Within These Walls: Series Box Set

by Tracey Ward

  That’s when the boys will hit the gates.

  “How long do we give Elijah and his people?” I ask.

  Ryan’s brow shoots up in surprise. “They’re people now, huh?”

  “People who eat people, but yeah.”

  “They have thirty minutes,” a Vashon guy tells me. He’s probably in his forties, short and stocky. He reminds me of Taylor. “We’ll launch two volleys while we wait. Hopefully they remember to stay away from where we’re firing.”

  “What’s a volley?”

  “It’s like buckshot,” Trent says.

  I stare at him, waiting.

  He stares back.

  “Buckshot,” Ryan begins mercifully, “is scattered fire. Comes from one source, smaller ammunition. It’s less precise but it can be more damaging. We’re gonna do a mix of small explosives along with stones. We don’t want to blow the whole place up right now, but we want to keep them scared.”

  “What if we hit someone with a stone?”

  “It will kill them,” Trent answers plainly.

  “Aim!” Crenshaw shouts to his team.

  They move quickly to their places, each of the men taking position around the trebuchet. They roll it over the uneven ground on its large wheels until it’s facing farther inland. They’re aiming closer to the heart of the Colony.

  “Load!”

  More stones and dark globes are carefully lowered into the waiting bag.

  “Fire!”

  The trebuchet launches the mix of ammunition toward the center of the peninsula in another high, sweeping arc. I don’t see any of it fly this time. It feels like we wait forever for the impact, but finally it comes. Several small flashes of light explode on the other side of the wall. I can’t see the fires on the ground, but their light flickers against the underside of tree branches, desperate to climb the tall, dry trunks.

  The watching crowd of Vashons cheers and shouts across the camp. They’re so loud I can barely hear Crenshaw speak.

  “The Page is approaching.”

  It’s a girl a few years younger than I am with long, light hair and a very serious expression. She’s panting for breath when she reaches us.

  “Master Crenshaw, they’ve given the order!” Her words fly excitedly out of her mouth in one quick rush. She takes a deep breath. “They’re here. The zombies are here. He says to blow the damn gate.”

  Cren stares at her, his face pinched with annoyance. “Did he say that word in front of you?”

  “Zombies?”

  “No, the swear. Did he use that word in front of you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  I smile. This is funny from the outside.

  “‘Yes,’ not ‘yeah.’ And I will blow the cursed gate. Please tell him that exactly as I have said it. Do not swear again, young lady. Not until you are older and have a stronger understanding of the weight of the words you use.”

  “Yes, sir,” she says meekly.

  “Very good. You wil—”

  “Return fire!”

  I look across the water to see a comet blazing into the sky. It’s a big ball of burning that’s been hurtled into the air, and it’s heading straight for us.

  I go to run back, desperate to get out of its way, but suddenly Trent is there. I run smack into him.

  “Move!” I shout, struggling with him. “Run!”

  “Joss, no!”

  “Run toward it!”

  Everyone is yelling at once. I can’t understand all of it and I definitely can’t understand why they’d want me to run toward the fireball. I don’t have time to ask or fight about it because Trent easily lifts me up and runs us forward—right into the danger. As he swept me up into his arms I saw Cren take hold of the Page girl. He’s running her right behind us.

  The fireball blazes closer to us. It looks large enough to blot out the sky—definitely large enough to crush us all into ash. But just when I think it’s going to drop right on top of us, it soars over our heads and touches down somewhere far behind us. Trent drops to his knees, curling his body over mine to cocoon me between him and the ground. There are screams when it lands, our intentional chaos in the camps suddenly turning very real. I wait, listening to Trent’s breathing against my chest and the sound of dirt and rock raining down around us.

  When it stops, I hear fire burning strong and angry. My pulse quickens.

  The trebuchet.

  “Trent, are you okay?” I whisper.

  He nods his head, uncurling from around me. He leaves me sitting on the ground in front of him as he sits up straight on his knees. The fire is burning behind him but I can see the arm of the machine standing up straight into the sky.

  “Do you know why you couldn’t run backwards?” he asks seriously.

  “Because I’d get smashed by burning death?”

  “Because you would have been racing on a path to meet it.”

  “It didn’t make sense to run toward danger. I’ve kinda lived my life doing the opposite.”

  “We didn’t run toward it. We ran under it.”

  “I get that now.”

  “Remember it.” He stands, offering me his hand. “The night’s not over.”

  I let him help me up. I was right, the machine is still standing, but the fire is dangerously close to it. Crenshaw is watching the Page girl run to the roaring crowd of worried Vashons, shouting for her to get to safety, while the rest of the group is already back at the trebuchet to make sure it doesn’t catch on fire.

  “Is it okay?” I ask Ryan.

  He looks up from where he’s checking one of the wheels. “I don’t know. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Yeah. Thanks, man,” he says to Trent with a jut of his chin. “I’m glad you were there to stop her.”

  “No problem.”

  “He’s fine, too, by the way,” I snap, annoyed they’re talking about me like I’m not even here. Let’s move past the fact that I wouldn’t be here if Trent hadn’t stopped me.

  Ryan chuckles. “I know he is.”

  “We’ve got a problem!” Bray shouts.

  Ryan and Trent run around the trebuchet to where Bray is crouched by a rear wheel.

  “What is it?” Ryan asks.

  “It’s cracked.”

  Ryan swears, his hands diving into his hair and rubbing it roughly.

  “We can’t reposition it,” Taylor’s stocky twin tells us. “If we move it, that wheel will split in half and it’ll never shoot straight. We’ll have no aim.”

  Trent steps up, touching the crack in the wheel. “It’s deep. Almost all the way through. If we fire it at all it’ll snap, most likely while the arm is in motion.”

  “Which means our aim is gone anyway,” Ryan says, sounding resigned. Then he swears again and I think he’s lucky Crenshaw is too far away to hear him.

  “What do we do?” I ask. No one answers me and I realize that’s my answer. “There’s nothing we can do, is there?”

  “No. It’s dead,” Ryan admits.

  “But the gate.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe the Risen will take it down on their own,” Bray suggests. “There are a lot of them.”

  “It’ll take too much time,” Trent tells him.

  Ryan nods. “We needed them cruising right through that gate to flush the people out. We can’t give them a chance to defend against the herd.”

  “We need to tell Alvarez. He’ll have to send in more people.”

  “The tunnels?” I groan.

  “Or the water,” one of the Vashons replies. “The cannibals are blowing the sewer tunnel entrance once they’re out. There’s no way to tell them to stop. Tunnels aren’t an option anymore.”

  “How long until they do it?”

  “Soon,” Bray says.

  Ryan looks around urgently. “Where’s the Page? We need to tell Alvarez we can’t blow the gate.”

  “She’s gone. Crenshaw told her to go
so she ran...” My words taper off as I look around, spinning to search the area. “Where’s Crenshaw?”

  “I don’t know,” Ryan answers.

  “I don’t see him,” Trent says.

  And that’s when I get scared.

  “Crenshaw!” I shout, spinning around again.

  “Guys,” Bray calls from the explosives table.

  “Crenshaw!” Ryan yells.

  “Guys.”

  “Crenshaw!”

  I can’t say exactly why I’m so worried, but something inside me is terrified. It’s the same cold feeling I had when I looked at Ryan and he smiled back at me. It’s that ominous sickness in my gut I’ve had all day. It’s some part of me that knows the world better than I ever could that’s screaming at me to pay attention. To see the signs.

  “Crenshaw!”

  “Guys!”

  “What is it, Bray?” Ryan snaps.

  “We’re missing explosives. A lot of them.”

  I lock eyes with Ryan.

  “He wouldn’t,” I whisper.

  “Wouldn’t he?” he challenges.

  I wait two beats—two measures in my heart that scream in my ears loud and clear.

  Go! Now!

  Ryan is half a step behind me when I take off at a sprint toward the gate. He’s fast, faster than Vin is, but he’s not as fast as me. Nothing is as fast as me.

  Nothing but fate.

  Once we’re away from the camp, I can’t see anything. The lights ahead at the gate are burning bright but they’re not focused out this far. I’m running in a dead zone of darkness where the sound of the crowd behind me is fading and the chorus of zombies rolling down the road right beside us is deafening. We’re stupid if we think the Colonists can’t hear this. They know what’s coming.

  But it will never get there if that gate stays standing.

  Not far ahead, where the water meets the fence line, I see a spark—once, then twice, in the familiar motion of someone striking flint.

  I want to shout again to tell him to stop, to wait, to see how dangerous it is to be this close to the gate, this close to the zombies barreling down on it. Cren isn’t a fighter; he never has been. He doesn’t even like killing animals to eat them. If this herd of Risen reaches him, he’s done for. Ryan and I probably are too. Who knows? We might already be dead.

  Another spark and then something catches. It buzzes with orange life in the darkness and I can see the outline of Crenshaw and his bathrobe billowing in the wind.

  Before he can throw it, the night erupts in a series of explosions from inside the Pod. The ground shakes underneath me, making me feel unsteady on my sprinting feet. I try not to stumble just as flames blow into the sky in pillars that devour trees as they climb. There’s screaming drowned out by a few smaller explosions.

  The cannibals have done their job, which means we’re late doing ours.

  “Throw it!” I scream to Crenshaw.

  He’s hesitated, the burning fuse still eating its way down to the explosives in his hand. He’s running out of time.

  Luckily he hears me. He reaches back then launches the bomb forward, straight at the gate. It lands just shy of it, bouncing and rolling over the ground until it comes to a stop a few feet away.

  “Get down!” Ryan shouts at me.

  I throw myself to the ground just as it explodes. There’s more fire, more dirt and debris falling from the sky, along with the very satisfying sound of metal groaning in angry protest.

  When I look up, I find Ryan on the ground next to me and an inferno burning at the gate. It’s still standing, but it’s taken a good hit.

  Before I can catch my breath or stand, there’s another spark. I bury my head in my arms, preparing for another blast.

  When it happens, it’s big.

  Too big.

  There’s the initial burst that sounds exactly like the first: boom, rain, groan. But then almost immediately there’s another one. And another. And another. They keep coming in rapid fire until I stop counting them and the sky feels like it’s falling down on top of me. Large chunks of dirt and rock pelt my back and legs. I feel like I’m deaf or underwater, the way I was in the tunnel. It’s too loud and disorienting. It also doesn’t make any sense.

  When the rain finally stops, I hesitantly look up. The gate is gone. It is completely and utterly destroyed, and just in time too. The zombie herd, not even the least bit worried about the explosions ahead of them, are wandering directly toward it. They’ll walk right in, make themselves at home, sleep in their beds. Snack on their brains.

  The part that’s crazy, though, is how it happened. I’m not an expert on explosives. I actually don’t know jack-all about them, but I know it’s weird that one bomb did minor damage while one just like it threatened to crack the earth in half.

  I sit up, glancing at Ryan to find him on his knees, staring in amazement at the devastation surrounding the Pod.

  “Ryan.”

  He looks back at me with his face still intact, not a drop of blood to be seen, and I sigh with relief.

  Then I nearly scream when I see his expression.

  “Joss, it—” He chokes on his words.

  I die a little when I hear his voice. It’s off. It’s the wrong key played in the middle of your favorite song. It’s someone changing the lyrics on you and it all stumbles to an awkward halt as you look around dizzily, wondering what went wrong. But when I see his eyes, I know what it is. It’s fresh pine and twinkle lights. It’s Jingle Bells played backwards. It’s blood on the stockings and lower intestines on the hardwood.

  It’s a bloody bathrobe bobbing in the water.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Ali has the body. What’s left of it. The explosion tore through everything. Metal. Stone. Flesh and bone. I don’t want to see it. I already did. I saw enough. I’m not sure why Ryan takes me to see it again, but I don’t ask and I don’t fight.

  I don’t care.

  I follow him and I watch him. I look at him the way Trent told me to—trying to understand how he works. Not simply accepting that he does, but wondering why. How. I’m looking at the complicated mechanics of his muscles moving his bones and his lungs filling with air and his blood somehow staying inside his body, warming his skin from the inside out. It’s impressive how he does it when everyone else keeps springing leaks.

  It was the Colonists. Not directly, but it was their explosives that killed Crenshaw. He launched a second bomb at the gate, one that did the job and sent pieces of it flying everywhere. Right into the field of landmines they had set up against their wall. The falling debris triggered them all, setting off a daisy chain of explosions that tore through the earth, heading straight toward us—right through Crenshaw. It was the shrapnel that did him in. The blast kicked him back into the water, but not before shards of cement and steel ripped through his flesh. According to Ryan, he was dead before he landed. The only reason Ryan and I are still alive is because we were already on the ground when it happened.

  “Ali has him in this tent by the water,” Ryan explains, though I don’t know why. I didn’t ask. “She said Crenshaw used to love the water, back before the gangs and the Colonies took over the bay.”

  I can see the tent just ahead of us. The sun is rising behind it, the first rays of light scorching the city, setting the tent on fire and making it glow with an eerie light.

  He holds open the flap for me. I go in without hesitation and I walk directly to the tables where the body is laid. Blankets have been pulled over it to hide the mess, but blood is seeping through. It’s destroyed. It’s nothing. It may as well be a zombie for how alive it is. Some would say that he’s better off because he died as himself. He was never a mindless meatsuit for some unthinkable freak show.

  I say that’s bullshit. Dead is dead.

  “Where’s Ali?” I ask Ryan.

  “Sam took her away. She needed to sleep.”

  “Why am I here?”

  He pauses. “I don’t know. To say goodbye?”


  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you need me for that?”

  More silence.

  “No,” he says quietly, but his voice is hard.

  I turn on my heel, carefully avoiding his eyes as I leave. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

  I burst out of the tent into the sunlight, leaving him behind, feeling like I’ll vomit.

  And I know. No one needs to tell me, because I already know: I’m being awful. I’m pushing him away, I’m acting like a coward, I’m ruining everything. I see it crystal clear. Don’t think for a second I’m not aware of it. Don’t think it doesn’t kill me to do it.

  Here’s what it boils down to—instinct. This is my survival. Being alone is what I know and I tried something different and that’s great—yea, me!—but it didn’t work out because as nice as the ride is, the destination is always the same. Simple truth is everybody dies. I can’t stop that and neither can they. I also can’t handle it. My instincts are telling me to run away from Ryan as fast as I can, the same way they told me to run away from the fireball. It doesn’t matter that I understand running away from it will get me killed. If it happened again, I’d still go the wrong way. Just like I’m running the wrong way right now.

  I spend the rest of the day sleeping. It’s my only chance to get clear of everyone. People know me now. They all knew Crenshaw and they’ve heard we were close, so now everyone wants to console the wild girl suffering a loss. It’s a miracle I’m still here. I don’t know how many times I look longingly through the throng of people surrounding me and dream of running through the streets. I want to go home, lock my door, and never think about this day again. I want to stow the crazy old man in the vault with the rest of them—the others, whose names I’ve managed to forget. The faces that are a blur, then a scream, then nothing.

  So I sleep. I hibernate through the day and come out long after dinnertime. Long after I was supposed to meet up with Ryan.