Ben’s head cocks to the side, as if he’s surprised by my statement. “I have a feeling you’re just like an onion,” he says, taking Elsey’s hand and pulling her off the train before I can ask what he means.
Chapter Five
Adele
The fourth hour passes and we don’t stop. Neither of us speaks. The only sounds are from our heavy breathing and the scuff of our shoes on the rock tunnel. The fifth hour passes and my headache escalates into a fever. I feel cold and shivery and empty, but my head is boiling. Sweat drips in my eyes, and when I blink it stings.
I sneak a look at Tawni. Her face is so gaunt and pale that she looks like a ghost. A thin sheen of sweat coats her skin.
Somehow we manage to maintain a steady pace to the sixth hour. My muscles are on fire, but not because of our long, strenuous hike. The virus is attacking my body, and from the feel of things, my body’s not putting up much of a fight.
Next to me, Tawni stumbles. She manages to stay on her feet, but then a minute later, she stumbles again.
“You okay?” I ask.
She opens her mouth to speak, but no words come out. She points to her legs. Her muscles are failing her. Mine will do the same soon. We have to hurry.
“Here.” I reach out and grasp her hand. We’re going to have to support each other the rest of the way.
We keep walking. Tawni stumbles every few minutes, but I keep her up. Her right leg is doing this weird dragging thing with each step. Left foot up, step, right foot drag, repeat. It makes for slow going.
I stumble for the first time, but Tawni holds me up this time, which I acknowledge with a nod. Speaking will waste precious energy. It is weird, losing control of your body. It almost feels like I’ve been sucked into the past, when I was a toddler, unable to fully control my arms and legs. It’s like I know they’re there, and capable of doing cool things, but I just can’t quite get them to do what I want. My left arm is no longer swinging while I walk, like it should; rather it hangs lifeless at my side. Dead. Like it’s not part of my body anymore, just a strange growth. My other arm is only held up because I’m holding Tawni’s hand.
I know my headache is bad, but I can’t really feel it anymore. My muscles are aching more.
Seven hours pass, but I know we aren’t moving fast enough to make it to subchapter 30 in only eight hours. Even if Tawni’s guess as to the distance was correct, we might be four hours away still. We won’t last that long. Not without water. Not without medicine.
“Ahhhhh!” Tawni screams next to me and I practically jump out of my skin. Instinctively I release her hand and pull away, moving flush with the tunnel wall. She is clawing at her face, tearing light scratches down her cheeks with her fingernails. A thin layer of blood rises to the surface. “Get them the hell off!” she screams.
I know she’s hallucinating, but I don’t know what she’s seeing. It doesn’t really matter—just that she’s scared and needs my help. Without hesitation, I grab her hands and pull them away from her damaged face. She’s lucky. Somehow she missed poking herself in the eye.
She struggles against me, tries to lift her hands back to her face, tries to claw at herself. Having no other choice, I release one of her hands and slap her hard across the face before she can raise it to her cheek. She stops struggling and collapses into my arms. Gently, gently, gently I lower her to the unforgiving rock bed. Her eyes are wide open, watery and red. She makes a weird gurgling, squealing sound from the back of her throat. “Shhh,” I say. “You’re okay, Tawni. They’re not real.” Whatever they are.
Tawni’s chest is heaving but as I talk her breathing seems to slow, so I keep doing it, speaking softly, like I’m talking to a child. “Hush, hush, hush, my friend, danger’s far away…Hush, hush, hush, my friend, the monsters go away.” It’s part of a poem my mom used to sing to me when I had nightmares, although my mom used to say my princess instead of my friend.
Not knowing what else to say, I cradle Tawni’s head in the crook of my arm and hum to her, finishing the rest of the poem without words. Partway through, her eyes close and her body relaxes, going limp in my arms. The worst of the hallucination is over. When I finish I think she might be asleep, but when I move, her eyes open, blue and misty, but snaked with red veins, brought to the surface by the virus.
“Thanks,” she says.
“It’s okay.”
“They were eating my flesh.”
“What?”
“Maggots, insects, things. They freaked me out. I could see them on me, feel them chewing on my skin. It was so real.”
I nod. “We’re both going to have to try to ignore them, try to remember it’s all part of the Flu.
Tawni sighs. “I’ll try.”
“We have to keep moving.”
“I know.”
Standing up again is torture. In the few minutes we’ve been on the ground, it seems every muscle in my body has frozen. My right arm is better off, so I use it to straighten my left arm, flex it, massage it. I feel a spurt of warmth as some blood rushes back into my arms. Next I work on my legs. Tawni is doing the same thing. Then we use the wall and each other to pull ourselves up. It probably takes us ten minutes to get to our feet.
Ten precious minutes.
I am dreading my first hallucination.
We continue walking, Tawni dragging a foot while I manage to lift both feet off the ground far enough to take real steps. At some point we switch from holding hands to huddling against each other, arms around each other’s shoulders. She is my crutch and I am hers.
My fever is out of control. When the sweat isn’t pouring down my face, I am shivering uncontrollably, shaking from head to toe. We are a mess. First Tawni shakes for a few minutes and then stops just in time for me to start convulsing. Soon our shaking begins starting and stopping at the same time. It’s weird, almost like how they say girls who spend a lot of time with each other somehow synchronize their periods—we’ve synchronized our shaking.
I hear a sound. A thunder, of sorts. It sounds like a train is heading our way, moving down the tunnel. But there is no train station, no tracks. It’s no train, of that I am certain.
I see what is making the noise, but it’s too late. The water is moving too fast, charging toward us, a deluge of power, bubbling and raging and bursting. I scream, loud and long, and try to pull Tawni in the other direction, back the way we came.
She resists my pull and I don’t know why. Perhaps she has given up; perhaps it is all too much for her; perhaps she just doesn’t have the strength. Whatever the case, my hand pulls free from hers and I run alone, but not fast enough. The torrent sweeps me off my feet with the power of a mining machine, lifting me up and slamming me on the rocky floor. I roll and bounce, battered by the white bubbly rapids.
My only hope is that the force of the water will sweep me all the way back to the contaminated lake, where it will exit the tunnel, washing me up on dry land before I drown.
Tawni is already lost.
But the flood doesn’t push me along. Instead, it encompasses me, leaving me churning on the tunnel floor, desperately straining to hold my breath for another second, another ten, another minute. It’s like all my childhood nightmares about drowning—brought on by my near-drowning when I fell down a well as a young girl—are muddled into one horrible reality. My lungs are on fire, setting my chest ablaze with pain. Agony. Somehow I’m crying underwater, blubbering and sputtering, my lips parted and my eyes closed. The water should enter my mouth, suffocate me as I take one last breath.
It doesn’t.
Tawni is by my side, holding me. The water swirls over and around her. It’s as if she’s in an air bubble, protected from the current. Not even her hair is wet. Her eyes are soft. Still red, but soft. Her lips move.
“Not real, honey,” she says softly. “Hush—not real.”
I realize I’m yelling something amidst my blubbering. I’m not sure what I’m saying, but I stop. The water looks strange. Almost too blue to be real
. Too perfect.
Before it begins to ebb away, I know it’s a hallucination. The waters subside and I’m left in Tawni’s arms, much like she was in mine not that long ago. I’m soaking wet and shivering.
“So cold,” I murmur between blue lips.
“No,” Tawni says, shaking her head. “Not cold. Not real.”
“But I’m all wet,” I say, hugging myself, trying to get warm.
“Not wet. Completely dry.”
Even as her words sink in, warmth returns to my body and I watch as my clothes stop sticking to me, the slickness on my skin vanishes, and the soggy, dripping locks of my black hair are replaced by soft, loose locks around my face.
I take a deep breath, trying to fight off the surreal memories of the life-taking water. “I’m okay,” I say, wiping the unwanted tears from my face. I’m embarrassed, even though I know the hallucination was so real. I knew it was coming, but couldn’t combat it. I need to do better with the next one. “We need to go.”
“Maybe we should just stay here and ride it out,” Tawni says. Her face is shining with sweat, her white hair tight and knotted, twisted together from the sweat on her neck and cheeks. Her words are a temptation. I can feel my face flushed with the fever and my muscles are battered and bruised. I couldn’t handle the hallucination, but I can handle a little pain.
“No,” I say, pushing myself up, biting back a groan as my muscles and bones scream at me. “That would be suicide.”
Tawni knows I’m right so she lets me help her up without complaining. “I’m scared, Adele.”
“We will make it,” I say. Won’t we?
With the Flu, things just keep getting worse. Thirty minutes later, Tawni is a ghost, pale and gaunt. She looks like she’s sweated off ten pounds that she can’t afford to lose. Her bony hands are clutching me at the elbow, depending on me to stay on her feet. I’m not much better off, but am coping with the achy muscles better than she is. I’ve been grinding my teeth in determination for so long I can feel the enamel flaking off on my tongue, gritty and dry.
Thankfully, neither of us has hallucinated for a while, and, despite the pain we’re in, we are making steady progress, although I don’t know if we’re minutes, hours, or days from our destination. Nor do I know what to expect when we arrive. For all I know, the star dwellers might kill us on the spot. They are not the friendliest of people at the moment.
My mind is becoming a problem. One minute it is sharp and clear, and then the next it’s hazy and groggy, like I’m sleepwalking through a deep fog. The foggy times are fast becoming the majority. I want to slap myself, but I can’t get my hand up to my face; nor can I move it with the speed required to hurt enough to snap me out of my numbed state.
Tawni’s fingernails dig into my arm and I know something is wrong. I slowly turn my head toward her to see what’s going on, but it’s too late. My face swivels right into her punch, and I feel a dull impact when her clenched knuckles collide with my cheekbone. It doesn’t hurt exactly, but does force me off balance, and my legs are in no position to correct my momentum.
I tumble hard to the earth and try to roll away from my friend, who is now my attacker. My body disobeys me once more and I remain pinned to the ground. All I can do is hope that whatever hallucination is clutching Tawni will release her.
It doesn’t.
Tawni leaps on top of me, grapples with my outstretched arms, tries to get the tips of her fingers into my eyes. She is screaming at me, shouting horrible things, obscenities, things I’ve never heard come from her mouth. Disgusting, vile things.
I try to remember that she’s hallucinating, but she’s trying to hurt me, and I have to defend myself. When she tries to hit me again, I grab one of her hands and get it under control. “You’re hallucinating, Tawni, get off me!” I cry, but she doesn’t listen, just keeps fighting with me.
A knife flashes, shiny and deadly. I can barely make it out in the dim light provided by our flashlights, which we have cast aside haphazardly during our fight. Where did she get a knife from? Why would she even have a knife? Tawni is the least violent person I know—more prone to run or hide than fight back. And yet she has a knife—and is trying to cut me open.
I grab the wrist of the hand with the knife and try to force it away from me. But Tawni has somehow become stronger from the Flu, gaining superhuman strength. The knife moves closer to my chest. She’s going to kill me. I have no choice.
I close my other hand around her neck. The Flu has weakened me beyond recognition, but I use every last ounce of energy to squeeze my fingers shut, hoping to get her to drop the knife. The feeling is sickening. Horrifying. Knowing that you are literally squeezing the life out of someone. But I don’t stop, because Tawni doesn’t stop. It’s weird. Although she’s being choked to death—that much I can tell by the wretched gurgling sounds she’s making—she won’t drop the knife. It’s like killing me is more important than her own life.
So this is how it ends for us? With friends killing each other?
Her lips are moving, trying to tell me something, but I can’t understand her. Is it a trick or should I relax my grip? I’m afraid if I do she’ll cut me to ribbons. “Ha…” she chokes out.
Her face is turning blue. I loosen my grip slightly. “What?” I ask. The knife is so close to my skin, inching closer, but I have to know what Tawni is trying to say.
“You’re…you’re hal...luc…in…ating,” she breathes.
Huh? I’m hallucinating? She’s the one with the knife, the one trying to kill me. The cold steel pricks my skin, just below my neck. It doesn’t hurt, doesn’t bleed. I try to consider for just one moment that I might be the one having a waking nightmare. As soon as I do, the knife disappears. My world spins upside down and I am on top of Tawni, rather than the other way around.
I’m trying to kill her.
I’m hallucinating.
My body shakes and I wrench my hand from Tawni’s neck. Twisting to the side, I throw myself against the hard rock, panting heavily.
Next to me I can hear Tawni gasping for breath, half-gagging.
I did it to her.
I spit once more and desperately wish for water. I’d even take a hallucination of water—they are so real, after all.
I turn back to Tawni, who looks like she might throw up, her head between her knees, her matted hair clumped around her face, which has no color in it. She’s not gagging anymore, but her breathing is ragged and forced.
I did it to her.
The fact that the Flu caused me to do it provides no solace. I still tried to kill my own friend, my only friend, and I hate myself for it. I hate myself even more when I pull Tawni’s hair away from her face so I can look at her, and she visibly twitches, pulls away sharply. She’s afraid of me. She should be. I’m dangerous. Lethal. I’ve killed before and I can do it again, even if I don’t want to.
Her neck is marked with red stripes where my fingers gripped her skin and I frown as I look at them. They will surely bruise, reminding me of my sins for the next few weeks. If we make it that long.
“Tawni, I’m—”
“It’s okay,” she croaks, suddenly looking from the ground to my eyes. Her eyes are watery—not from crying, but from the pain I put her through. I start to object, but she cuts me off again, once more in a voice two octaves lower than her natural timbre. “You were hallucinating, Adele. I would’ve done the same thing. It’s not your fault. Let me guess, I transformed into a goblin, some evil monster with big eyes and tentacles?”
In spite of the way I’m feeling, I laugh. “No, you were just yourself, but you were like a wild woman, ten times stronger than normal. You were trying to stab me in the heart with a knife. But I should’ve known—”
“No, it’s fine. Really. Promise me you won’t apologize again, won’t even speak of this again.”
I shake my head. I don’t want to promise, don’t deserve to be able to make such a promise.
“Promise me.”
“Oka
y.”
“We’ve got to go,” Tawni says. She is playing my part.
We go. We are moving even slower than before, hobbling along like a couple of oldies. At some point we strap the flashlights to our wrists because we can’t grip them anymore. I don’t know how we even manage it, as all dexterity is gone from my fingers. Seconds pass like minutes, minutes like hours, hours like entire days.
Somehow we keep going.
My head is down; I am watching my feet scrape the ground, barely rising high enough to move forward. Instead of holding each other up, we are slowly dragging each other down into the dust. Tawni falls first, not even trying to break her fall with her hands. I try to help her up, but she has nothing left. “Go,” she says. “Find help.”
I don’t want to leave, don’t want to abandon my friend, but we will both die if I don’t. “I will come back for you. That I promise,” I say.
I leave my pack with Tawni and will my body forward, using the wall to support my left side. Struggling along, I pray for a miracle. The walls start closing in, the ceiling falling on top of me; the floor even rises slightly under my feet—all moving together to crush me. It’s a hallucination—has to be. Not real, not real, not real, I tell myself, but it doesn’t help. The stone walls keep coming.
I am crouching now, trying to get out of the tunnel before it destroys me. I see a light in the distance, dim but visible, a mere hiccup in the endless darkness before me. Stretching, reaching, extending my arm, I fight toward it, beyond desperation. My vision blurs.
I am going to die.
My legs crumble.
Without seeing my mom again.
My vision blurs.
Without seeing him again.
The dim light is gone, once more replaced with utter blackness.
Tristan.
Chapter Six
Tristan
I wake up thinking about secrets. My secrets; Ben’s secrets; whether Adele has any secrets. Heck, I am even starting to get paranoid about whether there are things I don’t know about Roc, who I think I know everything about. I guess I’m just used to knowing things, because of my father. How could I be so stupid, so naïve? After everything my father has done, after everything I know about him, how could I have trusted him so blindly? How could I have actually believed that he told me the truth about our world? Could it be that he doesn’t know the truth? I doubt it. I think he was just too arrogant to admit the truth to his own son.