Beyond The Walls (NOW ON AMAZON!!!)

Dread

For weeks, the woman kept the same daily routine. Wearing similar brown frocks that covered her from neck to ankles, with different collars for each day, the woman would bring Hadley food – breakfast, lunch, or dinner – then carry the box filled with magazines into the room and wax poetic about the days when humans ruled after Hadley had eaten.

Hadley will never be able to pinpoint exactly when it happened.

Despite Hadley's initial reticence, over time the woman's stories became a source of awe and intrigue and fascination and Hadley couldn't get enough of it. All her life, Hadley had considered Aunt Zee the paragon of knowledge about everything beyond the Compound walls, but the information she was gleaning from Mrs. Smith and her magazines made everything Aunt Zee told her about the outside world pale in comparison. Like comparing a mug of tepid salty water on a hot summer's day to an ice-cold glass of fresh watermelon juice. What Hadley was learning from the woman was flipping everything she had ever believed about the world, and she wasn't sure what to do about it!

But surely, something had to be done!

Hadley didn't like Mrs. Smith – there was just something about the woman that made Hadley incredibly uncomfortable. However, it was difficult to imagine the woman was making up everything she was telling Hadley, especially when the magazines and the books and the photographs the woman had amassed supported everything she said. Even if only half of the information was true, it was enough to rock Hadley's sense of identity and cause her to question her place in the world!

At the Compound, they were taught from birth that Vampires ruled the world and always had. They were taught that the vampires had once commissioned humans to create the UV Shield, but a group of human rebels had tried to sabotage the launch. The rebels failed, and the Shield was successfully launched. That attempted act of sabotage was what they were taught in the Compound to be the Human Error. Taught that this is what led to the UV Wars and the death of hundreds of thousands of humans and thus the need for vampires to create the Compounds to protect those who survived.

The Wildlings had a different teaching. Aunt Zee explained that, according to Wildling history, the UV Shield was an invention that both the Vampires and the humans wanted. It would allow the vampires to move freely across the earth and it would save the world from the harmful effects of the sun. But not all humans were agreeable to its launch. Those who were against it began the war that came to be known as the UV Wars. They brought the end of the world, and their fate was imprisonment in blood warehouses and Compounds. The Wildlings were spared from imprisonment for working with the vampires to stop the rogue humans, thus given the freedom to live in the forests without interference.

Hadley had chosen to believe the Wildling theory because it pitted humans and vampires as equals, unlike the history taught to the Compound. But now, both theories were shattered by history's retelling by Mrs. Smith and her reading materials that put humans at the top from the very beginning. The magazines, the books, the photographs all pointed to one thing – humans ruled the world once, without vampires in the picture at all, and they ruled it for a long time. For far much longer than the vampires. It was a realisation that shook Hadley to the core.

How was this knowledge lost in the mere span of two centuries?

How could it all be lost?

"You see it, don't you?" Mrs. Smith asked when Hadley went silent after another one of her retellings about the past.

"Humans ruled the world," Hadley whispered, putting down the book she was holding. "But how? Vampires are much more powerful than we could ever be."

"Their power is an illusion," Mrs. Smith explained. "It's fully dependent on us. Without our blood, vampires are nothing."