Page 119 of Chaos

It’s fully loaded. I check every morning. I’m not defenseless. I’m not half naked and starved, trapped in a basement with nothing but a bucket.

My breathing levels out.

I attacked a man with my bare hands, sick with a fever, half starved, naked in a cellar with nothing but a bucket. I am a bad beech.

I can do this.

We head toward the back lawn, pull open the doors, and are slapped in the face by frigid air that rushes inward on a gush so strong it blows our hair back.

“What’s the army doing?” Shasta asks. “Don’t forget I can’t see.”

The wind tears at our clothes as we jog down the pathway. The walls crawl with soldiers, dressed for battle, helmets on, crouch-walking in Kevlar, jogging in lines along the bottom, moving heavier artillery weapons.

“Wendell’s there. The army, even split in half, is big. This is why we have walls.”

We should have grabbed coats.

I hope Auden has his, wherever he is.

Everything will burn. All our clothes, all our things, all our books. The painting I made for Yorke, our phones with photos. The library is off the promenade. Mr. Oink-Oink. The excess clothing is in the shops there, with more in a conference room on the mezzanine above the lobby. The greenhouse. My seeds.

My seeds.

That has my throat closing up.

Those seeds are everything.

“Walls trapusin as much as trapthemout,” Shasta says.

“I wish you hadn’t said that.” She’s right.

And even if there were no wall, it’s below freezing. We couldn’t walk the kids and the elderly out into the woods in this. It would only prolong people’s fear.

“Come on.”

“We need to find Auden.”

Where would I take the kids if I were May and Gus? The pool house is far from Thornewood, half on the other side of the wall, half on this side, supporting a staircase that leads to the top of the ramparts, but it’s built of stone, bullets won’t get in.

That’s where I’d go.

Snowflakes smack against my cheeks as we move as fast as I dare drag Shasta down the hill.

The sound of shooting from the front of the hotel gets louder. We slide over patches of damp grass and slush, all the way to the door of the pool house, barely daring to breathe because if Auden isn’t there I don’t know what I’ll—

The door blasts open when we’re within twenty feet of the pool house, and Auden comes racing out like a tiny pint-sized bullet, the fur-lined hood of his red parka flapping behind him, Beast a fluffy brown-and-white blur as they beeline toward me.

I catch Auden, and I don’t know if I lift him or he climbs me, but he ends up in my arms, his face in my neck. A second later, Beast is prancing around us, front paws tapping our backs, wet nose to our faces, barking his collie head off.

The relief is like a drug, rippling through my blood.

“Frankie.” He says it like I’m something he’d lost, something he wasn’t sure he’d ever see again.

“I’m right here. We’re safe.”

Just Shane left to find.

And Yorke … still outside the walls.

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