The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [39]
I take a step toward him. “Maybe you should worry about yourself more than us.”
He looks at me for a moment, his eyes tracing along my scars. I raise my chin, refusing to glance away.
“Maybe I am,” he says.
His words make me shiver, but before I can ask what he means there’s a tremendous crash and a chorus of wails behind us. I spin around and see a massive section of the Palisade wall only a few blocks away crumbling, debris from its collapse spiraling up to the sky and tangling with the broiling smoke from the fires.
And then they come, stumbling from the cloud of dust and dirt: Unconsecrated. At first it’s just a few, but then there are more and more, struggling across the rubble and flooding into the streets. Slow but steady they flow like blood from a seeping wound.
Some are short and some are tall. Some men and others women. Some wear clothes from olden times and some are naked, their bodies striped with wounds. But all moan with gaping black mouths. All claw at the air, reaching and needing. Some of them shuffle on broken limbs, arms gnawed away, with stringy gray tendons swinging with each step.
There are more than I could ever count and I know this is just the beginning. Soon the entire City will fall to them. I stare and wonder how we’ve survived as long as we have against such an inevitable destruction.
Elias scrambles onto the roof. “We have to go,” he says, a little breathless. “Now.”
I nod, unable to take my eyes from the sight of so many Unconsecrated only a few blocks away.
“This way.” Elias grabs my hand and tugs me toward a rickety bridge spanning the alley to the next building. Through grimy windows I see families shoving clothes and belongings into bags and reaching for weapons.
I struggle to remember the names of the terrified faces, of the little girl screaming as she clutches a ragged doll and her brother sharpening blades while their parents race to pack. These people are my neighbors—faces I see almost every day and yet never talk to. It seems too easy to leave them behind, which feels wrong and unsettling.
But I’m not sure I can save myself, much less anyone else.
The Dark City explodes around us as we run, news of the horde fording the river spreading everywhere. I hear screaming mixed with the shrill sirens alerting residents of the breach. Everywhere is panic, no one knowing what to do or where to go.
The bridges are chaos, people shoving one another as they flee the dead. I watch people tumble off roofs and scream for help as the Unconsecrated slowly fill the streets. They claw at windows and brick walls and moan and snatch at everything around them.
Elias runs in front of me, a strange, awkward, limping stagger, and Catcher follows behind as we scamper along the tops of crumbling buildings. Families climb fire escapes, joining us in a flow of refugees streaming toward the docks on the southeast side of the island. It becomes more difficult to keep track of Elias and Catcher and not to get lost in the crush of panic.
Long lines begin to crowd at the bridges, which are too narrow and fragile to take that many people at a time. The bridges were constructed long ago out of whatever material could be scavenged and are for people to travel back and forth between the roofs of buildings, to avoid the potentially dangerous streets. They weren’t made for this. Some snap and fall apart, spilling people to the ground, stories below, where hungry dead attack them, tearing at their limbs as they scream and fight. Any survivors may as well be dead. It will only take one bite to turn them Unconsecrated.
It’s hard to avoid looking, impossible not to watch the struggle taking place so many flights beneath us. I try to focus on Elias’s back and the feel of Catcher and his heat behind me, but the sounds and the smell are too much—the metal taste in my mouth and the screaming of the living.
Someone pushes up against me, knocking me down, and someone else steps on my hand, the weight grinding my knuckles. I scream