In the End Read online

  “So you’re his bodyguard, too, then.”

  He shrugs. “Bodyguard, secretary, gofer,” he says. “Pretty much whatever he needs.”

  A gunshot sounds from above and I flinch, involuntarily squeezing Jacks’s hand tighter. “Probably a Florae outside,” he says. “They try to shoot them before they reach the walls.”

  “The gunshots only bring more.”

  “This isn’t exactly a quiet place,” Jacks says. “They’ll come anyway. But the walls keep them out.” He’s right. Fort Black must attract any Florae within a ten-mile radius. I start to ask why they don’t use the crossbows, then answer the question myself, remembering how ineffective they’d been against the Floraes chasing the cyclist.

  As I look around at the flimsy structures these people call home, I see a man shoot up out of a cardboard box. He collides with me. I barely feel the impact against my shoulder, but it knocks a humph from him and sends him staggering. He nearly goes down before scuttling away without a word or glance back at me. He’s painfully thin—obviously malnourished—and the sharp stench he leaves behind him has me gagging again.

  I shake my head, taking a look at the people around me. They’re not all as bad off as that man, though and some of them do turn their eyes to me as I pass—wide, frightened, desperate eyes.

  They’re just people, trying to survive. They don’t want to create a perfect society or further the human race. They want protection from the Floraes, and given all that I know, maybe that’s better than anything New Hope has to offer.

  Jacks continues to pull me along, and I follow, clinging to his hand. I need to find Ken, and Jacks can help me with that. Maybe I don’t need to find out what else there is to know about this awful place. Jacks holds my arm as I leap over a pool of sewage.

  A man pushes by Jacks and stops dead in his tracks when he sees me. He’s all sinew, gleaming black eyes and rotten teeth.

  “Well, hi there,” he says with a leer.

  Jacks knifes between us. “She’s mine,” he says quietly, nose-to-nose with the man. Jacks’s face has hardened into a mask. It’s the same expression he wore when he spoke to Tank and Pete. The man with bad teeth doesn’t argue and gives me one final glance before moving on.

  “Yours?” I ask as we resume our trek through the chaos of the exercise yard, as if nothing had just happened.

  “Listen, it’s just how it works. I told you. Do you want a bunch of ex-cons fighting over who gets to own you?”

  I shake my head. Subservience—even fake—doesn’t come easy, but if it means my safety, I’ll let people think that I “belong” to Jacks.

  A child scurries by me, and I feel his small fingers brush over my hip and rest on my pack. I grab his arm and he looks at me, wide-eyed and innocent. He can’t be much older than Baby, and my heart softens. I take a protein bar from my pack and give it to him. He scowls and runs away without a word.

  Jacks watches this interaction with a strange expression I can’t quite place. Does he approve, or is he thinking I’m weak?

  “You have food?” he asks.

  “Some . . . and a few other things.”

  “You’re better off than a lot of these people. They have nothing to barter.”

  We continue to make our way through the pathetic shantytown. Emaciated children eye us warily through the holes in their boxes. Because of the crowds, progress is slow.

  “What do they eat?”

  “They grow mushrooms and edible flowers if they can find a few bare inches that get sun. A few—the brave ones, or the desperate ones—go outside the walls to gather berries and any other free-growing food they can find. Some catch rabbits and squirrels.”

  Despite myself, I cringe. I thought I was done eating squirrel.

  “How big is Fort Black?” I ask, remembering when I asked Rice that same question about New Hope, and was shocked to learn almost four thousand people lived there.

  “About two thousand people, all crammed into the space of six football fields. It’s crowded, but it’s better than being outside.” He motions around him. “These walls are thick on both sides of us—they keep the Floraes out.”

  “So it’s like a double wall?”

  “Yeah, exactly. Here.” He pulls me toward the side and up a flight of wooden stairs to the top of the wall. It’s comparably empty up here. A man stands with a rifle, surveying the empty expanse that is the world outside Fort Black. He glances at us and offers Jacks a curt nod. On the wall, Jacks leads me to the front so I can look out over the prison. As we walk, Jacks explains that the corridor in between the two walls used to let the guards get from one end of the prison to another without going into the prison itself. It runs around the whole facility, three floors high. Most of the rooms in the wall, former offices, serve as guard quarters, handy for Florae control, just a flight of steps or two from the top of the wall.

  Jacks stops suddenly and turns, motioning for me to look. I gasp. The entire prison is laid out before me. The front half is the exercise yard, which Jacks says people just call the Yard. It’s about the length of a football field, a hundred yards or so, but squared, taking up the front half of the prison. From this vantage point, it’s even more disturbing than it was walking through it. Desperate bodies everywhere. People are packed in so tight that even from up here it’s hard to spot pavement.

  Beyond the Yard are three large gray, concrete buildings. “Cellblocks A, B, and C,” he tells me, pointing each out in turn. “I live in the middle one there: Cellblock B.”

  “What’s that?” I ask, pointing to a relatively empty area to the left of Cellblock A.

  “That’s the Arena. . . . You should avoid the Arena.” He points to the opposite area on the other side, next to Cellblock C. Instead of an open area, it’s occupied by another tall building, but this one is black. “And that used to be the cafeteria, library, and visiting center. . . . See how it’s connected to the side wall? In the back is the parking garage, and visitors would check in, be escorted through the wall, and taken to the top floor. Prisoners would have to go through the bottom and three security checks before being brought to the visitor area.”

  I take it all in. “And what’s in the back, past the buildings?”

  “The Backyard . . . Don’t laugh. And don’t go there, either. The corridor at the back and the rooms above it are blocked off now, used to quarantine people recovering from the Pox and as a morgue. Doc took over almost all the offices in the front wall to keep track of who came and went, and to monitor their condition, trying to stop infections before they spread.”

  A man with a rifle walks past us, searching the horizon for Floraes. “And the guards will let me leave if I want to? Anytime?” Once I get to Ken, we’ll need to go straight to New Hope.

  “Yup. Anytime. But you’d really choose hungry, flesh-eating creatures over a protected, walled complex?” He’s looking at me as if I’m crazy. “I’d take a prison full of criminals over the Floraes any day.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t have a three-hundred-pound sociopath named Tank sweet on you,” I say. Why would anyone stay here? But then, I have my sonic emitter, synth-suit, and Guardian gun, and I’ve been to trained to fight the Floraes. Any normal person would just want a place to escape Them. They would gladly trade the Floraes for a place with high walls, regardless of the people inside.

  “What about you?” I ask. “Did you make your way here after all this started?”

  “Actually, I was here when the infection broke out.” He looks at me, but I remain motionless. “I had this great shop in downtown Amarillo—you should have seen it. At first I just loved that I could practice my art, but after a while I got sick of the local crowd. A lot of people don’t understand that tattoos are more than just a thing people get when they’re drunk or want to look like a rebel. They can tell a story. It’s more than ink on skin, it’s a window into a person’s past. It’s an art.”

  “So tattoos were your passion.”

  “They still are. At
the time I wanted to study everything I could about the art. Different techniques and practices. I had the start to an amazing portfolio. I was supposed to study tattoo practices in the Pacific Islands. I had my plane ticket and everything. Then my uncle suggested I start by studying some prison tats and their meanings.”

  “Interesting form of research.”

  “I almost brushed him off and said I’d do it after my trip. But my uncle can be very convincing. He said I should come here first, talk to some of the prisoners about their meanings. It was only an hour drive, so I thought, why the hell not? I could visit him before I left the country and do some research. Kill two birds with one stone. I didn’t know being here would save my life. It’s like my uncle somehow knew what would happen. He was desperate to get me out here.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “No . . . My uncle helped me out. Also everyone liked that I was a professional tattoo artist. Anyone with tattoos wants to show them off, especially if they let everyone know what a badass you are.” He smiles. “I’m not going to say it wasn’t tough at first, though. Everyone was scared of what was going on. Some guards went to go find their families. The Warden decided to let the prisoners out. He said anyone who wanted to leave could go. A lot ran.”

  “But they’re dangerous criminals. . . .”

  “Amy, it was the end of the world. The Warden said that the criminals weren’t any more dangerous than the Floraes. And with everyone dead, who was left for them to hurt?”

  “I was left out there. There are others. . . . Not many but—”

  “Look, my uncle isn’t exactly a stand-up guy. . . . He knew the prison wasn’t going to be getting any new food shipments. He thought he could get rid of some people. The problem was a lot of the worst criminals stayed. The ones who left were mostly in for petty crimes.”

  “Did they know the danger?”

  “Some didn’t want to believe it. People were saying aliens, others said zombies. Some of the prisoners thought it was bullshit, or maybe they just wanted out and thought they were bad enough or strong enough to survive. I went up the stairs and walked the top of the wall. I saw for myself. One by one the Floraes killed them.

  “Except no one was calling them Floraes yet, just creatures. The monsters were everywhere. The guards tried to help, shooting to clear a way for people to escape, but it was no use. That’s when we found out people could change if they were bitten. One guy started turning into a Florae while he was being fed on.” He lowers his voice. “Some tried to get back in, but we couldn’t let them. We were all so scared of the Floraes getting inside. It would have been a bloodbath. I haven’t left the prison since I came here.” He shrugged. “There’s nothing for me out there anymore.”

  “The rest of your family?”

  Jacks shakes his head, his face darkening. “My parents got divorced when I was little. My dad . . . He wasn’t really around at the best of times. I mean, he’d send us money and call on our birthdays, but we never really saw him. My mom died just before the infection broke out. Cancer. My dad offered to take my sister, Layla, but I was eighteen, and wanted her to stay in the same house and school. So I became her legal guardian. . . . We got along really well. She was so excited for our trip. Thought it would be the best summer vacation ever. She thought she would come back and go into school the coolest ninth-grader because I agreed to let her get one tattoo.”

  “So she’s here? Your sister?”

  He shakes his head and looks down, his jaw tight. “She didn’t survive Fort Black.”

  We’re quiet for a moment, and I try not to imagine what it would be like to lose Baby forever.

  “I’m so sorry. You have your uncle, though. Here.”

  “Yeah. Right.” Jacks snaps back to the present and motions around us. “If you ever need to get out of the yard fast, come up here to the wall. . . . There are stairs all along the perimeter now. They’re new. Built a few years ago. That’s why they’re wood and not stone.” I nod and continue to look down at the human chaos below.

  My heart pounds against my chest as I look out at the crowd. It’s so different than New Hope. So much more . . . free, unplanned. And frightening.

  “So now I know the layout. . . . Tell me about the setup here. Prisoners, guards, and random survivors—all mixed together?” How would the guards cope with living side by side with men they were once in charge of?

  Jacks nods. “Anyone good with a rifle becomes a guard now and gets to shoot Floraes all day.”

  “You said helping Doc was one of your jobs. Does that mean you also shoot Floraes?”

  “No. I’d suck at that. My second job is still tattoo artist. Tattoos are in high demand,” he tells me perking up. “People trade food and clothes for them.”

  He points out a group of men below. They jump another man and run off with his half-eaten can of food.

  “Survival of the fittest,” he tells me.

  “Well, I can protect myself,” I say with a confidence I don’t feel.

  He studies me. “So where are you going to stay, after our twenty-four hours are up?”

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  “I’ve got space,” he offers, not looking at me.

  “I don’t think so. Besides, I’m not staying. I’m just here to find—”

  Suddenly I see a flash of white in the yard. A lab coat. The man wearing it has dark black hair. . . . It can’t be Doc.

  “That’s him.” I turn to Jacks. “That’s Ken. Hey . . . Ken!” I yell.

  “Amy—”

  “It’s got to be him. I’m going down there.”

  I can hear Jacks shouting behind me, but I’ve already broken into a run and am flying down the stairs.

  Yet once I’m in the yard, I can’t see anything. It’s so crowded, I can barely put my hand in front of my face. The noise of voices is deafening.

  “Have you seen a guy in a white coat?” I ask. But no one will talk to me. Even the kids turn away.

  And suddenly I feel hands on me and my arms are pinned behind me. Then everything goes black.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Jacks!” My head is covered in a musty cloth. Several hands hold my arms. My legs go out from under me as I’m dragged. My legs bump against the hard ground as I’m pulled against the concrete. I scream at the top of my lungs, but no one does anything.

  I’m shoved into something soft, a rotting cardboard box by the smell of it. “Well, what have we here? Aren’t you a tasty snack?” a voice rasps.

  “I found her in the Yard. She’s gotta be a newbie,” the person holding my wrists in a death grip responds. “And a full pack, too? What goodies could be in here?”

  “Let me go!” I yell, trying to wrench free. Someone pushes me down and puts their knee into my back. My mouth is full of dirty cloth, muffling my screams. Even with all my training, this is going to be tough to get out of.

  I wrench my right shoulder up, trying to surprise my captives and break free. The man holding me falls to the side, and I roll around to my back, trying desperately to get to my feet. I’m not fast enough, and another pair of hands forces me back down, grabs my face, and presses it firmly in to the hard ground.

  I try to think beyond my fear. I lift my head to free my mouth. “Jacks has claimed me!” I spit, my mouth barely able to form the words. “I belong to Jacks!”

  I can hear everyone quiet. “Well, he’s not here now, is he?” The raspy voice says at last.

  “Let. Her. Go.” It’s Jacks. I’ve never been so glad to hear a voice in my life.

  Immediately the vice-grip hands release from my arms, and I pull the makeshift hood from my head. Three dingy men surround me, their attention at the opening of their cardboard hovel.

  “Sorry, man,” one of them says. “She was by herself. Didn’t see her tat that says your name . .
. Her arms are all covered up.”

  “I said I belonged to Jacks,” I hiss, pushing myself up and scrambling toward him. I take his hand, squeezing it gratefully.

  “Jacks, man, don’t tell the Warden I messed with your girl. He’d toss me out.”

  Jacks pulls me toward him and embraces me in a half hug. Then he turns to them. “Stay away from her,” he says, growling. “Don’t let me catch you near her again.”

  He grabs my pack and we head back into the Yard. “What the hell is here? Why didn’t anyone help me?”

  “Those people are too weak to help anyone. And the last thing they need is some guy with a grudge against them who’ll remember them later. So everyone minds their own business.”

  “So people really are on their own here,” I whisper.

  “Yeah. Which brings me to my point. You can’t just take off like that. If you’re looking for this guy, you need to be careful. Or else you’ll end up dead.” Jacks stares at me for a minute, his soft brown eyes studying my face. The look reminds me so much of the way Rice would gaze at me sometimes. There’s concern in his face, and a warmth that makes me feel at ease. Then Jacks leans in and for an anxious moment, I don’t know what to expect. But he wipes some of my attackers’ filth off my face, and smiles.

  “Also, if you start turning into a Florae, I need to be here to kill you.”

  I exhale. “It’s nice that you care,” I reply with a smirk.

  Jacks grins. “Seriously, I can help you. I can even protect you—as long as you don’t do anything idiotic like run into the Yard alone.”

  I nod. “Okay. That’s a deal. But I do think I just saw the guy I’m looking for. Can you come with me to look?”

  “If . . . and that’s a huge if, that was him, he’s long gone. Why don’t you rest a little and think of a plan?”

  “At your place?”

  “Well. We can kick one of those kids out of their cardboard boxes, if you want.”

  I look out into the Yard. Someone at the end of the row yowls.