“Ne pleure pas, mon petit enfant,” he whispered to her.
Sebastian slept the entire way back to school after Nate gave him some pain relief and a few other tablets, making him instantly drowsy.
“Are they your children?” I asked Luc.
“They may as well be,” Luc answered. His English was very good.
He was a man in his early forties with short, black hair and the beginnings of a reddish beard on his chin. His face was thin, but attractive, with pale, blue eyes and thick bushy eyebrows.
He hugged Isabelle closer to him. “Before the virus, I was a pastor. I often visited an orphanage just outside of Nice. When the children became sick, I went there to help them,” he said. “I got sick, but I survived. Isabelle was only five at the time, but by some miracle, she made it too. Bastian, I suppose, is immune.”
“And Phillipe?” I asked.
He swallowed hard. “We found Phillipe about a year after. He became a dear friend to me and the children.”
I gave him a half-smile and turned my attention back to the road. Nate, who sat beside me on the back passenger seat, watched Sebastian closely, monitoring his every breath.
It was almost three A.M when we arrived back at the school. The only light emanated from Daniel’s office, where he and Laura waited up for us to return. They were both in the courtyard before we’d even parked up.
The first thing Eve did when she got out of the car, was throw her arms around Daniel and bury her head in the opening of his cardigan. Luc slid from the open tailgate with Sebastian curled up in his arms, but he was too weak to carry him any further. Nate quickly came to his aid, gently putting Sebastian over his shoulder. Isabelle insisted on walking unaided, but as soon as we reached the stairwell, she began to struggle, breathing hard.
“It’s okay princess, I got you,” Ben said, swooping her up onto his hip.
It was a tender side of Ben I hadn’t seen before, and I wondered if he’d been a father before the outbreak.
I helped Luc on the stairs, but he was breathless by the time we reached the first floor. He paused before the double-doors to steady himself and get his bearings.
“We didn’t know about the radiation until Phillipe got ill. I thought it was the virus, but then Bastian and Isabelle—” He coughed and covered his mouth. There was a trace of blood on his bottom lip before he wiped it away.
“You need to rest,” I said, ushering him down the corridor and into the treatment room.
The children had already been tucked into the beds while Nate and Laura set up intravenous drips for them.
“Can you be brave for me?” Laura asked Isabelle as she was about to insert a cannula into a vein on the back of Isabelle’s hand.
Luc shuffled over to Isabelle’s bed and muttered something reassuring to her. I found him a chair to sit on and gave him some water to drink, but there wasn’t much more I could do to help.
“Halley, go to bed,” Nate said, flashing me a quick smile.
“No, I want to help.”
“There’s nothing you can do right now,” he whispered. “I’m going to administer some morphine for their pain and then get my head down for a few hours too. Get some rest, Halley.”
Reluctantly, I left, making my way back the dormitories in darkness, relying on moonlight to show me the way. To save power, most of the corridor lights were turned off around midnight by whoever was on duty. Tobias or Ben normally took it in turns to patrol, but tonight—or rather, this morning—Erik was the one protecting our perimeter.
From what I’d gathered, the biggest threat to our safety came from wild animals who sometimes dug in under the fences, searching for food. I ran into Erik just as I entered the west wing. He and a woman by the name of Disa were canoodling in the stairwell, and both gasped in surprise when I came through the double doors.
“How is everyone?” Erik asked, looking sheepish.
Disa stepped forward and clutched my forearm. I hadn’t seen much of her since I’d arrived as she usually had her head under an engine or deep in the innards of one of the generators. An Egyptian-born engineer and self-professed nerd, Mandisa and tech-head Erik had hit it off immediately, according to Priya. Their romance was currently the talk of the community. It was heart-warming to see them together.
I knew some of Disa’s story from things Priya had told me. Mandisa and her husband had been working in Canada at the time of the outbreak but tried to get home to Aswan by boarding a flight, before all the airport closures began. They’d been diverted to Manchester and quarantined, where they’d both caught the virus. Disa survived but her husband didn’t. Priya had eventually followed her sixth sense and found Disa living alone in an old football stadium. Later, they’d headed to Scotland—again guided by Priya’s intuition.
“How are the children?” Disa asked me. News of our new arrivals traveled fast, it seemed.
“Stable for now,” I replied.
She shook her head. “Poor babies. My father went to Fukushima after the disaster there. He saw people with radiation sickness, and it gave him nightmares. I pray the children can be saved. And their dear baba, of course.”
Erik gave a heavy sigh. “We’ll hope for a miracle.”
Hope and miracle were two words used a lot around here. “Yes,” I replied flatly, then smiled. “I’m off to bed. As you were.”
Erik gave me another coy grin before I ascended the stairs, my footsteps muffling the sound of Disa’s breathy giggling.
Eve and Daniel’s bedroom door was ajar when I entered the dormitory corridor. Lingering a few feet away, hidden in the shadowy folds of one of the heavy curtains, my ears pricked to the sound of their muffled voices.
“Eve,” Daniel said, in a low, soothing voice. “Please…”
“I can’t help it, Daniel,” Eve replied. Her voice was raspy, and I heard her sniff. “They’re kids.”
“I know. I know,” Daniel replied.
Eve began to cry softly. Seeing the children so ill must have stirred up more than a few unpleasant memories for her. Despite her strong and cool facade, she clearly still grieved deeply for the children she’d lost. I couldn’t imagine a worse pain and hoped never to experience anything like it myself.
Absently, my hand dropped to my lower belly, and I stroked it gently. It was a strange feeling to love someone I hadn’t met yet. Even worse, to fear losing them before having the chance to hold them in my arms.
Poor Eve. Poor everyone. We’d all experienced enough death to last a thousand lifetimes. To lose another—especially a child so young as Sebastian—would be devastating. But, what could Nate do? Sebastian was immune, and if Nate couldn’t save him, the little boy wouldn’t be coming back to life.
I moved away from Eve’s door, slowly tiptoeing along to my room, trying not to disturb the floorboards as my weight shifted from one foot to another. Apart from a few inaudible creaks, I reached my door and managed to open it without making a sound. The last thing I wanted was to disturb Eve and Daniel, then get accused of eavesdropping. In a matter of minutes, my clothes were piled neatly on the floor next to our bed, and my body was comfortably wrapped up in the cozy duvet.
“Goodnight,” I whispered, placing my hand back on my belly, feeling the faintest of flutters just below my navel. I wondered if it was my imagination or maybe a nerve, but the fluttering moved left and right and then a little further down.
My baby was moving.
I intended to stay awake awhile, to observe more of the nudges and bubbling, finding the sensation both wondrous and reassuring, but my weary body had other ideas.
****
My eyes didn’t reopen again until just after midday. By the lack of disheveled sheets on Nate’s side of the bed, he hadn’t come to bed at all, so I headed straight for the canteen to get him something to eat and a strong coffee before heading to the science classrooms.
Upon returning, I found Nate sound asleep on one of the spare beds. Loathed to wake him, I gave the coffee to Eve, wh
o sat by Sebastian, watching him as he slept.
“Where’s Luc?” I whispered to her.
“He’s in the room next door. He’s pretty sick and didn’t want the children to see,” she said, not taking her eyes away from Sebastian’s pale face.
“How are they doing?” I asked, glancing across the room to Isabelle, who snored softly as she slept. In the daylight, her illness was painfully obvious. Her skin was yellowing while her lips showed a blueish tinge. The shadows beneath her eyes leached all the way down to her sunken, sallow cheeks.
“There’s nothing Nate can do for them,” she whispered. “Daniel wants to evolve Isabelle and Luc, but Nate asked for a little more time. Daniel has given him till tonight.”
While I disliked the idea of drowning Luc and Isabelle—a child, for Christ's sake—in the fountain, it was the lesser of two evils in comparison to a slow and painful death by radiation poisoning. They would live.
Sebastian, on the other hand, would not.
An impossible situation with no solution. Shaking my head sorrowfully, I slumped down into the chair beside Isabelle’s bed and took her hand in mine. She squeezed my fingers but didn’t open her eyes. An hour later, Luc came in, flanked on either side by Ben and Laura, who helped him to walk. He’d diminished significantly in the eight hours since I’d last seen him, although his dilated pupils gave me the impression he’d been heavily medicated. This probably contributed to his inability to walk unaided.
I stood to let him take my seat next to Isabelle. As I leaned in close to kiss her forehead, I realized something was wrong. Still and silent, Isabelle had stopped breathing.
“Nate!” I shrieked.
He was up and by my side in seconds, a hand immediately on her neck, feeling for a pulse.
His voice was hoarse. “She’s gone into cardiac arrest!”
“My Isabelle!” Luc bellowed.
Nate kneeled awkwardly on the side of the bed and knitted his fingers together, placing his hands firmly on Isabelle’s diaphragm. After muttering a count-down with each compression, he breathed into her mouth in short bursts. As a doctor, letting Isabelle slip away went against every constitution he stood for, but in this case, it was the preferable outcome.
I gently pried his interlocked fingers away from Isabelle’s heart and held them tightly while the seconds ticked by.
“What are you doing?” Luc shouted. “Do something!”
Nate grit his teeth together but didn’t move, staring into my eyes with an anguish-ridden intensity, as if our locked gaze was the only thing keeping him from trying to resuscitate Isabelle again.
“She’ll be all right,” Ben said.
Luc pulled out of his grasp, a seething expression darkening his face. “What the hell are you talking about? She’s dying! Do something!”
“No,” Ben said firmly.
Luc, of course, didn’t know the things that we knew. He was certain that his daughter was about to die—for good—and from all appearances, it looked as though we were happy to let it happen.
He must’ve used every last ounce of his strength to lunge forward and drag Nate off the bed. He rammed him up against the wall, his fist slamming hard into the side of his face. Ben was on Luc before he got the opportunity to throw another punch, twisting his arm up behind his back and forcing him down onto the ground, face first. Luc didn’t have the fight in him to resist, especially after Laura stuck him with a needle, promptly knocking him out.
I rushed around the bed to Nate and threw my arms around him. “You did everything you could,” I whispered. My hand went to the red welt on his cheek and he winced back with a hiss.
“Sorry.”
“I’ll live.”
He held me for a few moments longer and then went over to Sebastian’s bed. Eve hadn’t moved from his side, despite the commotion, her focus solely on the little boy.
“I wish there were something I could do for him,” Nate said, brushing one of Sebastian’s cherub curls aside to lay his hand on his forehead. Judging by the moisture on his skin and the redness in his cheeks, Sebastian was running a fever.
A lump formed in my throat. It was getting harder and harder to watch the little boy suffer, and it would only get worse from here on in.
There had to be a way to save him. “What if you could infect him with the virus?”
Eve’s gaze finally shifted from Sebastian to give me a stark and stony glare. “He’d die!”
“With the version of the virus that learned not to kill its host, I mean.”
Nate shook his head. “Even if I knew a way of doing that, I can’t. He’s resistant to it. Somehow, his body can fight off the virus. I need more time, but—” he stopped when his voice became hoarse, his eyes glistening as he glanced at Eve.
Her face instantly contorted with sorrow. “How long?”
He bowed his head. “In a few hours, his pain will be unbearable.”
Eve’s eyes filled with tears, but she wiped them away quickly with the sleeve of her cardigan. “We can’t let him suffer. There must be something you can give him to…end it before that happens.”
He glared at her. “I can’t Eve…”
“Just tell me what to give him. I’ll do it,” Eve said, her jaw tensed resolutely.
He looked to me for counsel. I simply nodded and said, “Eve’s right. We can’t let him suffer.”
“Christ,” he whispered and covered his face with his hands. “Okay. I’ll…get…it ready.”
Eve turned to me. “Halley, can you find Daniel for me? He’ll probably be in his office.”
My heart felt so heavy; I could hardly move. It took all of my willpower to leave the room and walk along the corridor.
As it happened, on my way down, Daniel and I collided on the stairwell. He barely acknowledged me as he passed, ascending each stair as if the effort exhausted him. From the bottle-shaped bulge in his jacket pocket and the eye-watering stench of alcohol on his breath, he’d been drinking heavily for the past few hours.
“Eve needs you,” I said softly.
Daniel rubbed his face. “Yes, Ben told me about Sebastian.” He leaned back against the metal handrail and lowered his head.
In my time here, I’d found Daniel the most perplexing, but only because he rarely did anything that gave away any feelings of deep emotion. He generally maintained a stern façade, but occasionally, with Eve, he relaxed and was able to laugh a little.
“She’s upset.”
Daniel kept his attention fixed on the floor. “I don’t know how to help her.”
Reaching out a hand, I gave his arm an awkward pat. “You can’t help her. She just needs you to be with her.”
Daniel’s mouth opened to respond but fell silent when Gabriel, red-faced and wild-eyed, came rushing up the stairs. His fists clenched around the fabric of Daniel’s jacket as he swung him around and pinned him against the stairwell wall.
“What the hell, Daniel?” he yelled.
Daniel didn’t look surprised by the sudden intrusion, and he did not attempt to fight Gabriel off. “It’s for the best.”
Confused, I stepped away, my eyes darting between the two men.
Gabriel shook his head. “I asked you to let me speak to him first! To try and explain—” he spat.
Daniel shrugged off his grip and straightened the creases in his jacket left by the imprint of Gabriel’s sweaty palms. “What’s the point? He won’t understand. They never do.”
As he watched Daniel climb the stairs, Gabriel glowered at his disappearing shadow and muttered a string of swear words.
“Bastard,” Gabriel snarled. He hurried back down the stairs without so much as a glimpse in my direction.
“What’s going on?” I asked, following him.
“Ben has taken Luc to the fountain. On Daniel’s orders. I wanted a chance to explain everything to him first.”
Out in the courtyard, the rain fell heavily from a thick swell of gray clouds, making everything so much darker than it should�
��ve been for mid-afternoon. Ben and Laura were stood by the fountain, either side of Luc, who lay on the gravel slumped limply against the concrete basin. He stared ahead blankly, his face full of confusion and shock.
At the sight of Gabriel stomping toward him, Ben adopted a determined stance, like a bull about to charge. “I’m just following orders, Gabe.”
While the two men exchanged heated words, I dropped down onto the gravel next to Luc and took hold of his hand. The rain had soaked him to the bone, and he shivered so violently my fingers struggled to keep a grip on him.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Isabelle?” Luc mumbled, but he didn’t look at me when he spoke. A thin trickle of blood seeped from the corner of his left eye and ran down his cheek, instantly washed away by the deluge of rain. A scaly red rash had begun to form on his forehead, spreading into his hairline. In parts, the skin had begun to lift and blacken, exposing raw muscle.
If we didn’t drown him now, his death would be an excruciating one.
“Isabelle will be all right, Luc. I promise,” I said, using my index finger to push his sodden fringe away from his eyes.
His head rolled back as he looked at me, blinking slowly. He didn’t understand that Isabelle wasn’t really dead, and he was no state to be educated on the subject. If he even believed it.
As loathe as I was to admit it, Daniel was right—there was no other way. If we did this now, Sebastian might still be alive when Luc woke up, and he’d be able to say goodbye to his son.
Sebastian. I wanted to scream. This was all so unfair. All of it.
I closed my eyes and thought of the red desert, silently imploring them for help. I might’ve even uttered a prayer out loud, but not to any deity. My prayers were to them. In the blackness behind my closed eyes, I suddenly saw myself standing in front of Lizzie, her hand over my heart, blue bursts of static emanating from her palm.
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