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 at 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 here?”

“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.

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. Perhaps, 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.