He clearly thought we’d tried to run, and his distrust of us was evident in his suspicious expression.
“We broke down,” Eve said quickly.
Tobias appeared behind us, the books piled in his arms, stacked high enough to hide his conspiratorial smirk from Daniel. He was loyally sticking to Eve’s version of events.
“The Range Rover is caput,” he muttered as he passed through the gates.
Mumbling an excuse to leave, I hurriedly left Nate and the others to unload the pick-up and headed to the library. Claire had started her daily lessons with Priya today, so I knew that’s where she’d be. Curiously, the library was empty, but after running into Priya in the stairwell to the dormitories, she informed me Claire had gone back to her room to study.
Good, I thought. We could talk privately.
Claire’s room was next to Eve’s. I knocked gently until I heard her invite me in. She was sprawled on her bed with a book, looking thoroughly bored. Her room was smaller than mine but made even smaller by the amount of stuff she had everywhere.
In her short time here, she’d managed to accumulate quite a collection; mainly stuffed unicorns and other mythical creatures. The walls were the same pale blue as in my room, but I could barely see the color past the posters of dragons and winged horses she’d stuck up everywhere.
Claire looked up at me with a smile. “Hello! They said you were coming.”
Of course they did.
She waved her book at me with a disgruntled expression on her face. “Priya wants me to read this…King Lear! It’s boring and I can’t make out what anyone is saying.”
She chucked it on the floor and patted her sequined mermaid duvet, motioning for me to sit.
“Yeh, that pretty much sums it up,” I chuckled, slumping down beside her. “So, what else did they say?”
She ruffled her hair and sighed. “That if you want to know something, you should ask them yourself.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” My head fell into my hands with a growl of frustration.
She put her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder. “Don’t be sad!” she whispered in a soothing voice. “Your connection with them is even stronger than mine, talking to them won’t be as hard as you think.”
My connection? “I doubt that.”
She grabbed my wrists and pulled my hands away from my face. “Why do you think they chose you in the first place?”
“Chose me for what?”
She smiled, making a gesture of zipping up her lips and throwing away an invisible key.
“Stop being afraid of your dreams and listen to them. Invite them in.”
Right. Not sure I wanted to do that. “Why do they need an invitation?”
She frowned. “Human brains are complicated. We have…barriers that they can’t pass through very easily. Most survivors can hear them, in some way, but not like we can. We’re different. You, me, Eve and Priya.”
“What makes us different?”
She tapped her head. “We’ve always been broken.”
“What does that mean?”
She threw her hands up. “Dunno.”
With a shake of my head, I got up and headed to the door, but stopped abruptly before reaching for the handle. “Claire?”
“Mm?” she responded.
“After what happened in the fountain, you said they were protecting me?”
She nodded. “And the baby, yes.”
“And they were the ones that hurt Ben, right?”
A sheepish grin spread across her face. “That’s what I told Eve, but I lied.”
Before a response left my lips, she slid off the bed and gave me another one of her all-encompassing hugs. “A half-lie. It was you and them.”
With what Nate said about the virus cloning our cells and then integrating itself with us, was it possible that my—our—relationship with the virus was somewhat symbiotic? Maybe, there wasn’t a them at all, only an us.
The entire concept left me with a mounting ache in my temples. This was more Nate’s thing.
“Okay,” I said, squirming out of her embrace.
I left her room and headed to ours, eager to climb into bed and sleep off my headache. As my fingers reached out for the doorknob, a hand closed over mine and lifted it away.
“I’ve been looking for you,” Nate said, his eyes racked with worry again.
“I spoke to Claire,” I muttered.
“And?”
Glancing up and down the corridor, I put my index finger to my lips and motioned for us to recommence this conversation in our room, lest we be overheard.
Once inside, I flopped down wearily onto our bed, making a starfish shape with my limbs.
“Are you afraid of me, Nate?”
He laughed. “No.”
Maybe it was an overreaction. After all, I hadn’t killed anyone. Yet.
“Honestly, I’m more curious than anything,” Nate added. “I mean, we’ve both felt the static before, but why’s it stronger now?”
An excellent question. Never once, in all my time at the cottage, after the apocalypse, had I ever encountered it before meeting Nate. And it’d only gone into over-drive since being here at the school. Also, the red desert dreams were far more lucid now than they’d ever been.
“Maybe it’s something to do with being around other survivors,” I answered.
Was it possible that the virus had led us here because it needed us all to be together for some as-yet-unknown purpose?
There were too many questions and only one apparent way to get answers.
I had to invite them in. Whatever that meant.
****
Before going to sleep each night, I silently invoked them to communicate with me, but ironically, my sleep was completely undisturbed for the next two weeks. According to Nate, with none of my nightmare induced fretting waking him up, he’d slept like a log.
By accepting the dreams, they’d stopped altogether, or so it seemed. Perhaps I’d tried too hard to force them, instead of letting them come naturally. Defeated for the time being, I gave up and concentrated on helping Nate research the virus instead.
One afternoon, however, I’d dozed off on a desk in the science lab after attempting to read one of the books we’d brought back from the hospital. ‘The evolutionary history of RNA’ had failed to grip me, so I’d used its thick bulk as a pillow instead.
The lab was stiflingly hot as we’d had a few days of summery weather, despite the onset of what was usually a chilly and rainy October. The stuffiness of the room combined with my hormonally induced predilection for napping meant that no matter how uncomfortable I was, I quickly slipped into a deep sleep.
The red desert has changed, finally becoming the world that’s always reflected in the lake. The sky is cloudless and blue, and a golden sun beams down on the lush, green valley that contains the lake.
There are people here, but they aren’t solid. They wander about as blurry shapes, all apart from one that approaches me slowly from way off in the distance.
It is a woman with long, blonde hair and vivid green eyes. She’s exactly how I remember her—it is Lizzie. She stops a few meters away and smiles, her hair blowing wildly in the wind.
“Lizzie?”
I run to her and wrap her in my arms, even though it can’t really be her. I’ve missed her so much. Fake-Lizzie’s hug feels the same as always, and her hair smells pleasantly of coconut and fresh limes. It reminds me of Pina Coladas and tropical beaches. If it isn’t Lizzie, how do they know what her shampoo smells like? Are they reading my thoughts?
Lizzie pulls away from me and strokes my hair. “I’m so glad you aren’t afraid anymore, Halley,” she says. “It’s so hard for us to reach you—all of you. The human brain is like nothing we’ve ever encountered. Its complexities have confounded us at times.”
She smells like Lizzie but doesn’t sound like Lizzie.
“What have you been trying to tell me?” I ask.
&nbs
p; Fake-Lizzie smiles. “Only what you need to know at this moment in time. Which is a difficulty for us—the passage of time is not the same for us as it is for you. We do not occupy your dimension. The virus is our link to you, although only a part of it resides in your universe.”
Definitely not Lizzie. “Who are you?”
“I’m your friend.” Lizzie laughs, then beckons for me to follow her.
We walk along the lakeside, weaving in and out of the shadow people. “For so long, we were trying to send you where you needed to be, but you couldn’t hear us.”
“Well, I can hear you now.”
Lizzie nods, but then she frowns and strokes my hair again. “Your connection to us is strengthening. It will become even stronger once you know the truth.”
Quite the conundrum. No wonder Claire struggles to make sense of what she hears.
“And what is the truth exactly?”
Lizzie takes a deep breath and frowns. “I can’t tell you. Human minds are fragile. But when you’re ready to know the truth, you’ll remember everything. Make no mistake, the truth will hurt your heart. That’s why you resist it.”
“Can you give me a clue?” I asked, somewhat flippantly.
With a grin and a quick roll of her eyes, Lizzie shakes her head incredulously. “Nate told you something very important before you met.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It will.”
“You speak in riddles!” I snapped.
Lizzie shrugs. “It won’t always feel like that. Have faith, Halley, you’re on the right path now.”
I exhale deeply and grunt out of frustration. “The path you chose for me, you mean?”
“One of the many. The past is set. The present is volatile. And the future is a tree with over a billion branches. We can only steer you to where you need to be.”
“We still have free will then?”
Lizzie smirks. “Unfortunately.”
Her answer is comforting. We walk in silence for a little while until she says, “Did you have a question for us?”
“How long have you got?”
Lizzie laughs. “Coming here is tiring for us both. If you have a question, ask it quickly.”
“Am I dangerous?”
“Highly, should you choose to be.”
“I can’t control it.”
Lizzie reaches out and flattens her palm against my heart. I feel the static building beneath her hand. “Influencing the static is easier than you think. The static is not the beginning of something, but the end. It is a product of the virus and can be channeled and directed.”
Her touch begins to burn a little. Then it burns a lot. My heart skips a few beats as the static sears through my chest.
“Lizzie,” I whisper, now lightheaded and overcome by exhaustion.
There are more questions I want to ask, but I’m so tired.
I fall to the ground, and everything goes dark.
I sat up quickly, painfully peeling the plastic dust cover of the book from my sweaty cheek. Nate hadn’t moved from his spot at the desk opposite where he peered intently into the eyepiece of a microscope. The fluorescent lights above me dimmed a few times, almost imperceptibly; the only sign I’d been dreaming. I happily considered it a victory.
****
Before…
The years passed by. I watched each season turn to the next without knowing—or caring—what day or month it was. I’d ceased all talk of finding other survivors, although, on my darkest days, I cycled to the highway and spent a few hours watching and listening for the car I’d seen that’d never returned. Each time I gazed at the long road in front of me, the desire to leave became stronger and stronger, like I was space debris on the edge of a black hole, resisting the inevitable dive into oblivion.
At home, Rebecca seemed content with her daily routines and our fleeting interactions. Some days, I rarely spoke to her, although I smiled and nodded when I needed to, pretending to be as content as she was. I found it better not to think about life outside of the little bubble we’d created for ourselves. But I was suffocating, and all I wanted to do was stick a pin in it and breathe deeply again.
Occasionally, she would ask me if I was okay. I’d give her the same mechanical smile each time because my reply was irrelevant—nothing would change.
I wondered how long I could carry on like this before I finally broke down.
What would happen then?
What would I do?
What was I truly capable of?
Chapter Twenty-Two
After…
“What are you looking at?”
Yawning and stretching, I stood up and shuffled around to Nate’s desk, sliding my arms around his waist and kissing his cheek. He looked up from the microscope and smiled wryly at me.
“A sample of semen,” he said.
My nose wrinkled in distaste. “Glad I asked.”
He laughed. “Take a look.” He slid his chair back and made a space for me to look into the microscope.
“I’d rather not.”
“Would it make you feel any better if I told you it was mine?” he grinned.
“Not really.”
Out of morbid curiosity, I looked anyway. All I could see were hundreds of shadowy round blobs with spindly tales twitching and wriggling about.
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked, still observing the slide, oddly mesmerized.
“Nothing’s wrong. The sample is completely normal.”
I snapped my head up. “What?”
Normal? It was half the mystery solved, at least.
He reached over to another table and grabbed one of the notepads he’d been scribbling on. A few times, I’d attempted to read his scrawling to no avail. His handwriting—in typical doctor fashion—was dire.
“On one of the laptops, I found an email written by Kara Strahovski. It included a report on the infertility problem. She’d sent it off to a few other doctors in her field asking for their opinion,” Nate explained. “It would appear that once the virus infiltrates the male reproductive system, it destroys all the sperm and halts the production of new sperm. In women, it destroys their entire supply of ova.”
“Why?”
He flicked through a few pages of his notes. “I have a theory. I think the virus disables our ability to reproduce, so we can’t pass on inferior genes. At least, until we die and evolve. It wasn’t until I found an autopsy report on a man named Simon James that I discovered that—post evolution—his sperm count had returned to normal.”
“Simon James? Was he one of the people in the bunker with Eve?” I asked.
He nodded. “It’s a pretty harrowing read.”
“Tell me everything.”
“Sure?” he asked me, concern knitting his eyebrows together.
“Tell me.”
After a hesitant start, he finally gave me all the gruesome details.
Simon James had been flown to the bunker in Scotland from Australia. He was the first survivor I.D.R.I.S experimented on. Initially, they injected him with a lethal overdose of Pentobarbital, which induced Simon into a coma state. Then, an hour later, he died. The doctors planned to dissect his organs to get a better understanding of what the virus had done to the survivors and, if possible, synthesize a vaccine. Six hours later, however, he’d awoken, right as rain.
“Everything changed at that point,” he said with a solemn bow of his head. “It gets worse. In the end, they removed his liver and kidneys in order to see how the virus would adapt. He lasted a week, far longer than any normal human would.”
My mouth opened in shock. I couldn’t imagine the suffering Simon James had endured at the hands of the people that’d promised to save mankind, but it didn’t surprise me, given what we knew some humans were capable of. Especially in such desperate times.
Eve and the others held at the bunker may not have met such a brutal end as Simon, but they’d still been tested on and tortured. I wondered how such an experience mig
ht affect a person long term.
“But he did die? Permanently, I mean.”
“Yeh, the virus has its limits. It can’t grow new body parts; it can only repair them.”
Hearing this was somewhat of a relief. To me, it meant we were still mostly human. The ability to regrow vital organs was far too alien a concept.
“Anyway, Simon’s autopsy report was bizarre, to say the least, but they did find his reproductive function had returned to normal,” Nate continued. “Which makes sense if you think about it. After we evolve, the inferior genes are erased or disabled, leaving only the new and improved ones.”
I looked at him. “So, why no babies?”
He shrugged. “I have another theory, but it’s not good news.”
“Go on…”
“I think the virus made a mistake,” Nate said. “When it destroyed the women’s supply of ova, it was unaware that, unlike sperm, the female body cannot produce more.”
I knew from a distant memory of a school biology lesson that women were already born with all of the eggs they needed to reproduce. Once those eggs were used up, that was it.
It made me wonder if maybe, by some miracle, the virus hadn’t destroyed all of mine, making conception still possible. It was obvious though, by the four-year absence of periods, that my reproductive system wasn’t functioning as it should.
In any case, would they, or the virus, really make such a massive mistake? From what I’d learned about them, it seemed highly unlikely.
“It’s just a theory, though,” he added. “An explanation to offer Eve and Daniel.”
“They want more than just an explanation, Nate. They want a solution.”
He pursed his lips. “There’s a chance I may have found one.”
My eyes grew wide as he rubbed his stubble and shot me a grin. “There’s a drug called ABVD, used for chemotherapy. Before the virus, a version of it was being trialed as a fertility drug. As an unexpected side-effect of Cancer treatment, doctors discovered it had the ability to trigger the production of new ova. It was re-branded as ‘Restova’ and sent out for more clinical trials right before the outbreak. If we could get hold of some, there’s a chance it could work.”
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