Book Eight, Chapter 25: Walled In

There was something strange about castle walls and high towers that made us feel like a fight was coming to us.

Back in the Camp Dyer days, apocalypses were feared, but they weren’t something the vets made a big deal about. There were still bonfires to be had and rounds of kumbaya, cookouts, and volleyball. And that was in the open air, no fences.

The danger was far away and well warned.

Whatever Writ had made Camp Dyer safe must have had a huge amount of square footage in its terms. Once we had made it back to camp after escaping the Black Snow, we never saw another rogue monster or killer. But as I walked around the rampart surrounding Avery’s new castle, I could see them wandering through the woods in the distance.

“I figure we put the rifle in that tower over there if it comes to it,” Logan said. “It’s got the sightlines. It can be fortified from aerial attackers.”

Michael looked up at the tower he was pointing at and nodded. “I can sleep up there,” he said. “I’d like to bring up one of the spotlights we got.”

“You should do that,” Logan said. Michael quickly did.

For a while, a handful of us stood there, eyes to the horizon, watching the trees and the being watched by them.

“Strange times,” Logan said. “Saw that guy with the samurai sword again this morning. He was hacking these two inbred-looking hillbillies to pieces down by the river. I got a funny feeling about this.”

“That’s almost certainly the name of a trope,” I said as I stared down toward the long stretch of meadow that led to the Carousel River in the distance, and the bridge where we had once seen Dr. Simon Halle attacking those very same hillbillies. Those guys just couldn’t catch a break.

I looked up at the tower that Michael was hell-bent on living in. It was made of stone and mostly enclosed. It even had slits in the walls that must have been initially designed for bows and arrows or crossbows.

A distant tower across the way was set up to be a normal room. Bobby stood inside, watching us through a window. He nodded to me when he saw me looking. His wife was there too, rearranging the furniture in the small room for the hundredth time.

We couldn’t leave him out there alone, and fake Janet wasn’t nearly as dangerous here, we hoped.

Why did we feel so threatened? At Kimberly’s loft, we were surrounded by Omens, and we got used to that soon enough. Here we had thick walls protecting us, and we all felt like we had to prepare for something.

We weren’t exactly patrolling the wall by schedule or anything like that, but as we waited in the castle with nothing else to do, staring up at the inside of one of several walls, the natural instinct was to climb up and see what was going on in the surrounding area.

“Now, you’ve never actually seen any of them get close to us, have you?” Antoine asked as he sipped on a glass of spiked lemonade and held an antique spear.

“No,” Logan said. “I was afraid they’d start clattering against the walls, but that hasn’t happened. They’re not attacking us, they’re not targeting us, they just have nothing else to do.”

“Can’t really blame them,” I said. “There’s our boy,” I added after I spotted a white t-shirt in the distance.

“Where?” Antoine asked.

“See that tree that’s walking around? He’s hiding behind a bush right to the right of it,” I said.

The sword-wielding slasher who had followed us all the way from town and stuck around afterward seemed to be biding his time, contemplating whether or not he wanted to try to kill a walking tree.

“He’s going to go for it,” Logan said. “I can see he wants it.”

He may have, but as we sat and watched him, the tree planted its feet into the riverbank soil and stopped moving around, which seemed to have completely stripped Caleb Rowe of any interest in it.

“Maybe this is one way that they level up,” I said. “Sort of a survival-of-the-fittest kind of thing. A free-for-all.”

We contemplated that as something in the distance caused a bunch of birds to fly into the air with a deafening cacophony of wing beats.

“Just give me the word,” Michael called from the tower he had just climbed into. “I got him in my sights.”

“No,” Logan called back.

“Now?” Michael asked.

“Do not take the shot,” Logan said. Then, under his breath, he added, “He may be the only one here who actually wants a fight.”

Down in the grassland near the river, Caleb Rowe stared up at us before standing up and going on a patrol around the woods nearby.

Maybe the smart thing to do would be to attack any monster or other enemy we saw fleeing the apocalypse, but I didn’t want to shoot what we couldn’t kill. And Avery’s Writ was very clear: we were safe as long as we stayed where we were. At least, we were safe from common enemies like the trailer park ninja we had been watching.

Our real fear came from back east. At night, the sound from the circus carried far enough that we could catch it on the wind occasionally. We hoped that was just Carousel teasing us, but it was always possible that the circus was spreading further than the black snow had.

I tried not to think about it.

–

Logan and his team had been here for weeks, getting to know every inch of the castle and making sure that things were secure. The castle gate needed a bit of TLC, but by the time we got there, it was sturdy and easily secured with a new rope to raise and lower the wrought-iron portcullis that would protect us if something tried to get through the gate itself.

We left the portcullis down, but kept the large wooden gates open for a time for visibility.

At most, the occasional monster would walk up to the lattice, stare through the gate with the evil equivalent of puppy dog eyes, and then move on. It would seem we were safe from an attack from outside the wall.

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But it wasn’t like Carousel was going to grant us the protection of a castle without a cost. It hadn’t even given us Kimberly’s loft without a great price, constantly having to deal with late-night visitors trying to trap us in some random storyline.

The castle had its own version of that. Luckily, there were no roaming Omens that entered the castle walls, but there were monsters of the subterranean variety plaguing the dungeons underneath. That would absolutely not be a problem, since the entrance into the dungeons was a large stone wall that would slide open if you pulled a bottle of wine on one of the shelves in the wine cellar. Luckily, Camden was able to show us how to easily disable the mechanism so we could sleep better at night.

On top of that, we put a giant wooden doorstop right next to it so that if it did try to open, it wouldn’t be able to. The problem was that, for reasons only Simon Halle could know, an essential part of the electrical design of the castle existed in the dungeons, and sometimes a breaker would need to be flipped.

For electricity, an excursion into the dungeons was needed. The modern boiler room was down there, too, but it was summer, so there was no need to mess with the finicky boiler.

Calling it a dungeon evoked much spookier vibes than the place deserved. It was a large basement with decent lighting, assuming the electricity was on. Better not wander the distant passages, though.

“It isn’t such a big deal. I can do it myself,” Michael insisted. “Just three rooms that hardly ever had anything dangerous in them, and it’s easy enough to flip the switch. You can always tell which one needs it.”

But still, the possibility of having to kill a mole person or a giant slime creature made you think twice about the value of electricity. Luckily, there was an option to just wait it out.

“Creatures must be coming from any of these four corridors,” Logan said as he showed us the dungeons. “As far as I can tell, only zombies come from this fourth one over here, but it’s not like we’ve done much testing.”

The dungeon was cold and smelled of both the living and the dead—body odor, urine, decay, and even fecal matter. The sounds of rats scratching in the distance were ever-present. Almost everything was built from stone or thick timbers, and scattered around were random barrels and wooden crates filled with assorted loot: items like bullets, medieval armor, and various electrical appliances. This made exploring the dungeon an exciting challenge.

“What we can do,” Michael said when we got to the furthest room where the electrical breaker was, “is tie a rope around me and just send me anywhere down these paths, and we can map them out or at least figure out what’s down there.”

Michael really did want to fight things. On some level, I couldn’t blame him. Something about the apocalypse made me feel small and powerless, and sometimes, when you feel small and powerless, being able to cut a slime in half with a sword you found in a dungeon could be really cathartic, even when the sword started melting afterward, as one sword I saw lying on the floor had clearly done.