Page 35 of The Chain House

But why would it matter to her? She’d never read the Mallard Malone novels. She knew the gist of the series: a postapocalyptic future where the world was run by the Have-Nots, a lawless world of class systems where the millionaires and billionaires were put into concentration camps and later sold out as slaves, a violent world ruled by a man named Oliver Crown. The series ran in reverse, she knew, with the intent of raising suspense by slowly revealing how Oliver Crown became the ruthless ruler he was. She knew, because people talked and she’d followed it in the news and on social media, that in Phoenix Rising, Mallard Malone’s latest book, published almost a year ago, officially as Book Two, but in the series was really the seventh book, told of Oliver Crown as a young man, rising from the ashes of whatever event had caused the world to crumble, first in the United States before spreading north and south to Canada and Mexico, and then across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe and beyond.

Looking at the map on the wall made her knees wobbly.

She visually followed the length of the chain snaking from her ankle, roughly eight feet across the floor, before rising four feet up to the hole in the middle of the wall, a hole, she figured, that would have been somewhere around Kansas in the real world but in this one was the dead center of an amoeba-shaped zone called The Untrustables.

Beth lifted the chain in both hands. The brace around her ankle was tight, and her skin around it was red and swollen. She shuffled toward the wall, holding the chain as she went. It was heavier than she’d imagined, or maybe she was weaker than she thought.

Four paces from the wall, she felt resistance on the chain, and wondered what it was connected to on the other side of that wall.

She tugged.

And immediately heard a male voice from the other side of the wall say, “Jesus, what the fuck?”

Beth froze. “Who’s there?” Her throat was raw from yelling during her initial hours inside the garage, and she felt now like she’d survived the first stage of a video game and this was the next level.

“Who’s over there?” the male voice asked from the other side of the wall.

Beth shuffled the remaining distance to the wall and squatted low enough to put her right eye to the opening and peer through the hole to the other side, where the chain disappeared into another room. The walls of that room were covered as well, not by book covers but by drawings and sketches of what Beth assumed were characters from all the Mallard Malone novels.

A shadow approached from the other room.

The chain shifted inside the golf-hole-sized tunnel connecting the rooms, and then another eye filled the hole on the other side. Beth flinched but didn’t back away from it.

“I asked who are you?” the male voice said.

“Beth,” she said. “Bethany Hawthorne.”

“Holy shit,” said the voice. “The governor’s wife? You’re still alive?”

“Yes,” she said, and for whatever reason, perhaps to combat her nerves, felt the urge to joke with this apparent stranger and fellow captive. “But Gavin is better known as my husband.”

His laughter appeased her. Her shoulders relaxed.

And then he said, “I’m Billy. Billy Boyle.”

CHAPTER15

Before

RAVEN WASTED NO time contemplating.

As soon as Jennifer told him that Yellow needed him outside, and then adding the word now, just as Yellow had moments before, Raven, without hesitation, rushed from the Kitchen House. Raven was small for a man, but he looked mad enough at that moment to lift a house. Jennifer watched them out the window as they talked animatedly, with Yellow pointing repeatedly at the house where Batise lived, pointing more accurately, Jennifer thought, at the now vacant upstairs window of that house, where she’d seen the boy standing earlier. Yellow appeared to be holding Raven back, calming him down.

What was the big deal? she wondered, as her friends called her over to their table for breakfast, the three of them laughing about something because they didn’t know what was going on out there. And Jennifer had yet to tell anyone about what she’d witnessed the other day, too, and then later that night, after they returned from wherever they’d gone—the three women Jennifer first thought were nice but weren’t, and Mister Mean. Who Iris called the bad man. The man with the scar running down from the inside corner of his left eye and across his nose and onto his right cheek like a crooked jack-o-lantern mouth.

Or who Jennifer now referred to as the man in the mask.

She’d yet to tell anyone about any of it, because there were parts of her brain still trying to tell her it never happened. That she never saw what she saw around that campfire. But then what were those pictures under her bed? Pictures she’d drawn from memory, pictures she’d drawn in such scary detail and in such a hurry that they couldn’t have been from a dream. Or, in this case, a nightmare.

She’d been building up the courage to tell Yellow, but then seeing the boy in the window had sidetracked her. And now, something else was going on. Jennifer sat beside Peter and across from Iris and Markie at the small wooden table inside the Kitchen House, and when she mentioned the boy she’d seen in the upstairs window, her three friends went eerily quiet. Iris started crying and Peter was on the verge of it.

Markie sucked in a deep breath, as if to conjure some needed toughness. “It must have been a ghost.”

“Don’t,” said Iris. “Steven isn’t a ghost.”

Jennifer watched them. “Wait, who is Steven?”

Peter shook his head and covered his ears. “We aren’t supposed to talk about Steven. They warned us.”