The Forest of Hands and Teeth

I shake my head. “I thought Cass never liked my stories. Never remembered them.”

“Oh yes, I would beg her to tell me if she had any new stories from you.”

“Why didn't you ask me yourself?” I whisper.

“Because you were Harry's,” he responds.

“Not always.”

“Yes, always,” he says. “Always in his eyes,” he adds in a softer tone.

I begin to pace in front of the door, expanding my path until I'm striding along the room. “Why did you care about my stories?” I finally ask.

“Because you knew it too. You knew about the world out there. Past the fences.”

“So what?”

“So I needed that belief. I needed that…” He shrugs. “I needed that faith.”

“I still don't understand,” I tell him.

He slaps his hands on the table, startling both Argos and me. “I climbed the tower that day to say good-bye to the Forest. To give up on those dreams and accept the life I had chosen. To forget about the world outside the fences. To forget about you.”

I stop pacing. “What happened?”

“It was icy. I was careless. I thought of you and your stories of the ocean and how you always believed it so strongly.” He lets a hand fall back onto Argos's head. He doesn't look up at me when he adds, “I slipped.”

I fall into a chair with a thud. “I never knew.”

He shakes his head, his gaze still on Argos. “At first, when I broke my leg, I was delirious with pain and I thought it was God's punishment for wanting more. For being unhappy with the choices I had made. For daring to imagine a life outside the Forest.”

He looks up and meets my eyes. “I was ready to give it all up, then. To follow His path, whatever it was. But then you came into my room night after night and you told me about the ocean and pulled me through the pain and I didn't know what to believe anymore. I didn't know if I was being tempted or being shown the right path.”

He wipes his hands over his face. “You must understand that Harry has always loved you. That he would do anything for you.”

“I'm not sure that it's enough,” I tell him.

The corner of his mouth twitches as if he is almost about to smile. “I'm not sure either of us will ever be enough for you, Mary,” he says.

I know he's hoping that I will tell him he's wrong. I can see it in the way he holds his breath, waiting for me to correct him.

Instead, I look back at the door and the splinters and the cracks and the way it heaves under the weight of the Unconsecrated that will never stop pushing, trying to get into our world. That will never stop until we are all dead as well.

A shiver presses through my flesh and I pat my hand against my leg to call Argos to me for comfort. But he does not budge from Travis's side. Instead he lays his head on Travis's lap, his wide brown eyes staring up at me.

All I can remember is the waiting. With every breath and heartbeat, the waiting for him to come for me. “I wish I knew, Travis,” I say. “I wish I understood.”

“I know,” he says. Because he does know. He knows my desires better than I do.

I wonder then about my mother. My mother, who grew up listening to stories about the ocean and then passed them on to me but never went to look for it herself. She believed in these stories. The passion with which she would pass them on, the tremor in her voice when she talked about the time before the Return. The way she would cradle that photograph of our ancestor in the waves.

And I never asked her why she didn't leave. Why she didn't go in search of the ocean. Why she only passed these stories down with no instructions of what to do with the enormity of the memories other than pass them down ourselves.

I wonder, now, if she didn't leave because of us. Because of Jed and me. But in my heart I know that's not the case. She didn't leave in search of the ocean because of my father. Because he was enough for her. Enough to keep her snug within the fences her entire life.

Until he was the one on the outside. Only then did she leave the village, only then did she take that risk. For the man she loved she was willing to wander the Forest in constant hunger.

But not for the ocean. Not for herself.

“What do we do now?” I whisper, afraid of the answer. The house shudders under the pressure of the Unconsecrated outside. I pace back over to the door and lean against it as if my added weight will keep them at bay.

“We find a way out,” he says. “We keep going.”

I nod my head and we're both silent for a while. Looking at each other but not really seeing each other. Both of us lost in our own thoughts, our own world.

“Do you think they know about us out there?” I finally ask. When I see the confusion on his face I continue. “Not out there where Harry and the others are. I mean out there. Beyond the fence. Down the path.” I throw my hand out toward the shuttered windows.

Travis shrugs. “I guess I never thought about it that way. I spent so much time on that tower trying to figure out how to get out there that I never considered there would be people trying to get into our village.”

I tap my fingers against the wood of the door, my hands still behind my back, as I ponder this. “Do you think Gabrielle was trying to find us? Do you think that she knew we were there? Or do you think she was just following the path like us, taking it wherever it would lead?”

“I don't know,” he says. “She probably just escaped from this village when it was overrun, just as we escaped ours.”

I tilt my head back until it rests on the door and I am looking at the ceiling. I think back to that night when I first found Gabrielle's footprints in the snow. “Before, I always imagined that she left her village by choice, that she had the fortitude I lacked. When I was in the Cathedral and it was silent at night I used to dream of following in her steps. Of slipping through the window and drifting down the path until I found her village.”

I realize that I have tears in my eyes and I feel a little embarrassed as they run down my cheeks. “Everyone would welcome me with open arms and I would ask them about the ocean and they would lead me to it. I would be free from the Sisterhood and the Unconsecrated and all the rules and oaths and pledges and vows.” Even now I can see it so clearly in my mind—I can feel their arms around me. I can taste the salt in the air.

“I would have escaped,” I whisper. “But then when we got here I understood.” I knock my head back against the door, the old resentment surfacing. “I realized she left because her own village was overrun. She was no hero, no explorer. She was like me—forced from her home and scared, without any options.”

I bite my lip and then add, “It makes me wonder if I would have left if the fences had never been breached. Or if I would have stayed in the village waiting for you forever.”

Travis sits, watching me. I'm waiting for him to protest, to tell me I'm wrong. But then I hear an odd noise. Travis hears it too; we both turn our heads and try to pinpoint the origin.

A creak growing so high-pitched that I can no longer hear it—then a pop and a splinter. Argos begins to bark and I feel the door shudder under my hands.

Travis is at my side. He pulls me to the stairs. Argos circles us, nudging us onward. Always at our backs, protecting us. We are halfway up the stairs when there is a crash so loud that I raise my hands over my ears. I hear the sound of Argos's toe-nails as he scrabbles up the stairs.

The moans echo behind him, reverberating off the walls of the house. There are more crashes and splinters, the sound of furniture scraping across wood.

Then the Unconsecrated are upon us.

Chapter 26

I push Travis up the rest of the stairs and look down to see the Unconsecrated swarming. The wood reinforcing the door is in splinters, half of it missing, and they seep through the hole like blood from a wound.

A thousand thoughts run through my head. How to stop them. How to fight them. Where to go. How to hide. How to survive. Travis's leg and Argos and the ladder and the attic.

Travis stumbles down the hallway, his gait unwieldy as he tries to run on his bad leg. “Sheets!” I tell him. “Grab sheets!”

He doesn't question but turns into one of the bedrooms. I rush into another bedroom and pull the mattress from the bed. It's heavy and bulky and I waste a few moments maneuvering it out the door. But then I'm back in the hall and I push it down the stairs, creating an obstacle to the Unconsecrated's advance on our position.

But they'll find a way past. They'll build up against it with a pressure that will finally spill over, their awkward bodies piling up the stairs until they reach the floor and come for us again.

I run back down the hall to Travis and take the sheets from his hands. I drape one over Argos who still growls and whines and shudders. Without bothering to console him, I pull the ends of the sheets together and knot them until I have Argos captured, a squirming mass of teeth and nails.

I sling the package over my shoulder and muscle my way up the ladder and into the attic where I dump the dog onto the floor. He spills out with his hackles raised and backs into a corner, his eyes wide and ears flat.

I look down to see Travis standing at the base of the ladder. It is as if time narrows and focuses on this point, my heartbeat the only indication that time still passes. I can hear the sound of the Unconsecrated as they pool around the mattress and slide down the hallway. Slowly wending their way toward Travis, toward the ladder.

He has one hand on a rung, his fingers loose around the wood. He glances over his shoulder as the Unconsecrated bear down on him.

I move to swing my legs around so that I can go back down to help him. He shakes his head once, a sharp no.

Not knowing what else to do, I scramble for the rows of weapons on the wall and grab a long-handled ax with a sharp double-edged blade. I drag it back to the trapdoor and lower it down to Travis.

He looks up at me, his hand no longer on the rung. I've forgotten how green his eyes can be. How the edges of his irises are rimmed with a light brown. How there is a scar hidden under his left eyebrow.

How he can look at me and make me feel whole.

Before he can stop me I jump from the trapdoor, not bothering with the ladder. I land with a thud next to him, going down on one knee from the force of the landing.

I wrench the ax from Travis and turn to face the Unconsecrated. I yell to Travis, “You had better find a way to make it up that ladder and quick!” When I sense him start to protest I lunge down the hallway, gripping the handle of the ax in both hands.

Never in my life have I killed a human being. It's one thing to sit on a porch and sling arrows at the Unconsecrated below. It's another to feel the slice of a blade cut through flesh. Because even though the conscious mind knows that the Unconsecrated are no longer living human beings, there's still a part of the mind that rebels against the truth. That insists the woman, man, child coming toward you must still have some semblance of humanity.

Especially for those Unconsecrated that are recently turned. That haven't lost limbs and flesh to time and the Forest. That haven't broken their fingers trying to reach through fences and doors. To see a pregnant woman, her body still large and firm, her eyes still clear, walk toward you and to know she's dead and must still be killed takes a force of will that is almost unfathomable.

And yet I swing. With all my strength I pull that ax across the hallway, severing heads from necks, decapitating them in order to end their desperate existence. I don't even realize that I am yelling until I have to suck in gulps of air. The ax lodges in the wall and I tug it free and swing again, blood slinging from the blade. Again and again I swing, cutting down the Unconsecrated that fill the hallway.

The ax lodges in the wall on the other side of the hall and as I pull on it again, the handle slick with blood, I am distracted.

A girl my age crests the top of the stairs. She wears a bright red vest just like Gabrielle's. My hand slacks; I lose focus and momentum.

And I hesitate a little too long.

Something tugs at my foot. I stumble back, kicking. My hands slip from the ax. Without that anchor my balance falters.

I fall.

A hand grasps my ankle.

I scream and kick and begin pulling myself back down the hall with the heels of my hands. More hands on my feet, my legs. Tugging relentlessly. Unconsecrated continue to swarm up the stairs, stumbling toward me. Tripping over the bodies of the true dead that I killed but coming for me nevertheless.

All I can see is a wave of Unconsecrated cresting over me and I feel helpless, at their mercy. Ready to be tossed in the tides of their will. In that moment I wonder if I'll feel pain. If there will be anything left of me to turn. And if the hunger for human flesh will be the same as my hunger for the ocean.

I want to close my eyes and let it come. Let the end take me and sweep me away, drown me in the sea of Unconsecrated. But I hear my name as the shock of a thousand bee stings travels up my legs. I refuse to look at the source of the pain, don't want to see the Unconsecrated teeth that might be piercing my flesh, sending the infection deep into my body. Instead, I look up and I see Travis on the ladder, his mouth open in a scream, his eyes wide.

He reaches a hand to me and I am stretching toward him, desperate for the feel of his fingertips, when I see movement in the attic. Before I understand I'm engulfed in a frenzy of fur and fangs. I hear the sound of claws finding purchase on wood and then a ferocious growl reverberates down the hallway as Argos attacks the Unconsecrated at my feet.

He is nothing but action, tearing at the Unconsecrated flesh with his jaws, ripping them apart.

Suddenly free, I scrabble for the ladder, my hand connecting with Travis's. He is only halfway up and I take the rungs two at a time until I am directly underneath him. Then, with the strength of having faced death and survived, I throw my weight against him, almost catapulting him into the attic. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">