Chapter Seventeen

After…

Still in a trauma-induced haze, I remembered nothing of how I ended up in a little office on the ground floor of the school. As my brain fog cleared, I found myself sat on a well-worn leather armchair, wrapped in a thick fleece blanket. Claire was in here too, behind a large oak desk, spinning idly on a swivel office chair, clockwise and then anticlockwise, muttering something indecipherable under her breath.

I’d never taken any hallucinogenic drugs of any sort in my life, but I imagined this was what a bad trip felt like. Reality had left the building, taking common sense and sanity with it. Now I knew how Alice felt when she fell down the rabbit hole into Wonderland.

Daniel and Eve were just outside the door, whispering to each other in a hushed, yet heated exchange. When they finally entered the room, Daniel went straight to Claire, without so much as a glance in my direction. He held her shoulders to stop her spinning and then clicked his fingers in front of her face to try and garner her attention. Claire merely stared at him, expressionless and vacant.

“I thought she was supposed to be better now,” Daniel snapped at Eve.

“She is better. But her bond with it—them—is stronger than mine.” She let out a long sigh and leaned back wearily against the faded paisley-papered wall. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

Daniel let go of Claire, who returned to her incessant swiveling. “Well, I’m tired of being kept in the dark! And I’m not the only one!” he snarled. “I’m going to check on Ben.”

He stormed out, slamming the door shut as he left.

Claire immediately ceased her spinning. “He’s so moody. I don’t know how you put up with him, Eve.”

I almost laughed. Clearly, she hadn’t been catatonic at all.

Eve glared at her. “Claire, what’s going on? What happened to Ben?”

Claire stretched and then leaned forward, sliding her elbows onto the desk, knitting her fingers together to rest her chin on them.

“I warned him to stop,” she said. “He didn’t listen. So they stopped him.”

They was a term Claire seemed to use a lot. Who they were exactly was not clear, but Eve—and probably the others too—seemed to put a lot of stock in what Claire and the voices had to say. Any logical person would assume Claire was mad, but something told me that she wasn’t mad at all.

No, I didn’t hear voices in my head, but I did feel things that I couldn’t explain—like the connection I had with Nate and how I’d found him in the cabin, on the edge of nowhere.

We were meant to find each other. Had we also been led here? Did it have something to do with the strange dreams I’d been having?

“Will he be okay?” Eve asked her.

I didn’t care about Ben in the slightest, but I didn’t want him to die either. And I certainly didn’t want the people here to think I was somehow responsible for it.

“Depends,” Claire said, glancing over to me with a concerned frown. “We have to protect Halley. She can’t go back in the water. They won’t allow it!”

Eve slowly shook her head from side to side. “I don’t understand. Why not her?”

Claire sighed. “That’s what I’ve been trying to find out.”

“And?” Eve said, a little curtly. It was easy to see she was becoming increasingly frustrated. Coaxing any sense out of Claire proved a slow process.

After a minute of staring into space, Claire finally responded. “It would be very bad.”

“Bad for Halley?” Eve pressed.

“No,” Claire replied. “It would be bad for the baby.”

Eve gave an exasperated groan. “What baby? What are you talking about?”

“Halley and Nate's baby.”

My mouth dropped open as a tingle of static prickled against my spine and lifted the hairs on the back of my neck. “What?”

Eve whirled to face me. Her forehead knitted in confusion. “You…you’re pregnant?”

“No,” I snapped. “Of course I’m not! It’s not possible.”

No way. It really was absolutely impossible.

Claire grinned. “Sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Another line from ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.’

Of course, another impossible thing was that Claire was alive after I’d seen her drown. Nate too.

I shivered in my wet clothes and huddled further into the blanket. This was all too much.

“Claire, why don’t you go to your room and get some rest?” Eve said. She’d flipped back to using her composed, pacifying voice. “I’m going to get Halley some dry clothes.”

Claire pulled a face. “Fine.”

She slid off her swivel chair and quickly threw her arms around me in a clumsy hug before she left.

The idea of being alone with Eve set me on edge, but it wasn’t like I had any choice.

She led me down the corridor, which led to another corridor and then another, like a maze. The building was enormous, with a mixture of old and modern features. Most likely, it’d started off as a stately home and later been converted into a school by sectioning off the bigger rooms with stud walls.

Some of the doors to the classrooms downstairs were wide open; a few rooms were lined with dark wood paneling and ornate picture rails while others were plain and devoid of character. They were all being used for storage, stacked high with cardboard boxes or full of jumbled furniture, such as bed frames and desks.

Eve directed me into one of the larger classrooms. This one contained row after row of clothing racks and stacks of shoeboxes piled as high as they could go without toppling.

“Help yourself,” she told me after taking a perch upon a pile of clear plastic storage boxes.

Shivering, I hesitantly drifted over to a rack of casual women’s clothing and picked out a black, velour tracksuit. It looked warm. I also found a vest top and, thankfully, new underwear, although it was lacier and more delicate than I’d normally wear.

Each item still had the price tags attached—the underwear set cost more than three times my monthly wage waitressing. Somebody had obviously looted more of the upmarket, trendy London stores. And why not? It would only sit gathering dust otherwise.

Eve turned her back as I kicked off my water-logged trainers and dumped my wet clothes in a pile on the floor. Once dressed, I hunted down a pair of socks and pulled them on over my cold, puckered toes. Lastly, I found some trainers in my size.

“Where is Nate?” I asked Eve. “I want to see him.”

“Do a test,” she replied, turning back around to face me.

I gave her the most incensed glare I could muster. “There’s no point!”

“Humor me,” she said. “I’ll take you straight to Nate as soon as we’re done.”

Was this a negotiation? “What if I say no?”

Her jaw clenched. “I really think we need to know, don’t we?”

We? This was none of Eve’s business. But she had offered me a deal, and if I agreed to her terms, she’d take me to Nate. Right now, he was all I cared about.

“Fine.”

She nodded. “I think I saw some test kits in the school nurse’s office when we were clearing it out. It’s on the way.”

We headed back in the direction we’d just come from and ended up in a small room across the hall from the office.

A few faded medical advice posters were still taped to the walls, torn on the ends and rolled up slightly where they’d become unstuck. One displayed a detailed description of how to perform CPR, while the poster next to it had a dire warning about the dangers of drug use slapped across it. Various flyers filled the gaps between the posters, all featuring an image of a handsome teenage boy with the phrase ‘Do I look like I have Chlamydia?’ on his t-shirt.

Screwing my nose up, I sat down on a leather examination table while Eve searched through an array of boxes all marked ‘dump.’ She ignored the ‘keep’ boxes. I guess they’d thrown out all the pregnancy tests, along with the contraceptives, being of no use to anyone anymore. Clearly, no one else in this community had ever gotten themselves pregnant.

This strange community where people came back from the dead.

“How is Claire alive?”

Eve paused momentarily to look at me then went back to rifling through the boxes. “I wondered when you were going to ask that.”

“What is going on here, Eve?”

She groaned when another box didn’t contain what she was looking for. Part of me hoped her search would come up empty.

“It’s hard to explain. We help people…evolve.”

“Evolve?”

“Yes.”

“By drowning people?”

Eve sighed. “Until you experience it yourself, you won’t understand.”

“I might.”

She gave another frustrated growl and started emptying the contents of the boxes onto the floor. Before long, there were files and assorted bits of stationery everywhere, along with pamphlets on every topic a school nurse might dish out to her adolescent patients. And condoms. Hundreds of condoms.

She briefly paused her ransacking to blow a ringlet of red hair from her face. “After I recovered from the virus, I was taken to an army base in Scotland. What they did to us there was—” she stopped midsentence and gave me a glassy-eyed look. “It still keeps me awake at night, Halley. I used to think that most humans were good people, but it’s not true. We’ll do anything to survive. No matter how abhorrent or immoral. The army was supposed to protect us, but instead, they let I.D.R.I.S torture us.”

She pulled another box toward her. “In doing so, they made a discovery. We aren’t the people we used to be. We’ve changed, Halley. The virus has done something inexplicable to us.’

Eve’s revelation should’ve come as a shock, but it didn’t—I already had my suspicions.

“Like what? What has it done to us?”

She hunched her shoulders. “We don’t know exactly. That’s the problem. We don’t even know what the virus really is,” she answered. “We only know that the virus just sits dormant in us…until we die. Then, somehow, it comes alive. It makes us better.”

“Better how?”

“We heal faster. We age slower. We don’t get ill anymore. No colds. No diseases. It’s very hard to kill us, although I.D.R.I.S found a few ways. Some of those ways were permanent. I’ve died more times than I can count, but I came back. Others weren’t so lucky.”

It sounded like a plot right out of a horror movie. “I thought they were supposed to be looking for a cure?”

“At first, yes. They told us we could help them develop a vaccine. We trusted them. But then it all changed. They brought in this man—Doctor Lawson. He saw us as nothing but lab rats.”

Imagining all the awful things that might’ve happened to her turned my stomach. How many people in this community had been subjected to the experiments? I almost couldn’t bear to think about it.

She stared at me, a look of anguish in her chartreuse eyes. “It’s why we need Nate, Halley. We have questions that need answering.”

Unexpectedly, I found myself warming to her a little. Or maybe Stockholm Syndrome had kicked in.

“And what about Claire? What’s up with her?”

“Claire has been with us for a few weeks now. I don’t know for sure what her mental health issues were before the virus, but she seems to be able to—” Eve considered her choice of words. “She’s more receptive than the rest of us. Sometimes, I hear them, but not like she does. She can communicate with them—the virus, I mean—or whatever it really is.”

“You’re saying Claire’s…a conduit?”

“Yes. A conduit.”

“This is madness,” I muttered, shaking my head.

Eve raised her hands, palms up, in a who knows gesture. “You don’t know the half of it. Wait, what’s this? A-ha!”

At the bottom of the very last box, she found what she was looking for. In her hand was a pretty purple packet with the image of a giggling baby on the front.

I felt nauseous just thinking about it. “You know this is ridiculous, don’t you?”

She shot me a knowing smile. “Is it?”

I couldn’t respond.

****

Before…

I despaired when the snow fell.

It covered the spring flowers in such a thick blanket of white there was no trace of them left. Everything froze. The rainwater inside the butts became a solid cylinder of ice, and it was so cold that Rebecca brought the chickens into the house and let them wander around freely in the kitchen.

We weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Most days, I stayed in bed, cocooned in a sleeping bag with a duvet wrapped around me. When I wasn’t asleep, I read, my gloved hands struggling to turn the pages as my hot breath coalesced with the cold air and fogged my view.

Rebecca asked me, more than once, if I was depressed, but I denied it.

In truth, I was miserable. But, what right did I have to feel that way? I was alive when everybody else had died. I was lucky, wasn’t I?

I found myself thinking about my mother a lot, wondering if this was how she’d felt on the bad days when she couldn’t get out of bed or leave the house. As a child, I hadn’t been able to understand her depression—I was resentful of it because I wanted my mother to be like the other mothers. I wanted her to bake cakes for the school fair and run in the parent races on sports day, but she didn’t. Couldn’t.

“Take some of these, you’ll feel better soon,” Rebecca said, handing me a packet of pills.

Diazepam.

“No, thanks.” I tossed them back at her. “I’m fine.”

But I wasn’t fine. After a few weeks, I knew I had to do something to get me out of the black hole I’d fallen into.

I needed a friend.

In a chest, under my bed, I kept the letters that Lizzie had sent me after I’d moved in with Rebecca. She totally begrudged having to write to me by hand, but the cottage lacked two things; broadband and a reliable phone signal. Sometimes, her texts would reach me, but more often than not, they’d get lost in the ether. On average, she wrote twice a month. The last letter I’d received came a few days before the outbreak.

Slowly, I read through them all, laughing at all the shenanigans Lizzie got herself involved in and reminding myself of what life used to be like…and how it could be again if we ever managed to find other people. I began to remember what hope felt like.

Lizzie’s final letter to me was my favorite, even though it was the last.

Halley,

I’m writing this letter from Terminal B of Gatwick airport! Can you believe that? We’re finally here after a year of planning this trip! Wish you could’ve come with us, but if it makes you feel any better, it’s been a disaster so far. Our plane was delayed for four hours, so we all went to the bar for a few drinks. Bad idea. My boyfriend got absolutely hammered. We had to pretend to be sober so they’d let us board the plane.

It was all good till he tripped and smashed his face going through the walkway thing. What an idiot! He had to go to the hospital to have stitches! Now we have to sleep at the airport and catch a different plane tomorrow.

With any luck, he’ll manage to survive until then, and we’ll be off on our adventures.

I know what you’re thinking…that I’m going to hate slumming it in hostels and shared bathrooms…and you’re completely right, but I’m hoping the scenery makes up for it.

Anyway, I miss you loads, and I really would rather be going with you than with my idiot boyfriend—I do love him really, but you know I love you more!! Ha-ha.

Love always and forever,

Lizzie.

I smiled. Lizzie had always been an optimist, even when faced with the direst of circumstances. She’d never let anything get her down. She’d never let anyone, or anything, stop her from doing what she wanted. If somehow Lizzie survived the apocalypse, she’d be kicking its ass right now.

She wouldn’t have given up.

And neither would I.

I’d find a way to leave this place, and if there were survivors out there, I’d find them.

No matter how long it took or how far I had to go.

With or without Rebecca.