Thrive | Season 1 | Episodes 1-5

by Lamb, Harrison J.

  Sebastian obliged and helped her limp up to the empty front doorway of the house, supporting her with his shoulder under her arm.

  It was chilly inside and smelled of sawdust. The naked concrete floor was empty even of construction debris in the downstairs hallway. Shivering from a gust of wind that swept through the doorway behind them, they turned into a room on the right.

  The first thing Emma noticed was a jumble of rectangular wooden boards and some empty buckets in the corner of the room. There was a piece poking out from the bottom of the pile that looked promising, so she pulled it out and inspected it. It was the perfect length for a walking stick. Its thickness made it a little awkward to hold but it would do.

  With Sebastian’s help, she stood and put her weight on the stick, testing its strength. Then she tried walking with it. The stick didn’t have much grip on the smooth concrete surface so Emma had to take slow, careful steps to avoid slipping.

  It would be easier outside on the rough tarmac roads. She could move around on her own like this. Now she just needed an excuse to slip away.

  The men hadn’t told her she couldn’t leave or threatened her in any way. With her knee injury no longer inhibiting her there was nothing to stop her from leaving Sebastian and the others without explaining herself.

  But they had saved her life. And Emma had a feeling Mark would be offended if he saw her leave, that he would think she was ungrateful. While she didn’t want to risk angering him, she couldn’t stay and watch Sammy die.

  This is my only option, Emma reminded herself.

  “Do you want to take a walk, then?” Sebastian asked.

  “Erm, yeah,” Emma said. “But I need to go for a wee first. I’m busting.”

  “Oh, okay. I think the bathroom is upstairs, though if it’s as unfinished as the rest of the house, there probably isn’t even a toilet in there. You want me to go up and check?”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll just go outside. I should probably avoid stairs for the time being, anyway.”

  “Oh, right.” He gave an awkward, boyish grin. “Well, I’ll be waiting here for you. Shout if you need me.”

  Emma nodded and made her way into the kitchen and toward the back doorway.

  She was three steps into the kitchen when the sound of something falling over in another room, followed by what could have been footsteps, stopped her in her tracks. Looking back, it was clear that Sebastian had heard it too as he’d frozen and was staring toward the hallway.

  After several seconds of staring, Sebastian turned to Emma and held a finger in front of his lips. Then slowly and quietly he started toward the hallway.

  Her heart raced as sinister possibilities rushed through her mind; there was an intruder in the other room, a person who wanted to rob them or a lurking undead, and Sebastian was going to get hurt.

  Just leave him, said a voice in the back of Emma’s head. He’s not your friend. You need to worry about Leena.

  She listened to the voice and continued clumsily toward the back doorway.

  That’s not you. You don’t leave people.

  It is me. Driven by fear. Always.

  An intrepid thought, one that almost drowned in the clamour of her consciousness: You don’t have to be.

  Emma stopped.

  I don’t leave people.

  Repeating the sentence under her breath like a mantra, she limped back into the room she’d come from and followed Sebastian. The dull tap of her makeshift walking stick on the stone floor sent echoes through the vacant rooms, announcing her presence to whoever – or whatever – was in the other room.

  Sebastian stood a few feet inside the room across the hallway with his back to Emma. Stock-still, he was looking at something to his right.

  Emma called his name and his head turned an inch, but he didn’t speak. “What is it?” she asked, her whole body trembling as she came up behind Sebastian. When she saw who was in the room with him, she couldn’t believe her eyes.

  Standing in the corner with a crossbow in his bloody hands, it was Kingsley.

  E P I S O D E F I V E

  Forget

  1.

  As soon as Kingsley stepped into the chilly, bare hallway of the unfinished house, he knew he wasn’t alone.

  There were shoe prints in the sawdust leading from the front door into the room on his left. Upon seeing them, he picked up on the murmur of voices underneath the howl of the wind rushing through the empty doorways and windows.

  The voices were coming from the room to his left. One of the voices stirred recognition inside him – but fear stamped the feeling out before he knew what it was, the sound of footsteps moving into the kitchen where he had entered through the back doorway.

  If they found him, it would ruin Eric’s rescue plan. He needed to hide.

  Kingsley considered slipping straight out the back door and into the next house, but it sounded like someone was in the kitchen now. They would see him. He tiptoed past the stairs and through a doorway on the right.

  As he entered the room, he glimpsed a man across the hallway standing in the room opposite and his heart leapt. Darting behind the wall before the man could turn and see him, Kingsley’s foot collided with a bucket on the floor by the wall, knocking it over. It clattered.

  Shit, shit, shit, Kingsley panicked. The man must have heard that.

  Things were going south again.

  Don’t let Sammy down.

  He stood frozen still and listened for the man’s footsteps, laying out the options in his head.

  Could he kill them both with the crossbow? No, it was too slow to reload and it would only take one scream to alert Mark to the fact that something was wrong, thwarting the rescue operation; perhaps he could just threaten them with the crossbow to keep them quiet while he kept an eye out the window, waiting for Eric to get close to Mark. Then…

  Then what?

  No time – footsteps approaching. They’d definitely heard him knock the bucket over. Kingsley backed into the corner of the room and trained his crossbow on the doorway, waiting. Blood rushing like liquid fire to every extremity of his body.

  There was the sound of footsteps in the hallway right outside the room. Then a pause… before a man stepped in.

  The man’s eyes found first the toppled bucket, then Kingsley, and he froze. He was a young Asian man with messy hair. Looked harmless. But he wasn’t; he was getting in the way and that made him dangerous.

  Kingsley stared at the young man and held his forefinger in front of his lips. He gawked at Kingsley. There was a childishness about him that was hard to reconcile with the threat he presented.

  Voices drew his eye to the window where he saw Eric, Kara and Rebecca outside, standing in front of Mark – who was restraining Sammy with one arm and pressing a blade to her neck with the other – along with an older man. Kingsley just needed Eric to get a little bit closer to Mark, and then he could fire a bolt at the old guy.

  He focused again on the young Asian man in the room with him. Kingsley expected the man to retaliate as soon as he shot one of his pals dead, so he needed to make sure this guy wasn’t armed.

  “Drop any weapons you have,” Kingsley hissed.

  The young man reached behind his back and drew a knife from his belt, tossed it onto the concrete between them. Kingsley dragged the knife closer with his foot.

  “Sebastian?” came a woman’s voice from the hallway, and there was that odd feeling of recognition in his gut again. That sounded exactly like… No. It couldn’t be.

  But then Emma walked through the doorway and Kingsley thought he was losing his mind.

  *

  Mark’s eyes were those of someone who didn’t know how unstable they had become, Eric thought as he stared into them from several feet away; they seemed almost to bulge from their sockets in intense concentration.

  Eric dropped the duffel bag, full of the supplies from Darren’s flat and what they had scavenged from shops in Braintree, on the packed-dirt driveway before
Mark. Then he placed the chain mace next to it. Rebecca followed suit and laid the machete on the ground, and Kara did the same with her police baton.

  John came forward and collected the weapons and the bag. Placed it on the ground between himself and Mark and picked up the chain mace.

  The incessant wind tugged at a sheet of tarpaulin that covered a stack of materials nearby, creating a noisy flapping sound; the trees fringing the construction site hissed in the gale like a hive of rattlesnakes.

  But Eric barely noticed the noises or the force of the wind that caused them.

  Because he had noticed that the third man in Mark’s group, Sebastian, wasn’t here with them. From afar, Eric had assumed Sebastian was waiting in the van, perhaps not wanting to get his hands bloody. But the drivers-side window of the van was rolled down and he could see from here that nobody was inside.

  So where the fuck was Sebastian? And where the fuck was the fourth person he had seen sitting in the van earlier?

  A bolt of concern went through Eric as he wondered if Sebastian had gone into one of the empty houses to scout it out and had bumped into Kingsley.

  Shaking the thought, he waited for Mark to speak, knowing what the man would say before the words left his mouth.

  “The crossbow?” Mark asked.

  Eric cleared his throat. “As I told you on the radio, our friend has—”

  “And as I told you, Eric, that’s your problem. And it’s a big fucking problem for you now because I need that crossbow. Everything from that flat belongs to us. So unless you tell me where your curly-haired mate is, you can say goodbye to this one.” He pressed the tip of his blade into the side of Sammy’s neck, applying just enough pressure to draw a trickle of blood. Sammy shut her eyes, her chest heaving as she gasped in pain and discomfort.

  Taking a step forward while Mark wasn’t looking – while he instead watched Sammy squirm under the pinch of his blade – Eric snapped, “Okay! I know where he went and I can find him for you. I can get the crossbow back.”

  Mark levelled his gaze at him, one eyelid twitching.

  *

  “Emma?”

  The name fell out of Kingsley’s mouth in a stunned whisper.

  Realising they knew each other, Sebastian narrowed his eyes at Emma. She could do nothing but stare at Kingsley – the man who had taken her heart, painted her future with love and fulfilment, then ripped the canvas to pieces. A wave of varying emotions flooded her brain and clogged the words in her throat. But what she felt most was fear.

  Because Kingsley had brought pain and chaos into her life before and now he was here again and she couldn’t escape the feeling that she was falling down yet another hole with him. This was not supposed to happen. She was never supposed to see him again.

  In his shock at seeing Emma, Kingsley had lowered the crossbow, a similar internal battle going on inside his own head.

  Sebastian saw this; he took his chance while the weapon was out of his face.

  He grabbed at the crossbow, trying to wrench it from Kingsley’s hands. There was grunting and yelling from both men as they wrestled. Emma was suddenly very aware of the fact that she had no weapon – she must have left her steak knife somewhere, maybe in the van – and she scanned the room for one.

  An abrupt cry of anguish from outside curdled her blood.

  She found the knife Sebastian had dropped on the floor and snatched it up. Just as Sebastian delivered a savage kick to Kingsley’s shin, followed by a shove that sent him into the wall and allowed Sebastian to pry the crossbow from his weakened grip. Then he struck him hard in the head with the butt of the crossbow. Kingsley crumpled to the ground, unconscious.

  2.

  Sammy didn’t know what Eric was doing. But she had already decided she wasn’t going down without a fight.

  She was just building up the courage to act. To stab Mark with the sharp fragment of bone she’d found in the back of the butcher’s van – a remnant from an animal carcass that had fallen into a crack in the floor lining. Sammy had concealed the bone fragment up her sleeve, ready to draw it out with her fingers and plunge it into Mark’s neck.

  There was a huge chance she would die too. But at least she would take this bastard down with her.

  Sammy hardly listened to the negotiations going on between Eric and Mark. Mark had stopped pressing the knife into the side of her neck, which was a relief. For a good few seconds, she had thought he was going to kill her right there.

  Do it now, she thought. Just do it before he does kill you.

  She looked at Eric’s blood-speckled face – his cool eyes and chiselled features a mask of control even in this dire moment. And it lit a spark in her. She cradled the bone fragment in her palm.

  Just then came the sound of men yelling in the house to Sammy’s right.

  The pressure of the knife against her neck went away as Mark’s attention shifted for a moment to the noises coming from the house.

  Now. Sammy threw her fist backwards over her shoulder and bore into Mark’s flesh with the piece of bone.

  But the cold bite of the blade returned as Mark retaliated with a swift stab to the centre of her throat – driving it all the way in this time. He pulled the knife out and let her body fall. Eric caught her and dropped to one knee, her body going limp in his arms as she died, and he cried out in mixed despair and rage.

  Mark gingerly touched the gouge Sammy had just torn into his neck below his right ear. He seethed as his fingers came back coated in blood. She had tried to kill him, but it hadn’t worked. And now her friends were going to pay.

  Eric laid Sammy’s body on the ground and lunged at Mark.

  *

  At the same time, John swung the chain mace at the two women.

  They dodged the spiked head. Then they split – Rebecca going for the duffel bag to get a weapon while Kara circled John, darting in and out of his swing radius to kick at his legs. He grunted as one of her kicks landed on his thigh and he almost fell to his knees. But he kept his footing, screaming obscenities at her as he took another wide swing.

  John turned to Rebecca, who had retrieved the machete and police baton from the bag. She rolled the baton toward Kara and John saw the policewoman go to grab it out of the corner of his eye; starting to swing at Rebecca, he whirled and caught Kara as she picked up the baton, splitting her skull open.

  Rebecca screamed in horror as her partner fell. Then rushed John with her machete.

  The man backpedalled to give himself room to swing the chain mace again, but she was fast, closing the space rapidly and swiping at him. So he sidestepped and tripped her feet up.

  She fell flat on her face. As she scrambled to get back on her feet, John brought the spiked head down on her in an overarm swing, ending Rebecca’s frantic movements.

  A moment of deep breathing… catching his breath… then he noticed a choking sound and looked over to see Eric pining Mark to the hood of the van, a death grip around his friend’s neck.

  John found his knife, approached Eric from behind and stabbed him once in the lower abdomen; Eric let go of Mark, spun and threw a punch in John’s direction, which he dodged. Then Eric’s hand went to the wound in his lower left side and he stumbled backwards. John followed him.

  He fell to his knees several times as he staggered away, John and Mark both pursuing him now.

  He reached a spot where the shallow foundation for a small square building had been partially laid next to the semi-detached houses at the back of the site, a walled pit in the ground waiting to be filled and cemented. Eric collapsed beside the pit, too weak to go any farther.

  Seizing him by the collar, John hauled Eric and threw him into the pit.

  It was only about a metre deep. But it might as well have been a hundred; Eric hit the bottom with zero grace and lay sprawled on his chest, too sapped to drag himself up out of the hole. Bleeding. Dying.

  Next to the pit were bags of building sand and cement powder. John took one of the open bags and began
pouring sand into the pit, watching Eric squirm against the heaps of sand piling up around him, beginning to bury him. Mark joined in, lifting a bag of cement powder and emptying it into the hole.

  As the men poured bag after bag of sand and cement on top of him, Eric screamed one last time before the gritty mixture covered his mouth.

  3.

  Sebastian turned from Kingsley’s unconscious body to face Emma, and she hid the knife behind her back. Another shrill scream came from outside and they both looked out the window to see Mark and John fighting Eric and the women – one of whom was already dead on the driveway.

  “He knew your name,” Sebastian said, drawing Emma’s attention back to him. “You know each other. How?”

  Her eyes widened. “I—I don’t know him,” she stammered. “He must be… mistaking me for someone. I don’t—I don’t know.”

  Sebastian clearly didn’t believe her. She was a terrible liar. Panicking, she started to back out of the room.

  “Wait,” Sebastian said as Emma limped into the hallway. He glanced once more at the fighting going on outside. Then he stepped into the hallway and raised the crossbow at her retreating back. “Stop or I’ll shoot.”

  Emma froze.

  Shaking with adrenaline, she tried to control her breathing as she turned back to face Sebastian, slipping the knife into the waistband of her trousers.

  The two of them stood facing one another for a few silent seconds of suspense…

  Then Emma launched her wooden stick at him, whirling back to continue hopping away on one foot.

  She made it to the kitchen. A glance over her shoulder showed Sebastian aiming the crossbow at her once again – about to fire.

  Emma jumped to the side and the bolt sailed past her and out the back doorway as she fell to the kitchen floor. Her injured knee was burning, throbbing. She tried to stand but Sebastian pinned her down and straddled her. The crossbow empty, he held it horizontally against her neck, pressing down and choking her.