by Jack Lewis
Heather walked to his desk. She stood over him, lifted her hand and brought it down sharply on his desk. The boy jumped in his seat. Despite herself, Heather felt pinpricks on the back of her neck, felt her chest tighten.
She tried to stay calm in front of the kids. She hated losing her temper. But they just didn’t understand. They didn’t have the slightest clue what a deadly world they lived in. Kids couldn’t be kids anymore. They had to grow up. They had to get used to danger, to live apprehensively beside it as if it was a pet snake that they could never trust. If she had to be the bad guy to hammer some sense into them, then that’s what she’d be.
She felt her cheeks burn. “Stay behind after class. Five hundred lines. Can you guess what they will say?”
Gary swallowed. “I must remember my AVS?”
She shook her head. “I must remember not to die.”
She turned away from the boy, scared that she might start shouting at him again. He didn’t deserve it. She knew that, but it didn’t give her any more self-control, though. It was easy to come to realisations about yourself, but impossible to do a damn thing about them. At the board she picked up the chalk and wrote a date on the black slate.
AUGUST 2016
“Someone tell me the significance of this date,” she said over her shoulder. “Jenny, at the back.”
“That’s when the infection got in the air,” replied the girl.
She says it with such sorrow in her voice, thought Heather. Was it because she knew she was different? She wasn’t a stupid girl, even if the location of her heart sometimes confused her. Maybe she knew what the Capita would do to her if they found out what she was. Heather felt the heat rise through her again. Her muscles tensed up.
They think they can tell people how to live just because they keep them safe, and the consequence is kids who have to hide who they are.
There was a snapping sound and Heather felt powder on her fingers. She looked at her hand and saw that she had broken the chalk in her grip and white dust had fallen to the floor. Some of the kids stared at her strangely, and Heather tried to remember what she was talking about. She looked back at date written on the board.
“Correct, Jenny” she said. “And after it became airborne the Capita tried to help us by dropping masks and air sensors out of the sky.”
“Like Christmas presents, Miss?” said one irritatingly optimistic child.
“Yes, Declan. Exactly like Christmas presents.”
It was strange that she’d learned to identify the boys in the class by voice alone. When they wore gas masks that covered their faces, most of them looked the same. Strictly speaking they didn’t need the masks in here. The school was sealed, and the air was checked hourly by a caretaker called Kevin with hands as big as spades. It was just good practice to get the children used to wearing them.
At the end of the classroom the door opened and a man stepped through it. He wore a long mask with a beak that hung off the end, the kind plague doctors used to wear in the Middle Ages. A long leather coat flowed around his bulky waist, and the ends stretched past his knees. She knew the man, of course. He was Charles Bull. It was the kind of name a person came to recognise if they lived within the Capita’s borders. Heather felt cold.
“Hello class,” he said.
Heather squeezed her fingertips into her palm. It was an old trick she learned when getting ready to teach her first class. It supposed to take away the nerves, but usually it just left her with fingernail impressions on her skin.
“Mr. Bull. How can we help you?”
“Sorry to butt in, but I was wondering if I could have a word?” said Charles, looking at the children.
“Sure,” said Heather. Her heart started to hammer at her chest. She didn’t want to go out of the classroom with Charles. Just being in the same room as him made her feel guilty, that she’d done something to offend the Capita.
“Not with you, Miss Castle.” He looked over at the corner of the room. “I need to speak to Jenny Fairgrove.”
Heather froze in her place. He knows what she is, and he’s come for her. What do I do? She forced herself to stay calm. Betraying any sort of emotion was the wrong thing to do in front of Charles, and it wouldn’t do Jenny any favours.
“I’m sorry, but we’re in the middle of a class. Can this wait?”
Charles looked at the blackboard.
“August 16th. Is this a history lesson?”
Heather nodded.
The bounty hunter put his hand to his chin. He faced the class and span on his heel. “I’ve got a good question for you, kids. When did the Capita come into being?”
“We’ve done this one,” said Heather.
“Then let them answer.”
She hoped they’d get it right. She didn’t need Charles reporting back to the Capita about how ineffectual a teacher she was.
“Eight hundred years ago,” said the little voices.
Heather sighed with relief.
“No,” said Charles, and shook his head. “Try seven years. That’s how long the Capita has existed.”
Heather squinted at the bounty hunter and wondered how he could get away with saying things like that. If Heather had said it and one of the kids had told on her, Capita soldiers would have smashed through her front door at night. The kids looked as confused as she was from the way they stared at the bulky man with the pickaxe on his back. Charles gave Heather a grin, as if to say there you go. Now you can deal with that one.
In a second his face was business-like again. “Your lesson is of the utmost importance, Miss Castle. But I have an important matter to discuss with Jenny and not even the history of the Capita can delay it. Jenny, come with me please.”
Jenny’s chair scraped on the floor as she swivelled away from her desk. She got to her feet and looked up at Heather with pleading eyes. But what could she do? She couldn’t physically restrain Charles, and if she said anything untoward, he would pick up on it. She couldn’t risk anything happening to her. Not with Kim at home.
“Does Jenny have your leave?” said Charles. “I’d hate for her to get detention on my account.”
Heather didn’t speak. She felt that he was goading her.
“Miss Castle?”
There was a smile on Charles’s face, but his eyes were cold. She felt that he was peeling her layers back and reading her innermost thoughts. He knew her secrets, and he wanted to make her say it was okay for him to take Jenny. Somehow, he knew how it would make her feel.
She had to stop him, but where would that leave Kim? She couldn’t risk something happening to her and having to leave her daughter alone. She couldn’t do anything to put their Great Escape in danger.
“Yes,” she choked out.
Charles put his hand on Jenny’s shoulder and gently guided her out of the class room. As the girl passed the last of the desks one of the boys, Henry, reached out and grabbed her.
“You can’t take her,” he said, in a voice so hysterical it even surprised Heather.
Charles raised his hand and brought it down on Henry’s face. A slapping sound echoed against the walls. The boy’s head jerked back, and in seconds his cheek began to redden. Heather thought he was going to cry, but from his glazed eyes it seemed he was too shocked for tears.
“Carry on with your lesson Miss Castle,” said Charles. “History is my favourite. It’s always good to know the mistakes of the past lest we repeat them again.”
With that he left the room and slammed the door behind him. The class was silent and the room was cold, and Heather was left stunned. She knew she should say something to reassure the class, but she couldn’t.
“Excuse me a second,” she said to them.
She walked away from the blackboard, across the classroom and opened the door that led into the stockroom. She walked into the small cubby-hole and shut the door behind her. There were two shelves with various glass beakers, art supplies and text books. On the top shelf was the doomed class biology project, w
here they’d planted bean sprouts in soil and tried to cultivate them. The sprouts had died in days.
The four walls trapped her in a small space with nothing but her cowardice and her anger. Why hadn’t she done anything? She had let him just take her away. What if it had been Kim?
Her shoulder muscles tightened into knots and a lump the size of a tennis ball grew in her throat. She hated Charles and the Capita he served, and she hated herself even more because she was too scared to do a damn thing about it.
I let him take her.
Without thinking she swung her arm out and pounded on the shelf. She kicked her legs, threw punches, flung her arms around until she felt everything topple over and crash onto the floor. She didn’t care about the mess or the noise, nor the fact that the children outside could surely hear her. She just wanted to smash and destroy until there was nothing left inside her.
When the haze began to clear she ran her hand through her hair and smoothed it down. She took a deep breath, opened the door and walked into the classroom. She walked up to the blackboard, picked up a new piece of chalk and began writing.
“So class,” she said, trying to still her shaking voice.
“Miss?”
“Let me finish writing.”
“Miss, there’s blood on your hand.”
She looked at her hand and saw blood running from a cut on her knuckles, spreading over the white chalk and falling in drips to the floor.
3
Heather
Jenny’s pleading eyes followed Heather every step of the walk home. The rain fell in torrents and splattered onto the pavement, flowed down the road and ran into drains that hadn’t been tended to in years. The drops fell in hundreds of thousands and hit Heather’s forehead so hard that they actually hurt. She wiped her head and made her palm slick with moisture. At times like this maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea to have one of the full-face masks that the children had to wear instead of her minimal eyes-and-nose-only model.
Unwanted and unwelcome, Charles’s plague doctor mask thudded into her thoughts. The long, extending beak, black and pointed at the tip. The straps that came off the side and twisted snake-like around his neck. She knew that his choice of mask was a deliberate attempt to make him seem scarier. The annoying thing was that it worked. Whenever she thought of him she felt icy fingers tap up and down her spine.
She tried to push him out of her mind. She even tried to push Jenny away, because if she thought about the look on the girl’s face as the bounty hunter led her away, it would tear her apart. She needed to be strong for Kim. She thought about home and the vegetables they had planted in their garden. Hopefully with the current crop they’d finally have enough food to make the journey away from the Capita and the shadow of the Dome.
As she watched the water slosh over the roads and bubble up through flooded drains, she was worried. If it carried on this way then the plants would get waterlogged, and sometimes getting too much of something was worse than not getting enough. Before the outbreak Heather had lived a pretty middling life. Mediocre love life, a decent job. She usually felt well enough to get through the day without a panic attack, but never had the highs of happiness or rock bottom-lows of misery. Things had changed. The world was now one of extremes; safety in the Capita, and death and starvation beyond it.
She took a detour and arrived at the edge of an estate that had long ago fallen into ruin. The streets were lined by terraced houses that had been built by the council decades ago and then rented out to those who couldn’t afford the prices of anything better. In the years leading up to the outbreak, when everyone pretended things were still okay, the council had earmarked this estate for demolition. They never got the chance, and now these poorly insulated, unbearably grey houses had new occupants.
The Capita knew about the trader estate. They were aware of the seedy business that took place here, but they let it pass. The houses that weren’t used by black-market traders were filled by those suffering illnesses that the Capita couldn’t treat, or by people who lacked the skills to get a place in the Dome and the safe zones around it. Walking through the dirty concrete streets of the estate brought a sense of dread in Heather’s mind, but she didn’t have a choice. She needed to pick up some tarpaulin to cover the plants or she’d lose the crop. A trader named Wes usually had what she needed.
She opened Wes’s door and walked up a flight of splintering timber steps. She entered a room that had once been a master bedroom and which Wes had converted into his office. There were chairs in the corner, a grandfather clock leaning against one of the walls and a door on the furthest side of the room. The grandfather clock never ticked and its pendulum never swung, so the antique block of wood stood to attention as a silent guard.
Wes sat behind a desk. His short hair was combed forward, and his fringe was stuck up into a quiff that was a good two inches too high. He wore a shirt and tie, with the knot so tight that it looked like his Adam’s apple was squirming for breath. Heather knew that underneath the desk, where his clients couldn’t see, Wes wore a pair of slack jogging pants.
In front of Wes was a man with a less groomed appearance. His brown chequered shirt was covered in stains, and his hair stuck out in tufts at the back as though he had just gotten out of bed. He bent over the table as though a great weight was on him. Heather couldn’t see his face, but she could tell the man stared intently at the Wes.
The trader put a glass bottle on the table and tapped the lid with his index finger.
“Lantus Levemir insulin, five hundred mil. Lasts up to 24 hours.”
The man’s shoulders shook. “Thanks Wes. You don’t know what this means to me.”
“No, I don’t. That’s what you’re going to show me.”
Wes looked up at Heather in the doorway. He jerked his head to the side of the room where the chairs were lined up against the wall. Heather walked over and took a seat.
The man stuck a hand in his pocket. He moved it over the table in front of Wes and then opened it carefully. A circle of gold rested in his palm.
“This is my wife’s.”
Wes took the ring and held it up to his eye. He turned it in his fingers.
“I didn’t know you were married.”
“You never asked.”
He dropped the ring on the table where it rolled a few inches toward the edge and then clattered to a stop.
“I don’t trinkets. What good are they? Show me what else you have.”
There was silence as the man thought about it. He stared across the room and out of the window to the rundown buildings and elephant grey concrete streets.
“I don’t know.”
Wes nodded at the man. “What’s that tucked in your belt?”
“My Heckler?”
“That’s right, the pistol. Used by the police, weren’t they? How did you get hold of it?”
“My brother was in the force.”
“He doesn’t need it anymore?”
“He’s dead.”
Wes made a beckoning gesture toward the pistol.
“Well that’s better. Hand it over.”
The man shrank back in his seat. As a neutral observer, Heather thought it a little harsh to take away the man’s protection, especially since he didn’t look to be a Dome resident. He probably lived somewhere outside the Capita lands where the infected roamed, and out there a piece of metal and a clip full of bullets were the only thing that stopped the monsters chewing on your flesh. Wes’s manner didn’t surprise her. So cold. He was a useful friend to have, but a dangerous one.
“You want the gun?” said the man.
“That’s a lot of insulin.”
The man’s voice became tense. “Damn, Wes. What do you expect me to do? I’m screwed if I hand this over. You don’t know what it’s like to live out there. What am I supposed to fight them with? A broom handle?”
Wes pushed himself away from the desk and crossed his legs. He wore saggy grey jogging bottoms.
> “You’re not a man with a wealth of choice. I guess it boils down to this. You either watch your daughter slip into a diabetic coma and then curse the fall the of the National Health System, or you hand over the gun, leave with the insulin and find yourself a sharp stick.”
The man reached to his belt and took out his gun. There was a moment where Heather thought he might point the gun at Wes and make off with the insulin. Hell, it was something she would have considered in his position. These days survival was at a premium and you paid whatever price you could.
The man slammed the gun down on the table. He stared at Wes as he scooped up the bottle of insulin, never once breaking eye contact. The look in his eyes was so cold it seemed to freeze the room. He stood up, turned and walked toward the door.
