Half Lives (28 page)

‘Please. No.’ The words are repeated and jumbled among the screams.

‘Greta.’ Beckett whispers her name and Harper’s heart clenches. ‘We’ve got to help her.’

Harper so wishes they could walk away. She was beginning to believe they could leave everything behind. But Greta’s screams will not be denied. Beckett and Harper are being
sucked back into the conflict that’s based on hating what you don’t understand and fearing an enemy you’ve only imagined.

M
idnight leapt from her favourite spot on my chest. There was someone in my room. My nerves jangled like they did when a telephone call came in the
middle of the night. I held my breath so I could listen more intently. Every slasher movie I’d ever seen came flooding back. I imagined the flash of a knife, a wire pulled tight between
fists, the sound of a gun cocked and ready to fire. But the strange thing was these thoughts didn’t increase my pulse rate. A thought that couldn’t possibly be mine sprang into my head.
I tried not to think it, but it repeated over and over like a bazillion IM messages popping up all at once: I wasn’t scared of death. I was wishing for it.

We’d been locked in here for thirty-three days according to Tate’s tally. I don’t know when I changed, but at some point I’d stopped thinking about each day as being one
day closer to freedom. Each day had become one day closer to death.

‘Who is it? Who’s there?’ I asked. I sat up on my cot. I clutched the key in my fist. The key that I’d used to lock us in. Had one of them finally decided to come for
it?

The darkness seemed to speak: ‘Icie, it’s Chaske.’ I felt him bump my cot. ‘Can I sit down?’

‘Whatever,’ I said. It sometimes felt like that was the only word in my brain. Nothing mattered.

The cot bounced as he sat. I thought I could hear him biting his nails.

‘I don’t want to be alone any more.’ Chaske shifted so he was sitting right next to me. I slumped into him. He tilted so our heads touched. His long, silky hair fell like a
curtain on my shoulder. He smoothed my dreadlocks and kissed me on the cheek.

I closed my eyes, feeling a rush of warmth. He kissed my forehead and my skin tingled where his lips touched and the feeling flashed like a firework through my body. Like the night sky on the
Fourth of July, the darkness inside me was washed in a breathtaking array of colour. And I started to live again.

When the lights in the tunnel were switched on the next morning, I was wrapped around Chaske. We’d held each other all night. That was enough.

This never would have happened out there. I’d lived my life in fast forward. Everything was rushed and programmed. In here, we lingered. We had time to think, which wasn’t always a
good thing, but it meant that I could savour this moment with Chaske.

If he had shown up at my high school, we probably wouldn’t have even talked to each other. Well, he wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with the shallow, self-centred person I now
realized I’d been. I’d like to think I would have given this quiet, mysterious guy a chance, but I probably would have cared too much about what other people thought.

The even footfalls of Marissa on her morning run snapped me into the present.

‘Wake up, sleepyhead,’ she called and then she was standing in the doorway. ‘Oh, sorry.’ She turned away. She was wearing her hot-pink sports bra and ripped jeans. The
jeans hung low on her thin hips. She’d lost weight, more than the rest of us with her insistence on exercise. We could see the electric-green elastic of her thong. Her skin seemed to have a
greyish tint. Like always, she had her D&G bag slung over her shoulder.

Chaske and I sprang apart. ‘I-i-it’s OK,’ I stammered. Marissa was barely holding onto sanity and I was scared that seeing us together might push her over the edge. ‘We
were just . . . it wasn’t . . . is everything OK?’

‘Yeah, fine. No problem,’ Marissa said, still facing away from us. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot and I thought I’d start a morning prayer service . . . I thought . . .
you might want to . . . but you’re . . . whatever.’ She rubbed her hand back and forth across her stubbly scalp. Chaske had helped her shave her head with his hunting knife, but it
hadn’t worked so great. She looked like the love child of a guinea pig and a skinhead.

‘Marissa, it’s fine,’ Chaske said.

‘I’ll pray for you.’ She walked towards the entrance of the tunnel, then turned around and walked back the other way. When had Marissa found religion? The closest I’d
ever seen her to spiritual was when she had demonstrated her cheer routine for us. She’d tacked on this plastic supermodel smile and struck the standard stiff cheerleader pose – fists
on hips and legs spread in a sturdy A. ‘Ready! OK!’ she had yelled when she started every cheer. It was like a televangelist shouting ‘Amen!’

‘You’d better go after her,’ Chaske said.

‘Why?’ I didn’t want to leave him.

‘She’s getting worse.’

We’d all noticed these weird changes in Marissa, not only in her appearance but in her behaviour. We’d never really talked about it. If we didn’t acknowledge it, then it
wasn’t happening.

‘Yeah, this prayer thing is new.’ I drew my body into a ball and picked at a hole in my jeans.

‘Icie, it’s more than that,’ Chaske said, and scooted away from me. ‘You know what I mean. I don’t think the girl ever sleeps. Have you seen what she’s done
to the entrance?’ I’d seen it for the first time yesterday. She’d taken a stone or something and drawn hundreds of faces, like emoticons, all over the walls. ‘She’s
doing that at night. I haven’t seen her do it, but it’s got to be her. The rest of us sleep.’

‘Why can’t
you
talk to her?’ I asked. ‘You know she likes you best.’ I’d recently started to feel that she blamed me for everything, as if I’d
somehow tricked her so I could lock her in this bunker with me. I sensed this core of animosity as if she were a milk chocolate Easter bunny filled with red-hot chillies.

‘I could but it’s . . .’ Chaske shifted on the cot.

‘What?’

‘It’s awkward. She keeps . . .’ His rosy cheeks said it all.

‘She’s coming on to you,’ I said.

‘Yeah.’ He moved to the other end of the cot and crossed his arms and legs.

‘So.’

‘It’s more than that. She sort of stalks me.’

‘There’s not much to do in here,’ I said, feeling guilty about my own pseudo-stalker behaviour. I’d basically stolen his
To Kill a Mockingbird
and hadn’t
returned it yet. I thought about him non-stop. I was always listening out for him and secretly staring at him whenever the four of us were together. That was kind of stalker-ish.

He stood up. ‘Just forget it.’

‘No, wait,’ I said. He’d come to me and we’d had this perfect night and I was
so
blowing it. I slowly lifted myself off the bed. My head always felt as if it
were filled with cotton candy.

‘Icie,’ Chaske said, staring after Marissa. ‘I think she’s losing it. I mean seriously losing it. She keeps talking about me and her as if we are a couple. As if
we’ve . . .’

‘Oh.’ My body went cold. Why wouldn’t Chaske and Marissa, you know? Out there they had been equally beautiful. They deserved to be on a movie poster in a mad passionate
embrace.

‘No. God, no,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but she’s making me really uncomfortable.’

‘OK, I’ll talk to her.’

He cupped my face in his hands. ‘Thanks,’ he said. Maybe I was going a bit crazy, too. We inched closer; our heads touched. I could feel an electricity between us. He kissed my
forehead and walked away.

‘Hey, Marissa,’ I said as I entered the supply room with Midnight tagging along. Marissa was tallying our dwindling supplies. Luckily we had a renewable supply of
water. Chaske and Tate had rigged a funnel and the canteens to collect the water that leaked from two of the fissures we’d found in the tunnel. We’d agreed on what we could eat and
drink each day and used the honour system. At first I was hungry all the time, but my stomach had grown used to my reduced calorific intake. Supplies were supposed to be my responsibility, but
Marissa would double-check that we were all eating and drinking only our allotted amount. She kept precise track of what we had left. A few days ago I heard her screaming at Tate for eating a whole
MRE by himself. She was also the vitamin police, making sure we each took a multi-vitamin every day.

She gave an exasperated and exaggerated sigh and made a dramatic production of starting her counting all over again. I waited until she was finished.

‘Are you OK, Marissa?’ I asked as she busied herself with counting the MREs. Midnight weaved in and out of the food piles.

Marissa huffed again. ‘Yeah. Fine. Fine. What’s he been saying? I’m fine.’ But she wasn’t fine. Well, none of us were. She was talking fast and her head twitched as
if she were flicking phantom hair out of her eyes. My heart was breaking watching this once vivacious girl disintegrate before my eyes.

‘He didn’t say anything,’ I lied. ‘I thought we might do something together today. You could help me with a new exercise programme or maybe we could whip up something
interesting for dinner. Did you ever watch those cooking shows where they had to make three courses with like squid ink, some pasta and chocolate sprinkles?’

‘We can’t use our resources that way. What are you thinking?’ Her head twitched, but this time it was more like she thought she saw something behind her. She bent over the six
piles of power bars. ‘Who put a peanut butter in with the summer berries?’ she asked no one in particular.

‘How about it, Marissa? We could see what make-up we still have and give each other makeovers.’

‘That’s a waste of time. A complete waste of time. We could use that stuff for, well, I don’t know, something useful.’ She was babbling in this stream-of-consciousness
way and then she just stopped. ‘You won, OK. I get it. You won. I lost.’

‘I don’t understand.’ She was freaking me out big-time.

‘Chaske. You won. I lost.’ She started stacking the power bars against the wall.

‘It’s not a contest. We’re all friends.’

‘The condoms.’ She extended her arm in this quick cheer-action move. She pointed and shuddered. ‘The condoms are gone.’

She was right. The three condoms were gone. We’d put them there along with the first-aid supplies. I remembered because it had been a bit awkward when she’d explained to Chaske that
they were there and smoothed down the foil packets in a straight line. ‘Well, I didn’t—’

‘You know, you’re not so special.’ She was suddenly standing toe-to-toe with me.

‘I never thought—’

Her face was glowing red. ‘Your parents are never coming. Do you hear me?’

Why was she saying that? I shook my head slightly, but as she continued my whole body trembled.

‘Stop talking about them.’ She grabbed me by my shoulders and now she was shaking me. ‘Stop making me think there’s hope. Don’t you get it? This is it. This is all
there is. We’ve lost everything. No one is saving us.’

She shoved me hard. I stumbled, toppling piles of supplies. I hit the wall and slid to the ground. I covered my face and sobbed into my hands. Why did she have to say that? I knew in my head she
was right, but in my heart I’d never, ever stop believing. I couldn’t.

‘Hey, guys!’ Tate sang, appearing in the doorway. ‘Everything OK?’

I tried to stop crying. I wiped my eyes.

‘Nothing. None of your business,’ Marissa said, cracking her neck and bouncing like boxers do in the ring before the fight.

‘Whatever, Baldy. I came for some food and to see if there were any empty containers I could use.’

Marissa picked up a jug and downed the inch of water that was left. ‘Here.’ She wiped her mouth on her arm and handed the jug to Tate. That definitely wasn’t like her. She
usually savoured and sipped the water.

‘Uh, thanks,’ Tate said. He tucked the jug under his arm.

‘I’m not sure if we should use—’ I started, but Marissa interrupted.

She screamed at me, ‘It’s one jug. One jug. Let him have it. Let someone have something other than you. You’ve got the key. You’ve got everything!’