The Line Book Two: Walled by Anne Tibbets

Author:Anne Tibbets
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

My ears were ringing. All I could hear was a high-pitched wail. Everything else was muffled, as if I was trapped inside a glass jar with the lid closed tight.

The bullets had stopped, at least momentarily. I was covered in debris, lying in the dirt.

Stagnant.

My right arm wouldn’t move and pulsed with blinding agony.

What happened?

I blinked and fought to see. There were piles of burning trash scattered on the ground all around me. My eyes focused on an object to my right, a smoldering side mirror from a car, and then I remembered.

Sonya.

Oh, my God.

“Ric?” I said, although it sounded foreign and distant in my ringing ears.

I rolled over on my side and saw a body a few feet away. It wore a leather satchel.

“No,” I gasped. “No, no, no, no...”

Stumbling on my knees, I scrambled to the body. Ric. He was still breathing but was covered in burning debris, and he’d been shot in the leg just under his left knee.

I slapped all the scorched garbage off him and grabbed his face with my good hand. “Ric! Wake up. Please!”

His eyelids fluttered opened, and relief sputtered from my mouth.

Suddenly aware how we were out in the open, exposed, I slung his arm over my shoulder and dragged him to his feet. “Get up. Come on. We have to go.”

Ric moaned and struggled against me, but the more his feet moved, the more awake he became. Within a few steps he was limping on his own, although a stream of blood ran down his leg and soaked into his boots, leaving a trail.

I pulled him forward.

He shook his head as if to clear it and gaped at the wreckage. His eyes shot wide with a thought, and then, at the same time, we looked up to where the wall had once been.

There was a jagged hole, a large one. Between two watchtowers, an entire section of the wall was missing. Gone. A burned and blackened edge marked where it had once been whole. Half inside the gaping opening lay the skeleton of a scorched car frame. Anything inside the car had been eviscerated.

Sonya.

“Oh, God,” I muttered. “Sonya.”

“I gave her the backpack,” Ric said. “If I’d known. I thought she was— If I’d known...”

Unable and unwilling to process my current emotions, I pulled him along. “Keep walking.”

We did.

Wounded guards, garbage, chunks of rock from the wall and singed people lay scattered all over—most were dead, some were bleeding or dismembered. They sprinkled the area around the wall opening, in front and behind us, making us weave and curve around them. There were too many to count.

Survivors, like us, stood staring at the hole in the wall, disbelieving, blood coming from their ears. I saw a guard standing nearby drop his rifle and run through the gaping chasm, into the outside. Then another.

And another.

Then more.

With my good arm clinging to Ric’s wrist, balancing over my shoulder, we half walked, half dragged each other toward the opening.

A couple of guards gawked as we went by.

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