Tearing Down the Wall (4 page)

“
How many are there?” I whisper to myself, starting to feel hopeless.

“
There’s the one in the north where you were held,” Ryan says, counting, “the two stadiums, one in the south, and now one across the water. So five.”

“
That we know of.”

“
Yeah.”

I start to panic a little inside. When all of this started I never intended to get involved beyond fulfilling my pro
mise to the people in the MOHAI: I’d bring them help if I could and I’d get them free. From there I figured it would be between them and The Hive what happened next. I never planned on being part of it—the Colonies were their problem—but the deeper I sink into this mess, the more I see that the Colonies are
everyone’s
problem: the Hive’s, the Vashons’, the cannibals’, the Hyperions’ Crenshaw’s—even mine. Very, very much mine.

So now here I am amassing an army of my enemies
, exposing myself to all of the people I’ve lived in fear of for the larger part of my life, and I’m talking about taking down more Colonies than I ever knew existed. This is insane. It’s impossible.

“
We’ll need more people,” Trent says quietly. He’s still reclining, comfy and at ease, but his eyes are piercing. “We’ll need to talk to the others in the Hyperion to see if we can recruit more bodies. We’ll need to visit other gangs as well. The Elevens. The Pikes. You,” he says, looking directly at Andy, “will need to blow your cover. Start shopping for help.”

Andy stares back at him impassively. There
’s a tension passing between them, one that I don’t understand but I’m pretty freaked out by. The way Trent is eyeing Andy… it makes me happy Trent likes me.

“
This is what I was planted for,” Andy finally agrees. “I have some connections I can tap into. There are always people unhappy with the status quo.”

“
They’re going to need to be pretty angry if we want them to go against The Hive,” Ryan warns him.

Andy grins knowingly.
“Oh, they’re a very angry bunch. Trust me.”

I don
’t. I don’t trust this guy that has probably sat at a table full of Hive members just like he’s sitting with us now, smiled that same smile, and spoken those same words. He’s a traitor, and it doesn’t matter if he’s betraying the trust of a man I hate or not—he’s still willing to look people in the face and lie to them about absolutely everything. I don’t trust your average person even on a basic level, so this guy is setting off all kinds of alarms inside me.

“
How many people can you rally to make a move on the northern Colony?” Ryan asks Elijah.

“
At least twenty men and women from our guard.”

“
It’s not much.”

“
It’s more than none at all,” he says, carefully reminding us just how many people we’ve successfully recruited from The Hive and Vashon Island.

Ryan nods in silent
, grudging agreement.

Elijah stands suddenly
, gesturing for the rest of us to do the same. We do, though I’m not sure why, and the ease with which he commands the room bothers me. He leads Trent, Ryan, Andy, and I down one of their dark, strange hallways to the room where we first met him. Large white tubes have been brought in and propped up against the far wall. He and Andy immediately begin examining their tops.

“
Do we have that area?” I hear Elijah mutter thoughtfully.

“
We have everything,” Andy answers confidently. He looks over his shoulder at me. “Where exactly up north is the Colony you were in?”

“
On the shore. In the old MOHAI building. It was a museum. The Museum of—”

“
History and Industry. Yeah, I know. Here it is.”

He pops the cap on one of the tubes and pulls out a large scroll of paper. When he spreads it out on the table
, the faded blue paper a mess of white writing that makes me dizzy, I nearly gag. More maps. It makes me think of Captain Hook and his whorehouse. It makes me oddly angry.

“
This is a map of the sewer systems and storm tunnels,” Elijah explains. “We have street maps too, but the best route for making a move against the Colony is by the underground. They’ll never see it coming.”

“
That area is swarming with zombies,” I warn.

“
Yes, everywhere is lately.”

“
Not like up there. They have barricades to lock most of them in as a natural defense.”

Elijah looks at me pointedly.
“We can handle the Risen.”

I nod silently but inside I
’m thinking he’s using a Colony word. Is he like me and it became part of his vocabulary as he adjusted to this life? He’s old enough to know where that word started, but does he remember?

Or is he like Andy? Is he playing both sides?

“We’ll move on the smallest Colony immediately,” he says.

“
How soon is immediately?” Ryan asks.

“
Tomorrow night.”

“
No,” I say firmly.

He looks up at me with a mix of surprise and annoyance.
“And why not?”

“
Because it’s impossible. Because we don’t have a solid plan yet. Because we don’t know how many people we’ll be able to gather from the gangs.” I look him hard in the eye. “Because I don’t know you. I don’t trust you. I don’t want to make deals with and fight alongside vicious, rabid animals.”

Andy snaps up
, his posture going rigidly straight. I ignore him. He worries me, but not right now. Not when I’ve got Ryan and Trent beside me. I’m still afraid—I should probably watch my back when I think I’m alone—but I don’t feel vulnerable right now. It’s a heady drug knowing the Boys have my back.

“
You don’t know a damn thing about us,” Andy seethes.

“
Lucky me.”

“
We don’t need her,” he tells Elijah. “We know where the northern Colony is now. Get her out of here.”

I grin at him.
“All you gotta do is show me the door.”

“
Right this way.”

“
Stop, both of you,” Elijah barks impatiently. “Andy, we need her because the location of the Colony isn’t enough. She’s connected to them. They know her. They won’t work with us—they’re terrified of us—but they’ll follow her.”

“
She’s nothing but a mouthy brat. She’ll get people killed.
Our
people.”

“
And you’ll have dinner for a week,” I tell him with disgust. “What are you complaining about?”

  He shakes his head
, his mouth a tight line of compressed anger. “Get her out,” he snarls. “Get her out of my sight.”

“
She stays,” Elijah tells him, his voice quiet yet firm. “But I’ll make a deal with you.”

“
I get to kill her when it’s over?”

I smirk at Andy even though my stomach is a tight knot of dread. I feel Ryan and Trent close ranks around me. It
’s a half step each but it’s a warning—one I really hope Andy heeds.

“
No,” Elijah tells him. Then he looks at me and I see the anger Andy is so openly expressing buried deep inside this small man. The firelight is in his eyes where it burns hot, livid, and…happy? He smiles faintly. “You get to educate her.”

My education i
s a true learning experience—I’m sitting at a desk and everything. It’s a reminder of something I barely got to experience back in life pre-apocalyptic wasteland, and if this is anything like the real deal, I’m not sorry I missed out on most of school.

Trent and Ryan sit on either side of me. They
’re also in old, broken down school desks that were probably jacked from an abandoned elementary school because they’re about three sizes too small for all of us. The room we’re in is a legit classroom with a blackboard, chalk, a tattered world map, the alphabet and numbers counting up to one hundred painted in brilliant colors on the plain walls. And bones. There are bones, clean and shockingly white, stacked up neatly in a corner underneath a chart with a picture of the human skeleton. Beside that is a very beautiful painting of a bunny in a meadow.

It
’s the weirdest room I’ve ever been in.

“
What you know about us, or rather what you think you know about us,” Elijah says patiently, standing at the head of the classroom, “is a lie.”

Andy stands next to him
, his body tense, his eyes hard on mine. I keep my face carefully blank as I stare back.

“
Do you or do you not eat human flesh?” I demand coldly.

Elijah pauses. Andy
’s jaw clenches tightly.

“
Yes,” Elijah admits.

“
Then you’re animals and there’s nothing else I need to know.”

“
There’s more to it than you realize.”

I break my stare with Andy to shoot Elijah a bitter look.
“I don’t care what else there is to it. You’re no better than the zombies outside. You’re insane. You’re inhuman.” I take a breath, knowing I shouldn’t say what I want to say, but self-control is not my thing lately. I’ve been through too much, I’m flying wild and loose with all this change, and I feel my heart in my throat as I spit out my next words. “You’re disgusting.”

I feel Ryan tense next to me. He knows a fight is coming. I know it too. I
’m insulting monsters inside their home and it’s a great way to get yourself killed; but we’re probably going to die anyway, so at least I’ll die honest.

“
Shut up, Joss.”

My hea
d swings to Trent. “What did y—”

“
I said shut up,” he repeats. He looks at me with complete calm. Complete irritating as hell calm. “I want to hear what they have to say.”

“
Why?”

“
Because I like to understand things.”

“
What’s to understand? They eat people.”

“
But why do they eat people?”

“
I don’t care why!”

“
I do, so shut up.”

“
Quit telling me to shut up,” I growl.

“
I will when you quit talking.”

I sit back in my chair hard
, staring straight ahead and shaking my head angrily.

“
What about you do we misunderstand?” Trent asks Elijah.

Elijah nods to Andy
, his entire demeanor changing as he looks at Trent. He’s much more relaxed. He almost looks pleased.

Personally
, I’m pissed.

“
We do ingest human flesh,” Andy begins, his angry eyes still locked on mine, “but not for the reasons you think. We do it out of respect, and most importantly, we do it out of love.”

I fight to stifle a snort of disbelief.

“When the disease first took hold, the world was chaos. People were killing each other to stay alive. They abandoned each other, they turned deaf ears to pleas for help. It was humanity at its worst, but eventually things calmed down. People started to realize they needed each other to survive. Some realized they needed to work together, some realized they could enslave others.”

“
The Colonies and The Hive,” Ryan says grimly.

“
Yes. We realized the same thing the Vashons did: people like us—people willing to live together and help each other—needed to hide to stay free. But we didn’t have the numbers the Vashons did. They were better fighters. They had better resources.”

“
Why didn’t you join with them?” Trent asks.

Andy
’s mouth pinches tightly. “We weren’t invited.”

“
Can’t imagine why not,” I mutter.

He ignores me entirely.
“We were everyday people then, just looking to survive. But that was the problem. We were too average. We had nothing to contribute to their island, so they didn’t want us. They slammed the door in our faces.”

Andy
’s voice has grown more and more bitter until he’s spitting the words out like venom. Any anger he has toward me doesn’t hold a candle to the hostility he feels toward the Vashons.

“
We were locked out,” Elijah agrees calmly. “Forced to live here on the outside in the wild with the growing gangs and the Colonies running out of control.”

“
Why didn’t you join with the Colonies?” I ask. “If you were scared of everything else around you, why not willingly be locked inside their gates? At least you’d be safe.”

“
Why don’t you join with them?” he counters. “Why did you escape?”

“
Because I refuse to live as a prisoner.”

“
You were a slave. They all are. And we’re exactly like you—we refuse to live that way.”

“
When and why did you begin to eat people?” Trent asks.

His tone amazes me. There
’s no judgment. None at all. From the sound of it, he could be asking them when they first learned how to ride a bike instead of when they decided to go full Hannibal on their family and friends.

“
A couple of years after we were locked out of the Vashons’ palace,” Andy tells him. “We were threatened by other gangs and the Colonies with their roundups. We were made up of mostly families. We weren’t great fighters. We were parents—parents who would do anything it took to save their children. That’s why we moved underground. We hid from the Risen and the gangs, but they found us. We knew we had to do something to keep them away. We tried laying traps but they never worked. We were hiding in the sewers like rats and they still attacked us, still stole from us and killed our people. We were dwindling and dying out and all we could think was who would take care of the kids if we were gone? They’d be next to die. They’d starve or they’d be taken in by the Colonies and raised as slaves. Or worse—they’d be taken in by The Hive and the girls would…” He takes a deep breath, his eyes fixed far off on the empty wall behind us. When he speaks next his voice is soft. “We couldn’t stand it. We definitely couldn’t let it happen. That’s when we came up with a plan. We tapped into a defense we hadn’t considered before.”

“
Fear,” Ryan says quietly.

Andy nods.
“And what is everyone afraid of?”

“
The zombies.”

“
The Risen are monumentally stupid, something that makes it relatively easy to escape them if you know what you’re doing. They can’t strategize, they don’t have any thought—not beyond eating human flesh. But what if they did? What if they worked together? What if they could plan and plot? What if they were organized killers?”

“
They’d be horrifying. No one would be safe from them ever.”

“
So that’s what we became. It didn’t take much. We were seen killing an intruder via ingestion one time and the rumors flew. The warnings went out and the attacks slowed. A few more times to drive the point home and the attacks all but stopped. We were monsters but we were safe.”

Via ingestion.
What a lovely, clinical way to say they gnawed on a person’s living, kicking, screaming body until they died one of the most horrible deaths the world has ever known.

I feel bile burning the back of my throat.

“I understand how it’s an act of love,” Ryan says, “because you did it for your children, but how is it respect?”

Elijah sighs. Whatever he
’s going to say, he knows we aren’t going to like it. “We eat our dead,” he tells us gently.

I sit forward and put my face in my hands
, breathing deeply. I can’t. I can’t deal with this place and these people. They are so far beyond insane that they can’t even see crazy anymore. It’s a pale light beyond the horizon. A star still burning in the sky eons after its last ember has died out.

“
Why?” Ryan asks, his voice tight.

“
To ingest them is to take them with us. To carry them on in our lives as part of us. They maintain us. They keep us alive and we keep them close to us forever. It’s done very ceremoniously. It’s not much different than taking communion. Jesus himself said that his body was the bread and his blood the wine. He encouraged people to ingest him into their bodies as a religious rite.”

“
It’s not the same thing at all,” I say, my face still in my hands, my voice muffled against my palms.

“
It’s exactly the same.”

“
I see Joss’ point,” Ryan agrees, carefully remaining neutral. “With communion a person ate a Ritz cracker and drank some grape juice. It was symbolic. What you’re talking about is… it’s pretty different.”

“
It’s sick,” I groan. I lift my face, dragging my hands down it roughly. “You’re telling me that if a kid’s parent dies, you make them
eat them
?”

“
No,” Elijah says firmly. “Children are not allowed to participate in the burial ceremony until they’re eighteen, and then it’s their choice. No one is required or forced to do it.”

“
Burial ceremony,” I chuckle to myself. I feel like I’m losing my mind in this place.

“
Joss,” Trent begins.

“
No, uh-uh. Don’t tell me to shut up again. I listened. I heard their side and you know what I’m taking away from all of this? They bury their dead in their bowels.” I stand abruptly, unable to sit in this room with them anymore. “School is over. I’m done. I’d like to leave now.”

“
And where will you go?” Elijah asks, his voice hard. “Who will you look for help from now? Will you try to save your friends in the northern Colony or will you give up and try to forget about them? If that’s your plan, you should be asking yourself who the real monster is in this room.”

I stare at the floor. I stare at the floor and I try to remember to breathe
, but I feel trapped. Trapped by the truth, by these walls, by the cage I’ve built for myself with my promises and high hopes for a world we all gave up on years ago. That filthy word that lights the way and draws me like a moth to a flame, to my doom, but I can’t look away and I can’t ignore it. I can’t ignore him.

I look at Ryan to find him already watching me and I feel it swell in my chest
—hope. The rest of the men in the room are watching us and I feel the weight of the world on my body, crushing me down into powder on the floor. I could stay there. I could become part of the dust and the earth under their feet to never be bothered again. Never be burdened. Never be expected to be something I’m not.

Or I could finish what I started. I could try. I could become something more than the sum of my broken
, fragmented parts, and maybe it will never be perfect or beautiful, but it will be me. And it will be strong, because I don’t know any other way to be.

I swallow hard as I take a reluctant step forward.
“What’s the plan?”

Trent slips past me
, going to stand next to Andy as though the guy had not just told us that he eats his cousins for Easter dinner.

“We haven’t decided yet how exactly we’re going to go in,” Andy tells us.

“
By water?” Ryan suggests.

“
It’s too obvious,” Trent disagrees. “They’ll be watching the water for sure. We have to go for something less conspicuous.”

“
We can’t go in on the roads,” I tell him. “They have that zombie swarm trapped around their front gates. We’d never get through without being noticed. Or being eaten.”

Trent raises his eyebrows.
“You made it through.”

“
Barely,” I remind him, holding up my injured arm.

“
So if we can’t go in by land or sea…” Ryan says suggestively, looking to Elijah.

He nods.
“Underground. We don’t know that area, but if the tunnels aren’t caved in we should be able to make it. We can come in from under the building.”

I scowl at the map
they’re all looking at. It means nothing to me. “What are we going to do? Pop up in a toilet?”

“
I know I said you were too skinny,” Trent tells me, “but you’re not that skinny.”