The Line Book Two: Walled Read online

  “No,” I agreed.

  “And Central isn’t safe.”

  “No,” I agreed again.

  “Shirel might have been thinking the same thing.”

  “Go to another sector?”

  Ric nodded. “Yes. Probably.”

  “Where’s the closest checkpoint to here?”

  Ric paced the length of the kitchen as he thought. “The one to East. Down on N and 25th.”

  “Where we promised to meet Sonya,” I pointed out.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I wiped the tears from my cheeks and nodded, getting up from the floor.

  I caught sight of Ric standing in the doorway, his arms hanging limply at his sides. I wanted to run to him, to wrap my arms around him and bury my face in the warmth of his neck. I wanted him to tell me everything would be all right. Wouldn’t it? But instead I stood still, staring at him, unable to blink, unable to move.

  He looked just as stricken as I felt. Deflated.

  I wondered if he was thinking the same thing—how my touch was poison. Or maybe he was worried about Adena and Clea too.

  Of course he was.

  Were they scared?

  Were they safe?

  There was nothing we could do about it, and it was maddening. Truly, utterly maddening.

  I wanted to scream. To punch something.

  Someone.

  Finally I couldn’t think about it a moment longer. I would surely go mad contemplating all the things that could go wrong for my daughters after what we’d done.

  They could cry and get caught by Auberge soldiers.

  They could get caught up in a riot and trampled.

  I shook my head, banishing the thoughts and forcing myself to think of something else.

  Finding them.

  Yes.

  I needed to concentrate on finding them.

  It made sense Shirel would flee Central. Maybe to the gate at East.

  Just like Sonya.

  At the thought of her, my mind zipped back to how she’d comforted Ric that very morning. Her hands had cupped his flushed face. She’d kissed him on the cheek in the alley when we’d said goodbye. How easily it came to her.

  Touch.

  Jealousy surged through me, and mixed with my grief and fear, it morphed into rage. I was losing sight of rationality and I knew it.

  It wasn’t fair. None of this was his fault. But I was still furious at him, knowing full well it was wrong.

  He watched my internal struggle and didn’t move to comfort me. How could he? After what I’d done to him, he probably never wanted to touch me again.

  I didn’t blame him.

  He was better off without me. All I’d done was turn his life upside down. And what had he gotten from me?

  A glass statue.

  Fragile, cold, with sharp edges.

  No wonder he was looking at me like that. As if he had no idea what to do with me.

  For that matter, neither did I.

  * * *

  We rode the bike back through the crowds clogging the streets of Central and headed toward the gate to East. It was the height of afternoon now, and the streets reeked of rotting refuse and dead Auberge guards. The sidewalks and roadways were packed full of people, unsure of what to do.

  Twice we came close to being yanked from the motorcycle. Once from a group of men who were moving from block to block, taking whatever they could, and the other time from a teenage boy who flung a trash can lid at our heads in hopes of knocking us off. Ric swerved the bike and took the blow on his shoulder, but we barely slowed.

  When we reached Avenue N and 25th Street, we skidded to a halt and gawked at the scene ahead.

  The checkpoint, which stood at the end of a typical trash-ridden Central street, was comprised of large darkened spotlights, a double-wide trailer, also dark, a long metal pole that blocked the roadway and a chain-link fence that obstructed the way for miles on either side of the entrance. The road through the gate was guarded with no more than ten guards, but they blocked the way in two rows. One row squatted on their knees with their rifles aimed at the crowd. The second row stood behind them, their guns raised, as well.

  The crowd was at a standstill, but I got the sense a lot had happened in the time we’d taken to check our old apartment. Several bodies lay on the ground in front of the guards. Obviously, they’d been shot, given the bullet wounds and pools of blood surrounding each corpse.

  The crowd, a group of well over a hundred people, stood several meters behind the bodies, clustered together but facing the gate as if waiting to charge. They were ebbing closer then backing up, a tide of people on a shore. I could only guess what they were planning. They were probably mentally calculating just how many bullets each of the guards’ rifles held, and what the chances were of them breaking through the gate before being shot like the others?

  It was a standoff.

  I slid off the back of the motorcycle and waited for Ric to push it aside. He rammed it between two abandoned cars. The whole block was lined with them. Each vehicle was stuffed full of mountains of garbage.

  We left the bike there and scanned the crowd for signs of Sonya, Bubbs, Minnie or Shirel and the babies.

  “I see Sonya,” Ric said. “On the left side, by that white car.”

  “Do you see Shirel?”

  “No. I don’t think she’s here. It would be insane to try and pass the gate with the girls while the guards are still armed, and she’d know that.”

  “But insane enough for us to try?”

  He waggled his eyebrows. “Come on.” Then, taking my hand, we dove into the crowd.

  We headed straight for Sonya. Ric did his best to navigate through the throng, but we were still bumping people with stressful regularity. Within a minute or two, we arrived next to Bubbs and Minnie, who stood beside Sonya with guarded readiness. They gave us a look of mild interest. Sonya, on the other hand, smiled brightly.

  “Excellent! Glad you’re here,” she said, and then turned back to look at the guards.

  Annoyance flared. Didn’t she realize the girls weren’t with us?

  I was about to say something when she spoke again.

  “Bubbs thinks we should rush the gate,” she continued, “and Minnie is convinced the guards won’t shoot if we go slowly, an inch a minute, but I don’t think I can wait that long.”

  Ric shook his head. “I don’t think either of those will work. There are still too many guards.”

  “I had the same thought,” she said. “I’d love to take a few of them out, arming the crowd. We’ve got the stash of guns in the van. But I think that’ll only lead to more chaos.”

  “So what do we do?” Minnie asked.

  Giving up on my annoyance with Sonya’s insensitivity, I said, “We need a shield.”

  Bubbs scoffed and fumbled with his backpack. “And body armor couldn’t hurt either.”

  “No, I’m serious,” I said, nodding toward the row of abandoned cars on the curb where we’d parked the motorcycle.

  Sonya’s eyes lit up as if she’d followed my train of thought. “It’s as good an idea as any. Let’s do it. Minnie, distribute the weapons. Doc and Naya, go find a place to hide. Bubbs, you’re with me.”

  “Wait,” I interjected. “You want us to hide?”

  Sonya blinked at us. “Yes. Of course.”

  Now I was thoroughly confused. “But why have us meet you here at the gate if you only want us to hide? You said yourself you needed our help.”

  She set her jaw. “Yeah. To break into HQ and kill two guards. This is different. They’ll open fire on us. You understand? It’s an ambush, and Doc is right. You’re not soldiers. Just take your guns and set up in position behind one of those cars down there
, and shoot any guard who gets in our way.”

  Bubbs gawked at her, aghast. “But we need them to help with the shield car.”

  She shook her head, her chin high. “No.” She pointed at a truck a few cars down the street. “From over there, Doc. You understand?”

  Ric pursed his lips. “That’s a bit far from the gate. We won’t even be in range.”

  Her nostrils flared. “Just do it! Okay? Just...Ugh.” Before we could argue the point any more, she set off toward the largest of the vehicles, and the rest of us followed.

  As we jogged, Ric panted, “So we’re not hiding behind the truck, right?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, no way. If you want to, go right ahead. But I don’t. If this plan fails, and we don’t get through that gate, Shirel and the girls won’t have a path out of Central. We have to get through, no matter what. And we’re no good hiding behind a truck, even if the idea of running straight into a hail of bullets is a bad idea.”

  Ric’s frown lined his face. He looked at me, as if silently asking if I meant it.

  I did.

  “It’s the only way,” I explained.

  I could tell he didn’t like it, but he also agreed with me. “I know.”

  We continued following behind Bubbs as we made off toward the car and Sonya.

  I caught Ric’s expression out of the corner of my eye. He was right to look worried. The plan was a gamble. We were risking both our lives. I was surprised he’d agreed to do it, honestly. But then I remembered he loved the girls just as much as I did. The risk was worth taking. For them. It gave them a chance at a better life. Even if they only got to East, at least they were out of Central.

  When the group of us arrived at Sonya and the car, she glared at us like an old grandmother. But then she mumbled, “Suit yourself,” and went about helping Minnie discreetly hand out the weapons.

  The rest of us stood around the car, each of us lost in silent contemplation. It was a midsize four-door. Upon closer inspection, I didn’t think it would offer much in the way of shielding. But there wasn’t any sense in speaking my reservations aloud when everyone was probably having the same thought, and there was no altering the plan now. So I kept it to myself. At one point the car had been painted white, but now it looked spotted and rusted. A shell of its former self.

  As luck would have it, the car still had all four of its tires, although they seemed bald and too low to the ground to be filled with any air. But for the way we planned to use it, I didn’t think that mattered.

  At one point, the driver’s side window had been smashed in, and residents around this area, or maybe even the guards at the gate, had filled it with burlap sacks of garbage. There was a pile of old rags that had probably been clothes, rotting food scraps and even a cardboard box of broken and shattered plastic tablets that had been outlawed decades ago.

  Bubbs reached into the driver’s side window and unlocked the door. He tried to unlock the rest of them with a flick of a switch, but of course the battery was dead, if not gone. He tried fishing in the car to unlock the back driver’s side door, but that proved fruitless, so the rest of us shattered the windows with chunks of cement and rocks we picked up from the streets and unlocked the car doors manually. After she returned from handing out the guns, Sonya positioned herself at the driver side window and dug through the garbage inside the stinking cabin, popping a lever that made the tires unlock.

  Once the doors were ajar and the wheels were able to roll, the four of us took positions in the openings. Sonya remained on the driver’s side, with Minnie behind her. I was on the passenger front door with Ric behind me. Bubbs stationed himself at the back bumper.

  “Good luck everyone,” Minnie squeaked.

  Sonya nodded.

  “Push!” Bubbs barked.

  Grabbing hold of the door frame with one hand and gripping the roof of the car with the other, I leaned all of my body weight into it and gasped when I felt the car inch forward. Ric grunted with the strain and I heard Minnie whimper, but the vehicle slowly advanced.

  When it pitched slightly to the left, I glanced over and saw that Sonya had reached in through the driver’s window and had turned the steering wheel.

  We were now aimed directly at the gate.

  At seeing us approach, the crowd scattered out of the way, but then a couple of men and one woman gathered around the car and on the back bumper with Bubbs, and helped us push.

  We picked up speed and I was forced to jog in order to keep up, or risk falling behind and perhaps getting trampled by the people behind me, or worse, run over by the car itself.

  I saw another group of bystanders breaking car windows of other abandoned vehicles down the block and rolling them into the street. We’d started something.

  “Halt!” shouted one of the guards. “Stop!” It was the guard on the end, the smallest of the bunch. He was kneeling on one knee in the front row. His eyes widened with terror but the rest of the guards barely blinked. “Halt!” he cried again.

  The first shot rang out. It hit the roof of the car by Sonya. She bobbed her head but kept pushing.

  Then another bullet. It hit the windshield, cracking the glass.

  Then the bullets didn’t stop coming.

  I ducked down low behind the door, feeling it vibrate as the bullets struck. I kept pushing. I dug my feet into the dirt and flinched when a bullet hit right by my hand. I heard the glass of the windshield shatter and break away, sprinkling my head with shards. Then a woman screamed.

  I wanted to look up to see who’d been hit but I also knew that was a sure way to get my head blown off, so I kept low and continued pushing.

  A bullet hit the roof of the car right beside my hand again and then I dropped both my palms behind the car door, grasping the handle and pushing with so much force I felt the back of my neck slick with sweat.

  “Stop!” shouted another guard.

  More bullets flew.

  More screams.

  I heard the unmistakable sound of bodies falling to the ground and I risked a look over my shoulder to see if Ric was still pushing from the door behind me. Either he’d ducked down like I had or he’d been hit, because I couldn’t make out if he was there.

  “Ric?” When no one answered, I shouted, “Ric!”

  He shouted my name back and I felt such a rush of relief my eyes clouded with tears.

  Losing focus, I tripped over my own feet.

  Falling face-first, I smacked the asphalt with my stomach. My hands gripped the door handle and for a moment I was dragged. My boots raked across the pavement with a horrible grating sound. I kicked to try and catch my footing, but the car was moving too fast. I heard a woman shrieking and realized it was me.

  The bullets seemed to slow down as the car continued to roll forward. I wondered how close we were to the gate, and then my fingers loosened and I slipped off the handle and hit the ground full force.

  My chin cracked onto the street and my eyes filled with white light. I tasted blood. Thinking fast, I rolled to the right, away from the car. Feet pounded the pavement all around me, and when my eyes cleared, I saw nothing but legs and feet. Someone stepped on my thigh. I got kicked in the back. I bellowed in shock and pain. A jolt of panic shot up my spine. I was getting trampled.

  Wrapping my arms around my head, I curled into the fetal position to protect myself from the stampede. I could only hope they didn’t roll another car over the top of me.

  There was a rush of air behind my back, and the cement exploded, cascading me with rocks and clumps of the street. With no car to protect me from the bullets, I knew I was a sitting duck.

  Get up, you idiot!

  I poked my head out from under my arms enough to glance around. A man ran over the top of me, kicking the back of my head on his way. A sharp pain rattled the inside of my skull and s
hards of light zipped across my eyes. I curled up tighter.

  Someone screamed my name.

  “Here!” I shouted back. “I’m over here!”

  In the sea of feet and legs, I felt hands on my body, and then I was in the air.

  Ric had me in his arms and he was carrying me, away from the mass of people, his back toward the shooting guards. He pushed against the stream of rushing citizens and then he hooked to the right, coming up behind another car, an old pickup truck, that protestors had freed from the curb and now thrust toward the gate to East sector.

  We stood behind the people at the tailgate and he put me back on my feet. I noticed a bloody smear on his forehead.

  “Ric!”

  He wiped his sleeve across it, smearing blood into his hair. His coat was covered in splotches of red. “I got grazed,” he explained. “Looks worse than it is.”

  It looked bad. I reached out to touch it, and he flinched away.

  I fought to hide how much his recoil hurt me. “Where’s Sonya and the others?” I asked.

  He nodded toward the gate. “They’ve gone through.”

  I spun around. I could hardly believe my eyes.

  The gate was open. Wide open.

  Two cars, the white one we’d pushed and an even smaller red compact, were both on the other side.

  All the guards were dead, or wounded, or about to die at the hands of the angry crowd. The bodies of citizens were scattered across the gate opening, blocking any more vehicles from being pushed through.

  I caught sight of Bubbs as his enormous form pushed backward through the crowd. He was coming out, back into Central. He plowed through the steady stream of Central refugees like a bulldozer.

  As he grew closer, I realized Bubbs was carrying someone in his arms, and he was crying. “Doc!” he screamed. “Doc!”

  Ric looked up and gasped and took off running toward him.

  As Bubbs approached, I felt my legs weaken. He had blood smeared across his chest and arms.

  The body he held was Minnie.

  Chapter Ten

  “Doc, you gotta help. You gotta do something!” Bubbs cried. Minnie lay limp in his arms. Her arms and legs swung from his massive form.