No one lights a torch—for good reason—and so I don’t see who we lost. We all feel our way back to the middle of the street to regroup before someone leads the way to the nearest door.
Like the last one, this door leads to a complex of flats. We take the one on the top floor, but we don’t break in the door. We loot keys from the front desk to ensure our silence. It’s an unspoken agreement between us. Unspoken is the keyword here—no one speaks a word all the way into the flat.
In silence, we avoid the kitchen that overlooks the main street and hole up in the lounge instead. Paul breaks the quiet for the first time when he mutters that he will take first watch.
Before he goes to the kitchen to sit alone, he switches on his faint torch and hands it off to me.
I arch a brow as he adds in a low voice, “You can take over watch in a couple of hours.”
A frown pinches between my brows and, just as I’m about to ask why me, I trace the aim of the torchlight to the musty couch against the wall—and I see the extent of what has happened to our group.
I understand, and Paul leaves for the kitchen.
Standing by the armchair, I look around the tattered group, turning the torch on each one of them. My light grows stronger as one by one, more start to flicker on. Our sense of safety is rising, or we are just too exhausted to care now that we have a moment to recover. Besides, we need the light if we’re to take care of anyone’s wounds.
And there are wounds aplenty.
My gaze lands on the floor, where a beige-tinted rug is starting to turn red. Jamie is sprawled out over it, somehow still with us. But with Harry and Mikey—a middle-aged Spanish man—crouched over him, I suppose he was carried out of danger and protected all the way here.
Jamie doesn’t look so hot. His eyes are rolling to the back of his head, short lashes fluttering, and there’s a build-up of white foam crawling out the corner of his mouth. But that’s not what catches my whole attention—it’s his arm, where the razored tentacles had coiled.
The flesh there has blackened. Looks rotten to the bone, about ready to fall off. And black lines—like wisps of dark clouds—are stretching up his bare shoulder.
I watch as Harry peels apart the tattered remains of Jamie’s shirt. With his narrow torso revealed, it’s all the easier to see the shaky rise and fall of his chest. His breathing is choppy and strained, and now that I listen over the shuffle of the room, I hear the hoarseness of it.
For a while, I just stand there, looking around the wounded. Someone has a deep gash running down the backside of his leg, from mid-thigh all the way down to his heel. At some point, I hear mutters that tell me he cut himself scrambling to get under a van.
The Spanish sisters, Silvia and Maria, aren’t together anymore. Maria is nowhere to be seen, so I know she didn’t make it back with us. She either perished out there or somehow lost us in the dark. Silvia is huddled up in the corner, nursing her knee. At first glance, I don’t think much of her wound, but then Laura forces her hand back and reveals the truth of her injury—black lines, threading through her skin.
Tentacle critters got her too.
Our uninjured come to the rescue of the wounded. Not me. I stand too long in the middle of the room, unsure of myself. Spike is the only other one not to help, and I loathe that we have that in common. I loathe it so deeply to the bone that it spurs me into action. I don’t help bind cuts—blood and torn flesh make me ill. Instead I trade the torch for a blanket then roll it over the curtain rod, blacking out the window.
Once that slight chore is done, I check what we normally do when we hole up in a new place: Find a bathroom, check the water works (it does), and refill some bottles, loot for batteries and medical supplies. When that’s finished, I carry my small supply of paracetamol and two batteries to the lounge.
It’s then that I learn Jamie didn’t make it. Not like I expected otherwise, really.
Looks like it was the black lines that killed him. Now, the lines have reached his chest, curled as though they are poisonous lashes wound around his heart.
Harry is weeping beside him. He sniffs and uses the back of his hand to wipe away snot. Mikey drapes a blanket over the corpse. We’ll have to keep him in here for a little while. Can’t go dumping his body out in the hall or another flat just yet, not with the critters likely still nearby, and other survivors barely clinging onto the threads of life.
We respect the dead as much as we can in this dark world; this dark, cold world with a brand-new threat to wipe us all out.
It’s never been clearer. We have to face off with these lone warriors headed our way. For me, it’s about more than what awaits us if we don’t put up a final fight—a part of me just wants this to be over. And that part is growing, swelling into an unavoidable abyss.
I need to fill it.
I need this all to be over.
I need to die—on my own terms.
6
Though there is no night and day anymore, no moon or sun to tell the time, the adrenaline of the day has now simmered through the group and softened us into a faint state of exhaustion, leaving me to feel like it’s night.
Parked on the table pushed up against the back wall, I drift my attention around the room. Most of the others have been lured by sleep—they are curled up around the not-working heater, tucked close together on the couch, sleeping wherever they can. Can’t blame them. Even my eyelids are starting to gain weight, growing heavier by the minute.
I blink the weariness away and glance over at Harry. Alone, he works on the homemade bomb that he managed to salvage when the critters first attacked us. Clearly, he does it to distract himself, or feel betterresigned to the fate of his friend. I don’t know why, but I’m just glad he keeps tinkering away on it. We need it up and running soon.
You know, before now, the sight of a homemade bomb would have terrified me, speared white-cold fear right through me. Especially when the terrorism-fear was climbing the walls to the skies. Now, it’s almost a welcome reprieve from all that we suffer.
Harry pauses his work for a moment. I watch as he slowly—reluctance clinging to his stiff muscles—glances over his shoulder at the hidden bodies. His eyes are bloodshot red, and at the blushed bottom of his nose, scabs have started to appear on the skin.
He shakes his head before he turns back to his work.
His friend’s corpse is still under the stiff, itchy blanket. Jamie (Don’t forget their names. Try to remember them all). Name or no name, he’s now joined by Silvia, and her swift death confirmed that there’s something toxic about those razored tentacles—something that, no matter where they get you, makes certain you die.
It’s a strange thing to realise, isn’t it? That everything in your life you have done up to this point—trapped in the thick blackness with monsters—was all for nothing.
Harry can’t say the same about himself. Whatever he has done in his life (excelled at chemistry, maybe?) has come to this point, where he is our best weapon in our final stand.
But me?
What have I done that has led to this moment, that has somehow benefited me and the group, helped me survive?
I’m not afraid of death, so there’s that. I’ve tried to dip my toes in the other side before with bottles of pills and vodka. Unsuccessfully, of course.