It’s daytime aboveground, and when I throw open the doors and we reel out of the darkness, the bright glare of snow sears my eyes. Catcher stumbles after me, both of us holding arms in front of our faces against the blinding light of the morning. A stinging cold wind roars down the alley between two buildings behind us, instantly penetrating my layers of clothes and causing me to shiver violently.
Pulling my coat tight and wrapping my arms over my chest, I let the wind shove me toward the mouth of the alley. The tips of my hair whip around my face and force me to close my eyes as the howling fills my ears, blocking out any other sound: the crunch of ice underfoot, Catcher’s footsteps behind me. Every movement is an effort. The storm rushes at us until we finally stumble around a corner and into a crowded intersection of one of the main Neverlands roads.
Someone in the crowd blunders against my shoulder, knocking me off balance, and I stumble sideways. Hands grab at me, and at first I think it’s Catcher trying to help me regain my footing, but the tugging becomes insistent like an aggressive beggar, causing my feet to slide over a patch of ice coating the ground.
I jerk my arm free, my elbow connecting with the beggar as I fall. The impact with the ground makes me bite my cheek, filling my mouth with the taste of hot metal. “Get off me!” I shout with a gurgle just as the beggar lands on me, pushing me back until my head smacks the ground.
There’s a sharp pinch along my arm and I struggle to draw a breath, fighting the lump of sour-smelling clothes twisting on top of me.
“Stop!” I shout, feeling blood from my shredded cheek leak from my lips and down along my jaw. The person on top of me becomes frantic, elbows punching my chest as he lifts his head from my arm and lunges toward my face, desperate for something he must think I have.
My mind’s a moment behind. As his teeth veer toward my cheek I’m belatedly aware of two things. First, the man is Unconsecrated, and second, he just bit me. That’s what the pinch on my arm was.
Horror floods me. It incites a panic I’ve never felt before. I lash out, retribution in the face of death, punching at his face and kicking at his torso.
Even so, he’s heavier than I am, and gravity pulls him closer. I twist my head away, trying to scramble from underneath him. “Catcher!” I scream, desperate for help. The frozen ground numbs the back of my arms. It’s impossible to find traction. I can’t dig my feet in, I can’t buck the plague rat off.
I push my fingers into his eyes, trying to keep his lips from my flesh, but nothing stops him.
My arm throbs where he’s already attacked me and useless grunts slip from my mouth. I’m choking. This isn’t the way I’m supposed to die. I’ve fought too hard. I’ve resisted the Unconsecrated for too long for this to happen now.
I growl and sob as his mouth brushes my ear, tongue trying to fold me between his teeth. To bite. To infect. That is all that matters to this monster. I’m nothing to him but the absence of infection—something clean that must be sullied.
His teeth scrape my skin, once more and then again.
Chapter VIII
I twine my fingers through the Unconsecrated man’s hair, trying to pull him away, but it’s too short and I can’t get a decent grip. Just then, his head shudders in my grasp and he collapses on top of me, immobile.
For one moment I wonder if this absence of feeling is what it means to be Unconsecrated. If this is death. And then the body on top of me shudders again and I scramble from underneath him, pushing myself as far away as possible across the ice-slicked ground.
My back hits a wall and I shove myself standing. The storming wind pauses and its absence is filled with moaning everywhere at once, ripped from mouths and carried away as the howling wind rises again. Bodies and bodies and bodies stumble down the street, a trickle around me, a river several blocks away and a flood in the distance. They push against rotted doors and crumbling walls that keep the living sequestered, and start to pile beneath windows, fingers reaching up and up.
At first it doesn’t make sense—I can’t comprehend it. I’ve seen outbreaks before but nothing like this. There are too many of them.
To the north a building roars with fire while people run over trembling bridges to safety. The air’s thick with panic—the sound of it all whipped together by the rising storm so that the only noise is a screeching wind.
The true tidal wave of dead is blocks away, but rivulets of Unconsecrated have already pooled through the streets around us, stumbling and straining for the living.
A line of crumbled bodies arcs around me like a barrier. I stare back at the man who attacked me and there’s a wooden bolt jutting from his head. Another flies through the air, catching an Unconsecrated child midstride. It collapses only a few feet away, and I follow the trajectory of the arrow up to a narrow window high in a building several doors away, where I can just see the tip of a crossbow.
I raise my hand in thanks just as Catcher emerges from the growing tide of Unconsecrated, reaching for my hand. A bolt slams into his upper arm, throwing him against me. I open my mouth in horror as blood splatters from the wound, frosting the snowy ground red.
His weight pushes me against the wall with a thud and Unconsecrated ooze around us. There’s a sound like the scraping of metal and I realize Catcher has dropped a machete at my feet. Blood runs across his elbow and over his empty fingers from the bolt still lodged in his upper arm.
“Let me help—” I try to tell him, reaching to pull it free, but he shakes his head and twists the wound away from me.
“The machete,” he pants, and I shift my weight underneath him, reaching for the large blade. Catcher’s eyes are bleary, wide with pain and shock. He blinks rapidly, trying to focus on me. “The tunnels.” His teeth are clenched and the words come out clipped and harsh. “We can get back to the tunnels.”
He breaks off the length of bolt, tossing the spiked chunk of wood to the ground before lurching toward the Unconsecrated lumbering our way. I press against the wall and lash out with my machete as he shoves the dead back, grunting from the impacts that jar the remnants of the bolt still protruding from his arm.
There are so many of them creeping around us, all I can do is swing the machete indiscriminately. I scream, fight raging through me, as I take off fingers, slice through flesh, kick at knees. Anything to keep them away from me. We make it back into the alley just as the current threatens to overwhelm us and we find that it’s still clear, no living around to draw the dead in. Catcher pushes me toward the tunnel entrance and I sprint, feet skidding through frozen slush as the wind tries to throw me back.
I fight the buffeting air, clutching building walls for traction until I get to the dead end. I throw open the doors leading down into darkness and hesitate. “Come on, Catcher!” I shout at him. I can barely see the top of his head in the throng of Unconsecrated pooling around the intersection of the alley and the main road. At first I think the Unconsecrated have him. That they won’t let him go.
“Catcher!” I yell. The Unconsecrated are already stumbling toward me, following the trail of blood from my lips. I swipe my hand over my mouth, smearing red on my palm. My heart screams in my body, my muscles straining with the instinct to defend myself.
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. I turn, just slightly. Inch closer to the warmth. When he inhales, his chest brushes against my shoulder, his coat scratching my bare chest.
“You weren’t bitten,” he adds softly, breaking the silent tension between us.
Relief soars through me. I collapse, wrapping my arms around myself and rocking, my fingers clutching my naked shoulders. Tears course down my cheeks and drip, rosy red after trailing through blood, from my jaw to the cracked concrete of the platform.
I was dead. I was so sure of it. I’d felt the sear of Unconsecrated teeth. How is it possible I’m not infected?
I’m sobbing and shaking from the release of the terror that froze me deep within. Catcher kneels, pulling me to him, and I bury my face in his chest and let the sweet solace of life course through me.
“I’m not infected,” I say, still incredulous.
He runs his fingers over my hair, cupping my head so easily in his hand.
“I don’t understand.” I try to gather my emotions back inside myself, afraid of having let them run free for so long. I pull away from him and swipe at my eyes and that’s when I remember the bolt lodged in his arm.
Dried blood pools at the base of it, crusted black in the firelight. “Oh, Catcher,” I say, reaching a hand toward him, horrified at the sight of the angry wound.
He jerks his fingers around my wrist, stopping me. “Don’t touch it,” he says, his eyes turning hard and pleading and full of pain. My mouth opens to protest. “Please,” he adds before I can speak. Then he gently nudges me back into the darkness.
I try to pull my arm free of his grip, to move closer, but he’s too strong. I’m intensely aware of the fact that I’m not wearing any clothes from the waist up—all the scars and twisted skin visible—but his injury is more important. “You’re hurt.”
He still doesn’t let go and seems oblivious to my nakedness as he moves me away from his bleeding arm. “You know this feeling of being alive—those tears you just cried because you’re not infected?” When I don’t answer his grip tightens until I nod my head.
“That’s the feeling you need to hang on to,” he says adamantly. “Because that’s not a feeling I can guarantee you.”
I don’t like that I’m unable to escape from his grasp. I don’t like how vulnerable it makes me feel. “If you were dangerous you’d have killed me by now,” I tell him, still struggling. I almost believe what I’m saying.
