In the near vicinity, I heard footsteps on wet tarmac—definitely not my imagination. The woman suddenly sprinted out from behind the back of a car and bolted toward us, careening into me as she tried to make herself invisible in the shadowed nook. Her eyes were wild as she looked at me and placed a finger to her lips, beseeching our continued silence.
She was younger than me, in her teens still, with long blonde hair soaking wet and plastered to her pale face.
When the footsteps became louder, she stiffened and whimpered. A bright beam of light flashed into the street then, from one side to the other.
“Claire?” It was a man’s voice, gruff but gentle. “C’mon, Claire-bear, talk to us.”
The torchlight found us.
The girl—Claire—stared at me, shivering. “I shouldn’t have run!” she croaked. “Or…was I was supposed to run? I can’t remember!”
She hit the side of her head a few times with her fist in an act of frustration and then, just like that, she stepped back out into the road and waved at whoever was pursuing her.
“I’m sorry!” she yelled at them, clutching her head. “Don’t make me sleep, please.”
My fingertips dug deeply into Nate’s arm as I gripped it hard, reeling from the inexplicable scene that played out before us.
Two men, both of them tall and stocky, edged toward her slowly like she was a startled deer who might scarper from them any minute. She held her hands up, her chest rising and falling rapidly.
“I’m sorry,” she sniveled again and then swung her arm out in our direction. “But, look at what I found!”
She pointed to us with a trembling finger and then turned back to the two men. “Don’t put me to sleep though, yeh?”
The man on the right glanced at us. “Well done, Claire-bear,” he said.
His hand went under his jacket, producing a dark object which he then pointed at the girl.
It was a gun.
Nate instinctively lunged forward and aimed his rifle at the man, who didn’t even flinch. In fact, a low chuckle escaped from his throat.
“Calm down. It’s just a tranquilizer gun. See?”
He then turned from us abruptly and shot Claire in the chest.
She screeched but didn’t fall.
Nate stepped forward again, his finger curling around the trigger of the rifle. “What the hell is going on here?”
Gulping down my fear, I managed to will my shuddering legs to move into a position beside Nate.
“Stay back, Halley!” he snapped, but I stayed where I was.
The man with the dart gun re-aimed it toward Nate. “Put the rifle down, mate, and we’ll talk about this, yeh?”
At that moment, Claire stumbled forward and lowered herself to the ground, dizzily. The second man went over to her and propped her up against one of the cars.
“Sleep tight,” he muttered, pulling something off his belt and holding it up to his mouth. It was a walkie-talkie. “Need some help here, we’re on Brompton,” he said into it as it crackled and whined.
“Be there in two,” came the muffled reply.
More people. We’d soon be outnumbered, which felt like an extraordinary thing to be, considering only half-hour ago we thought were the only two people on the southeast coast.
Nate held the rifle steady. “Put yours down first,” he called out.
The man with the dart gun nodded in compliance, but instead of lowering his weapon, he suddenly leaped sideways and fired it. The dart caught Nate in his left shoulder and forced him to drop the rifle to the ground. He pulled the dart from his skin and clutched the area where he’d gotten hit. I desperately tried to hold him up, but there was nothing I could do to stop him from falling to his knees.
The man casually walked over to us; the gun now aimed at me.
“Please,” Nate mumbled, ‘Don’t…hurt…her.’ His voice faltered until he lapsed into unconsciousness.
I kneeled next to Nate’s limp body and cradled his head, shock rushing over my body and rendering me completely numb.
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think.
The gun clicked as it fired again.
A sharp, burning pain seared across my collarbone as the dart’s metal tip pierced my skin. I fought hard against the sedative, holding onto Nate as tightly as I could until the effect of the tranquilizer sent my head into a fog and I passed out.
****
Before…
The leaves on the trees had only just begun to turn to their fiery autumnal shades when Rebecca began hanging up Christmas decorations. The cottage ceiling was adorned with shiny metallic stars and lanterns, spinning on their strings every time the slightest draft wafted through. Each day, at least one of them fell and had to be stuck up again with an even bigger blob of tac than before.
Insisting we hand-make paper chains, I spent several days cutting out strips of paper and then haphazardly applying glue and glitter until it was a suitable level of tacky.
Sometimes, I spelled out swear words with sticky gems—a passive-aggressive demonstration against the art project I’d been forced to participate in. It was childish and stupid, but it made me smile.
Although October by Rebecca’s calendar, this was to be our first Christmas, post-apocalypse, almost a year since the outbreak began. Not that it mattered to me what day or month it was because every day was mostly the same.
Wake up, have breakfast, clean, feed the chickens, make lunch, read, nap, walk, make dinner, sleep, and repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Luckily, I had the ability to completely disappear into a novel.
Rebecca now made monthly looting trips to the closest towns where she picked up a half-dozen books for me every time. So many titles were now stacked in piles around my bedroom that we burned the not-so-good ones for kindling. I kept the better ones in my bookcase in order of ranking; in an emergency, the bottom shelf would be offered first as a sacrifice to the open fire in the lounge, but the top shelf was precious. It would’ve had to be pretty bloody cold before I considered burning those.
I preferred to immerse myself in fantasy worlds rather than anything based on real life, but I read everything Rebecca brought me, even the vapid, D-list celebrity autobiographies. They caught fire super-quick.
As well as cooking a passable Christmas roast dinner, my aunt also managed to make a Christmas pudding, although she swathed in so much brandy it made my mouth burn. Probably to hide her rather eccentric choice of substitute ingredients.
She’d also got me presents and wrapped them, placing them under a potted fir tree she’d dragged in from the garden. Being stuck here all the time, I’d had to be more resourceful, resorting to making something of my own creation. I painted her a portrait of her favorite actor, which looked nothing remotely like the handsome man on the magazine cover I’d copied it from. In fact, it was like Picasso had drawn it, drunk and blindfolded.
When Rebecca unwrapped it on the date that she designated as Christmas day, it took her a good few minutes to figure out who it was, and then we fell about laughing until we cried. She hung it proudly in her bedroom, and for several weeks after, I heard her laugh whenever she walked in there.
Ironically, it was the best Christmas in a very long time.
Chapter Fourteen
After…
When I finally managed to peel my eyelids apart, I blinked and flinched from the painful brightness suddenly piercing my pupils. Dusty beams of sunlight streamed into the room, where I lay immobile, and nauseated from the sensation of being on a carousel.
After a massive effort, I managed to roll over onto my side and dry retch, breathing deeply between heaves until the dizziness wore off and my surroundings became clearer.
The room was square and off-white, with areas where the paint peeled back to plaster. There were two windows covered with metal shuttering—the kind that concertinaed out of the way if you wanted to open the window, though a chunky iron padlock hung a
t the end where the catch was. I lay atop a single mattress that was covered with a creaseless yellow sheet. I’d been provided with a pillow too, freshly laundered and smelling of berries.
On another mattress on the opposite side of the room, was Claire, still out cold and snoring lightly with her face buried in her pillow. It was at least an hour before she finally stirred.
As I started retching again, she stretched and yawned. “Hey.”
She crawled over to me and put her hand on my back, giving my spine a gentle rub. A momentary wave of static prickled between us. She quickly withdrew her hand and frowned, flexing her fingers briefly before she took hold of my arm and helped me sit up. Her pale face was racked with concern as she pushed my hair back behind my shoulders and then sat cross-legged next to me.
“You all right?” she asked, staring at me out of chocolate brown eyes. They were ringed with red like mine and Nate’s. She was a survivor.
“No,” I snapped.
My thoughts went to Nate. I needed to be with him. The pull tugged at me, along with a feeling of homesickness fused with longing. Where was he?
“I have to find Nate,” I muttered.
“That the man you were with?” Claire asked. “He’s probably in one of the other cells—sorry, holding rooms. Not supposed to call them cells.”
Cells. Seemed like an accurate description to me, and I was willing to bet the door was locked so we couldn’t escape.
“Where are we?” I quizzed her, still too weak to get up and look out the window. Were we still in London? We had to be. They couldn’t have carried us very far on foot.
“This used to be a boarding school. These were classrooms,” she answered.
I glanced around again. In my haze, I hadn’t noticed the bottles of water placed at the foot end of our mattresses. I leaned forward and grabbed one, sucking down the water until there was less than an inch left in the bottom.
She watched me curiously. She didn’t seem to be as affected by the tranquilizer as I was. Maybe it wasn’t the first time she’d been darted? Hadn’t she begged them not to ‘put her to sleep?’
“There are dormitories in the west wing. I have a room there. You’ll get a room too,” she added.
“I don’t want a room,” I snapped. “I want to find Nate and go home.”
She frowned and shook her head. “You can’t go home! I was sent to find you, so now you have to stay.”
There was something very peculiar about her. A childishness to her manner and the way she spoke. Seeing her features in the daylight reinforced my estimation of her age—fifteen or sixteen at the most. Her long hair was curly now it was dry, with tight ringlets springing from her temples, framing her oval face. Her thin lips were a little crooked, becoming more apparent when she smiled, but it suited her.
Confused by her statement, I growled and kneaded my temples roughly with my fingers. “Who sent you, Claire?”
She flopped back against the wall next to me and cast her eyes downward, shrugging. “They did. They told me to run and where to go.”
She stared blankly at me for a moment, as if she’d lost her train of thought, almost like someone had pressed her pause button. Finally, though, she blinked, and her vacant expression vanished.
“I got confused. I always get confused. Too many voices telling me what to do. I don’t know which ones I’m supposed to be listening too!” She sighed defeatedly, hugging her knees against her chest and rocking a little. “I didn’t want to go into the water. But I know I must.”
Clearly, she wasn’t entirely sound, but given she would’ve been around ten years old when the virus hit, it was really no surprise.
“Who told you to run?” I asked, deciding to humor her.
“I don’t think I should tell you,” she murmured. “You’ll think I’m mad. Mostly everyone thinks I’m mad.”
Yes, I bet they did. “I promise I won’t think that.”
I kept my tone as reassuring and gentle as I could. The last thing I wanted to do was upset her, in case she was also prone to being a little volatile. We were locked in a room together, after all.
She continued to look down at the floor, huddling tighter into her fetal position. “I used to…take pills, because sometimes…I heard…things in my head.” She faltered as she spoke, and it was clearly a subject that made her uncomfortable. “There were these…voices. They said such horrible things. The pills made them go away, though. Then everyone got sick and left. I got sick too, but I didn’t leave.”
Then everyone got sick and left. I assumed this was her own unique way of explaining how everyone had died. Still, it was an odd choice of words—they left, as though the human race had all just gone off on holiday.
Casting my mind back to my psychology classes at college, we’d only just touched on mental disorders, but she seemed to fit the profile for schizophrenia.
“I stopped taking the pills, and then the nasty voices came back,” she continued. “This time, there were also…new voices. Actually, they aren’t voices—not really—but it’s the only way I can describe them.”
She finally lifted her head to look at me. “They told me to wait and that someone would come for us. Me and Peter.”
This conversation was making my head thump more than it already was. “Peter?”
She beamed. “My little brother.”
Little brother? Shit. She must’ve had to look after him, alone. How on earth had she managed to stay alive?
“We hid out in a shopping center near Dartford and waited,” she said, still smiling. Her affection for Peter was obvious. Maybe the end of the world was a little easier when you had someone to look after. Easier was probably the wrong word. Bearable was more apt.
“Where is Peter now?”
She shrugged. “He’s here somewhere.”
It sounded like Peter had probably fared better than Claire after the apocalypse. Little kids had a way of bouncing back better than older ones and adults. At least, I hoped that was the case.
“Did someone come for you?”
I needed to know more about the people here and, more importantly, what the hell was going on. Why were we being kept in these cells? And by whom? There were so many questions, but I didn’t want Claire to feel interrogated. I had to tread carefully.
“Yes. We waited, and waited, and waited,” she replied, her tone puerile as if to emphasize how bored she’d been. “Then, Eve came.”
Her last sentence took me by surprise. I’d expected her to mention one of the men from last night, but Eve was an entirely new entity. How many people were there here?
“Eve?”
She beamed again. “Yes. Eve finds people. That’s what she does. That’s what the voices tell her to do.”
“Do they?”
I’d hoped that this Eve might be more rational than Claire, but it didn’t sound very promising. Although Claire probably wasn’t the best source of information.
Feeling a little stronger, I pushed myself up off the mattress and got to my feet. My legs were like lead weights, but I managed to stagger over to the window. The cell—or classroom, or whatever she’d called the room we were in—was one floor up from the ground, looking directly over a large courtyard. It was paved, free of weeds, and bordered by a dozen or so neatly pruned rose bushes of pink and red. In the center of the courtyard was a big stone fountain with a mermaid in the middle. Her algae-covered tail rose up out of the water as she held a conch shell to her ear and stroked her long moss-strewn hair. A tall red-brick wall surrounded the courtyard and clutched a set of immense wrought iron gates at the far end, each emblazoned with a heraldry shield—probably the school crest.
My breath caught when I spied people—five of them—coming out onto the courtyard to sit on the edge of the fountain. They began to chat animatedly, one of them puffing away on a cigarette as he sipped from a steaming cup.
Although I hadn’t wanted to keep pressing her, I turned to Claire and said, “How many people are there he
re?”
“Twenty or so,” she said matter-of-factly.
My shock was evident from my sudden gasp. “Twenty?”
Twenty people. My heart leaped. I never imagined there’d be so many people in one place.
“Or so,” she repeated. “There’s more, but Eve can’t get to them. It’s why they came to London, to be closer to the tunnel. The one to France.”
“How long have they been in London?”
She scratched her head in pensive contemplation. “A year, I think. They were somewhere in Scotland before. In the bad place.”
Bad place? My mouth opened to ask her another question, but I was silenced by the rattling of the cell door. The clanking noise of a bolt sliding across its bracket confirmed my suspicion about being locked in.
It was the man from last night, the one who’d shot us. He stood in the doorway and glanced back and forth between Claire and me.
“Morning,” he muttered. He wore a blue polo shirt, snug enough to be able to see the outline of a gun tucked into his belt. In his hand, he had a carrier bag which he chucked down onto Claire’s mattress. The contents spilled out a little to reveal a few packets of snack food and more water.
“Eat,” he ordered gruffly. His eyes were tired and a tad bloodshot. I could see by the ring around his blue irises that he was another survivor like us.
His gaze settled on me. “You must be Halley?”
He was no less intimidating in the cold light of day. His head almost touched the top of the door frame as he moved into the room, blocking out the fluorescent lighting from the corridor behind him with his bulky frame and broad shoulders. His neck was thick, his larynx protruding prominently from behind a fine dusting of stubble that reached his jawline. His eyes flickered over me in a way that made me feel like I was being intimately scrutinized.
“How do you know my name?” I asked him.
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