‘I was just about to tell James what happened in the ruins,’ Amelia says carefully. ‘Thought he might need to know . . .’
Lucy bristles. Clenches and unclenches her fists. Why? It’s not going to make any difference to him, is it? She says nothing.
Amelia presses: ‘Best that we get everything out in the open, don’t you think? I have a feeling that’s why we’re all here. It’s an experiment. They’ve selected us because of our repressed memories, and they want us to release them.’
It makes sense, but Lucy’s still not sure why. Why her? There must be millions of people on the planet who are suppressing terrible memories. Why has she been chosen? No doubt they’ll all find out soon enough.
‘Do you mind if I tell the full story, though?’ Lucy says. She sucks in a fast breath, lets it out slowly. ‘It’d be better in context. For you too.’
‘Fine. Let’s walk and talk. It’ll be dark soon.’ Amelia turns and starts walking.
‘Go on,’ James says, his voice gentle.
She walks in step with him, but she can’t look at him. ‘I think Amelia might be right with the memories thing.’ She taps the tracker. ‘I thought these things were nonsense at first, but after the presentation . . . and what happened in the ruins.’ She pauses, blows out a long breath. ‘I think maybe they are tapped into our neurons. Or something, at least. There was an . . . an incident projected. Amelia saw it. It was a video, like Tiggy’s. But the thing is, I know there was no way a camera could’ve filmed it. The only footage of that night is inside my own head—’
‘Hang on.’ James stops walking. ‘You’re saying that film we watched earlier, of Tiggy, came from her own memory? And that the same thing just happened to you?’
Amelia realises they’ve stopped walking. She sighs and turns round, heads back towards them. ‘There’s another possibility,’ she says. ‘Maybe the memories are false. There’s a psychological condition – false memory syndrome. It’s been well documented. Remember that “satanic panic” stuff? It was all disproved, and it turns out the kids had been almost hypnotised to believe that this stuff happened to them when it didn’t. I’m wondering if maybe they’ve inserted something into your bloodstreams with that tracker probe. Maybe it’s not pulling out repressed memories – maybe it’s putting some garbled garbage in there instead.’
Lucy shakes her head sadly. ‘I’d like to believe that, but I’m afraid I know for sure that what you saw really did happen.’ She rolls up her sleeve, revealing pink, puckered skin. ‘I spilled petrol on my arm.’
‘I didn’t see that happen . . .’ Amelia says.
‘I know you didn’t. Because I didn’t look at my arm when it happened. So you didn’t see that part. It’s evidence, isn’t it? It’s my constant reminder. I can cover my arm up with long sleeves, but I can’t cover up the fact that it itches every night, and sometimes it still bleeds.’
‘Are you going to tell us what happened that night?’
Lucy nods. ‘I think I have to. I think that’s the only way for us to end the game.’ She’s about to say more when a loud crack of thunder sounds overhead. They all look up at the sky as the sun fades out as though someone has turned a dimmer switch.
‘I agree,’ James says. ‘But first, I think we need to find Scott and Brenda . . . then we need to get to the big house before we’re caught in the storm.’
Brenda
Brenda’s head is pounding, but the pain in her leg has gone. She daren’t look at it again, knowing it can only be getting worse – but at least for now, she can’t feel it. She sits up, rubs her eyes. ‘How long were we asleep?’ The light has faded, the sky a dark purple. She’s propped up against the plastic crate that Scott found. It’s still only the two of them. At the top of the hill near the tip of the island. ‘Scott? Wake up. I think it’s going to rain.’ She pokes him with a finger in the ribs and he groans. ‘Scott?’
‘All right, all right.’ He pulls himself up into a sitting position, glances around. ‘Where are we? Where is everyone?’
Brenda is beginning to feel more awake, and as well as her head, her body has started to tingle with pins and needles, her muscles straining to get back into position after she’s been slumped for however long. ‘What time is it?’ she says, louder.
The holographic text starts to scroll. ‘It is T minus 3. Thank you for using this service.’
‘Three hours to go,’ she mutters. ‘Three hours until what, though?’
‘Huh?’ Scott looks confused.
‘I think we need to get going. Can you give me something for my head?’
He drags the bag out of his pocket, his movements seemingly in slow motion. He digs about and finds a red-and-white capsule. ‘Pain at the base of your skull, as if someone has whacked you with an axe?’
She nods.
‘This’ll sort it. Might make you drowsy again though.’
Brenda laughs, but the sound seems alien to her. ‘Drowsy? We’ve been asleep for two hours.’
‘That’s one way to avoid this crap. Right?’
She pops the pill with a long swig of water, then shoves her backpack behind her as a cushion and lies back against the plastic crate. ‘Maybe we could just stay here a bit longer.’
‘Mmm-hmm.’ Scott is looking at his phone. ‘Well, I had a reply from Mark. Only, I don’t know if it’s actually from him.’ He runs a hand through his hair, tugging at it. His earlier neat styling is long gone.
‘Oh?’ Brenda tries to be interested but she feels herself drifting off again. ‘What makes you say that?’ She’s trying to remember who Mark is, and wonders if it’s relevant. If she gets out of this alive, she’s definitely going to be making more use of pharmaceuticals in the future. She’s always been put off, seeing the obvious effects of coke on the workaholic players that do her bidding, and she’d assumed that anything else was for neurotics and fools. But what Scott has given her has been a revelation. Numb the pain, doze off, treat the side effects with something else. It’s easy to see how addiction can creep in.
Scott pauses. ‘Might be a stupid thing, but it’s the fact that he’s replied to me using my name. He never calls me Scott, or Scottie or anything like that. He calls me “Doodle”, as in “Yankee Doodle”. He thinks it’s hilarious.’
Brenda sits up straighter. ‘Well, that’s interesting. What did he say though – in response to your call for help?’
‘“Don’t worry, Scott. Everything is under control.”’
‘That doesn’t sound like the sort of response you were looking for, does it?’
He shakes his head. ‘He’s a man of few words at times, but this . . . well, this doesn’t help us. I thought he’d have mentioned our location – if he’d been able to track it via my message. I think it’s safe to say that my communication attempt has been intercepted.’
‘Maybe there’s a firewall of some sort?’ Her leg is starting to itch again now, but it feels different from before. It’s more of a crawling, squirming feeling than an itch. She can’t tell if it’s getting better or worse.
A patter of rain starts to fall. Light at first, but by the colour of the sky it’s going to get worse soon.
‘We need to find shelter,’ Scott says, sounding distracted. He’s still tapping at his phone.
Brenda drags herself up but feels unsteady on her feet. Scott drops his phone in his pocket and gets up from the ground, then walks over and takes Brenda’s arm. ‘Come on.’
As they start walking, jets of pain begin to shoot through her leg. This is definitely not good. ‘Do you . . . do you think he even got your message?’
Scott is walking too fast, limping with his bad ankle, trying to support her too. ‘Well, someone got it. Someone replied. Harvey, probably. Or one of the other Timeo minions.’
She glances at him, but he’s still looking straight ahead. There’s a small pulsing in his cheek. She’s seen it before, in some of her consultants. When everything’s about to hit the fan. When they’re trying to avoid the
inevitable. ‘Scott?’
He keeps walking, practically dragging her along beside him. She’d always thought she was in decent shape for her age, but now she feels every one of her sixty-two years. Like one of those awful women she refuses to look at in the high street, gossipy and doddery and buying the latest cardigan from Per Una and thinking it makes them look young. Yes, she lied on her information form – but what difference was it going to make? Do they think for a minute that she’s too old to do something like this? She’s still running her business like a woman half her age, while most people she’s encountered along the way have burned out, or lost it all and thrown themselves off a tall building.
She sucks in a breath and tries to remember the mantra her long-term counsellor told her: Mind over matter, take the first choice – not the latter, too much sleep makes you fatter. She smiles to herself. It’s a stupid mantra. A parody of a mantra. But it still holds true. She can do this. She can take control. And that enforced sleep she had can only stand her in good stead to get through the rest of this horrendous day.
The rain comes then, the real rain. Not that pathetic hair-frizzing pretence at rain. This is hard rain, coming at them from all angles in their exposed position on the cliff. They’re drenched within seconds. There’s no point hurrying now. A bright flash of lightning shatters the sky, followed a few seconds later by a loud crack of thunder. It’s this they need to take shelter from. She’s always hated electrical storms. Always been secretly terrified of being burned from the inside out.
Scott speaks at last. ‘There,’ he says, pointing ahead. A cluster of rocks juts out from the side of the central hill of the island. She’d realised earlier, after the quick look at the map, that the whole thing is shaped like a figure eight. The airport at the bottom, the lighthouse at the top. The tiki hut bay at one side, the big house on the other. It would have been helpful if they’d been shown this map right at the start – but thinking back, none of them asked for a map; they just followed that first arrow, then things took their own course: stage-managed, no doubt, by their elusive ‘host’.
However, she knows the layout now, and she knows they are close.
They just need to get out of this storm.
‘There,’ he says again. ‘Do you see it?’
She’s struggling to see anything, now that the rain is hitting them in sheets. She puts a hand to her forehead, trying to shelter her eyes enough to see what he’s pointing at. Other than the rocks, there’s . . . then she sees it.
The overhanging rock is the entrance to a cave.
Scott takes a firmer grip on her arm and starts to run as best he can. She tries to follow, slipping and sliding on the wet path. Stumbling more than once as her leg gives way. But then somehow they’re there. He drags her under the overhanging rock and into the mouth of the cave, then he switches on the torch on his phone, directing it inside.
Sitting inside, wrapped in blankets, faces frozen in surprise, are Lucy, Amelia and James.
Amelia
Amelia jumps to her feet. ‘Oh, thank God! Are you OK? Where have you been? You’re drenched!’ She grabs her blanket from where it has dropped to the ground and rushes towards Brenda, draping it around her shoulders and ushering her into the dry warmth. Brenda is pale and shaking quite violently. Scott, apart from being soaked to the skin, seems to be OK. He lays his phone on the ground, leaving the torch on to give them some light.
James gets up and hands a blanket to Scott. ‘Jeez, you two don’t look like you’re having much fun.’ He gestures to a wooden crate just inside the mouth of the cave. ‘We haven’t got a lot to offer, but we seem to have unlimited blankets.’
Scott starts laughing. He can’t stop. James joins in, but Amelia can’t bring herself to, not with Brenda looking like this. She picks up another blanket and uses it to try and get the worst of the rain off, drying her hair, dabbing her face. Brenda lets her, almost childlike in her demeanour now. She looks older too – with the rain having washed off her make-up, it’s clear to Amelia that she is a lot older than they thought.
It’s also clear that there is something very wrong with her.
‘Brenda? Are you OK? Talk to me. Are you in pain?’ She turns round to the others. Lucy is still sitting on the floor, red-faced from crying and apparently in a bit of a trance. She hasn’t reacted at all to Brenda and Scott’s arrival. Amelia has seen this before, when people have fallen into a semi-catatonic state from shock. Clearly Lucy’s video-memory and her subsequent recall of the story to her and James has pushed her somewhere deep inside herself. She’d blurted the story out in a wash of tears the minute they’d entered the cave. All she and James could do was sit there in shock, while trying to comfort her – and she still needs comforting. But for now, Amelia knows she has to focus on Brenda, whose needs are more physical.
‘Can’t really feel it now,’ Brenda says. ‘Red and white and yellow and pink.’ She giggles. Then her legs seem to collapse from under her. Amelia makes a grab for her, but she’s a dead weight. ‘James—’
James is there in a flash, grabbing Brenda under the armpits, half dragging, half walking her over towards Lucy, to the area where they’ve kept themselves warm wrapped in the blankets. As he lays her on the floor, her shorts ride up her legs and she starts to scream.
‘Shit.’ James steps away, points at her leg. ‘That does not look good. Jeez, Brenda, I thought you said it didn’t bite you?’
‘She lied, didn’t she?’ Scott says. ‘She told me, then we partied for a while. She’s pretty good fun for an old lady.’
Amelia ignores him. ‘This is bad.’ She crouches down and inspects Brenda’s leg. It’s swollen up like a balloon, the shorts sticking to her clammy skin. The bite area is leaking yellow pus. ‘It looks like an infection.’ She leans forward and puts a hand to Brenda’s forehead. She’s burning up. Amelia frowns. ‘We need to lower her temperature. Has anyone got any paracetamol?’ She stares out of the mouth of the cave, then turns to James. ‘Soak one of the blankets in the rain, then wring it out. I need a cold compress.’
Scott limps towards her, holding out his plastic bag. ‘That’s Tylenol, right? The red gel ones are the rapid release. Maybe you could burst it and squeeze it into her mouth.’
Amelia raises her eyebrows at his sensible suggestion. Not shocked that he has a bag of random mixed drugs and knows what they all are by sight, but that he’s realised they might struggle to get Brenda to swallow a pill right now. There’s just one problem. ‘What did you give her before, Scott? I want to reduce her fever, but I don’t want to kill her with a drug reaction.’
Scott snorts. ‘Funny you should say that. Most of the lunatics who come in for vitamin infusions have ended up in the emergency room after doing something like that. People pop these like they’re candy, but you gotta know what you’re doing.’
‘Scott, I’m not looking for a lesson in illegal pharmaceutical combination therapy and its consequences. I just need to know if she’s already had any paracetamol, because I think the state her body is in right now, her liver won’t handle it.’
He shakes his head. ‘She’s had fentanyl and Demerol. I was going to give her a Percocet but she was already out of it.’
‘Wow.’ A drenched James has come back in from the rain. He stands at the entrance, wringing out the blanket and rolling it tight. ‘Really going for it there, mate.’ He hands the blanket to Amelia and raises an eyebrow.
‘Whatever, buddy,’ Scott shoots back. ‘Don’t make out like you’re the innocent. I can see it in your eyes.’
Amelia lays the blanket over Brenda’s leg, and she murmurs something incoherent. Amelia has managed to squeeze a couple of the capsules into Brenda’s mouth, and now with that and the compress, all they can do is wait it out.
‘They’re not coming to help us, are they?’ Lucy says. Her voice is flat. Emotionless. Amelia had almost forgotten she was there.
‘Maybe we need to just ask,’ James suggests. ‘You know, like they keep telling us
to?’ He shrugs. ‘I know it seems mad, but it does work. They’re watching us. Listening to us. Whether it’s via the trackers or more hidden cameras doesn’t really matter.’
‘They’re not coming,’ Lucy says again. ‘If they can see us and hear us. If they can track us. If the tracker is measuring our bodily functions . . . they already know how sick Brenda is. They know we’re all sitting here cold and tired. They know that whatever they’re doing is triggering our worst ever memories, or biggest fears, the most awful things we’ve ever done. They know all this, and they don’t care.’ She pulls her blanket tighter. ‘They want to destroy us.’
‘Why, though?’ James says. ‘Why us?’
‘It doesn’t matter. People who do stuff like this? It doesn’t matter.’
Scott slaps a palm on his forehead. ‘I didn’t tell you this yet, guys. The phones. Remember earlier, Tiggy said she used her phone to text Giles – that she was linked to their Wi-Fi? Well, I’m the only other one with a phone. I was linked too.’ He runs a hand through his wet hair. ‘After the boat came, I sent a message to a friend of mine. Someone I thought could get us out of this mess. He messaged me back when I was alone with Brenda. Only . . . only it wasn’t him. It was a reply as if it came from his number. But it wasn’t him.’
‘How do you know? What did it say?’
Scott shakes his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. I just know it wasn’t him. They’re messing with us—’
‘Wait, so when Tiggy got a message from Giles saying he was OK – that wasn’t from Giles?’ Lucy pulls her knees up to her chest. ‘So we don’t know when Giles was last OK. We don’t know if he was OK when Tiggy left him.’
‘And where is Tiggy?’ Scott says.
‘She went on the boat,’ Amelia says. ‘She’s with Harvey – presumably others too – at the big house. With Giles.’ She lifts the compress to check on Brenda’s leg, and Brenda groans again. Her eyes are closed, sweat is dripping off her brow. Her fever is still raging, and there’s nothing Amelia can do to fix it. ‘Look, we need to get help. Can someone please tap their tracker and ask?’ She looks back at Brenda. ‘I really don’t know how much longer she’s going to last.’
The Last Resort Page 16