by Mike Revell
“What happens if we touch it?” I panted, glancing at Iris.
And right away I knew it was the wrong thing to say. Her forehead creased. There was a look in her eyes like she was trying to figure out if I was joking or not.
“Jack—,” she said breathlessly.
But another screech cut her off, so loud it made me stumble. I caught myself, breathing heavily, trying to get away from the storm even though I knew I couldn’t, even though it was impossible.
Jack. That was my name.
But I’m not! I thought. I was Owen Smith. Just plain old Owen Smith, and I didn’t belong here. I should have been back at home, back in the real Cambridge, where there was grass in the fields and leaves on the trees and buildings that were full of life.
The screech rang out again as the storm closed in and I shut my eyes tight, trying to picture home, wishing I could just wake up from this nightmare, kick a ball around in the garden with Dad, anything, as long as it wasn’t this. A cold feeling seeped out from my heart, down my arms and legs, tingling my fingers and toes.
My mind filled with images again, but not strange memories that I’d never seen before, like Dillon’s name and the Darkness.
They were—
They were mine. Owen’s.
“Mum,” I said, trying to imagine the sight of her healthy face, her real face, because I knew now what memories were coming and there was nothing I could do to stop them.
I was standing outside the hospital ward. Inside, Dad held Mum in his arms. They didn’t know I was there. They thought I’d gone to buy them drinks.
Even though Mum had been in pain for months, she never cried.
But when I left the room, she must have given in.
She must have broken down.
Because she wasn’t fighting now. The tears flowed down her face.
The memory shattered. I was surrounded by Darkness again, breathing faster and faster. My throat was dry and tight. My eyes burned. That memory—it felt so real. Like I was living it again. Like I was there.
A long, thin tendril of Darkness reached out, lurching toward me. All I could hear was whispering. Soft, quiet whispering, repeating the same words again and again. I’m so sorry, Owen. It was Mum’s voice. The fog in my head grew stronger than ever. I couldn’t shake the weight in my chest. I stepped back, but my knees buckled and collapsed . . .
The machines around Mum beeped and beeped. The nurses rushed me out—
I looked at her through the window, saw her white face, her sunken eyes—
Now we were back at home and she was in bed, gagging and retching—
A sudden roar jolted me back and I dropped the containers to cover my ears in shock. High, never-ending screaming, like a hundred cats fighting in the night. But it wasn’t the Darkness, like I expected it to be. It was a truck, headlights blaring. Swirls of dust twisted and twined, hanging in the golden beams. The light stabbed into the seething storm cloud, and where it touched, the Darkness sizzled and popped. The clouds pulled back, recoiling at the edge of the light.
It couldn’t get any closer. It couldn’t penetrate the headlights.
I gulped desperately, breathing hard. But the relief didn’t last long. Because lying in the dirt, a few yards in front of the truck, was Iris.
She wasn’t moving. Fresh panic bubbled up inside me, but it was distant and close at the same time, as if it wasn’t just coming from me.
The truck door opened and a man jumped out. He held a flashlight in his hand, and shone it at the Darkness, making it scream louder. Then he cast the light over Iris.
When she was running, her hair trailed like fire behind her, but now . . . now it was limp and lifeless. The man knelt beside her and brushed a loose strand out of her face. He slid his arms under her back, lifted her up, and took her to the truck. He laid her along the backseat, then turned to me.
“Did it get you?” he said, scanning my face. He had short black hair and wild, silvery stubble. His eyes were dark and lined, like Dad’s got after the Longest Day. “Did you touch it?”
“What?” I said, trying to get hold of the thoughts in my head. Did he mean the Darkness? If I did, would I even remember? The way it gleamed and cackled, those memories—a shiver ran through me even thinking about them. “I don’t think so,” I said, watching him carefully. “It was about to get us, but then . . .”
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re safe now. Come on, let’s get back to camp.”
8
The engine roared into life. The man floored the accelerator, yanking the wheel and spinning us round to face the camp. Lights had sprung up all around it, shining into the sky. If it’d had walls, it would have looked like a football stadium.
There was a crackle on the dashboard and I looked down. It was some kind of radio, like in police cars. A voice shouted through the bursts of static.
“Quinn, you there?”
“Yeah,” the man said. “I’m here.”
“It’s started earlier than before. It’s coming faster too.”
“I know,” Quinn muttered, dodging the blackened husk of a fallen tree. “Just get the perimeter up.” His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. He licked his lips, and gripped the steering wheel harder as the truck sped forward.
I twisted in my seat to get a better view. Iris was slumped in the back, unconscious. Behind us red dust clouds billowed up, only to be swallowed by the storm. The Darkness lashed out, chittering madly, but every time it got close to the rear lights it sizzled and pulled back.
I could hear sirens now, just like the ones in war films, the ones that wailed high and low and high and low. Outside the window, the Darkness overtook us, fingers of rippling black slamming against the glass. Fear stabbed through the fog in my head. I gripped the seat so hard my knuckles turned white, and willed the truck to go faster.
Quinn flicked on to full beam, and in front of us the Darkness peeled away.
I looked down at my rags again. The elbows were torn, the knees mud stained. But a few minutes ago, I was in my school uniform leaving the house. This wasn’t my world . . . it was like I was trapped inside a horror movie. I didn’t understand it—any of it—and the more I thought about it, the more light-headed I felt.
“How can this be happening?” I whispered, more to myself than anything.
Quinn glanced at me sideways.
“You’re sure it didn’t touch you?” he said.
How could I tell? It was just a storm cloud, wasn’t it? And yet—
It was so much more.
“I don’t think so,” I said finally.
We were approaching the center of a city now. Light flooded out from cracks in the abandoned buildings and holes in the broken roofs. Every street lamp was on too. All along the road people were manning huge floodlights, hooked up to even bigger generators, which glowed green and thrummed with life. They all shone up, into the sky, creating a huge dome of piercing white light. And we were heading straight for it.
A blood-chilling shriek split the gloom as the Darkness lashed out one last time. But the truck was too fast. We pulled away, getting closer and closer to the light—
And then we burst through the protective dome, skidding along the narrow streets.
As we shot through the gap between two broken-down buildings, I realized . . . this place, whatever it was, was just like the Cambridge city center. Well, not just like it, because Cambridge was alive and green and filled with people, and its buildings were so pristine that you could buy them on postcards. I didn’t think these buildings would ever be on postcards. None of them were whole. Almost all of them had been reduced to piles of broken brick and rubble. Every now and then we passed a wall that still resembled a shopfront, but the windows were smashed and the roof above them was caved in. Out of all of the holes shone dazzling light, adding more strength to the barrier.
The storm slammed into the light, but it couldn’t follow us, it couldn’t break through. There was a hiss and a crackle as the jet-black clouds
rippled over us. Inside the dome, it was as clear as day, but above us the Darkness turned the sky into never-ending night.
I’d been gripping the seat so hard my knuckles ached, but now I let go and flexed them, working out the pain. My hands were shaking, so I sat on them to cover it up. My rags were drenched in sweat.
I didn’t dare let my guard down. We may have escaped the storm, but we were hardly safe.
Quinn slowed the truck down near an open space, which, I realized now, would have been the market square in the real Cambridge. I stared wide-eyed at the buildings around us, all of them pumping out great beams of light, the exact opposite of those stories you heard about the war. In wartime, families had to turn off their lights so they couldn’t be spotted by enemy planes flying overhead. These houses wanted to be seen now. They wanted to be big and bright.
Around the market, some shops had been patched up and repaired. Cloth canopies stretched out from crumbling walls, with stalls spread out underneath them. In the middle of the square was a large table with a steaming pot on top. All around it, other tables were loaded with books and CDs, and the kind of stuff you’d get at a charity shop.
“You found some gas,” Quinn said, and before I could tell him that it wasn’t me, it was Iris, he went on, “That’s good. That’s really good. I’ll take it to the refilling station. You two need to get to Cleansing.”
I nodded, even though I had no idea what he was talking about. Cleansing? I didn’t want to go anywhere but home. This place . . . The blackened buildings, the lifeless earth. It made my skin itch. I pinched myself, trying to wake up.
Nothing.
Just a sharp pain and a red mark on my skin.
I didn’t know you could feel pain in dreams . . .
The truck pulled up and Quinn leapt out. Iris stirred as he carried her out and helped her to stand. She was alive, at least. She hadn’t—
She hadn’t died. That was what I was going to say. But the thought felt strange. Could a storm really do that? Could it kill? Where had I got that idea from? Then I thought back to the way it screeched, the way it moved, and suddenly it didn’t feel so stupid.
“W-what . . .” Iris stammered.
“Don’t worry,” Quinn said. “You’re safe. You both are.”
I hesitated, then slid out of the truck into the buzz and hum of the electric light and the droning wail of the siren. It was still blaring now, even though the Darkness was trapped outside the barrier. I watched as the storm clouds billowed, blacker than midnight, hanging over the camp like the shadow of some giant spaceship.
Those memories . . .
Mum in the hospital, crying in Dad’s arms.
Somehow the storm had dragged them back up.
I needed to get away, to try to find a way to wake myself up. Pinching myself obviously wasn’t going to do it, but maybe something else would.
A wave of nausea flooded through me just as another man came rushing up to us from the square, muttering in a low voice to Quinn. I squinted at him, eyes streaming. I thought I recognized his voice from the radio in Quinn’s truck.
“Get these two to Cleansing,” Quinn said. “Then check the lights. Make sure we’re secure. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
My legs buckled. I clutched my stomach, trying to steady it. I staggered. The last thing I saw was the concern in Quinn’s eyes as the ground reared up and smacked me in the face.
9
I opened my eyes.
High-pitched ringing filled my ears.
I blinked, and looked blearily around.
I half expected to be back in bed, or in the hospital. But this wasn’t my room, I knew that much. The walls were bare and crumbling. As my vision cleared, the room came into focus. The ceiling was half crumbled, the holes patched up with canvas and wood. Shafts of light pierced through the gaps, picking out motes of dust all around me.
But that wasn’t the strangest thing. The strangest thing was the TV, set against the wall, directly in front of me. Why would you have a TV in such an abandoned-looking room?
Where am I?
My heart quickening, I opened my mouth to call out, but my throat was so dry the words got caught. That ringing! It wasn’t just in my ears, it was in my mind too. Constant wailing, a rush of jumbled thoughts.
I tried to move—
And that was when the panic kicked in.
There was something clamped to my wrists.
My legs wouldn’t budge either. I strained and pulled, but I was locked in place.
Deep breaths. Calm down. It’s all right, I thought, even though it didn’t feel all right. How could it possibly be when I was locked in a chair in some kind of—
Some kind of what?
Prison?
“Hello?” I said, forcing the words out, but my voice was so quiet. “Hello?”
Nothing. Only the heavy silence and the dust.
The quiet made my pulse hammer harder and harder. Where was everyone? First I got chased by that storm, and now this. I thought back to what Quinn had said. Get him to Cleansing. Is that what this was? Nothing in here looked very clean. And my rags . . . they hadn’t done anything about them. I looked as if I’d never even heard of a bath.
“Let me out!” I yelled.
“Ah, you’re awake,” said a woman’s voice. “There’s no need to worry, Jack, this is completely normal procedure.”
Jack? I thought, my mind reeling. Everything was still wrapped in that thick, pressing fog. Something about it sounded wrong. “That’s not my name,” I said. I tried again to move, to wriggle out, but the ropes wouldn’t budge.
“Of course it is. You’ve been touched by the Darkness. The lemon balm oil should see to the burns, but if your memory has been affected, we’ll have to act quickly . . .”
“Lemon balm? Why have you got that here?” It seemed an odd thing to have in a camp where everything was so dead. How had they even got it?
“Don’t worry, Jack, it’s perfectly normal to feel panicked after exposure. We’ve been through this dozens of times before. The Darkness has a habit of jarring memories out of your head, when it drags up the horrible ones you try to forget. Lemon balm is a miracle medicine. The pre-Darks used it for alleviating Alzheimer’s, as well as treating cuts and burns. Thankfully it works just as well now, or else we’d be in rather big trouble.”
The woman moved into my line of sight. Her clothes were dark and dirt smeared, and she had a mask over her nose and mouth. Her blonde hair was tied back in a bun, and her cold gray eyes made the hairs on the back of my neck squirm. Instinctively I tried to move again, to back up, to run. But she didn’t come any closer. She moved to the far wall and switched on the TV screen.
“What do you remember?” the woman said, turning back to me.
I stopped struggling against the chair and focused on trying to think. What did I remember? Everything happened so fast after I got hit by that bike, and it didn’t help that every time I tried to make sense of anything the fog in my head thickened.
But something told me she wasn’t talking about my life. Owen’s life. She called me Jack, just like Quinn had. I wasn’t Owen here, not to these people.
“I . . . I don’t know,” I said.
“Let’s start with the City,” she pressed, not taking her eyes off me.
“Which city? What do you mean?”
“The City.” She frowned. “Our City. Our home.”
Growing desperate, I tried to find those thoughts again, the ones that weren’t mine. They had to come from somewhere. If I could just access them again, maybe I’d be able to figure out what was going on. The woman’s face was set in an expression that might have been concern, but it disappeared quickly, as if it was too hard to overcome the sternness of her eyes and mouth. She turned to the TV and pressed a button on the screen.
With a flicker of static, a series of images flashed up. First a building—no, a whole load of buildings—dozens of faces, a raging storm cloud. Each one shot by so fast it wa
s almost impossible to see. Recognition flickered in the back of my mind, the same place where the thoughts that weren’t mine had bubbled up earlier.
Was this the City she was talking about?
“Keep your eyes on the screen,” the woman said, moving away. I turned to check what she was doing. There was a monitor on the side of the room, a bit like the one they’d had beside Mum in the hospital. “The screen,” the woman repeated. “I can’t help you if you don’t want to be helped.”
A soft hissing sounded somewhere above me.
And that smell . . . lemons and mint. Was it some kind of lemon balm gas?
“What are you doing to me?” I wrenched my arms against the chair again, but all it did was send red-hot pain stabbing into my wrists. “Let me out!”
“You’ll be let out once we know you’re safe,” the woman said.
I had to get out. I needed to get out. But there was nothing I could do. They had me trapped. Trying frantically to control the panic ripping through me, I forced myself to look at the screen.
A movie was playing, showing archive footage from—
No, that couldn’t be right. The year said 2024.
Was this the future? Had I somehow time-traveled when I got hit by the bike? That was impossible . . . but then, I thought, as the footage played, everything about this place was impossible.
A montage of shaky phone videos showed the first storm hitting. Newscasters detailed the spread of huge dust clouds as they swept across the world and cut off access to nuclear reactors in every country, destabilizing them, allowing dangerous levels of radiation to leak out. I watched wide-eyed as the clouds shifted, mutated, and grew.
The storm changed from dust to Darkness and chewed through buildings and forests alike, reshaping the landscape like a child with a lump of clay.
It was just like a disaster movie. Except this one was real, wasn’t it? No, not real. My life was real. Dad and school and the National School Football Championships. Those things were real.
But I had seen the Darkness right up close. I felt what it did to me. And this room, this chair, my stinging wrists—right now, they were definitely real.