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“Maybe, but why wouldn’t they just kill us then?” I asked. “When you go deer hunting, you bring home a carcass, not a living animal you store in your stable.”
“Who says they won’t butcher us once they know we’re not infected? This whole quarantine is to ensure that they don’t eat tainted meat,” Kimber figured.
“Good news for me is that I won’t be anybody’s dinner then,” Kerrigan chimed in tiredly.
Kimber stopped walking and looked over at him. He still appeared to be sleeping, and he’d been intermittently talking to us without opening his eyes. His skin was pale, and his forehead was shiny with sweat despite the chill in the air.
“We can’t stay here,” Kimber said definitively, her eyes still locked on him. “We’re going to die one way or another if we don’t get the fuck out of this stall.”
“You say that like we haven’t been trying,” I reminded her in a hushed whisper.
All three of us had searched every inch of this stall, looking for a weakness we could exploit. Despite the shabby appearance, everything was astonishingly reinforced. Any gaps were only millimeters wide, and holes were closed with sheet metal, other than the one in the roof, but that was much too far to reach. Even the iron bars were wrapped in barbed wire, and the top of the wooden part was lined with rusted nails pounded outward to impale anyone who tried to climb it.
Kimber chewed her lip, and her gaze went back to the stall walls. “The only way out is over.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked as I stood beside her. “Neither of us are tall enough, and we’d get all torn up by the wire and nails.”
“Sure, individually we’re not tall enough,” she conceded. “But together, we could probably do it.” She reached out and tentatively touched at the rusted spikes and frowned. “Getting torn up is better than dying. Give me a boost.”
“What?” I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Harlow, we can’t stay here if we want to survive.”
“No, I know that. But you should be the one to boost me. You’re taller and stronger, you could lift me higher. I should go over into the hall, and then I’ll find a key and let you out.”
Kimber scowled at my proposal, as if just realizing that the plan she was suggesting was dangerous. But I was right. Kimber was two years older than me with slightly broader shoulders and more defined biceps.
“Fine,” she relented with a frown. “But you have to be careful, and if it gets to be too much, we switch jobs.”
“I’ll be fine. I can do it,” I insisted with more confidence than I actually felt.
Kimber boosting me was the easy part, because there was no way I could do it without tearing up my hands. I grabbed onto the bars to steady myself, the sharp barbs immediately cutting into the soft flesh of my palm. I gritted my teeth to keep from crying out, because I didn’t want Kimber to know how badly it actually hurt.
I thought of Remy, because I knew she could do this. She survived everything, even zombie bites, but she was only human, same as me. Which meant that I could endure this, and so I had to, despite the pain.
I gripped tightly on the bars, and with the help of Kimber’s shoulders, I was able to climb up onto the stall wall without spearing myself on a rusty nail.
When I put my full weight on the bars, pulling myself up, the barbs tore through my skin. The blood was making my grip slippery, but I was able to stable myself with my boots.
The worst part, though, was pulling myself up over the top. I had to rest there, and when I swung my legs over, the spikes tore through my pants and into my inner thighs.
I winced, and then all at once, before I could get my footing, my hands slipped, and I fell over the wall onto the concrete floor on the other side. I landed roughly on my back, knocking the wind painfully out of me, but nothing felt broken or sprained.
“Harlow!” Kimber gasped, and I could see her eyes above the top wooden slats, staring down at me between the gaps in the bars.
“I’m okay,” I hurried to reassure her before I even had a chance to assess anything. “I’ll be okay.”
My hands had definitely taken the worst of it, and I wiped some of the blood on my shirt. The rest of my injuries were scrapes and bruises, nothing that should slow me down too much.
“Hurry and find a key!” Kerrigan shouted drowsily, as if I didn’t already know the plan.
“I’ll go look around so I can get you out of here as soon as possible,” I told Kimber as I stood up.
“Be careful,” she said.
The stalls on either side of the one Kimber, Kerrigan, and I were in were vacant, at least from what I could see standing on my tiptoes and peering inside.
“Is someone out there?” a small voice asked from the last stall.
