‘No! No, it can’t be!’ I stretch forward a little more and kiss his eyes. As I pull back my tears fall down, spilling onto his lashes, splashing like rain.
Chapter 73: Adam
I used to hate seeing numbers. They scared me. I didn’t know why I’d got this gift, this curse. But it’s a number that saves me now. Sarah’s.
I’m in a tunnel, a long tube of darkness, but there’s light at the end; light and warmth and someone waiting for me. Mum. She’s how she used to be – not how she was when she died. She holds her hand out, and I reach towards her, but our fingers don’t touch. She’s smiling, and it feels so good to see her again. I never thought I would. She’s talking to me but her lips aren’t moving. I can hear her thoughts.
‘What you doing here, darlin’? It’s not time yet.’
I can hear other voices too, shouting, crying, but they’re miles away.
‘It’s over.’
‘No! No, it can’t be!’
And then someone’s close to me, really close, and I open my eyes, but I can’t see them. I can only see the light, and somehow the light is Mum and she’s the light. It’s all I want to see. I’ve missed her so much.
Something splashes in my eyes, and it stings. I blink it away and now there’s another face. Sarah. And her number floods through me and it’s like the first time I ever saw her. It shocks me, how someone can leave this world so easily, bathed in love and light. And I know I’m going to be there. I’ll be with her, holding her in my arms. I’m part of it, part of her life. So I can’t go now, I’ve got to stay.
The tunnel’s gone, Mum’s gone, but it’s okay. Just seeing her was enough.
Chapter 74: Sarah
He blinks. Once. Twice. And then he looks at me.
‘Adam,’ I say. ‘Come back. Come back to me.’
And in that moment, that fraction of a second, he’s with me again. I want to keep him so badly. The feeling’s so fierce, it’s like a pain, but I know that all I can do is look. All I’ve got is my eyes looking into his, his eyes looking into mine. And everything else goes away. It’s the two of us again. We’ve got now, this minute, this second.
‘Come back to me, Adam. I need you.’
His mouth is moving now. I strain to catch his words.
‘I love you, Sarah.’
‘I love you, too. I always have, only I was scared.’
‘I’m scared now …’ He’s trying to say something else, struggling to find enough strength to get the words out.
‘Shh,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry. Tell me later.’
‘The numbers …’ he whispers.
‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry about them. Not now.’
‘But Sarah, you don’t understand.’
‘What? What is it?’
‘Mia’s number …’
I freeze. Her number was today. Oh my God, oh my God. I lean closer, so my ear is next to his mouth. He’s talking under his breath. A list of numbers. I can’t make them out.
‘Two. Twenty. Two …’
‘Adam? Adam, what are you saying?’
‘Mia’s number,’ he says, his voice no more than a whisper, ‘it’s changed.’
‘Oh my God. Do you mean she’s all right? She’s going to be okay?’
‘I dunno. I don’t get it.’
‘Why? If it’s not today, then she must be okay, mustn’t she? Adam, tell me. Tell me Mia’s number.’
‘2022054,’ he murmurs. ‘It’s the same as Nan’s now. I’ve got to tell her. Where is she? Where’s Nan?’
I sit up and look round the crowd of faces peering down at us. She’ll be somewhere close at hand, but she’s not. I bend and twist, trying to see through all the legs, through to the others behind them.
And then I realise – I haven’t seen her since Adam put his arm round her shoulders and sent her off into the flames. She wasn’t there in the garden when I got out, but I heard her in the fire. I felt her hand guiding mine. Didn’t I?
‘Sarah.’ Adam’s looking straight at me now. ‘Sarah. Where’s Nan?’
Chapter 75: Sarah
He won’t leave her in the wreckage. He’s hurt, badly hurt. We need to get him to hospital so someone can treat the burns on his back, but he won’t let us.
‘She’s in there,’ he says, looking towards the house. ‘Nan’s in there. I’m not going anywhere.’
If he had the strength he’d go back inside, but the flames are too intense, and, besides, Adam’s beat. He only just escaped with his own life. His own and Mia’s.
There are no fire crews to put out the flames, only a gaggle of neighbours watching helplessly as the house is incinerated. One by one they drift away, back to their own shattered homes, or to see if they can find help. We stay in the garden – Adam, Marty, Luke, Mia and me – and we watch and we wait. We wait until the flames die down, and the column of smoke dwindles away to almost nothing. We spend the night camped out while metres away from us the embers glow.
In the morning, the hopelessness of our task is clear. The whole house has collapsed, reduced to a mixed-up pile of ash, charred wood and metal … and, somewhere, human bones. My mum’s in there, as well as Val.
Adam stares and stares at the smouldering remains.
‘Adam,’ I say, ‘we can’t.’
I want to get out of here. Find some help for him. Overnight the skin on his back has puffed up and blistered. He says it doesn’t hurt, but it hurts me to look at him. I don’t know how someone so badly burnt can still be alive. But I’m glad he is. It’s true what they say: you don’t know what you’ve got till you lose it. And I came close to losing Adam. I think I did lose him. He went away and came back again.
‘She’s gone,’ I say, as gently as I can. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘We can’t leave her there.’
Suddenly I’m back at Carlton Villas, and Val’s staring into the rubble where her home used to be. She didn’t want to leave, but I made her. And now I’ll have to make Adam leave her.
‘There’s nothing else we can do for her,’ I say. ‘We need to find a doctor. You need a doctor.’
‘Why?’
I think he’s asking about his burns. He can’t see them himself, not properly, so he doesn’t know how bad they are, but then he says, ‘Why did she die, Sarah? How did her number change?’
‘I don’t know. Val thought that you could change numbers. She told me that, and I think you did, Adam. I don’t know how many people got out of London, but it must be hundreds, maybe thousands. You saved them. And you saved Mia.’
He looks at me then.
‘I don’t know about the hundreds and thousands. I don’t know what their numbers were, but Mia … Mia’s different. You knew about Mia’s number,’ he says.
‘Yes. I saw it in your book.’
‘I was wrong. The numbers I saw were wrong.’
‘No, you saw them, but they changed. You changed them.’
He looks away from me then and his eyes fill with tears.
‘I wanted to save Mia, but I would never … I never …’
He doesn’t have to say the rest. I know. He would never have hurt his nan.
‘Did I do it, Sarah? Did I kill her?’
‘No, of course not. You saved people, you …’ I stop. He’s looking at me again and his eyes are so tortured. I want to say the right thing, make it all better. But there are some things that no-one can make better. And there are some times when bullshit just won’t cut it. ‘Adam, I don’t know. I don’t understand about the numbers. I don’t know what the rules are. Maybe it was you. Maybe it was Val. She wanted to help. She loved you so much, Adam. She was a powerful woman.’
‘I hated her, Sarah. I hated her … but I loved her too. I never told her.’
‘You didn’t need to. She knew anyway.’
‘Did she?’
‘Course she did.’
He shakes his head and looks away.
‘Adam,’ I say, ‘you saved thousands of lives. You’re a hero.
’
He won’t look at me now. He doesn’t reply. But a tear spills out of one eye and trickles down the scarred skin on his face.
Chapter 76: Adam
We stay on in London for weeks, first in the field hospital set up in Trafalgar Square and then, when they say I’m out of danger and my burns are starting to heal, in the Hyde Park camp. I don’t know what we’re waiting for. I s’pose we think that things’ll get back to normal soon. But as the days turn into weeks, nothing seems to change, except the queues get longer and our daily handouts of food smaller.
The city’s dark at night. The National Grid’s still down. We got generators here, but they turn our lights off at ten, and it’s pitch black until dawn.
There’s five of us in our tent, but it feels like five hundred after another night of the boys messing about, wriggling and crying. It’s not their fault. The things Sarah used to see in her nightmares belong to all of us now, even the kids. Especially the kids. When one of the boys starts crying, it wakes the other one up and then they start up too, and we’re all awake. Sarah does her best, but it’s not her they want in the middle of the night. It’s their mum. And she’ll never cuddle them better again.
I have nightmares too. I see the same thing over and over again – a slight figure walking away from me into the flames. I can’t reach her. She doesn’t hear me shouting. She never turns round. I just have to stand there, watching, as the flames take hold of her.
Sarah hardly sleeps, what with the boys and Mia. The thing is, Mia’s no trouble. She don’t cry. She feeds and sleeps and feeds some more. You’d think a three-month-old baby would be the most trouble of all in a place like this, but she’s a doddle: calm, settled, happy even. When I’m right on the edge, when I think I can’t take any more, I pick her up and hold her, and I start to feel human again.
The soldiers in charge of the camp start to ration water and I know it’s time to leave.
‘Where are we going to go?’ Sarah asks.
‘I dunno. Somewhere where they grow stuff to eat. Somewhere near a river, so we can have as much water as we need. Somewhere near a wood so we can burn stuff and keep warm.’
She sighs.
‘You want to move to the country. There’s nothing there, Adam. We’ll starve. We’ll die.’
‘Do you call this living? There’s cholera in the camp now. They’re keeping it quiet, but I heard that three people have died already. We got to get the kids out, Sarah. This is a bad place.’
She frowns and hugs Mia closer to her.
‘Are the boys’ numbers bad, Adam? What are their numbers?’
My stomach turns over. We haven’t talked about the numbers. I’ve tried to block them out, not to look at anyone, not to think about it, because when I do, it does my head in. Now it comes flooding back in again, like a dam bursting.
‘It don’t matter about the numbers, Sarah!’ Without knowing it, I’m shouting. ‘You can’t trust them. Numbers change. A bad number can turn into a good one. A good number can turn into a bad one.’
She puts one hand out and strokes my arm.
‘It’s all right, Adam. It’s all right. Calm down. We’ll go. We’ll get out of here.’
I try to get my breathing back under control, stop rocking backwards and forwards.
‘I’m sorry, Sarah. I didn’t mean to get het up. It’s just … just …’
‘I know. I know,’ she soothes. ‘It’s too late to leave now. We’ll go tomorrow.’
In the morning we quietly pack up the few things we’ve got left.
‘Are we doing the right thing?’ Sarah asks just before we leave the camp. There are dark circles under her eyes and her face has got thin. She’s still beautiful though. I can’t help looking at her and as she searches my face for answers, her number fills my head again, and suddenly I want it to be real. Her number means hope and love and light. Her number makes me want to believe in happy endings.
I cup her face with my hands, and kiss her gently.
‘Yeah, Sarah,’ I say. ‘We’re doing the right thing. We’ll be all right, you’ll see.’
And I want to believe it. I do. I really do.
We take a last look round, then she puts Mia in her sling, she gets the boys to hold hands with her and I pick up our bags, and we walk away.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank everyone at The Chicken House and Scholastic – you’ve made my dreams come true and changed my life; Barry, Imogen, Rachel, Elinor, Chrissie, Nicki, Claire and Esther, and my fellow writing Chickens – what inspiring people you are. Thank you also Mary and Becky, publicists extraordinaire, and Steve for your amazing cover design. Thanks to my parents, Shirley and David, my parents-in-law Ann and Peter, and all my family and friends for sharing the fun. Thank you to Ali and Pete, who mean more to me than books ever will, even if writing takes me away from you sometimes. Thank you to my friends at Bath and North East Somerset Council and Keynsham Town Council who have taken an interest in my other, ‘secret’, life and supported me. And finally thanks to the people who read ‘Numbers’ and took the time to tell me that they liked it – I had no idea how touching your feedback would be.
‘You Are Not Alone’, with lyrics by Robert S. Kelly (© R. Kelly Publishing Inc, 1994). Produced by Michael Jackson and R. Kelly, and released by Michael Jackson in August 1995 as the second single from his album ‘History: Past, Present and Future, Book I’ (© Epic Records, 1995).
From the Chicken House
Rachel Ward’s new novel, NUMBERS: THE CHAOS, made even greater demands on my nerves than her first. Here’s an author who can climb into your head, create truly believable characters, and give you a superb thriller with colossal consequences – all in one book!
Remember the scene with Jem’s son at the end of NUMBERS? Spooky wasn’t it? You knew he was special, I’m sure. Well, his future is even stranger than you can imagine …
Barry Cunningham
Publisher
Copyright
Text © Rachel Ward 2010
First paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2010
This electronic edition published in 2012
The Chicken House
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Rachel Ward has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
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ISBN 978-1-906427-30-6
ePub eISBN 978-1-908435-04-0
Mobipocket eISBN 978-1-908435-05-7
Rachel Ward, The Chaos
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