by Leyton, Bisi
“What is this?” she exclaimed.
She was in London, eighty miles northwest of the Isle of Smythe.
“I am glad to see you are awake,” someone spoke with a strange accent. He almost sounded American.
Wisteria spun around to see a tall teenage boy with messy brown hair and incredible green eyes, standing in the doorway, carrying a tray.
“Hello,” he greeted her.
“Hi.” She tried to sound cool.
He was dressed strangely. Granted, nowadays fashion was the last thing on anyone’s mind, but this boy’s clothing looked old, like they were from the 1920s or earlier. He wore a green striped shirt. His expensive looking dark gray trousers were held up with suspenders. Weirdest still, he wore brand new leather shoes.
Where would he get clothes like this from a city with biters? Why would he spend the time to pick out an outfit when food, medicine and weapons were far more important?
“I brought you dinner; unless you are a vegetarian.” He switched on the lights.
“No, I’m not.” She gazed at the tray. “Who are you?”
The tray held a steak and a salad of some kind. The food smelled amazing. The ingredients looked fresh, not like the dried powdered food she ate on the Island. The vegetables were very exotic and definitely out of season.
She wanted to ask him questions, but was transfixed by the fresh steak.
“I am Felip.”
“Felip,” she echoed. “Where am I?”
“You do not know?” He placed the tray on the small table. “We are in London.”
“We can’t be in London.” This has to be a dream.
Felip simpered as if he were amused by her statement “I was unsure what you wanted to drink, so I brought water. Do you want any ice?”
“Ice?” Wisteria hadn’t even seen ice in years. “What exactly is going on here? How did I get here? What day is it today?”
“Ninth of March.” He took a chain watch out of his pocket.
“I left home on the twenty-sixth of March.”
“But who knows what the date is nowadays. You have been out for a few hours. I was a bit concerned, since there are not a lot of doctors out here. Why do you not get some food in you, and then we will talk.”
Her mind flashed back to what happened earlier. She recalled the events leading up to her fall, outside Cunningham’s, and winced. “Thank you,” she muttered. “For taking care of me and for the food. I feel a lot better. I should be going.” But her ankle was swollen. The pain was agonizing and she felt the beginning of a migraine. How was she going to get out of here? How was she going to get home?
“You are safe here. True, you have no reason to trust me, but you are safe here.”
“It’s not that.” Unaware of what this guy really wanted, she wasn’t going to cross him. During the dark days, after the outbreak, when she travelled with her family, they ran into people who pretended to be nice, but later tried to rob them or feed them to the biters. She forced a smile. “I’d just like to get home. My family will be out of their minds looking for me. Please?”
“Of course, you are a guest here. You can go whenever you like, but it might make sense to eat first. I hear it can be rough out there and getting a meal can be hard.”
A good meal outside was an abnormality and a miracle in the dark days. The supermarkets and food shops were quickly ransacked as people got sicker. The only places that had anything usable had been crawling with biters. As a result, Wisteria and her family had eaten rats more times than she cared to remember.
“If she wants to go, let her.” A stern voice came from the door. “But you should know an even larger swarm than the one you encountered in the shop is on their way through this city.” Another boy appeared at the doorway. He too, spoke with the peculiar accent. He looked to be about Wisteria’s age or maybe a little older, and he was tall, taller than Felip. Hidden behind his messy black hair, his piercing green eyes were fixed on her.
As he stared intently at her with his arms folded tightly over his chest, she saw a series of black tattoos running down the sides of his defined biceps to his elbow. He was dressed similarly to Felip execpt he wore all black and had on red shoes. “But I will not take you back through the swarm of the infected that is on their way.”
“Bach, how bad is it?” Felip turned to the other boy.
“About two thousand are coming from the east and are heading north,” he answered, and then conversed with the other boy in a strange language that sounded oddly familiar. He glanced at Wisteria, as if he was angry about something. Then, he left her alone with Felip.
“Did he bring me here?” She was relieved that the cold, strange boy was gone.
“Bach? Yes he did.”
“And he knows there’s swarm of biters heading this way?”
Felip nodded.
“No one can predict how the biters move,” Wisteria retorted. “It’s impossible.” She knew the scientists and trackers on the Isle of Smythe had been trying to predict that for years.
Felip looked at her as if she was insane, but then he smiled.
“If we could do that, I would never be caught in an overrun,” she said.
“An overrun?” he asked.
“Well, I call it an overrun. It’s when a swarm of hundreds, or sometimes thousands of biters, flood through while devouring everything.” During the outbreak, Bristol was flooded with hundreds of biters that turned into tens of thousands overnight. Luckily, Wisteria and her family had hid in an old Cold War fallout shelter with an elderly couple, the Lawsons. This was when Wisteria’s mother got the idea about the bunkers when they settled on the Isle of Smythe.
“Then you know there is almost no way you could survive it,” Felip said.
“So, you just wait for the biters to get here?” she asked.
Again, he looked slightly confused. “We are safe here. Please eat something, and then get some rest. I promise I will answer your questions later.” He left the room, but didn’t close the door.
She didn’t know what to think. These boys could be setting her up as bait or maybe they were part of a cult. She walked back to the window and peered down. It was kind of hard to make out was happening below, but she noticed some movements.
“Here.”
She jumped at the voice.
Bach stood in the doorway. “Felip says that you need proof of what I said.” He held out a pair of binoculars.
“It’s okay, I believe you.” She only agreed so she wouldn’t provoke her captors or rescuers. She didn’t know who these people were.
“No, you do not.” He was still holding them out to her. “I want you to see for yourself.”
She cautiously took the binoculars, noting that Bach was sweating a little. She swung them over to look out of the window. She felt devastated by the destruction she saw below. The streets were littered with burnt and crashed vehicles. Rotten bodies lay everywhere. The shops had been looted or vandalized by survivors. This wasn’t the city she remembered visiting years ago. Was this what it was like in her real home? Her mind went to her home and her extended family. She shuddered.
“Are you all right?” Bach asked.
“Of course.” She attempted to smile. Looking through the binoculars again, she saw three biters in tattered fancy dress, shuffling through streets. Seconds later, she spotted groups of twenty or so, all wearing red football jerseys staggering slowly behind them. As the moonlight shone through street, one of the biters gazed up as if looking at her. Wisteria quickly dropped behind the curtain. “Kill the lights,” she said to Bach, who was now standing by the door.
“Why? I am sure Felip told you, we are safe up here?”
“Please?”
He switched off the lights.
Peeking out again, there were forty biters now roaming through the street below. Wisteria was trapped here with no way out.
CHAPTER FIVE
Bach marched across the roof of the Hunter Tower, through the makeshift
forest. It was once a flower garden, but he now used it to grow vegetables. Over a year ago, he and Felip built a greenhouse and planted the garden up there so they would be able to grow some of the vegetables from their home realm. Growing plants was something he’d learned from watching his mother, who collected the most unusual plants he’d ever seen.
Felip was bad at working with plants, but he’d gotten a bit better over the last years with Bach’s help.
Enric, on the other hand, was useless at it and he tried to get Piper to learn, but Bach refused to be near enough to teach her.
Once at the edge of the roof, he leaned over, watching the night covered street. About three hundred or so infected Terrans staggered along in the street below.
Bringing the Terran girl here was a mistake. She didn’t remember him and from her eagerness to leave, she despised him. This hurt him deeply. He did not expect her to fall at his feet, but he didn’t expect such rejection. “Ah.” He clenched the railing as sweat poured down his arms.
“I thought you would be inside, figuring out why you think you remember her.” Felip tapped him on the shoulder. “Instead, you are up here alone while getting extremely angry.”
“Why are you not resting? You look worse than before.”
“I think Wisteria has been around strangle weed.” He waved his hands and sat down on a nearby bench. “But it’ll be better once she has washed.”
“That explains why I have been sweating so much. How much does she have on her?”
“She did not have with her. I think she bathes in it.”
Unbeknownst to the Terrans, strangle weed, a violet vine that grew on Terra, was one of the few things from Terra that could kill the Family. It was toxic to the Family in almost any form and just being near it was uncomfortable for Bach, to say the least.
“After the swarm passes, I will take her back. We will not have to worry about her poison,” Bach grumbled as he stepped onto the railing. “I want to check the perimeter again. At least to make sure there’s no risk of a breach.”
“Why? Your grandfather’s Thayn built this tower one hundred and fifty years ago to make it impregnable to the Terrans. Not even one of their tanks could break the walls.”
“What do I know about construction or tanks? I will sleep better knowing everyone is okay.” Bach climbed on to the ledge.
He was about to jump off when Felip stopped him. “Are you afraid of her?”
“What?” he scoffed.
“It is like you are trying to find reason to leave, but I could be mistaken.”
“You are right—you are mistaken.”
“Or are you lonely here? Is that what this is about?”
“Lonely?” He almost fell off the edge. “For a Terran? If I wanted to find entertainment of that grade, I would not have settled for her.”
“They do look a lot like us. If you drink a lot of sandwine, you might trick yourself into thinking she was?” Felip jeered.
“I do not know what you are talking about.” Needing to be alone, Bach jumped off the ledge. He grabbed onto a windowsill to break his fall when he reached the eleventh floor, and climbed into Room 1134, his east side entrance. He headed to the stairwell, moving swiftly through the dark interior.
* * * * *
The food Felip had brought for Wisteria was far too rich and too much for her. When she was younger, she never had trouble eating big, rich meals, but after years of living off rations she couldn’t seem to indulge anymore. The main reason she couldn’t seem to eat much was because of her worry over the horde of biters below.
She limped out into a dark corridor and spotted a door near the end. It was open and a bright light shone from it into the hall. She could hear music and laughter emanating from the room. Slowly, she moved to the door and peaked inside. Felip stood playing video games in front of an enormous television at the far end of a massive living room.
The floor was marble and she was sure there was a swimming pool on one end of the room. On the other was a large mirror, which made the room look even larger. When everyone else she knew was struggling to find food, these boys were living like kings, and really stupid kings at that. She couldn’t understand why biters didn’t just break in and overrun this place. Wisteria needed to escape, but with the swarm below that was impossible. Maybe she could reason with the guys to turn off the music and the lights at the very least.
“Hello,” Felip greeted her. “Have you decided what you are going to do?”
“I can’t leave, not with the biters swarming down there.”
He gestured for her to sit.
She hopped over to one of the sofas and sat down in front of the television, spotting a newspaper on the couch. The headline read, Doomsday Virus Cured! She wanted to both laugh and cry, because people had been so naïve and stupid back then. It was certainly an old newspaper from before the swarms.
There was a time when the government thought the biters could be saved. It was months after the outbreak and everyone thought there was a real cure. The scientific community, media, and the government championed it. Some pockets of scientists were skeptical, but they were painted as quacks and panic mongers.
People clamored for this cure and it was practically handed out on street corners. Her mother wasn’t convinced and she made them bunker down in Bristol. Wisteria waited, hoping for sanity to return while people were treated, but that never happened. Three weeks later, most of the government, media, and medical communities were infected. Days later, she heard the final broadcast from the BBC, with a message from Queen Elizabeth asking people to stay calm and carry on. That was the last government communication of any kind.
“Television, wow! I can’t remember the last time I watched TV,” Wisteria remarked as she sat down. “But how do you make all this work?”
“Magic,” he teased.
“Seriously.”
“If I explained it to you? You would not understand.”
“You’re running diesel generators? That’s not hard to understand.”
“Yes, that is exactly what we are doing.” Felip chuckled as though she was an idiot and turned back to his games.
There was no point continuing the conversation or showing any frustration over his response. She had to figure out how and when she’d leave. Her sword had vanished and these people didn’t have weapons in easy access.
“How long have you been out there? Where are you from?”
“Oh, not for long. How long have you all been up here?” She didn’t want to discuss where she was from. She got up, limped over to the cabinet and started to examine the titles.
“Two years, but it is better for me not to try and keep track. In my mind, it helps pass the time. But I am going to assume you live around a lot of people.”
“Why do you assume that?”
“Because Bach said he got you from Norton and I have heard there is a safe haven near there. The Isle of Smythe; one of the last human safe havens.”
“One of them? Wait, you know about other settlements?” She jumped up, but couldn’t stand long. “How many? Where?”
“A few.” Bach came into the room. “Eventually, they kill each other or are devoured by the infected. I would not expect yours to last very long.” He sounded as if he wanted everyone to die.
“We’ll be fine,” She shot back angrily. “We keep ourselves safe.”
“Not very safe, since you ended up here with us.” He looked like he was smirking.
“That was an accident,” she defended.
“Well, it is only a matter of time,” Bach quipped. “The infected will breach and everyone you know will die, if they are not dead already.”
“What?” She searched for words to reply, but she didn’t have to figure that out because Bach skulked out of the room.
“Ah, do not worry about him. He is just mad because you are using his room,” Felip chortled while he continued to play the game.
* * * * *
Bach returned to his makes
hift quarters, regretting what he said about the Terrans. Well actually no, he stood by it. The reason he and his cohorts came to Terra was to watch the Terrans suffer for what they did to him and his mother.
Watching the swarm of infected Terrans wandering beneath his window, he wanted to will the swarm to dissipate, so Felip could take Wisteria away. But doing that would take almost all his strength to get a swarm this size to scatter.
Hours later, he was still at the window when someone knocked. Opening his door, he saw Wisteria standing outside with her arms crossed. Just seeing her mad at him upset him because she must have remembered this lost secret and was choosing to toy with him. Her large black eyes squinted up at him through her long eyelashes. This particular guise was one he’d seen before.
“Yes?” He looked down at the short girl.
“Thank you for saving my life. And thank you for letting me stay in your room.” The sound of her voice was rhythmic because he remembered now that she’d been a singer. She was also a liar, for not admitting that she knew him.
“But you owe me an apology.” Her eyes were squeezed to angry slits.
“What?”
“You should apologize for what you said before. Why did you act that way?”
“Okay, I am sorry. Is that better?” He started to close the door.
Wisteria stopped it with her hand. “Please, never speak to me like that again.” She furiously limped away from him and made her way down the hall.
* * * * *
Moments later, Wisteria lay down to sleep, but her thoughts were full of mixed images of her family and the surreal groans from the biters below. After several hours of trying to sleep, she gave up and left the room. She wandered around the penthouse apartment and found her way to the roof.
