Beyond The Walls (NOW ON AMAZON!!!)

A Reunion

Hadley opened her eyes and wished she hadn't. It wasn't just that there was a building on top of her, pinning her hopelessly under dusty, crumbly rubble.

They were gone!

They were all gone!

Billy, Crystal, Jael, Yuvan, Kade, Brielle, Jamila...

Her daughter.

Tears stung Hadley's eyes. She sobbed, coughing up a lungful of dust as she did, which caused a tremor above her that dumped a new cloud of concrete and dust over her. It didn't matter. She wished she could die, but even now, she could feel cuts and bruises healing all over her. She wondered how it would feel like, slowly starving in the depths of hell until her blood couldn't sustain the healing. She wondered if it would even feel an inkling close to the pain and hurt crushing her insides at the absolute loss she was already enduring.

What was left for her in this world without her daughter?

She couldn't even mourn because her daughter was still alive, on her way past the stars to a new planet. Hadley's goal to save her daughter from her mother's demoralising influence had just ended up ushering her into the arms of her father, a stranger with an extremely questionable moral standing at best and whom she couldn't trust not to corrupt the little one's soul.

The pain creeping past her adrenaline from the concrete block crushing her from the waist down couldn't hold a candle to the pain of her infinite guilt.

Wreckage from that final massive earthquake covered every inch of space around her and the concrete boulder on top of her made it impossible to swivel and use her hands to search through the dusty, musty darkness. The darkness she had once been so afraid of swallowing all her emotions forever was now physically personified in the most horrific way, swallowing her whole being. She would die here. Alone. Having lost and lost to everything and everyone that ever mattered to her.

Alone.

Alone in the most complete sense of the word.

Until she felt it...

...that familiar brush against her mind.

Ruqwik?

"Help! Help me! I'm here! I'm alive!" Hadley yelled as loud as she could while trying not to drown in the clouds of fine dust she breathed in, pouring urgency into the pleas as she too reached out for the vampire's mind!

Hadley counted out the seconds of silence that followed.

One.

Of course, no one was out there. Ruq was dead. Hadley had seen the arrow hit its mark. She'd seen the lines spread out from the wound. No vampire survived Hadley's dead blood! She was imagining the telepathic brush. A hallucinogenic consequence of being at death's door.

Two.

Even if the vampire was alive, Hadley was several storeys underground, in a bunker located past what Barret had called the Dead Zone, a region where no one living in the Enclaves and rainforests would ever willingly cross. How would the vampire even find her here?

Thr...

"Hadley?!"

No!

Surely, she'd imagined the voice.

How?

How was Ruq in the depths of hell with her?

"Ruq?! Is that you?" Hadley yelled back, still convinced no one would answer back. "Help! Help me! I'm stuck!"

"Hadley, keep calling out!" the vampire yelled through the darkness almost immediately. A lifeline. A hand grabbing for her in the dark. Again. "I'm coming for you!"