The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [128]
Eventually, the ground becomes slick, and I press my hand against the ice-coated wall to keep steady. My footsteps alternately crunch and slip, making it easy to lose my balance. Every time I crash to my knees it takes longer for me to push myself up again, and the dead get closer.
Every time I hesitate, that’s distance lost between me and the dead.
I’m so tired. My body’s exhausted. Spent.
This is the true brutality of the Unconsecrated. My body tires and theirs don’t. My muscles cramp and lock up and theirs don’t. My mind screams to rest for just a moment and they know only the hunger that will keep them stumbling after me forever.
Every heartbeat I’m not moving, the Unconsecrated are.
And eventually I will have to stop. To sleep. To eat. To drink. To catch my breath.
I can’t walk forever. The dead can.
Knowing this should break me. It should have broken all of us long ago.
But it didn’t. Not my mother or my father. Not their parents or the generation before that.
And if I’ve learned anything surviving on my own it’s that I can take another step. That’s all I have to promise myself: one more step, and then I can worry about the one after that.
One more morning: that’s all I have to focus on.
So that’s what I do. Behind me the dead follow, the empty sound of their moaning making me nauseated and dizzy. I begin to hum, a wavering sound as the muscles in my arms and across my chest clench from the cold.
My throat’s sore, mouth parched dry, so I run my hands across the ice on the wall, bringing the drops of water to my lips to keep them from cracking. It tastes old and stale. Metallic, like blood.
A minute or an hour or a day or a week may have passed, for all I know. I just know one foot and then the other. I know the feel of the frozen wall under my half-numbed hands to keep balance. I know the feeling of my feet sliding—that moment I think I’ll catch myself just before I slam to the ground.
And I know pushing myself back up, bruises blooming on bruises. Moans chase me, the sound such a constant that it feels as necessary as breathing.
The tunnel slopes deeper underground, which makes the ice underfoot grow thicker. It starts to fill the tunnel until I’m forced to walk stooped over so I don’t hit my head on the ceiling. Keeping my balance on the slick surface becomes difficult, and finally I fall with a thud that forces the air from my lungs and sends the lantern flying.
As I lie there trying to coax myself to breathe again, shadows whisper at the edge of the feeble light.
I roll to my knees, recognizing the shapes: twisted arms, splayed fingers, gaping mouths. Eyes still open, sightless. Ice burns on my knees and palms. My teeth chatter and I have to clench my jaw hard to make them stop.
Bits of the bodies jut from the ice, frozen in time. Fingers like blades of grass coating a field, an elbow like a broken tree branch. They’re everywhere, surrounding me. My lantern’s trapped in a nook a few arm’s lengths away, and slowly, careful to avoid the snags of protruding bodies, I crawl toward it.
The ceiling grates against my back, the space so narrow I almost have to lie flat on my stomach to reach the lantern. I’m forced to rest my cheek on the ice, facing the bared teeth and clawing hands.
Some of the dead look like they’re asleep—like they collapsed down here, with no more living flesh to tempt them, and have been trapped ever since.
As I crawl I feel the top layer of ice beginning to melt under my touch. A tiny puddle already rests under the divot where the lantern rolled to a stop. Moans from the dead chasing me slip around the narrow space, bathing the frigid air with a sense of intense loneliness.
Stretching my arm as far as possible, I feel my fingers slide over the heated glass bulb of the lantern, knocking it just out of reach. Something brushes my foot and I glance over my shoulder, see fingers wrapping around my ankle. Teeth straining from the ice. All around me ice crystals sparkle and shimmer in the light and then there’s a sputter, a last gasping wheeze from the lantern,