Ending Eleven by Jerri Chisholm

Author:Jerri Chisholm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dystopian, Saving the World, Opposites attract (Romance), Redemption, Revenge, Across the Tracks, Bad Girl, Rich boy, Forbidden Love, Race against time
Publisher: Entangled Publishing, LLC
Published: 2023-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

As I walk down the hill toward Compound Eleven’s outbuilding, I trip over a rock. I fall flat on my face. My cheek presses against dirt, long grass sways through my vision, and the sound of cicadas swells in my ears.

Right now, two guns are wedged into my waistband. They are cold and uncomfortable and loathsome, and yet I placed the same type of weapon in the palm of my mother’s hand. Into the hand of a woman so desperate to escape reality she allowed herself to drift behind a thick and impenetrable fog every single day, rather than face up to life. And then I left. I abandoned her, because I couldn’t summon the will to shoot those guards.

But she didn’t turn the gun on herself. My father did.

Sometimes it just doesn’t seem real. All the time, actually.

Anger wells up in me, anger at everyone—especially myself—but I push it down as deep as it will go, so deep that for a while I don’t know where I am or what I’m supposed to be doing. Life simply passes me by—an insect moving slowly along a blade of grass, a bird flying from one tree to the next, the endless, aimless drifting of clouds.

Eventually, I steel myself. I force my feet under me, then head for the outbuilding now imprinted on my identity. I descend, down, down, ignoring the thumping in my chest, the nausea climbing the walls of my stomach. I push through the kitchen and out into the corridor, where a sea of bodies lulls me forward.

It looks even worse down here than I remember.

Caved-in walls surround me, and almost all the bulbs overhead are smashed apart. It’s as dark as the bottom floor where the Noms live. And then, there’s the people. They are more plentiful than before, and I remember nobody down here can go upstairs. Not when the risk posed by Katz is so great.

Maybe that’s what makes it all feel so foreign. Like I don’t really remember my time living here. Like I’m not quite sure I recognize whoever it was who used to call this place home.

Well, I don’t look like myself anymore, that’s for sure. My skin is no longer pale—it is deeply colored from the sun. It’s no longer bruised and split apart, either, since I’m no longer a hobby fighter. My blond hair is lighter now, and my clothes are not the clothes I used to wear. I feel totally unrecognizable, moving through another world, no matter that my boots have padded over this very spot thousands of times before. And then, my shoulder is grabbed, and that…that is more visceral. That is a sensation I recall.

Except normally I cock my fist when I’m grabbed unexpectedly. Right now, I turn placidly, wondering who it is, wondering who can make sense of the new me. Maybe if I embody peace, maybe if I can bring peace down here, I won’t recoil so deeply at all that is Eleven. Maybe I won’t be so fearful of the darkness spilling over up there.

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