Free The Dark and Hollow Places by Carrie Ryan Page A

pooled through the streets around us, stumbling and straining for the living.
    A line of crumbled bodies arcs around me like a barrier. I stare back at the man who attacked me and there’s a wooden bolt jutting from his head. Another flies through the air, catching an Unconsecrated child midstride. It collapses only a few feet away, and I follow the trajectory of the arrow up to a narrow window high in a building several doors away, where I can just see the tip of a crossbow.
    I raise my hand in thanks just as Catcher emerges from the growing tide of Unconsecrated, reaching for my hand. A bolt slams into his upper arm, throwing him against me. I open my mouth in horror as blood splatters from the wound, frosting the snowy ground red.
    His weight pushes me against the wall with a thud and Unconsecrated ooze around us. There’s a sound like the scraping of metal and I realize Catcher has dropped a machete at my feet. Blood runs across his elbow and over his empty fingers from the bolt still lodged in his upper arm.
    “Let me help—” I try to tell him, reaching to pull it free, but he shakes his head and twists the wound away from me.
    “The machete,” he pants, and I shift my weight underneath him, reaching for the large blade. Catcher’s eyes are bleary,wide with pain and shock. He blinks rapidly, trying to focus on me. “The tunnels.” His teeth are clenched and the words come out clipped and harsh. “We can get back to the tunnels.”
    He breaks off the length of bolt, tossing the spiked chunk of wood to the ground before lurching toward the Unconsecrated lumbering our way. I press against the wall and lash out with my machete as he shoves the dead back, grunting from the impacts that jar the remnants of the bolt still protruding from his arm.
    There are so many of them creeping around us, all I can do is swing the machete indiscriminately. I scream, fight raging through me, as I take off fingers, slice through flesh, kick at knees. Anything to keep them away from me. We make it back into the alley just as the current threatens to overwhelm us and we find that it’s still clear, no living around to draw the dead in. Catcher pushes me toward the tunnel entrance and I sprint, feet skidding through frozen slush as the wind tries to throw me back.
    I fight the buffeting air, clutching building walls for traction until I get to the dead end. I throw open the doors leading down into darkness and hesitate. “Come on, Catcher!” I shout at him. I can barely see the top of his head in the throng of Unconsecrated pooling around the intersection of the alley and the main road. At first I think the Unconsecrated have him. That they won’t let him go.
    “Catcher!” I yell. The Unconsecrated are already stumbling toward me, following the trail of blood from my lips. I swipe my hand over my mouth, smearing red on my palm. My heart screams in my body, my muscles straining with the instinct to defend myself.
    Slowly pushing against the storm, the dead advance as ifthey’ve never known urgency. And they don’t need to. They’ll just keep coming. They’ll always press forward. I can kill the first few, but it won’t take long for them to overwhelm.
    They come at me with teeth bared, some with bloody lips where they’ve already found a living person to bite and infect. Catcher threads his way through as if he’s one of them.
    My heart lurches at the sight of it: him there among them. Them not even noticing. It’s jarring: He’s alive, they should be scrambling for him, and yet they don’t. He walks through the throng as though he’s used to being surrounded by their moaning death, and it makes me realize that this is his reality.
    He’s the line between the living and the dead. He is both and neither at once. He belongs nowhere, and now I understand his hesitation when we were down in the tunnels. I recognize the way he holds walls between him and other people because I’m the same way.
    “Faster!” I shout at