As the World Falls Down

by Katy Nicholas

  I squeezed my eyes shut and bowed my head to the floor, unable to watch. The frenzied splashing and the distorted sound of Nate’s voice permeating through the water was enough to fill me with more despair than I’d ever felt.

  Then, there was silence.

  Nate became still. And, just like that, he was gone.

  My soul left my body, leaving me empty and paralyzed. As my knees gave out, my body lapsed back against Ben, who barely managed to keep me from hitting the floor.

  An age seemed to go by before they eventually lifted Nate out of the water and laid his body down on the gravel next to the fountain. No one said a word or moved, they just stood frozen, eyes on the lifeless body before them.

  Laura was the first to break the silence when she cleared her throat and walked over to Nate. She bent down and took his pulse the same way she had done with Claire and then glanced over to the man called Max.

  “Take him away,” she said, her expression stricken. There was an undertone of anger in her voice, maybe a touch of remorse too. Not that it mattered. It was too late.

  Her eyes briefly flashed to me before she turned back to Nate and gently closed his eyes with her fingers.

  Suddenly, she let out a muffled yelp and fell backward.

  Nate breathed.

  It was a sharp, deep intake of air that lifted his chest and shoulders. Seconds later, his eyes snapped opened and he rolled onto his side, coughing out water and gasping for oxygen.

  I got to my feet, but Ben still wouldn’t let me go. He tightened his grasp on me again and held me firmly against his sweat-drenched chest.

  “Well,” he whispered, so close to the side of my face that I felt his hot breath in my ear. “Looks like your boyfriend didn’t need our help, after all.”

  What the hell did that mean?

  As Nate slowly crawled to his knees and tried to stand up, I tried calling out for him, but I choked beneath Ben’s stranglehold.

  “Get him upstairs!” Daniel barked.

  Max and the other man quickly rushed to Nate and grabbed hold of him. He tried to pull away from them, but he was dazed and just ended up falling against Max.

  “Laura, go with them!”

  She shot Daniel a look of fierce indignation. “This isn’t what I signed up for!” she growled as she barged past him to follow the men back into the school.

  Daniel ignored her. “Get Halley into the water,” he ordered Ben, the mention of my name jarring me back to a state of semi-awareness.

  My limbs were lead weights as Ben picked me up and carried me to the fountain.

  For Christ’s sake! Fight!

  The cold water enveloped my body as Ben clutched my shoulders and pushed me back into the water.

  Fight!

  At that moment, another figure appeared by the fountain and leaned over the rim.

  It was Claire.

  Claire.

  Claire, who’d died yesterday.

  She loomed over me, smiling. “Don’t be scared.”

  I reeled. “Claire? How are you alive?”

  “We didn’t know about Nate,” she whispered, ignoring my question. “If we’d known, we wouldn’t have put him in the water.”

  “Known what? Claire?”

  She smiled again and rested her hands softly on my chest. There was an unexpected burst of static under her palms when her skin made contact with mine, so intense she staggered back with a screech. Her brows knitted in together in a pained expression as she inspected her hands.

  “I—I don’t think we should do this,” she stuttered, twirling round to face Eve.

  Ben groaned. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. What now?”

  “No. We can’t. We can’t!”

  Then, suddenly, Claire screamed out in agony and covered her ears.

  Eve ran to her side. “Claire? Honey, look at me. What’s wrong?”

  Claire thumped her ears and then covered them again. “So loud. Screaming. We have to stop! We aren’t supposed to do this. Not to her!”

  “Claire—”

  “You’re not listening!”

  Claire yelled into Eve’s face so vehemently that she stepped back, her emerald eyes wide with astonishment.

  Ben shook his head. “Screw it!”

  With that, he used his knee to pin my legs while wrapping his hands around my neck. As the cold water rushed over my face, I clawed at Ben’s hands with my fingernails, but he pushed me down deeper until the back of my head hit the concrete bottom. My chest burned from the lack of oxygen as I resisted the urge to let the water fill my lungs. Above me, through the cold murk, warping outlines of people took shape. For a second, I thought it was my imagination when the ripples turned red, but I recognized the way the red tendrils curled through the water—it was blood.

  I was abruptly released.

  And Eve was pulling me up.

  I sucked in air and coughed out the stale water that sat in the back of my throat. My sodden hair was plastered to my face, and it wasn’t until I scraped it out of my eyes, that I saw Ben laying on the ground, his body jerking violently. His white t-shirt was now saturated in the blood that poured out his mouth and dribbled down from the corners of his eyes.

  I gaped, unable to comprehend what’d happened.

  Daniel glared at me. “What did you do?”

  Claire stopped hyperventilating and let her hands slide slowly from her ears. “It wasn’t her,” she said sternly, staring Daniel down. “It was them.”

  ****

  Before…

  The fear of ending up alone in this hell lingered constantly in the back of my mind. Every day, at some random moment, a vision of Rebecca lying dead in her bed would force its way into my consciousness, and nothing I did made it go away.

  To add to my anxiety, being unwell had really taken it out of Rebecca. At least once a day, I’d find her dozing on the couch or slumped over the dining table asleep. She was more tired now than she was before she’d gotten sick. I thought maybe she’d become anemic or deficient in one vitamin or another, and so I badgered her into taking a supplement.

  However, not before I’d found her sleeping in the garden against the chicken coup.

  “Fine, I’ll take the damn vitamins,” she said, as I insisted on putting her to bed for the afternoon. “On the condition that you stop worrying about me catching the virus.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m probably immune. Otherwise, I’d have gotten sick by now.”

  I shrugged and threw her duvet over her legs. “If that’s true, you can’t be the only one.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I remember watching the news and hearing about a few people in America who were immune,” I said. “There might be people here in Britain that are immune too.”

  “I doubt it,” Rebecca responded flatly.

  Did I dare broach the subject of survivors again? Even though it was always met with the same categorical rebuff.

  “We could look together. We don’t have to stay here forever, Rebecca. We could move around.”

  “Halley—”

  “Remember the car that I saw? What if they were immune, like you? Or, a survivor, like me?”

  “I told you that I looked, Halley. There was no one,” she growled, the veins in her neck throbbing with irritation.

  “But we could go further North, or…wherever. Please say you’ll think about it.”

  Rebecca stared at me, a fleeting expression of sympathy crossing her face. “Fine. I’ll think about it,” she sighed. “But, not now. We’ll see how things are when the weather warms up.”

  For the next few months, I waited eagerly for the daffodils and bluebells to appear, wishing away Winter so that, maybe, we could finally leave this place.

  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?”