The Dark and Hollow Places (9 page)

“Let me help—” I try to tell him, reaching to pull it free, but he shakes his head and twists the wound away from me.

“The machete,” he pants, and I shift my weight underneath him, reaching for the large blade. Catcher’s eyes are bleary,
wide with pain and shock. He blinks rapidly, trying to focus on me. “The tunnels.” His teeth are clenched and the words come out clipped and harsh. “We can get back to the tunnels.”

He breaks off the length of bolt, tossing the spiked chunk of wood to the ground before lurching toward the Unconsecrated lumbering our way. I press against the wall and lash out with my machete as he shoves the dead back, grunting from the impacts that jar the remnants of the bolt still protruding from his arm.

There are so many of them creeping around us, all I can do is swing the machete indiscriminately. I scream, fight raging through me, as I take off fingers, slice through flesh, kick at knees. Anything to keep them away from me. We make it back into the alley just as the current threatens to overwhelm us and we find that it’s still clear, no living around to draw the dead in. Catcher pushes me toward the tunnel entrance and I sprint, feet skidding through frozen slush as the wind tries to throw me back.

I fight the buffeting air, clutching building walls for traction until I get to the dead end. I throw open the doors leading down into darkness and hesitate. “Come on, Catcher!” I shout at him. I can barely see the top of his head in the throng of Unconsecrated pooling around the intersection of the alley and the main road. At first I think the Unconsecrated have him. That they won’t let him go.

“Catcher!” I yell. The Unconsecrated are already stumbling toward me, following the trail of blood from my lips. I swipe my hand over my mouth, smearing red on my palm. My heart screams in my body, my muscles straining with the instinct to defend myself.

Slowly pushing against the storm, the dead advance as if
they’ve never known urgency. And they don’t need to. They’ll just keep coming. They’ll always press forward. I can kill the first few, but it won’t take long for them to overwhelm.

They come at me with teeth bared, some with bloody lips where they’ve already found a living person to bite and infect. Catcher threads his way through as if he’s one of them.

My heart lurches at the sight of it: him there among them. Them not even noticing. It’s jarring: He’s alive, they should be scrambling for him, and yet they don’t. He walks through the throng as though he’s used to being surrounded by their moaning death, and it makes me realize that this is his reality.

He’s the line between the living and the dead. He is both and neither at once. He belongs nowhere, and now I understand his hesitation when we were down in the tunnels. I recognize the way he holds walls between him and other people because I’m the same way.

“Faster!” I shout at him, afraid that he’ll be too late. He starts to jog, arms up against the biting wind, fighting to cover the distance between us and leaving the dead to stumble after.

My hand’s curled tight around the sharp edge of the metal door guarding the stairway. One side of it’s scarred and dented while the other’s still smooth and shiny. As I turn to the darkness I catch my reflection: wide eyes, blood smeared around my mouth. I grip the machete tighter, instinct screaming that it’s an Unconsecrated staring back at me.

I can’t catch my breath, startled terror zinging through my body. What if I
am
one of them? I relive the pinch of the Unconsecrated biting my arm, the feel of the edge of his teeth against my ear.

Catcher finally makes it to the entrance, grasping his arm where the shaft of the bolt still protrudes. Blood trickles over
his fingers as he gently nudges me to the stairs and closes the doors, throwing us back into the pitch-black. Cutting the vision of myself as one of the dead away.

“Annah,” he says. I feel his hand wave through the air, seeking me, but I ignore it. Instead I race down the steps, gripping the railing to find my way back to the fire and the light.

Catcher calls after me but I don’t slow. My heart’s roaring in my chest, my thighs aching, but none of that matters.

Back on the platform the fire’s nothing but embers, and I blow shaky breaths over them until one of the half-burned bits of wood catches and sparks.

My fingers shake as I fumble with the buttons of my coat, ripping it from my body and then yanking off my sweater and the shirt and tank beneath until there’s nothing covering my torso.

“Annah, what’s going on?” Catcher shouts as he jumps the last few stairs and runs into the weak ring of light.

As soon as he sees my nakedness he jerks away from me, throwing his good arm up over his eyes and twisting his head away from my pale bare skin. “Annah?” Concern threads through his voice. It’s clear he thinks I’ve gone insane.

Frantically I run my hands over my arms, prodding and poking at the flesh as I twist to get a better look. I don’t feel any breaks in the skin but I can’t be sure. I run to Catcher and thrust my arm in front of him.

“Is there a bite?” I demand, breathless.

“Annah, what’s—”

“Is. There. A. Bite!”

His eyes go wide and then he takes my arm lightly in his scalding fingers, running them along the contours of my muscles as goose bumps spring to life in the path of his touch.

“No, not that I see,” he says gently.

“What about here?” I ask, tilting my head so that my ear and neck are under his gaze. I feel each exhale of his breath as his touch flutters up along my hairline, tracing the curve of my ear, slowly. Methodically.

“No.” It’s a whisper, his lips almost—but not quite—pressed against the base of my skull the way I thrust myself at him.

I stand there a moment longer, the heat of him pulsing around me in the dim cold underground air. I turn, just slightly. Inch closer to the warmth. When he inhales, his chest brushes against my shoulder, his coat scratching my bare chest.

“You weren’t bitten,” he adds softly, breaking the silent tension between us.

Relief soars through me. I collapse, wrapping my arms around myself and rocking, my fingers clutching my naked shoulders. Tears course down my cheeks and drip, rosy red after trailing through blood, from my jaw to the cracked concrete of the platform.

I was dead. I was so sure of it. I’d felt the sear of Unconsecrated teeth. How is it possible I’m not infected?

I’m sobbing and shaking from the release of the terror that froze me deep within. Catcher kneels, pulling me to him, and I bury my face in his chest and let the sweet solace of life course through me.

“I’m not infected,” I say, still incredulous.

He runs his fingers over my hair, cupping my head so easily in his hand.

“I don’t understand.” I try to gather my emotions back inside myself, afraid of having let them run free for so long. I
pull away from him and swipe at my eyes and that’s when I remember the bolt lodged in his arm.

Dried blood pools at the base of it, crusted black in the firelight. “Oh, Catcher,” I say, reaching a hand toward him, horrified at the sight of the angry wound.

He jerks his fingers around my wrist, stopping me. “Don’t touch it,” he says, his eyes turning hard and pleading and full of pain. My mouth opens to protest. “Please,” he adds before I can speak. Then he gently nudges me back into the darkness.

I try to pull my arm free of his grip, to move closer, but he’s too strong. I’m intensely aware of the fact that I’m not wearing any clothes from the waist up—all the scars and twisted skin visible—but his injury is more important. “You’re hurt.”

He still doesn’t let go and seems oblivious to my nakedness as he moves me away from his bleeding arm. “You know this feeling of being alive—those tears you just cried because you’re not infected?” When I don’t answer his grip tightens until I nod my head.

“That’s the feeling you need to hang on to,” he says adamantly. “Because that’s not a feeling
I
can guarantee you.”

I don’t like that I’m unable to escape from his grasp. I don’t like how vulnerable it makes me feel. “If you were dangerous you’d have killed me by now,” I tell him, still struggling. I almost believe what I’m saying.

His eyes narrow. “It’s not an
if
, Annah, it’s a reality. I
am
dangerous. I’m infected. This blood”—he holds his injured arm away from me—“it’s infected.”

We’ve already had this argument and so I just glare at him and say, “Fine. Keep the stupid bolt in your arm for all I care.”

He actually smiles, which softens the moment between us.
He holds me a minute longer and as if by instinct, his eyes sweep along my neck and across my collarbone, careening down my exposed body. It lasts only an instant, almost as if it were involuntary, and I tug my arm free from his relaxed grip, immediately missing the heat of his skin against mine.

I turn sharply and start pulling on my clothes, waiting for the sound of him to release the breath he’d held when he glanced at me.

“I’m sorry,” he says softly. I close my eyes. Is he apologizing for yelling at me or gaping at me? For my nakedness or the ugliness of my body?

I deflect his attention away. “You’d better figure out what to do about that thing in your arm,” I tell him. “You don’t want an infection.” Before he can say anything I hold up a hand to stop him. “I don’t mean Unconsecrated infection, I mean a blood infection. That arrow looks pretty dirty, and who knows what kind of bugs it got into your system.”

I finish buttoning my coat and turn to face him. He’s staring toward the dark mouth of the tunnel at the far end of the platform. His eyes glisten, but before I can ask him why, he shakes his head, grabs the bolt and jerks it free. His choked whimper echoes in my ears and I flinch at the pain. Then he groans and falls to his knees, the bloody arrow slipping from his fingers and landing on the broken concrete. I rip some cloth from my quilt and place my fingers over his shoulder, letting him lean on me as he ties the strip around the wound. This time I’m the strong one.

“W
hat happened up there?” I ask after he’s tied off the bandage and pulled away from me. “I’ve never seen that many Unconsecrated before.” I walk closer to the stairs, wondering how long it will be before the pressure of so many dead against the metal doors at the top causes them to buckle and collapse.

“The horde.” He sounds indifferent as he sits and rubs a chunk of ice between his fingers to wash away the blood.

I move back to the tiny fire, huddling in close to chase away the damp cold, hoping the light will erase the terrors floating at the edge of my thoughts. “Horde?”

Water drips from the bony knob of his wrist, leaving a trail of pink across his skin. “The horde. The one from the valley in the Forest.” He’s speaking as if what he’s saying makes sense but it doesn’t.

“They didn’t warn you?” he asks, incredulous.

“Who warn us?” The air down here is frigid and each exhalation puffs like a cloud from my lips.

He pushes to his feet and starts to pace. “Millions of Mudo headed for the City. Already here apparently. How did the Recruiters not prepare you for this? They had to have known.” His eyes are wide, the ice forgotten in a puddle.

“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I tell him, my chest fluttering with fear.

“Annah, those dead up there—that’s just the beginning. There are millions, more than you can even imagine could exist. That’s why Gabry and I were in such a hurry to get to the City and find you—so we could get you out before the horde hit.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.” I’m shaking my head. “I was just at the bridge to the mainland—
we
were just there and there weren’t Unconsecrated. How did they get across the river? How did they get over the walls? It’s only been a few hours.”

He crouches in front of me, rests two fingers on my knee, two bright points of heat seeping through the layers of my clothes. “You were knocked out for a long time, Annah—you slept even longer. It’s been more than a day since the bridge.”

I push away from him, an explosion of movement, and stalk to the edge of the platform. “Okay, fine. So it’s been a day. That’s still not enough time for what we saw up there. Those streets were almost overrun. That can’t happen that fast. It just can’t.”

He doesn’t say anything to contradict me. He doesn’t have to. His expression says everything and I spin to the darkness of the tunnels, reeling. There were so many dead. It was like walking into a swarm of gnats on a hot summer evening. They were everywhere.

Slowly Catcher walks over to me. “There are enough of them that they can almost fill the river—clamoring over each
other before there’s time for them to sink. They’ve probably already overrun the bridges. They’ll overrun
anything
in their path.” His voice is gentle but his words are not. “They pile on top of each other against the walls—they’ll push any barriers down. A horde that big … it’s like pouring the ocean into a jar except the island is the jar. There’s nothing that can hold it back. It’s impossible to comprehend unless you’ve seen it.”

But what I don’t tell him is that I
have
seen a horde. I press my palms into my eyes until it hurts, trying to erase the memory, trying to push it down but still it comes.