The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [105]
I want to say something to give her comfort. “There could still be something …” I struggle for words and end up lamely offering, “More.”
She shrugs again but doesn’t protest.
“How long have you been here?” I ask, not sure I want to know the answer.
“Weeks? I don’t know. Doesn’t really matter. Noell and I were down in Vista when the town revolted. They wouldn’t let us keep our dead and the Recruiters promised to protect us.” She laughs softly. “They brought us here. Caged us and have slowly been killing us off since. Not enough resources to feed us all—not enough entertainment for them.” She waits a moment before adding, “I guess I’m lucky that they just threw me in here and didn’t do anything else to me.”
Weeks. I press my forehead to the bottom of my cage. I knew about the fights and what the Recruiters were capable of. I knew about the Soulers being used as Sweepers. How many people suffered because I didn’t do anything?
I was too selfish. “I’m sorry,” I tell her again.
She watches the way her husband moans, the way his teeth clack together. “Doesn’t really matter, it’ll be over soon. If there’s something to their belief in Resurrection, then I guess I get to be with them after all. And if there isn’t …” She closes her eyes again and I see that her fingers are trembling as she wipes a tear from her cheek.
For a while we sit in silence.
Eventually, she says, “Do you think people were this cruel before the Return?”
Her question surprises me. “I don’t know.”
“They take so much pleasure in suffering. I don’t understand it.”
I swallow, stare down at my hands. “I don’t either. Maybe they don’t understand.”
“Maybe,” she says. “I just wonder sometimes if that’s why all this happened. If there wasn’t enough good in the world and that’s what caused the Return. People got greedy and selfish with their lives and were unwilling to let it go in the end when it was time.”
“I don’t know what caused the Return,” I say. “If what they wanted was eternal life, they didn’t do a good job of it. Who wants to live like them?” I wave my hands at Noell and Jonah. “And who wants to live like us?”
She coughs again, loud and vicious. Noell wanders back over to her. “And to think,” she says, hauling herself to her feet so that she can evade him. “All the times in my life when I pushed my husband away and fought with him over something petty, I should have been pulling him tighter. I should have been thankful each day to have him healthy and by my side.”
I close my eyes, unable to watch what’s happening in the cage. Yet I can still hear her quiet whimpering. Hear the sound of her husband’s moans and the tangled shuffle of their feet. How much longer can she go on like this? Because he’ll go on forever.
I hear a crunch and snap and I look back up at her.
She’s in the middle of the cage standing over Noell. One of his knees is bent at a wrong angle, crooked out to the side with the lower part twisted and dangling. She’s openly sobbing now. “I’m so sorry, honey, I’m so sorry.” She brings her foot down against the back of his neck, screaming in agony as she does it.
It takes a few times but eventually, with a snap, his neck breaks and he goes silent and still. She limps to the other Unconsecrated, who’s still pawing at the cage for me, and brutally, efficiently, she snaps his knee and when he falls she breaks his neck as well.
I’m barely breathing, my hand covering my mouth as if I can hold inside the sound of bones cracking.
She falls to her knees, laces her fingers through the cage. She’s not that far away from me now and I can see the tracks of tears cutting through the dirt and blood on her face. I can even see some of the bite marks along her arm.
“I couldn’t leave them like that,” she says, as if seeking absolution from me. “I couldn’t see them like that any longer.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her, because I know they’re the words she needs to hear.
She nods, but whether it’s at what I said or a conversation taking place