Chapter Sixteen

After…

The sedative wore off much quicker than last time, and I was fully alert when they came for me. It was Ben who appeared at my cell door, while Laura waited in the corridor behind him. With no possible way to overpower them, I resorted to pleading.

“Laura, you don’t have to do this!” I whispered to her as Ben took me by the shoulders and escorted me out of the room.

Laura avoided making eye contact with me. “Just don’t struggle.”

As we passed Nate’s door, I noticed it was open slightly. Impulsively, I jumped back out of Ben’s grasp and slammed into the door, which swung open with a bang as it hit the wall behind it.

“Nate!” I choked out as Ben hooked his fingers painfully around my forearm.

The room was empty. There was only a mattress on the floor and empty bottles of water lined up against the wall next to it.

My heart sank. Where was he? Were they really going to make him watch?

Ben adjusted his hold on me so that I couldn’t make any more sudden moves, his arms so tight across my ribs that I strained to breathe as he carried me down the remainder of the corridor. Laura scurried ahead to open a set of double doors leading to a stairwell, which Ben descended quickly as if the weight of lifting me was no effort at all. At the base of the stairs were another set of double doors and a corridor almost identical to the one upstairs. The entrance to the courtyard was mid-way along, preceded by a massive stone arch and a set of heavy oak doors that were already wide open.

As Ben lugged me outside, he let me slip down a little. I dug my feet down into the gravel, carving out long lines in the path as he dragged me into the courtyard.

Eve, Daniel, and three other men stood in a row in front of the fountain—not quite the crowd that’d been here last night. Perhaps they’d all lost their appetite for senseless murder.

Only Eve turned to look at me as Ben hauled me forward. He stopped abruptly behind her and said, “Let’s just get this over with,” but made no further move toward the fountain.

Laura caught up with us and stood next to Ben with her arms crossed. “I thought you said she wanted to be here.”

It was Daniel who responded, the same forlorn expression on his face as last night. “Tobias is bringing her down in a minute.”

She who?

“Well, if you wait much longer, the good doctor will need another shot,” Laura snapped.

Nate?

I twisted about in Ben’s grip until I could see past Eve. The courtyard was mostly in darkness aside from the solar lights—no candles or pretty petals for me, it would seem.

Daniel stepped forward slightly, producing a torch from his jacket pocket. He cast the beam across the gravel and settled it on the fountain, lighting up the stony mermaid in her tranquil loll.

My eyes took a moment to adjust. There was someone else in the water already, flanked by two men who held the figure firmly in position.

“Fine,” Eve sighed, turning her attention back to the fountain. “Go ahead, Max.”

As the torchlight reached the face of the captive in the fountain, I screamed.

It was Nate. Nate was in the water.

I elbowed Ben hard in the ribs, causing him to cough and hunch forward, and managed to wriggle down enough to duck under his arms. Before I could get anywhere, he caught my wrist and twisted it up behind my back until I shrieked, feeling my shoulder muscles crunch.

Ben quickly wrapped his other arm around my neck, constricting my throat, while his right leg hooked around mine, stopping me from kicking back at him. In seconds, he’d rendered me completely unable to move.

Nate shouted then, struggling with his captors as they forced him down onto his knees.

“Eve! You said you needed him!” I croaked out, my vocal cords compressed by Ben’s lumpy bicep.

Eve didn’t acknowledge me, but I continued to beg her. “Please, don’t…”

“Halley!” Nate shouted my name as the men struggled to keep hold of him, but I could tell his strength was failing, still battling against the effects of the sedative. He managed to twist his head to look at me, and then he just stopped moving, like he knew it was a fight he couldn’t win. There was a swollen bruise around his right eye and a little trickle of blood spilling from his top lip. He blinked slowly and mouthed “I love you” before they gripped the back of his neck and pushed him roughly down under the water.

I squeezed my eyes shut and bowed my head to the floor, unable to watch. The frenzied splashing and the distorted sound of Nate’s voice permeating through the water was enough to fill me with more despair than I’d ever felt.

Then, there was silence.

Nate became still. And, just like that, he was gone.

My soul left my body, leaving me empty and paralyzed. As my knees gave out, my body lapsed back against Ben, who barely managed to keep me from hitting the floor.

An age seemed to go by before they eventually lifted Nate out of the water and laid his body down on the gravel next to the fountain. No one said a word or moved, they just stood frozen, eyes on the lifeless body before them.

Laura was the first to break the silence when she cleared her throat and walked over to Nate. She bent down and took his pulse the same way she had done with Claire and then glanced over to the man called Max.

“Take him away,” she said, her expression stricken. There was an undertone of anger in her voice, maybe a touch of remorse too. Not that it mattered. It was too late.

Her eyes briefly flashed to me before she turned back to Nate and gently closed his eyes with her fingers.

Suddenly, she let out a muffled yelp and fell backward.

Nate breathed.

It was a sharp, deep intake of air that lifted his chest and shoulders. Seconds later, his eyes snapped opened and he rolled onto his side, coughing out water and gasping for oxygen.

I got to my feet, but Ben still wouldn’t let me go. He tightened his grasp on me again and held me firmly against his sweat-drenched chest.

“Well,” he whispered, so close to the side of my face that I felt his hot breath in my ear. “Looks like your boyfriend didn’t need our help, after all.”

What the hell did that mean?

As Nate slowly crawled to his knees and tried to stand up, I tried calling out for him, but I choked beneath Ben’s stranglehold.

“Get him upstairs!” Daniel barked.

Max and the other man quickly rushed to Nate and grabbed hold of him. He tried to pull away from them, but he was dazed and just ended up falling against Max.

“Laura, go with them!”

She shot Daniel a look of fierce indignation. “This isn’t what I signed up for!” she growled as she barged past him to follow the men back into the school.

Daniel ignored her. “Get Halley into the water,” he ordered Ben, the mention of my name jarring me back to a state of semi-awareness.

My limbs were lead weights as Ben picked me up and carried me to the fountain.

For Christ’s sake! Fight!

The cold water enveloped my body as Ben clutched my shoulders and pushed me back into the water.

Fight!

At that moment, another figure appeared by the fountain and leaned over the rim.

It was Claire.

Claire.

Claire, who’d died yesterday.

She loomed over me, smiling. “Don’t be scared.”

I reeled. “Claire? How are you alive?”

“We didn’t know about Nate,” she whispered, ignoring my question. “If we’d known, we wouldn’t have put him in the water.”

“Known what? Claire?”

She smiled again and rested her hands softly on my chest. There was an unexpected burst of static under her palms when her skin made contact with mine, so intense she staggered back with a screech. Her brows knitted in together in a pained expression as she inspected her hands.

“I—I don’t think we should do this,” she stuttered, twirling round to face Eve.

Ben groaned. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. What now?”

“No. We can’t. We can’t!”

Then, suddenly, Claire screamed out in agony and covered her ears.

Eve ran to her side. “Claire? Honey, look at me. What’s wrong?”

Claire thumped her ears and then covered them again. “So loud. Screaming. We have to stop! We aren’t supposed to do this. Not to her!”

“Claire—”

“You’re not listening!”

Claire yelled into Eve’s face so vehemently that she stepped back, her emerald eyes wide with astonishment.

Ben shook his head. “Screw it!”

With that, he used his knee to pin my legs while wrapping his hands around my neck. As the cold water rushed over my face, I clawed at Ben’s hands with my fingernails, but he pushed me down deeper until the back of my head hit the concrete bottom. My chest burned from the lack of oxygen as I resisted the urge to let the water fill my lungs. Above me, through the cold murk, warping outlines of people took shape. For a second, I thought it was my imagination when the ripples turned red, but I recognized the way the red tendrils curled through the water—it was blood.

I was abruptly released.

And Eve was pulling me up.

I sucked in air and coughed out the stale water that sat in the back of my throat. My sodden hair was plastered to my face, and it wasn’t until I scraped it out of my eyes, that I saw Ben laying on the ground, his body jerking violently. His white t-shirt was now saturated in the blood that poured out his mouth and dribbled down from the corners of his eyes.

I gaped, unable to comprehend what’d happened.

Daniel glared at me. “What did you do?”

Claire stopped hyperventilating and let her hands slide slowly from her ears. “It wasn’t her,” she said sternly, staring Daniel down. “It was them.”

****

Before…

The fear of ending up alone in this hell lingered constantly in the back of my mind. Every day, at some random moment, a vision of Rebecca lying dead in her bed would force its way into my consciousness, and nothing I did made it go away.

To add to my anxiety, being unwell had really taken it out of Rebecca. At least once a day, I’d find her dozing on the couch or slumped over the dining table asleep. She was more tired now than she was before she’d gotten sick. I thought maybe she’d become anemic or deficient in one vitamin or another, and so I badgered her into taking a supplement.

However, not before I’d found her sleeping in the garden against the chicken coup.

“Fine, I’ll take the damn vitamins,” she said, as I insisted on putting her to bed for the afternoon. “On the condition that you stop worrying about me catching the virus.”

“Okay.”

“I’m probably immune. Otherwise, I’d have gotten sick by now.”

I shrugged and threw her duvet over her legs. “If that’s true, you can’t be the only one.”

“Maybe.”

“I remember watching the news and hearing about a few people in America who were immune,” I said. “There might be people here in Britain that are immune too.”

“I doubt it,” Rebecca responded flatly.

Did I dare broach the subject of survivors again? Even though it was always met with the same categorical rebuff.

“We could look together. We don’t have to stay here forever, Rebecca. We could move around.”

“Halley—”

“Remember the car that I saw? What if they were immune, like you? Or, a survivor, like me?”

“I told you that I looked, Halley. There was no one,” she growled, the veins in her neck throbbing with irritation.

“But we could go further North, or…wherever. Please say you’ll think about it.”

Rebecca stared at me, a fleeting expression of sympathy crossing her face. “Fine. I’ll think about it,” she sighed. “But, not now. We’ll see how things are when the weather warms up.”

For the next few months, I waited eagerly for the daffodils and bluebells to appear, wishing away Winter so that, maybe, we could finally leave this place.