Beyond These Walls (Book 7): The Asylum

by Robertson, Michael

  “Every time I speak to a guard, they tell me to wait.”

  “I’m not a …” But what did it matter? A lump caught in Max’s throat. “How long have you been in here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When did you see your mum last?”

  “I don’t know. None of us boys have seen our mums in a long time. I wouldn’t even recognise her now.”

  His war hammer in his right hand, Max reached up with his left and pressed his palm against the wooden door. Unlike the front door, it had been locked with a large metal bolt. If he kept the noise down, he could get the kid out of there without disturbing the others. What harm would it do to let a child go free?

  While biting down on his bottom lip, Max pulled the small knob on the bolt away from the door, the action gritty with rust. Just as he drew breath to reassure the kid, a woman’s voice burst from the cell. “Please let us out.”

  Max stopped. “H-how many of you are in there?”

  “Six. Now please let us out. We won’t be any trouble, I promise.”

  Maybe the kid he’d spoken to, or maybe another one, but the sobbing of a small child stuttered from the darkness. If he let them out, who would they let out in turn? If the cells were only locked with bolts, the place could be overrun in seconds, and if he couldn’t see a thing, what could he do about it? What would this place be like if the vocal minority took over? What would happen to him if enough of them thought he worked for Grandfather Jacks?

  Max stepped back several paces.

  “Please!” the woman said. “We’ve been in here for weeks. Months even. Please!”

  While shaking his head, Max muttered, “It’s not safe. It’s not safe.” And until he found a way out of there, it would be madness to let other people out with him.

  More screams from far away. They searched the darkness of the corridors as if they might return to the women who’d released them with some kind of wisdom. A mental ointment for the infection of the mind. An easing of the insanity running laps in their skulls. No way could he let them out with him. Their salvation would come. Of that he’d make sure. Just not yet.

  “I’m sorry.” Max stepped farther away from the cell he’d nearly opened. “I’m sorry.”

  Max slammed into another wall. Which way to go now? He turned right. The cries soaring through the place begged him to liberate them, but what good would that be if he couldn’t even liberate himself?

  His legs weak and wobbly, Max managed several more steps before he sat down on the cold ground, cross-legged. His head in his hands, he blinked in the darkness, his tired eyes burning. “What good am I if I can’t even liberate myself?”

  Chapter 9

  The diseased closed in from all sides again, some of them even crawling after William beneath the solar panel. In an open space he might have tried to fight them, but the panels were too close to allow him to work. With his friends at least fifteen feet away on the roof, he had to find a way out of this mess on his own.

  The only way to use his weapon, he brought Jezebel over his head in a vertical swing, splitting the skull of a diseased. A woman with black hair, her cranium cracked, her legs turned instantly ineffective, and she crumpled. Her face slammed against the edge of a solar panel.

  As another diseased fell across his path, William stamped on its head and broke its skull. A child no more than about eight or nine years old. Naked from the waist up, the boy had scars around his neck. But being a child made him a cinch to kill. At that moment he was fighting the diseased, and the more easily they yielded, the better.

  More creatures from the right than any other direction, so William charged left and slammed both hands into the chest of a tall diseased man. The large body drove the others behind him back. William darted past him and leaped onto another solar panel.

  He’d jumped without looking. Jezebel made it hard to be nimble, but the crumbling glass sheet over the solar panel made it impossible. The glass had turned to dust in some places, shingle in others. Like running up a mirror covered in sand, his feet slipped away from him, and he slammed down onto the panel with both knees before he slid back down.

  This time William spun, turning his momentum into an attack. He buried Jezebel into the arm of a diseased, the creature yelling, blood belching from the deep wound.

  Another diseased tried to grab William and he ducked, but one caught him from behind. It pulled him so close its rancid breath smothered him. Its teeth snapped with a sharp clack next to his right ear.

  William slammed the end of Jezebel’s handle into the beast’s soft body. It forced another wave of rancid breath from it with a gasp, but it let go. Three more blows with the wooden handle sent three more diseased stumbling back. He caught a flash of Matilda standing among the others on the roof. Her left foot pointed in a tiptoe from where she tried to take the pressure off her thigh. As pale as when he’d left her, she chewed on her bottom lip. An uninjured Matilda would have been beside him by now. But in this, he was on his own.

  The blunt end of Jezebel as effective as the axe head, William kept away the diseased closest to him. Another gap opened and he made a mazy retreat, the panels working in his favour, the route after him much harder to follow because of their layout.

  A hiss in his left ear, William pulled aside at the last moment. Closer than the previous one, the creature still caught air with the snapping clack of its biting jaw.

  They were too close. There were too many. He couldn’t see a path out of there.

  Movement flashed to William’s right. Someone hopped across the tops of the solar panels. They moved one step at a time like when Matilda had crossed the logs in the national service area. Olga reached the panel closest to William and slid down its forty-five-degree slope. She led with the point of her sword, spearing a fat diseased woman through the face, pulling it out with a spray of blood as the woman fell away.

  The mob around William turned one way and then the other. It gave him enough time to act. He drove Jezebel’s curved blade into the neck of a woman close to him while Olga went to work, her right arm moving like a piston as she speared face after face.

  A gap opened between them. William crossed it and pressed his back to Olga’s. Gasping, he said, “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me yet.”

  While he drove vertical axe swings, she continued to stab the diseased. Both of them effective enough in their own way, but they were still outnumbered. They could only keep this up for so long.

  “William!” Artan waved before jumping down into the courtyard, a spear in one hand, his knife in the other.

  The panels hid him from sight, but it gave them something to head towards. Hawk jumped down after Artan.

  Were it not for the narrow channels between the solar panels, they would have been dead by now. It forced the diseased into a funnel. At every crossroads, Olga threw a flurry of stabs. It bought them enough time to cross to the next narrow path.

  Sweat stung William’s eyes as he worked. He drove some of the diseased back with blows to the head. With others he used the flat end of the thick metal blade. As blunt as a hammer and as heavy, it did almost as much damage as the sharpened edge.

  Matilda and Cyrus remained on the roof, launching tiles into the diseased.

  Olga and William burst through the final gap between the solar panels and into the space Hawk and Artan had cleared for them. They both glistened with sweat. They both moved like machines, killing diseased after diseased.

  A second to catch his breath behind the safety of Artan and Hawk, William pulled one of the spears from the sheath on Hawk’s back. William held it up at Cyrus, who stared at it for a second.

  “Come down here. We need your help.”

  “But—”

  “Now!” As he said it, William jabbed the spear in Cyrus’ direction.

  The boy’s bottom lip buckled, but he jumped down and took the weapon.

  Olga had joined the boys’ attack on the diseased. They’d already formed a pr
otective semicircle, the gated entrance and batteries within their control.

  “Use the spear to stab the diseased in the palace,” William said. “You have the gate to protect you, but you need to make sure they don’t keep pushing against it. I’m worried the wooden shaft won’t hold.”

  Although Cyrus looked like he might argue, he clearly thought better of it, turning to the gate while William forced his way next to his three fighting friends.

  The bodies were mounting up and they lay on the stone ground like sandbags. The diseased charged, many of them tripping over their fallen brethren. Before they’d regained their balance, they met the sharp tip of a spear, sword, or the razor’s edge of an axe.

  “Get to work on the batteries,” William called to Hawk.

  It took a second, but Hawk pulled away from the fight and hunched down in front of the metal box. The sooner they got the power back on, the sooner they could get out of this hellish courtyard.

  William couldn’t hear anything over the sound of his own ragged breaths. His arms were aching with fatigue. Wielding the heavy Jezebel felt like trying to fight with a battering ram, but he found the strength he needed for every swing. No wonder Magma had arms as thick as William’s thighs.

  If Olga and Artan suffered like William, they hid it well. The pair of them danced like they were born for this. Olga a wild and frenzied mess of bloody fury; Artan an artist with calm and poise. One as deadly as the other.

  And like that, the diseased were defeated. Blood coated the stone ground. The bodies lay piled one on top of the other. A sea of diseased corpses. “Jeez,” William said with an exhale, wiping his sweating brow with his forearm, “I didn’t think they’d ever run out.”

  Both Artan and Olga remained alert, scanning left and right.

  Hawk remained crouched over the batteries when Cyrus said, “Guys! A little help over here!”

  The spear William had used as a pin had snapped. It lay in pieces on the ground.

  Artan shot past William and grabbed a length of wire from next to the batteries.

  Diseased faces pressed against the bars of the gate. The sheer weight of bodies forced it open by a few inches. Cyrus stabbed them and shoved it closed again.

  Artan threaded the cable through the hole. He pressed his own boot against the gate to help Cyrus and tied a quick knot before pulling it tight with both hands.

  The gate held.

  Olga came to Artan’s side with several more short pieces of wire. She handed them to Artan one after the other. He used each one to tie the gate in place, every knot tighter than the one before.

  All the while, Hawk worked on the batteries, frowning into the large box.

  Artan and Olga smiled at one another, a nod of recognition passing between the two before they turned away from the gate. “That should hold it,” Artan said.

  The diseased inside the palace as loud as ever, but the fallen in the courtyard gave the enclosed space a sense of calm by comparison. Now they needed to wait for Hawk to finish.

  “Artan!” Cyrus yelled.

  William’s settling heart took flight again, and he clapped his hand to his chest.

  It took for Cyrus to launch his spear for William to see the cause of his concern. A diseased woman, no taller than Olga and, from the twist of her vicious face, no less fierce.

  Cyrus’ launched spear missed and clattered into a solar panel beside her before falling to the ground.

  Unlike the other diseased, this one jumped the fallen, landing inside the semicircle of protection the diseased corpses had upheld for them.

  A large tile spun over William’s head and struck the woman in the centre of her face. The corner dented her cheek and she fell backwards.

  Cyrus shoved William aside. Weaponless, he stood over the woman and stamped on her head. Once, twice, three times, the woman’s nose turned into mush, her mouth still working as she chewed on the air.

  Crunch! The woman’s head gave and she fell limp.

  Cyrus panted like the rest of them and turned to Hawk. “How much longer before the power’s back?”

  “Nearly there,” Hawk said.

  William couldn’t help but smile. “You know,” he said to Cyrus, “maybe there is a warrior in you.”

  Cyrus’ stoic expression softened. “I’m just doing what needs to be done.”

  Chapter 10

  Mad Max.

  It wouldn’t leave him. His war hammer in one hand, his forehead in the other, Max leaned forwards. Were it not so dark, he would have been staring at the cold stone floor that turned his bottom numb, but he couldn’t see an inch in front of his face, let alone a foot or more. No matter how he rocked from side to side, he found no comfort on the frigid ground.

  And what about the kid he’d left in the cell? How many of them were there in this place? And how could he walk away from them? But if he opened the doors to any of these cells and they didn’t have Dianna in, what would he be inviting out into the corridors? At the moment he had—

  Mad Max.

  He had control. Control of the asylum even if he didn’t have control of his own mind. He didn’t need screaming insanity running through the corridors with him. “But …” he said to himself, his voice searching the darkness before dying somewhere in the abyss, “what if I let out enough people for them to show me a way out of here? What if I let out enough people for one of them to be Dianna so I won’t have to come back again?”

  But if he let everyone out and they found the exit, he’d have to give them the key. For their own safety, he couldn’t let them outside with the diseased. Every one of them would be turned, including Dianna.

  Caws, shrieks, and cries searched the corridors as if they might get an answer. Some way to placate their insanity. But it would never come.

  “Right, Max.” He pushed off against the cold and gritty ground and got to his feet. “One thing you know for sure is you won’t be getting out of here by sitting on your arse all day. That’s a fact.”

  So much adrenaline had coursed through his system it had left him weak. Shaking legs, a heavy heart and deep aches in his bones, Max used the wall for support with one hand while clinging onto his hammer with the other.

  Mad Max.

  As he stood there swaying, everything quietened. A rare second of stillness before the smallest sound burst through it. A sniff. Someone ahead of him. At first it sounded like they might have a cold, but when they sniffed again, it seemed more intentional than that. An investigative sniff. They were testing the corridor to see what lurked there.

  Max took a step towards the sound and they sniffed harder. “I don’t know you,” a woman said. “Who are you?”

  “Huh?”

  “What kind of a name is that?”

  “I’m not one of the guards.”

  “That’s not much of a name either. Do you understand questions? Also, even if you were a guard, you’d deny it. You’re on your own; the last thing you want to do is mark yourself as the enemy. I suppose it doesn’t matter who you are because I probably won’t believe the truth even if I do hear it.”

  “It’s true, I’m not a guard. Grandfather Jacks’ palace has fallen. There are diseased everywhere outside. I have a friend in here.”

  “She might not be your friend anymore.”

  “Huh?”

  “This place changes people.”

  A scream called to them from deep within the asylum. It came in rasping waves. Again and again until it slowly died, the will draining from the person with each call.

  “See!” the woman said. “I can guarantee you she didn’t sound like that when she came in here. None of them do.”

  “Who are you?” Max said.

  “I’m not sure I know that anymore. And I’m not sure it matters anyway. I am who I am. You are who you are. Both of us are in the situation we’re in, and both of us need to deal with what’s in front of us right now.”

  Max reached out and gripped the bolt on her cell door in a pinch. Like with the
one on the boy’s cell, he wiggled it, the action gritty with rust.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” the woman said.

  “Huh?”

  “You say that a lot, don’t you?”

  Max bit back his urge to say it again.

  “You don’t want to open this cell. You don’t want to open any of them. You don’t know what’s behind these doors.”

  “Are you alone in there?”

  “No, sweetie.” Her voice was soft. Maternal. “And trust me, you don’t want to open this Pandora’s box.”

  “Then what shall I do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what your plan is, and I don’t care to know, but I can tell you what you shouldn’t do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You shouldn’t sit around feeling sorry for yourself. No one’s going to show you a way out. You need to find it on your own. If the world outside is as you say it is, then no one’s coming to rescue you, so sitting around is only going to give you a sore arse and a slow death.”

  “She’s right, you know,” Max said to himself.

  “Huh?” the woman said.

  “You sound like me!”

  The woman tutted. “The madness in this place is as infectious as the disease. Get out of here while you still can.”

  “Thank you,” Max said.

  “You’re welcome. And don’t feel bad for me. For us.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “This cell isn’t as bad as it looks. We get a lot of daylight in here.”

  The woman had clearly lost her mind. After looking left and right, Max said, “Huh?”

  “Compared to most anyway. I saw you come in. I see everyone come in.”

  “What? Why didn’t you tell me that? Where does the daylight come from?”

  When the woman didn’t say anything, Max said, “Are you pointing?”

  “Sorry, sweetie.” The woman laughed. “It comes from my right.”

  “Thank you.” Max followed the woman’s direction by turning to his left.