Portland (we hear from several people that, yes, that did happen while we were tucked away in the woods) are doing everything they can to keep us alive. Us and two other towns like us. There’s an outpost in Lincoln City on the coastline and another up in Washington just south of Tacoma. I’m told there was supposed to be a third just outside of Eugene. The flood of people came on too heavy too fast, though, and they ended up ditching their plans and pulling out of the area. If rumors are to be believed, there’s a wall of moaning, moving dead pressed up against the quarantine lines down there. They had to start expanding the massive wall they built in order to keep them all out. It’s making its way toward the coastline and us. Why they don’t do to that swarm what they did to Portland is beyond me.

  The mini-village across from the barricade is there watching to make sure no one crosses the quarantine zone, sure, but they’re also there keeping the power supply from that dam juicing this town. This town and the resort and spa just to the north of it. I thought it was a joke at first that there was a resort out here in the middle of nowhere, but it’s true. The town is fenced off tightly with the quarantine area slightly away from its center. Between it and the resort positioned just north of it, there’s a fenced in road that’s regularly patrolled. At the end of the road is the resort, also fenced in tightly. It has 50 RV parking slots, 140 hotel rooms and 20 teepees that can house
a large portion of the people seeking refuge here. Alissa and Syd have set up our RV in one of the spots beside the river. I’m expected to go there when I’m released from the hospital. Part of me wonders if I will. Things between Ali, Syd and I have gotten infinitely better since our forced time apart. They’ve both come to visit me every day, Syd surprising the crap out of me every time he does it. But we sit and watch TV silently for half an hour (some random TV show, the kind they show you on airplanes with no commercials or breaks of any kind), then he slaps me on the leg, tells me to feel better and walks out of the room. It doesn’t sound like much but it doesn’t sound like a fight either, does it? That’s improvement.

  Two weeks after my arrival in Warm Springs, I’m released from quarantine. Alissa and Syd were released after the traditional 24 hours seeing as they’ve never been bitten. The infection gave us all an out on discussing why I was held longer, but everyone knew what it was. I’m still a question mark, even to myself. Every time I get hungry I get worried. Anytime I get tired or zone out I’m afraid it’s the beginning of the end for me. I don’t know when that will go away or if it ever really will. I imagine I’ll always feel like I’m living on borrowed time. I’ll always be waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  Syd has become a member of the Repair Crew, a group of men and women trained in certain trades that are called in to do exactly what it sounds like – repair things. Apparently Syd, on top of being ex-Army and a pain in the… anyway, he’s also a contractor. He’s been inspecting a lot of the buildings, troubleshooting some of the new construction. Apparently he fits right in. Happy as a clam. Yea.

  “Where are you working now?” I ask Alissa.

  She’s in my hospital room with me as I eat my last meal here. I’m leaving just as soon as Leah gets all my drugs in a row for me with strict instructions of when to take them and how much and with what. I guess Alissa and I have that in common now. A dependence upon pills. I’d rather we liked the same movies or flavor of ice cream, but what can you do?

  “Here.”

  “What? In the hospital?” I ask, my mac and cheese slipping off the spoon in my left hand and dropping with a thick thump on my tray. I scowl at it. I’m still getting used to this whole left handed thing. It’s not going well. I cringe to think what my throwing accuracy is like. I’m pretty sure my batting average is gone forever.