by Ryan Casey
One hundred per cent.
She looked into her arms at baby Holly. Couldn’t stop checking on her, especially not after the scare she’d given her yesterday.
But she seemed quiet. She seemed peaceful.
But she was alive.
She was alive, and she was well.
That was the most important thing.
Kelsie looked up at the road ahead alongside the sea. She saw the waves crashing against the coast, bigger than she remembered them being in the past. She saw the seagulls swooping down, scooping fish out of the ocean—but they were bigger than she remembered them being, too. She saw all of this, and she couldn’t help smiling—but with a hint of the bittersweet—at the world that had once been here.
The world that had gone long ago.
And the world that was going to completely disappear in no time at all.
She saw all of this, and she went to face the road ahead.
That’s when she saw movement.
Movement up ahead.
At first, she just slowed down and stopped. Because she couldn’t see them properly. Not from here.
But then she saw something else.
This group. They were dressed in black. There were about seven or eight of them.
Holding rifles.
And they were heading right in Kelsie’s group’s direction.
“We need to hide,” Kelsie said.
“What…” Tate started.
But then he stopped. His eyes widened. His face looked covered with fear.
Because he had seen them, too.
He had seen what was coming their way.
“We’ve—we’ve no choice,” Tate said. “We need to go back.”
But Kelsie felt a hint of sadness and irritation at the suggestion. She bit down on her lip. Shook her head. “No.”
Tate looked at her, bemusement across his face. “What?”
“We don’t give up.”
“But—”
“We hide. We find a place in the buildings, and we watch them, and we wait. And then when the chance comes… we strike.”
“We strike?” Manuel said.
Kelsie looked at him too, sensing pushback all around. “I’ve done running away. I’ve done backing down from these people. We’ve got a rifle. We’ve got the advantage of surprise. We can take these people out. Hold a few hostage if we have to. I’m done messing around.”
She looked at the rest of her people. They looked back at her, none of them looking totally enthusiastic about her suggestion.
And then she looked at Gina.
Saw a glimmer in her eyes.
“We go into the buildings on the right,” Kelsie said. “We wait. And then when the chance arises… we strike.”
They moved, then. All of them rushing their way over towards the flats on their right. They climbed in through the smashed window, over glass that had been cleared many years ago. When they stepped inside the building, Kelsie felt the dust fill her lungs, coughed and spluttered.
It wasn’t ideal surroundings for her baby.
But it would have to do.
They just had to hope Baby Holly stayed quiet.
They moved past a weird freestanding lamp in the lounge that looked like it’d been snapped in two years ago, its sharp metal length stretching up and glistening in the light. Then they made their way up the stairs. Every step felt like it was going to break under Kelsie’s feet. The sound was bad enough, too.
She had to hope nobody clocked her from outside.
That nobody noticed.
They reached the upstairs windows. Crouched on the dusty, rotting wood floor, which creaked and moved with every step.
Kelsie was beside Jack, who was holding the rifle. Watching. Waiting. Breathing heavily.
“You know how this goes down if it fails, don’t you?” he said.
“I’ve spent too long fearing these people. It’s about time we gave it back to them. About time we stopped letting them hurt us.”
Jack just nodded. Sighed.
And then he turned his attention back to the outside.
The Outsiders came into view. All of them walking slowly, rifles in hands. It was strange, in a way. There was a day to go until Britain was supposedly obliterated. Why were they so casual? Why were they in so little of a rush?
She took a breath. She knew some things weren’t easily explained.
She waited until those people came into view. Until they were well within sight. Heard Jack’s breathing getting deeper. Like he was readying himself. Preparing himself.
But as far as she believed, he should’ve acted by now.
She looked at him. Frowned. “Jack?”
He looked back at her. Nodded.
Then he looked back at the rifle.
But then something happened.
Kelsie felt it before she heard it.
The creaking underneath her.
The wooden floor splitting.
And then tumbling down through the floorboards, down a floor, down to the room below.
The last thing Kelsie saw before she fell?
The Outsiders turning around, looking at the building they were in.
And raising their rifles at them as they surged towards the building.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-Four Hours to Go…
Kelsie slammed against the bottom floor of the house, baby Holly in her arms, and the first thing she thought of was that armed group of outsiders getting closer and closer to the building she was inside.
She rolled over. Her back was aching like mad, and she could taste blood in her mouth. But there was no time to hang around. She had to get back to her feet. She had to hide. Because there was absolutely no way the group outside hadn’t heard them fall through to the floor below. There was no way they weren’t coming over here to check on things right now.
She had to get to her feet, and she had to get out of here ASAP.
She struggled upright. Her ankle was sore, but not bad enough that she couldn’t walk on it. She looked around, scanned the room, tried to find the rest of her people.
She didn’t see anyone at first.
Then she saw Arya Jr. By her side. Barking.
Her heart picked up. She froze still. Because Arya Jr barking was only going to draw those people outside even more towards her.
“Ssh!” she said.
Outside, those footsteps getting closer.
“Arya,” she said. “Be quiet. Now!”
Then she heard something else.
Something that caught her attention more than Arya Jr.
She heard a shout.
A cry.
She froze. Turned around.
That’s when she saw her people.
Most were getting to their feet. Tate. Trev. Jack. All of them seemed fine. All of them seemed okay.
And then she saw Manuel, and her heart sank.
Manuel was on his back.
He hadn’t got up.
And there was a reason he hadn’t got up.
The sharp spiked remnants of the lamp in the middle of the room that Kelsie had spotted on her way up.
Manuel had fallen right onto it.
It had impaled him. Pierced straight through him.
He was lying on it, crying out, wailing, trying to hold the wound. Trying to stop the flow of blood.
And all this time, Kelsie could hear the voices outside.
She could hear the footsteps getting closer.
She knew time was running out.
She rushed to Manuel’s side. Put a hand on his shoulder. But that didn’t help. It just made him wince even more.
“We… we need to get you off there.”
He couldn’t speak. He just shook his head. Blood trickled from the side of his mouth.
Kelsie looked at his wound. Looked at the metal piercing through his chest. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all. And she felt bad for him. So bad for him. Because in the short time since she’d known him,
he’d looked out for her. He’d had her back.
He’d helped her get to where she was.
If it wasn’t for him, she wasn’t sure she’d still be here at all.
But she knew that this situation had an inevitable ending.
She swallowed a lump in her throat. Fought back the tears. “I’m… I’m so sorry.”
And for a moment he looked like he was going to stand up to her. For a moment, it looked like he was going to protest. Like he was going to beg for her help or something like that.
But a look of inevitability crossed his face. A look of acceptance.
And then he closed his eyes and he nodded, and as blood trickled from his lips, he forced a shaky smile.
“Go,” he said. “Go now.”
Kelsie felt the sickness in her gut. The determination to help Manuel. To stay by his side.
But she knew there was no more time.
She turned around and with the rest of her people, as the Outsiders got closer to the building, she ran through the house.
She ran towards the back. Ran to the first window, which was boarded up, as the footsteps echoed around.
And then she reached the second window, and she climbed out of it.
Helped Arya Jr out of it.
Helped everyone else out of it, and into the streets.
She went to run away when she heard a crack of a rifle.
Then another.
And as she stood there, tears beginning to flow, she knew what it was.
She knew what it meant.
She cleared her throat, took a deep breath, and then went to run.
“Kelsie?”
She stopped.
Saw Trev looking at her. Big shiny bruise on his forehead, but alive. Okay.
But he looked concerned about something.
“What?” she asked.
But then she realised.
Just as she asked the question, she realised.
“Gina,” Trev said. “She’s gone. She’s vanished.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Three and a Half Hours to Go…
It was another half an hour before Kelsie was far away from the site of the showdown that she felt safe enough to stop and run through everything that’d just gone down; everything she’d lost.
The clouds were thick now, but the weather was still humid and muggy. They’d walked off the coastal road and more into the suburbs. The suburbs felt like a jungle themselves now, in all truth. There was no boundary between the man-made and the natural anymore. The moss growing up the side of these buildings. The vines clawing through the smashed up windows, worming their way inside. Birds’ nests on the rusted remains of cars. Nature had merged with the man-made. It had reclaimed it.
But it was all going to go away, soon.
She looked back in the direction they’d come from. She couldn’t stop thinking about what happened back there. Manuel. The way he’d fallen through the ceiling. The way he’d landed so unfortunately on the sharpened spikes of the old lamp in that living room. The sheer pointlessness of it all.
But even more tragically… the way he’d been in pain. The way he’d resisted. The way he’d struggled to accept his fate at first.
And then the way he’d gulped, nodded, and accepted what was coming.
She could still hear the echoing of the gunshots in her mind. At least it was quick. At least it was over in no time.
But if Kelsie had learned something from that situation, it was that life was fragile. So fragile.
It could’ve happened to any one of their people.
It could’ve happened to her. To her baby.
They’d just been in the right place at the right time.
But there was something else pressing Kelsie, too. Something else bothering her.
And that was Gina.
She’d been with them. With them as they lay on that upper floor.
And then they’d fallen through, and she’d disappeared.
But the more she thought back, Kelsie wondered. Had Gina been on the upper floor with them all along? Sure, she was there for a minute. But maybe she’d snuck out when the rest of the group hadn’t been watching. Maybe she hadn’t fallen through to the floor below after all.
What did it matter, at the end of the day?
She was gone.
She’d disappeared.
And she was nowhere to be seen.
“We need to decide what we’re going to do next,” Jack said.
Kelsie looked at him. Looked at the rest of her people standing there, waiting. All looking knackered. All looking exhausted.
But all still here.
All still alive.
So all still ready to go.
“There’s nothing to decide,” Kelsie said. “We know where we need to go.”
“But Gina,” Jack said. “Are you sure we should move on without her? Are you sure… are you sure you’re ready to?”
Kelsie thought about Gina. The unfinished business between them. The anger she felt towards her. And how that anger was only going to multiply if it turned out she was lying to them.
And the unfinished business. That’s all it could be called.
She was still out there somewhere.
But then she thought about what she could do about it. And ultimately, there was nothing.
She took a deep breath. Looked back. Back towards the buildings, where she knew those people would be. The Outsiders.
And where she felt Gina would be, somewhere.
“Come on,” she said. “We’ve got a day left. We’d better get moving.”
And then she started to walk.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Gina watched Kelsie and her group drift into the distance, and she felt torn about the next step.
The clouds were thick and grey. It felt like they were going to burst open at any moment. To rain down on them, heavy, unforgiving.
But Gina didn’t care. She didn’t care about the weather or anything like that.
She only cared about getting to Grange-over-Sands as quickly as she possibly could.
Because there was something there for her.
Not in Heysham, sure.
But not much further down the road.
She rubbed her hands against her arms, thought about the lie she’d told. She felt bad. And she knew that if she’d stayed with Kelsie and her people, they wouldn’t have forgiven her. They’d have found her out somewhere along the way.
There might not be anything waiting in Heysham, like she’d promised.
And she felt bad about that. Guilty beyond belief.
But there was something in Grange-over-Sands.
And that’s where she was heading.
That’s the direction she was going in.
The same direction as Kelsie and her people, sure.
Which was why she had to hold back.
She thought about why she’d said what she’d said. Why she hadn’t just been honest about Grange-over-Sands. But then she guessed she’d done it because she wanted something on Kelsie and the rest of her people. She wanted some extra information.
She didn’t want Kelsie and her people to fall. She especially didn’t want that beautiful baby to fall.
She just wanted to have something on the others so there was a reason to keep her alive.
She waited until Kelsie and her people were gone from view. Waited until she was certain the armed group was gone, too. And then she stood up and took a deep breath. It hurt her chest a little, sure. But she wasn’t as weak as she’d been letting on. Her fall into unconsciousness, that hadn’t been totally… well, legitimate.
She was fine enough to walk.
And she was relieved they’d left her alone. Because at the end of the day, she only had one destination in mind now.
She was going to make her way towards her destination.
Towards Grange-over-Sands.
Into the unknown.
If she ran into Kelsie and her people o
n the road… so be it.
But if she didn’t…
She felt the numbness taking over her after what’d happened to her.
After what she’d lost.
And she thought of a world that didn’t have all these old reminders of her old self in it.
She thought of a world where she could wake up and not have to think about the people she’d done awful things to, living, surviving.
But more than anything, knowing who she was.
What she was.
She cleared her throat, took a deep breath.
Then she went to walk.
She felt a momentary speck of guilt, right in the middle of her chest.
Then she pushed it away, repressed it in that same place all of her darkest memories resided, and she walked.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Eighteen Hours to Go…
They had been walking for hours when Kelsie finally dropped to her knees.
It was late afternoon. It was summer, so the sun would stay up for a while yet. But there was still sadness seeing it make its descent. Because this could be the last time they ever witnessed this. This could be the last time Kelsie and baby Holly saw the sun crawl across the sky.
And this probably was the last time Britain—as they knew it—would see it.
She thought about all the people still surviving here. All the people who had no idea of what was coming for them. No idea just how much everything was going to change.
And she couldn’t help feeling total sadness.
She fell to the ground. Smacked her head against it. She heard shuffling right away. People rushing towards her, baby Holly in her arms.
It was Tate who rolled her onto her back.
“Kelsie?” he said. “You’re not well.”
He was right, of course. She wasn’t well. She knew why it was, too. Her blood sugar. Her diabetes. It was playing up.
She ignored him, though, pushed herself back to her feet. She was still dizzy, though, still uneasy. But she grounded herself. Steadied herself. “I’m fine.”
“Really?” Tate said. She could see the concern on his face. The rest of the group was up ahead. All of them looked concerned, too. “You’re really going to stick by the ‘I’m okay’ story?”