Artan and Max stood by the window on the building’s first floor, chatting to one another. The grainy light of the early morning around them, mist hung in the air, and condensation billowed from their mouths.
William battled his trembling body and pushed himself to his feet before stumbling over to his friends. They were both focused on something outside the building. When he got closer to the window, he said, “What the hell is that?”
A large wall dominated the horizon, stretching across the landscape as far as William could see. Tens of feet tall, black and gnarly. As imposing as a mountain range, but too straight along the top to have been formed by nature.
William pulled the map from his back pocket. Considerably more wrinkled and damp than the last time he’d looked at it. Max bent down, retrieved something from the floor, and handed it to him.
Clear plastic. William held it for a second.
“To cover the map,” Max said. “Otherwise it will turn to mush, and then how will we find Grandfather Jacks’ community?”
While wrapping the unfolded map, William said, “Is this the wall the woman you were in prison with spoke of?”
Max fixed on the map with a deep frown. Since they’d left Umbriel, Max fixed on everything with a deep frown. “Aren’t we too far north for that?” The thick line dissecting the depicted land sat much lower down the map than their current spot. Max pointed at the much thinner line north of it. “This could be what we’re looking at. Like the main wall, it looks like it runs coast to coast.”
“The wall, a wall. I suppose it doesn’t matter,” William said. “The fact is, we need to get past it if we’re to get to Grandfather Jacks’ community.”
While scratching his closely cropped brown hair, Artan said, “And before we even try, we need to find Cyrus.”
Cyrus was dead. They all knew that, and the loss of the boy weighed heavy, but Artan clearly hadn’t accepted it. And how long would that take? The question sat on the tip of William’s tongue, but he chewed it back. Instead, he turned to Max. “Are you okay?”
The stoic boy nodded. “I’m fine, why?”
“You’ve not said much since we left Umbriel.”
“I’m not sure there’s much to say.”
Artan barged past William on his way to the edge of the first floor. “Come on, we let you sleep because we figured you needed the rest, but now we need to look for Cyrus.”
Max raised his eyebrows and William nodded. Artan wouldn’t take no for an answer regardless of what either of them thought. They needed to find the boy, or at least make the gesture of trying to find him. The sooner Artan gave up on him, the sooner they could move on.
William’s already cold and damp trousers picked up the early morning dew from the long grass. His clothes clung tighter to him than before, but at least it had stopped raining. They’d entered the town in the darkness. The silhouettes had shown the number of buildings surrounding them, but the details had been hidden. At least fifty structures of varying sizes, moss covered a lot of the brickwork. How much longer before nature reclaimed this small town? “You want us to search them all, Artan?”
Matilda’s brother led them back to where they’d been fighting the previous evening. “If that’s what it takes.”
Max must have been thinking it too, so William shrugged. Someone needed to say it. “At what point do we give up?”
“When we’ve searched every inch of this ruined town.”
Every answer came back like the crack of a whip. A hard snap to his words, but they needed to have the conversation, and because Max hadn’t said much since Umbriel, the responsibility had fallen to William. “Maybe he’s been bitten and moved on?”
“Do you even care he’s gone?”
“I was the one who wanted to save him, remember? We owed him for his help in the national service area.”
“But what about now? You owe him more now than ever. He’d still be with us if you’d stopped when everyone else wanted to.”
“Well, screw me for wanting to make sure your sister and Olga are okay.”
“At this rate, you’ll be the only one making it to them. We need to look after ourselves so we can be of some use when we find them.”
Although William drew a breath to reply, Artan cut him off, reaching the first of the slain bodies they’d left from their fight the previous evening. “Anyway, if he’s turned, he’ll be here. When have you ever known a diseased to get infected and then run away from people?”
If William had a reply, he would have given it.
“Exactly,” Artan said.
As Max turned over a diseased woman, shorter than Cyrus, with long blonde hair and pale skin, he said, “This feels like when I was looking for my family in Edin.”
“You found them all, right?” Artan said.
“That’s supposed to be a consolation?”
“No. But it suggests when they turned, they didn’t go far. Which is why I don’t want to give up looking for Cyrus until we know what’s happened to him for certain.”
At least flipping dead bodies drove the cold from William’s bones. His breathing grew heavier; his brow dampened with sweat. His dirty skin itched beneath his sodden clothes.
As Artan turned over the final body—a large man with a deep gash across his face—William twisted Jezebel’s shaft, spinning the double-headed axe.
Flushed from the workout, Artan had his war hammer slung over one shoulder. He ran a hand over his head, his cheeks puffing out when he exhaled. He spun on the spot, avoiding eye contact with William before he handed Max his weapon and ran towards the building closest to them. One of the taller structures, the old church had lost its spire, but its first floor remained intact. While grunting, Artan pulled himself up into the old loft.
Despite the distance between him and Artan, William still spoke to Max from the side of his mouth so as not to be heard. “This feels like a lost cause, right?”
“We have to try though. I’d want you to try if you were looking for me. Cyrus is one of us now.”
“Diseased!” Artan called down, pointing away from him. “Just one of them.”
The slightest change in Max’s expression. A hint of excitement broke through his stern fix, and his eyes widened. He raised the war hammer and said, “I’ve got this.”
The church and a row of four terrace houses beside it blocked William’s view of the diseased. An alleyway ran between them, the grass only two to three feet tall from where the road had once been paved. The swishing of a stumbling form headed their way. The tight alley caught its slathering breaths, but William still couldn’t see it.
Max stepped closer to the opening and William raised Jezebel. Artan continued his search from the church’s roof.
The creature burst from the alleyway. An explosion of limbs and yelling fury, it slashed at the air. What few teeth it had, it displayed, its cracked and bloody lips pulled back in a snarl, a blackened wound revealing a hole in its cheek. Max might have been closer, but it fixed its crimson stare on William. Its next scream died before it could release it from its filled lungs, Max slamming the war hammer over the top of the creature’s head.
The wet crack snapped William’s stomach tense, and the back of his knees tingled as if his legs might fail him. It didn’t matter how many diseased they’d killed, his senses were yet to dull to the acts of extreme violence. Especially in the cold light of day.
The absence of Max’s smile up until that point only hit home now he beamed at his accomplishment. While staring at the hammer, turning it over in his grip, he laughed. “I need to get myself one of these.”
“Look!” Artan remained on the church’s roof, now pointing down into the alley the diseased had just burst from. Instead of explaining further, he took off across the church’s first floor, leaped a low wall that must have once separated rooms, and jumped through the open wall at the end to the ground at least ten feet below.
William followed Max into the alley and called to Artan, “You s
ure there weren’t any more diseased?”
“I couldn’t see any.”
“So what are we looking at?” Max said.
Artan pointing down explained nothing. The boy then dropped into a crouch and traced the lines with his finger to better show them. A large metal disc embedded in the ground, it had moss surrounding it. Several lines of fresh scrapes had been torn through the green vegetation. “This cover has been moved recently.”
The disc stretched about a foot and a half in diameter. It mostly covered a hole, a small gap along its side from where it hadn’t been properly replaced. Artan wedged his fingers into the space and William stepped back. “You don’t know what’s down there. What if you get bitten?”
If Artan heard him, he ignored him, dragging the heavy metal disc aside, the steel scraping over the concrete as he revealed a deep and dark hole.
“You’re not going down there, are you?” William said.
“I’m not giving up on him.”
“But what if that hole’s filled with diseased?”
“You wanted to run through the night to get to Matilda and Olga. You wanted to run blind, and that’s why Cyrus got separated from us, so please don’t start trying to be cautious now.”
“Let me go down there,” Max said. “It makes sense.”
Artan hesitated at the hole’s entrance. “You sure?”
“No, but it makes sense.”
The second Max lowered his leg into the hole, the dark pit squeaked.
“Cyrus?” Artan said, his call echoing in the hole.
All three boys waited for a second until the febrile voice responded, “Yes. It’s me.”
“Cyrus?” Artan leaned into the hole when Max stepped aside. “What are you doing down there?”
Ladder rungs ran all the way down the side wall. They’d been there all along, but it had taken for Artan to start climbing for William to notice them. The space looked similar to the one they’d used to climb from the tunnel near Magma’s community. What use had the underground paths had in the old world?
Cyrus emerged from the darkness.
Artan helped him out by holding a hand down to him. He hugged the boy when he’d pulled him free of the hole.
William shoved Cyrus and Artan aside with his left arm and brought Jezebel over in a wide arc. Not built to be used with one hand, William lacked the accuracy required to end the female diseased, burying the large axe head in the beast’s shoulder. It opened a deep red wound, unsettled the creature’s balance, and threw her and Jezebel into the right wall of the alley before she fell to the ground, screaming and kicking her legs.
Max crushed her head with one swing of Artan’s war hammer.
The boys paused, waiting for more, but only the wind called through the buildings.
“What were you doing down there?” Artan said, hugging Cyrus again. “Why didn’t you come back up?”
Glazed eyes, a tear ran down Cyrus’ dark cheek. “Because I ran away like a coward. I got surrounded by diseased and I ran.”
“And why wouldn’t you?”
“Because no one else did.”
“Max doesn’t need to run away, and William and I can fight the diseased. We’ve had plenty of practice.”
“But what good am I to the group if I run at the first sign of trouble? I’m slow and I can’t fight. I’m a liability.”
Cyrus trembled beneath William’s comforting hand. He squeezed his shoulder and waited for the boy to make eye contact. His deep brown eyes fixed on William before dropping to the ground again. “You did the right thing,” William said. “You kept yourself safe. If you don’t feel confident fighting, at least you looked after yourself. We all have something to bring to the group.”
A shake of his head, Cyrus said, “I don’t.”
“We got into trouble last night because of me, and for that I’m sorry.”
“You’re not mad at me?” Cyrus said.
“Of course not.”
“Have you had any sleep?” Artan said.
Cyrus shook his head.
The words stuck in William’s throat and it took a second to get them out. “Do you need to get some now? We can stand guard while you take a nap.”
Cyrus shook his head again. “We need to get moving. The longer we wait, the farther we’ll fall behind the girls.”
“Thank you,” William said. “Are you sure you’re ready to move on?”
“I’m sure.” Cyrus pointed at the dark wall on the horizon. “What’s that?”
“We don’t know.” Max handed the war hammer back to Artan, holding onto it for a little longer than he needed to. “But we’re about to find out.”
Chapter 7
They’d been walking through the funnel since first light several hours previously. A cold spring morning, it had been misty when they woke, and that mist remained. Olga’s nose and ears stung from where the sensation returned to them after being numb all night. Her bound wrists burned, the damp rope eating away at her skin.
The hunters had often returned to Edin with salvaged steel, so Olga had seen it before, but only ever in small quantities. She couldn’t have imaged the miles of it now beneath her feet and stretching beyond her vision in either direction. The entire wall had been constructed purely from the cold grey metal. They walked through the lowest part, a deep crevice they called the funnel. The bottom of it still stood about seventy feet from the ground. The deep gorge condensed the bitter wind into an icy blast. Olga walked with a hunch, dipping her head against the blustery assault.
The surface was uneven, rocklike in its formation. Olga’s foot slipped again on the dew-coated surface, her pulse spiking at the potential bone-breaking fall. Keeping up with Peter’s pace forced large white clouds of condensation from her. She might have asked him to slow down, but since the weirdness of the previous evening, she’d only spoken to him when absolutely necessary.
Not that it stopped Peter talking to them, the smaller man either oblivious to how he’d made them feel, or he simply didn’t care. “So, as I was saying, girls, the funnel is the only way through this wall. The wall itself stretches from coast to coast, and this is the only path. Every other part is too sheer to climb.”
“Why is it here?” Olga said. She might as well talk to him. They were going to have to spend time with them both anyway.
“Who built it, you mean?”
Like he had towards the end of the previous day, Carl continued to follow them at a safe distance. Over forty feet behind, he checked over his shoulder many times and chatted to himself as if trying to appease the demons he carried with him.
“Yeah,” Olga said. She checked on Carl again when he raised his voice and spun one way and then the other, watching the sky as if the voices he’d been speaking to had taken form and came at him in a winged assault.
“It was built to stop the troubles from the south of the wall spreading north.”
“It’s that bad in the south?” Matilda said. If she struggled with the walk, it didn’t show. Looser than she’d been from Carl’s beating, she now hopped from one high point to another like a cat along the top of a fence.
Peter smiled, his feline eyes narrowing. “To some it is, but you know what fear does to people. They think building walls and killing others is a way to manage their own insecurities. They blame everyone else for their fragility. I think the south’s wonderful. And this wall’s worked in our favour. The only people who can pass through here with any kind of certainty are those blessed by Grandfather Jacks. The prophet lights the way.”
The most challenging part of their journey so far—other than the company of the two men—had been trying to match Peter’s pace. What did he mean about the prophet lighting the way?
Clearly buzzing with being their guide, Peter ran with a hop, skip, and jump to one of the higher spots. He shielded his brow against the rising sun. “We’re nearly there.” He then spun, pointed at Olga’s foot and shouted, “Stop!”
It had been all but invis
ible until Peter had brought it to her attention. A square foot of metal in Olga’s path, the outline of it too faint to be obvious. A small panel. A trigger of some sort. “What is it?”
Peter leaped to another high spot on the funnel and peered down on something Olga couldn’t see. A sadistic grin spread across his slim face.
Matilda passed Olga and gasped when she joined Peter. Olga caught up a few seconds later, her legs burning from climbing without the use of her hands. The new angle revealed what stepping on the trigger would have done. The path in front of them would have fallen away. It would have thrown them into a chute with a dogleg bend in it that ended in a pit about six feet square, the sheer walls at least ten feet tall. The entire trap made from the same cold dark steel, the pit had a carpet of spikes lining the bottom. Each spike stood about two feet tall. If they didn’t kill the victim instantly, they would do enough damage to cause a slow and painful death. Had Peter halted Olga a second later … She shook her head to banish the thought.
“Well, well,” Peter said, “what have we here, then?”
The pit and spikes had taken all of Olga’s attention. She hadn’t even seen the hands clinging on to the end of the chute.
It made Olga’s skin crawl to move closer to Peter, but it gave her a clear view of the woman with her brown hair clinging to her sweating face. Her mouth stretched with the agony of clinging on, her eyebrows pinched in the middle. She grunted against the effort it took to speak. “Please help me. I don’t know how much longer I can stay here.”
While resting his hands on his hips, his two spears in their holder on his back, his long knife at his belt, Peter threw his head back, forced his stomach forwards, and laughed at the clouds.
The woman’s already wide blue eyes widened. “Please,” she said to Olga and Matilda, “do something.”
Olga turned her back on the woman to show her the bonds.
“You know what this is?” Peter said.
The woman looked back to him, her face chalky white.
Beyond These Walls (Book 6): Three Days Page 4
