‘She isn’t feeling well, Alice,’ their father answered.
‘I want her here,’ Alice said.
‘Yes, but that’s not possible tonight, Alice. I’m here, though. And so is Max, who, as I’ve already reminded you, is our guest.’
‘Hello, Alice.’
Lily scowled at Max’s familiar, unpleasant voice.
‘Can I be excused?’ Alice said quickly, ignoring Max. ‘I don’t feel well either. I want to go and lie down in my room and I want to see Lily. She needs something for her arm.’
‘No, Alice. Max wants to talk to you,’ Pym said, his voice impatient.
‘What about?’
‘About you, Alice.’ There was some kind of scuffling and their father said angrily, ‘Be nice, Alice.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s not very accommodating, is she?’ Max said in his greasy voice.
‘I want Mum!’ Alice said.
Lily could hear that she was on the verge of tears. Lily reached down and grasped the step below. She pulled and felt herself sliding further down. She didn’t know what she could achieve in her partially paralysed state, but she knew she had to get into the dining room with Alice. Maybe she could speak up in support of her sister.
‘I’ll take her now, that’s the best thing,’ Max said.
‘Take me where?’ Alice screeched.
‘Keep quiet and do as I say,’ Max said sharply.
Alice started sobbing hysterically.
‘Maybe we should do this another time, Max?’ Pym said.
It sounded to Lily as if her father was pleading with Max. Alice must have heard it, too.
‘Dad,’ Alice cried pitifully. ‘Don’t make me go with him.’
‘I’m sorry, Alice. You have to, there’s no choice. Do as Max tells you. I’m sorry,’ Pym said again.
‘Come,’ Max ordered.
Alice must have been putting up a fight because Lily could hear the sound of a commotion.
‘Dad, Mum. Mum!’Alice screamed. ‘I’m not going with you, you can’t make me. I’m not going!’
‘Oh, yes you are, my girl,’ Max said. He sounded furious.
‘Alice!’ Lily yelled. Her voice was cracked and high.
Her father appeared at the foot of the stairs, his face filled with rage at the sight of Lily.
He leaned down and struck her hard across the face. ‘You’re only making it worse,’ he said, turning away.
When Lily came around she was in her own bed again. The drip had been reinserted and there were people outside her door.
‘… yes, but I never thought I’d see her again, doctor,’ Megan was saying.
‘Well, don’t get used to having her around.’ The voice was harsh and deep.
Blacktrooper, Lily thought with a shudder.
‘She’s missed her medication,’ the Blacktrooper voice said. ‘As soon as she’s stabilised, we’re taking her. I’ve given her something …’
Lily opened her mouth, but no sound came. The room seemed to spin. Another Blacktrooper was hunching over the dressing table, fiddling with something. He turned and Lily saw he held a large syringe. He wasn’t wearing a helmet and she saw his head was shaved. A stethoscope hung around his neck. He stepped towards her and leaned in to insert the needle into the tube. She lifted her arm and tried to clench her fists and twist her body to resist the injection. It was no use.
‘Lily’s first thought was that they were finally killing her. More Blacktroopers entered the room, two of them wheeling a trolley. Her parents weren’t with them. The Blacktroopers lifted her roughly onto the trolley, strapped her in and covered her with a sheet. Like a corpse, she thought.
They took her from the house and loaded her into a van, which lurched off at alarming speed.
Lily had no real sense of time, but it seemed the van stopped after only ten minutes or so. A female Blacktrooper turned her roughly onto her stomach, unhooked her drip and shifted her onto yet another trolley. More Blacktroopers appeared and unloaded the trolley from the van. They wheeled her into a large building and down a metal passageway into a cavernous space. Still on her stomach, they spread Lily’s arms and reconnected the drip.
Lily tried to roll onto her back, but she was completely immobilised. She was splayed out and strapped down. Her neck was bent upwards so she faced a high bank of low-slung screens that lined the inside walls of the room. What was this place? Lily made another frantic effort to move, but her muscles refused to respond. She couldn’t speak either, let alone scream. She couldn’t even close her eyes as her eyelids were somehow fixed open. She rolled her eyes from side to side, desperately trying to work out where she was and what was happening to her.
The worst thing was the noise. Lily stared in horror at the screens, which showed awful scenes of violence. After a few minutes Lily noticed a pattern. Without exception, the scenes showed teenagers attacking older people. The teenagers, armed with baseball bats, iron bars, bricks and all manner of other weapons, were attacking and beating the older people until they were knocked down and lay still. There was a lot of blood. It wasn’t just one group of teenagers either; or one group of older people; there were dozens of scenes, all showing different groups. The only similarity was that all the attacks took place outside and it was always younger people perpetrating the violence.
There was no Wall in the images on the screens. The footage must have been taken more than twelve years ago, before the Wall was built. This was confirmed by the occasional glimpses of the harbour that appeared in the scenes. Lily saw flashes of landmarks that no longer existed – huge chunks of foreshore edged with the grand mansions that must be underwater by now because of rising sea levels caused by the warming.
Lily wished she could look away, but the violence was always there in her peripheral vision; constant, brutal movement, bright flashes of blood and steel, the looks of terror on the victims’ faces.
Whoever was running this place obviously wanted to make the point that young people were vicious and violent. Maybe they were trying to justify what they were doing to teenagers now. You killed us once, so we’ll kill you now, they seemed to be saying.
Lily concentrated on what she could see, apart from the screens. In front and around her were five other trolleys with people lying on them. Lily got the sense from the way the screen noise echoed that the place was huge and there were perhaps hundreds of other people being held captive like her.
Those she could see were laid out on trolley’s in the same way as she was – on their stomachs, arms stretched out in a crucifix position and supported on metal planks. Like Lily, they all wore white hospital gowns and white sheets covered the lower part of their bodies. Suspended above each person was a metal box with tubes and drains coming out of it, some of them attached to the person and some just hanging. Next to each trolley were metal trays, but Lily couldn’t see what was on them.
The thing that frightened Lily the most was the tubes coming out of people’s heads. Thickly coiled tubes were connected at the base of their skulls and looped up and over metal stands. The tubes fed into transparent bags and from there into metal boxes. The bags and tubes Lily could see seemed to be empty, for now.
There was no feeling in her body so she had no idea whether she also had a tube attached to the base of her skull. She could see in her side vision that she did have tubes running into her hands and arms.
Lily tried not to panic. She thought about Daniel. Maybe he was here too, lying on a trolley somewhere in this place. She had to find a way to free herself and either find Daniel or get out of here. She had already squandered her first chance at freedom.
It was almost impossible to concentrate with the screens blaring in her face, but she told herself to calm down and think. She tried to draw on all those years of silence in her parents’ house.
‘Hello, Lily,’ a woman said. She stood by Lily’s bed. Her voice was pleasant.
Being unable to turn her head, Lily could only see the woman’s b
ody. She was wearing a sharply ironed navy-blue uniform with a brown belt cinched around a tiny waist. The woman’s hands were encased in pale-green gloves which she had pulled over her sleeve cuffs.
‘I am your carer for today,’ the woman said affably. ‘It’s time to drain you.’
Drain me? Lily strained to move her body; to get away.
‘There’s no point trying anything like that,’ the woman said crisply. ‘You won’t succeed. My advice is to lie still while I’m working on you.’ She reached up and pulled at something. A metal tray appeared in Lily’s peripheral vision. The woman prodded at the drains and tubes that ran into Lily’s arm. Every now and then she reached upwards, but Lily couldn’t see what she was doing.
‘All seems to be in order,’ the woman said.
Lily felt an uncomfortable, wrong sensation beginning at the back of her head, along with an ache similar to that which had come with the headaches she’d been getting.
The woman was humming tunelessly. She sounded like a buzz saw and Lily wanted to scream at her.
Another woman appeared at the side of the trolley that was diagonally in front of Lily’s. A boy with reddish curly hair lay on the trolley. At least Lily thought it was a boy. It was hard to tell. The woman also wore a navy uniform so Lily figured she must be a carer, too. Lily watched in revulsion as a thick, yellowish fluid surged out of the boy’s head and into the tube. It oozed along the spiral tube, pulsing slightly.
This has to be harvesting, Lily thought. And they’re doing it to me, too.
‘All done,’ the carer said eventually. She pushed the metal tray up again and fiddled with something out of Lily’s line of sight. Lily caught a fleeting glimpse of the carer holding a plastic bag filled with the same yellowish fluid Lily had seen coming from the boy across the aisle
NINE
They never turned the lights off in the place, so night blended into day. The screens flashed and blared out their violent video clips, making it almost impossible to sleep. Lily suspected she and the other young people on the trolleys were being kept awake intentionally. She figured it had something to do with the harvesting. Maybe if they kept them awake and stimulated, there was more to harvest.
The draining happened at what felt like regular intervals. The people who ran this place had obviously worked out how long they had to wait before the yellow fluid was replenished and could be harvested again.
Lily figured the drugs that were being pumped into her arm were keeping her immobilised. But at least they also anaesthetised the pain.
Although painless, the draining was terrible. Every time the carers came to perform the procedure, Lily’s eyesight dimmed. It always returned, but it took longer every time and Lily had the strongest sense that the harvesting was ageing her. After each draining, she felt sick with exhaustion, as if she’d run a string of marathons.
Her fears were compounded by what she saw happening to the red-haired boy on the trolley opposite her. She noticed that his hair, which had been so vivid when she had first seen him, was becoming increasingly pale. It was as if whatever they were doing to him was sucking the pigment out of him.
Lily also noticed that the boy’s skin was drier than when she’d first arrived. Bits of skin occasionally flaked off, as if he’d been over-exposed to the sun. She watched the skin shrivel and drop down beneath his trolley. Her own skin felt dry and taut.
She was also pretty sure the boy’s finger joints were swelling. They were bulging out at each knuckle and his forefinger was bending inwards. Lily remembered Meredith’s hands with the bulbous joints and deformed fingers.
The ‘carers’ were draining the life right out of all of them.
Lily tried to think how long she’d been in the place. She counted the drainings. She’d had thirty-six of them. Supposing they did four a day – and she was just guessing – that meant she’d been here for about nine days.
Even without a distinction between night and day, Lily thought it was safe to assume that the periods when fewer people worked were nights. During the ‘day’ the place teemed with carers. Lily stored this meagre piece of information in case she needed it for her escape, because she sure as hell planned to escape, no matter what.
On what Lily thought might be the tenth day, two carers stopped at the red-headed boy’s trolley. Working quickly, they unhooked the drains and tubes from his arm. Then they pulled out the tube that ran into the back of his head. Dark blood oozed out of the hole left by the tube. One of the carers pressed a wad of something onto the wound and taped it in place while the other coiled up the tubes, placed them on the metal tray and pushed the tray upwards where it fitted neatly underneath the metal box. The carers folded the boy’s arms along his body, swung the metal planks against the trolley and then wheeled him away.
Lily forced her unwilling body to twist around so she could see where they were taking him. She managed to move her head fractionally to the right. It was just enough to see the lines of people lying on trolley’s exactly like her, with tubes piercing their heads, thinner tubes and drains running in and out of their bodies, metal trays bearing vials and implements and strange metal boxes with more tubes coming out of them. Lily took it all in avidly, storing information about numbers of people, carers and drainage stations in the file in her brain marked ‘Escape’.
She saw the carers inserting the red-headed boy’s trolley between two others further down the hall. Then her vision was obstructed.
‘Time for your procedure, Lily,’ a female carer said. ‘What you’re doing is a fine thing,’ she added, out of the blue. ‘You are giving life. You should be proud.’
No one asked me. I don’t want to give away my life, Lily thought bitterly.
As the draining began, the edges of Lily’s sight became grey. The greyness was taking longer to go away with each new procedure. Lily thought with panic that eventually she would go blind, the moisture would leave her skin like it had with the red-headed boy and she would crumble into ash.
Lily had to find a way out. She had to find Daniel. She had to get back over the Wall now that she knew there were people over there like Kieran and Ingie and Ric who might help her.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a loud crash. The carer froze. Lily strained to turn her head. The video screens went blank and there was a momentary echoing silence before loud voices started up.
A person flashed past Lily and the carer let out a howl and fell. Lily saw that a deep cut ran from the woman’s hairline down to her left eyebrow and blood was pouring from it. Lily felt a surge of dark satisfaction. As the woman fell, Lily saw her properly for the first time. The skin on her face was firm and youthful. Her blue eyes were clear, but her neck was wrinkled, with furrows running from chin to collarbone.
‘We’ll have you out of here in no time,’ said a boy about Lily’s age who appeared suddenly beside her trolley. His hair was ginger and frizzy, standing out in a shock. There was some old bruising around his left eye.
‘I’m Merrick,’ he said. ‘We have to move quickly.’
Lily was having trouble focussing.
‘This may hurt,’ the boy said, grabbing the tube at the back of Lily’s head. A burning rush of pain radiated across her head and she passed out. When she came around, she was lying on the floor and Merrick was injecting her with something.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘it’s just an antidote that I nicked from them. It’ll hurt, but should do the job with the paralysis.’ He glanced around and shouted to someone nearby. There were screams and the sounds of scuffles, then a rapid thumping of feet and three more people appeared behind Merrick.
‘How many are we taking?’ one of them said, a girl. Blood trickled from her forehead, tracing a lurid pattern across her face. She tossed away a metal bar and it clanked to the floor.
‘This one,’ Merrick replied. ‘And two others from the resting section. That’s all we can manage.’
‘She’s bleeding heavily.’ The girl leaned towards Lily for a clos
er look. ‘Is she worth taking?’
‘Have a heart, Sal,’ Merrick said. ‘She’s coming. End of story.’
A loud alarm started up. Lily reached up to cover her ears. Her arms moved as if under water, but at least they moved. Lily looked at her fingers, flexing them. They’d left her bracelet on.
‘It’s okay, er … Lily.’ Merrick twisted his head to read the nametag on her trolley. ‘Everyone has that reaction. Can’t believe they’re alive, can’t believe they can move again. You’ll just have to take it slowly.’ He hoisted her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
Lily didn’t have the neck strength to raise her head, so it was impossible to see where they were going or who was following. Liquid ran down her cheeks into her eyes and mouth and she tasted blood.
‘Halt!’ An amplified voice echoed through the building.
‘Blacktroopers,’ Merrick said.
Lily heard heavy footfalls and furious shouts.
‘Their system must be up and running again,’ Merrick said. ‘Let’s go.’
Using the trolleys to shield them and gripping Lily tightly, Merrick scurried a short way along the wall to where the silent screens were and then ducked down what looked to Lily like a metal-lined passageway with barred doors at one end. Merrick punched a series of numbers into a glowing keypad and the steel doors swung open. The girl called Sal, who was also carrying someone over her shoulder, jostled behind them as Merrick darted into the hot outside air.
They slipped behind one of three bug-like, armoured Blacktrooper vehicles parked against an outside wall. Lily looked up at the building. It was enormous, as she’d suspected. The walls were high and windowless. She couldn’t even see all the way up to the roof.
‘They probably won’t shoot,’ Merrick said to Lily. ‘Not while we have you. They usually don’t like to risk losing someone they’ve cultivated for harvesting.’
He had moved them out of the shelter of the vehicles and was now sprinting across an expanse of concrete. The light and heat reflecting off the ground momentarily blinded Lily and she couldn’t imagine how hard it must be for Merrick, who was bearing her weight as well. She bounced and bumped on Merrick’s shoulders, watching Sal running beside them, carrying a thin boy in a white gown. Then her bracelet began screaming.
Days Like This Page 9