Follow Me Through Darkness

by Danielle Ellison

  FOLLOW ME THROUGH DARKNESS

  DANIELLE ELLISON

  SPENCER HILL PRESS

  Copyright © 2014 by L. Danielle Bunner

  Sale of the paperback edition of this book without its cover is unauthorized.

  Spencer Hill Press

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Contact: Spencer Hill Press, PO Box 247, Contoocook, NH 03229, USA

  Please visit our website at www.spencerhillpress.com

  First Edition: October 2014

  Danielle Ellison

  Follow Me Through Darkness/ by Danielle Ellison

  1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A girl escapes a controlled community and races through a forgotten world in hopes of saving everyone she loves before time runs out and their existence is wiped away.

  Cover design by Hafsah Laziaf/ IceyDesigns

  Interior layout by Jenny Perinovic

  Author Photo by Jennifer Rush

  ISBN 9781939392145 (paperback)

  ISBN 9781939392688 (e-book)

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Margaret Polk, Donald Snider & Cheryl Olcott

  Three teachers who came into my life at various

  times and impacted it differently, but in equal

  measure. You believed in my dreams way before

  I ever knew I was allowed to dream them.

  Thank you for never letting me give up on myself.

  And to everyone fighting for your dream:

  may you never give up.

  THE HUMAN SOUL STANDS BETWEEN

  A HEMISPHERE OF LIGHT AND ANOTHER OF

  DARKNESS ON THE CONFINES OF TWO

  EVERLASTING HOSTILE EMPIRES -

  NECESSITY AND FREE WILL.

  -THOMAS CARLYLE,

  ESSAYS, “THE OPERA”

  DEADLINE: 34D, 10H, 55M

  THE BURROWS - SOMEWHERE IN OLD TEXAS

  ALL I’VE EVER WANTED IS FREEDOM, but I never imagined it would be like this. There are no rules that I’m forced to follow, no bylaws or Troopers or barriers to keep me inside. But there is also no ocean, no sky, no sun; there’s nothing but torches and endless underground tunnels. For five days and fourteen hours, all I’ve had is darkness.

  The smells of sweat and rotten food permeate the hot, sticky air. Sometimes a baby cries; the sound of its squalling sticks to me, jams into my pores like the humidity. I’m trapped, and it’s worse than the safehouse because I can almost feel the walls and the tunnels caving in on me, burying me. I wish I were home with Sara, with the ocean and the school children and Thorne. Oh, I miss Thorne.

  “You’re lagging, little girl,” Bayard barks at me.

  “I have a name,” I snap. “Neely, remember?”

  He grunts in response, and I follow him more closely. Bayard is the third person I have followed through the Burrows, and so far he hasn’t been very friendly. Most of the people here are nice, but they’re cautious. They’re unlike anyone I’ve met before in the Compound. There, we were connected to each other, and here I can go hours without seeing anyone except Bayard.

  I miss Rover. Rover told me jokes, and he always had that line of dirt over his nose that seemed to match his freckles. Even Josef had a way about him-a happy, amiable smile. Bayard makes me feel like I’ve been bothering him for the last ten hours.

  His bushy beard, dark skin, and tattered clothes almost meld his image into the walls. If not for the torch he holds, I’m sure I would lose him completely.

  “I hear you met a Cleaner,” Bayard says.

  For a second I think there’s something mocking in his voice, but his eyes are intense on me. That’s not a look of mocking. I nod, glancing down at my hands.

  Some of my fingernails are cracked, one is missing, and all of them are red and puffy from the force of my hands scraping across the pavement. The Cleaners are louder than anything in the Compound, piercing and whirring and relentlessly searching for any form of life. Anything they can suck up and destroy. Rover called them “vacuums.” One of those machines wrenched a tree from the ground and sucked it up through a chute that was connected to a large, metal sphere. I’d covered my ears as I ran, and the whirring sound hovered over me. The wind caught me, and my feet flew up, fingernails gripping anything they could while Rover dragged me into the Burrows.

  “You were lucky,” Bayard says.

  Whatever “lucky” counts for. None of this is lucky to me. I’ve been a target since I set foot outside the Compound, since before I even left it, really. I’ll be “lucky” if I even make it through the Old World in time. Forty days isn’t a lot of time.

  “Which way?” I ask when we reach a crossroads. Bayard huffs at me and then points his torch left. My shoulders ache from my pack, so I readjust it and move left just ahead of him. My pack is still heavy, still full, but how long will it be until I run out of my own food?

  The Remnants-that’s what the people of the Old World call themselves-are generous, offering up whatever food they’re eating. When I first arrived, I was shocked by the strange, dirty people and the language. Especially because I never even knew anyone existed out here. I’d started to question my decision to venture out here, but then one of them handed me a bowl of food and encouraged me to eat. Soon I realized they were more than I believed, giving and friendly and full of life. The taste of stringy meat and gristle still lingers on my tongue. I never ask what I’m about to eat when I accept food, and I try not to think about it, but the smells around me are too pungent to push the negative thoughts away.

  We pass under a measly sliver of sunlight. A dot really. A dot forcing itself through the same kind of metal hole that Rover pulled me through. I wish I could feel the sun seeping through, but the warmth of the spot is lost before it touches my skin. I want it to touch my skin. Five days without it is too much. How much longer will it be? Time is pushing me into the ground, and the weight of it is enough to make me give up and stop trying. Out of habit, I glance at the watch Xenith gave me.

  With each minute that passes, I feel my life slipping away. The numbers are large and blocked, and they tell me the days, the hours, the minutes I have left until my deadline. Xenith said it was powered by the sun, and there is no sun underground, yet it still counts down the time until my life changes forever. Unless I stop it.

  When we stop to sleep, when my feet ache more than I expected them to at five days in, I always mark the days I’ve lost on the map Xenith gave me. Not because I need to but because I want to see them in as many ways as possible.

  The marks are piling up, and I know that soon the days will all be gone.

  “How old are you anyway?”

  “Seveteen,” I say. Not that my age should matter to him.

  “Where are you going?” Bayard asks.

  The question makes me pause. I haven’t told any of the others. Xenith instructed me to only tell the people he approved, but I have a long way to travel with Bayard. And not talking is lonely. I’ve been not talking about what I know for months now.

  “San Francisco,” I say. But my next stop is to see a woman named Cecily Lopez. The Mavericks helped Cecily and her twin sister escape from the North before I was born. Their escape changed everything.

  Bayard whistles. It gets caught in his throat, and he coughs through it. “That’s the other side of the world. You’ll never make it there, little girl like you.”

  “You don’t think
I can just because I’m a girl?”

  Bayard stops walking, shines his light in my direction. The brightness of it makes my eyes water. “I don’t think you can because it’s a death mission. The world’s a dangerous place. Always has been. No one has ever made it to the other coast on their own above ground.”

  “Then I guess I’ll be the first,” I say.

  Bayard stares at me for a moment, then grunts. His light shifts away from me, and we walk on.

  DEADLINE: 32D, 13H, 47M

  THE BURROWS

  I NEED TO SEE THE SUN BEFORE I GO INSANE. Bayard tells me there are two more days, and then I will go up to the Old World. I will step on the ground above and walk among the dead. Or what they always told us was dead and haunted, a place where people are hunted and disease destroys and nothing is safe. But I’m not sure what to expect anymore. This place, these tunnels burrowed under the land-none of it is even supposed to exist. Nothing was supposed to be here, and yet it is. I know now that the Elders started keeping secrets long before I was born.

  What else have they lied about?

  I can’t help now but reconsider all the things Xenith ever said to me. I was so quick to dismiss him back then, but he knew. He knows so many things about the Old World. And I’m here now. I’m underground.

  “How did your people come to live here?” I ask, glancing down at the metal tracks on the ground. It’s a question I’ve asked both guides, but they refuse to answer. They didn’t trust me, not with the mark I bear and the place I come from. I’m a stranger to them-a threat from the Compound, despite Xenith’s seal of approval. I hope this guide will answer my questions. I need to know these answers from someone else’s perspective, someone without a motive-and because after all the impossible being possible, I want to know the truth.

  Bayard snorts. “My people? We’re your people as well.”

  I don’t respond. They don’t feel the same as me, yet I can’t deny that I finally understand what I didn’t know before-that they are more than Remnants and I am more than the director’s daughter.

  We walk a few more steps before he clears his throat to answer me. “Before the Preservation, before the Elders got involved, these tunnels connected the sides of the country. Trains travelled underneath the ground delivering food, supplies and people to other places.”

  I didn’t realize trains were this big, not really. I saw a picture once in a book, and even next to the people who waited on the platforms, the train wasn’t that much taller. If the trains fit in here, they were much larger than that picture. Most things are not as small as they seem to be in pictures.

  “Do you know the story of the disease, Neely?”

  “I know what they taught us in the Compound.”

  “The US was mostly gone. Entire cities wiped out, no economy anymore,” Bayard says as we walk through the tunnels. There’s a noise above as a few of the Remnants move on the platforms around us. Josef said that was where people used to wait and catch the trains. Now it’s where the Remnants sleep in the warm months.

  “It started with the ravens. They say the ground was covered in so much black that it was as if the night sky had broken into pieces and landed on the ground. Feathers. Feathers everywhere.” Bayard’s voice falls silent. We walk on along the path next to metal strips. “The scientists used to experiment on mice, and there was an incident during the downfall of the United States where all the mice were released. A form of protest. They think the birds ate the mice, and all the birds got sick.”

  “I know that part,” I say quickly. “The scientists learned the ravens’ flesh was blackened and that the blackness was eating their flesh off. It spread to humans until everyone was covered. But what happened at the end? Before the Preservation? Before the disease was destroyed?”

  “To understand the end, you need to understand the beginning,” Bayard says, his voice short.

  We walk on in silence, vaguely hearing the echo of the other Remnants somewhere above us. I look up and try to see someone, but there’s nothing. There’s not enough light. I can barely make out the rounded top of the tunnel above us, obscured by the smoke of the Remnants’ fire pits. The smoke swirls above my head, seeping out into the other world through those little holes of sunlight.

  “The people got fevers that made them act out, be irresponsible, irrational. Within hours, the skin changed and the symptoms spread rapidly from one person to the other. One by one, until the disease was widespread across the United States,” Bayard says. “After much death, a cure was discovered. The blackness disappeared. Humans were saved.”

  But they weren’t. Bayard grunts again, and the silence consumes the space around me, the torch he carries lighting the path. There’s no noise except the echo of our feet, of his boots that clomp as we walk across the dirt- and rock-filled tunnel. I listen, counting each step. There are many things in the tunnels-trash, large bugs, smelly old rags that were once clothing, broken glass boxes with buttons, round rubber things.

  His deep voice startles me against the silence, and I miss something he said. “But then the cured started going crazy, and instead of their flesh being eaten by the blackness, they started feasting on the flesh of others. They had no control, no humanity. The cure had failed, and in a few months, the whole world became a skeleton of what it was. Everything stopped, they say.”

  The way he says that has too much sadness to it. I can’t imagine all that death. There isn’t much death where I come from-not in the same way. We have no real sickness and absolutely no disease. We are too perfect for diseases, too pure. People die in the Compound when it is their time, when they are elderly and their bodies fail. Sometimes there are accidents or unexpected deaths when bodies are tired or too complicated or worn too early. Like with my mother.

  “Then the Elders came,” Bayard adds stiffly. “They’d risen up in the midst of tragedy, of a falling nation, and they had money, power, and hope. They’d discovered a new cure to this failure, had a plan, and everyone believed them. They needed someone to believe in. That’s when the Preservation started.”

  There’s another sound from above, but again, I see nothing. Maybe they’re all ghosts and nothing is real. I could probably believe anything at this point. Maybe they are ghosts and this is a dream-some kind of nightmare-and I’ll wake up back at home and it will be as if the last two months never happened.

  “During the Preservation-” Bayard’s voice brings me back to reality. This is the reality, even if I dream it isn’t. “-those who’d never been infected, the Clean, were tested. If they were found not to be carriers or have genes vulnerable to Raven’s Flesh, they were marked with the branding. But the Elders only chose the best of the uninfected, the people at the top of the broken world, those with the best genetic makeup. The strongest. The rest were forgotten, left to rot.”

  A sick feeling rattles around in my stomach. “They never told us that they only took the best or that the others were left behind,” I say.

  Others. The Remnants and those who probably didn’t even have time to call themselves anything. The lives down here have meaning, even if they didn’t before. The Elders were wrong. All people matter; all lives count.

  “I’m not surprised,” Bayard says. “The Clean forced themselves underground to survive and start a new life. The infected ended themselves eventually, I guess.”

  I don’t miss the disdain in his voice. That was centuries ago. Raven’s Flesh is gone, but we still get the branding. The brandings are uniform, all given at birth throughout our history and painted into our skin. Everyone I know has one on the back of his or her neck. Three circles that get smaller, one inside the other. The circles exist to remind them of the cycle of the Preservation-disease, death, salvation. And then the circles crossed in an X because they are saved. Clean. Perfect.

  Has it always been a sign of the Elders’ deceit?

  “That’s the end. Now we all survive the best we can,” Bayard says, falling silent. That’s it. But it’s only the be
ginning. “Have you ever seen the Elders?”

  “No,” I say. They are a mystery, a force we can’t see. They came to our Compound once to visit my father, but I was too small to remember. It was when my grandfather died and I was still believed to belong to Sara. Before the Elders knew to look twice at me.

  My mind drifts back to Thorne-the boy I love; the boy who was branded as my twin, even though he isn’t. I press my fingers into the half-circle on the back of my neck. My branding is not the same; I’m one of the exceptions. Twins have a different branding, one that marks them as one half instead of one whole. It’s the mark I have. The mark Thorne has. We got it before Cecily Lopez and her sister left the Northern Compound, before the Elders stopped giving it, and the branding has changed Thorne and me into something more than normal. What would it be like if he was here? What would he say to this story? This mission?

  “No more questions, then?” Bayard scoffs in the silence after I shake my head. “Is something bothering you? You seem to always have a question in need of answer.”

  I smirk. “Touche, old man.”

  Bayard goes silent, waiting. I wouldn’t usually share details, but I’m with the man a few more days. Just long enough to escape. It shouldn’t matter if he knows something about me; it’s not like we’re going to be friends after this. “I’m just thinking about Thorne.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “He’s my…” But I can’t finish the thought. He’s a lot of things. “He’s someone I love that I left behind.”

  Bayard sighs. “You can go back home someday, and he’ll be there, ready to see you again. I’m sure he’s thinking about you as well.”

  I force a smile. “I hope you’re right.”

  But will he be there? Will I go back home? I’ve hurt Thorne. Even with hundreds of miles of distance between us, I know that. There are some things that aren’t easy to forgive.

  “I am. My daughter, my family will be home once I return. The people you love don’t leave so easily if they truly love you.”