Beyond the Barriers (28 page)

The smell of dirt, mud, and old leaves filled me with a sense of peace. That came into sharp contrast as I tried to blink away flashes of light. It was like I had stared at the sun and paid for it with the aftereffects burned into my retinas.

I lifted my head, but the pain made me pay for that little effort. A pissed-off demon bashed around in my skull. It screamed over and over again for me to just give up and lie here for eternity.

Reaching up, I felt around the back of my head, which revealed a huge lump to my questing fingers. My shoulders hurt when I moved; they felt pinched and sore right in the middle of my back. Where had that blow come from?

My head was in a fog. The last thing I remembered was the battle at the barricade. My half-suicidal attempt to take out the enemy while my new friends got away.

Some of my vision returned after I blinked, but only on one side. My left eye continued to throb in time with my heartbeat. A blast of darkness that almost cleared soon fizzled out again. I shook my head, but that only made my brain rattle around and hurt even worse.

I had fights that didn’t hurt this badly.

I rolled to my side and then onto my stomach, managing to get one arm under my body and push myself off the ground. My hand crunched against leaves and wet foliage of some sort. When I gripped at pressed grass, I felt something slither across my fingers.

After I rubbed my eyes, my vision started to come back.

It was cold, wet, must have been close to morning. I got a glimpse of my hand and grabbed a piece of earth to reassure myself it was still there. Then I looked up at a scene of horror.

I would like to say it was some sort of hallucination brought on by the blow to the back of my head. I would like to say it wasn’t reality, but a bad dream. But the place in which I woke was all too real.

I was in a large cage complete with rusted metal bars. It looked like someone had taken over a farm of some sort and put people in the cages instead of animals. There were other large jails, some just chicken coops, but those had kids in them. I got a glimpse of grungy faces cowering together. They shifted around when they met my eye with a nervousness I did not find reassuring.

Another giant cage to the right was filled with folks—men and women in various states of dress. Some looked familiar, but I couldn’t be sure if they had been at the camp with me. I sat up and leaned my head forward so I could rest it against my fist, arm crooked and set against my knee. The effort of getting up had all but exhausted me.

I looked up again, and this time I saw the sky. It was red like blood, and I had to wonder if there was something wrong with my sight. The clouds rolled by, but had a pink tinge that made me think of the end of the world. They were late to the party, since they missed the end by about six months.

I had a feeling this was the end for me, because I was in a cage, and it was rare to keep things locked up like this. Either I was a prisoner or I was food. Couldn’t be much else. I struggled to a sitting position and heard a cry behind me.

Turning, I saw a girl lying on her side, sobbing. Her body jerked in big shaking movements that made her look like she was having a seizure. She wore a jumpsuit like I had seen at Lisa’s camp. It was gray, and she had her sleeves done all the way up. Near her was a man who wasn’t moving. I could only see the back of his head, which was caked with blood that matted his black curls. That had to be Scott.

It was warm, must have been morning, but I felt a chill deep in my bones. I wondered how long I had been on the ground. Cries from all around came in at an alarming rate, as my head struggled to equalize the pressure on either side. I crawled slowly, like an animal in pain. My back ached, my head hurt, and my shoulders felt like they were carrying an extra passenger between them.

I looked all around me to find the place was a nightmare. A home to misery.

Dirty faces pressed to metal bars. Like refugees on TV, the ads one saw to make one want to give money. I would give whoever these bastards were a piece of hell if I managed to get out.

So many people, and all of them in misery. I heard screaming in the distance, but it was too far away to pick out a location. There were shamblers walking around, zombies in various states of decay that stopped to look at the men, women, and children in cages. Some stopped as if considering them, but others just moved on. How the hell had we ended up here?

I went to Scott. He was covered in filth. Glancing down at my own shirt, the flannel one I had worn for months, I found it was in equally deplorable shape. I felt his neck and found a pulse. Breathing a sigh of relief, I turned his head. His face was bruised, and when I checked the back of his head, the lump there had dried blood on it. I hoped that neither one of us had a concussion.

I pulled him into my lap as I sat near his body. Brushing away his hair, I pulled back his eyelid to see if his eyes were dilated. I had no fucking idea if that was how you checked someone this damaged, but I had seen it on television dramas. What else could I do?

He shuddered, but slept on while I continued to hold him like a child. I did feel very protective of my new friend, like we had done and seen a lot together even though I had known him for less than a day. I hoped he would come around.

Outwardly I was calm. Inside, I was an inferno.

Rage was building inside me as I sat and considered my circumstances. Away from Katherine, carried here with my friend, thrown into a scene from hell. I had to get out of this cage. Then there were those around me being treated like Jews in Germany during World War II. How many times had I seen a documentary and raged against the injustice to humanity that had taken place? Here it was in the flesh, and I was likely to die in the middle of it.

There was a curious lump near me, and I reached out to touch it. The mass was a piece of meat, and when I pushed it, a bit of blood drizzled out. It was disgusting, and when I foolishly put my finger to my nose, I smelled the stench of decay. There was another lump, and when I pushed at it, I realized that it was the end of a human arm.

I recoiled and dropped Scott’s head, which got a reaction out of him. He reached up to touch his bruised skull, but his eyes remained closed.

That’s when the voice came and sent shivers up and down my spine.

“Eat. Become us.” It was raspy and deep. I turned slowly to confront one of the green-eyed men about whom I had been so interested in learning.

I didn’t have any words for this thing that was supposed to be a man. It was no person; it was no creeper. It was a monster. I had seen too many of these things driving the zombies on. On one hand, I wanted to crush his skull. On the other, I wanted to ask him why he did what he did. What did they stand to gain?

He was dressed in a pair of jeans that were surprisingly clean. He had on a long-sleeved flannel shirt that must have been hell in the heat of day. His hair was long and black and was a rat’s nest. Perhaps this emissary dressed just for me. I wished I were out of the cage so I could offer a proper thank you, just before I took him apart with my bare hands. I had held one close not too long ago, and I knew they were just as fragile as regular men.

“What are you?” I ran my hands through my hair, but the action made my head throb. The pain pissed me off even more.

“We are you. Just better.”

“Better? YOU ARE BETTER? You’re a fucking monster!” Yelling didn’t improve my pain.

The thing stared at me for a long time without blinking. That was odd. His lips parted, and I thought he was about to stick his tongue out and waggle it like a child. His lips did not curl up or down. No smile, no frown. His brow did not move. He was a walking, talking corpse. I wished once again that I were outside this cage so I could finish his transformation.

“You will join us. As will the others in the cage.”

“You expect to change everyone in this camp by making them what? Eat some rotting piece of flesh? You are out of your mind.”

“Not everyone. Only you few.”

“What about the other people? What do you feed them?”

He didn’t respond. I stood and went to the metal bars and pulled at them. This ignited a ripple of pain across my shoulders that made me nauseated. I had to sit down and collect my thoughts for a moment.

It was just as I feared. The people in the cage were used for feed. At the end of it all, we had become livestock to the monsters we had created. I had to get out of here. I had to free them somehow, but who was I fooling? This wasn’t some action movie or adventure book where the hero had all of the answers. Hell, I was far from heroic. I was just a man caught in a bad situation. The fact that I didn’t have a gun to shoot my way out was going a long way toward me being as useful as a wet puppy.

The ghoul turned without a sound and wandered away. His steps were mechanical, and he had about as much emotion in him as a rock.

I turned to regard my companions. The young girl had her eyes open, and she was staring at me. Tears streaked the dirt around her face. She sniffed and then sobbed. Her body shook, and I tried to imagine what it was like to be a child caught up in this madness. She couldn’t be more than fourteen or fifteen. She should be surfing the web, looking at her Facebook account, hanging out with her friends, going to music lessons after school, prepping for college. She shouldn’t be locked in a cage like an animal.

Holding one arm out, I put my hand up in a form of supplication I hoped she found comforting. I started whispering to her, because I didn’t know what state her mind was in. “It’s okay. I promise not to hurt you.”

She stared at me, and then seemed to withdraw. Her eyes clouded, and she clenched them tightly shut. Then she curled up into a ball and shook as great wracking sobs took hold. I nearly wept at the misery before me.

I considered the situation. I didn’t know shit about girls her age. All I did in my teens was chase them. Now I needed to be someone quite different, so I moved to her, creeping across the ground ever so gently. When I reached her side, I sat down with my legs crossed. The ground was cold and wet here, grass pressed down by the bodies that had been in here before us. At least I assumed that was the case. I reached out and shoved aside the chunk of meat that was left near her head, shuddering in revulsion. I couldn’t even pick out what part of the body it had been. It was just meat, like something left over from cattle.

I wanted to douse my fingers in acid to clean them, but I stuck out a foot and kicked the chunk across the cage. It rolled over and over until it struck a bar.

The arm was a mess. It was covered in blood, with the exception of the hand. So, like a weird handshake, I took the arm by the fingers and pushed it away. I couldn’t get it far enough away, though, so I picked it up and slung it under my side, flinging it away so it struck the bars with a hollow clang. Scott groaned and curled up into a ball, the ground crunching under him as he moved.

I reached over and gently touched her shoulder, just leaving my hand there for a moment then patting her. I didn’t want to push my luck, so I lifted it and tried to talk to her again.

“Hey, can you tell me how you got here?”

I tried to appear as non-threatening as possible, which may have been next to impossible. My normally short hair was in need of a trim, and after the lack of baths, it probably hung long and lank. I hadn’t shaved in days, and I’m sure my eyes were hollow and rimmed with red. I had slept the sleep of the injured, not the sleep of the tired, and I was paying for it.

My eyes were raw, felt like sand had gotten into them, and I wanted to rub them. I really wanted to put my face in a pail of cold water and revel in the feeling. A bath would wipe away the filth of the past few days.

I patted her shoulder again, but she recoiled from me like I burned her. I backed up a few inches, but sat so my chin was on my fist. She stared into my eyes, and it appeared that she came to some kind of conclusion.

“I don’t know. There was the fight, and people were running everywhere. Mom said to hide in our truck, but when I got to it, there were a bunch of the monsters around it.”

She had a scared voice that was tinged with a hint of hysteria. She sounded so young. Her voice quavered as she spoke, and I barely resisted the urge to reach out and touch her again.

“Were you at the camp with Lisa and the others?”

“I don’t know Lisa. We were up from the center of town, in the Vesper Wood area. About thirty of us. Mom said we were going to move on soon, but it kept getting pushed back. Said there were a lot of sounds out there, a lot of noises, like the things were getting closer. They raided our first camp, but we fought them off.”

I let her talk.

“We had a lot of guns, but this time they came late at night. They were silent, and they just walked over the cars and barricades. By the time the alarm went off, there were too many of them. We tried to fight, but they kept swarming the camp.”

Smart of them—quiet and at night. I tried to imagine a less organized group than the one I had been in. How long had it taken them to grow complacent and lax in their patrols? As the batteries wore out, had they been forced to use less of the flashlights? Maybe they didn’t have enough fuel to run generators all night. This required a lot of organization. Lisa’s group was always on guard. That is, until I came along.

Of course, that had been my fault. Bringing the ghoul there had been a terrible mistake. I should have killed the green-eyed bastard when I had the chance. Should have left his head split like a melon and returned to camp. What did I gain? I had the picture of me and Allison and some fruit, but that was all gone now. All gone and me with it, because I was sure I would die sooner rather than later.