Chapter 1
It’s not the first time I’ve woken up screaming.
My reaction is the same as always: I shove my fist in my mouth, the tangy taste of blood landing on my tongue as I reopen another one of the cuts on my knuckles.
It doesn’t stop the screaming, but it muffles it until I can shake the last vestiges of my nightmare from my mind and get some kind of control.
It’s pitch-black around me, the unfamiliar room full of nothing but too-haunting memories.
The screams have stopped as my breathing turns frantic; the same terror that I’ve gone blind in the night makes it hard for my lungs to function the way they should.
It’s suffocating, like someone has sucked all of the oxygen out of the air. I start to choke.
My legs kick at the sheets already so hopelessly entangled after another night of restless terrors. I want to run, I want to break free, I want to get out and kill any lurkers I can find before they get me.
A cold sweat breaks out on my forehead, on my neck, down my back. I have to get the hell out of here, but to where? I have no fucking clue.
I yank my hand out of my mouth. Fingers clutch at the sheets, fisting them, grounding me. I suck in another breath. Pushing myself up to my elbows, I blink a few times, looking past the impenetrable dark. It fades, letting the shadows in.
For a split second, I’m still lost. My bed never faced this way before.
When I had a TV that worked, it was mounted on the other wall.
My closet door was in front of me, not to my left, and I used to enjoy sleeping by the window.
Waking up in the winter, rolling over to see the snow…
it was one of those little pleasures in life.
But it’s not worth the risk of a lurker breaking through the Grave and smashing the glass. This bed is positioned as far away from the blacked-out, covered windows as it can be.
Oh, and it’s not my bed.
It belonged to Stacey Finch. I went to school with her younger brother, Tom.
They lived with their parents in a complex of pretty pricy condos called Oak Grove.
When the survivors abandoned their homes, moving closer to the local high school, Jack brought my twin and me to take over one of the empty condos.
We’ve lived here ever since, and if I still wonder whether Stacey fled, if she was lurker food, or she ended up Turned herself, I try not to obsess over it too much.
The Finches were gone when the Turning was done, leaving their house ripe for the pickings, and that’s all that matters.
At least, that’s how Jack explains it, and it’s easy to just agree with him.
Does that mean I want him to know that I’m having another nightmare? The master bedroom is down the hall. If he was home to get a couple of rare hours down himself and he heard me, he’d never get any rest.
Worrying about Jack is enough to help me get my ass under control. My throat is raw from screaming and the strain of choking on my breath. My eyes have adjusted enough for me to finally remember where I am, and at the very least, I know I don’t have to run.
Not yet, anyway.
I’m safe. I’m alive.
I’m alone.
All of a sudden, the panic gives way to a heavy weight pressing against my chest. It feels like someone just dropped a rock on me.
I lay there, paralyzed for a moment, all the fight in me simply gone.
Angry, hot tears appear in the corners of my eyes, but I pretend not to notice them.
I fool myself into thinking it might be the sweat dripping from my brow that’s causing my eyes to sting. I don’t care. Besides, I’m used to it.
Instead, leaning over, I start groping around the edge of the bed. My emergency pack of matches must be somewhere near. My lighters are never too far away, either.
My hand closes on something poking out from under my pillow. It’s rectangular and sleek and cool against my palm. The relief is sudden and sweet. I finally feel like I can breathe again at last.
It’s my phone.
I know it’s silly, especially since most of the survivors got rid of theirs when we eventually gave up on any hope of cell service returning, but I still keep my old phone charged whenever we can spare the power.
All of my games and contacts and photos are long gone—no technology means no cloud and our devices went kaput months ago—but it still has its uses.
Tapping the screen, I squint at the bright display.
A makeshift glow-in-the-dark clock, even when the electricity is off.
It takes me a second to read the screen. When I do, I groan. It’s eight o’clock in the morning. If Jack’s here, he let me oversleep.
Again.
Before the Turning, my concept of passing time was a hazy blur at best; past or future, it was either coming or gone.
I was twenty-five. A couple of years out of college, working a shitty retail job while I waited for my history degree to put me on the map, I was carefree.
Having fun. The future could wait—and then, suddenly, it was January, the Turning happened, and, like everyone else, I was forced to change, too.
That’s when I started to think of everything as “ago”, as in nine months ago the world turned to hell. It’s only gotten worse since.
Ago—
Two months ago, I still had my twin sister.
Seven weeks ago, I didn’t.
Seven weeks ago… it seems like a lifetime, but it’s only been seven weeks since the accident. Just seven weeks since I woke up in the triage area at St. Matthew’s, just like I’ve done nearly every morning since: panicking, afraid, and, no matter who was home, completely on my own.
I couldn’t remember anything at first, but everyone knows they only keep you in the church when they want you as close to God as possible.
I saw the weathered wooden crucifix hanging over my head, witnessed the memory of the blazing fire coming back at us in my mind’s eye, and I instantly knew what had happened as certain as if I had seen Hallie’s ghost hovering next to my bedside. Sometimes I imagined I did.
I survived the explosion. Hallie didn’t.
Five weeks ago, I came home to an empty condo. Not entirely empty because Jack still calls our stolen condo ‘home’, but I hardly ever see him—and, well, that’s not really his fault.
It’s nothing like the two-story house my family shared about a fifteen-minute walk away from Oak Grove.
From the layout to how narrow it is, the condo is just…
wrong. After all these months of living in it, I’m still not used to that, and maybe I was still dazed after they let me leave St. Matthew’s, but after I accidentally, forgetfully, stupidly walked into the room Hallie claimed—Tom Finch’s old room—my first night back, I took a hammer to the doorknob and mashed it in.
I left it the way it was, a shrine to my twin and maybe my old schoolmate, too, and I know one thing: it’s a room I won’t ever enter again.
Four weeks ago, I decided it was time to start hunting again.
As much as it hurts, as much as I still feel like I’m only partially whole without Hallie by my side, I’ve never been the type to grieve and mope.
All I wanted then… all I want now is to get to take out my anger and pain on as many lurkers as I can.
Not even in Hallie’s memory will I spare them any mercy.
But, damn it, Jack won’t let me.
He seems to think it’s safer if I stay in at night when the threat of the lurkers is at its peak.
He won’t come out and say it, but he’s already rearranged all of the patrols so that I’m not needed for any of them.
Whenever there’s a new mission and he calls for volunteers, he never sees my hand.
If I try to head out with my gas can and a bottle, one of the other survivors always escorts me back to the front porch.
I’m fucking twenty-five and the whole community is treating me like I’m a kid.
I hate it. I absolutely hate it. It’s driving me crazy.
I tried to sneak out once, to prove myself, but when Camden skipped his patrol to bring me back home and Liza nearly got bit by a youngling, I promised myself that I wouldn’t do anything so foolish again.
I won’t let anyone else get hurt because of me.
So now I’m nothing but a reluctant prisoner until Jack decides to let me be useful. Seeing as how he seems to think it’s best if I sleep my life away, I doubt that will happen any time soon.
Leaning over, I grab the bat lying under this side of the bed and bang it twice against my floor.
If Jack’s still home, he’ll turn the fuses back on so I can get ready.
We’ve got to be an example, he says, to show the other survivors that we can get along without electricity in case it disappears like the television and the phones did months ago.
So he turns the fuses off purposely every night to conserve it, I guess, and I’m left to wake up blind every morning. Sometimes I wonder why, when everything else went to hell when the world Turned, we still even have power, but Jack tells me not to question it so I don’t.
In the beginning, I used to torture myself with why’s. Why did this happen? Why did everyone take the Injection? Why did the supposed miracle cure backfire, leaving most of the population little more than ravenous monsters? Why now?
Why me?
But now all I think is: Why worry? Why wonder? I know firsthand it doesn’t help. All it does is cause heartache and grief. Fuck knows we already have way too much of that in the Grave.
It’ll take a few minutes for Jack to go into the cellar and reach the fuse box.
I busy myself with picking clean clothes out from the mounting piles of soiled ones scattered on the floor.
Laundry day was three days ago, but I haven’t gone to the community center where we’re encourage to share washers—and socialize—in two weeks.
Eventually I’ll run out of fresh clothes—plus those that a spritz of perfume can’t cover up—and I’ll have to face the gossiping women that work there.
Rifling through the clothes, I’m determined that won’t be today.
When I find a shirt that doesn’t make my eyes water, I throw it onto my bed for later, then head into the bathroom.
The power isn’t on yet. That’s nothing new.
Sometimes Jack has an early meeting, or someone in the Grave needs him…
they always need him, and he’s always on duty.
Oh, well. I’ve gotten used to taking showers in the dark.
It doesn’t really bother me anymore. It’s only Jack’s concern that I might fall and hurt myself that keeps me from always leaving the lights off.
As long as the bathroom mirror remains hanging over the sink, I’ll take a hundred showers in the dark if it means I can avoid my reflection.
There are no mirrors in the bedroom. Once they let me out of St. Matthew’s, I took one look at the wall mirror upstairs and punched the glass.
After that I smashed every mirror I could find except for the bathroom; and that was only because I was bleeding too much to work up the energy to take on that one.
Jack didn’t say a word about my breakdown, not even when he had to bandage my hand up himself.
He spent three hours picking shards of glass out of my hand, three hours when I’m sure he was needed elsewhere, and never asked me why.
In return, I never explained why I lost control like that. I still think it’s obvious.
How can I stand to look in the mirror when all I see is Hallie staring back?