Contain (35 page)

Mister Abramson drops Hannah. He
turns, but when he sees Eddie step out in to the light, he spins
around again and begins to run toward me. Now the screams behind me
are of horror.

Eddie's a terrifying sight to behold—
pale gray skin, smooth and hairless and etched with dark veins. His
face is twisted in fury, writhing with emotion, contorting like
some fluid-filled thing. His eyes are two limpid pools, oily and
glistening, glowing as if they are producing their own light. The
skin on his knuckles is riven from his assault on the steel door.
Blood covers his fists and shoulders, courses down his arms. He
truly is a monster.

Mister Abramson pounds toward me, the
sharp sounds of his shoes on the metal pinging against the cement
walls. But Eddie moves like a cat. He leaps over Hannah and reaches
the man before I can even react. He sweeps him up with a roar,
lifting him over his head.

“
No!” I shout.
“Stop!”

It would kill Bren if I allowed it to
happen. It would kill her and that would kill me. I spared his life
to spare hers. I spared it to save me from suffering his death
every day of the rest of my life.

Eddie's body shudders from feet to
hands. His arms twitch with strength he never possessed before. He
extends them to their full length, preparing to hurl the man over
the side.

“
Eddie, stop!” I yell
again. “You're not a killer.”

He turns his face toward me, and those
eyes seem to pierce my soul.

Hannah's there now, reaching for her
father. There's a cut on her cheek, and another line of blood
trickles down her forehead. “Daddy, please.”

“
We're better than this, “I
tell him.

I sense someone standing behind me,
and I turn to see Bren there. I can't tell what the look is on her
face, whether it's disappointment or disgust or something else.
Maybe it's both of those things. “Don't do this, Eddie,” she
whispers. “Please. He's my father.”

“
He's a murderer, Bren,”
Eddie tells her. “And it's likely he may have done
worse.”

His eyes flick past her and over to
her mother. “And what about you? What's your role in all
this?”

“
She had nothing to do with
any of it,” Seth says, his voice little more than a tight
whisper.

The muscles in Eddie's face ripple,
not from the exertion of holding up the large man, but from the
struggle inside his head.

I turn once more to the group and ask
again who wants to come with us. This time, the Rollins and their
two boys step forward, as does Susan Miller and Danny Delacroix.
Julia Largent tries, but Stephen stops her with his arm. Mia and
Sammy look scared. The Fujimuras, the Caprios, Dominic Green, and
Chip Darby also remain behind.

“
You heard the boy,” Mister
Abramson says. His voice is shaking. “Put me down,
Mancuso.”

Eddie glances at me again, and I give
him a slight nod. Slowly, he lowers the man until he's standing on
the catwalk. Sweat glistens on Seth's forehead, drips down his
face. Once more, the smug grin is back.

“
Jonah—” he
begins.

But my fist catches him square under
the chin, and his body folds over the railing. If Eddie hadn't
still been holding him, he would've gone over the side. I guide his
limp body down to the walkway.

I turn one last time. “Sorry,” I
whisper to Bren. “But we can't stay.”

For a moment, I see something in her
eyes, a desire, a longing for something better. And I give her one
last chance to come with us.

She looks past me and over to Hannah,
to Bix and Jonah. Mister Blakeley is getting groggily to his feet.
Then she returns her gaze to me and she says, “I  I can't
go.”

I nod. ”Lock him up.”

And then I'm gone, before anything
else can stop me, including the blinding tears threatening to burst
from my eyes.

“Dude, you want to explain to me what happened back there?” Bix
asks me as we scramble up the tunnel. His voice sounds hollow,
empty, like the walls are somehow soaking it up. And yet at the
same time our footsteps are loud, scratching at my ears. Perhaps
I'm just hyper-aware of them, afraid we're being
followed.

The passageway narrows, forcing Bix to
walk behind me, giving me an excuse not to answer him.

We had begun to climb not twenty feet
into the tunnel. It slopes steadily upward in a twisting path, so
that we can't see more than a dozen feet in either direction. Steps
have been chiseled out of the rock in some places, but for the most
part, the floor, walls, and ceiling are uneven, the tunnel
narrowing and widening without reason, so we have to pay attention
not to trip or hit our heads.

The lighting is just as inconsistent.
Half of the bulbs strung along the ceiling are dark or missing;
they're heavily draped with old cobwebs and littered with the
ancient corpses of insects. We race from one puddle of light to the
next, and each time we leave another and the darkness shrinks
toward us, I fear something is going to reach out and grab
me.

“
That was some crazy-ass
shit back there, Finn,” Bix tries again. “Like, insane in the
membrane crazy. I thought for sure we were all dead.”

His father doesn't comment on the
profanity, though he does ask Bix to be quiet.

I'm grateful for the reprieve. I don't
want to talk about what happened, about how much my heart hurts
right now. Besides, the stink is so bad that it makes my eyes
water, and it's only growing worse the farther we get. The last
thing I want to do is open my mouth to speak.

Not Bix, though. He gags and says,
“What the hell is that obnoxious smell?”

“
Human excrement, body
odor,” his father answers, shushing him again.

Up ahead in the lead, Eddie points to
a door on the left, the first we've passed since entering. “They
use this one for a toilet.”

We hold our breath, cupping our hands
over our mouths and noses as we pass. The stink is so thick that I
can feel it coating my skin, my throat, seeping into my hair and
clothes.

But once the door falls behind us, the
fetid odor quickly dissipates. A breeze from above blows it
downward. It's a wonder Level Ten didn't smell worse.

“
I can't believe you let
that bastard live,” Bix starts up again. “If it was me—”

“
Enough already!” I snap.
“It wasn't you, Bix, so shut up!”

I'm a little irritated that he didn't
jump in and help when the situation went south. But I'm even more
irritated that he might be right, that I made the wrong decision
allowing Seth Abramson to live. I hope I don't regret it. I hope
the ones we left behind heed my warning and lock him up.

“
Okay, dude. I get
it.”

“
Naw, man. I'm sorry,” I
apologize, softening my tone. “Thing is, it
wasn't
your father. Okay? And it
wasn't your girlfriend, either. I mean, what was I supposed to do
with Bren standing right there? I couldn't let her watch her father
die.”

“
It's cool, Finn. Really.
You did what you had to do. It was the right thing, and I respect
that. In fact, I'm—”

“
Bixby Michael Blakely,”
his father quietly says. “No more talking, please.”

I hate the way my resentment feels
inside of me, hot and greasy, weighing a million pounds, like a
big, hot, greasy million-pound ball of burning lard sitting on my
soul. I hate that I let my feelings for Bren get in the way; hate
even more that I won't let my feelings for her keep me from doing
the one thing I've been dreading most the past three years:
leaving.

Leaving without her.

Then I think about the horrifying
things her father did to Doc Cavanaugh, how he tore her body to
pieces to mask his crime. The coldblooded way he murdered Rory and
Dad and Jack. The heartless way he'd tried to destroy
Jonah.

What is his secret? What could be so
bad that Jonah would willingly stay behind?

I tell myself I don’t care,
but I know it's a lie. I want to know. I
need
to know.

Jonah's silence eats at me. I feel
like he's judging me, too, wishing I'd not intervened when Eddie
was going to throw Mister Abramson over the side.

Hannah touches my elbow. “You did the
right thing, Finn,” she assures me. “You're not a
murderer.”

“
Maybe.”

But if I'm wrong about this, then I
could be sentencing us to death by taking us out of the bunker. On
the other hand, am I committing the others to death by not forcing
them to come with us?

They know the
risks.

So, what are the risks to
us?

What if the Wraiths aren't really
gone? What if they're still out there despite Jonah's claim to the
contrary? And what about the Flense?

I should've tried harder to get Mister
Abramson to talk.

I clench my jaw and keep walking. No
way am I crawling back there. I'm done with that place.

I stumble into Jonah's back, not
noticing that everyone else has stopped. He grunts and steps to the
side without a word, opening a gap that shows me we've entered some
kind of chamber carved out of the mountain. It's lit only by stray
light from the corridor. His face is slack as he turns to look at
me, his eyes devoid of emotion. I'm about to ask him if he's okay
and why he stopped when shapes begin to emerge out of the
shadows.

Bix gasps. I think most of us
do.

They are little more than skeletons,
their skin pale and draped over their bones. Their eyes are
sunken.

A baby's soft burble draws my
attention to a woman standing near the back. Her arms are withered
sticks, her fingers knotted and scarred twigs. The pale bleached
bark of her skin is withered. Her white hair is thin, scraggly, and
oily. She steps forward, more into the light.

For my fifteenth birthday, my sister
Leah had bought me a Walking Dead tee shirt, the one with Carl
eating a gallon tub of chocolate pudding and the hashtag
#loveatfirstbite. I'd had it on the day we left home and, after
wearing it for five straight days, had gladly exchanged it for the
jumpsuit they gave me at the evac center. The woman is wearing that
tee shirt now. She must have scavenged it out of my abandoned bag
from the bus.

“
Hannah,” I whisper. I pull
off my rucksack and hand it to her while holding my gaze on the
woman. I can't take my eyes off of her and the tiny bundle in her
arms. “Open a couple cans of stew. Feed the new people first. Let's
take a few moments to figure out what we're going to do
next.”

“
What
are
we going to do?” Kari asks. She
sounds like she may already be second-guessing her decision to
follow us out. The others I hadn't already prepped early this
morning nod as well.

I had had a plan. We were going to
find the stranger's mythical Bunker Twelve. We'd all agreed to
it — Bix and his dad, Jonah, Hannah — though we had no
clear idea how we were going to do it, other than to retrace our
steps back to the evacuation center. Jonah had assured me he could
remember the entire route we took, but now I'm not so confident.
He's utterly withdrawn inside of himself.

I just hope he was telling the truth
that the bus he'd been working on for the past couple of weeks is
as close to running as he said it was.

The sight of these people, however,
forces me to rethink my strategy. I hadn't expected them to be so
emaciated.

“
Well, first, we need to
make sure we're strong enough to move,” I say, and I settle down on
my haunches while they eat.

A man steps forward. He's as gaunt as
the woman is, and his eyes are haunted by an animal-like wariness,
but his jaw is set in a determined line. I notice a patch on his
shoulder and realize that he's one of the guards who protected us
when we first arrived. I don't recognize him. I doubt I would, even
if I'd known him before.

“
We're strong,” he asserts,
coughing into his fist. It's an alarming rattling sound. “We won't
slow you down.”