Extinct (AM13 Outbreak Series), page 7
It feels unreal. I’m absolutely frozen numb.
How is this possible? It isn’t! I was talking to her only moments ago. If only I’d gone with her. If only Tom hadn’t left her alone…
As soon as I saw her, lying there, blood pouring from her skull, I felt my body collapse on the ground next to her. My legs just…went. They lost the ability to hold me upright. It was like my body weight became too much for me.
Tom moved her as I stopped there on the ground. I didn’t even acknowledge that happening, I think my body had gone into shock at that point. I just couldn’t understand it—I still can’t. How the fuck did that happen? Who did it? She didn’t just die, someone made that happen.
It was these questions that forced me into a sitting position, but I still haven’t asked them out loud yet.
“Come on,” Tom whispers into my ear, but I don’t react. I can hear his voice, I can recognise what he’s saying, but my body doesn’t know how to deal with the command. If there is someone on a murderous rampage in here, and we have Dr. Jones—probably the one person they’re looking for—then the best thing for us to do would be to go. But I don’t know if I can.
I don’t know if I can carry on without Jasmine. We may have only been friends for a short time, but the extenuating circumstances made her extremely important to me. Can I really continue this journey without her? Losing her so suddenly, so brutally, so needlessly, makes it that much harder to deal with. I think I might be able to cope better if she’d been bitten—but this…?
This is something else.
As I feel myself being dragged along the ground, I can clearly see that I don’t have a choice in the matter—that I’m going to be forced to carry on, even if I don’t want to. Even if I’m certain that I can’t.
The second the fresh air hits my face, my body seems to go into shutdown mode and everything goes black. I can still hear everything that’s going on around me, but it’s as if someone had turned the lights out in my brain. I focus inwards, trying to find some answers, but my brain is blank.
***
As I come back around to reality, I can hear a fierce whispering above me. I try to pick out any words, to figure out what the hell is going on, but I can’t.
I try to move, but my throbbing head keeps me in place. Images of Jasmine’s bloodied body keeps flicking violently into my brain. I can’t believe that it’s real, that that happened. It makes no sense. A part of me truly wants to believe that I just imagined that, and that she’s going to wrap her arms around me at any moment.
“We can’t…”
“Shhh!”
Two faces lean over me and it seems that they’ve finally realised that I’m alert again. I try to smile weakly, reassuringly for a reason that I haven’t quite figured out yet. My emotions feel detached from my body—it’s really strange. Is this what an out-of-body experience feels like? Oh God, no, I think I’m just numb.
“Can you move?” Tom asks me.
I nod, even though I’m unconvinced. I push myself into an upright position and a searing ache runs through every part of me. Every muscle, every bone, every limb hurts like hell.
“This is stupid,” a third, unfamiliar, crotchety voice says. “What the fuck are we hanging around for? She’s not going anywhere anytime soon.”
I flick my eyes across to whoever it is that’s disregarding me so callously. It’s not like I’m doing this on purpose, I’ve just lost my friend, for goodness sake, how can he be so cruel? I run my eyes up and down a strange man—he’s tall, largely built with a mass of strawberry blond hair. His dark brown eyes stare at me coldly, sending shivers up and down my spine.
Confusion washes over me. Why is this man looking at me as if I’m nothing? As if I’m scum? Unless—
“You,” I whisper quietly to myself.
“Andy, just calm down, will you?” I hear Tom say, a desperate note to his tone.
“You,” I say again, much louder. I feel myself standing upright, a new power coursing through my veins. “You fuc—” I start to stumble over my words as tears pour down my cheeks. Frustration builds. I didn’t want to cry now. This is literally the worst time for me to break down and weep. “You killed her!” I finally scream, tugging my fingers through my hair.
No one speaks. Everyone stands in silence, all eyes turning towards me. This just confirms that what I’ve said is true and I just lose it. There’s no other way to describe what happens within me. Everything that’s been building up bursts out and I completely forgo sanity for rage. I feel myself rushing towards this man I’ve never seen before and I start to punch and kick wildly, like an animal. I let out every bit of emotion into my fists and feet, thinking that I’ll never, ever be able to stop.
The tears keep streaming, and even as Tom drags me away they don’t stop. “You fu…you fuc…how could you?” I finally shriek one last time, before the sobs take over me completely. My body shakes completely as I howl. I don’t even consider how I might look, the sadness inside is overpowering.
“I didn’t kill anyone, you stupid girl,” Andy snaps at me. He looks exactly the same, as if my rampage had absolutely no effect on him whatsoever.
“What the hell was that?” Tom whispers into my ear, his arms still wrapped around me. “Andy didn’t kill anyone; he wasn’t even in that building. You can’t just go around accusing.”
“Where was he then?” I spit back, not allowing my eyes to leave Andy for one second. “How do you know where he was?”
“Because he was getting this,” Tom announces, sounding different, sounding proud.
I allow my eyes to avert, just to see exactly what it is he’s showing me—the item that somehow proves Andy didn’t kill Jasmine—even though I know he did! I see a tiny vial of an odd coloured liquid. It takes a few moments for my brain to connect, to work out what it is that I’m looking at.
“Is that…?” I ask, breathlessly.
“Yes,” Tom hisses. “It’s the cure. It’s Dr. Jones’s cure.”
At that, a shadow of a figure stumbles over towards us. It’s Dr. Jones. I can’t help but think he doesn’t exactly look like the sort of person that would be able to cure this virus that has ravaged the country—and possibly the world. He looks a little like a homeless man. I wonder how old he is, forty? Older? His appearance suggests as much, but the fear in his eyes makes him look younger—childish, even. I don’t know. He’s just a mess.
“No, no.” He shakes his head vigorously. “That’s not mine, that’s not it.” He’s adamant about what he’s saying, making the whole thing even stranger.
“Yes, it is,” Tom says kindly. “I saw what you wrote in your book, I know you made this. I saw your handwritten note with the vial. This is your work. You’ve done something amazing here, Edmond. You’ve saved everyone.”
“No…don’t understand…not…” he says again, walking away from us, shaking his head and mumbling incoherently to himself the entire time.
“He’s not himself anymore.” Tom sounds sad now. “I don’t know what they’ve done to him, it’s sad. He’s brilliant—well, I’ve always thought he was anyway. He was doing tough work, and then—”
“What happened?” I ask, guessing that things went wrong a long time before all of the shit went down here. Otherwise there would have been no time to do…whatever it is they’ve done.
“I don’t know the details. I just know that there was an incident a while back, and he was locked up. From the looks of it, much more was done to him than just that.”
“Do you think he’s dangerous?” I’m wary now. I sneak a peek over to the two strange men that Tom and I are stuck with, and I don’t know which one I distrust the most. The killer or the madman scientist?
“Come on, Tom,” Andy calls out angrily. “We need to move.”
“I need to find my daughter,” Dr. Jones pipes up too. I wonder if Tom is going to tell him that we have the most important thing—the cure—now, and that is bigger than us, that all of our lives are irrelevant, that we can’t waste time looking for his child, but instead he takes a more tactical approach—he palms him off.
“Okay, we’ll see what we can do.”
We move relatively quickly throughout the woodlands, pushing past trees, branches, jumping over roots and debris. I’m sure if it wasn’t for Dr. Jones and his ailing body, I’d be struggling to keep up with everyone else. Andy—and even Tom—isn’t particularly concerned about how I’m doing with all of this. Not that I’m bothered, of course. I just don’t want to get lost.
Okay, that’s a lie. I’m afraid, absolutely petrified. Everything is a blur, my heart is pounding so loudly it’s in my ears, blocking out any other sound or rational thought. I try to keep my focus on simply moving, on keeping behind the others—even if I think that they’re untrustworthy, right now it’s them or no one.
Until a loud, piercing scream rings out. One that’s so loud and full of fear, it stops all of us in our tracks.
“Melody,” Dr. Jones pants. It isn’t a question, more of a statement of fact and he sprints off in the opposite direction.
I glance over to Tom, who is completely ignoring me and already rushing off behind him. I don’t have time to feel the acute hurt, but I can still sense it in the pit of my stomach. I know Dr. Jones is obviously more important right now—after all, he’s seemingly the person that could save us all—but I can’t stop the pain at the prospect that my life is meaningless. However much I tell myself that I’m not important, I still wish I was.
I go to move too, not wanting to get left behind. This is all going to be bullshit, I just know it. There’s no possible way Dr. Jones could know that scream is his daughter. Sad as it is, the chances are that she’s dead—so much has happened and without any adult to protect her, I’ll be amazed if she’s made it this far.
But Andy stops me. He grabs me roughly and pulls me backwards, resting me against his chest. My pounding heart and breathlessness becomes a source of focus. I don’t want my fear to be this obvious. I don’t want him to know I’m afraid and for him to kill me too.
“Wha—?” I start to ask, but he shakes his head to silence me.
“I have the vial,” he whispers. “I can’t risk anything happening to that, and if Dr. Jones is rushing off into a dangerous situation I need to keep out of it.” He glances down at me, staring into my eyes for a millisecond too long. “There is no point in you endangering yourself either.”
Bang.
A gunshot rings out, giving me no chance to reply. Andy shoves me to the ground with him and we lie low, trying to remain safe. Panic and agony consumes me. All I can think of is Tom. I hope desperately that he hasn’t been shot too, that will leave me completely by myself—well, without anyone I trust anyway. I don’t want to be stuck in this nightmare with the insane Dr. Jones and nutter Andy. I wouldn’t have a clue what to do!
I can hear shouting, yelling, unfamiliar voices, a few more gunshots ring out, and I start to shake with the terror. I don’t know what’s going on and that’s almost worse than anything else. Andy grips me tighter and that just makes me feel more afraid.
“We should move, we should find the others,” Andy announces, as if he’s trying to sound calmer than he really feels.
I allow the adrenaline coursing through my veins to take control and push me upright, and by the time I get into a standing position, Tom is stood in front of us. I expect relief to crash through me at the sight of him alive, but it doesn’t. I feel nauseous instead.
“Are you…?” I start to ask, but the two people stood slightly behind him stop me in my tracks.
Neither of them are Dr. Jones.
One of them is a young girl, and the other is a woman—one that isn’t much older than me, one that I recognise.
CHAPTER TEN
“Billie?” She rushes towards me, throwing her arms around me. I can feel her wet cheeks next to mine, proving that she’s crying. I grab onto her as if my life depends on it. It was her that I spotted back when the fight kicked off. I thought I saw her, but it was so quick that I convinced myself I’d just imagined it.
Billie is one of the girls I’d travelled to the airport with—another of my neighbours that I hadn’t known before the virus. She was a friend of Ruby’s—a proper, pre-apocalyptic friend. Chances are she knows what happened to her! Maybe I will be able to solve this mystery after all.
I pull back and take a good look at Billie. She looks a lot different to how I remember—she’s hacked off all of her black hair, leaving nothing more than spiky remains, her skin and eyes have that exhausted, “given up” look that we all now wear, and her shabby clothes are all limply hanging from her. She used to be one of the most glamorous people I’d ever seen. Even as we travelled together, she still managed to look smart. Seeing her in this way is truly shocking. She smiles weakly, but the depression inside of her is clear.
“Ruby?” I whisper, already knowing the answer isn’t going to be a positive one.
Billie looks at her feet, confirming my worst fears. “She got bit. Inside the camp. I don’t know how it happened, but the bite was obvious. I tried to ask her, but she just shut down, wouldn’t talk. I was confused because I thought the camp was away from all of the infection—but no one would answer my questions. She ended up getting taken away to a specialist medical facility type place. Even though I knew the virus was deadly, I half expected her to come back, you know?” I nod, numbly. “She was always such a survivor. But of course she didn’t.”
“Where the fuck is he, Tom?” Andy’s warning tone interrupts our reunion.
I flick my eyes between the two. Tom doesn’t speak, but indicates to the girl at his feet instead. Andy shrugs, echoing my sentiments.
“This is Melody,” he finally says, making everything a little more clear.
I’m stunned. It seems I was very wrong. Dr. Jones could tell his daughter’s scream among all of the others and despite all the odds being stacked against her, it seems she has survived this long.
“How…?” I start to ask, but trail off, unable to form the question properly, so I change tactic. “What happened?”
“There were…quite a few people over there,” Tom begins. “I don’t know exactly what happened to—” He stops, knowing that we’re all going to get the message. “I just heard gunshots, that’s whe…then I found Mel…erm, him.” He talks quickly, tripping over his words, not really making any sense. He’s obviously desperate to skip over this part, to spare Melody’s feelings. I glance down at her ashen face, her stiff, frozen body. She’s clearly in shock; none of this has sunk in for her yet. My heart goes out to her; she’s much too young to be dealing with the loss of her parents—her dad dying, just as she found him again. “After the gunshots died down, we were running back here and found your friend—”
“I was with Melody before,” Billie interrupts. “She was being looked after by a man…I can’t remember his name; I think it began with a ‘B’ though. I was with a couple that were staying in a tent nearby. Anyway, we were told there was a small group of people, a camp that was still going—that the people in charge still had an area under control, but by the time we got there everyone was fighting and stuff. It was brutal.” I nod, not saying that I saw her there, even though I know I should. “So we hid for a while. Then the gunshots started. I was just coming out to see what was going on when I ran into Tom. The others are still back there—”
“Okay,” Andy jumps in. “We’ll get to that in a moment. What we need to do is decide what we’re going to do now. With this.” He pulls out the vial of cure. If Billie is confused, she doesn’t show it, or ask any questions. “Now that…well, you know.”
The reality of Dr. Jones’s death suddenly hits me. In the chaos of finding someone I know, of discovering what had happened to Ruby, I’d forgotten all about that tiny little bit of liquid—the only bit of cure we have. Without the brains of the operation, the one who created the damn thing, there’s nothing the rest of us can do about it.
“Okay.” Tom sighs deeply. “I know what we can do.” He sounds resigned, but carries on. None of us interrupt; we certainly have no ideas to speak of. “When we were in the UK, I met a scientist, someone who has been working on the cure from the very start. He can help us.”
“He wasn’t killed?” Andy asks, looking very serious. “Despite orders?”
“It seemed a waste of life, murdering someone who was actually working to end all of this.” Tom’s tone is icy cold.
“So…what you’re saying is that you’re going back home, to take this to some scientist who can reproduce it?” I say quickly, stopping this conversation before it turns nasty. I feel like if no one jumps in, this conversation will head down the wrong path.
“Pretty much.” Tom shrugs, as if he’s trying to play this down a bit.
“So how do we get back—?”
“We can’t leave until we’ve got everyone else here—”Billie and I both start at the same time.
Stress is etched in all of Tom’s features. I can tell he just doesn’t know what to do. He should, he’s had much more experience with this sort of thing than the rest of us. I know Andy was on the UK mission with him, but Tom was in the army before that—who knows what Andy was doing.
But then again, what should happen, and what does are always two very different things.
“Okay, we’ll go and get the others—”
“No,” Andy interrupts brusquely. “Don’t you think getting this to your scientist is more important? What if the others find him while we’re out looking for people here? They’ll kill him for sure. They won’t be as lenient as you. Then it won’t matter how many people you find, you won’t be able to save any of them.”
“Oh God.” Tom runs his fingers through his dark, matted hair. “But if we just leave them, with all of this aggression going on…it might get worse. They might die anyway.”
“So then we split up. I’ll take the vial; you stay here and round people up.”
“But I know where the scientist is…”Tom’s expression starts to look a little panicked, as if he’s slowly losing control of all that’s going on around him.
How is this possible? It isn’t! I was talking to her only moments ago. If only I’d gone with her. If only Tom hadn’t left her alone…
As soon as I saw her, lying there, blood pouring from her skull, I felt my body collapse on the ground next to her. My legs just…went. They lost the ability to hold me upright. It was like my body weight became too much for me.
Tom moved her as I stopped there on the ground. I didn’t even acknowledge that happening, I think my body had gone into shock at that point. I just couldn’t understand it—I still can’t. How the fuck did that happen? Who did it? She didn’t just die, someone made that happen.
It was these questions that forced me into a sitting position, but I still haven’t asked them out loud yet.
“Come on,” Tom whispers into my ear, but I don’t react. I can hear his voice, I can recognise what he’s saying, but my body doesn’t know how to deal with the command. If there is someone on a murderous rampage in here, and we have Dr. Jones—probably the one person they’re looking for—then the best thing for us to do would be to go. But I don’t know if I can.
I don’t know if I can carry on without Jasmine. We may have only been friends for a short time, but the extenuating circumstances made her extremely important to me. Can I really continue this journey without her? Losing her so suddenly, so brutally, so needlessly, makes it that much harder to deal with. I think I might be able to cope better if she’d been bitten—but this…?
This is something else.
As I feel myself being dragged along the ground, I can clearly see that I don’t have a choice in the matter—that I’m going to be forced to carry on, even if I don’t want to. Even if I’m certain that I can’t.
The second the fresh air hits my face, my body seems to go into shutdown mode and everything goes black. I can still hear everything that’s going on around me, but it’s as if someone had turned the lights out in my brain. I focus inwards, trying to find some answers, but my brain is blank.
***
As I come back around to reality, I can hear a fierce whispering above me. I try to pick out any words, to figure out what the hell is going on, but I can’t.
I try to move, but my throbbing head keeps me in place. Images of Jasmine’s bloodied body keeps flicking violently into my brain. I can’t believe that it’s real, that that happened. It makes no sense. A part of me truly wants to believe that I just imagined that, and that she’s going to wrap her arms around me at any moment.
“We can’t…”
“Shhh!”
Two faces lean over me and it seems that they’ve finally realised that I’m alert again. I try to smile weakly, reassuringly for a reason that I haven’t quite figured out yet. My emotions feel detached from my body—it’s really strange. Is this what an out-of-body experience feels like? Oh God, no, I think I’m just numb.
“Can you move?” Tom asks me.
I nod, even though I’m unconvinced. I push myself into an upright position and a searing ache runs through every part of me. Every muscle, every bone, every limb hurts like hell.
“This is stupid,” a third, unfamiliar, crotchety voice says. “What the fuck are we hanging around for? She’s not going anywhere anytime soon.”
I flick my eyes across to whoever it is that’s disregarding me so callously. It’s not like I’m doing this on purpose, I’ve just lost my friend, for goodness sake, how can he be so cruel? I run my eyes up and down a strange man—he’s tall, largely built with a mass of strawberry blond hair. His dark brown eyes stare at me coldly, sending shivers up and down my spine.
Confusion washes over me. Why is this man looking at me as if I’m nothing? As if I’m scum? Unless—
“You,” I whisper quietly to myself.
“Andy, just calm down, will you?” I hear Tom say, a desperate note to his tone.
“You,” I say again, much louder. I feel myself standing upright, a new power coursing through my veins. “You fuc—” I start to stumble over my words as tears pour down my cheeks. Frustration builds. I didn’t want to cry now. This is literally the worst time for me to break down and weep. “You killed her!” I finally scream, tugging my fingers through my hair.
No one speaks. Everyone stands in silence, all eyes turning towards me. This just confirms that what I’ve said is true and I just lose it. There’s no other way to describe what happens within me. Everything that’s been building up bursts out and I completely forgo sanity for rage. I feel myself rushing towards this man I’ve never seen before and I start to punch and kick wildly, like an animal. I let out every bit of emotion into my fists and feet, thinking that I’ll never, ever be able to stop.
The tears keep streaming, and even as Tom drags me away they don’t stop. “You fu…you fuc…how could you?” I finally shriek one last time, before the sobs take over me completely. My body shakes completely as I howl. I don’t even consider how I might look, the sadness inside is overpowering.
“I didn’t kill anyone, you stupid girl,” Andy snaps at me. He looks exactly the same, as if my rampage had absolutely no effect on him whatsoever.
“What the hell was that?” Tom whispers into my ear, his arms still wrapped around me. “Andy didn’t kill anyone; he wasn’t even in that building. You can’t just go around accusing.”
“Where was he then?” I spit back, not allowing my eyes to leave Andy for one second. “How do you know where he was?”
“Because he was getting this,” Tom announces, sounding different, sounding proud.
I allow my eyes to avert, just to see exactly what it is he’s showing me—the item that somehow proves Andy didn’t kill Jasmine—even though I know he did! I see a tiny vial of an odd coloured liquid. It takes a few moments for my brain to connect, to work out what it is that I’m looking at.
“Is that…?” I ask, breathlessly.
“Yes,” Tom hisses. “It’s the cure. It’s Dr. Jones’s cure.”
At that, a shadow of a figure stumbles over towards us. It’s Dr. Jones. I can’t help but think he doesn’t exactly look like the sort of person that would be able to cure this virus that has ravaged the country—and possibly the world. He looks a little like a homeless man. I wonder how old he is, forty? Older? His appearance suggests as much, but the fear in his eyes makes him look younger—childish, even. I don’t know. He’s just a mess.
“No, no.” He shakes his head vigorously. “That’s not mine, that’s not it.” He’s adamant about what he’s saying, making the whole thing even stranger.
“Yes, it is,” Tom says kindly. “I saw what you wrote in your book, I know you made this. I saw your handwritten note with the vial. This is your work. You’ve done something amazing here, Edmond. You’ve saved everyone.”
“No…don’t understand…not…” he says again, walking away from us, shaking his head and mumbling incoherently to himself the entire time.
“He’s not himself anymore.” Tom sounds sad now. “I don’t know what they’ve done to him, it’s sad. He’s brilliant—well, I’ve always thought he was anyway. He was doing tough work, and then—”
“What happened?” I ask, guessing that things went wrong a long time before all of the shit went down here. Otherwise there would have been no time to do…whatever it is they’ve done.
“I don’t know the details. I just know that there was an incident a while back, and he was locked up. From the looks of it, much more was done to him than just that.”
“Do you think he’s dangerous?” I’m wary now. I sneak a peek over to the two strange men that Tom and I are stuck with, and I don’t know which one I distrust the most. The killer or the madman scientist?
“Come on, Tom,” Andy calls out angrily. “We need to move.”
“I need to find my daughter,” Dr. Jones pipes up too. I wonder if Tom is going to tell him that we have the most important thing—the cure—now, and that is bigger than us, that all of our lives are irrelevant, that we can’t waste time looking for his child, but instead he takes a more tactical approach—he palms him off.
“Okay, we’ll see what we can do.”
We move relatively quickly throughout the woodlands, pushing past trees, branches, jumping over roots and debris. I’m sure if it wasn’t for Dr. Jones and his ailing body, I’d be struggling to keep up with everyone else. Andy—and even Tom—isn’t particularly concerned about how I’m doing with all of this. Not that I’m bothered, of course. I just don’t want to get lost.
Okay, that’s a lie. I’m afraid, absolutely petrified. Everything is a blur, my heart is pounding so loudly it’s in my ears, blocking out any other sound or rational thought. I try to keep my focus on simply moving, on keeping behind the others—even if I think that they’re untrustworthy, right now it’s them or no one.
Until a loud, piercing scream rings out. One that’s so loud and full of fear, it stops all of us in our tracks.
“Melody,” Dr. Jones pants. It isn’t a question, more of a statement of fact and he sprints off in the opposite direction.
I glance over to Tom, who is completely ignoring me and already rushing off behind him. I don’t have time to feel the acute hurt, but I can still sense it in the pit of my stomach. I know Dr. Jones is obviously more important right now—after all, he’s seemingly the person that could save us all—but I can’t stop the pain at the prospect that my life is meaningless. However much I tell myself that I’m not important, I still wish I was.
I go to move too, not wanting to get left behind. This is all going to be bullshit, I just know it. There’s no possible way Dr. Jones could know that scream is his daughter. Sad as it is, the chances are that she’s dead—so much has happened and without any adult to protect her, I’ll be amazed if she’s made it this far.
But Andy stops me. He grabs me roughly and pulls me backwards, resting me against his chest. My pounding heart and breathlessness becomes a source of focus. I don’t want my fear to be this obvious. I don’t want him to know I’m afraid and for him to kill me too.
“Wha—?” I start to ask, but he shakes his head to silence me.
“I have the vial,” he whispers. “I can’t risk anything happening to that, and if Dr. Jones is rushing off into a dangerous situation I need to keep out of it.” He glances down at me, staring into my eyes for a millisecond too long. “There is no point in you endangering yourself either.”
Bang.
A gunshot rings out, giving me no chance to reply. Andy shoves me to the ground with him and we lie low, trying to remain safe. Panic and agony consumes me. All I can think of is Tom. I hope desperately that he hasn’t been shot too, that will leave me completely by myself—well, without anyone I trust anyway. I don’t want to be stuck in this nightmare with the insane Dr. Jones and nutter Andy. I wouldn’t have a clue what to do!
I can hear shouting, yelling, unfamiliar voices, a few more gunshots ring out, and I start to shake with the terror. I don’t know what’s going on and that’s almost worse than anything else. Andy grips me tighter and that just makes me feel more afraid.
“We should move, we should find the others,” Andy announces, as if he’s trying to sound calmer than he really feels.
I allow the adrenaline coursing through my veins to take control and push me upright, and by the time I get into a standing position, Tom is stood in front of us. I expect relief to crash through me at the sight of him alive, but it doesn’t. I feel nauseous instead.
“Are you…?” I start to ask, but the two people stood slightly behind him stop me in my tracks.
Neither of them are Dr. Jones.
One of them is a young girl, and the other is a woman—one that isn’t much older than me, one that I recognise.
CHAPTER TEN
“Billie?” She rushes towards me, throwing her arms around me. I can feel her wet cheeks next to mine, proving that she’s crying. I grab onto her as if my life depends on it. It was her that I spotted back when the fight kicked off. I thought I saw her, but it was so quick that I convinced myself I’d just imagined it.
Billie is one of the girls I’d travelled to the airport with—another of my neighbours that I hadn’t known before the virus. She was a friend of Ruby’s—a proper, pre-apocalyptic friend. Chances are she knows what happened to her! Maybe I will be able to solve this mystery after all.
I pull back and take a good look at Billie. She looks a lot different to how I remember—she’s hacked off all of her black hair, leaving nothing more than spiky remains, her skin and eyes have that exhausted, “given up” look that we all now wear, and her shabby clothes are all limply hanging from her. She used to be one of the most glamorous people I’d ever seen. Even as we travelled together, she still managed to look smart. Seeing her in this way is truly shocking. She smiles weakly, but the depression inside of her is clear.
“Ruby?” I whisper, already knowing the answer isn’t going to be a positive one.
Billie looks at her feet, confirming my worst fears. “She got bit. Inside the camp. I don’t know how it happened, but the bite was obvious. I tried to ask her, but she just shut down, wouldn’t talk. I was confused because I thought the camp was away from all of the infection—but no one would answer my questions. She ended up getting taken away to a specialist medical facility type place. Even though I knew the virus was deadly, I half expected her to come back, you know?” I nod, numbly. “She was always such a survivor. But of course she didn’t.”
“Where the fuck is he, Tom?” Andy’s warning tone interrupts our reunion.
I flick my eyes between the two. Tom doesn’t speak, but indicates to the girl at his feet instead. Andy shrugs, echoing my sentiments.
“This is Melody,” he finally says, making everything a little more clear.
I’m stunned. It seems I was very wrong. Dr. Jones could tell his daughter’s scream among all of the others and despite all the odds being stacked against her, it seems she has survived this long.
“How…?” I start to ask, but trail off, unable to form the question properly, so I change tactic. “What happened?”
“There were…quite a few people over there,” Tom begins. “I don’t know exactly what happened to—” He stops, knowing that we’re all going to get the message. “I just heard gunshots, that’s whe…then I found Mel…erm, him.” He talks quickly, tripping over his words, not really making any sense. He’s obviously desperate to skip over this part, to spare Melody’s feelings. I glance down at her ashen face, her stiff, frozen body. She’s clearly in shock; none of this has sunk in for her yet. My heart goes out to her; she’s much too young to be dealing with the loss of her parents—her dad dying, just as she found him again. “After the gunshots died down, we were running back here and found your friend—”
“I was with Melody before,” Billie interrupts. “She was being looked after by a man…I can’t remember his name; I think it began with a ‘B’ though. I was with a couple that were staying in a tent nearby. Anyway, we were told there was a small group of people, a camp that was still going—that the people in charge still had an area under control, but by the time we got there everyone was fighting and stuff. It was brutal.” I nod, not saying that I saw her there, even though I know I should. “So we hid for a while. Then the gunshots started. I was just coming out to see what was going on when I ran into Tom. The others are still back there—”
“Okay,” Andy jumps in. “We’ll get to that in a moment. What we need to do is decide what we’re going to do now. With this.” He pulls out the vial of cure. If Billie is confused, she doesn’t show it, or ask any questions. “Now that…well, you know.”
The reality of Dr. Jones’s death suddenly hits me. In the chaos of finding someone I know, of discovering what had happened to Ruby, I’d forgotten all about that tiny little bit of liquid—the only bit of cure we have. Without the brains of the operation, the one who created the damn thing, there’s nothing the rest of us can do about it.
“Okay.” Tom sighs deeply. “I know what we can do.” He sounds resigned, but carries on. None of us interrupt; we certainly have no ideas to speak of. “When we were in the UK, I met a scientist, someone who has been working on the cure from the very start. He can help us.”
“He wasn’t killed?” Andy asks, looking very serious. “Despite orders?”
“It seemed a waste of life, murdering someone who was actually working to end all of this.” Tom’s tone is icy cold.
“So…what you’re saying is that you’re going back home, to take this to some scientist who can reproduce it?” I say quickly, stopping this conversation before it turns nasty. I feel like if no one jumps in, this conversation will head down the wrong path.
“Pretty much.” Tom shrugs, as if he’s trying to play this down a bit.
“So how do we get back—?”
“We can’t leave until we’ve got everyone else here—”Billie and I both start at the same time.
Stress is etched in all of Tom’s features. I can tell he just doesn’t know what to do. He should, he’s had much more experience with this sort of thing than the rest of us. I know Andy was on the UK mission with him, but Tom was in the army before that—who knows what Andy was doing.
But then again, what should happen, and what does are always two very different things.
“Okay, we’ll go and get the others—”
“No,” Andy interrupts brusquely. “Don’t you think getting this to your scientist is more important? What if the others find him while we’re out looking for people here? They’ll kill him for sure. They won’t be as lenient as you. Then it won’t matter how many people you find, you won’t be able to save any of them.”
“Oh God.” Tom runs his fingers through his dark, matted hair. “But if we just leave them, with all of this aggression going on…it might get worse. They might die anyway.”
“So then we split up. I’ll take the vial; you stay here and round people up.”
“But I know where the scientist is…”Tom’s expression starts to look a little panicked, as if he’s slowly losing control of all that’s going on around him.
