As the World Falls Down

by Katy Nicholas

He scratched his head and ruffled his sandy-brown hair. “Your boyfriend keeps asking for you.”

  Swallowing hard, I moved forward. “Is he okay?”

  “Oh, yeh. He’s peachy,” he said, and despite his upbeat choice of words, he was distinctly impassive.

  “Can I see him?”

  “After.”

  “After what?”

  “After Eve has spoken to you. She’ll be along soon,” he added. “Either of you ladies need to use the bathroom?”

  Claire shook her head. “I’m fine, thank you, Ben.”

  My thoughts were so consumed by Nate, I simply shook my head in a mechanical, indifferent manner.

  “Sure?” Ben asked, his query directed solely at me. “We’ve got hot running water, ain’t that clever?”

  “And power. And running cars,” Claire piped up.

  Her comment was significant enough to rouse me from my dazed state. Ben glowered at her, making it clear he didn’t want me knowing too much.

  “Cars? How?” I asked.

  Ben licked his lips and looked me up and down once again. For a moment, I thought he wasn’t going to answer me, but he did.

  “One of the survivors here is a mechanic. He got a few old diesels to run on vegetable oil.”

  I didn’t know it was even possible to run cars on anything other than the commonly used fuels. Vegetable oil? Not too difficult to get hold of. My aunt had a dozen bottles stashed in the garage back home.

  Getting hold of an older diesel car might be more problematic since the British government banned them from road use for being too damaging to the environment. We could scour scrap yards maybe. A running car would be an invaluable asset.

  “I see.”

  Ben continued to stare at me for a few seconds more before turning to leave. “I’ll be going then. See you tonight, Claire-bear.”

  Claire gave him an unsure look.

  “No running this time though, okay?” Ben added before shutting the door. He spoke in a soothing tone of voice, the same way you would reassure a child getting a tooth pulled out at the dentist.

  To me, it sounded distinctly unnerving, like something very bad was about to happen to Claire.

  “What’s happening tonight?” I asked her, after he’d gone.

  Her forehead wrinkled as a distraught look crossed her face. “I have to go back into the water. I must be brave.”

  “Why? Why must you go into the water?”

  Her eyes lit up. “It’ll make me better.”

  This was making no sense at all. “Is it…magic water?”

  She tossed her head back and laughed loudly. “Don’t be daft. Of course it isn’t magic water!”

  My frustration was only exacerbated by her response. What was so important about going into the damn water? “Is it more like a baptism, then?”

  She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose it is a bit like that. But when I come back out of the water, the bad voices will be gone. Forever.”

  Maybe there wasn’t anything macabre going on here after all. In all likelihood, this was simply some religious thing. Just because a plague had wiped out humanity didn’t mean people couldn’t adhere to their faith.

  Perhaps they’d even invented a whole new faith?

  The word cult suddenly sprung to mind and notched my anxiety up another level. I had to find Nate and get out of here.

  “You should eat,” Claire said as she got up and began delving into the carrier bag that Ben had brought in.

  “Not hungry.”

  She tossed me a packet of crisps anyway. “Eat. She needs you to be strong.”

  “What?”

  Her expression became perplexed. I repeated her statement back to her, but she simply cocked her head as though I’d spoken in a different language.

  “It’s loud in my head today,” was all she said.

  ****

  My eyes only closed for a second, but somehow, I slipped into several hours of deep sleep. It was probably due to the effects of the tranquilizer still wearing off. Upon waking, I was surprised to see that Claire had changed into a long, white, bohemian-style dress, and was chewing on the contents of a packet of jelly sweets, reading a magazine that rested on her knees.

  “Hey,” she said, only looking up for a second.

  I really needed to use the bathroom now. “Is someone coming back? I need to use the ladies.”

  Claire stood and went over to the door and thumped on it heavily. “Need to pee!” she yelled.

  The door unlocked and opened.

  This time it was a woman who stood before me.

  She stretched out her arms with an audible crack and then beckoned for me to leave the cell.

  By my reckoning, she was in her late forties and reminded me of one of those fifties pin-up girls with a tiny waist and impossibly long legs. Her blonde hair was cut into a long choppy bob, and her full lips were smothered in bright red lipstick. A quick glance over her tightly fitting pencil dress told me she wasn’t concealing a gun on her person, but her icy glare was enough to convince me not to make any sudden moves.

  “Follow me,” she said, a note of irritation in her voice.

  As I left the room, I noticed a plastic chair across the hall. A collection of magazines and sweet wrappers were haphazardly discarded onto the floor beside it, along with several empty mugs of what smelled like coffee. This woman had obviously been posted outside our door since we’d been brought in.

  She began to lead me down the long corridor, but I stopped abruptly outside of one of the other classroom doors.

  There was a plastic chair outside of this one too, but no guard.

  “He’s not in there,” the woman said.

  I didn’t believe her. I felt like a magnet had suddenly latched onto me, drawing me toward the door. There was no doubt in my mind that Nate was in there. Besides, the bolt on the door had been pulled across—why would they lock the door if there wasn’t anyone in there?

  But what could I do?

  The woman’s stony facade softened a little. “He’s okay. We just had to give him a little something to take the edge off.”

  My stomach knotted. “Why?”

  Her impeccably crafted eyebrows knitted into a frown. “He tried to attack Ben.”

  With that, she put her hand on my back and ushered me away from the door. “He—Nate, is it?—he really is just fine. You don’t need to worry.”

  Really? I wasn’t about to take her word on that.

  She offered me a forced, crimson-lipped smile. “Ben won’t take it personally. We’ve all tried to punch him in the face at some point.”

  Was she trying to be funny? If so, her humor was misplaced, although I imagined what she’d said about Ben was probably true.

  For lack of any other choice, I reluctantly let her lead me further down the corridor until she stopped by a set of male and female toilets—the kind you’d typically find in a school. I went into the female restroom while the woman stood outside.

  The walls were an insipid shade of yellow and decorated with several famous paintings far too upmarket to be hanging in a school toilet. A floral chaise-lounge sat in the corner next to an elaborate bronze side table adorned with various pillar candles and a scented reed diffuser. The sweet smell was so overpowering, I covered my nose and swallowed down the urge to retch.

  I picked a stall at random and relieved myself before lingering at the sink for a few minutes to splash my face with hot water and soap. I hoped it might banish the residual sedative-induced brain fog.

  The woman poked her head around the door to check on me after some time had passed. “Everything okay?”

  No, it wasn’t.

  Biting my lips together angrily, I left the bathroom. “Fine.”

  The woman set her pace beside me as we headed back up the corridor. “Halley? Is that your name?” she asked. “Like the comet?”

  I wasn’t in the mood to be sociable, but at least she wasn’t staring daggers at me anymore. Perha
ps, she’d expected me to cause trouble. Like Nate.

  “Yes,” I said flatly.

  “Laura,” she said, motioning to herself.

  As we passed by, the desire to linger at Nate’s cell door struck me again, but Laura pre-emptively placed a firm hand on my back and steered me back into my own cell.

  Claire was gazing out of the window when I returned. There were people in the courtyard again. One woman scattered rose petals into the fountain, and another set up a row of pillar candles. Two men were going back and forth with buckets of water, topping up the water level in the fountain.

  “They like to make a big deal out it,” Claire mumbled.

  The fountain was obviously where this ‘baptism’ would be taking place.

  She still looked unsettled, so I gently put my arm around her. The static prickled again the moment my palm touched her shoulder.

  “What is that?”

  The question was rhetorical, and I certainly hadn’t expected an edifying response from her.

  “The little shock thingies? They help us connect,” she said.

  “Have you felt them before?”

  She nodded. “Sometimes, with the others.”

  “What do you mean they help us connect?” I demanded.

  She laughed. “Are you sure you want to be asking me that question? I’m mad, after all.”

  She made a valid point. Why did I think that she had the answer when, by her own admission, she was nuts?

  “I want to know.”

  She gave me one of her faraway looks before her eyes refocused on mine. “You’re trying to tell me something. Or they are. Or both, probably.”

  Right. I shouldn’t have asked. My eyes rolled involuntarily before I could stop them.

  “I told you you’d think I was mad,” she responded with a grin.

  My psychology teacher had once told me that truly crazy people didn’t know they were crazy. Conversely, Claire knew she was away with the fairies—a saying my mother had used often to describe her own state of mind, like it was a fun pastime. But Claire was nothing like my mother. She wasn’t sad and melancholic, although she probably had good reason to be. Instead, she exuded a kind of innocent optimism.

  There was something else too…something about her I couldn’t quite define.

  “I think we’re all mad, Claire,” I muttered.

  She returned her gaze to the courtyard with a broad smile. “All the best people are.”

  Instantly, I stiffened. “That’s from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

  Claire shrugged. “Is it? I’ve never read it.”

  “Then, how do you know the quote?”

  Quite frankly, I felt like I was on the edge of the rabbit hole myself, about to descend into a trippy, alternate dimension.

  “Just popped into my head,” she replied absently, her attention on the people below us.

  Sure. It just popped into her head, just as I’d thought about my mother, who’d read ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ to me every night before bed when I was little.

  I wasn’t on the edge of the rabbit hole at all. I’d fallen in. Plummeting down and down and down.

  To Wonderland.

  ****

  Before…

  Rebecca and I only celebrated New Year’s Eve once, post-apocalypse. And only because there were five bottles of Irish cream in the larder about to expire. We started on the drink late afternoon and were sloshed well before midnight.

  My aunt, her inhibitions lowered, began to talk about subjects that were normally off-limits—her childhood, for example.

  My grandfather had served in the Navy for most of his youth, and so they’d moved around constantly, rarely staying anywhere for more than a year. When my mother was born, ten years after Rebecca, he left the service and took a normal nine to five job at a library.

  “I felt like he’d missed most of my childhood. I hardly knew him,’ she told me. “As soon as I was old enough to rebel against him, I did. I was a total brat.”

  Her confession made me laugh. It was hard to imagine Rebecca as a rebellious teenager.

  “I left home at eighteen, and we barely spoke. When he got diagnosed with cancer, I came home, and we made up. I’m glad I got the opportunity, but I wish we’d had longer, you know?”

  Too tipsy to add anything to the conversation, I simply nodded.

  “Your mother was seventeen then. I hardly recognized Natalie when I came home. She was head over heels in love with this man she’d met at a party. He was at university, a little older and more mature than her previous boyfriends.”

  My mother had never mentioned any of this to me, never spoken about how she’d met my father, or even what he looked like.

  “I did something terrible, you know,” Rebecca said, her words slurry and slow. “I never forgave myself.”

  Licking my lips, I gulped down another glass of Baileys. I wasn’t clear-headed enough for heartfelt confessions, so I figured I’d just get more sozzled and then hopefully if it was anything too bad, I’d have forgotten about it by morning.

  “I slept with him. She never knew. He broke up with her to be with me, but I didn’t love him. I didn’t care about him at all.”

  My mouth fell open.

  Rebecca stared solemnly into her drink. “It was jealousy. I envied her relationship with our father. She was the favorite. I wanted what she had.”

  She glanced up at me then. “If it weren’t for me, you might’ve gotten to know your father.”

  A tear formed in the corner of her eye and ran down her cheek. I’d never seen her cry before.

  I managed to articulate a response. “He cheated on my mother, with you, her sister. He doesn’t sound like the kind of man I’d want to know.”

  Rebecca reached across the table and grabbed my hand. “I had no idea she was pregnant with you at the time. I really didn’t. I’m sorry, Halley. Forgive me, please.”

  When I didn’t reply, she let go of my fingers and poured herself another drink. My mouth twitched as a comforting sentiment formed on my tongue, but I stayed silent, pursing my lips together tightly. If she wanted forgiveness, she should’ve sought it from my mother while she was still alive.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” I said finally.

  With another drink downed and one in hand, I left the kitchen and stumbled into my bedroom.

  When I woke the next morning, I greeted Rebecca with a warm smile and grumbled about my hangover.

  “It’s such a blur,” I lied. “We must’ve had fun.”

  “Yes,” she replied hoarsely. “I suppose we did.”

  Maybe she wanted to forget about it, as I did.

  It was better this way. My aunt’s betrayal was not a story I wanted to remember.

  Chapter Fifteen

  After…

  Eve wasn’t what I expected. As Ben predicted, she finally made an appearance just after sundown.

  The moment she waltzed into the room, it was clear that she was in charge by the way she held herself, exuding confidence and supremacy. She wasn’t much taller than me, but her big round eyes were the most vibrant shade of green I’d ever seen and clashed with both the red ring around her irises, and the fiery curls cascading down to her shoulders. She was probably in her early thirties but had the kind of pearly luminescent skin that redheads often did, making them look younger than they actually were.

  She was followed into our cell by a man she introduced as Daniel.

  “Halley, nice to finally meet you,” he said, standing by Eve’s side. “Apologies for the delay, it’s been a busy day for us.”

  His accent had the slightest tinge of welsh in it, but it was only just detectable. He was taller than Eve and a little older—early forties at a guess. His eyes were such a deep shade of brown that his pupils were indistinguishable at a distance, and it made him look downright fiendish. The rest of his appearance embodied the term ‘dark and brooding’ with a head of thick black hair and an artfully trimmed goatee beard
.

  “Are you ready to go?” he asked, his attention turning to Claire. It wasn’t really a question, though.

  Claire smiled half-heartedly and then gave me a little wave. “See you on the other side.”

  In a matter of seconds, Daniel had ushered her from the room, his hand clutching her forearm so tightly his fingers left indents in her flesh.

  I didn’t want her to go, and I couldn’t shake the feeling of doom building in my gut.

  “I hope that Claire kept you company?” Eve asked, leaning back against the wall opposite me with her arms crossed. “Did she tell you much about us?”

  “A little.”

  Eve smiled. “She can be…muddled, at times.”

  In no mood for small-talk, I breathed deeply through gritted teeth. “I need to see Nate.”

  “Of course,” she said, coolly. “I just wanted to come and talk with you first.”

  My growing irritation channeled its way into my hands where it made balls of my fists. It took me a good few seconds to settle myself enough to respond as impassively as possible.

  “Fine.”

  She moved toward me. “To be honest, we don’t normally do things this way. It’s been messy, to say the least.”

  My next response was far from unemotional and came out far more curtly than I’d intended.

  “You don’t normally lock people up then?”

  “No, we don’t,” Eve replied. “Not unless we have to.”

  My composure fractured there and then. “You didn’t have to lock us up!”

  “You had a gun and threatened one of us,” Eve countered.

  “We thought you were going to hurt Claire,” I snapped, copying her turn of phrase.

  She said nothing until her lips finally curled into a sneer. “Like I said, messy.”

  She walked over to the window and peered out onto the courtyard. “I have to protect the people of this community. You understand that?”

  I watched her carefully, but she gave nothing away other than what she chose to convey; concern for her people, regret for the way things had happened. Right now, she was trying to take the moral high ground.

  A swell of guilt rose in my stomach and forced me to suppress the urge to apologize. This mess was not our fault. Were they right to distrust Nate and I? Yes, of course they were, but we had just as much reason to distrust them.