Vicky sat down and Serj pushed a plate with a bun on it and a cup of water across the white Formica surface to her. Piotr offered her a tight-lipped smile, but Flynn completely ignored her.
“It’s scary, isn’t it?” Vicky said to Scoop as she watched Meisha join some people at another table. “She’s growing up so quickly.”
Scoop beamed a smile at her.
“You must be so proud.”
“She’s a strong young woman,” Scoop said. “Although, she’s not always been that way. It’s how I got my nickname, you know?”
A bite on the rough bread and Vicky chewed it. Bland, but it filled a hole. What she’d give for some jam. She pushed the half-chewed bread to the side of her mouth and smiled as she said, “You mean you weren’t christened Scoop?”
Scoop laughed. “When Meisha was a kid, all she’d say to me was scoop, scoop, scoop.” As she looked off into the distance, Scoop smiled and her eyes lost focus. “She wanted me to pick her up, as in scoop her up.”
“And you always did,” Serj said.
A heavy sigh and Scoop nodded. “Yep, I always did.”
“That’s probably why she’s so confident now,” Vicky said, taking another bite of the plain bread. “You gave her what she needed as a kid. That’s gotta set her up for being a well-balanced adult, right? They know how loved they are and that makes them secure.”
A glance over at the table with her daughter and Scoop’s stare glazed with tears. “I’ve tried my best.” She laughed and dabbed the corners of her eyes. “My God, look at me! Becoming a mum has made me so soft.”
Vicky smiled again. After the night she’d had, Scoop had just shown her exactly what she needed to see. “You’re clearly a great mum.”
“Anyway,” Scoop said, “how are you? You look tired. You’re normally the first one in here.”
“I had a rough night.” The image of the family in the cage snapped through her mind and it took all she had not to flinch.
Silence hung for a second as if the group wanted more information from her, but Vicky didn’t give it.
Serj finally spoke. “Right, I need to see all of your keys. We need to do regular checks to make sure none of them have gone missing.”
One by one, they all pulled their keys from beneath their shirts. Although Vicky had intended for the shoelaces to be used by Flynn, she smiled to see everyone else had adopted the idea too.
Serj checked them all and nodded. “Good. I’ll change the locks when I have to, but I’d like to do it as little as possible.”
Stifling a yawn as best as she could, Vicky clamped her jaw shut and watched her world blur in front of her as her eyes welled up. Heavy limbs, heavy eyelids, slow thoughts …
Before Vicky could drift off into a daydream, a scream cut through the place, silencing everyone in the busy area and forcing each head to turn to the entranceway.
A short woman of about five feet four inches screamed again. Her cry rang so shrill it sent stabbing pains into Vicky’s ears, and her shoulders tensed in response. She recognised the woman as Sharon Blythe. She’d never seen her cause a fuss before.
Dan—Sharon’s husband—stood next to her. Although he didn’t shout, he looked equally as distressed.
Serj stood up and called over at them, “What’s wrong?”
“They’ve taken them!” Sharon shouted.
“Who’s been taken?” Serj said. “What are you talking about?”
“Our children! They’re gone!”
Ice ran through Vicky’s veins and she searched the room as if the children would appear. Most people watched the parents with their jaws hanging loose.
“Gone where?” Serj said.
It seemed like a stupid question to Vicky, but she probably wouldn’t have asked anything better.
Dan stroked his wife’s back as he spoke. “We took them out with us this morning to clean the solar panels.” He turned to Vicky and his voice broke when he raised it. “You said we should get them used to the outside. Well, we tried to do that and now they’ve been taken from us.”
Fire spread through Vicky’s cheeks and her pulse sped up, but she didn’t reply to him.
“They’ve taken all three of them?” Serj said.
One of the reasons why Serj made a better leader than Vicky ever could … he knew the people. He remembered who they all were and how many children they had. He remembered names and minor details. She knew they had kids, but she couldn’t remember how many or their genders, let alone their ages. They were young, that much she knew. The youngest was maybe a boy.
“Who took them?” Serj said.
Dan drew a deep breath. “Three men and two women. They knew they had us outnumbered. They got between us and the kids. They had weapons and said they were taking them. We couldn’t do anything about it. Three of them held us in one place.” He rubbed the swelling on his face. “They whacked me and told us to stay put while the other two took the kids away. They said the kids would have a chance at surviving if we didn’t resist.”
“Do you know where they’ve taken them?” Vicky said.
“How the fuck would I know?” Dan shook as he shouted. His eyes brimmed with tears and a large vein raised on his forehead. “Do you think I’d be here if I knew that?”
“I’m just asking so we can help.”
“You’ve helped enough. None of this would have happened if we hadn’t taken them outside.”
Vicky wanted to respond—especially as she felt most of the people turn to look at her—but she kept her mouth shut. They had every right to be upset, and she couldn’t say anything to change that. Instead, she stood up and headed for one of the corridors out of the canteen. Her footsteps registered as the only sound in the silence.
“Where are you going?” Serj asked. His voice echoed through the cavernous room.
“I’m going to get some weapons and then I’m going to rescue the kids. No way are they taking people from this place. No fucking way.”
Although Vicky didn’t look back around, she didn’t need to; the sound of action behind her clearly came from the guards mobilising. They were in this together.
Chapter Seventeen
Vicky left Home and didn’t close the door because the four other guards followed her out. The second she stepped into the warm June sun, she turned around and walked up the hill the door had been built into. She only had one place in her mind: Moira’s community. Although what she’d do when she got there …
At the top of the short hill, Vicky looked over the field of solar panels. A sea of black, it always awed her no matter how many times she saw it. How it had remained untouched for so many years … Surely someone had designs to destroy them.
Vicky kept a few steps ahead of the rest of the guards, weaving quickly through the panels as sweat lifted on her face from the combination of effort and heat. The grass had been well trodden from where the residents of Home went outside more often. Although, if she hadn’t insisted on it in the first place, the kids would still be okay.
Once through the solar panels, Vicky walked for a few minutes before she saw the next short incline. Butterflies fluttered through her chest. The other side of it plunged down to Moira’s fenced-in complex.
A deep breath and Vicky smelled pollen in the air. Never being one for hay fever, she remembered seeing people at this time of year dripping in snot. Although not so much now; maybe it had more to do with pesticides than it did pollen.
The ground on the small hill sat as lumpy and calloused as it did outside Moira’s community. Vicky didn’t slow down as she scaled it, checking the knife on her hip as she went.
When Vicky crested the top, the sight in front of her drove a mule’s kick to her stomach and she stumbled back. A second later, her legs gave way and she crashed down hard against the lumpy ground.
Before the rest of the guards could follow her up, Vicky raised a palm at them and shouted, “Stop!” Although she’d aimed it at all of them, she meant it for Flynn. He didn’t n
eed to see this.
The guards did as she instructed.
Turning back to face Moira’s community, Vicky’s head spun. “W-wait there. Just wait there,” she called to the others.
Although Vicky had mobilised quickly, she clearly hadn’t done it quickly enough. Why hadn’t she headed straight out? In the time it had taken her to get to the weapons room and cross the small distance between the two communities, this had happened.
A look at the three forms—the backdrop of Moira’s brutal complex behind them—and Vicky cried uncontrollably. All three of them had been crucified.
“How could they do this to kids?” Piotr said.
When Vicky looked to either side, she saw all of the guards had made their way up, even Flynn. Sadness, rage, and guilt swirled within her and formed a tight ball in her guts. She directed it all at Flynn. “I told you to stop. What are you doing? Why don’t you ever listen to me?”
“I’m not the only one who didn’t listen to you.” Flynn looked at Piotr, but the large Russian didn’t get involved. He clearly knew when to shut the fuck up.
“I’m getting fed up with it, Flynn. You chuck your weight around all the time and forget you’re only sixteen. Why do you continue to disregard everything I say to you?”
The sides of Flynn’s jaw widened and eased from where he clamped and then relaxed it, but he didn’t respond. And maybe he’d been right to hold it in. They didn’t need a row at that moment.
“Look,” Scoop said as she walked toward one of the corpses. He appeared to be the eldest of the three. Vicky didn’t know his name.
He had some kind of letter attached to him, nailed through his chest bone with a rusty six-inch nail. At first, Vicky had only glanced at the bodies, but now she looked again, she saw their hands and feet dripping fresh blood from where they’d been recently nailed up. She saw each child had had their eyes gouged out. Streaks of red ran down their faces as if to recreate the diseased look. Huge crude holes had also been dug into their chests, and their hearts had been removed.
Before Vicky could ask Scoop what the letter said, her head spiralled out of control, her stomach bucked, and a hot rush of thick and acidic vomit exploded from her.
Chapter Eighteen
Vicky wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve and spat the bilious taste of vomit away from her. A line of stringy bile caught on her bottom lip and dribbled down her chin. She wiped for a second time and spat again, her stomach still churning at the sight in front of her.
The wind on the hill picked up and tousled the children’s hair, animating the now permanently inanimate. It also tossed the letter nailed into the kid’s chest, forcing Scoop to grab it in a pinch as she read it aloud. “This is what happens when you break free. We never had any beef with the people of Home, but she’s mugged us off by breaking out. Now we’re coming for all of you.”
All of the guards looked at Vicky.
It took for Serj to speak up to break the silence. “It’s okay; no one blames you. I know I would have busted out given half the chance and I’m sure everyone here would have too.”
All of the guards nodded.
Serj pointed down the hill, his hair covering his eyes from where the wind caught it. “That community has been allowed to exist for far too long. We need to put a stop to it. All you’ve done is force our hand.”
Vicky swallowed and nodded several times before she found her voice. Even Serj—their leader in name only—looked at her for their next move. “We need to pull those kids down,” she said, her voice echoing in her mind as the ramifications of her actions glared at her from six bloody eye sockets. She winced to stare back at them. “As grim as they look, Sharon and Dan need their bodies back to bury them.”
***
The crucifixes both came down and came apart easily. The guards—under Vicky’s instruction—laid the three upright bars in a row and then tied the smaller horizontal bars across them. It looked like the start of a raft. They had enough twine from taking them apart to make it work.
The three kids lay with the contours of the stretcher like thinly sliced bacon on a griddle pan. Far from level because of the crossbars, their malleable little bodies showed just how lifeless they were. It would be a while yet before rigor mortis kicked in.
None of the guards spoke as they carried the kids back. Other than the sound of the wind and the crunch of their feet through the long grass, they walked in silence. Vicky continued to stare straight ahead as she and Serj led the way at the front of the stretcher. She scanned their surroundings for signs of the diseased and Moira’s army.
Scoop, Piotr, and Flynn walked behind Vicky and she heard at least two of them crying. She didn’t look back to find out who. A hard lump like broken glass had balled in her own throat. She’d only just managed to stop crying; if she looked at them, it would set her off again.
After they’d passed through the solar panel field, they descended the small slope towards Home’s entrance.
“So …” Serj said, “shall we show them the note?”
Vicky shrugged when the others looked at her. “Show them. They deserve to see it.”
Chapter Nineteen
“So this is all her fault?” Dan said, the letter shaking in his hand as he glared at Vicky. “They killed our children to get back at her?”
What did Vicky expect? The note said why they’d done it. Ultimately, their children had died because of her. Had she not escaped, then Moira’s community wouldn’t have sought retribution. At least, that was what the letter said.
Instead of replying, Vicky looked down at the dead children on the ground in the flat grass. They’d done their best to trample it before they removed the bodies from the stretcher. She looked at the dark red holes where their eyes should have been. She looked at the cavities in their small chests. A rock of a lump rose up in her throat, but she gulped it back down. What right did she have to grieve?
Vicky drew a deep breath and looked at the gathered crowd outside of Home. Her stomach turned over and her heart fluttered to be the focus of so much rage. Would she become a pariah in the community? A Jonah that needed to be thrown overboard? At least thirty adults and as many children, they all stared at her. Given half a chance, many of them looked like they’d end her where she stood. Then she saw Stuart. The man offered her a tight-lipped smile. At least she had one person on her side.
Serj stepped towards Dan, the long grass up past his knees. “Now that’s unfair,” he said. “What would you have done in Vicky’s situation? Would you have stayed in the community and accepted death when you had a chance to get away?”
The tension in Dan’s jaw made it look like he could bite through steel. He didn’t reply to Serj; instead he addressed Vicky again. “If it saved the life of my children, then yes.”
Scoop—who comforted a distraught Meisha—let go of her daughter and moved forward. “Look, Dan, I know you’re hurt. Of course you’re hurt—”
“Let me ask you something, Scoop,” Dan said, the wind blowing his loose-fitting shirt.
Scoop froze and looked at him.
“How would you feel if that—” he pointed down at the brutalised corpses of his three children “—if that was Meisha? What would you do if you saw her like that?” The June sunshine made his tear-sodden cheeks glisten.
As much as Scoop looked like she wanted to reply, she didn’t. Instead, she shivered and moved close to Meisha again.
Sharon stood over her children’s bodies the entire time. She clamped her hands to the bottom half of her face. While shaking her head, she rocked on the spot and muttered something to herself that Vicky couldn’t understand. She then kneeled down, tore a strip from her jumper, and wiped at the eyes of her youngest. The blood had already dried against his cheeks, so she licked the makeshift cloth—zero regard for the red stain already on it—and went again at cleaning him up. No doubt she’d do the same for the other two.
The silence seemed to last an age before Dan threw his arms up in the
air and addressed Scoop again. “So you have nothing to say? I know you’d be exactly the same as I am now, yet you expect us to accept it?”
“I’m not saying accept it,” Scoop said, “but I would have done what Vicky did were I in her situation. How could she possibly think her escaping would mean Moira’s community would do this to your children? In what world does that logic make sense?”
For the first time since coming out of Home and seeing her children, a flash of clarity ran across Sharon’s otherwise washed-out features. She looked up from the ground, her long blonde hair dancing in the breeze as she spoke with an unnaturally calm tone. “All I know is we’ve lived in Home for close to a decade now, and we’ve never had a run-in with this community before.” She levelled a stare at Vicky that cut to her core. “Now she comes here, and we’re in a war. How many more children will die? Why don’t we just give her up and be done with it?”
Piotr spoke this time. “You think that will work? You think they’ll let this go now?”
But Sharon had gone again. The glaze had returned to her eyes and she shook her head at her mutilated children as an indecipherable stream of garbled nonsense issued from her mouth.
A rip opened into a chasm inside Vicky as she watched the broken mother. Although not a parent, she’d cared for a little one. She knew what it meant to fear for their safety. No one should outlive their child; it went against the natural order of things.
Movement flashed through Vicky’s peripheral vision. When she spun to face it, she saw Dan had been knocked to the ground and Flynn sat on top of him. A large chunk of brick lay a few feet away from them.
Flynn raised his fist and gritted his teeth as he glared down at the man. But before he could swing for him, Vicky darted forward and put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t.” She tugged on Flynn’s arm and encouraged him to his feet.
Although Flynn came with her, Vicky had to pull hard to move him. Still breathing heavily, Flynn twisted away from her and continued to lean over Dan, both of his fists clenched and his face red. “Have you seen the community they had Vicky trapped in?”
The Alpha Plague (Book 6) Page 7