The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [26]
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.