by Ryan Casey
She tried to throw herself around the woman’s side.
But it didn’t work.
The woman grabbed her—and despite how frail she was, she was stronger than she looked.
She yanked Kelsie back. Those eyes weren’t loving and focused towards baby Holly anymore. They were frantic. Manic. Angry.
And Kelsie knew she was the source of her anger.
“You don’t go anywhere,” she said. Her bony fingers dug into Kelsie’s arm. The long fingernails had cut into her skin and were getting tighter, tighter. And those eyes darted around Kelsie’s face like she was trying to process what she was looking at. Like she hadn’t seen another person in quite some time.
Kelsie knew she probably hadn’t, in all truth.
And Kelsie knew then, as this woman held on to her, knife in hand, that she wasn’t going to be running away from her.
Because running away was a risk. A big risk. A risk to the life of her daughter.
And that wasn’t a risk she was willing to take.
“Please,” Kelsie said.
The woman’s face turned, then. Her grip loosened. Her eyes narrowed. Like she was processing what Kelsie had said. Like she was trying to understand the fact that someone had actually spoken to her in all this solitude.
But she had to be careful. She had to watch out.
The rest of her people. They were outside.
They would be growing worried about her.
And if they rushed in here, they might just ruin everything.
“Clarissa?” the woman said.
But she wasn’t looking at baby Holly anymore. She was looking at Kelsie.
Like she was Clarissa.
Kelsie felt caught in two minds. She wanted to allow this woman’s fantasy to continue for as long as she could stretch it—as long as it would take before she could figure out some kind of escape.
But at the same time… she knew this woman was dangerous. She’d seen how unpredictable she was. She’d barely even processed what’d happened to Jack, yet.
But she found herself shaking her head.
She found herself doing something dangerous.
Being honest.
“I’m not Clarissa,” Kelsie said. “And this baby. She isn’t Clarissa either. She’s… she’s Holly. She’s my baby. I’m so sorry for what happened here. So sorry for what happened to you. But… but that’s the truth. You need to let us go. Please.”
The woman’s face turned a little. Her forehead creasing, the cogs in her mind trying to understand, trying to interpret, trying to comprehend.
“Holly?” she said. That recorded tape still playing on a loop in the background, again and again and again…
“Yes,” Kelsie said. “That’s her name. And… and I know it’s tough to accept, but we need to go right now. We need to get out of here. There’s—there’s somewhere important we need to be.”
The woman was growing more edgy, now. More frantic. And the more time stretched on, the more anxious Kelsie grew, too.
The others outside. She was worried about them. What they might do. What their next actions might be.
And then the woman staggered forward, knife raised.
“Not yours. Mine. Mine!”
And Kelsie stepped back in turn. Pulled baby Holly tighter to her chest. Because she wasn’t letting her go. She wasn’t loosening her grip on her.
But then the woman reached her. Grabbed baby Holly. Started to pull her away. Knife in hand.
The rifle. It was too far away from Kelsie. And it was too risky, too. Too much of a chance of bullets hitting baby Holly.
She had to try something else.
Something she wasn’t even sure she could do.
She loosened her grip on Baby Holly. Let the woman pull her away, just a little. “Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m—I’m sorry.”
The woman’s face turned again then. A sympathetic look as she went to take baby Holly from her arms. A look like she couldn’t believe what was happening. Like she was being reunited with someone she’d lost long, long ago.
“Clarissa,” she said, tears streaming down her blood-stained cheeks. “My baby.”
Kelsie swallowed a lump in her throat as she went to hand baby Holly over.
Then she nodded.
“I’m sorry.”
She pulled baby Holly back.
Then she tripped the woman over the hole in the floor.
The woman stumbled from side to side. Struggled with a balance. And as awful as Kelsie felt, as much as she didn’t want to do what she was going to do… she pushed the woman.
Hard.
She looked up at Kelsie. Total look of loss in her eyes. Total look of devastation.
A look like Kelsie knew she’d have if her baby was being taken from her.
And then the woman fell down the stairs with crack after crack.
She hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs.
Blood started pooling from her head.
Her body was still.
She stood there for a few seconds. Heart racing. Baby in her arms. Arya Jr by her side.
The door slammed open. Tate was standing there. “Kelsie?” he called.
She took a sharp breath in. “I’m okay.”
“Good. But…” He looked down at the woman’s body, then. “Shit. What happened here?”
“I said I’m okay.”
He looked back up at her, unconvinced.
And then he said two words.
Two words that sent shivers up her spine.
“Something’s happening.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Sixteen and a Half Hours to Go…
When Kelsie stepped outside, she knew something was wrong right away.
It was late afternoon, but the sky was jet black. And they didn’t seem to be from ordinary clouds either. There was something lining the sky. An almost physical barrier blocking their view of the blueness above.
And there was a rumbling, too. Something in the distance. It sounded like a storm, but more… man-made. More human constructed.
Kelsie didn’t know what it was. She didn’t know where it was coming from. And she didn’t know how it was going to manifest.
She just knew that something was wrong.
And she knew for a fact that it didn’t seem like the kind of noise that would be coming from an extraction group.
She stood in the street. Tate, Trev, Arya Jr, baby Holly, Trev’s people. All of them looked up at the sky. All of them stared above.
And for a moment, Kelsie worried. What if the timing was wrong? What if they were a day late? What if the helicopters they’d seen before were a part of what they were seeing now?
What if they were a precursor for what was happening now?
At the end of the day, she didn’t know. She couldn’t be sure.
She could only look up at the sky, watch the lightning flashing above. Listen to the mini-explosions.
“What is this?” Tate asked.
Kelsie cleared her throat. “I don’t know. But…”
There was something else, then. A sound. A deafening sound getting louder, louder.
Baby Holly crying louder in her arms.
And she thought this was it. She thought whatever was coming was about to erupt right now.
But then she saw them.
The jets.
The black jets fly over like hurricanes.
She wasn’t at ease when she saw them. Quite the opposite. Because she hadn’t seen anything like these for years—and now she was suddenly seeing them. Any distant hope that all this extraction and destruction talk might be nonsense was fading rapidly.
And then there were the weapons, too. She didn’t know what type of weapons they might have. She didn’t know what types of weapons had developed since she’d been in the dark. She didn’t have a clue what kind of new technologies existed now. What had been developed by the underground powers in the last fifteen years.
She didn’t e
ven know how long that the world outside had been going exactly since the collapse.
Or if it was even going at all, now she’d learned that Tate had been lying all along.
Only that this wasn’t normal.
And time was running out.
“We don’t know what it means,” Kelsie said. “We only know that we have a deadline. And we’ve got to keep on going off that deadline.”
“Sixteen hours,” Trev said. “That’s all we’ve got.”
Kelsie swallowed a lump in her throat and nodded. “Sixteen hours. Sixteen hours to get to where we’re going. To find out whether… whether we have any hope at all. And then that’s it. It’s over.”
Trev looked at the road ahead, and Kelsie did too.
“What happened back there?” Tate asked.
Kelsie looked at the house. Thought of the woman. Her manic eyes, sure. But that other look, too. That look of loss. That look of devastation.
As if baby Holly really had been hers.
She felt that momentary sympathy for her.
Then she took a deep breath and turned to the road ahead.
“Let’s keep going,” she said. “We’ve not got all the time in the world. We’ve…”
She stopped.
Dizziness taking over her.
Surrounding her.
“Kelsie?” Tate said.
But then she lost her footing.
Felt fuzziness, right through her body.
Then with the taste of blood in her mouth, she fell to the ground.
Her vision went dark.
Her body went numb.
Everything around her faded to black.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The first thing Kelsie noticed was the sounds.
A cascade of sounds, battering her ears, out of nowhere. She wanted to resist those sounds. To give in to the dullness; to the warmth, even if she knew something wasn’t quite right. Even if she knew that there was something waiting for her when her consciousness fully returned.
Then she saw the lights.
The lights above.
The lights in the sky.
It took Kelsie a few moments to realise it was the sun, setting in the distance.
She felt a sickening pain in her gut. That pain of inevitability. That pain that something was teetering on the borderline of her consciousness. Something that was going to come back with a vengeance and haunt her.
And then she saw the thick clouds in the sky, heard the volume above increasing, and the memory hit her.
She shot upright. Looked around. Her vision was blurred. Everything felt wobbly, just out of focus.
But there was that memory of exactly where her caution came from after all.
The deadline.
The countdown.
The time in which she had to get to Heysham.
She had passed out. Fallen unconscious. In the deepest crevices of her psyche, she could remember seeing something before she passed out. Something that felt like a part of a dream now.
But it wasn’t a dream. It was real. Very real.
She knew it was real because there were more weird things going down right this moment.
There were planes. More of those jet planes, only they were flying lower now. Closer to the ground. Jets that looked like army, flying overhead, swooping by in formation with a deafening ring.
Baby Holly was crying. Deafening. Almost as deafening as the planes above.
And all of it was making Kelsie want to slip back into that state of nothingness again. That state of unfocus. Of disconnect.
But she knew she couldn’t mess around.
“Kelsie?” Tate said. “You—”
“How long have I been out?”
“An hour. Tops.”
“Shit.” She tried to shake herself. Tried to bring herself back to the present. She’d passed out, and she knew why it was. A combination of factors. The worst of which being her diabetes.
“It’s about time you laid back and took your—”
“Stop it,” Kelsie said. “Just… no.”
She saw the look of surprise on Tate’s face. On Trev’s face. On his people’s faces.
“I’m sick of this. Sick of being treated like the invalid just because I’ve got a condition. Just because I’m a woman.”
“That’s not why we’re treating you this way—”
“So I’m diabetic. I’ve suffered some losses recently. Big losses. And yeah. I’m exhausted. But you don’t need to use that as an excuse to mollycoddle me. You don’t have to use that as an excuse to try and be all protective over me.”
“We’re doing it for your daughter too, Kelsie.”
“Don’t pretend to know what’s better for my daughter than I do,” she said. Then she pointed at the sky. “Look up there. Look at those planes. Look at the… at the colours in the sky. Does that look normal to you? Does that look ordinary?”
He looked up. Glint of defeat in his eyes. “I know how it looks. It’s just hard. Hard trying to… trying to do the right thing. For everyone.”
Kelsie nodded. She had to be sympathetic. She knew he was only looking out for her, after all. “And I appreciate that. Really. But right now, we’re a few miles from Heysham, and we’ve still got a way to go. I’m okay now. Really. Maybe not… maybe not for the whole stretch of the journey. But that’s something I’m going to have to face as I go.”
Tate looked like he wanted to protest.
And then he nodded. Half-smiled.
“We’ve got your back. No matter what happens.”
Kelsie smiled back at him. And she felt a bond growing again. She felt a union. Like he understood where she was coming from. Even after everything he’d lied about. Even after everything he’d done.
She couldn’t forgive him. She couldn’t let him off the hook for what he’d done.
But she wanted to believe he had her best interests at heart.
At the end of the day, he’d sacrificed so much to put himself in this danger.
He’d given up so much to risk being here—to save other people.
She owed him so much for that.
They turned around again. Under the planes from above. Under the darkening sky. Under the cacophony of hellish noises.
And then they looked to the road ahead.
“We need to keep moving,” Kelsie said. “We need to—”
She didn’t finish.
There was a blast.
A deafening explosion, right to their side.
And then another.
Right up ahead.
She felt her stomach sink as she watched the planes fly overhead, and a sickening reality hit her.
“It’s happening,” she said. “It’s… it’s already happening.”
Another blast. Right up ahead.
A momentary flash.
It all happened so quickly.
Trev.
His friends.
Up in flames.
Screaming.
Burning.
Kelsie held her ground, heart racing, trying to comprehend what she was looking at. She saw Tate behind the flames. Fear in his eyes.
She went to rush over to him. Because despite what had happened, she wanted to be by his side now. He was one of them.
And then another blast cracked opposite and blew her across the street and into the sea.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Fifteen and a Half Hours to Go…
Kelsie felt herself flying through the air and towards the sea, baby Holly in her arms, and she braced herself for impact.
She hit the water with a crash. Felt it slap against her face like a wall of water, harder and more solid than she was expecting. The water seeped up her nostrils, made her gasp and struggle. She could feel that dullness of unconsciousness creeping up on her again.
But she couldn’t pass out now.
She couldn’t fall into the dark void now.
Not while she was in the water.
Not while she
was holding onto her baby.
She tried to scan around her surroundings, but she couldn’t see a thing. Just darkness. Debris. Dirt.
But above, she could see a light. A faint light glimmering, probably from the moon, she wasn’t sure.
She just knew she had to swim towards it.
She had no choice.
She went to swim towards it then she felt something.
Something holding her back.
Something around her ankle.
She looked down, saw it in the dark grimness of the wild water, and her stomach sank.
There was something wrapped around her ankle. Some of the debris, a piece of building debris and old wiring, all attached to her foot.
She tried to kick it. To kick free of it.
But it was no use.
She was stuck to it.
And the debris was dragging her down.
She felt that total dread, then. Looked at baby Holly in her arms. Her instinct was to protect her, but at the same time, she’d been so focused on getting herself out of this water in order to protect her that she hadn’t taken much of a moment to check on her.
She looked at her.
Looked at her wide eyes.
Looked at the way she cried underwater.
And she felt so bad for her—and hoped to God that the myth about babies being able to hold their breath instinctively was true.
She looked down again, then. Looked at the debris wrapped around her foot. She knew she needed to act fast. Even if baby Holly could hold her breath, it wasn’t going to be something that lasted very long. It was going to be a temporary thing. A very temporary thing.
So Kelsie had to try something.
She had to risk something.
She looked at baby Holly. Mimed the words to her. The words she needed her to see. Needed her to hear.
And then before she could let emotion and tears get the better of her, she let go of her and then reached down towards her ankle.
The debris and the chain had got more tangled around her than she’d first thought. It seemed like it was tightening every second. She kept on checking on baby Holly, checking on her as she floated there, slowly drifting down.
Keeping check on her at all times.
