Children of Magnificent Atrocities
by Jon Palestini


Chapter 1

“Let me get the door for you, Eli.”
Mrs. Weston, my art teacher, stepped around me giving me a wide berth so as not to damage the rolled up canvas tucked under my arm, and reached for the door handle as two girls from the senior year shoved it open. Neither of them was looking where they were going. The teacher managed to dodge the door which bashed my left sneaker causing me to hop on my left foot while trying to juggle the canvas and rub the side of my foot through the leather.
“Ow!” I yelled.
“Sorry,” said one of the girls. “Did no one ever tell you not to stand behind closed doors?”
“Very funny.” I rolled my eyes at them, but they were already crossing the room towards their paintings of Persephone and pomegranates which were hanging from a rail above the craft supplies.
“Will you get that home okay?” asked Mrs. Weston.
I checked the edges, top and bottom, to make sure I hadn’t buckled them at all; carrying a stretched canvas this big would be impossible, which was why this was rolled. “Sure,” I said. “I’m getting a ride with my brother.”
I stuck close to the wall in the hallway, standing well back from the school exit while a group of younger kids piled out, and headed for the football field where Jonah had football practice. I was working on a collage of Marvel characters for my end-of-year art project, and Mrs. Weston was so impressed with it, she wanted to enter it into a one-off competition being run by this year’s Comic Con in Philadelphia where we lived. I was going to the movie theater later in the evening to watch the latest movie. I’d had the idea of making it look like the opening scenes of a movie and, although I could’ve sat at home and binge-watched Disney+, I wanted the finished picture to represent the whole cinematic experience somehow. Large screen. Loud noises. Real-life superheroes.
I sat in the bleachers, the roll of canvas across my lap, and watched them practice. My brother Jonah was four years older than me. I was a measly freshman and he was a senior. He was taller, his shoulders wider than mine, and he had darker skin and thick dark hair like our dad, that would curl over his ears and the collar of his polo shirt if he ever let it grow. He hated it that his hair was curly which was why he got it cut every few weeks. Our mom had photographs of him as a baby and she said everyone used to call him a dark-haired Shirley Temple. Not only was he super-good looking – everyone knew he would be prom king, including Jonah – but he was good at everything he did. Unlike me – I was only good at art, and I looked like our mom, which made me pretty much the shortest and palest boy in my year at school and saw me labeled cute by some of the girls.
A couple of girls sat at the other end of the bleachers, heads together, not paying much attention to the boys on the field. I thought one of them was Jonah’s girlfriend Molly, but because she had her back to me, I didn’t want to wave in case it wasn’t her and I made myself look stupid.
When the session was over, Jonah yelled as he ran past me on his way to the shower room. “Be out in ten.”
His best friend Billy shook his head, jogging backwards, and gesturing at my lap. “You need to get a life, dude. They got comics for that kind of stuff.”
Jonah was back out, showered and dressed in jeans and a sweater in eleven minutes and thirty seconds. I didn’t mind. He never complained about giving me a ride even though I knew Billy wound him up about it because Billy never allowed his kid brothers in his car, and Jonah knew how important this project was to me. I was hoping to get an art scholarship into college. Making me carry this all the way home, would have been like making Jonah climb a mountain in his football gear.
He opened the trunk and rearranged his football bag, a pair of sneakers, and some other stuff so that there was room for the paper without anything sliding on top of it. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I saw Billy in the wing-mirror waving at us, but Jonah didn’t stop the car and I didn’t tell him.
We listened to the Beach Boys in the car; my brother had a thing for dated tunes. He loved the Stones, and Elvis, and Roy Orbison. Whenever he caught me listening to punk and what he called hipster music, he would leave the room and tell me to get my ears checked.
Jonah went straight up to his room when we arrived home, and I went through to the kitchen to show my mom my artwork. She ruffled my hair like I was a shaggy-haired puppy and told me she was proud of me. “How do you even think of these things?” she said. “My art project consisted of doing bad pencil sketches of me, my mom, and my Grandma, in increasing sizes.”
“Things have changed since then,” I said. “I mean, I bet your favorite movie wasn’t even made in color.”
She laughed out loud. “Sure, we had color, and they showed adverts at the cinema too, and B movies before the main event. We even had cars with round wheels, you know.”
“You should come Comic Con with me and Jonah. You could dress up as Black Widow.”
She rolled her eyes. “I think I’ll stick to being mom-taxi.”
She poured me a glass of milk and tipped some cookies onto a plate while I took a stool at the kitchen island. Our kitchen was the best. It was retro, all chrome and shiny red with coordinating appliances in cream and chrome; it was like walking into a diner, or the set of Grease, especially when she made hot dogs or burgers for dinner.
“You’re still giving me a ride tonight, right?” I asked with a mouthful of cookie crumbs.
“What’s tonight?” she stopped, one hand still resting on the coffee machine, and wrinkled her nose. “Cinema. I forgot, Eli, sorry. I have to go out and run some errands, but it’s okay, Jonah can take you.” She left the kitchen and I heard her yell up to Jonah, “I need you to give Eli a ride to the cinema, Jo. Seven thirty.” There was a pause and then she came back into the kitchen.
“What did he say?”
“I couldn’t hear him,” she said, “but I’m sure it’ll be cool.” My mom was one of those weird people who grew up in the last century when ‘cool’ was a word that everyone said, and flares and sandals were like their version of skinny jeans and converse. “You’ll have to keep an eye on the time though, Eli. You know what he’s like when he’s bored. He’ll get engrossed in a video game or he’ll go out with his mates and forget all about it.”
“I’ll set an alarm on my phone, Mom. It’s cool. Don’t panic.”
She stuck a pizza in the oven for my dinner, and fussed around, moving my art project around the room before eventually settling for standing it upright in the corner of the hallway beside a brightly painted wooden duck wearing red spotted boots and holding an umbrella above its head. “I feel calmer with it out there,” she said. “You won’t be happy if you spill your drink on it.”
She kissed the top of my head as she left, said, “Enjoy the movie.” She yelled up to Jonah at the bottom of the stairs; if he replied, I didn’t hear him.
I was already tucking into my first slice of pepperoni pizza, holding the tip of the triangle up above my head and catching a glob of melted cheese before it landed on my lap. I noticed a spot of greasy tomato puree on the counter where the canvas had been seconds before and wiped it with some paper towels, I could just imagine her face if she was still here. It would be that “I told you so” mom face.
I relocated to my room with my Nintendo Switch after I was done eating. The house was missing my mom’s busy presence. My dad worked late most nights, so the house seemed to have adjusted to only seeing him weekends pretty much the way we had. I’d gotten a new game for my birthday – Marvel superheroes versus some bizarre new villains and creatures although my dad assured me it was the real deal – and got lost on the third level where I was trapped in a sinister penitentiary guarded by a man who sometimes resembled Voldemort and sometimes a woman who reminded me of Jessica Rabbit, depending on the angle of my hiding place.
See, here’s the thing with my mom, she only noticed when Jonah was addicted to a video game because she usually wanted him to help her with chores, or run an errand, or fix something that our dad promised to get around to six months ago and never did. But if I spent an afternoon playing games and only surfacing for food or drinks, she didn’t say a word, other than: “Dinner’s ready, Eli.”
So, it wasn’t entirely my fault that I completely lost track of time, only jolting back to reality when the alarm on my phone sounded and made me shoot my sidekick instead of the weird guard who was hiding in a bathtub.
I strolled into Jonah’s room and said, “We need to go.”
He was sitting on his bed, legs outstretched, laptop open, but as soon as I entered, he snapped the lid shut. “Don’t you ever knock?” He stared at me like he wanted me to go back out and try again, knocking first.
“Sorry,” I said, still holding onto the door handle. “Mom said you’d give me a ride to the movie theater.”
He shook his head. “The movie theater? What for?”
“Duh, a movie? It’s the new Marvel.”
“She never said.”
“She did; I heard her.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“Well, will you?”
He rolled his eyes and checked his phone. “Sorry, I’ve gotta go see Molly.”
“Can’t you see her after?”
“I can’t, Eli. It’s important.” He was on his feet and grabbing his car keys from his desk. “Call Mom and ask her to come pick you up.”
“She asked you to give me a ride. I have to go, Jonah.”
“Watch it on Netflix,” he glared at me and I noticed the dark circles under his eyes and a spot above his eyebrow that looked swollen and red.
“I can’t. I have to see it on the big screen. It’s for Comic Con. I told you this, Jonah, you know this is important to me.” I saved the best for last. “Please, Jo, I’m never going to get a football scholarship like you, please.”
He took a deep breath, his chest rising as his lungs filled. “Fine,” he said, although I could tell it wasn’t by the way he narrowed his eyes. “But you owe me. I’m keeping a list, remember. When you are some big shot artist or animator you better not forget about me.”












Chapter 2

Something had changed while we were at home; it felt like something had snapped without either of us realizing and we’d returned to Jonah’s car in fragments that had been jumbled up and put back together but minus the insides that connected us as brothers. Something seemed off, like that feeling you get before something bad happens.
Jonah ground the gears making them screech and squeal before he managed to get the car moving. His lips were pressed together, and his eyes narrowed like he was driving into sunlight. I stared out of the passenger window and tried not to check the time on my phone. It was my fault that we were running a little late, but I didn’t understand why he was acting like giving me a ride had ruined his life. I wanted to speak to him about Comic Con, about my costume which he said he would help me put together with Molly, because we only had a few weekends left and I knew Molly was going away with her folks one of those weekends.
I reached forward and turned up the volume on the stereo. Jonah hadn’t connected his phone and a Green Day song blared out. Without speaking, he twirled the knob back off. Okay, so no music then. The silence was prickly, like crawling through a thorny bush to avoid seeing someone you had beef with only to spot their sneakers waiting on the other side.
I psyched myself up to ask him what was wrong, taking a deep breath, “Jonah—”
His phone rang and he raised it to his ear without checking the caller ID. “Moll?” he said.
I heard the tinny voice at the other end which sounded like one of his friends, not Molly. “Not now,” said Jonah, switching his phone to his other ear and balancing it between his ear and shoulder. “I’ve got Eli in the car.”
There was a pause and I tried to make myself invisible, pressing my back hard against the seat and my forehead against the side window. I tried to imagine how it would feel to be invisible. Would your body feel lighter because there was nothing there? Would you be able to see your own arm if you raised it, or would it be guesswork, the way deep sea creatures detected movements around them by changes in pressure? And if you were weightless, would other people be able to hear your footsteps?
The voice at the other end of the phone was still buzzing like a wasp, and Jonah snapped, “Not now, Bill, it’ll have to wait, and besides you owe me.” Another pause in which Billy’s voice changed tone, wheedling now, the way I spoke when I wanted to play one of Jonah’s games, or wanted him to practice soccer with me in the back yard. “Yeah, well,” said Jonah, “you forgot that jokes are supposed to be funny, and I don’t see anyone laughing.” He ended the call and dropped his phone into the side pocket.
I could see his jaw twitching the way it did the time Mom turned one of his polos pink because she washed it with a pair of my red boxers. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing.” He swerved to a stop outside a 7-Eleven store, the tires scrunching on the sidewalk. Leaving the engine running, he ran inside.
I watched the store entrance, my shoulders tense, waiting for him to reappear. Jonah and Billy had been friends since kindergarten. They played football together. They had both applied to the same college on a football scholarship and there was no question of one of them not being successful. I tried to think of whether I’d ever heard them arguing and I couldn’t. Our mom was even friends with Billy’s mom. But Billy had done something that had made Jonah angry, and I didn’t think it had anything to do with something like letting him copy his Math homework.
When he climbed back into the driver seat, he handed me a Snickers bar and chucked a packet of cigarettes into the glove compartment and started the engine.
“How did you buy cigarettes?” I asked.
“I didn’t.” He didn’t look at me as he pulled out into the traffic.
“Where did you get them from?”
“Jeez, Eli, what’s with the twenty questions? Molly’s sister works there – she gave them to me.”
“I’m going to tell Mom,” I said.
Okay so I could be a spoiled brat when I wanted to be, but Jonah, this car journey, the silence, was making me anxious and I knew I wouldn’t sleep after the movie because all sorts of weird scenes involving my brother and his pals dressed up as spiders and chasing him through tunnels filling with water, would play on repeat inside my head even if Mom put lavender oil on my pillow.
He stared at me then, his eyes dark. “No one likes a snitch, Eli. Just focus on the Snickers and forget about the cigs”
I surreptitiously checked the time on my phone which was on the seat between me and the door. We were cutting it fine to catch the opening credits of the movie.
“This is not my fault,” he snapped. “No one told me I was babysitting you tonight.”
I glared at him and blinked back tears as I stared out of the window. I didn’t want him to notice – he was angry enough. I wished I could stop the car and magic myself outside the movie theater. I could buy some stale popcorn and nachos with that fake cheese stuff, forget that anything outside the darkened theater existed, and then later, when Mom collected me, she would tell me that she’d had a chat with Jonah, and he was going to apologize in the morning.
He rolled down the window and raised an arm to wave at two girls who were walking towards the mall. He pulled into the parking lot and killed the engine, and I watched him go and speak to Molly and her friend. Molly kept glancing all around, anything rather than make eye contact, and Jonah kept moving into her line of vision like he was standing on hot coals. He was obviously trying to explain something to her, and it seemed to me watching from the car, that she wasn’t interested in listening to his excuses. I wondered if this had anything to do with Billy and the telephone conversation.
I spotted Jonah’s phone still in the side pocket of the door. Chewing my bottom lip, my eyes on his back in case he turned around and saw what I was doing, I reached across his seat and grabbed his phone. I unlocked it first attempt with the last four digits of his phone number – he was so predictable. There was an unread message from Molly which said that she was done with his lies and excuses. I scrolled back through his messages and there were some from another girl, but I didn’t want to read them, so I locked the phone and put it back in the pocket.
As I straightened, I thought of the packet of cigarettes Jonah had tossed into the glove compartment. He was still talking to Molly, his back still to the car. I released the catch and picked up the cigarettes. It was still sealed. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I glanced at the other stuff on the shelf and spotted a small clear packet; I pulled it out and stared at the white pills inside.
I could walk to the cinema from the mall. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to freak Jonah out by being gone when he came back to the car, but I was freaking out staying in the car. I shoved the pills into my pocket and then realized that if I got caught entering the cinema with them, I’d probably be arrested, and then I would have to tell the cops where I got them from and we’d both be arrested. I thought of my mom getting a phone call from the police station later to tell her that her sons had been charged with possession of drugs.
I was staring at the packet in my hand when Jonah opened the door and climbed back in. I quickly stuffed it under my leg. “Everything okay?” I asked as he reversed out of the bay and another car stepped on the horn behind us.
Jonah raised a hand to apologize to the driver and sped off; I imagined a cloud of dust beneath the wheels as we drove away. “What do you think?” he asked, in response to my question.
I shrugged even though I knew he wasn’t watching. I stared at his profile, looking for signs that he’d been doing stuff he shouldn’t have been doing. His skin looked pale, gray almost, a layer of stubble clouding his chin and neck. He opened the glove compartment and reached inside for the cigarettes, ripping the cellophane from the packet with his teeth, flipping the lid open and taking one out between his teeth. He was glancing around for a lighter when he realized I was staring at him.
“Quit staring at me, Eli,” he said. He tossed a cheap lighter at me and gestured to the cigarette clinging to his bottom lip.
“I’m not lighting it,” I said.
“Give it to me, I’ll do it myself.” The cigarette bobbed up and down as he spoke. I handed him the lighter and he clicked the igniter with his thumb, holding it to the end of the cigarette and sucking until smoke trailed out of the rolled-down window.
“You’re killing your lungs,” I said.
“Shut up, Eli.”
“And what’s this?” I held up the tiny packet and dangled it in front of his face.
“What—where did you get that?” He tried to snatch it from me, but the cigarette fell from his mouth and into the footwell and he had to stamp on it to put it out, the car swerving across the road before he straightened the steering wheel. “Give it to me, Eli.” His gaze was flicking between the road and me, and I almost didn’t recognize him, with the dark expression clouding his features.
I chucked the packet at him and it bounced off his cheek and dropped onto his lap. He shoved them under his leg as if we could pretend that they didn’t exist if we couldn’t see them.
“They’re Billy’s, not mine,” he said, his voice softening.
“I’m going to be late,” I said.
“You’ll only miss the first five minutes, nothing interesting.”
“It’ll be too late.”
“I’ll get you there, alright?” he said.
“I wanted to see the start of the movie. That was the whole point of it,” I was yelling now, my voice catching in my throat.
“I said I’ll get you there!” Jonah yelled back. “Why are you yelling at me?”
“My art project will be ruined!”
“I don’t care! I'm sorry Eli but I have bigger issues I'm trying to handle right now”
I knew it was stupid, but I didn’t want to be in the car with my brother. I should’ve got out and walked while I had the chance, while he was talking to Molly, or rather talking at Molly because she certainly didn’t seem to be reciprocating the dialogue. In that moment, I hated him. I hated him because he’d made me miss the start of the film and sure, I’d seen a hundred movies, I knew how they started, could recite some opening scenes word-for-word and with my eyes shut, but not this one. This one was going to be special – all the reviews said so. And I was supposed to be focusing my art project on this movie.
But most of all, I hated him for yelling at me, for smoking, and for keeping pills in his car, because all these things made him look different in my eyes.
So, instead of waiting for him to pull over and kill the engine, I reached for the handle to open the door while he was still driving.
Two things happened at once and in slow motion, or maybe my brain was just giving me time to figure a way out of the situation I was about to find myself in.
Jonah had indicated to turn left and was already partway into the turn as I pressed the door handle. Through the passenger window I saw an old man with wispy gray hair walking a raggedy dog with wispy gray hair as though they’d visited the same salon. He was in the road, his back bowed like something heavy was pressing down on it, even though the intersection lights were green for the traffic and the little pedestrian-crossing-man was red. A SUV driving in the opposite direction was heading straight for the old man and his dog and I held my breath waiting for the collision. But then the driver of the other vehicle, who must have spotted the old man at the same time, swerved his car to avoid him and hit Jonah’s car instead.
It was like being on a theme park ride, one that spins the riders around and makes them dizzy. The car spun. There was a terrible sound like a monster rising out of the ground, and everything went black.



















Chapter 3

When I woke, I was in bed, the room so bright that the light hurt my eyes. I squinted and shielded my eyes with my hand like a cap. It was several seconds before I realized that I was in hospital; there was another bed in the room with all sorts of monitors and tubes surrounding it, tall stands with plastic bags hanging from them filled with liquid that I didn’t want to think about, a small flatscreen TV hanging from the wall like it needed fixing. There was someone in the other bed because I could see the lumps of their body beneath the cover, but they weren’t moving.
I closed my eyes.
How did I get here? I could still see the stark glaring light through my eyelids, making strange shadowy patterns that flickered like a candle burning down. My brain had turned into an abyss while I slept, through which all my thoughts had drained away leaving behind a great big gaping hole.
Think.
Think!
My mom always said that whenever she walked into a room and couldn’t remember what she’d gone there for, she retraced her steps, literally, going back to where she started to begin afresh and jogging the memory into view. So that’s what I did now.
I squeezed my eyes tight shut to block out the dancing patterns. My brain didn’t want to play the game though and remained empty until, with a flash of inspiration, I remembered the movie. I went to the movie theater to see the latest Marvel. What was it about? I chewed my bottom lip, forcing the memory of the movie into my head but I’d forgotten it already. I thought back to what I was doing before I went to the cinema. Jonah took me because my mom had to go somewhere.
I pictured my mom handing me a glass of milk as clear as if she were standing right beside me, but everything after that was like someone had built a brick wall and painted it black. I took a mental step forward and bashed my forehead on the wall. What the hell? My mom went out … my mom went out …
I swallowed and my throat felt dry, but I had to concentrate on remembering what happened first. Jonah was driving. Now that I’d had the tiniest glimpse of being in the car with my brother, I stared at it with my eyes closed so that it wouldn’t disappear again. He was driving and we were singing along to the Beach Boys, but that didn’t feel quite right, like I was forcing the vision into my head because that’s what we would normally listen to in his car. It was silent … no music was playing … Jonah was driving and yelling at someone.
My breathing was speeding up, growing shallow, like I was running around the track in school on a hot day. My heart rate was too fast. Jonah was yelling at me; we were arguing over something, and I wanted to cry because I was going to miss the start of the screening, so I told him I’d get out and walk. That was it. I opened the car door and … what was that noise? … why is there a dog in the car? … why did you do that, Jonah?
I sat upright in the bed, coughing because my heart was doing funny things inside my chest. I blinked back tears and waited for the horrible screeching sound to go away, and for the nightmare to stop. It was only a dream, I told myself, only a dream. Any minute now I would wake up …
I stared at my legs under the thin starchy sheets and shook my head because they didn’t look right, but they wouldn’t come into focus. That was the thing with dreams – they jumped from one scene to another like you were watching a mashup of all different movies.
I glanced at the other bed. I couldn’t see the lumps of the other person now and wondered if they’d got up and walked out of the room while I was sifting through my memories. I shrugged. It was only a dream anyway. The other person wasn’t even real.
The door opened then, the stark light in the room dulling to a strange eerie twilight, as a woman entered. A nurse. She was wearing a white tunic, her hair tucked inside a stiff white cap so that she might as well have been bald for the amount of hair visible beneath it, and sensible white shoes, the kind backpackers wear because they’re comfortable and not because they want to look trendy.
“You’re awake,” she said. Her smile was wide, but I couldn’t see her teeth. “How are you feeling?” She didn’t wait for an answer but came straight over and plumped up the pillows behind me and then settled me back against them.
I grinned at her. It didn’t matter what I said – I probably wouldn’t even remember when I woke up. I wondered if I was still in the cinema. I hoped I wasn’t in the cinema – it would be so embarrassing if I was dribbling on someone’s shoulder. “I’m good,” I said.
“Excellent!” She handed me a plastic tumbler filled with milk. I hadn’t even seen the cup in her hand and had no idea where it had come from, but I accepted it anyway. “Drink up. You need fattening up a bit, you've been here too long without food or drink”
I took the cup from her, confused at the last part of her comment, and swallowed a mouthful of lukewarm liquid … and spat it straight back out, splattering the front of her tunic with green spots. “Eww! That’s disgusting. What the hell was that?” I could still taste the vile liquid and all I could smell was fish. I stuck my tongue out and tried scraping the rest of the liquid off with my sleeve. “It won’t go away.” I was gagging at the smell and the taste which was still trickling down the back of my throat. My eyes watered, tears streaming down my cheeks. “Water,” I mumbled. “I need water.” I sounded like a Nomad lost in the desert without a camel and desperate to find a waterhole.
“Don’t be such a baby,” said the nurse. I glared at her and I was certain she was laughing at me. “There’s no water here, and that’s good for you.”
“No water? Why is there no water? Try turning on the faucet.”
Her eyes narrowed then, became slits that I could barely see in the gloom, and the smile vanished, her veins throbbing in her temple. There was something weird about her face, something I couldn’t put my finger on, but I didn’t like it. She was scaring me.
I used to have nightmares as a child when I first started elementary school. There was a teacher who frightened me because his eyes never looked directly at you and I could never work out who he was angry at, me or the boy sitting beside me who used to suck his arm until he drew blood. He regularly featured in my nightmares and my parents took me to see a child psychologist who told my mom to put lavender oil on my pillow and to make sure I never ate anything containing E-numbers, or cheese before I went to bed.
Maybe I’d eaten cheesy nachos at the cinema. That was it. I must’ve forgotten about the nightmares and ordered cheesy nachos and probably a syrupy regular soda too. I squeezed my eyes shut again, pushed my fingers in my ears and whispered, “Go away. You’re not real. Go away.”
My breathing slowed a little and when I opened my eyes, the nurse was gone.
The eerie light remained though. I peered around me, at the monitor beside the bed which glowed green, a thin light traveling across the screen, jumping occasionally in sync with my heartbeat. That was good. At least I was still alive in my dream. There was a Band-aid stuck across the back of my right hand, and beneath it, a tube inserted into a vein. I peeled back the Band-aid and flexed my hand, watching the way the tube tugged on the vein. It felt so real, like my dreams were not always this vivid, but I could feel the sting of the tube as it stretched the skin around it. I tugged on it, but it was stuck.
I followed the tube with my eyes, tracing it back to whatever it was attached to. It led up to a drip-bag dangling from a tall stand, but when I gave it a gentle tug, the tube came away from the bag and flopped onto the bed like a dead snake. I shook it and nothing happened but still the other end was stuck fast inside my hand.
That was when I realized that there was another tube inserted into my nose. I panicked because I could feel it wriggling away inside my brain, like whispers puffing air onto my thoughts. I couldn’t breathe. I tried pulling the tube out and it came away, dropping onto the floor and slithering under the bed, because it wasn’t attached to anything either.
The door opened again. The nurse came back in, a wide smile across her face as though she’d smudged lipstick all around her mouth like a child playing at being a grownup with her mom’s makeup or like a clown. There were shadows behind her, multiple shadows and I thought someone was following her inside, but I shook my head, and they were gone.
The nurse blinked slowly, the way a snake or a serpent blinks, her eyelid dragging across her eye and back up again to reveal a black slit in the iris that became a fully dilated pupil. “Look who is here to see you.” She stepped closer and I waited for someone else to enter. “Aren’t you going to say hi to your parents?”
“My—my parents?” I stared at the open doorway, waiting for the sound of footsteps. “Where are they?”
“They’re right here.” The nurse shook her head at me and clucked her tongue like she was talking to a shy horse. “Come now, Elias, stop playing games.”
“It's Eli. I’m not playing games. I can’t see them.”
I heard a sound then and I stared at the space beside the nurse, my ears straining to hear it again. There it was. Still faint, but there was no mistaking it sounded like my mom calling my name. “Where is she? I can’t see her. Why can’t I see her? What have you done with her?”
The nurse didn’t move; she stared at me as though she were planning my punishment for misbehaving.
“Mom,” I said. “Where are you?” I listened again but now there was nothing. I’d lost her voice. “Mom? Mom! MOM!” I was yelling now, tears streaking my face, and the yelling evolved into full-on screams as the nurse reached across my chest to pin me down on the bed.
“What a spectacle!” she said. “No wonder your parents don’t wish to see you.”
“Get off me!” I shrieked. I threw back the cover, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. I needed to get away from her. I couldn’t let her touch me because she wasn’t a real nurse and I needed to find my parents. I jumped off the bed and fell forwards, my hands slapping cool tiles and my chin bouncing off the floor. It stung. I knew I had to get up but when I tried to stand, my legs were wobbly. I dragged them around in front of me, and that was when I saw it – my right leg was gone mid thigh. There was nothing below.
I shrank back against the side of the bed, the stump sliding across the floor with me. “No … no … NO!” I closed my eyes. This was only a dream. I pinched myself, hard, my fingernails digging deep into my arm but when I opened my eyes a slit, I was still on the floor. My right leg was still missing. I was frantic now. My breathing was too fast, making me dizzy. “Mom!” I yelled. “Mom! MOM!” I needed someone to wake me up. I needed someone to help me … now … so I did the only thing I could think of: I had a meltdown. I threw myself onto the floor and I cried like a baby.















Chapter 4

The world was silent. I listened, trying to control my breathing, praying I was at home in my own bed. I moved my fingers across the cover, but they were tingling with sleep so it was impossible to tell what I could feel. I opened one eye and my stomach sank, my heart flipping over like a tossed omelet. I was still in the hospital bed.
I lay there panting, my heart rate racing. What if this wasn’t a dream? The thought spun around my head like cotton candy and fresh tears welled in my eyes. I had to think about this logically. Dreams sometimes felt like they were lasting forever when they were probably only taking place over a few minutes, so the only way to tell if this was real or an endless nightmare was to get up, get moving, and get it over and done with. But if it wasn’t a dream …
I would not allow myself to think about that. Not yet. It was too horrifying, because if this was real then something terrible had happened … something bad. I knew what I had to do – I had to find my mom.
The tube was still inserted into my hand but the other end of it lay across the bed, limp and unmoving. I pulled until it slid out with a pop, a tiny droplet of blood welling on the back of my hand. Scrunching my eyes shut, I pushed back the covers and swung my legs over the side of the bed, raising myself to a sitting position. My head swam and I gripped the side of the bed until it stopped. Eyes still shut, I counted down: Three … two … one.
I opened my eyes. I had two legs. My heart skipped and I couldn’t stop the smile from spreading across my face. I lifted both legs and stared at my feet. I was wearing sneakers. It took a few moments for it to sink in that I’d been wearing sneakers in a hospital bed with basketball shorts and a T-shirt. Where was the hospital gown? These sneakers were not even mine – they were bright green, like neon green, with white laces that glowed fluorescent despite there being no lights in the room. Okay … I slid forward, still traumatized by the last nightmare and stood slowly, hands outstretched in case I fell again. But I was okay. I was standing. I wanted to yell and cheer and stomp my feet, but the patient was back in the other bed and still sleeping, so I kept my excitement locked away inside my chest.
I could do this. I was going to find my mom, and she’d make me breakfast, and we’d talk about the movie before I went to school.
I crossed the room and opened the door. The corridor was empty. It was long and wide, with lots of closed doors, but there was no one about and I could hear no sounds. I glanced up at the ceiling looking for a sign that I could follow, but there were none.
Closing the door softly behind me, I turned left. I stopped outside the next room, pressed my ear to the door and listened. I couldn’t hear a sound, not even the beep of a monitor or someone snoring. The next door was the same. My legs were trembling, and I realized that I was hungry and thirsty, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth and my lips flaky and cracked. Ahead, I saw what looked like a water fountain. When I reached it, I pressed the button and guzzled water until it made me burp, staring into the eyes of Spiderman. The water fountain had been designed to resemble the superhero, which made me think that maybe this was the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia. I took the idea and stored it safely in the back of my mind; I was going to find a doctor, ask them if I could call my mom, and then I was going home.
At the end of the corridor, I’d still found no signs, so I turned right. There were no doors and this hallway sloped downwards as though it had been purpose-built to provide a slope, possibly for children in wheelchairs. I had a brief vision of kids racing down the slope to a finishing line at the bottom and hoped that if I was correct, it would at least bring the kids a little bit of fun.
At the bottom, another slope veered left, like a zigzag, and I kept walking, passing no one, until I reached the bottom which opened into what looked like the lobby. In the center of the lobby was a round glass office like a globe. I pressed my forehead against the glass and peered inside. There was a curved desk with a telephone and nothing else on the desktop, and a white leather seat which spun slowly as if the owner had just vacated it.
I banged on the window. “Hello!” I waited for someone to come back, but no one came, and I couldn’t see the back of the office which appeared kinda misty. “Hello!” I yelled again. “Can I use the phone to call my mom?”
Nothing.
I walked all the way around the glass office searching for the door, but I couldn’t find one. I walked around it a second time, my hands feeling the way, expecting to feel the ridge of a door frame, or the bump of a handle, but again I found nothing.
Peering behind me, I saw the sliding glass doors of the exit. If no one was here to stop me, I was going to walk right out of the doors, find a cab, and go home. My mom would pay the driver when I got there; she’d be so worried that they’d allowed me to walk out without anyone raising the alarm, that she’d pay it without question. She would kick off with the hospital governors for sure, but then they deserved it. What kind of hospital was this?
I imagined the huge investigation that would follow, the headlines in the newspapers, and everyone in school wanting to hear about what an awful experience it had been for me. And then I laughed out loud, the sound echoing off the walls. This was a dream, Eli.
I stepped outside.
The parking lot was empty. That would be normal, I guessed – visiting hours didn’t run through the night. I passed the empty bays and reached the road, which was also empty, and saw signs for the Schuylkyll River down the road. Peering left and right to get my bearings, I realized that if I followed the riverbank past the Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Zoo, I could walk home from there. It would probably be quicker than waiting for a taxi, especially as there were no cars on the road.
Instinctively I felt my pockets for my phone – I should have looked for it before I left the hospital because I had no idea what time it was. There was no one about, no cars, no pedestrians, no kids. I sniffed the air like an animal searching for a scent and that was when I realized that it was the same eerie twilight out here as it had been in the hospital room, only I couldn’t tell if it was late evening or early morning because I couldn’t see the sun or the moon in the hazy cloudless sky.
The river was still; there wasn’t a ripple or a glint of light on the surface, no bubbles, no movement in the reeds. I took the footpath across the bridge to the other side and kept walking, the river on my right. When I thought about it, I literally couldn’t hear anything. There were no birds, no planes in the sky, none of the inaudible atmospheric city sounds that filled the world around us.
My legs were still trembling with hunger and despite the water I drank from the fountain, I was still thirsty. I thought about drinking an ice-cold soda from the refrigerator when I got home, my mom making me some toast while she cooked up some pancakes. I hoped she had blueberries.
And then I heard it – a sound like someone stepping on a twig behind me. I whirled around, but there was no one there. There were trees some distance away, but the sound had been too close for whoever it was to have reached them in time to hide. I narrowed my eyes, peering all around. Maybe I imagined it.
I walked a few steps and spun around again hoping to catch whoever it was out, but there was no one. Only now I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being followed. I walked faster, stumbling in my green trainers over invisible obstacles, almost tumbling headfirst into the river one time.
Past the art museum, with the steps from Rocky, which was all locked up and dead quiet. I still had passed no one, and still had the strange feeling that I was being followed, or at least being watched, when I reached the zoo. The outskirts of the zoo housed the wild animals, the lions and tigers and leopards. I remembered visiting the zoo as a child with my mom and Jonah and staring at the lions with their great tangled manes, hoping that they weren’t sad locked inside their fenced-off area which might have resembled a small plain but was nothing like roaming free in Africa. I didn’t understand why people paid to look at wild animals whose wildness had been contained by brick walls and electric fences. Leave them alone. Let them go live their lives.
I was feeling faint and sweating by the time I reached the entrance to the zoo, not because I was hot, but because my blood sugar levels were running low. I needed to eat something sweet. Keep going, I told myself, one foot in front of the other. Once I passed the zoo I could turn left at the next intersection and I was about five minutes away from home.
I was almost at the wall hiding the monkey enclosures when I heard it again. This time I knew it was real because it was close enough for me to hear their breath. I turned around slowly, fists clenched, and saw the lion.
I stumbled backwards, moaning aloud as I jolted my ankle. Where was the zookeeper? How had it escaped? The enclosures must be alarmed, I thought, any second now, I would hear the woo-woo of the police siren and a car would pull up alongside me, drag me to safety while they shot the animal with a sedative or something. Any second now.
But the animal kept coming. I was limping backwards now. “Help,” I managed, my voice sounding surreal in the dense silence and half-light. The lion stopped. “Help!” I yelled louder. He watched me as though I was expecting him to help me, then he shook his head and leaped forward.
I turned and ran. I was panicked, shrieking nonsense words, screaming until my throat burned and then I was shoved to the floor, landing on my chest with an oomph that left me winded. I was crying though. I was crying when I rolled over and watched in slow motion as the lion clamped its huge mouth around my leg.
The pain was hot and cold, and I was sniveling, silly sounds coming from my mouth as he ripped a chunk from my leg. I expected blood to spurt everywhere. I expected torn flesh, stringy muscles, pain so immense that I would be unconscious for the remainder of the nightmare. This was the moment when I would wake up. I always woke up at the scary parts, that was how dreams worked. But there was no blood, no stringy muscles, no torn flesh. I stared at my leg as the lion raised its head and roared, and I gaped at the hole he had left behind. The edges were jagged from the lion’s teeth, but inside was shiny metal, like the mechanisms of robotic leg, jutting out at a strange angle where the animal’s jaws had fastened around it.
I screamed, and my scream was louder than the lion’s roars.













Chapter 5

I scrabbled to my feet and ran. I couldn’t see where I was going through my tears, and I knew I could never outrun a lion, but I ran because it was better than sitting on the sidewalk waiting to be eaten. I was also confused. Why was my leg like a robots under the flesh. My gait was awkward and lopsided because my robotic like leg had half-collapsed in the middle, but I didn’t care – there was no one around to see me anyway. The cops weren’t coming. The zookeeper wasn’t coming. It was me and the lion on the empty streets of Philadelphia in a nightmare that didn’t want to end.
I rounded the corner at the end of the zoo and recognized the street. There were no cars coming, obviously, because this was a deserted city in the twisted anxious recesses of my mind, and I’d decided no one was going to help me, so I ran across the road too scared to glance behind me. When I reached the other side, I darted between two buildings. It was a shortcut that led through to the small park at the elementary school, and if I could make it that far, I was one block away from home.
There was a thump behind me, and I wondered if the lion had hit the wall of the building, but I didn’t stop. The alleyway was narrow and more than once I scraped my elbows on the wall, but it was nothing compared to the air whistling through the hole in my leg, which I could feel as though it were real. It was making me feel sick and I swallowed bile, my throat on fire.
Out the other side and I almost flew into the park, hurdling the fence surrounding the kids’ play area knowing it would never keep a wild animal out. I thought I saw a face peering at me through the window of the kindergarten which was painted with yellow ducks and a number five, but I guessed I imagined that too.
I was on my street. I could see my house in the distance. Sobbing, my face streaked with salty tears and mucus, I screamed for help, screamed until I was hoarse because I still believed a neighbor would come out and capture the lion or at least open their door and take me in.
I was still screaming when I reached my front door. I banged on it with both fists, panting, my heart trying to leap through my chest. “Mom! Let me in, Mom. Open the door!”
There were no footsteps. The house was dark and silent inside. I slumped against the door and turned to face the street, praying that my mom or my dad would open the door and catch me as I fell inside. The lion was on the sidewalk, staring at me, waiting as though he knew he had me cornered and could afford to be patient. But I was so close to safety, I couldn’t give up now, so keeping my back pressed to the wall, I made my way around the house to the back yard. I banged on the back door and yelled up at the window of my parents’ bedroom on the first floor.
“Mom! Dad!”
Footsteps were following me around the side of the house, heavy, slow, determined. I tried the door handle and it moved easily, clicking open suddenly with the force of my weight. I stumbled inside, forgetting the lip of the step that I always tripped over, and on hands and knees, slammed the door shut, turning the key in the lock.
I sat on the kitchen floor, my back pressed against the door, my heart running a marathon, and waited for the lion to go away. I had made it. I was home.
A scratching sound on the door made me jump and I scrabbled away on my hands and knees across the kitchen floor. I wasn’t sure if a regular door would keep a wild animal out, but I wasn’t sticking around to find out. I had to reach my parents – they would know what to do.
I crawled along the hallway in case the lion was peering through the window, rising to my feet when I reached the stairs. I ran up the stairs, tripping every couple of steps and making my knee raw and bloody, but I didn’t stop until I reached the top and bound into my parents’ bedroom.
They were not there. The bed was unmade, the duvet in a heap in the center of the bed, a pillow hanging over the side, as though they’d left in a hurry. My mom made the bed every morning – it meant she could tick something off her to-do list without any effort – and this wasn’t her favorite ivory and gold duvet cover with the silk tassels in the corners. I’d never seen this one before. I had a sudden terrible thought that I was in the wrong house, but then I saw my dad’s watch on the bedside table and sighed with relief.
I heard a bang from downstairs. The lion was trying to get into the house.
I ran, limping, to my room and slammed the door shut behind me. I was praying my phone was here although I knew I would’ve taken it to the movie theater with me. Please let it be here, please. I crossed the room to my desk, lifting art books and a Math textbook, knowing even as I scanned the desktop that it wasn’t here. I ran my hands across my bed, dropped to my knees and felt around amongst the fluff and old shoes and sticker books underneath, knowing it was all futile. I leaned back against the side of the bed and examined the hole in my leg. My heart was racing, sweat beading on my top lip, as I poked my finger into the hole. I cried out with the pain, panting, eyes squeezed shut. It was a hole. How could I feel it?
Another bang from the kitchen and I swear I felt the house shake.
I quickly dragged a hoodie from the hook on the back of the door and slipped it over my head. A pair of jeans was folded neatly over the back of the chair by my desk, so I yanked them over my basketball shorts so that I couldn’t see the hole in my leg. Out of sight, out of mind. I found my Switch under my pillow and stuffed that into the front pouch of my hoodie and my earbuds into my jeans pocket. Glancing around the room, I noticed my Spiderman web shooters on the end of my bookshelf; Jonah had customized them for me in engineering class and they were super-cool. Without thinking, I picked them up too, and stuck them inside my hoodie.
Then it dawned on me. Jonah! He would know where Mom and Dad were, and he could call for help.
I limped back to the door but stopped with my hand on the doorknob. Something felt different. Peering around the room, I turned a full circle on the spot, trying to put my finger on what was wrong, and then I noticed the gap on the wall where my Guardians of the Galaxy poster should be. It was signed by Karen Gillan. It never moved from that spot on the wall and my mom would never have taken it down, so where was it?
My heart had gone from racing to thudding as I crossed the landing to Jonah’s room. I didn’t knock – there was a lion outside waiting to eat us, so I didn’t think it was important. Bursting through the door, I stopped on the threshold when I saw the state of my brother’s room. The bed was stripped, the blue and white striped mattress barely visible beneath the boxes of stuff piled on top. His TV was on the floor, his desk empty. I saw the corner of his Xbox poking out of one of the boxes and I walked over to touch it, to make sure that’s what it was. My finger came away with a fine layer of dust.
I shook my head.
I couldn’t stay here. Some part of my subconscious, the part fueling this dream, was obviously telling me to get the hell out of here.
As if it could hear my thoughts, the lion roared from the back yard. A warning. It was coming for me.
I peered out of Jonah’s window. The street out the front was clear which meant the lion was still trying to get through the kitchen door, which meant I had to leave by the front door. My stomach grumbled and I had to prop myself up against the wall as a wave of dizziness washed over me. If I didn’t get some food, I wouldn’t get far.
I had no choice – I had to sneak into the kitchen without the lion seeing me, and get some food, or at the very least a drink. I made my way down the stairs, bumping along on my backside, tiny silver stars spiraling behind my eyes. I crawled back along the hallway the way I came, into the kitchen and, on hands and knees, reached up to open the refrigerator. The stench hit me the instant the door opened, making me gag. I leaned over and retched onto the floor, slamming the door shut. I didn’t want to see what was inside.
Blinking back tears, I noticed there was no fruit in the fruit bowl on the table. When I could swallow, I crawled to the sink and turned on the cold faucet – I could fill a plastic bottle with water and at least that would keep me going a while – but the water plopped into the sink like dirty brown sludge, piling in the bottom and making me gag again.
A movement in the window caught my eye, and I glanced up as the lion placed its large front paws on the windowsill and stared straight into my eyes. He was sizing me up. It was almost as if he knew I was weak – as if it wasn’t bad enough that he’d bitten a chunk out of my leg – and he was waiting for me to surrender. Surprising myself, I stared right back at him, rose to my feet steadying myself against the kitchen counter, and placed both feet squarely on the tiled floor deliberately ignoring the sludge in the sink.
I took a step backwards away from the window. Another step. I needed to get as close to the front door as possible before he realized what I was doing.
When I was standing in the doorway that opened onto the hallway, I kept my expression blank, holding eye contact, and then I sprinted for the front door.














Chapter 6

I knew where I was heading without the thought fully materializing inside my head. It was the only obvious place to go. The hospital. It seemed to me that whatever was going on, everything had started in the hospital and it stood to reason that was where everything was going to end.
I had thirty seconds at most on the animal in the back yard, and I had to make them count. Ignoring the hole in the prosthetic leg and the green sneakers that were not mine, I sprinted across the road, dashed between old Mr. Phinazee’s house and the McDaniels’s, covered the old neighbor’s back yard in three strides and did a back flip over the prickly hedge at the rear of his garden, landing on the sidewalk. I didn’t psych myself up for the leap, neither did I consider breaking any bones when I landed the other side. This was my dream, and I was taking control of it.
My sense of direction was not the greatest, but I’d had spent enough time riding my bike around the neighborhood to know which route would bring me out at the river the fastest by avoiding traffic, and the zoo … not that there was any traffic right now. I was banking on being far enough away that the lion wouldn’t sniff me out when it reached the front of the house.
I ignored my breath rasping in my throat. I ignored the way I was grunting because my mouth was too dry to swallow. I ignored the jagged pain in my leg. I ran until I reached the river and kept going until the hospital was in sight. Without looking over my shoulder, I was certain the lion wasn’t behind me, but even so, I leapt onto the bridge across the water, my feet pounding against the footpath.
Sweat trickled into my eyes from my forehead and I tried to wipe them clear with the back of my sleeve, so when I saw movement in the hospital parking lot, I had to blink to clear my vision. I stared through the stinging tears, my brain cells jolting with every step. I must have imagined it out of desperation.
Almost into the parking lot now and I stared up at the hospital. I hadn’t noticed when I ran away from the building earlier, but there were no windows on the lower levels; other than the lobby which was visible behind floor-to-ceiling glass, the walls were nothing but uninterrupted brick until around the third or fourth floor.
I slowed as I approached the lobby, the revolving doors moving slowly as if someone had entered before me and turned around to check whether the lion was still on my trail. It wasn’t. But the parking lot was no longer empty. A crowd of people filled the bays, all staring at me, all grey-faced and black-eyed, wearing drab clothes that looked as though all the color had been washed out of them. They were not all children. Some were adults, some seemed quite old the way their shoulders stooped, some were barely more than teenagers, but they watched me now as if they were zombies on a movie set all primed to chase the one living person who had stumbled into an otherwise undead city.
I shivered. I tried to lick my lips, but my tongue clicked against the roof of my mouth making a noise that reverberated around my skull. Why hadn’t I seen anyone on the streets? How had they all followed me without me knowing? Where was the goddamn lion when I needed him?
“Hey!” I yelled, my voice echoing despite that we were outside. “Where did you come from?”
No one moved. They stared at me with their black eyes as if I’d spoken a different language. And then one man, a tall guy with arms and legs that were so skinny they looked breakable, stepped forward. It was the cue the others had been waiting for, because suddenly they were all running towards me, arms and legs flapping silently, their gray faces expressionless.
I yelped. They were faster than they looked.
I turned towards the revolving doors and bashed my forehead on the frame as the door spun past me moving faster now than it had a few seconds ago. Without missing a beat, I jumped inside, the floor bouncing under my feet, and out the other side, sprinting past the empty glass reception and back towards the hallway that had brought me out here earlier.
At the corner, I kept running, turning first left and then right, believing that eventually I would end up back where I started, at the corridor with the doors and the water fountain and the room where I’d woken up. I swallowed at the thought of quenching my thirst from the fountain. If anyone was following me, I couldn’t hear them.
At the next intersection, I stopped. Why were there no signs? I glanced left and right. Up ahead, at the end of the hallway on my left, was a bright light. I made up my mind. But as I stepped into the hallway, I realized that it was steep, like climbing a hill. My sneakers were loose, flapping against the backs of my heels and I felt a blister stinging my left foot. The further I climbed, the steeper it became.
I stopped and leaned against the wall, glancing behind me. A face appeared at the bottom of the hallway: the tall skinny guy. He licked his lips. I didn’t wait around for the others to join him. I took another step up the slope as I heard a roaring sound from up ahead where the light was now flickering like a bulb about to die. It sounded like water.
I glanced down at my feet and saw that the floor was wet.
Behind me, more faces appeared at the bottom of the slope. I took a deep breath and ran towards the light. More water gushed down the slope and after a few steps I slipped, my hands and knees slapping against the floor, but it didn’t stop me. I was back on my feet and ignoring the stinging on my knee when the roaring from above seemed to explode and an avalanche of water appeared from behind the corner as the light went out.
I knew that if I remained on my feet, I would be sent hurtling back down the slope towards the zombie-like people at the bottom, so I pressed myself flat against the floor, and closed my mouth. Water gushed over my head and for several moments, I was completely submerged and sliding backwards. I tried to dig my feet and fingers into the floor, but it was impossibly smooth, and a quick glance at the walls showed me what I already knew – no doors and nothing to grab hold of.
The force of the water let up a little and I seized the opportunity to crawl forwards. I had already put some distance between me and my pursuers before the water came, and I wasn’t about to sit here and wait for them to swim up to my level. The thought hit me like a slap in the face. I peered over my shoulder and saw that the skinny guy was ankle deep in water, and that eventually it would rise enough for them to reach me.
I had to move. Now.
I scrabbled along the floor. It was slow progress – each time I raised a leg to crawl a bit higher, I slid backwards. I needed something to hold onto. I stopped, water dripping into my eyes from my saturated hair as another roar sounded from the slope above me, and more water came gushing towards me, foamy like the surfs I remembered from our vacation in Australia.
I took a deep breath and pressed my hands hard against the floor, staying as flat as possible. But the water was coming with more force this time and it was impossible to stop myself from sliding backwards and straight into the arms – or the mouths – of the people waiting at the bottom. I couldn’t breathe, water was gushing up my nose and pummeling my face, and it was hard to even think of anything else, but I needed to move.
Rolling slightly so that I could turn my face, I felt something hard pressing against my ribs. It was my Switch. And then I remembered picking up my web shooters from my bedroom. It was a long shot, but it was the only shot I had.
Moving my arm towards my chest, I slid down a few feet and pressed my face to the floor until I stopped. I had to reach the pouch in my hoodie. I tried again, moving faster, until my hand was beneath me and I could feel the video game. I fumbled around until my fist closed around the web shooters and slid them back out. I had no idea if this would work; they were strong, and they stuck fast when I’d practiced aiming them at the ceiling, but whether they would hold my weight or not was something I was about to find out.
Dragging them out from my hoodie, I slid them onto my wrists, slipping backwards and trying to stay on my front so that I was facing forwards. The water was rising. I could feel it now, lapping against the walls lower down the slope and was too scared to look behind me in case I found a zombie creature staring right at me, hands gripping my ankles. Lips clenched shut against the onslaught of water, I aimed the web shooters at the ceiling at the top of the slope and felt the jerk as the webs shot out from my wrists. I watched them arc overhead, praying they would reach, and almost cried when they stuck to the ceiling. Gripping the webs tightly, I began to drag myself forwards.
I’d gone maybe a couple of feet when I felt a tug on my right sneaker. It came loose and my foot was dragging along the wet surface as I kicked out with my left foot. I felt it make contact, but I didn’t look around. Sobbing now, strange choking sounds emitting from the back of my throat, I heaved myself forward, using my feet to push me up. Fingers clawed at my ankles and shins, and I lashed out with my feet, not caring what I hit, or what damage I did.
Slowly, slowly, I made my way to the top, praying the webs would not break.
When I finally collapsed at the summit of the slope, drenched, sobbing, and gasping for breath, the water stopped as suddenly as it had started. I remained there on all fours, waiting for my heartbeat to regulate, before I peered down the dim hallway to the bottom where my zombie followers had all disappeared. I rolled onto my back, my sobs evolving into hysterical laughter. It was a while before they abated, and the hallway floor appeared dry once more.
I dragged myself to my feet, bedraggled, the limp, water sodden webs still clinging to my wrists. Peering left, I spotted the water fountain I had drunk from previously, and slowly made my way towards it, releasing the web shooters and leaving them dangling from the ceiling.
When I had quenched my thirst, I trudged lopsidedly back to the room I had vacated earlier, my left heel throbbing with blisters. Entering the room, I closed the door softly behind me and limped over to the bed. I climbed up, drawing the cover up to my chin, taking comfort from the monitor which still bobbed silently to the tune of my heartbeat although it wasn’t attached to me.
This was the point at which I should wake up. If I just closed my eyes, and reminded myself that I was asleep in my own bed, in my own home, with the autographed poster still on the wall where it had always been … I should wake up.

























Chapter 7

When I opened my eyes, someone was staring at me from the end of my bed.
I screamed, and the girl screamed too.
“You scared me,” I said, shrinking back against the pillows. I didn’t have to peer around me to know that I was still in the hospital room. There was still the same eerie light, the same monitor next to the bed still skipping along with my heartbeat.
Ignoring my comment, she asked, “What happened to your leg?”
“My—my leg?”
She pointed at the lumps under the covers where my leg was outstretched.
“A lion bit it.”
“A lion?” She blinked, her dark skin growing hazy in the shadow light when I couldn’t see the whites of her eyes. “In Philly?”
I told her what happened when I left the hospital to go home and find my mom, a cold ache spreading through my chest when I realized that I still hadn’t found her. I told her everything to distract me from the sinking feeling and the hunger pains which were so real now, I thought I would pass out; about the missing poster in my room, about Jonah’s empty bed, and the zombies who tried to catch me inside the hospital. “I only escaped because I had my web shooters.” I felt around inside my hoodie and realized that I’d left them in the hallway.
“Web shooters? Are you for real?” She grinned and her teeth glowed fluorescent white like she’d been using special glow-in-the-dark toothpaste.
I didn’t say anything. This was my dream, and it didn’t matter if she didn’t believe me.
“I meant before,” she said, gesturing to my right leg. “What happened to your leg before you came here?”
“I—before I came here?”
“Has anyone ever told you that it’s rude to repeat everything someone else says to you?” She grinned like she didn’t think it was really rude, it was just something her mom told her. When I didn’t answer, she said again, “Your leg?”
“I don’t know.” I stared at the outline of my limbs beneath the covers, one significantly shorter than the other, hoping it might come to me in a flash of inspiration, but there was still a great empty void in my brain from before I woke up here.
“Were you in an accident?”
“I don’t know.” I was losing patience now and the emptiness in my stomach wasn’t helping.
“Wait there,” she said, like I had anywhere to go.
She left the room and returned a few minutes later with a thick sandwich, a layer of peanut butter and jelly oozing from the middle and over her fingers. She broke the sandwich in half and handed one half to me.
I almost snatched it from her and bit into it, closing my eyes when I tasted real peanut butter and jelly. We didn’t speak while we ate, but when I was licking the last of the filling from my fingers, I asked, “Where did you get the food?”
“There are places,” she said, “if you know where to look.”
I swallowed and the last of the sandwich barely went down, my throat was so dry.
“Here …” She crossed the room to the other bed, took a plastic bottle of water from beneath the pillow and offered it to me. When I hesitated, she said, “It’s clean, you know.”
I nodded and took a tentative sip. It tasted like water. I guzzled half the bottle before I came up for air. I sighed and wiped my mouth with my sleeve. “The nurse gave me milk and it tasted like fish.”
“Yeah, you can’t believe anything the nurses say. You want food, I’ll show you where to get it.”
“Wait … what? They’re nurses … they’re supposed to make us better.”
The girl watched me for a long while, her expression unfathomable, and then she shook her head slowly as though it were painful. “You still don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?”
“They’re not real nurses. This …” – she gestured at the room with her eyes – “is not a real hospital. You think those tubes actually do anything?”
I followed her gaze to the drip stand and the monitor and a slow smile spread across my face. “Because this is still my dream, and my subconscious brought you into it and I just have to play along until I wake up.”
She took a deep breath, her chest filling and expanding. “This isn’t a dream, Eli.”
I gasped. “How do you know my name?”
“It’s written on your notes,” she said. “Don’t start freaking out on me.”
I nodded. “Sorry.”
“This isn’t a dream,” she repeated slowly so that there was no room for ambiguity. “Dreams you wake up from I've been here far too long for this to be a dream. I'm as real as you are. I'm not a part of your subconscious. I was playing hide-and-seek with my sister and then … I don’t know … Next thing I knew, I was here” She shrugged.
I shook my head. “I don’t understand … you fell asleep while you were playing?”
“I don’t know, alright? I can’t exactly remember. But again, this isn't a dream.”
I blinked and looked away. I couldn’t look at her until I got my head around what she was saying. I was at the movies watching a movie and eating cheesy nachos; Jonah gave me a ride because my mom was busy only, he wasn’t Jonah, he was … we stopped so that he could speak to Molly. An idea flashed through my brain so quickly I almost didn’t catch it. An old man crossing the road with his dog.
I stared at the girl. “How—how do you know this?”
She shrugged again. “I’ve been here a while.”
“You mean you’ve been asleep for a while, or you’ve been in the hospital a while? Were you waiting for me?”
“Who knows? But to answer the first part of your question, again, this isn't a dream. Think of this as an alternate universe. A world that exists parallel to the one we are from. Like the upside-down in Stranger things.”
Laughter threatened to rise up from the pit of my stomach and erupt like a volcano, but I knew that if I allowed it to, it would become hysterical and it wouldn’t be pretty. “I don’t believe you,” I said.
“Suit yourself,” she said, “but if you’re going to get out of here, you’re going to need my help.”
Something about the tone of her voice and the way her eyes narrowed, made me sit up straighter. “Why would you help me?” I asked. “If you know the way out, then why are you still here?”
The girl chewed her thumb nail as if working out the easiest way to explain. “I haven’t completed the last test.”
“The last test?” At her raised eyebrows, I said, “Sorry.”
“This world, as you experienced, isn't like our world.”
“So, what about the tests?”
“Yeah, the tests.” She studied the cover on my bed. “There are five of them from what I’ve worked out so far, and they’re not easy. You know how sometimes you wake up sweating after a dream, with your heart racing?” She waited for me to nod. “Expect plenty of that.”
I shook my head; the sandwich was giving me a sugar rush which was making me feel a little giddy and I didn’t want to throw up. “You said this wasn't like a dream. I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I when I first came. But someone else helped me, and I’ll help you. It’ll be easier together, and you will understand. Trust me.”
There were so many questions I wanted to ask her, that I didn’t know where to start. I still wasn’t entirely sure I believed her, even though she sounded sincere, but it was all so unbelievable, so fantastic, like something out of a Black Mirror episode.
The girl held out her hand for me to shake now. “My name is Olivia, but you can call me Olive,” she said.
I took her hand which felt warm in mine, real. I was going to tell her my name and then I realized she already knew it. “Did … did something happen to you, Olive?”
“I got burnt.”
“You got burnt?”
She flashed me a look that said you’re still repeating everything I say, but she continued anyway. “There was a fire, in our apartment. But I’m okay.”
I sucked in my breath. “Jeez, I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “Not your fault.”
I thought about it. If she was burnt, she would be wrapped in bandages, wouldn’t she? I didn’t know much about it, but I knew how much it hurt when I burnt my hand on the oven helping my mom bake cookies. “How bad was it?” I asked.
“Bad.” She nodded. “Do you want to see?”
I didn’t want to, but I found myself nodding anyway.
She walked around the bed until she was standing beside me and held out her hands so that I could see them properly. The skin was raw and shiny, deep dark scabs forming in patches the length of her arms. She raised her nightdress and showed me her legs which were the same.
I couldn’t control the expression of horror on my face, and she covered her limbs and smiled at me. “Pretty, huh?”
“Did it hurt?” I asked.
“Not really.”
How could that be possible? It must have been horrific, and I couldn’t shake the vision in my head of Olive surrounded by flames.
The girl must have sensed what was going on in my head because she said, “The deeper the burn, the more nerve endings are killed so you don’t feel it so much. It’s why those little burns you get from the cooker when you’re grilling your sausages sting like crazy.”
I raised the cover to my chin like a little boy trying to hide in a game of hide-and-seek. I decided to play along for now.
“So … do I have to complete the tasks and get through the stages?”
“Unless you want to stay here forever.”
“And you’ll help me?” Olive watched me, her head tilted to one side. “I’ll help you.”
“Nah, you won’t.”
“I will, I promise. Just tell me what I need to do.”
She stood then. “I don’t accept your promise because you have no idea if you can keep it or not.”
“Okay, I don’t promise,” I said, wilting a little under her stare. “But I will try.”
“You’re only saying that because you still don’t believe me. You still think this is all your own little dream and Mommy will wake you up any second now and cook you pancakes for breakfast.”
Her voice had taken on a brittle tone, like she was angry with me, and I didn’t want her to be angry with me because I had a feeling that I was going to need her on my side. Plus, she was a little scary when she stared at me this way with her eyes bulging.
“Show me then,” I whispered, because I really wasn’t as brave as I’d hoped I would be. “Prove to me this is real.”
She stood there with her hands on her hips. “Why did you come back?”
“Because I didn’t know where else to go. My mom wasn’t home, and there was a lion, and zombies.”
Her expression softened a little. “And you normally have leg-eating lions and zombies in your dreams, right?”
“Well … um … no. But they’re not real.”
“Depends which way you’re looking at it. They’re real enough for us who are completing the tasks. Did it hurt when the lion bit you?”
I thought about it, concentrating on my right leg with the hole in it. If I was being honest now, which I knew I should be with Olive if I wanted her help, I could feel it throbbing now under the covers.
“Yes … and no,” I mumbled. “I can feel it now.”
“Show me!”
“What?”
“Show me your leg. We need to get it out in the open, Eli, because while you’re keeping it hidden, you won’t even make it through the first task, and you’ll still be expecting a hand on your shoulder waking you up at any moment.”
I didn’t need to give it any consideration to know that she was right. Throughout our conversation, I’d been waiting for my mom to come into my room and say, “Wake up, Eli. Time for school.” But now, with a sense of icy dread, I was losing that tiny glimmer of hope and sinking deeper into this new reality.
I kicked back the covers and revealed my legs, my left leg still wearing the green sneaker, the back of it caked in watery blood from burst blisters, and the shoeless leg with the hole in the middle of it.
Olive sat gently on the side of the bed and said, “Touch it, Eli. You need to know that it is real.”
I reached down and touched my leg, above the hole but just below my knee. It felt smooth, solid. I traced a line down to the hole made by the wild animal and poked my finger inside a second time. I quickly jerked my finger away. “Why can I feel that?” I asked.
“Because you haven’t let go.”
I was confused. “Let go of what?”
“Your real leg. You can’t finish the first test until you understand that you’re going to complete the tasks with this prosthetic limb, because your real leg is gone. It is part of the test”
“I—I haven’t started the test,” I mumbled.
“What do you think you were doing when you walked out of here to find your mom? Or when you escaped the lion? Or how about using your web thingies to escape the zombies which are not actually zombies by the way.”
I shrugged. I hadn’t thought about it because at the time, I still felt like I was living out a dream.
“What’s the last thing you can remember, Eli – the last real thing?”
“I—I went to the movies.”
“What movie did you see?”
“It was Marvel, the latest movie. I wanted to see it because … because it was the focal point of my art project.”
“Good,” Olive said. “What happened in the movie? How did it start?”
I swallowed. That was the thing – I still couldn’t remember how it started, or anything that happened in the movie, and it was making me anxious because, what if I didn’t get to the cinema? “I can’t remember.”
Olive’s eyes narrowed. “You can’t remember any of it?”
“No.”
“How about the car journey?”
I felt sweat trickling down my spine. “My brother gave me a ride.” I closed my eyes and tried to think. Jonah was in a strange mood – something to do with Molly – and I was angry with him about something. Again, the vision flashed into my head of an old man and a dog, a big car, I was trying to open my door. I opened my eyes, and I was panting.
“What?” asked Olive. “What did you remember?”
“We were fighting. I think I tried to climb out of the car while he was driving.” I strained to follow the memory further, but it was like I’d hit a brick wall. “Oh my God,” I whispered to Olive, “I hit a brick wall.”
“Okay,” Olive shuffled closer. “I think that’s enough for now, Eli.”
I was crying, hot ugly tears and I didn’t try to stop them. “It was my fault,” I said. “It was all my fault. Why did I try to climb out? What was I thinking? I hit a wall.” I stared down at my legs. “I killed my leg,” I said. “Olive, I killed my leg.”
Olive sat beside me on the bed and wrapped her arms around me. “It’s okay, Eli,” she whispered. “Shh, now, shh. It’s okay. I’ve got ya. It’s all going to be okay.”





















Chapter 8

I had no idea how long we sat together on my bed, Olive’s warm strong arms wrapped around me while I cried like a baby.
Eventually, I straightened and said, “Can you show me how to find food?”
Olive nodded. “There’s something I should tell you first—”
She didn’t finish because the door opened and the nurse strode in, her smile fixed back in place like there were strings keeping the corners of her lips taut. I even glanced either side of her head to check there weren’t any puppet strings attached. “What’s going on here?” she asked.
Olive leapt from the bed and stood, hands on hips, watching the nurse as she approached my bed.
“I was telling Olive about my leg,” I said. Now that Olive and I were friends, I felt like I had grown a couple of centimeters with my newfound confidence.
The nurse narrowed her eyes and glanced sideways at Olive. When she reached my bed, she reinserted the tube into the back of my hand before I realized what she was doing, then stared at the hole in my leg. “What about your leg then, hmm?”
“I … I think I remember what happened.”
She did the blinking thing with her eyes again, like a serpent, and I instinctively crawled back along the bed away from her. “Which part?” she asked.
“Um, the accident?” I mumbled.
“Oh, that.”
The nurse laughed as though I’d told her a joke and tapped on the front of the monitor which bleeped higher, the green line resembling a roller coaster. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt the movement inside my chest. My heart was tapping strangely against my rib cage and I had to remind myself that my heart controlled the bleep and not the other way around.
“You don’t want to be dwelling on that.” She walked around the bed and checked the drip bag which was now empty. “My, you have been greedy,” she said. “We’ll have to get you another one.”
“Olive said,” I began. I heard Olive’s sharp intake of breath, and watched the nurse’s head jerk in her direction, like a pigeon spotting a last crumb on the ground.
“Olive said …?”
I swallowed. “Olive said that it would help if I could remember … you know … what happened.”
“Help who?” There it was again – that slow blinking. The smile was still fixed in place though.
“Help me?” I managed. “This is my dream. I have to wake up at some point.”
The nurse reached above the bed, her uniform rising up her legs to reveal a pink and white striped pair of—I didn’t know what they were called, bloomers maybe?—and opened a panel in the wall. She reached her hand in, and her arm seemed to keep going and going as if it were made of rubber, before she pulled out another plastic bag filled with red liquid. “Yes, keep thinking of this being a dream. You shouldn’t listen to little Olivia,” she said. “She tells lies.”
I glanced at Olive, but she wasn’t looking at me.
The nurse clipped the new bag to the stand and went to connect it to the tube protruding from the back of my hand.
I snatched my hand away. “Is that blood?” I asked.
The nurse stared at the bag as if she hadn’t noticed the liquid inside. She shook her head. “Of course it’s blood.”
“What are you doing?” I climbed over the other side of the bed as far away from her as possible without leaving the room. “I don’t need blood.”
“But it’s yours, Eli. It came from your leg.” Her voice had smoothed a little around the edges, the grin even wider but still just as bizarre.
“Ha!” I snapped. “You can’t just squeeze blood from a … from a …” I couldn’t finish. I knew what I was trying to say, but the image in my brain of this woman wringing my leg out to empty it of blood was making the sandwich threaten to come back up and spill over the floor.
“A leg?” suggested the nurse.
“He’s fine.” Olive stepped closer to my side, and I realized how close to tears I was. “He doesn’t need the blood.”
The grin dropped, the woman’s red lips narrowing until they almost disappeared. Even though I was watching her, she suddenly appeared in front of us and we both stepped backwards. Literally, one second she was next to the drip stand, and the next she was close enough for me to smell her fish-breath. “So, you’re the expert now, are you?” she said to Olive.
“No. I’m looking out for my friend. He can stand. He can speak. He don’t need your blood.”
“His blood,” the nurse reminded us.
“I know that’s not how it works,” said Olive. “The body replaces blood. He might be a bit w—” she hesitated. “He might be a bit tired, but his blood’s fine.”
The nurse tilted her head from side to side, her gaze flitting between us and finally settling on me. “Ask her about her sister,” she said.
I glanced at Olive who stared straight ahead as if she were scared to let the woman out of sight. “Her … her sister?”
The nurse nodded. “Ask her where her sister is. Go on. I dare you.”
Olive looked at me now, and I was scared that she was going to cry. I couldn’t do this without Olive, and I couldn’t do this with Olive if she was going to cry. I was depending on her to be the strong one, to keep me safe until this nightmare ended. She promised she was going to help me find a way back. She shook her head, a movement so slight, I wasn’t entirely sure it had happened.
“No,” I said. “Olive will tell me where her sister is when she’s ready.”
The woman tipped her head back and laughed then, her laughter echoing around the room and bouncing off the ceiling. “And poor little Elijah, you’ll believe her, won’t you?”
“Yes. I’ll believe her more than I believe you.”
The laughter stopped abruptly. She reached down to the floor and stuck her hand inside the hole in my prosthetic leg. Pain ripped through me and I screamed. I screamed until my throat felt like it was on fire and my leg felt like it was being sawed in half.
Olive stood in front of me and talked me through the pain. “Eli, listen to me. Eli, come on, now, it’s me, Olive. Listen to me, it’s all going to be okay. Breathe, try to stay calm. What she’s doing to you – you need to power through it. Remember the tasks? You need to focus. That’s it. Breathe … Everything is going to be fine”
That phrase resonated with me, like I've heard it many times but I couldn't remember where. But that phrase helped bring me back to myself. When the screams slowed down and the noises escaping from my mouth sounded more like a gorilla grunting, I opened my eyes and saw Olive’s face close to mine, her eyes wide, her hands squeezing mine. I could still feel the pain, but it was duller now, throbbing the way your knee feels after you’ve banged it hard on the corner of a table.
The nurse had gone.
I glanced down at my leg expecting to see a puddle of blood on the floor but there was nothing. The hole was still there where the lion took a chunk out of it, the mechanisms still jutting out at an angle, but when I tried to put my weight on it, I found that it didn’t collapse under me. I took a tentative step, gripping Olive’s hand. I could still walk. Clumsily, but if it meant I could get out of here, then I wasn’t waiting around for the nurse to come back.
I went to walk towards the door, but Olive pulled me back. “Where are you going?”
“Home,” I said. “Maybe my parents will be there.”
A strange expression crossed her face. “They won’t be there. You’ve been outside. You’ve been home, you said yourself that it was different. You can’t just walk out of here and expect to wake up like none of this ever happened.” She shook her head like she was angry with me because I didn’t understand.
“Why not?” I asked. It seemed like I was never going to stop asking stupid questions in this dream. “I want to be at home when I wake up … don’t I?”
Olive stared at her feet for several moments. “Sit down, Eli,” she said. She waited for me to be comfortable on the side of the bed before she spoke. “That isn’t how this world works.” She held her hands out to shut me up when I went to interrupt her. “You have to remember this isn't a dream. No one is going to wake you up. To get back home, to our world, you have to complete certain tasks. You have to—”
“Tasks?” I couldn’t stop myself. “I don’t understand. What kind of tasks? And how do you know – this isn’t your dream, it’s mine.”
“Eli, This isn't a dream,” she said. “This isn't something you have dreamed up. Others have come and gone, others have stayed, unable to complete the tasks. There are others in this world like us, the children of magnificent atrocities.”
“Children of magnificent atrocities? What kind of name is that? Who came up with that?”
“It doesn't matter who came up with it. It's what those of us who have been brought here have been referred to long before I got here. But think about it, its true right? We have both been through something bad that got us here.”
I nodded. I opened my mouth to speak and then closed it again, not sure what to say.
“You noticed the light, right?” She glanced up at the ceiling.
I followed her gaze. The lamp was on but there was still that same eerie twilight in the room as there was outside, like a gloomy day when the sky is filled with thunderclouds and you need the lights on all day. I nodded.
“The tasks … we have to … to leave this world, we have to make it dark.”
“Dark?” I swallowed. I didn’t even care that I was repeating her. “How dark?”
“I mean middle-of-the-night dark. So dark, we can’t see our own fingers if they’re right in front of our faces.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know why,” Olive said. “That’s just the way it is. When this world turns black, we go home.”
“And the tasks?”
She took a deep breath. “The tasks …”



















Chapter 9

“We have to get down to the basement,” said Olive.
“Why? What’s in the basement?”
“There’s a box, in the basement. It controls the light.”
I glanced up at the ceiling again. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed as though the room was a bit lighter. There was no window, so it wasn’t as if we could tell if the sun had peeped out from behind some clouds, and the overhead lamp was no brighter. If what Olive said was true—and I had no reason to disbelieve her despite what the nurse said—we couldn’t let it get brighter.
“So, we find the box,” I said, “turn the lights off, and then we’re done.”
Olive raised her eyebrows at me and scratched at one of the scars on her left arm. I winced. I could almost feel it searing my own skin. “Yeah, like it’s going to be that easy.”
“I’ve been outside,” I said. “I can find my way down to the lobby, and then we take the stairs down to the basement from there, right?”
She chewed her bottom lip. “Eli, when you came back after you went home, you said the corridor was a slope and there was a tsunami trying to wash you away.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Did you see that on your way out?”
Goosebumps were prickling under the skin on my arms and shoulders. I hadn’t thought about it because I was too busy trying to avoid the zombie team that was learning to swim, but she was right – I hadn’t even seen the slope on my way out.
She didn’t wait for me to answer; she could probably see it in my face. “The hospital changes all the time.”
“It ch—” Olive shot me a look that shut me up. “How? What do you mean, like the stairs in Hogwarts?”
“Yeah, and like we’ll find a couple of broomsticks outside the door and fly down to the basement. No, not like in Hogwarts. I mean the rooms move. The corridors disappear. The basement isn’t always underground.”
“Okay …” It wasn’t okay but I didn’t know what else to say. “How do we find it then?”
“We try all the rooms until we find it.”
My shoulders sagged. It sounded impossible. I’d been outside and this was a big building – there must’ve been hundreds of rooms.
“Yeah, and there’s more,” said Olive. “The rooms won’t all be empty. In fact, if they are empty, we’re heading in the wrong direction.”
I didn’t want to ask, but I had to know. “What … what’s in the rooms?”
She shrugged. “People. Kids. Monsters.”
A giggle escaped before I could stop it. She said ‘monsters’ like she was reciting her favorite ice cream flavors: chocolate chip, cookie dough, oh and monsters. But her expression was serious. “We don’t have to, you know, fight them, do we?”
“Sometimes.”
I thought about the zombies waiting outside and how fast they ran when their leader decided to chase me. “What about zombies?”
“They’re not zombies, but yeah, sometimes them too.”
I glanced around the room. It was getting brighter in here and I wondered if there was some kind of time limit on this task. As if reading my mind, she said, “It doesn’t matter how long it takes, the whole thing resets tomorrow.”
I shook my head. I would wake up before tomorrow so that wasn’t important. My heart rate sped up a little when I reminded myself that it didn’t even matter if I got caught by a monster because I’d wake up before it killed me.
I swear Olive was psychic because she shook her head again. “You won’t wake up Eli, this isn't a dream. We are here until the tasks are complete. That’s how it works.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I just do,” she said. “I’ve been to the basement already.”
“But you’re still here.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m still here.”

Olive tugged the tube from the back of my hand. “Look for stuff that we might be able to use,” she said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Sharp tools, although the nurse doesn’t generally leave stuff laying around. Anything heavy, but not too heavy to carry.” Olive was rummaging through the locker beside my bed and rattling the drip bag filled with blood.
“Should we take that?” I pointed to the plastic bag.
She shrugged. “Could do.”
“How about the cupboard above the bed.” I raised my eyes to the cupboard where the nurse found the blood.
“I’m not going in there,” said Olive.
I rolled up the tube and shoved that inside the pouch of my hoodie along with the blood and a pair of tweezers I discovered beneath the monitor. Olive pulled on a pair of jeans over her nightdress, tied a sweater around her waist, and ripped some buttons from a skirt which she stuffed into her back pockets. “Ready?” she asked.
I wasn’t but I could hardly say no; and besides my stomach was still rumbling. “Can you show me where to find food first?”
She looked at me and smiled. “You’re still hungry.” When I nodded, she said, “I’ll show you, but we have to be careful. If the nurse is feeding, we have to wait.”
I followed her to the door and heard the heart monitor beeping loudly. Turning around, I saw that the green line was hopping across the screen and at the same time my heart was skipping inside my chest. “What’s happening?”
“It’s okay.” Olive grabbed my hand. “It just means you’re excited.”
“I think it means I’m scared,” I said.
“That’s okay too.”
It wasn’t until we were walking along the corridor heading right, that I realized Olive hadn’t said the nurse might be eating, she’d said the nurse might be feeding.
The corridor was pretty much how I remembered it. Every few steps, Olive stopped and sniffed the air. At the end we turned left and followed a slope upwards until she stopped again outside a narrow door. Gesturing for me to wait, she pressed her face against the door and closed her eyes. “I think we’re okay,” she said, her voice low.
She pushed the door gently, gripping the door handle, and peeked around before I followed her inside. I’d expected a kitchen, a refrigerator in one corner, a kettle on the counter, cupboards stocked with food, but instead we were standing inside a tiny metal-lined room. It was so cold my teeth were chattering.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Wh—what c—can I have?”
“Anything.” Olive shrugged. “Waffles,” she said loudly. A drawer appeared in the wall in front of us. Olive pulled it open and removed two waffles. “Here.” She offered one to me.
“Th—this is so—so cool.” I bit into the waffle and felt the sugar rush. “Potato ch—chips,” I said. Another drawer appeared with a packet of potato chips inside. I took them out and put them inside my hoodie.
“Let’s go,” said Olive. “You don’t want to be in here when the nurse arrives.”
As soon as we stepped outside, I felt the heat warming my skin. I turned to the door, but it had vanished. “Where did it go?” Olive shrugged. “Why do I not want to be in there when the nurse arrives?”
She started walking, chewing her bottom lip as if deciding how much to tell me. “She makes a mess,” she said eventually.
I was licking sugar from my fingers when we reached the top of the slope. We both stopped and peered down. I couldn’t see the bottom, but there was nowhere else to go but down. “Do we slide?” I asked Olive.
She gave me her hand. “Whatever happens, don’t let go,” she said.
We both sat down at the top of the slope and pushed ourselves over the edge. We started off slowly at first, but soon gathered speed, hurtling along the corridor which still seemed to have no end. It reminded me of a slide at a water park I’d been to in Florida, where the slide was inside a tunnel that curled and twisted so that you never saw the bottom until you flew out of the end and created a tidal wave in the splash pool.
It was dark, but not so dark that I couldn’t see Olive. I gripped her hand tightly, even when our legs flew into the air and we spun around so that we were sliding backwards. I could barely concentrate on breathing and staying upright so that my head didn’t bang the walls, so I didn’t notice the nail jutting out from the wall to my right until my prosthetic leg got caught and I was jerked upwards. I screamed. Olive was still clinging to my hand, but now she was being dragged away from me, my grip loosening.
“Don’t let go,” she yelled.
“I can’t hold you.” It felt like my arm was being ripped from its socket. My shoulders were burning and there were sharp stabbing pains in my leg as I hung upside down from the nail on which I was caught.
“Eli! Hold on!” Olive was trying to press herself against the floor the way I had done in the water, but gravity was dragging her away from me. “Eli!” she yelled again.
“What?”
“I’m going to let go. When I do, you need to free your leg. I’ll be waiting at the bottom for you.”
I felt her fingers sliding slowly through mine.
“Eli! Did you hear me?”
“Yes!” I yelled as her hand slipped from mine.
“I’ll wait—”
I watched her sliding away from me and out of view and all I could hear was the sound of my own breath. My heart was racing. She told me to free my leg. I raised my head from the floor and looked at the nail which was now poking out from inside my leg. I tried lifting my upper body, but it was so difficult hanging upside down. I tried wriggling my leg free, but the more I moved it, the more stuck it seemed to become. I tried kicking my prosthetic leg with my other foot and that made me yelp with the pain.
I had no idea where Olive was, or whether she’d even reached the bottom yet, but I had to catch up with her before the slope altered and I lost her. What if I never found her again? The thought made tears well in my eyes. I couldn’t do this without Olive.
Rolling my upper body to one side, I pushed myself upright, until I was sitting, propped up on my hands, my right leg still stuck fast. Letting go, I grabbed hold of my thigh. So far, so good. Now I just had to free my leg. Shuffling my hands forward I reached the nail. I tried sliding my leg off the nail, like unhooking a robe from a hook on the back of a door, but the pain was like knives ripping through my flesh, and my leg only budged a fraction. I punched my thigh in temper and screamed.
Instinct was telling me to lay down, but then I would have to drag myself upright all over again. I tried again. Gripping my thigh, I twisted my leg, jerking it towards me, but the nail twisted also with the movement of my leg. I was crying now, tears of frustration. My stupid leg, why couldn't it be normal. This stupid dream. Why couldn’t I wake up and go to school? Why did I have to argue with Jonah in the car?
Thoughts of Jonah made my tears catch in my throat. I needed to wake up so that I could apologize to him for our argument, and make things better between us again, and to wake up, I needed to complete these stupid tasks.
I took some deep breaths, waiting for my heart rate to settle. I wasn’t like Jonah. He was always the one who pushed himself harder and further than anyone ever expected him to go. Jonah was a winner. He was the strong one too. If I was slowest at track, it didn’t bother me because I knew that was as fast as I could go; I wasn’t set on coming first, or winning a medal, or reaching national standard. Sure, I pushed myself with my art but that was because I was a perfectionist, not a jock.
Gripping my knee this time, my back and thigh muscles straining with the effort of sitting upright, I studied where the nail had pierced my leg. It had entered my leg on one side and was poking out the other. I tilted my head and tried easing the torn ligaments from around the nail, but the pain was still excruciating. I didn’t understand. This leg wasn’t real. There was nothing else for it but for me to grit my teeth and wrench the leg free. At least then I’d be moving, and I could catch up with Olive.
My left arm was resting across my chest and squashing the bag of blood tucked inside my hoodie. I thought about what the nurse had said – that the blood had come from my leg. Was she maybe giving me a secret clue? Would the blood help?
Still holding onto my knee with one hand, I slid my other hand inside my hoodie and pulled out the blood – it looked thick, and dark, with shimmering swirls like ripples in a pond. Clutching it between my knees, I unscrewed the cap at the bottom, held it above the hole in my leg, and squeezed. A few droplets of blood dripped into the hole. I heard them, like a leaky faucet, and felt the vibration inside my head. I replaced the blood in my pocket, gulped in air filling my lungs, and heaved my leg away from the nail.
It came away with such force, that I somersaulted backwards, and ended up careening sideways down the slope. It was several moments before I realized that there was no pain. The blood had worked, it had dissolved the nail. I was grinning like crazy by the time I reached the bottom, landing awkwardly on my right arm which twisted beneath my body.
I laid on my back, staring at the ceiling, and catching my breath. I felt my arm – the elbow was throbbing, but it didn’t feel broken.
It wasn’t until I rose to my feet and peered at the vast empty space around me, that I realized Olive wasn’t here.















Chapter 10

I was standing in a high-ceiling, windowless room, with two doors set in each wall. Apart from the doors, there was nothing else here. No lights. No beds. No equipment. I turned a full circle, and as I turned, the slide via which I’d arrived, vanished, and was replaced by another wall. I hoped one of the doors would offer a way out.
I took a step into the room, my leg completely pain-free now. “Olive?” I called tentatively.
Nothing.
I didn’t understand why she would have left through one of these doors when she was supposed to wait for me. “Olive!” I yelled, louder this time. What if she was waiting on the other side for me? What if I chose the wrong door though and found a monster instead of Olive? What would happen to me then? “Olive!” I shrieked.
She said she would meet me at the bottom. Why did she say that if she didn’t want to wait around for me?
My thoughts flicked back again to the nurse. She said I shouldn’t believe Olive because she tells lies – but I didn’t believe anything the nurse said either. So, where did that leave me? Realization hit me like a punch in the stomach. It left me alone.
In that moment, I wished I’d never met Olive. I wished she hadn’t told me about the tasks and the monsters, and the zombies that weren’t actually zombies. I wished she’d left me asleep in my bed in the room with the monitors – I could’ve slept through all this, corridors that turned into slides, and empty rooms, and feeding times, and woken up hopefully with no recollection of any of it.
I made up my mind. I was going to open the doors one at a time, find a way out of the hospital, and I was going to go home and crawl into my bed and sleep till morning.
I opened the first door on my right and staggered backwards as the stench hit me. I landed on my backside, gagging, and crawled away from the door where I rolled onto my knees and threw up onto the floor. Whatever was in that room, was seriously disgusting. I’d never smelled anything like it before and had no idea what it could even be.
Burying my face in the crook of my elbow, I inched forward so that I could peer inside. If it was safe enough, I was going to reach inside and pull the door closed. If I could get close enough. The smell made my eyes water, it was so strong. I remembered my grandpa buying this blue cheese one time, and my grandma yelling at him because it stank out her refrigerator and she said it took weeks before the smell went away. He offered me a tiny chunk of cheese to try, and I didn’t because it made me feel sick just looking at it. This was a hundred times worse than that. A million times worse.
Crawling, I reached the entrance to the room, my knees barely touching the threshold, and squinted at the gloom inside. The room was much larger than I’d expected, larger even than the empty room I was in; I didn’t know why I was surprised after the never-ending slide that had materialized from the upstairs corridor. At first glance I assumed it was empty—or maybe I was convincing myself that it was empty so that I could close the door and move on—but then I saw a glimmer of movement in the far-left corner. A glint of something shiny.
I blinked furiously, trying to clear the tears that were protecting my eyes from the foul stink. There was something in the corner, but I couldn’t make out any details. I closed my eyes, my breathing fast and shallow because my nose was smothered by my sleeve and weighed up my options. I could close the door and forget I’d seen anything. Or I could investigate.
My brain was telling me to close the door and try the next one. Despite what Olive kept saying, I knew this was a dream. Whatever was in this room and producing this smell was not something I wanted to see. But then I remembered that Olive had said we needed to find the box that controlled the lighting, and that the closer we got, the more monsters we’d find. Maybe I was supposed to enter the room. Maybe Olive had entered before me and this was the only way for us to find each other again.
But I didn’t want to go in. what if I entered and then something closed the door behind me trapping me inside? I’d suffocate. I’d die from the smell. Anger welled inside me again, anger because I’d trusted Olive, and now she’d deserted me, and I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing. I felt it red and hot in my brain like I was going to explode.
I reached for the door handle, my fingertips brushing cold metal, when I heard a sound, and the anger drained out of me to be replaced by icy fear. Whatever was in here knew I was there, and it was waiting for me to make a move. Slowly, hardly daring to breathe, my blood pounding in my ears, my fingertips closed around the handle. If I could get hold if it, I could leap backwards and drag the door with me.
As my pinkie closed around the bottom of the handle, I heard it again, and this time I froze. It—whatever it was—said my name.
I stared at the shadow in the corner waiting for it to come into focus, but it remained a blur, a dark fluid blur, like a stain on the wall. Only I knew it wasn’t a stain because I was certain that’s where the sound came from. Still holding the handle, I slid one foot closer, and then the other, concentrating on the shadow, ready to bolt if it suddenly morphed into a boy-eating monster.
“Eli.” It was faint, but this time I was convinced the shadow had spoken my name. “Help.”
My heart stopped. Well maybe it missed a beat because when it started up again it was racing like I was competing in a marathon. I couldn’t leave now.
“Help. Eli. Help.” It was still faint, but the thing that was making my blood turn to ice was that the voice sounded like Olive.
“Olive?” I croaked. I tried again. “Olive?”
“Eli!” Louder now. “Be care—”
The word was cut short by my scream because, as I’d leaned closer to focus on the voice, a creature—monster?—had slithered out of the other corner and was approaching me silently, stealthily, across the floor.
Rather than running out of the room, which might have been the sensible course of action, I shuffled around the creature and closer to the shadow. Its head followed me. It was difficult to tell what it was because it slithered like a snake, its body long and thick, but it also had long spindly black legs like a spider. Lots of them. I hated spiders. I got the fear from my mom who couldn’t even look at a spider without crying. I wasn’t one of those people who trapped them in a glass by sliding a piece of paper underneath it so that the spider could be carried outside and released into the garden. I couldn’t even bash a spider with a shoe. So now, with these black eyes staring at me and its hairy legs bent at strange angles above its body, I wanted to curl into a ball and close my eyes until it went away.
“Eli!” Olive’s voice was more insistent. “This way.”
I inched backwards towards the shadow in the corner that was Olive. For every step I took, the spider-snake crawled closer, its legs tip-tapping on the floor. I didn’t hesitate. I moved faster, closer to Olive, until I felt something soft and sticky brush the back of my neck.
I yelped and tried to brush it away from me in case it was a baby spider-snake attacking me from behind, but instead it was the fuzzy shadow surrounding Olive. It looked like some kind of cocoon. Or a spiderweb.
I shrieked. “Olive?” I didn’t want to take my eyes off the creature, but I didn’t want to leave Olive tangled up in this sticky black web that still looked like a shadow even close up.
“Eli. Get me out.”
“How?” I felt a momentary flash of anger again – if Olive had waited at the bottom of the slide for me, she wouldn’t be wrapped up like mummy, and I wouldn’t have to rescue her.
“I don’t know. I’m stuck.”
Her voice shook. I knew she must be scared, but I was scared too. I was the one with the spider-snake coming after me. I didn’t think it was going to sit there and wait for me to free Olive and then watch us stroll out of the room. Maybe it was going to eat Olive. That’s why spiders trapped flies in their webs, wasn’t it? Maybe it was going to trap me too.
Closer and closer, the creature sneaked up on me until my whole back was pushed up against Olive’s cocoon. I could feel it sticky and prickly on my back, but I still couldn’t feel Olive. I swallowed. I couldn’t even close my eyes because I had a hunch that the moment I looked away, the spider-snake was going to pounce. “Olive.” My voice sounded so feeble, so puny, even to my own ears, that I felt like I deserved to be eaten alive.
The creature opened its mouth. I felt the cocoon crawling over my skin, ready to drag me inside with Olive, and something inside me switched. I lashed out with my prosthetic limb, noticing as I did so, a couple of drops of blood flicking from the hole in the side of my leg and onto the monster’s head. It reared up on all its horrible gangly legs and let out a piercing scream.
“What happened?” Olive yelled.
“I don’t know.” I was struggling to unstick my arms from the web behind me and scared to take my eyes off the shrieking monster in front of me.
It was trying to rub its face with its two front legs as though it had touched something toxic. Was it the blood? I didn’t waste a beat. I had nothing to lose, and I didn’t know what else to do. Reaching inside my hoodie, my fingers located the bag of blood; I dragged it out, unscrewed the cap and squeezed. Blood shot out, creating an arc above the creature, and spraying its entire body with red liquid. The screams were terrifying. I watched as its legs wriggled, and scratched, and clawed at the blood splattered across its body, slithering out of the room as it fought against the poison attacking it.
Turning away from it, I plunged my hands into the cocoon. Something touched me and I yelped, but then I realized it was Olive. She placed one hand in mine, and I pulled, staggering backwards as she slowly emerged from the shadowy shroud.
“What kept you?” she said.













Chapter 11

The monster was still screaming. It was the other side of the door now, writhing and jerking, but its tail was still inside. If we wanted to leave, we would have to clamber over it.
“This way!” Olive grabbed my hand, taking control again.
I mean, I wanted her to take control, because she knew way more than I did, but at the same time, I felt like I was teetering on the top of a cliff, on one side was the me who was happy for her to tell me what to do, and on the other side, was the angry boy who’d freaked out because she’d gone and left me dangling from a nail.
I followed her anyway, swallowing my rage for now.
“Where are we going?” I had to yell so she would hear me above the screams.
“There’s another door.”
I’d thought that the cocoon was in the corner of the room, but I was wrong. Olive led me behind the cocoon and through a small door which we had to crouch down to walk through. I pushed the door shut behind us to block out the sounds of the monster.
“Sorry,” said Olive, turning to face me.
“You left me,” I said, sounding like a sulky child.
“It came at me out of nowhere. I couldn’t get away from it.”
I should’ve known she wouldn’t abandon me. I felt guilty for being so angry with her, but I was still too hurt and confused and frightened to relent completely.
“What did you do to it?” she asked.
She had bits of stringy sticky web clinging to her face and hair, but as the adrenaline rush abated, I didn’t even have the energy to brush it away. “I used the blood from my leg,” I said. “I don’t know for certain, but I think it might be poisonous.”
“Sounds about right,” she said.
We peered around this new room. It was small. The ceiling was low, I could reach up and touch it without standing on tiptoes and it only took six or seven steps to cross the room and reach an even smaller door on the opposite wall. We bent low to enter this room which was so small we could touch both sides without moving. Another smaller door was in front of us. Olive went to open it and I stopped her with my hand.
“Do you think we should?” I asked. “I mean …” I glanced behind me. “What if all the other rooms have gone?”
“Then this is the only way for us to go.” She shrugged. “No point turning back now.” She turned the handle and hesitated. “Thank you, Eli. I didn’t know what I was going to do if you didn’t find me.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
We had to crawl through the next door and squeeze into the room like Alice when she ate the cookie in Wonderland and grew too tall for the house. The back of my head was pressed up against the ceiling, my cheek resting on Olive’s shoulder, my knees against my chest, while Olive seemed to be curled into a ball on her knees with her face buried somewhere in my hoodie. It was stifling and difficult to breathe.
“Can you see a door?” I asked.
“No,” said Olive. “Feel around the walls with your fingers.”
The only door we found was the one behind us through which we had crammed ourselves into this tiny space which could not be called a room, and which now had become so tiny, we could only fit a hand inside.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
I felt the dull red ache of rage blooming behind my eyebrows again and I fought to contain it. But I kept telling myself, it was Olive’s idea to come this way. Pain in my leg flared suddenly, a reminder that if I hadn’t argued with Jonah, I wouldn’t be stuck in this nightmare anyway, and my head throbbed with the injustice of it all. I wanted to wake up. I was done with this whole task thing that Olive may or may not have made up.
“Can you reach it?” she asked.
“No.” I didn’t even try.
“Okay.” If Olive noticed the sullenness in my response, she didn’t react to it. “Let me squeeze my hand under your leg.” She tensed as she tried to force her hand between our limbs and then said, “Got it.”
I heard the tiny click as she opened the door. “What’s in there?” I asked.
“A box,” she said. “A tiny box. There’s a button on it.” She paused, breathed, while her fingers traced whatever was on the box the other side of the door. “I think we’ve found it, Eli. I think we’ve found the switch.”
“Ha!” My anger subsided, rushing away from my temple like the ocean rushing away from the shore with the tide. “Can you get it out?”
Olive tugged. She tugged again. There was a pause before she said, “It’s chained to the wall.”
And just like that, the tiny glimmer of hope vanished like a star when the sun comes up. “That’s it then,” I mumbled. I had a vision of us stuck in this cramped space until we used up all the oxygen, and it wasn’t pretty.
“I’m going to press the button and see what happens.” Olive paused, waiting for me to agree, but I said nothing. “Ready, steady, go!”
I held my breath. I had no idea what should’ve happened, but we were still squashed together, and I could still see Olive.
“It didn’t work,” she said. Her voice was different, like she’d caught a glimpse of a rainbow and it disappeared when she blinked.
“Maybe it’s the wrong button,” I said. Angry-Eli was back.
“It’s the right button.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do!” Olive snapped. “It’s the right button, but I don’t know why it didn’t work.” She paused, thinking about it. “Maybe you need to be the one to press it, as it’s part of your task.”
“Okay.” It wasn’t okay, but what else could I say?
“I’ll slide my hand out, and you see if you can reach.”
I felt Olive’s shoulders pressing into my chest as she moved her hand, and I shifted slightly so that my right arm wasn’t completely bent at the wrong angle. Even so, there was nowhere for my elbow to go, and my hand was upside down as I pushed it through the tiny door.
“Got it?” Olive asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Press the button.”
“I just did!” I snapped. “Nothing happened.”
I felt Olive sag against me. I didn’t want to hold her up, so I shrugged my shoulders to deliberately make her feel uncomfortable as I slid my hand back through the door; I knew I was being mean, but I couldn’t help it. It was game over.
“Right, think about this,” Olive said, more to herself than to me. “We’re here because this is the box that controls the lights. We beat the monster to find it. This world wouldn’t lead us through all these doors if this wasn’t it.”
“How do you know that though?” I asked. “I mean, what makes you an expert?”
I shouldn’t have said it, and the nurse’s face appeared in my head with her macabre grin, and her serpent-eyes, and the sudden realization that she was probably trying to cause friction between me and Olive, smacked me in the face.
“I never said I was an expert,” said Olive. “I said I would help you.”
“Sorry,” I grumbled.
“We must be missing something. Maybe we’re not supposed to press the button. There’s a reason it’s chained in that tiny space – there’s no way we’re getting the box out of there.”
“Haven’t you done this before?” I asked. “It sounded like you’d done this before.”
“No. It isn’t always a button. Sometimes it’s a switch. But it’s always a tiny box like this, so I know I’m right.”
I thought about it – as much as I could think while crammed into this tiny space with our faces pressed together and our breaths mingling. Jonah was good at engineering and electronics. He would know exactly how to make that button work. He was ace at Xbox – I never beat him at any video games. And then I realized that I still had my handheld in my hoodie. Maybe that would operate the button on the box – I mean, anything was possible, right?
“I’ve an idea,” I said. “Don’t move.”
“It’s not like I can go anywhere,” said Olive.
With my arm pressed close to my side, I managed to maneuver my hand back around to the front of my hoodie and inside the pocket until my fingers located my Nintendo Switch. There was barely room to slide it out, so I turned it around until it was the right way up.
“What are you doing?” Olive asked.
“It’s a long shot,” I said, “but I have my Switch in my pocket.”
“O-kaaay.”
“So, I figured maybe I could control the box with it.” I knew it sounded childish, like a kid believing a toy remote could control the TV, but it was the best I had. It was that or give up and die.
“Go for it,” Olive said.
I switched the Nintendo Switch on, waited several seconds, and then hit the center of the movement control. I waited, holding my breath, for something to happen, terrified that I’d made a mistake, that the dream was only mine when it was working against me, and then suddenly it felt as though I were being sucked away from Olive and into a tube that was barely large enough to fit my head through.
“Olive!” I screamed.
















Chapter 12

When I opened my eyes, I was sitting in front of a long, polished table. The nurse sat opposite me, the grin still fixed in place, only now she wasn’t wearing her nurse’s uniform, she was dressed in a pinstriped business suit, a white frothy shirt beneath the jacket which went right up to her chin. It might not have been the same nurse – I was basing my assumption on the grin which was all I could see when I looked at her face.
To her left was the tall zombie leader. I felt myself shrinking back in my seat when I glanced at him and had to swallow and wait for my breathing to regulate before I could look at him properly. I didn’t care what Olive said – he looked like a zombie to me. His skin was gray and patchy even in this strange light, his eyes rolling around in their sockets, his hair in little grassy tufts around his head and his lips pulled back away from his teeth in a snarl.
I glanced to my left and saw that Olive was seated beside me which made relief swell inside my chest as I realized that it was darker here than it had been when we left the bedroom what felt like days ago. Not so dark I couldn’t see the blood dripping from the corner of the zombie’s mouth, but gloomier than it had been before. It was like someone had thrown a sheet over our heads rather than turned the lights off.
My eyes widened, and Olive gave me a half-smile. She’d noticed it too. I quickly felt inside my hoodie – the Nintendo Switch was still there along with the packet of blood (what was left of it), the tube, and the tweezers.
A throat cleared across the table. I blinked. Someone was sitting to the right of the nurse; someone I hadn’t noticed before. Someone who looked like my dad.
“Dad?” I whispered.
My dad smiled at me and I felt hot tears flooding my eyes. We’d done it. We’d found the box and now my dad had come to wake me up.
I felt a hand in mine and stared down at my lap. I almost jumped when I saw Olive’s dark-skinned hand wrapped around my fingers. She squeezed and I peered up at her. She shook her head. “It’s not your dad,” she said in a low voice.
I glanced at the man sitting opposite her and he was still smiling at me, still my dad. He was even wearing my dad’s favorite sweater, a baggy blue top with a small hole in the sleeve that he refused to allow my mom to sew up because he liked the fact that the sweater was growing slightly imperfect with age.
“Don’t listen to her, son,” said my dad. “I’ve come to take you home.”
Olive’s fingers were insistent around mine. I dragged my eyes away from my father and back to Olive’s large brown eyes which had dulled in this gloomy light. “You want to know what I see?” she said. I couldn’t bring myself to nod, so I blinked instead. “I see my mom.”
I turned back to my dad. He gave a brief shake of his head and a sad smile as though we had to humor Olive because she was delusional.
“Olive,” I began, “your mom isn’t here.” I tried to keep my voice gentle. I would never have come this far without Olive, and I didn’t want her to think that I was going to abandon her now that my dad was here, although that was probably exactly what I was going to do. “It’s my dad. He’s come to take me home.”
“It’s an illusion, Eli,” she said. “It’s what this world wants you to see. It’s what she wants you to see.” She gestured at the nurse whose smile quickly returned the instant I set eyes on her. I wondered if her expression had been different for Olive but instantly dismissed the thought. It no longer mattered.
“No,” I said, “You’re wrong. If that were true, my mom would be sitting in that seat. No offense, Dad.”
“None taken, son,” said my dad.
“Ask him something that only your dad would know,” said Olive. At my hesitation, she added, “Go on.”
I thought about it. I didn’t spend as much time with my dad as I did with my mom. Sometimes at weekends we’d play ball, or watch a movie together, but mostly my dad was interested in football, or other sports, the stuff that Jonah was interested in. I couldn’t think. My brain was frantically trying to think of something that my dad and I had done together, my fingers picking at the pocket of my hoodie.
“What did I get for my last birthday?” I blurted out.
My dad smiled. “The Nintendo Switch that’s in your pocket,” he said.
“What did he say?” asked Olive. She was still staring at me, refusing to meet the three pairs of eyes watching us from the other side of the table.
I shrugged. “The Switch in my pocket,” I said.
“How did he know it’s in your pocket?” she asked.
I glanced down at my hoodie. It would be impossible to tell even from the bulge in the pouch what was inside. Had I pulled it out and then tucked it back in? Had I inadvertently glanced at the pocket when I asked the question? Body language was easy to read if you knew how, but I’d never thought my dad was an expert at that kind of thing.
“Does he speak the same way as your dad?” asked Olive. “I mean, is he calling you Elijah, Eli, or does he have a pet name for you?” I stared at her vacantly. “Think about it, Eli.”
My gaze flickered between Olive and my dad. “He called me son,” I mumbled, knowing even as I said it that my dad had never called me ‘son’ in my life. There was a sinking feeling in my stomach, and I felt like I was going to puke. She had to be wrong. This had to be my dad.
“Don’t listen to her, Elijah” said my dad, using my name at last. “She’s being selfish. She doesn’t want you to come home with me because then she’ll be stuck here alone again. She’s using you to esca—to help her get home. Ask her about her sister.”
“Yes!” said the nurse, clapping her hands. “Ask her about her sister.”
I turned back to Olive. She was still staring at me and her eyes were making me feel uncomfortable like I shouldn’t be looking at the people across the table, like their eyes held some kind of terrible powers which were controlling me.
“What happened to your sister?” I asked. I hoped my voice didn’t sound too harsh – Olive was the only person I’d been able to trust in this bizarre place, and I didn’t want to lose her friendship.
“Don’t, Eli.” She stared at our entwined fingers, tears welling in her eyes.
“Why won’t you tell me?” I asked. “Please, Olive, please tell me where your sister is.”
“Tell him, Olivia,” said the nurse, her voice taking on a hissing quality, like there was a snake wrapped around her neck.
“I …” Olive shook her head and sniffed loudly.
“Where is she, Olive? What happened to her?”
“She’s trapped in the fire.”
Olive’s voice was barely audible above the hissing escaping from the nurse’s mouth and the low rumble of laughter in my dad’s throat. I looked at the scars on her arms. She’d told me she got burnt because she didn’t get out of the apartment in time, but now I realized with a feeling of icy horror, that she got burnt because she was trying to save her sister.
It was my turn to swallow back tears. I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around Olive’s shoulders and waited quietly while she cried. I didn’t say anything. There were no words I could find that would offer her any comfort – this whole thing was awful and no matter what I said, I understood that she would never forgive herself.
When she stopped, I sat back and peered into her pink-rimmed eyes. “We’re in this together,” I said. “Whatever it takes.”
Olive sat back and sniffed loudly. A tiny smile reappeared on her lips as my dad let out a huge roar of laughter and started clapping, the sound echoing around the room which I now realized was as large and as bare as the room at the bottom of the corridor-slide.
“That was a disastrous mistake, son,” he said. “Catastrophic. All you had to do was listen to me and this could have all been over. Done and dusted. And you’d have been on your way home.”
The nurse suddenly leapt from her seat, her right arm lashing out at a right angle to her body, her hand gripping my dad’s throat. His feet left the floor as she lifted him by the neck, his face turning first pink and then flaming red as his eyes bulged from their sockets. He was still laughing at me, his hands still clapping.
“Silence!” yelled the nurse.
He stopped immediately, his body hanging lifeless and limp in her grip. She set him back down in his chair and resumed her own seat directly opposite me. Completely in sync like those underwater dancers you saw at the Olympics, the nurse, my dad, and the zombie, all sat forward, their elbows on the shiny table-surface, and stared at me wide-eyed. They seemed oblivious to Olive’s presence, but she leaned closer to me anyway as if reassuring me that she was still there.
A sheet of paper appeared in front of the nurse with one of those old-fashioned quills that people used to dip in a pot of ink to write with.
“Enough dilly-dallying,” she said in a strange accent that wasn’t there before. “Let’s begin. Elias Stellan Pilz, we hereby order you to give us your left leg, from the mid-thigh down, in payment for your safe return home.”
Olive gasped.
“What? No!” I yelled, my voice shaking. “What the hell? I’m not giving you my left leg. You’ve already taken —”
“No leg.” The nurse didn’t wait for me to finish but drew a straight line through the words ‘left leg’ which had appeared from nowhere on the blank sheet of paper, the line ending with an elaborate flourish at the side of the page. She began again, “Elias Stellan Pilz, we hereby order you to give us the girl Olivia Marie Bello, either in one piece or in installments starting with the limbs and finishing with the head (although this might get a little messy in which case, we will have to add a clause to include a surcharge for the cleaning of said mess), in payment for your safe return home.”
“Oh, my God, are you crazy?” I was on my feet, my hands gripping the edge of the table, my breathing so rapid I was already starting to feel dizzy. The room spun away from me as I felt something push me back into my seat. There was nothing there, but I still felt the imprint across my chest.
“What do you say?” asked the nurse.
“Why would I give you Olive?” I asked. I felt the pressure of Olive’s thigh against mine and I didn’t flinch away from her touch. We were in this together; I’d promised her.
The nurse glanced at the sheet of paper as if searching for the answer to my question. “In payment for your safe return home,” she said.
“No,” I said firmly. “I’m not leaving without Olive.”
The nurse picked up the quill and scrawled a wavy line through the statement about handing over Olive in one piece or in sections – I couldn’t even think about what she’d suggested it was too awful.
“Elias Stellan Pilz,” said the nurse in the same weird accent, “we hereby order you to hand yourself over, in payment for your safe return home. This is our third and final offer.”
My heart was beating so fast it made me cough as it lurched sickeningly inside my chest. “Wh—” I mumbled. “What does that even mean?”
“Eli.” Olive’s voice was firm, insistent. “Look at me.”
I raised my eyes to meet hers. I was trembling all over as if I was in shock, which I guess I was.
“You must be careful what you say,” she said. “They will take everything at face value, okay? Do you understand what I’m saying?” I nodded. “You don’t have to agree to any of these things. She knows that if you complete the tasks, you’ll return home anyway, with or without her terrible demands.”
“What should I do?” I asked.
“I’m waiting!” The nurse’s voice sliced the air, and she tapped the tabletop with her sharp scarlet fingernails.
“You don’t agree to any of their terms,” said Olive. “You strike a bargain.”
“What? How? I don’t have anything to offer them.”
“You have plenty to offer them in the real world,” Olive continued. She was still staring into my eyes, demanding my sole attention, and I wondered if she was scared that I might blurt something out and agree to a payment I couldn’t make. “Think, Eli. Think about your life, your home, your … I don’t know …” – she shrugged – “… your games. Things you’re good at. Things you would never part with at home. You’ve passed one task already. You can’t give up now. Offer them something else as payment. Just because they’ve asked for you to stay, doesn’t mean that’s all they’ll accept.”
“You mean … like … set my own terms?”
“Uh-huh. This is your life, Eli. She can’t control you outside of this world, remember?”
Olive was right again. Now that the initial shock was subsiding, I knew that what Olive was saying made sense. I didn’t have to agree to stay – not that I could get my head around how I could agree to stay and be returned home. Nightmare-worlds weren’t supposed to make sense though. It was our subconscious working out the minor problems of our life in its own incomprehensible way; my mom had this book all about dreams and how psychologists had discovered a way to link certain dreams to certain problems, none of which made sense when I was reading about it. Like, if you dreamed your teeth were falling out or crumbling, it meant that in the real world you were worried about a relationship with someone. Crazy!
I just had to think of something to offer them instead of me.
My mind was blank. Why did it always do this when I needed it to step up? Studying for a quiz I could recite the periodic table without stumbling over a single item, sit me in a room with a blank sheet of paper and an examiner watching the clock and nothing.
“I don’t know what to suggest,” I said.
Olive shrugged. “It’s okay. There’s no timer on it.”
I swear the girl could read my mind.
“What about your favorite teddy?” I glared at her and she rolled her eyes. “Okay, no teddy. I don’t know … do you have a favorite book? Something that means a lot to you. You know, or an autograph.”
My brain jerked back into action. “My Guardians of the Galaxy poster,” I said. “It’s signed by Karen Gillan.”
“Okay,” Olive said like it wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind.
“It means a lot to me.” I turned to face the nurse and said, “In payment for my safe return home, I offer you my autographed Karen Gillan poster.”
“A poster? That's what you offer?” The nurses eyes turned cold and scary, it felt like she was staring into my soul.
I knew there was something else I could offer as well, but I didn't want to, because I didn't want it to be real.
“I'll give you the poster, and you can keep the prosthetic...” I looked to olive after hearing her gasp, she was staring at me like she was trying to speak to me without saying a word.
“I'll give you the poster, and you can keep the prosthetic right leg after I complete all the tasks..”
The smile of the nurse didn’t falter. Her eyes were locked on mine. “You’re sure about that?” she asked. Either side of her, my dad and the zombie started fidgeting, the zombie’s fingers plucking at a scab on his neck.
I nodded.
Within a heartbeat, the words were printed on the sheet of paper and it was in front of me, the quill in my hand. “Sign at the bottom,” the nurse said.
I glanced at Olive. “Should I sign?”
“Yes.” She was staring at the words on the paper making sure there was no small print I guessed.
The quill felt strange in my hand, like something that was alive, but I signed my name at the bottom and that was when I remembered that the poster hadn’t been on my bedroom wall when I escaped the lion.






















Chapter 13

“Olive,” I mumbled.
Olive wasn’t sitting beside me because I was no longer sitting at the table. I was outside. The sky was blue, but the world existed in the slightly darker shade of twilight now that the task to find the control box was complete. I peered around me. I was standing in a garden, a house behind me, and in front of me, paving stones winding around a pond, and flowerbeds, and ending with some tall trees at the back of the garden. I saw a large decorative toadstool with a metal frog sitting on it cross-legged holding an umbrella above its head. I blinked to focus on the frog because it looked like the ornament in our garden at home.
I turned back to the house. I recognized the pots on the kitchen windowsill, the ones my mom was trying to grow chili plants in. The window on the top floor was open, my mom’s curtain flapping outside. It was our house, but not out house.
I stepped closer and saw claw-marks from where the lion had tried to get in. I tried the back door – it was locked. Course it was, I’d locked it to keep the lion out – trust the dream to keep it real when I least needed it.
“Olive?” I called out. Maybe she was inside. Maybe she was inside so that she could let me in. It didn’t occur to me that she might still be in the hospital – we were in this together and I’d not agreed for them to keep her.
There was a movement in the trees at the back of the garden and I squinted into the gloom. “Olive?” I called again. “Is that you?”
No one spoke, but there was another movement in the flowers at the base of the big apple tree. My heart lurched. Olive would’ve spoken, so whoever it was didn’t want to be seen.
I turned back to the house and noticed the paint flaking from the kitchen window frame. My dad needed to get it painted. I pushed the window, knowing it wouldn’t budge. Another sound behind me, and I whirled around. I still couldn’t see anything.
I didn’t hang around. I ran around the side of the house and tried the front door. It was shut. I rang the doorbell, heard the annoying tune sound inside, and waited for footsteps coming towards the door, but nothing happened. I took a step backwards. My bedroom window was open too, and I wondered briefly if my mom had been cleaning and had opened it to air it. I stood there weighing up my options. Last time I was here, the poster wasn’t on the wall, but something was telling me I’d been sent here after I signed the contract because it was here somewhere – I only needed to find it. I still had a sickly nagging feeling in my head that Olive should’ve been here too, but part of me hoped that she was inside the house and I’d find her in my closet, the signed picture in her hand, and a wide grin on her face. “Sorry, you should’ve knocked,” she would say.
That was the part of me I was listening to.
Stepping away from the door, I crunched something underfoot. I bent down to see what it was and picked up a button. It looked familiar. And then I remembered that Olive had ripped some buttons from a skirt and brought them with her when we left the hospital room. She had to be here!
I studied the porch. If I could climb up the corner post and onto the slanted roof, I should be able to shuffle across to my bedroom window. I grabbed the post to the left of the porch and shook it. Wood splintered in my hand. I hadn’t noticed before that the porch was getting old, but now that I was close, I could smell it, the rot. Something wriggled inside the wood and I jumped back. Poking out was the head of the biggest termite I have ever seen. Jeez. My mom must not have told my dad about this.
With the doors locked though, this was the only logical way up, so I took a deep breath, raised my hands as high as I could reach and lifted my legs off the ground. I clung to the post like a monkey on the wrong tree, my knees wrapped around it, and tried to drag my thighs upwards. A splinter tore into my left hand and I cried out, letting go of the post and landing back on the ground having barely left it. The splinter was jutting from my palm, about a third of an inch of wood still under the skin. Gritting my teeth, I yanked it out with my teeth and spat it onto the grass behind me.
Okay. Maybe that wasn’t the best idea. I jumped to see if I could reach the edge of the porch-roof and my fingertips scraped the metal trim. A quick glance around the front yard and there was nothing for me to stand on. I jumped again and almost grabbed hold of the trim. Third time is the charm, I thought to myself. I took a deep breath, crouched low, and sprang upwards, my hands latching onto the edge of the roof. I waited, my feet grazing the ground, to see if it would hold me before I swung my legs sideways and wrapped them around the post.
I realized I hadn’t really thought this through because I had no idea how to haul my body upwards, when I heard a voice from behind me.
“Do you need a hand?”
Twisting my neck in surprise, my arms already aching, I saw a little girl of around seven or eight in the front yard. I hadn’t heard her or seen her coming, but she didn’t look strong enough to help. “I’m fine,” I said.
“I can help,” she said, stepping closer.
It was difficult to see her properly at this angle, and I could feel my fingers slipping, so I mumbled, “Okay, whatever.”
I sensed her movement as I inched my legs further up the post until I was almost horizontal, but rather than pushing me from beneath, she reached up and slapped my face with her hand, leaving it behind as she ran away laughing. I screamed. The bloody hand landed on the ground beneath.
“Don’t look at it,” I said to myself. “Don’t look at it. It isn’t real.”
Inching my legs up the post, I managed to raise my left arm so that my elbow was resting on the porch-roof. I was panting with the effort and with the feel of the girl’s hand on my cheek. This was way more difficult than I thought it was going to be and I wished, for the first time ever, that I was better at gymnastics.
“Sorry about my sister,” came another voice below me. A boy.
I didn’t dare take my eyes off the roof, so I said, “It’s okay.” Keeping my upper weight on my left arm, and using my legs as leverage, I dragged myself upwards so that both arms were on the roof, my legs dangling below me.
“Almost there,” said the boy. I felt his hands on my prosthetic leg. “Would it help if I took this away?”
“What? No! The deal was I get to finish the tasks with it” I lashed out with my foot and felt it connect with his skull. Desperate now, I dragged my hips up and over the lip of the roof as if I were climbing from a swimming pool. My body felt just as heavy, but I wasn’t going to stop now, even if I had just killed a child. Hands gripped my ankle, and I kicked my prosthetic leg backwards, but they weren’t letting go. With a last burst of energy, I dragged my left leg onto the roof. Only my right leg to go, but the boy was hanging from it now. I peered over the side, my breaths rasping in my throat, my muscles on fire, and saw his grin.
“Can I come with you?” he asked. “Please let me come with you?”
“No!” I reached down and tried to loosen his grip around my ankle, but it was like iron. And then I saw the others. They lined the street, hundreds of them, children, adults of all ages, and they were all staring at me. I had no idea how they had all appeared without me noticing, but I wasn’t sticking around to ask them where they’d come from.
Leaning over the side of the roof, I grabbed the boy’s face in my hand and pushed as hard as I could. I heard his teeth gnashing. His head bent backwards, his hands still gripping my ankle, and with a yell that didn’t even sound like me, I gave a violent jerk, snapping his neck in two. His head flapped backwards, but he let go and landed in the front yard.
No one moved. I clambered up the roof, hoisting myself over my windowsill and landed in my room on my back with a thud. I leapt to my feet and slammed the window shut, locking it and slumping to the floor.
I sat there, breathing heavily, my eyes closed. I killed a child. Oh my God, I was a murderer. Tears trickled down my cheeks and I sat there whimpering. I needed to get a grip. It wasn’t real. My dad wasn’t real. The nurse wasn’t real. There was no way on this planet the little boy was real. At least I hoped he wasn't. I hoped he wasn't stuck here like me and Olive. Olive did say others come and go. Could he be a child of magnificent atrocities too? I shook my head to get my bearings again. This was just a dream, it had to be despite what Olive said.
When my tears slowed enough for me to open my eyes, I glanced at the walls, taking stock of the posters. My Desert Danish poster was still there, as was my Dreambender poster. My eyes landed where the Guardian's of the Galaxy poster should’ve been. It wasn’t there. A different picture was in its place, one I’d never seen before, but one I recognized instantly, by the large brown eyes staring down at me.
It was Olive.
I clambered to my feet and went over to the poster on the wall. Olive’s eyes watched me like one of those weird paintings that seem to follow you around the room. She was peering out from behind a window, and she looked scared, like she was in a scary movie where anyone watching would be yelling, “Get out!”
Closer, and I saw the yellow ducks painted on the inside of the window and a number 5. Olive was in the elementary school. I went back to the window, and the front yard was now filled with the people from the street. I could see the kindergarten roof from here behind the houses on the other side of the road and next to the park. But how could I get past the people outside?
I didn’t know why, but I thought about The Walking Dead. Olive kept insisting there were no zombies here, and these people didn’t even look like zombies, but all I could think about was the survivors smothering themselves with zombie blood to disguise their scent. I wished I’d kept the girl’s hand. It was a disgusting thought and it made me laugh nervously despite there was no one in the house to hear me, but I needed to not smell like me.
What about if I smelled like Jonah? It might work, and if it didn’t, maybe I’d end up back in the hospital bed with Olive accusing me of failing the task.
I yanked open my door and covered the hallway between my room and Jonah’s in two strides. His bed was still unmade, boxes of his stuff sitting on top of the mattress. His closet was empty, but there were black trash bags piled up on the floor that looked like they contained clothes. I ripped open the first one and found his Eagles hoodie. I dragged it over my head, keeping the hood up. Then I found a pair of his joggers which I slipped on over my jeans. I didn’t care if I looked ridiculous. I didn’t even care if Jonah would be angry with me – he’d understand when I explained the whole crazy story.
I tiptoed down the stairs and paused at the front door. If it didn’t work, I had no idea what would happen, but I needed to find Olive.
I opened the door and faced the crowd.



















Chapter 14

They were all staring up at the window as if they were waiting for me to reappear and wave at them like royalty. I stepped outside, pulling the door closed softly behind me so as not to attract their attention. No one glanced my way. Another step and I was within arm’s reach of a young woman with sunken eyes and a bandanna wrapped around her head. She didn’t flinch or give any indication that she’d sensed my movement but continued staring up above my head.
Head down, I walked along the front path, avoiding any contact, and keeping my eyes focused on the ground. It worked! I reached the sidewalk without anyone realizing I was there.
I crossed the street heading towards the narrow alleyway between two houses that would take me through to the elementary school and lowered the hood. That was when I sensed movement behind me. They were climbing over the low front wall and racing towards me like ants in a jam jar.
I ran.
It felt like I’d never run so much or so fast in my life and it occurred to me that Mr. Brooks, my Phys ed teacher would have been proud of me. Along the alleyway a second time, I ran into the elementary school playground with the plastic bikes and kitchens and climbing equipment outside, and through the open front door, slamming it closed behind me, pulling the bolt across. I didn’t question why it was open. I leaned against the door listening to the pounding of fists on the other side.
As soon as my breathing slowed a little, I made my way along the darkened corridor towards the playroom where I’d previously seen the window with the painted ducks. I opened the door expecting to see Olive, but there was no one there. Toys were scattered across the floor: plastic fire engines, painting easels, beanbags, cuddly toys, and doll’s houses. And on the far side of the room, plastered against the window, was another picture of Olive.
This time, I knew exactly where she was. Olive was at the Adventure Aquarium, and by the looks of it, she was surrounded by sharks.
I could still hear the fists pounding the front door of the kindergarten. I found the back exit doors easily and this time I didn’t glance behind me as I jogged away from the building and towards the river. It would take me a while to walk there, a while that I didn’t have because despite Olive’s assurances that there was no time limit on this task, I had the feeling sand was trickling through a timer. But I had a plan: I was going to find a car. Driving can't be too difficult right? I know the basics from videogames.
I was parallel with the river before I found a car. The vehicle was unlocked and the key in the ignition, but I didn’t question it. It wasn’t the most bizarre thing that had happened in this world, and I needed to reach Olive before she drowned or was eaten by Jaws. And then, I sill had to find the missing poster.
I turned the key. The engine rumbled into life and I slipped it into drive. I could do this, I needed to do this. I had no confidence in my abilities, but I knew how to make the car move, and I knew where I was going, and right now, that was all I needed.
Pulling away from the sidewalk slowly, I turned the car around and headed towards the river and north to the Aquarium. I’d been driving for a couple of minutes when a tiny spider dropped onto my hand. I shook it off. The car had probably been sitting empty for a while and spiders got everywhere when left to their own devices.
I was on the main route to my destination when I felt something crawling on the back of my neck. I yelped and swiped at it with my left hand. Another spider, this one a little bigger than the first, obviously the Mommy or Daddy. Ugh! A few meters down and I saw movement on my lap from the corner of my eye – more spiders crawling across Jonah’s joggers and even though I was wearing two layers of clothing, I swore I could feel the pitter-patter of their feet on my skin. I had the sense to slam on the brakes before I brushed them off me, but I was shaking now. I had to get to Olive.
My skin was crawling when I started the car moving again; I could feel spiders crawling up my legs and along my arms and in my hair, but I kept my eyes focused on the road and my mouth shut. If I swallowed one, I knew I would have to pull over and be sick and there was no way I’d be getting back into this car after that.
When I reached the parking lot of the Aquarium, I stopped the car in the middle of the lot, leapt out, and ran for the building, screaming and brushing spiders off me as I went. There was probably a trail of black insects behind me, but I didn’t stop, I ran through the entrance to the building, my sneakers skidding across the gleaming polished floor and almost collided with a zombie.
I held my arms out in front of me as if that would stop him from eating me. He looked at me with his vacant eyes, mouth open. He had a large beer-gut, dark pouches beneath his eyes and a bulbous nose, an alcoholic maybe. I didn’t know much about it, but the stained vest and the way he itched himself inapropriatelyl made my flesh crawl even more than it already was.
“Ticket?” he asked.
“What?” I shook my head.
“Ticket?”
“I don’t have a ticket. I need to get to the Shark Experience.” I was already walking away, but he was keeping up with me, walking backwards, even though his feet weren’t moving.
“Can’t let you in without a ticket.”
I didn’t know what had happened to me, but I didn’t argue, or plead, or check my pockets for money to purchase a ticket, I lashed out and punched him in the face. Then I ran towards the far side of the vast polished foyer.
I should’ve known I wouldn’t get far. More zombies were lined up against the back wall, barricading the door I needed to get through. A vertical banner was on my right, promoting a new Turtle Experience that was coming soon – I picked it up, held the top and bottom bars horizontally, like spears, and charged the zombies. The zombies didn’t move. They watched me coming, motionless, and didn’t even flinch when the bars pierced the chest of a middle-aged man in a formal shirt and tie which was already stained with what looked like dried blood on the left-hand side below where his heart should have been.
I didn’t stop. I crashed through the doors and let them swing backwards onto the remaining zombies. Let them follow. I’d take them all out if I had to, but first, Olive.
I had a vague idea where the Shark Experience was, and I ran all the way. When I arrived, I entered a tunnel that was even darker than the world outside, and so silent, I realized how ragged my breathing was, wheezing through my lungs like I was having an asthma attack. The tunnel was lined on both sides and above by reinforced glass, and behind the glass was water. Fish approached the glass to follow my movements. I might’ve been imagining it, but they looked scared. In fact, they looked terrified.
And then I saw Olive.
Not a poster this time – Olive was really here. My heart did a somersault of elation that I’d found her, and then horror that she was underwater, a shark with its nose pressed against her ribs. I saw the rows of sharp teeth. The evil eye staring at me. It hadn’t eaten her yet though, I told myself.
Olive wasn’t wearing a mask or breathing equipment, but her eyes were open, and I could tell that she’d seen me. She moved a hand slowly and pointed to her left.
I kept walking, following her directions, until I reached a door marked PRIVATE. Not anymore, I thought. The other side of the door, there were steps leading upwards. I climbed them, entered through another door, and realized that I was in the area where the workers could enter the water to feed the fish, or to help a sick creature. It was warm in here, like sweltering, so I removed Jonah’s hoodie and joggers and dropped them into a heap on the floor. Opening a hatch, I peered into the water. I could see Olive and the shark still waiting below me by the tunnel.
I’d never seen the movie Jaws, but I kinda knew what happened in it, and I knew that sharks were attracted by the scent of blood. There was still some blood remaining in the IV bag – I just had to hope it was enough to distract the shark so that I could rescue Olive.
I fumbled around inside my hoodie and retrieved the bag of blood. The length of tubing came out with it. I wondered if it would be long enough and wide enough for me to breathe through underwater. Holding it to my lips, I sucked air through the end of the tube – it wasn’t great, but it would have to do. The new me, this other-world me, wasn’t hanging around so I attached the tube to the metal handle on the hatch, bit the loose end between my teeth, and lowered myself into the water.
Despite the heat outside, the water was cold, so cold it took my breath away. Think about the Titanic, I told myself, how those few survivors must’ve felt in that freezing water. This was nothing compared to that.
The shark saw me coming. Its nose turned towards me, razor-sharp teeth appearing in a sinister grin, and began weaving its way towards me. The tube was so narrow that I could already feel my lungs straining to take in enough oxygen, so I had to act fast. I took the bag, unscrewed the tiny cap, and squeezed a few drops of blood out, enough for the shark to get the scent, and then I held it at arm’s length, waited for the shark to follow the blood, before I let it go. The shark lunged for the bag. As it did so, I saw what looked like a rolled poster appear from nowhere and slip straight into the shark’s open mouth.
“No!” I tried to scream, swallowing water. I choked, coughing and spluttering, my eyes clenched tight with the chaos happening in my lungs, and then I felt a hand in mine, and I was being pulled upwards. I stopped fighting. It was enough to keep what little air remained in my lungs from escaping, but I felt Olive place my hands on the edge of the hatch and shove me out of the water before she climbed out after me.
We both lay on the floor, chests heaving. I rolled onto my side and coughed up a puddle of water. When I could breathe again, and open my eyes, I looked at Olive who was motionless on her back, eyes staring at the ceiling.
“Olive?” I asked. She looked like she was dead, her eyes were dull and empty like the zombies.
She turned her head a fraction and gave me a tight-lipped smile. Her eyes were still dull, but I put it down to the lack of light and the stinging in my eyes. “Thanks,” she said.
I shrugged. “We’re in this together, right?” The vision of the poster being swallowed by the shark came flashing back. “I didn’t save the poster though. The shark ate it.”
“I’m not going back in there to get it,” she said.
“Me neither.”
When our legs stopped shaking enough for us to walk, we left the Aquarium. I’d been half expecting to be whisked away from the building and back into the hospital because we’d failed the task and the deal I had made with the nurse, but nothing had happened so far. Outside in the parking lot, the car I’d arrived in had vanished. The wind had picked up though and it tugged at our hair as we stepped outside. Litter was being blown about, cans clattering along the sidewalk, empty packets somersaulting in the air along with dry leaves and old soggy newspapers.
A sheet of paper slapped my face, and I tore it away, stopping dead when I looked at the picture printed on it. It was a movie poster for Guardians of the Galaxy, and in the bottom right corner, it had been signed by Karen Gillan.
“Ha!” I said. “My poster!”
The sky suddenly turned darker, and Olive reached for my hand.
“We did it!” I wanted to jump up and down with excitement, but Olive was staring straight ahead, her eyes narrowed. “What? What is it?”
She raised a finger and pointed across the parking lot to the other side of the road. A man was watching us. I squinted, waiting for my eyes to adjust to this new darkness, and as he came into focus, I realized that it wasn’t a man. It was Jonah.




























Chapter 15

I raised my hand and waved at Jonah.
“It’s my brother,” I said to Olive. I couldn’t keep the excitement from my voice, and I guess I expected Olive to jump and down with joy because, after all, we’d completed the task and found Jonah. What more could I want? But she squinted at him with her new dull eyes and didn’t speak.
“Jonah!” I yelled.
It was dark, like it was when we were on our way home from a late movie, in the fall, when the nights were getting longer, but I knew he recognized me by the way he tilted his head.
“Jonah!” And then to be sure, “It’s me, Eli!”
I started walking towards him, expecting him to come running over, but he glanced left and right, stared right at me again, and then he turned around and he ran.
I stopped. For a moment, I wondered if I’d been wrong, if I’d been so desperate to see him that I’d imagined him there at the other side of the parking lot, like a mirage. Wasn’t that what happened to people in the desert when they were dehydrated? But I watched him run and I knew it was him. I'd seen him run enough with the football during his games. His run was as familiar to me as the way he held a pen in his left hand with his fingers wrapped around it like he was going to punch someone with it.
“Eli,” Olive began.
But I wasn’t listening to her. “Jonah, wait!” I yelled. “Come back. It’s me, Eli!”
I ran after him. My brother had always been faster than me. Whenever we went to the beach, or to the park, he always challenged me to a race, because he was always guaranteed to win, and I was even slower now with my prosthetic leg, but no way was I letting him out of my sight.
I heard Olive’s sneakers slapping the ground behind me, and I kept going. Along the sidewalk, Jonah veered away from the road and cut down by the river, jumping the short flight of stone steps until he was on the towpath below us. He was still running. I could hear his footsteps pounding the path, heading north.
Taking the steps as quickly as I could with my clumsy gait, I chased Jonah along the path. In the distance, I could see the overhead bridges, lined up in a row like a neat Lego village. Jonah kept turning around, glancing over his shoulder, as if he was being followed by someone that he was afraid of, and each time, I raised my hand to reassure him that it was only me. But he didn’t stop.
My heart was thumping inside my rib cage. My breathing was hard and heavy; I could hear my own breaths, but the gap between me and Jonah was increasing steadily.
Under the first bridge, and I didn’t see the group of zombies huddled in the darkened curve of the arch, until I tripped over a bare foot and almost fell headfirst into the river. Hands reached for my ankles. Because I’d been running at speed, I was stumbling, top-heavy, and with the grip on my leg, I crashed forward, bouncing on my hands and knees. I yelped as something gave in my wrist, but it was the skin scraped off my knees through the rips in my jeans that brought tears flooding from my eyes. It felt as though I’d slid along a path made of sandpaper.
Instinctively, I rolled onto my back, dragging my knees up to my chest. But the hand was still around my ankle, and the hand was attached to an old woman whose bare foot I must have stumbled over. Without thinking, I lashed out with both feet and sent her flying backwards into the river.
Panting, hugging my bloody knees, I watched her arms flailing as she flew out of control and landed in the water with a huge splash. I waited for her to start crying for help. I waited. I couldn’t even see her hands reaching for the surface. There wasn’t a bubble where she’d gone down. Nothing.
Olive caught up with me and helped me to my feet. “We should go,” she said.
“But … what about that woman?”
Olive gestured behind us to the other zombies who were muttering to themselves, unfazed by what had happened to the old woman. “There’s nothing you can do for her,” she said. At my blank gaze, she added, “Your brother?”
I turned in the direction Jonah had been running. If he’d heard me fall, he hadn’t stopped to check I was okay – he was far away from us now. Moving out from under the bridge, my knees stinging like they were on fire, I saw in the distance, where Jonah was headed. There was a white painted rowboat on the water, and he seemed to be slowing down as he approached it.
“No!” I cried.
I ran again, trying – and failing – to ignore my burning knees, Olive keeping up with me.
“Jonah, stop!” I shrieked. “Wait for me!”
Again, he glanced around as if he were being pursued by a man-eating monster rather than his kid brother. He had reached the boat now. On his hands and knees, he was untying the rope attaching it to one of the low poles set intermittently along the towpath, then the rope was tossed into the boat, and Jonah was climbing in.
Fresh tears of frustration streaked my cheeks. “Nooo!” I yelled.
He didn’t even glance up but keeping his eyes straight ahead, he settled himself on the wooden seat in the center of the boat and began rowing away from us and out towards the middle of the river.
“Jonah!” I was sobbing now. I couldn’t let him get away, not now, not when he was so close. Olive called out my name, but I barely even registered the sound of her voice. Jonah was making slow progress and I was gaining on him. I pushed myself even harder, ignoring my racing heart and the thumping in my skull of my feet pounding the path. Come on, I kept telling myself. Almost there.
Jonah had only moved a couple of feet away from the riverbank. I willed him to stay there, to look up and realize that it was me, to raise a hand and call, “Hey, Eli!”
Closer, and I saw him finally get to grips with the oars and start making progress, the boat gliding silently away from the path. I didn’t miss a beat. I veered off the path, running along the grassy bank, and when I was almost there, I lunged for the boat, arms outstretched like I was a professional diver.
I must have either seriously misjudged the distance between me and the boat, or Jonah suddenly found some magic rowing rhythm, because I landed horizontally in the river, missing the front of the boat by a whole body-length.
Icy water engulfed me instantly. I’d no idea the river could be so cold, but it wasn’t the temperature that scared me. It was the way it swallowed me whole, dragging me down as though I were weightless, with fish, creatures, I didn’t know what, nipping me all over. I tried to fight them off, rubbing my arms and legs and feeling nothing but sharp teeth tearing at my skin even through my sodden jeans and hoodie. I needed to get to the surface. Kicking with my legs, I clawed at the water above my head seeing nothing but a solid wall of darkness. I couldn’t hold my breath much longer. A low moan built up inside my chest as I kicked and flailed, and used up what little oxygen remained in my lungs, desperate for Jonah to dive in and rescue me. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I couldn’t breathe. My eyes were blurry with tears and river water.
And then warm hands grabbed mine.
I was being dragged from the river, my already ruined knees scraping against the riverbank, as I was hauled out of the water and onto the grass. Olive rolled me over, kneeling beside me. “Eli,” she said. “Eli, can you hear me?”
She turned my head towards her, and I felt her fingers in my mouth, moving my tongue so that I wouldn’t choke, as hot liquid came gushing out of my mouth, my nose, my ears. My shoulders heaved and jerked as I vomited over the grass, my throat burning. When I was done, I lay back on the grass and screamed when I saw a zombie peering down at me.
Scrambling backwards towards the towpath, I said, “Olive, we need to get away.”
“It’s okay,” said Olive. “She helped me save you.”
I looked at the woman now. She was dark-skinned like Olive, although her hair was a halo of graying frizz. She looked like the other zombies, but she was standing there watching me. She wasn’t trying to attack us. I didn’t know why she helped Olive, but my brain was numb from the cold and the shock of finding Jonah and losing him again, and I couldn’t process any thoughts. Even so, I wasn’t going anywhere near her.
I felt something crawl across the back of my hand and I jumped, but when I shook my hand there was nothing there. “Something in the water,” I mumbled. I hadn’t seen anything, but I’d felt the bites and as I stared at my hand, red dots appeared on the skin like a heat rash.
Olive and the zombie woman glanced at each other. “How do you feel?” Olive asked.
“Cold.” I shivered as if proving the point.
“You shouldn’t have jumped in,” she said.
“I didn’t.” I swallowed as bile rose in my throat. “I was trying to get in the boat.” I glanced at the rowboat in the middle of the river now. Jonah was still rowing, but he didn’t appear to be going anywhere – the only thing I did know was that he wasn’t coming closer to the bank.
“No one comes back from the river.”






















Chapter 16

I watched Olive and it took me several moments to work out that she hadn’t spoken. It was the old zombie woman.
“Wh—what did she say?” I asked. I was buying time; I’d heard her alright.
Olive chewed her bottom lip. “You shouldn’t have jumped in.”
“I didn’t!” My gaze flickered between the two of them. My body was warming up despite my saturated clothes, and my skin felt prickly all over. “Why did she say no one comes back from the river?”
“Because …” Olive began. “There are things in the river.”
“Things?”
“People. Souls. I don’t know what you would call them.”
“What I would call them?” I was confused. I ignored Olive’s raised eyebrows.
“Look, Eli.” Olive sat down on the grass beside me. The woman didn’t move. “All these people you see along here …” – she gestured to the zombies gathered beneath the bridges – “… they’re biding their time.”
“For what?” I asked. I still had Jonah in my sight. He was motionless now, the oars resting loosely either side of the rowboat.
“Until it’s their turn.”
“Their turn for what? Tell me, Olive!”
“To go into the river. It's how they pass on. Think of the river as the veil Sirius fell through in Harry Potter.”
I peered at the water which looked black now like spilled ink and I thought about how the color of the ocean, and lakes, and rivers, was a reflection of the sky. I gazed up at the sky which was like a ceiling painted black with fluorescent stars stuck to it, as if we were inside a planetarium and waiting for a narrator to begin telling us a story about the universe.
I dragged my eyes back to the water and gasped, my breath catching in my throat. Someone was in there. “Olive,” my voice was barely more than a whisper. “Someone’s drowning.”
I crawled back to the water’s edge, groaning as I scraped my already sore knees across the grass. Leaning over the riverbank, I searched frantically for the face I was certain I’d seen moments earlier, praying that whoever it was, hadn’t drowned. I reached down to feel beneath the water’s surface, but before my fingers made contact, the zombie woman slapped my hand away.
“Ow!” I yelped, staring at her. “What did you do that for?”
“No one comes back from the river,” she said.
“Someone’s in the water. We should help them.”
“No one comes back from the river,” she repeated.
“Why won’t you help me?” My voice was shrill now. I turned to Olive who was still where I’d left her. “Help me. We need to save them.”
Olive watched me but she didn’t move. “I can’t,” she said eventually.
“Someone’s drowning. I can’t believe you won’t help me.” I leaned over the water again, blinking, focusing on what was under the surface, leaning out, stretching my neck, staring. It was so dark, so still, but I could hear faint sounds, like someone calling for help. My face was moving closer, closer. Then a pale face bobbed to the surface, vacant eyes accusing me.
The zombie woman pushed me backwards, my skull bouncing off the grassy bank.
I screamed.
Olive was beside me, trying to peer into the water from a safe distance. “You didn’t touch it, did you?” she asked.
“What? No. There’s a body … in the water … I think someone drowned.”
“Eli.” She took a deep breath. “They were already dead. They already passed.”
I shook my head vigorously, feeling water sloshing about in my ears making Olive’s voice sound hollow. “He … it … was staring at me.”
She hesitated before answering. “They see everything still, which was why they wanted your help, but they feel nothing. They feed on the living.”
“They?” I thought about it. “Are they zombies?”
This time, Olive shook her head. “Not really.”
“Not really? What do you mean?” I didn’t understand why she wasn’t giving me a straight answer. She obviously knew more than she wanted to tell me, and anger was consuming me again because we were supposed to be in this together.
“They’re just bodies.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “How did they get there? How did they die? How do you know they’re just bodies?”
“I’ve been here longer than you, Eli,” she said.
“How long?”
She didn’t answer.
“How long have you been here, Olive?” I persisted. I wanted answers. I wanted to know why Jonah was sitting in a boat in the middle of the river and pretending to ignore me.
She shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. Months maybe. Maybe longer.”
My anger subsided, flooding out of me the way the river had emptied from my lungs. “I came back from the river,” I said.
She glanced at the old woman. “I made her help me.”
“Why?”
“I couldn’t leave you in there,” Olive said.
“No, I mean why did you have to make her help?”
Olive didn’t say anything. She stared at me with her dull eyes, but I knew exactly what she was thinking.
I turned back to look at Jonah. He was standing in the boat now, facing away from us as though he were staring into the distance, following the river with his eyes. The river was flat, and he was steady on his feet, but as I watched, he batted something away from his face like a fly was buzzing around him. He kept doing it. He’d be still for a few moments and then he’d jerk and wave a hand near his face.
“Jonah!” I called.
He didn’t even register that he’d heard me.
“I need to get him back,” I said. Standing, I realized how uncomfortable I was in my wet clothes, my ripped jeans clinging to my stinging legs, my hoodie dragging me down.
“You won’t get him back,” said Olive.
“No one comes back from the river.”
I’d forgotten the old woman was still there and now, hearing her repeat the words again, I marched across the grass and went to push her backwards. I wasn’t thinking. She would’ve fallen straight into the river had I made contact, but she didn’t, because her hand clamped around my wrist, and she pulled me close so that our noses were almost touching. I could smell her. It wasn’t a bad breath smell, but more like rotten vegetables, like how a potato smells when it hides in the bottom of the vegetable rack until it goes moldy.
“We should have left you in there,” she said, her voice little more than a growl. Then she shoved me away.
“Come on,” said Olive.
“Where are we going?” I asked, following her anyway, but listening out for the old woman.
“We’ll keep walking so that we can follow your brother.”
Olive was right. We walked along the foot path, heading in the opposite direction to where we came from, and although Jonah was still standing in the boat, he was moving at the same pace as we were. We didn’t speak. I walked closer to the river so that I could keep my eyes on Jonah. Part of me was still hoping that he would notice us and bring the boat back to the bank, tell me didn’t realize it was me, that I should’ve yelled at him to stop. We would both laugh, I thought. “See,” I would say to Olive, “people do come back.”
Occasionally something caught my eye in the water, usually something bone-white, dipping just under the surface, but each time I faltered and moved closer to the edge, Olive snapped. “Eli!” and I jolted back to the path.
It was so quiet. Groups of zombies were huddled under each bridge we came to, but we might as well have been invisible for the attention they paid us. Everything sounded muffled and I wondered if I couldn’t hear anything because of the water in my ears, but I heard Olive okay when she said my name. It felt as though someone had wrapped a blanket around the city.
As we stepjjped out from beneath yet another bridge, I understood why.
We’d stepped out of the shelter and straight into a thick, gray, swirling mist, that blocked everything from view. The river. Jonah. The zombies huddled up like frightened rabbits behind us. I couldn’t even see Olive and she was standing right beside me.
“Olive,” I mumbled, my voice hitting the mist and bouncing straight back at me. “Olive!”


















Chapter 17

My art teacher showed us a video clip once about pea soup fog in London in the last century. They were caused by pollution and soot from the factories, and there was this one fog referred to as the “Great Killer Fog” that killed thousands of people, not only because they couldn’t breathe, but because no one could see where they were going. She wanted us to recreate that eerie sense of not knowing was lurking behind the fog in our art projects that semester.
I wished she could’ve seen this.
It came down so thick and so heavy, I felt it pressing down on me, trying to push me to my knees and I didn’t think it would stop there; it would keep pressing me through the ground and down to the melting-hot center of the planet.
I felt Olive’s fingers reaching for mine although I couldn’t see her; I couldn’t see my own hand. “Olive?” I mumbled.
“I’m here.” It didn’t sound like she was there. It sounded like she was a mile away, a hundred miles away, her voice battling through the gray mist. “Hold on. Don’t let go.”
I wasn’t about to let go. I didn't think anything could make me let go.
But then Jonah’s face appeared from the solid gray, his eyes boring into mine. “Help me, Eli,” he said before he vanished.
“Jonah?”
With my free hand, I was feeling about for my brother, he must be here somewhere. I took a tentative step forward expecting to collide with him, but felt nothing but the sense of being lost, the way a toddler must feel if they run off from their mom and realize too late that they’re out of sight. It was like playing hide-and-seek, blindfolded.
“Jonah!” I yelled, and my voice was swallowed by the thick soupy fog.
Another step, and I felt Olive’s hand tugging mine. “Eli! Stop. It’s too dangerous.”
“Help!”
I heard it again, and this time I knew Jonah was in serious trouble. “Jonah, where are you?” I had to find him. My free hand was still wading through the thick air swirling around us, and still finding nothing.
A glimpse of a pale face flashed to my left and I jerked in that direction, but it was already gone.
“I’m hurt, Eli,” Jonah said. “Help meeeee …” his voice drifted away.
“Jonah, stay where you are. I’m coming!” I waved my hand frantically like I was trying to stay afloat. I felt Olive’s fingers slipping through my other hand, but I didn’t give it a thought because I had to help my brother. “Jonah! Take my hand.”
I waited. I prayed that he would find my hand. I prayed so hard, my eyes closed because I couldn’t see anything anyway, that I believed I could will him to come to me, but nothing happened. I was sobbing now. I was so close to him that I should’ve been able to reach out and touch him, to smell the expensive cologne that Mom got him for his birthday, to see him roll his eyes and tell me to stop being a baby. But I couldn’t do any of these things.
I opened my eyes and started stumbling blindly along what I thought was the footpath beneath my feet. I couldn’t be certain – I couldn’t even hear my own footsteps. I’d lost Olive. I’d lost Jonah. I’d never felt so alone in my entire life and I was even starting to realize that I’d been safer in the hospital bed with the nurse feeding me fish-milk.
My foot bashed into something solid, and I crashed forward, hands outstretched to take my fall, landing on my wrist which was probably already broken from my previous fall. I rolled over, cradling my hand against my chest, and crying ugly snotty tears.
Warm arms wrapped around my shoulders and I felt my head crushed against someone’s chest. When I opened my eyes, I was in Olive’s arms and the fog had cleared as quickly as it had descended. I could see my bloody knee through the holes in my jeans. I could see my tears dripping onto Olive’s arms. I could see my hand bent at an awkward angle.
Glancing around for Jonah, my tears were stifled by what I saw.
I must have been hallucinating when I saw Jonah’s face appear through the mist, because he was still on the rowboat which was still in the middle of the river. He was still standing, facing forward, only he was no longer flapping at whatever insects had been buzzing around his head. He wasn’t moving. His eyes were transfixed on the direction in which he was traveling, towards the city, which was on fire.
There were more boats on the water now – Jonah was surrounded. I wanted to be grateful that he wasn’t alone out there, but the icy feeling inside me coupled with the prickling of my skin, was increased by the fact that every person in every boat was standing upright and staring into the flames slowly engulfing the city. Their faces remained dull, vacant. They were just standing there.
As I watched, I realized that the boats were moving. Slowly, but they were moving towards the fire and as I dragged my eyes away, I saw that the flames were also moving towards the boats. Towards us.
“Jonah!” I was on my feet and running towards the riverbank before Olive could stop me. “Jonah!” I waved my hands above my head to grab his attention, but he didn’t even glance my way. No one did. “Over here!” I yelled.
Olive ran to my side.
I glanced at her. She was staring at the people drifting along the river, but I couldn’t fathom her expression. I wasn’t even sure if she’d noticed the fire.
“Where did they all come from?” I asked.
She shrugged. “They were drawn to the river, I guess.”
That made no sense – they still had to come from somewhere. Why hadn’t we seen them before the fog? And then a thought slipped into my brain and made me want to vomit.
“Olive,” I whispered, “is Jonah a zombie?”
She swallowed. Eyes on the boats, she said, “They’re not zombies.”
“Okay, whatever they are, is my brother one of them?”
She looked at me then, her eyes like dark shadows in the gloom, and said, “We’re all one of them, Eli.”
A sound escaped from my throat that was somewhere between a sob and a groan. I stepped away from her, away from her dull lifeless eyes as though I’d just noticed them for the first time. I wasn’t a zombie. Olive couldn’t be a zombie, she was in hospital with me, she knew how to pass the tasks and get out of here. I glanced down at myself, at my tattered jeans, my bloody knees and the mangled prosthetic leg hidden by denim, at my twisted wrist, the livid pink spots on the back of my hands. I was a mess. I’d been chased by a lion, survived a tsunami, fought a spider-snake, and climbed up the side of a house, I had to be alive.
“Olive,” I said, my thoughts jumbled and clambering over each other, “if we don’t pass the tasks, do we … do we come here to die?”
She didn’t answer. I could see that she wanted to by the way her mouth opened and closed, the words forming and dying before they escaped.
“What’s the next task, Olive?” I asked. My voice had become empty, lifeless, and I wished I had a mirror so that I could see if my eyes were as dark and flat as Olive’s, but another part of me knew that if they were, I might just give up right now and hurl myself into the river, and not even fight to survive.
Before Olive could speak, there was a sound like an explosion in the distance. We both turned our eyes to the flaming buildings, in time to watch an office tower block crumble internally, a cloud of dirty gray smoke mushrooming into the sky where the top of the building was, moments earlier.
“What should we do?” I asked above the crashing and crackling. “Should we help?” I had no idea what one boy and one girl could do to help in this situation, but all I could think was that there might be people trapped in these buildings.
Olive stared at the flames and the smoke and the building dropping to the ground like a giant sinking to his knees. “I …” she began. She shook her head.
I reached for her hand and, even in the gloomy darkness, I saw the scars on her arms, and it hit me that she must be terrified of the flames because she’d experienced them first-hand. “It’s okay,” I said gently. “We won’t go anywhere near the fire, but we need to keep moving. I need to save Jonah.”
She nodded and allowed me to lead her along the footpath.
Keeping one eye on Jonah, and one eye on the fire in the distance, we walked. Slowly, but we kept moving. The boat people didn’t move, they didn’t lose their balance, they didn’t even wobble, it was as though they had turned to stone, and I wondered why they didn’t take their chances and jump into the river to swim to the bank. What was holding them there? Was it an unseen force, invisible ropes, had they been brainwashed?
As weary as I felt, I hadn’t completely given up on saving my brother, and my thoughts turned to creating a distraction, to draw their attention away from the mesmerizing flames, and in our direction.
“Olive,” I said, “I need your help.”
She stopped dead and stared at me. “What?”
I saw the fear in her open-mouthed expression, if not in her eyes. “They’re in a trance,” I said, because I was running with the idea now. “If we distract them, I think we can stop them.”
She twisted her mouth to one side then as if she didn’t know how to deliver the bad news that I was deluded, then she glanced at Jonah and back at me, and said, “What are you thinking?”
The subconscious is a funny thing. Olive’s comment that we were all zombies had obviously strolled around inside my brain trying to find a niche somewhere to settle and fester, and now that it had, survival instinct had kicked in along with every zombie movie and Walking Dead episode I’d ever watched and had formulated a plan without me even realizing.
“We’re going to get me a boat, and we’re going to do it as loudly as possible.”








Chapter 18

“I can’t do that,” Olive said when I told her my plan.
“I’ve already been in the river once and you saved me.”
I didn’t tell her that my skin felt as though it were on fire, as though tiny blisters were popping all over my body and that on the inside I was turning to ice. I didn’t say this because I needed her on board with the plan – I knew there wouldn’t be a second opportunity to rescue Jonah if this one failed.
We were going to start an argument. The plan was that Olive would try to push me into the river to meet my zombie-destiny – she wasn’t happy about this, but I promised I would try not to fall in – and I was going to fight back, loudly, that I wasn’t ready to go. I was hoping that two things would happen: firstly, the boat people would hear the commotion and be distracted, and secondly, that a boat might appear to carry me to Jonah. This was a dream after all, they do say you can control your dreams, and stranger things had already happened.
This was my plan and yet I wasn’t prepared when Olive turned to me and blinked slowly. A shiver ran through me like I’d stepped outside in the dead of winter in Alaska without a jacket. We’d barely covered the whole plan when she shoved me backwards and I stumbled, my arms flailing wildly trying to stop me from landing on my backside.
“Hey,” I yelled. “What are you doing?”
I expected her to yell back, add to the commotion, but instead she marched at me, reached down, and grabbed my hoodie under my chin, twisting the material in her fist. I didn’t have a chance to react. She was pushing me backwards with such force that I barely found my footing, words forming on my tongue and sticking there, like I was choking. The grass was slippery. It was dark and her face was even darker, her mouth set into a thin line.
“Olive!” I managed eventually. “Stop!” I realized I had to get into the plan the way Olive had before we reached the river. “Let me go!”
But she didn’t flinch. She didn’t yell back at me. Her expression didn’t even flicker, she kept on walking, the front of my hoodie bundled up in her fist, her knuckles pressing into my collarbone.
A quick glance behind Olive and a few zombies had left their hiding place under the bridge and were gathered on the towpath watching us. I didn’t need to glance behind me to know that we were close to the river. At the same time, it hit me that Olive wasn’t going to stop. I didn’t know what had happened, but she’d changed. This wasn’t part of the plan.
“Olive,” I tried. “We’re just pretending, right?”
She didn’t speak. I tried digging my heels into the soft springy grass, but she had picked up too much momentum and all that happened was that my feet jerked and almost tripped us both up.
“Stop!” I yelled now. “Don’t throw me in the river.” I screamed at her, “Stop! Somebody help me!”
The zombies hadn’t moved and were fading into the shadows. We must be almost there. I was breathing fast, my heart racing, my eyes locked with Olive’s; all I could do was hope that she would stop when we got to the water.
But she didn’t.
One second, I was stumbling backwards, and the next, she shoved my chest so violently I thought I heard a rib crack. Then I was hurtling away from the riverbank.
“Olive!” I screamed, realizing too late that I should have held my breath. But the splash didn’t happen. Instead, I landed in the bottom of a wooden boat which lurched away from the bank with the force of my landing.
This time I did hear a crack though. Without skipping a beat, I crawled onto my knees, fumbling around in the bottom for the damage. My fingertips found water. Only a trickle, but as I probed further, I found a large thick splinter jutting upright, a gap between it and the next strip of wood.
“It’s leaking,” I said, more to myself than to Olive. I glanced at her on the verge, staring at me as if she couldn’t believe I was in a boat. “Olive! There’s a hole. It’s going to sink.”
She shook her head. “Eli, what are you doing?”
“You pushed me in!” I was yelling again. I didn’t have a Plan B, and my knees were already drenched with the water seeping through the fractured hull.
“I … I pushed you in?” She was standing there, her fingers picking at her jeans like they were sticky.
“Olive, you need to get me out.” There wasn’t time to fill her in on her peculiar behavior.
“Use the oars, Eli.”
She was walking now, and I realized that she was keeping pace with me because the boat was moving. I was drifting towards the fire.
I grabbed the ends of the oars where they poked through metal rings attached either side of the boat and tried to glide them through the water. It was harder than it looked. The boat began to spin until I was facing the opposite direction to which I was traveling. I made the mistake of glancing up and saw what looked like hundreds of boats all following me along the river.
I’d only ever been in a rowboat once before with my when I was little, and I’d paid more attention to the geese watching us from the island in the center of the lake than to my dad’s rowing expertise. But it made sense that if I moved one oar, I could propel the boat around in a circle. My grip slipping off the oar every couple of seconds, I managed to spin around so that I could see Olive again, the boat horizontal across the river.
“Use both oars,” said Olive, waving me towards her.
I tried leaning backwards so that my head was almost touching the bench behind me, and pulled as hard as I could, but the boat kept turning until I was facing the same direction as the others, then it began drifting again. Frantic now, my breath loud in my ears, I pulled the oars until I found a circular motion that seemed to work, but the boat wasn’t turning. It wasn’t going backwards. It was drifting along on an invisible current.
“Eli, what are you doing?” Olive shouted.
I glanced at her. “The oars don’t work.” I wanted to cry. I wasn’t supposed to be in a boat. I wasn’t supposed to like all the others.
I peered through the gloom at the people standing in the other boats and located Jonah about five or six boats ahead of me, in the middle of the river. I didn’t hesitate. If I couldn’t make it back to Olive on the riverbank, then I would reach Jonah. I didn’t know how long I had until this boat sunk, and the old woman zombie had given me the fear that I wouldn’t make it out of the river a second time. If I could get to Jonah, I could climb into his boat and save both of us.
“Where are you going?” It was Olive. “Eli!”
Gritting my teeth, I heaved the oars with all my weight behind them. The boat lurched forward a little then continued to drift as it had before. I tried again. Another lurch and I realized that I was heading towards the other boats that were gliding along centrally in the river, but I was no closer to Jonah. I was sweating with the effort of rowing, yet it felt like I was shivering inside, in my veins.
I glanced at Olive. She was keeping pace with me, and she was being followed by the zombies that had been disturbed by my screams. If I’d thought about it, I mean thought about it properly, I might’ve wondered why the other zombies weren’t in boats, but I guessed I already knew the answer.
As the water rose to the tops of my sneakers, I sat there with the oars still in my hands and weighed up my options. I could jump out and try to swim to Jonah’s boat, but I already knew that even if I made it to him, I wouldn’t be able to make his boat go anywhere it didn’t want to go. I could try swimming back to Olive. I thought about how cold the water had been when I fell in before, so dense and cloying that I’d barely struggled back to the surface. I looked at Olive – I must’ve been four or five meters away from the bank. Or I could stay put and hope that it didn’t sink before I made it to wherever this boat was taking me.
I then heard a crash in the distance, and everything changed.












Chapter 19

Another building had gone up in flames, but instead of crumbling from the bottom up, collapsing like a stack of apples in the grocery store, the top of this building had toppled forward causing a mini explosion on the ground. Sparks flew in all directions from the explosion, causing the fire to spread like a Catherine wheel firework.
I expected to feel the heat on my face – the boats were moving closer and closer to the fire, which was taking hold of the city, but I felt nothing. No warmth lighting up my face, no breeze, no chill from the night air although I had no idea what time of day it was.
I looked at Olive and she was staring at the burning building, her hands covering her mouth as if stifling a scream. I didn’t know whether she sensed me staring at her, but she lowered her hands and turned to face me, and I was reminded of one Halloween when I was maybe five or six. My mom had bought me a vampire costume and taken me trick-or-treating. We stopped at this one house in our neighborhood and the door was opened by someone dressed as Wednesday Addams from The Addams Family. My mom told me to say, “Trick-or-treat,” which I did, and she complimented the girl on her costume. The girl didn’t speak. She didn’t offer a treat. She simply stared at us until I started fidgeting and reached for my mom’s hand, then as I started to realize that I wasn’t going to get any candy, she opened her mouth and let out a high-pitched scream which made me cover my ears, while her family, hiding in the hallway behind her, burst into raucous laughter.
I was so scared, it was a few years before my mom could persuade me to go out on Halloween again.
I felt the same way now looking at Olive with her mouth open wide and I wished my mom were here to take me home. She raised an arm and pointed towards the flaming building. Because I couldn’t feel the heat from where I was sitting, and maybe because my lower half was wet sitting in the rising water, it was a while before I realized what Olive wanted me to see. The fire was steadily creeping towards us, and the boats leading this group were about level with the fire on the opposite bank to Olive, but now I noticed that as the first boat drifted into the reflection of the flames on the water’s surface, it glowed red for an instant, the passenger raising his hands to the sky, and then disintegrated. Vanished. Boat and passenger gone.
I looked at Olive and she was shaking her head.
If I reached the fire, I’d be gone too.
This is the thing with dreams – the fear is real. The danger sends your heart rate through the roof and makes you believe that you’re potentially going to die. And right then, I didn’t want to die.
I stood, the boat rocking from side to side and making me wobble, and I yelled and screamed at Jonah until my throat was burning. He didn’t even glance back around at me.
I was still closer to the riverbank than any of the other boats, but it was only a matter of time before I was riding along with them on the invisible current. I needed to get back to Olive. I sat back down and paddled like crazy with the left oar to turn the boat around, but it stayed right on course. In desperation, and anger, I slid the oar out of the metal ring and tossed it into the water, where it sank without so much as causing a ripple.
Olive had run down to the water’s edge now and was glancing back and forth along the river. I stood there watching her. A heavy weight was pressing down on me again the way it had when I was in the water, and my shoulders sagged. I was out of energy. I was out of ideas. Why hadn’t Olive stopped me when I suggested she pretend to push me in? Feeling drained, the twisted thought penetrated my mind that this had been Olive’s plan all along, that maybe she’d struck a deal with the nurse to get rid of me in return for her own safe return home.
I slumped back down into the water at the bottom of the boat, images of Olive’s dull eyes, and the way she pushed me down to the river flooding my brain. She hadn’t argued. Maybe they’d conspired against me somehow to slip the stupid plan into my head.
Sniveling, my eyes stinging and my face snotty, I looked back at Olive across the water. She’d removed her sweater and jeans and was tying them together, the hem of one leg knotted to the cuff of one arm. She was yelling at the zombies who started making their way slowly down to join her at the water’s edge. One by one, I watched as they removed their dingy clothes and Olive knotted them to her own until she had a long haphazard length of clothes all linked together with bulging knots, but still resembling a rope.
I stood back up too fast and held my arms out like an airplane until the boat stopped rocking. I didn’t take my eyes off them.
With the zombies helping, Olive stretched out the rope so that she could gauge how long it was and then she gathered it up in her arms like a lasso looped around her arm. She saw that I was watching and nodded. “Get ready, Eli!” She swung the end of the rope and tossed it into the water as far as she could throw it. It landed in the inky river a meter away from me and was swallowed up.
Dragging the rope back, Olive coiled the rope a second time and tossed it back in my direction. This time, sodden, it only covered about half the distance before sinking beneath the surface.
A crackle from the buildings on the other side made me jump, and I glanced back as another boat vanished into the reflection of the flames, tiny crimson sparks bouncing above the surface, the only reminder that it was ever there.
I turned back to Olive, panic constricting my chest. “Use the other end!” I yelled. And then it occurred to me that the rope was made of lightweight cloth, it was never going to travel this far because it needed to be weighted. “Olive, find something heavy!”
“What?” I heard the confusion in her voice.
“You need to weigh it down!”
She must have understood because she was on her hands and knees scrabbling around for a heavy rock or something. Eventually, she stood, and I saw her slide something into one end of the rope and secure it with another tight knot, tugging on it to make sure it wouldn’t come undone and kill me with a flying bit of stone.
Standing as close as she could to the edge, Olive threw the rope again, a zombie holding onto the other end. I hoped he wouldn’t be dragged in with it as he looked little more than a skeleton.
I watched as the rope shimmied through the air towards me, my hands outstretched to catch it, my heart practically stopping, and then it arced into the water still about an arm’s length away. “Try again!” I shouted.
Three times, Olive threw the rope and each time it landed further and further away from me. She was getting tired and frustrated, I could tell. Or maybe I was drifting further away. I peered at the boats ahead of me as another one vanished in the fiery reflection.
Olive saw it too. Her head dropped as the saturated rope hung limply in her arms. It was useless. She’d tried, and it hadn’t worked, and now I was on a collision course with a glimmering image of a flaming building and a few tiny sparks.
There was only one thing left for me to do. Swim.
I knew I wouldn’t make it back to Olive but what was the worst that could happen? This was my dream, I’d wake up back in the hospital bed, the nurse would come in and reattach me to the drip, and we’d start the tasks over again by trying to find the light switch in the basement.
I stared down at the black water and braced myself for the icy sting and the nipping underwater creatures. I thought of the pale face bobbing beneath the surface and swallowed as bile rose in my throat. I couldn’t think about it. The water was up to my ankles now, and the boat sitting lower on the river, so one way or another, I was going in.
I put one foot on the side of the boat.
“No!” Olive yelled. “Eli, don’t!”
I looked at her and shrugged, and then jumped in before I could talk myself out of it.
The water felt even colder than before. I felt it dragging me down the instant my head was fully immersed, but instinct kicked in and I lashed out with my feet, paddling towards the surface with my hands. I opened my eyes. That was a mistake because a face appeared in front of me, and my instant reaction was to open my mouth and scream. Water filled my mouth and my lungs, and I wondered if this was how it felt to drown, this feeling of being a bottle filled right to the very top.
And then everything went black.











Chapter 20

There was no transition period between water and oxygen. Drowning and breathing. Death and life. One moment I was underwater, a dead face killing me with its vacant fish eyes, and the next I was peering at Olive.
“What happened?” Hot vile water spilled from my mouth as I spoke, sounding like a gurgling drain.
“You jumped in.” She was sitting back on her heels, not touching me. “Why did you jump in?”
I sat up, my head spinning. “What else was I supposed to do?” I didn’t have the energy to argue with her. Part of me wished I’d woken up in the hospital bed instead of here, with the fire still raging and the boats still drifting. Here, I still had the problem of rescuing my brother and I didn’t think my brain could cope with that while it was waterlogged.
“I’d have saved you somehow,” she said.
“It was useless,” I said. “It wasn’t working.” I peered around me in the gloom. “How did I get out?”
“They saved you.”
“They? Who are they?”
“The …” she hesitated, “… the others. They just jumped in and dragged you out.”
I couldn’t see anyone. I swiveled around to look behind me, but they’d gone. And then it dawned on me – they hadn’t gone. They hadn’t made it out of the river.
“I …” I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry.”
Olive shrugged. She had no fight left in her either.
As we sat there, tired and beaten, flames crackled on the other side of the river, rising into the sky, and lighting up the world for a few moments. Then, a fireball or spark or something, flew across the river creating a rainbow arc above our heads that imprinted itself behind our eyelids, and a building behind Olive caught the flame and ran with it. The fire didn’t hang about. It consumed the building within seconds, angry flames licking through the windows and climbing the outside of the walls like a dragon.
We both scrambled backwards away from the heat which was so fierce I was scared my hair would catch fire.
Then we heard a sound that I hadn’t heard since I arrived here – someone screamed.
“What was that?” I mumbled.
Olive was fixated on the flames lapping the building and didn’t answer.
“Olive, is there … is there someone trapped inside?”
With what appeared to be a monumental effort, Olive wrenched her eyes away from the burning building and stood. She offered me a hand. “We have to go,” she said, her voice as dull as her eyes.
I took her hand and rose to stand beside her. I forced myself to stare at the building, the flames already creeping to the next building. It would only be a matter of time before it reached us. Back to the river and I saw that Jonah was about six or seven boats away from hitting the reflection. And then another scream. I blinked, and as I turned back to the fire on our side of the river, I saw something being tossed out of a window.
I stared. I blinked to clear the flickering behind my eyelids like strobe lighting and stared again. “What was that?”
“There’s nothing we can do,” Olive said. “We have to go.”
“We can’t.” I shook my head. “Was that a person fell out of the window?”
“Eli!” she snapped. “What do you think we can do against a fire like that, huh?”
“We could save someone. Look …” I pointed at the next building, the flames sneaking dangerously close. “We could … I don’t know … we could open the door and let people out.”
“Get real, Eli! You need water to put out a fire and if there’s anyone in there, the smoke will kill them before the flames even get to them. It’ll kill us too.”
“This is a dream, Olive!” I snapped back, panting now. “This is my dream, and we can do anything we put our minds to.” I pointed at the river. “No one comes back from the river. You said so yourself, yet I’ve come back from it twice.” I didn’t tell her that my veins felt like they were turning to ice despite the heat from the fire, and that my skin felt like it was being chewed alive.
She watched me as though I were a child who didn’t understand that you couldn’t buy candy if you had no money.
“And we have water,” I persisted. “We have a whole river there!”
Olive shook her head slowly. “I can’t, I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t go near the fire.”
Her words felt like a blow to the stomach. Of course, she couldn’t go near it – she’d been trapped in a fire herself once. No one understood better than Olive how it felt to watch your skin shrivel and burn. I bet there were no words for her to describe it to me either. But I couldn’t turn my back on the situation and walk away as if I didn’t know it was happening.
And there was still Jonah to save.
I nodded. “What about Jonah?”
“I don’t think we can save him,” she said.
We had to. There had to be a way. My brain was still sluggish and cold, and I had to close my eyes to concentrate. The boats were disintegrating when they reached the fire, like the reflection was canceling them out, so surely the only way to save Jonah was to put the fire out with the water from the river.
As if reading my mind, Olive shook her head. “It’s impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible,” I said, conveniently forgetting that I’d thought the same thing moments earlier when I was trapped in a sinking boat. “We have to put out the fire.”
“How are you gonna do that? How are you gonna get that river up there, huh? With a bucket?”
I didn’t know much about science, it being my least favorite subject in school, but I knew enough to understand that you could move water through a tube, or a hose provided it was higher than the water level. Or lower. I had to think about it. Either way, it could be done – we simply needed to find a hose.
“We need a hose.” I was already running away from her. “Stay there!” I yelled over my shoulder. She was still watching me, and I didn’t think she was going anywhere.
“Look for a hose,” I murmured to myself on repeat. “Look for a hose.” Anything could happen, I just had to believe it was going to. So, when I left the foot path and spotted a row of houses across the street, I ran to the first one, leapt over the low gate and sprinted to the rear of the house where they had a garden hose coiled up on a hook on the back wall. I yanked the hose away, hoisted it over my shoulder and jogged back slowly to the river, stopping occasionally to keep dragging the heavy coil back over my shoulder.
Olive was still exactly where I’d left her.
I dropped the hose onto the grass by the river. I knew that if you put one end of a tube into a raised container and sucked on the end, the water would start to travel, but there was no way I was trying to suck water through a hosepipe. I’d almost drowned twice – I needed all the oxygen I could get. Plus, we were running out of time.
And then I recalled another experiment in school where the teacher submerged a tube in a container full of water, removed one end and plugged it up and then, when the stopper was released, the water traveled all by itself. It was worth a shot. It had to be – it was the only shot I had. If I put out the fire, I would save Jonah at the same time, or at least, that’s how my deluded brain was working. The fires had to be connected both sides of the river, so no reflection, no way of sending the rowboats up in a flurry of sparks.
I dunked the hose in the river, ignoring the biting cold on my hands. It was ages before the first bubbles appeared and I was starting to think it wasn’t going to work, and then one popped on the surface and I almost cried with relief. When the last of the bubbles disappeared, I clamped my hand over one end and ran with it. I had no idea if it was long enough, or how fast the water would spurt out, but I had to keep telling myself it would work.
I passed Olive who still hadn’t moved.
“Olive, make sure the other end stays in the river,” I yelled.
I didn’t stick around to see whether she’d heard. I ran up the edge and across the foot path. A quick glance over my shoulder and the hose was still snaking across the grass behind me, the other end disappearing into the water. I was nowhere near the fire when I felt a tug on the hose. Olive was on her knees by the water’s edge, and she was gripping the other end to stop it from going any further.
I took a deep breath, removed my hand, and waited.
At first, nothing happened. Then a trickle of water bled from the end of the rubber hose in my hand. Disappointment dragged me to my knees. I’d lost. It was a crazy stupid idea anyway; the only way this fire was stopping was if the fire department arrived with twenty vehicles and a hundred men with motorized water pumps.
There was a splutter of water from the hose, and I felt it gurgling in my hand, and then water began pouring out, slowly at first, and then with more force so that it was traveling as far as the building closest to me. I jumped up, screaming, “I did it! It worked! I can’t believe it actually worked!”
Maybe if I saturated the buildings this side of the fire, it would have nowhere to go. Wasn’t that what people did with wildfires – drench their homes so that the fire couldn’t burn?
I kept the hose directed at the building closest to me and held on with both hands watching the water arc away from me and splatter the walls and windows.
Behind me the boats were still drifting towards the burning buildings. Jonah wasn’t quite level with me yet which meant that I still had time to save him. As I thought this, another building erupted and another boat vanished. I shifted my position and swerved the hose so that it was spraying the next building too, not enough to saturate it, but I was praying that any liquid would potentially halt the flames.
But I wasn’t prepared for two buildings to catch fire at once. The heat was immense, making my face slick with sweat, as another two boats vanished. There were only two more buildings between me and the raging inferno. The crackling was fierce, like nothing I’d ever heard before and I wished I’d removed my hoodie before I started because now it was bone-dry, and I was roasting.
I prayed there was no one inside. “Please, God,” I mumbled, “please let these places be empty.”
Then, as if my dream had decided there would be no prayers today, someone opened a window and screamed. I yelped, the hose jerking out of my hand. I quickly recovered it as the person in the window became a black silhouette against a backdrop of flames.
“Climb out!” I yelled. I took a few steps closer, and Olive must’ve dragged the hose along the river parallel with me. I ran then, directing the water up towards the window but there was not enough pressure for it to travel that high. “Jump!” I shouted.
The silhouette disappeared for a moment and then returned dragging something large and heavy to the opening. The object was thrown outside where it landed flat on the ground below. I turned the hose towards it. I had no idea what it was; all I did know was that it might survive if it was wet.
I kept the hose trained on that spot, my eyes watering from the billowing plumes of smoke. I raised an arm to wipe sweat from my forehead as something fell out of the window and landed on top of the flat object. It didn’t move. It looked like an animal.
“Move,” I mumbled under my breath. “Move.”
I sprayed it with water, hoping that I was wrong, that it wasn’t an animal but a cushion or a pillow, something soft to cushion the person’s fall when they jumped, but when it did eventually move, I saw that it was a child.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Hey, you! Are you hurt?”
The child, a boy I guessed from the short pajamas, rose slowly, peered all around, and then started limping towards me, his gait lopsided, like he had a dislocated shoulder or something. When he was close enough for me to see his face, I recognized instantly the vacant eyes and slack mouth. A zombie.
He continued straight past me and headed down to the river where I saw that there was an empty boat waiting for him.
“No!” I yelled. “Stop! Come back! Don’t go down there.”
There was a crash as the person in the window fell to the ground. I quickly sprayed them with water, convinced now that it was hopeless. What was the point? Why was I even bothering when I should’ve been trying to save Jonah? The house began to crumble and crack, orange flickers already appearing in the property next to it. It was no good. I wasn’t going to save anyone and the whole city was going to go up in flames around me.
I sank to the ground, tears streaming down my face as the water began to slow.
What? There was a whole river full of water behind me so the momentum had no cause to slow until the riverbed was dry, which would be like never.
I tugged the hose and there was no pull at the other end. Olive must’ve let it go.
As I followed the snaking hose down to the water, Olive was coming towards me. “Olive, what are you doing?” I asked, my voice already hoarse from the smoke. “You were supposed to keep the hose in the water.”
But she didn’t look at me. I might as well have been invisible because she walked past me heading straight for the fire.























Chapter 21

“Olive?” My skin was prickling even more, and I felt the shivers right through my spine. “Wait!”
She still didn’t stop, or glance around at me and I wondered if she couldn’t hear me above the raging fire.
“Olive!” I dropped the end of the hose. “Olive, come away! It’s too dangerous!”
I leapt to my feet and followed her, a few steps behind, but what I saw in the house that I’d been aiming the hose at stopped me like an invisible force field – there was a face in the upstairs window that I hadn’t noticed before. Someone else was inside the building.
“Hey!” I shouted, jumping up and down on the spot, and waving my arms to get their attention. “You need to get out!” I was pointing at the entrance to make them understand, but the face remained pressed up against the glass.
Although the building was in darkness, and the face was dark-skinned, I could see it as clearly as if they were standing right in front of me. I saw it more clearly than I saw Olive’s back moving away from me. It was a little girl. And the resemblance to Olive was uncanny.
A movement in another window on a lower level caught my eye. There were more people in there. But when I focused on this other face, I saw that it was the same face as the one in the upstairs window. I checked the next window. And the next. The same face was misting the glass with her breath in each room of the house.
“Olive?” My voice had deserted me with my confusion, and I knew she wouldn’t hear me. My legs felt like jelly and I took a tentative step forward unsure if they would even hold me up, let alone carry me forward. I felt nauseous. I felt like I could close my eyes and never wake up again. Hunger gnawed at my insides adding to the queasiness, yet I couldn’t even think about food without wanting to throw up.
Another step. I took a deep breath and let out the loudest roar I could muster, building up from my abdomen and tearing through my body. “Arggggghhhhh!” My throat burned with the sound and the effects of the smoke which was turning the sky dirty-brown. “Olive!”
She stopped.
My shoulders slumped and I allowed tears to spill down my cheeks. She heard me.
Olive raised her head and studied the top window where I’d first seen her sister’s face, then she took another step closer to the house. She was on the move again.
In that instant, I knew that she wasn’t going to stop until she rescued her sister. I remembered what she said when I’d asked where her sister was – she said that she was trapped in the fire. Only this house wasn’t on fire, and if I’d made it wet enough, I might have prevented the flames from catching hold.
But even as I thought this, the first embers flew across from the building next door and flared on the roof like fireworks fizzing to life.
I screamed.
It was too late to run back to the river and douse the hose again; by the time I came back the roof would be burning, and Olive would be inside. I had to stop her.
“Olive!” I shrieked. “Olive!”
A streak of crimson had ignited across the length of the roof and I stared at it, open-mouthed, as two hands appeared at the top window beside the face. Olive’s sister must’ve heard it too. She would come out now. Any minute, I told myself, she would disappear from the window and the front door would open, and there she would be. Olive would hug her, and then I could save Jonah.
A sound behind me caught my attention. Someone was shouting, and it sounded like they were calling my name.
I turned slowly, my eyes searching for Jonah, and locating him. He was no longer facing forward the way the other zombies were, he was staring straight at me, and when he saw me turn, he raised a hand to wave.
“Eli!”
“Jonah?”
“Help me, Eli!” he yelled, palms raised to the sky in a gesture of helplessness.
I forgot about Olive. I forgot about Olive’s sister behind the window. My brother wasn’t a zombie, and he needed my help.
I did the only thing that I could think of in the spur of the moment – I grabbed the end of the hose and I ran with it. Down to the river’s edge, as close to Jonah as I could get, tripping over the hose when it snaked under my feet, landing on my knees, and scrambling straight back up again.
When I reached the water, I almost didn’t stop, my feet skidding across the slippery grass, my arms flailing around to get my balance. My heart was thudding in my chest. I didn’t hesitate though but swung the end of the hose back and forth a few times and then hurled it towards Jonah. It stopped miles short of him.
Jonah had stopped waving. He watched me reel the hose back in and throw it again. It landed with a plop in the water, still nowhere near Jonah’s boat.
I chucked it on the bank and stripped my hoodie off over my head. There was only one way I was going to save Jonah and that was by swimming to him.
“No!” Jonah must’ve realized my plan. “No, Eli! Stay where you are. I’m coming to you.”
He raised a foot and placed it on the side of the boat, rocking it gently, as another explosion ripped through the sky. It was on the opposite side of the river, but it was so violent that I felt the force of it and landed on my back on the grass.
Jonah turned to face it as though it had been a warning for him not to jump. He stayed that way for what felt like hours, and then slowly turned back to me. His foot was no longer on the side of the boat.
“Jonah, jump!” I yelled. The water was dangerous, I knew that, but there were only two boats in front of Jonah, and right now, the river was the better option.
His face was exactly how I remembered it, his hair flopping into his eyes, his high cheekbones and perfect smile. I saw it as clearly as I’d seen Olive’s sister behind the window.
Jonah mouthed the words, “I love you,” and then those words he would always say to me when times seemed tough and overwhelming, “Everything is fine, Everything will be okay” and then turned to face the direction in which he was drifting.
A sob caught in my throat. “No … Jonah, no! This isn't fine. This isn't okay. Jonah!”
“Eli?” It was Olive’s voice behind me.
I swallowed and turned around to where Olive was standing outside the door of the building I’d been trying to save. The top level was already alive with flames.
Behind me, on the river, another boat vanished with a burst of flaming embers. Only one remained ahead of Jonah.
“Eli!” Olive called again. “I’m sorry.”
“Olive?” I was sobbing now, loud guttural sounds erupting from the depths of my quaking shivering body. I shook my head.
“I have to go in,” Olive said. She was no longer yelling but I could hear her clearly.
The face was still at the window; it was still in all the windows. “Get out!” I yelled. I started running back towards the house. “Get out! The house is on fire!” I was running as fast as I could, but my footsteps were slow, sluggish, and it felt like I was going nowhere.
This is what happens in dreams, I thought. When you need to run, you can’t. When you need to escape, you can’t.
“Get out of the house!” I kept yelling until my voice was hoarse, the sound barely rasping out of my mouth.
I was running, my thigh muscles trembling, but it felt as though I was wading through quicksand. I was pointing at the window and jabbing a finger in the direction of the ground floor entrance, but as I watched, the flames engulfed the room on the top level, and Olive’s sister moved away from the window and disappeared.
“Nooooo!” I cried, my voice dying in the smoke.
Another boat disintegrated behind me.
Jonah was in the next boat, and he was standing perfectly still as though awaiting his turn in line for a roller coaster ride. I could barely breathe. I was bent double, hands gripping my thighs while my head spun with the lack of oxygen. I was halfway between Jonah and Olive. I didn’t know if I would make it to the river and still have time to swim to Jonah and drag him into the water before his boat vanished. A glance at Olive and she was at the entrance to the building, and about to step inside.
Jonah was inching closer and closer, everything moving in slow motion, but he didn’t move, he didn’t struggle, he didn’t glance in my direction, and I understood why Olive had said sorry. She was going to save her sister, even if that meant she would die herself.
I straightened.
My breathing was still ragged but that no longer mattered.
I saw that Jonah was almost level with the blazing building and I ran. I ran in the opposite direction, away from the river, and towards Olive who had disappeared inside the house. Muddy-brown smoke was billowing from the open doorway. I ran on silent footsteps hurdling the low wall and charging straight towards the entrance.
Inside, I couldn’t see a thing. The house was in total darkness which was made even denser by the smoke. I smothered my nose and mouth in the crook of my arm and felt my way blindly forward. I touched something ahead of me and slightly to my left and jumped, but as I stepped closer, saw that it was a coat-stand with several jackets hanging from it.
I lowered my arm, and called, “Olive!” the sound immediately lost. I tried again, “Olive!”
Nothing.
I kept moving. She couldn’t have gone far – there was no way her visibility would’ve been any clearer than mine. Another couple of steps and I tripped over a pair of shoes on the floor. Fortunately, I stayed upright. My eyes were streaming even though they felt dry and gritty each time I blinked like someone had thrown sand in them. My throat was constricted. Every couple of seconds a cough erupted and burst out of me.
And then I stumbled over something large and lumpy. I landed on my knees, my feet still on the obstruction. I turned and felt it gingerly with my fingertips as it moved. It was soft.
Olive!
I felt my way along her body until I found her face and skimmed it lightly with my fingertips. “Olive,” I murmured behind my arm. “Olive, can you hear me?”
There was a groan which sounded like it had come from her. I didn’t waste a heartbeat. Lifting her head, ignoring my coughing, and spluttering, I wrapped my arms around her shoulders from beneath her and dragged her slowly towards the door. Only, I was moving blind, and three times I backed into walls before I found the way out.
Dragging Olive’s feet over the threshold, I kept going until I’d pulled her far enough away from the house that we wouldn’t be caught by the flames. As I lowered her head onto the grass and flopped down beside her, the building erupted, seeming to implode, a plume of giant flames and fiery sparks rising into the sky.
Behind me, a boat disintegrated.
Eyes stinging with tears, I peered over my shoulder, knowing that Jonah would already be gone, and then I collapsed on the grass beside Olive and sobbed until everything went black.

























Chapter 22

I sat bolt upright screaming over and over until my voice was nothing more than a donkey bleat.
“Shh.” Strong arms held my shoulders and settled me back down against the pillows. “There, there, it’s only the night terrors.”
“Night terrors?” I whispered. I opened my eyes, and the room was midnight dark. I could tell that I was back in the hospital bed though by the monotonous beeping of the monitor beside the bed, the neon-green line hopping along, and the tube in the back of my hand which was no longer twisted at an awkward angle.
“They’ll go away in time.”
The nurse was leaning over me, tucking the blanket around my torso so tightly I could feel it crushing my ribs. Her face was close to mine. I felt her breath on my eyelids and smelled the artificial tang of her lipstick. She moved her face closer so that I could see it clearly and it seemed somehow to have softened – her lips were no longer stretched into a macabre grin, her eyes, though still like black pebbles, were not as frightening as I remembered them.
“You’ve had quite the time,” she said almost tenderly. “Here, I fixed you a drink.”
“Does it taste like fish?” I whispered. My throat felt as though it had been scrubbed with sandpaper.
She laughed then. “Try it. I’m sure you’ll like it.”
She held a cup to my lips, and I took the tiniest sip, the liquid barely hitting my tongue. It was warm and sweet, and I guzzled the whole lot down, gasping for breath by the time I’d finished.
“That’ll perk you right up,” she said. “Now, sleep, and I’ll be back in a while.”
I closed my eyes and blackness took over again.

My eyes flew open. I blinked, waiting for them to adjust to the gloom, my heart galloping. Where was I? I tried to move but something was pinning me down. A ghastly pale face appeared in front of me, and I tried to scream but no sound passed my lips because my throat was on fire.
Fire!
I thought I must be in the river, reeds and rushes strangling me, dragging me down to the bottom. I fought and struggled and writhed until the blanket tucked around me loosened and I was able to raise a hand to bat away the elusive face which had already disappeared.
The monitor was still beeping away beside the bed. I lay there for a while, a crushing weight still pressing down on my chest, making it difficult to breathe. I tried to moderate my breathing, in through my nose, one … two … three, and out through my mouth, one … two … three. As soon as I stopped counting, my heart rate increased and my breathing became shallow again, and the weight on my chest became unbearable.
I rolled onto my side and it hurt even worse as though I was squashing my heart and it might explode. I tried rolling the other way which felt a little easier. I clung to the pillow, eyes staring into the darkness, and then I understood what had happened.
It all came flooding back. Jonah in the boat. The fire. Olive’s sister.
I went into the house. I coughed as the memory ignited behind my eyes and the smoke inhalation reminded my lungs how difficult it had been to breathe. I found Olive – I remembered dragging her out safely and leaving her on the grass. But Jonah was already gone. I’d sacrificed my brother to save Olive.
Tears streaked my face, saturating the pillow and the top of the cover, and I lay there crying until my shoulders were sore with the effort. I let Jonah die. It was all my fault. I should’ve swum across the river to pull him from the boat when I had the opportunity, and I didn’t because I needed to save my friend.
My lips and my face and my heart felt swollen with tears. As my sobs abated, another memory slipped into my head, that of the face behind the window. Olive’s sister. Olive had tried to save her sister and I’d pulled her out of the house, so she’d lost someone too.
Wiping my nose on the back of my hand, I pushed myself to a sitting position. The room was so dark that I could barely make out Olive’s bed.
“Olive?” I whispered.
Nothing.
I swallowed and tried again. “Olive?”
When there was still no answer, and I could sense no movement from across the room, I pushed the cover back and swung my legs over the side of the bed. I was wearing pajamas now; they smelled clean when I raised my arm in front of my face. I had no idea who they belonged to, but they weren’t mine – I didn’t even wear proper pajamas.
Sliding over the side of the bed, I stood carefully. My head was dizzy, stars spinning around in front of my eyes, and I leaned back against the bed until my brain cells settled. Then, on tiptoes, I went over to Olive’s bed, feeling my way along from the foot-end where her notes were hooked onto the top bar, until I reached the pillow.
I leaned closer until my face was practically touching Olive’s. Her eyes were closed, and her breathing was slow so I guessed she must be asleep. I didn’t want to wake her, but I needed to know that she was alright. I didn’t think I could bear it if she were badly hurt. What if she was dying? I would have lost Jonah and Olive, and everything would have been a waste of time.
“Olive,” I whispered again. “Are you asleep?” She didn’t answer and there was no movement, just the steady ripple of her own monitor the other side of her bed. I raised a hand and touched her shoulder. She felt warm and I realized that I’d been holding my breath, panicking that she might be dead.
I waited, standing there in someone else’s pajamas, watching the green line blip across the screen. I didn’t know if I should wait for her to wake up or shake her awake. In the end, curiosity got the better of me, and I reached out to touch her again, this time nudging her arm.
She groaned, and I instinctively reached for her hand on top of the blanket and squeezed it. “Olive. It’s me, Eli. How are you feeling?”
She didn’t open her eyes, but she didn’t pull her hand away from me either. “Eli?” Her voice was hoarser than mine because she’d been inside the house longer than me. “Where am I?”
“We’re back in the hospital,” I said, my voice gaining confidence now that I knew she was okay. “I don’t know how we got back here. I’ve seen the nurse. She looks different. She gave me a drink and it tasted like strawberries and marshmallow.”
Her fingers shifted in mine. “Is … is it dark?” she asked.
“Yes. Like the middle of the night.” I thought about it once the words left my lips. Any darker and we wouldn’t be able to see each other, and Olive had said that would only happen when we’d completed all the tasks and we could go home. Yet … we hadn’t completed the last task. I didn’t even know what the last task was, but I’d assumed it was to save Jonah.
Fresh tears squeezed from the corners of my eyes.
Olive rolled her head away from me so that I couldn’t see her face even when I leaned closer. “Leave me alone,” she murmured.
“What? Olive, are you hurt? Do you want me to call the nurse?”
“Go away, Eli!” she snapped.
“I … what?” I shook my head. I didn’t understand what was wrong with her. I saved her. I let my brother go so that I could save her and now she didn’t want to speak to me. “What’s wrong? Look at me, Olive.”
“Go back to bed, Eli,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do now.” Her voice was as dull as her eyes like she’d lost the spark that made her Olive.
“We must have completed the task,” I persisted. “I don’t know how, but we must’ve. It’s darker now. That means we did it, right?”
She tugged her fingers from mine and rolled over.
But I wasn’t being deterred. My hand touching the blanket, I walked around the bed until I was standing in front of the monitor, and then I lowered my face to Olive’s. “Tell me what’s wrong,” I said.
She took a deep breath and coughed as though her lungs were shredded. I held her hand until she stopped and then wiped her chin with the cuff of my sleeve. She chewed her bottom lip, and I could see that it was an effort for her to swallow, so I smoothed her hair away from her clammy forehead with my cool fingertips and waited for her to speak. “My sister …” she said. “Did I get her out?”
I froze. I wished she’d asked me anything else but this, because I knew that she already knew the answer. I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You tried. We tried, but there was no time.”
She nodded, her cheek rubbing against the pillow. “Your brother?”
“No.” I shook my head even though her eyes were still closed. “I couldn’t save him either.” I peered around the room straining to see anything but shadows.
“Is …” she began. “Does your chest feel as though it’s being crushed?”
“Yes,” I said. “Do you feel it too?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Must be the smoke,” I said. “You inhaled a lot more than I did.”
She tucked her arm back under the cover so that I couldn’t hold her hand. “It’s the task,” she murmured in that vague, flat tone of voice which made me shiver. “We completed the task, and now we’re paying for it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “We didn’t save them. How did we complete the task?”
“That was the whole point, Eli. We weren’t supposed to save them.”
“But …” I blinked and fresh tears spilled. I wiped them away with my sleeve and sniffed loudly. She must be delirious. She didn’t know what she was saying. “The boat I fell into.” I almost said that Olive pushed me but stopped myself in time. “The hose. These things happened because we were supposed to save them, right?”
“Wrong, Eli.”
“We weren’t supposed to save them?” Olive didn’t speak. “Okay, so why is it darker then? Why does it look like we completed the task? How did we even get back here?”
“I didn’t say we didn’t complete the task,” she said now. “We did.”
“We didn’t.” I waited for anger to fill my head, but it didn’t. I stood there shivering uncontrollably despite the warmth of the room. “Why do you keep saying that?”
“Because it’s true. This …” – she arched her neck and thumped her chest with her fist – “… this pain is the point. Why do you think the nurse gave you a strawberry milkshake now, huh? Why is she being nice to you now, when she’s been a monster the rest of the time?”
I thought about it. Or rather, I tried to think about it, but my brain wasn’t cooperating right now. “I don’t know.” I shrugged.
“She’s helping us complete this task and transition into the last one.”
“The last one?”
“Ha! Don’t be thinking we’ve come this far so it’ll be a breeze.”
“I’m not,” I said. “Do you know what the last task is?”
“I’m not doing the last task with you, Eli.” Olive seemed to shrink into the pillow, like she was trying to slip away from me.
“What? Why not? I can’t do it without you.”
“Then you won’t complete it.” She went to roll away from me again, and I grabbed her arm a little too roughly. She wrenched it free. “Leave me alone. Eli, this pain is the last task. We have to move past the pain. We have to accept the pain. Accept the loss, accept that this is real. I've never made it past this task. Truthfully I don't know if I want to.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Look at me, Olive. Please. I don’t understand what’s going on.”
For a long while she was silent and then she opened her eyes and I let out a stifled scream. Her eyes were no longer dull – they were white.


















Chapter 23

“Why are you staring at me?”
Olive’s expression was unfathomable in the gloom, but probably more so because my eyes were glued to hers. The white gleamed at me as though they were made of polished stone, and the image of someone removing her eyeballs, spitting on them, and polishing them with a dirty cloth made me squirm.
“How … how do you know I’m staring at you?” I asked.
“Jesus, Eli, did that river water get into your brain?”
I swallowed. I was still shivering, but I guessed it was because it was cool in the room now; I’d almost forgotten that I’d fallen into the river. “Maybe,” I mumbled. There was too much to think about. The river. Olive. The next task. I had no idea what would happen to us next, but all I did know was that I wasn’t about to let Olive push me away. Not now. I needed to keep her talking, keep her involved. I needed her on my side. “Shall we go and get some food?”
She opened her mouth to speak, and instead, let out a sigh. “What’s the point?”
Something swelled inside me. Hope? She hadn’t refused or rolled over, and I took that as a good sign. “I’m hungry?” I suggested.
“You’re always hungry.” She still didn’t move.
“Olive, will you tell me about your sister? What’s her name?”
She swallowed repeatedly as though something was stuck in her throat and just as I was about to reach forward and sit her up so that she wouldn’t choke, she said, “Victoria, but everyone called her Queenie.”
“Queenie? That’s awesome.”
I waited. Questions formed on my lips, but they all presented themselves in past tense, and I couldn’t bring myself to say the words aloud, because it meant that I would have to think about Jonah in past tense too.
“She has the biggest smile,” said Olive, her voice barely more than a whisper. “Her teeth are crooked, you know, with gaps between them like she needs to grow more to fill them in, but her smile makes everyone happy.”
I nod. It’s like I’m scared to break the spell now that she’s talking to me.
“Her favorite game is hide-and-seek. We play it all the time and whenever I find her, she holds out her hands for a hug and says, ‘Again’, like we can play a hundred times and she’ll never get bored.” She has been staring over my shoulder at the wall, but now, she shifts on the pillow and stares right at me with her empty eyes. “That’s what we were playing when it happened.”
“When what happened?” I blurted out.
“When the fire started. We were making cookies. Our mom set the timer before she went out to run some errands, but I never heard it. I forgot about them.” She stared right at me her mouth open, as though she were about to scream. “Eli, the cookies. They’ll catch fire.”
“It’s okay.” I reached for her hand and squeezed her fingers. “It’s okay. There aren’t any cookies.”
“I can smell them, Eli,” she said. “They’re burning. Is there smoke?” She raised her head from the pillow and twisted back and forth, her eyes facing the ceiling. “Where’s the smoke coming from?”
“Nowhere,” I said, trying to bring her attention back to now. “There’s no smoke, it’s just dark.”
“Dark? Where’s Queenie?” Her voice was shrill, and she tried to tug her hand away from mine, but I held fast.
“She isn’t here, Olive. We’re in the hospital, remember?”
“I have to find her.” She shoved the covers back, thumping my chest accidentally with her fist, and swung her legs over the side of the bed.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to find Queenie. The smoke. I can’t leave her. What was that?” She whirled around to face the door and almost tumbled forward onto the bed.
“What?” I peered into the gloom and couldn’t see anything, the door a fuzzy shadow where I knew it should be.
“That noise. People banging on the door. They want me to go with them, Queenie. They’re shouting at me to open the door, but I can’t leave you.”
“Olive …” I reached a hand to touch her shoulder, but she slapped it away. “Don’t touch me. I’m not going anywhere without my sister.”
“I’m not taking you anywhere,” I said. “It’s okay, Olive. Queenie is … she’s … she’s safe.”
Her shoulders slumped. “She is? They saved her?”
I didn’t know what to say. If I lied, she would believe that her sister was alive and she would never forgive me when she eventually learned the truth, but if I said that her sister died in the fire, she would retreat into the pain and tell me to go away. In the end, I settled for, “They got her out.”
It was a cop out. I knew I would have to tell her the truth at some point, but I would save that until we completed the final task. We couldn’t come this far together and fail now.
“Take me to her.”
Okay, I wasn’t expecting that. “I … I don’t know where she is right now.”
“Is she in the hospital? I need to see her. I want to know that she’s going to be alright.”
“Olive.” I rubbed my hand through my hair. “I’ll ask the nurse when she comes back. She’ll know where she is.”
I saw her thought process as plainly as if the words were rolling across her forehead like an LED sign, saw the moment she remembered her sister in the flaming building and the look of disgust she shot at me when she realized that I was lying to her.
Without warning, she pummeled my chest with both fists, and I stumbled backwards, crashing into her monitor which wobbled and fell onto the floor, the monitor still beeping face down.
“Olive!”
I didn’t have a chance to finish, because she grabbed my pajama top and hurtled me across the room where I collided with the end of my bed, spun around, and fell backwards, my prosthetic leg knocking something hard. Pain shot through me and I cried out.
Olive was striding towards me and I scrambled backwards, suddenly afraid of the girl who’d been my ally throughout this horrible dream.
She kicked my foot and reached down to pick me up as the door flew open and the nurse had her arms around Olive’s shoulders. Olive tried to punch her in the face, but the nurse was fast, her hands everywhere.
“Help me,” the nurse said.
I scrambled to my feet and, avoiding Olive’s thrashing arms and legs, helped the nurse to get her back into her own bed. She tucked the covers tightly around Olive’s fidgeting body. Then she produced a syringe from a pocket in her uniform which she stuck into Olive’s arm. Within moments, her eyes closed, and her head was still on the pillow.
The nurse peered at me closely. “Are you okay?”
I nodded. “I think so.” My prosthetic leg was throbbing which made no sense, so I didn’t mention it. “What happened?”
“Same as usual.” She slipped an arm around my shoulders and escorted me back to my bed. She didn’t tuck the covers so tightly this time. “Happens every time Olive reaches the final task. She accepts her injuries but fixates on finding her sister and we can’t get her to move forward.”
I thought about it. “Is that why her eyes are white? Does she have to forget about her sister then, to complete the final task? Do I have to forget about Jonah?”
The nurse busied herself checking my pulse. She stuck a thermometer over my fingertip and tapped the monitor where the green line was beeping erratically. “No. Quite the opposite in fact.”
I waited for her to elaborate. When she didn’t, I asked, “What does that mean? Is he coming back?”
She removed the thermometer and squinted at it. When she looked at me, her eyes were wide and her gaze almost gentle. “You saw him go, didn’t you?”
“Yes … but …”
“Did you say goodbye?”
Tears welled in my eyes. Jonah waved. He told me he loved me, he told me everything would be fine, but I was stuck between saving him and saving Olive, and I turned and ran. I shrank back into my pillows.
“There you go then,” the nurse said.
I shook my head, confused.
“Are you hungry?” She straightened, smoothing her uniform with her hands.
“No,” I said, waiting for my stomach to complain.
Without a glance at Olive, she crossed the room and opened the door. Hesitating, her face a hazy shadow, she said, “Do you remember going to the theater when you were little?” I nodded. “Did you ever wonder where the characters went when they stepped behind the curtains? They were still there only they were a shadow of the actors who played them.”
Then she closed the door behind her.























Chapter 24

I lay in the bed facing away from Olive—not that it made any difference in this shadow-world of no light—and thought about the few times my mom took me to the theater when I was growing up. I loved the bright colorful shows like The Lion King and Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, shows where I could be mesmerized by the costumes and the songs. I remembered waiting in the audience for the actors to take their bows. What had I been waiting for—a glimpse of the person beneath the makeup? Or something else? A sign that the characters were real?
My thoughts wandered to movies. Not Marvel—I knew they were based on comic books and obviously Iron Man wasn’t real. But take someone like Daniel Radcliffe—he would always be Harry Potter even though he wasn’t Harry Potter. Did that mean that he carried around Harry’s shadow no matter where he went or what role he played? Was Harry a part of him now?
Should I even have listened to what the nurse was saying? Sure, she wasn’t as scary now as she was when I first woke up here, but was she trustworthy? But then I thought about the blood that she gave me that saved me and Olive several times, and the opportunity she gave me to barter my poster for my safe return home. It occurred to me that she must’ve been helping us all along, so she must have mentioned the theater for a reason.
My head hurt. I closed my eyes, but my brain cells thumped like they were having a party under a disco ball and I almost wished the nurse had given me an injection to knock me out too. My leg was still throbbing too and when I rolled over, I felt a stabbing pain above the knee. I sat up and massaged my thigh through the covers. I tried not to look at the prosthetic limb. A few times, my fingers strayed too low and I thought I felt something slither away from my touch.
I froze. Sliding my leg towards me, I bent forward to see more clearly in the glow from the monitor. Something moved. I yelped and then clamped a hand over my mouth—I didn’t want to wake Olive. Holding my breath and with my face turned away, I slid my fingers down to touch where my knee and lower limb should’ve been and instead, touched something cold and slimy. I yanked my fingers away and shook my leg over the side of the bed. Something from the river must have got inside my leg and stayed there.
I couldn’t see if anything fell out onto the floor, and I didn’t want to see. Curling back up into the fetal position, I hid my legs under the covers and tried to ignore what I’d felt. But now, I knew I could feel something wriggling around inside my leg.
It was no good. I had to get rid of it.
I sat up again and pushed the covers away. Pulling the limb closer, I patted my way down my leg, my heart racing like my life depended on it, and even then, even when I felt nothing from below mid thigh, I still didn’t believe it. This dream had just taken a whole new turn of weird. I closed my eyes and tried again. Nothing. I leaned even closer so that my nose was almost touching my thigh, and that was when I realized that the prosthetic limb I’d kinda grown attached to had disappeared. I was starting to realize Olive had been right. This wasn't a dream. The pain in my chest was too real. The pain in my leg made me realize I've never felt pain in a dream. But if it wasn't a dream that means this is real...
“What are you doing?” It was Olive.
“You’re awake.” When she didn’t speak, I said, “There was something inside my leg. From the river.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth, not when she was so vulnerable.
“Is it gone now?”
“I …” I swallowed. “I think so. Are you … are you feeling okay?”
“Hungry,” she said.
I wanted to tell her that I offered to go get food with her, but I was frightened of jogging her memory. My ribs still ached from where she pushed me over. “Olive, have you seen a theater here, in the hospital?”
“An operating theater, you mean?”
I hadn’t thought of that. “No, at least I don’t think so. A real theater with actors and red velvet curtains and props and stuff.”
“In a hospital?”
It sounded crazy even to me, but something was telling me that it was important.
The door was flung open again, and the nurse came in wheeling a trolley that smelled of tacos and guacamole. I stared at the trays trying to bring the food into focus. She stopped the trolley by the side of my bed and lifted a silver lid from a plate.
“I thought you’d be hungry by now.”
“Tacos are my favorite,” I said. I could taste the food already and my mouth was watering.
The nurse placed the tray on the movable stand which she pushed across the bed so that I could reach it, then she handed me a fork and a napkin.
“Jerk chicken,” Olive said as I placed the first forkful in my mouth.
“Tacos,” I mumbled. The food was steaming hot. I’d never tasted anything so amazing and there was sour cream dip as well as guacamole.
The nurse wheeled the trolley across the room to Olive’s bed and set another plate onto her stand which she moved across the bed, but just out of Olive’s reach. I watched her feeling about with her hands for the food which she could obviously smell. Whenever her fingers almost made contact, the nurse pulled it further away.
I stopped eating and watched them. Olive shifted lower down the bed, her eyes on the plate as if she could see the meal, but it was obvious that she couldn’t because she was still patting the bed trying to find it. When the nurse moved the plate again, I pushed my own dinner away to go over and help.
“Stop it,” I said. I went to climb out of bed and then realized that I wouldn’t be able to walk. I glanced at the nurse who nodded to the drip stand. Propped up against it were a pair of crutches that I hadn’t noticed before. I reached for them, and heaved myself upright, sweat bobbling on my forehead and upper lip. It was more difficult than it looked; my leg hung heavily while I stood there swaying. I didn’t even know if I should move the crutches first or my other leg. Eventually, when I finally felt like I’d found my balance, I went to move a crutch, leaned too far forward and then when I tried to over-compensate for the movement, fell back onto the bed. I had to start the process all over again.
When I finally got the hang of it, I crossed the room and took the stand away from the nurse, who was still messing with Olive, and set it in front of her, placing a fork in her hand.
“I can manage,” Olive said.
“I know,” I said gently. “I was only trying to help.”
“I don’t need your help. I’m not a baby.” Olive’s lifeless eyes were fixed straight ahead at the wall above my bed. She wasn’t smiling. If she’d heard my crutches, she didn’t say.
I turned to the nurse. “Why did you do that? You knew she couldn’t …” I sucked in a deep breath, scared to look at Olive.
“Do what?” asked the nurse.
“I am here, you know.” Olive thumped the fork down onto the plate so heavily I thought it might’ve smashed.
I jumped, swaying unsteadily. “Sorry, she just … kept moving the plate so you couldn’t find it.”
Again, it was as though Olive’s thoughts flickered across her brain. Her scary-white eyes narrowed and with one swift movement neither of us could’ve predicted, she swept the meal onto the floor. The plate smashed and food splattered the walls and the nurse’s legs.
The nurse’s expression didn’t alter. “Clear it up,” she said.
Olive folded her arms across her chest. “No!”
The nurse snatched the covers and pulled them off the bed, dropping them into a heap on the floor at my foot. Then she reached out a hand and pinched Olive’s cheek.
“Ow!” Olive reacted too late.
“I’m waiting,” said the nurse.
Rubbing her cheek, Olive slid her legs over the side of the bed and dropped to her knees, feeling about for the ruined meal with her fingertips. As she was about to touch the first piece of the cracked plate, the nurse pushed it out of reach with the toe of her shoe.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She stared me in the eye levelly. “She has to learn.”
“Learn what? What are you teaching her? You’re a nurse—you should be helping her get better.”
“Ha!” the nurse let out a short snappy sound. “That’s exactly what I’m doing. You should stop interfering.”
I peered down at Olive on her knees on the floor, her arms hanging limply by her sides. Spicy jerk chicken was smeared across her pajama bottoms, but she was oblivious. It made me want to cry.
Leaning my crutches against Olive’s bed, I murmured, “It’s alright, I’ll clear up the mess.”
“I don’t need your help, Eli,” she said.
“You heard her.” The nurse grabbed my pajama collar in her fist and pulled me close to her. “This is her last meal. If she doesn’t pick it up, she doesn’t eat.”
“Huh? Last meal?”
She released my collar and smoothed out the creases in my top. “Yes. You should eat too.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why is this our last meal?”
“I won’t be here.” The nurse smiled at me then as though she almost felt sorry for me. “This room won’t be here. The hospital. All of it will be gone.”
“Gone? Gone where? Where are you going?” I tried and failed to keep the panic from my voice. I glanced at Olive and she hadn’t moved.
“Gone. I’m sure you understand the meaning of the word.” The nurse took my hand in hers and squeezed. “My role here is done.”
I blinked, waiting for my brain to catch up and make sense of what she was saying, but it seemed to be working on a time-delay. “What about us?”
“The rest is up to you,” she said. “You’re almost there, Eli.” Her eyes found Olive on the floor and lingered there for several moments. “You might have to complete the final task alone. Olive doesn’t want to eat her last meal.”
“I … I don’t understand. What happens if she doesn’t eat it? I’ll help her clear up the mess. I’ll pick it up. She can share mine, can’t she? If she eats something, she’ll be strong enough to complete the task.”
“That isn’t how it works, Eli.”
“Why not? I’ll …” I was scrabbling around for the right words to say. “I’ll feed her. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll carry her through the final task if I have to.”
The nurse studied me for several moments before holding out her hand for me to shake. “Goodbye, Eli. Good luck.”
I watched her back retreat into the shadows, sensed rather than saw the door open and close behind her, and then we were alone.

























Chapter 25

Olive was still on the floor, still motionless, still staring at nothing in particular. I lowered myself to the floor using the bed, and began gathering the broken chunks of china into a pile, ignoring the food clinging to my fingers.
“You can’t eat this now,” I said. “The five-second rule is way out of time. You can share my dinner. I have tacos. Do you like tacos?” I mumbled away while I scooped the slops up onto the tray above Olive’s bed, then wiped my hands on the napkin the nurse had brought in with the food. I turned to Olive, but she was already on her feet and climbing back into bed. “I’ll bring my food over and we can eat together,” I said.
But she settled down and dragged the cover over her until only the top of her head was visible.
I hesitated, not knowing whether to say more or fetch my dinner. In the end, I made my way slowly back upright and sat on the edge of her bed. “Here, Olive. Sit up and I’ll fix you some food.”
Nothing.
“Olive?”
I thought about when I was younger, and hormones were kicking in. The terrible twos ten years too late, my mom said. I became a sulker. If something upset me, or there was no ketchup to go with my french fries, or my favorite pants were still in the laundry, I sulked for days, and I was good at it. I mean, I refused to speak or even acknowledge anyone elses presence at home. But my mom refused to pander to it, and she carried on talking as if we were having a two-sided conversation, and she wasn’t just talking to herself.
So, that’s what I did now. I pretended that her meal was the best I’d ever tasted as I raised the fork to my mouth. “Hmm, this is good,” I said. “You should try it, Olive. I mean, if this is our last meal, we might as well enjoy it, right?”
She didn’t speak, but I felt her shift beneath the blanket.
“If the nurse is leaving, that must mean we’re going to pass the final task. Then we can go home. I can’t wait to tell my mom all about it, I mean, this has been some wacky experience. One day, when I’m an illustrator or graphic designer or something, I’ll make a video about all this and you can … you can come along to the premiere.”
I hesitated. My throat suddenly felt dry, and it was difficult to swallow. Was Olive from Philadelphia? Is that why she is in this upside-down version on the city? When we completed the final task, would I ever see her again? It felt like that moment in Alice in Wonderland when the Mad Hatter finally realizes that he only exists in Alice’s crazy dream.
“I’ll … I’ll get my leg back.”
I swung my leg as proof that the prosthetic was still there until I remembered that it wasn’t. It was funny, but I’d kinda got used to walking on it, even with the hole the lion chewed out of it. I looked at Olive, at the shape of her beneath the covers. She was listening to me—I could tell by the way her shoulders tensed.
“You’ll …” I began. “You’ll get your eyes back.”
Olive sat up suddenly, making me almost lurch off the bed. “I can see just fine.”
She was facing me, that much was true, but I knew she couldn’t see me. Slowly, holding my breath, I raised my hand and pointed my index finger at her nose until my nail was almost touching her. She didn’t even flinch.
I lowered it again. “I know,” I said.
I couldn’t eat anything else, even though the nurse had said we needed to eat because this was our last meal, and I needed my strength because Olive hadn’t touched hers. It was all coming into focus. Everything that we’d done so far: the tasks, the monsters, the people we’d seen around town, but mostly my leg and Olive’s eyes. The notion was right there in front of my eyes, waiting for me to grasp it and run, because once I did, I knew that everything would be okay. I’d lost Jonah. Olive had lost her sister. Were we supposed to find them—was that the final task? Were they waiting somewhere in the hospital? But there was more to it than that.
I reached for the crutches and rose carefully. “Olive, we have to go.”
I dragged the cover off her and ignored her startled, “Hey!”
“Come on, up!” I said, like I was her mom, and it was time for school. I gripped her hand and pulled but she was a limp, dead weight, sliding across the bed. “Okay, if that’s how you want to do it.” I slid one arm under her legs and pulled. She was heavier than I expected. “You can make me carry you, or you can walk,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t realize that I was bluffing. “Choice is yours.”
“Let me go, Eli.”
“Nope.” I stepped backwards, skidding on a lettuce leaf, but managing to keep my balance.
“I’ll walk.”
“If I put you down, you won’t get back under the covers?”
“I said I’ll walk,” Olive said.
She was already starting to slip out of the bed, so I released her, my arms poised in case she dashed back to the bed.
“What’s the rush?” she asked.
I didn’t really know how to explain. “The nurse said that was our last ever meal. No more food. Nothing. And all this …”—I waved a hand around the room—“… will be gone.”
“So?”
“So, I don’t want to be here when that happens.”
“Don’t you get it? You’ll wake up in another hospital room, Eli.”
“Not if we pass the last task. It’ll be dark. The hospital will vanish, boom, and we’ll be back home.”
“We’re not going to pass the last task.”
“I am.” I waited for her to argue. When she didn’t, I continued, “I’m getting out of here. I’m completing the task, and I’m taking you with me.”
Olive chewed her bottom lip. “Eli …”
I didn’t wait around. I crossed the room and opened the door.
I’d expected to step into an unlit corridor, a claustrophobic place where all the doors remained shut and unapproachable, and we would have to listen out for the sound of gushing water. But instead, we stepped into what looked like a theater auditorium.
We were in the stalls, tiers of empty velvet-cushioned seats stretching endlessly upwards as far as I could see. To our left was the stage, heavy gold-tasseled curtains pulled closed, spotlights aimed towards the center. As I watched, a spotlight clicked to life and a golden circle lit up the curtains.
The door closed behind us.
A voice said, “Please take your seats. The performance will begin in two minutes.”
“Where are we?” whispered Olive.
“The theater,” I said.
















Chapter 26

We took our seats in the middle of the stalls—I was too scared to sit in the front row in case a clown came out and cream-pied us, which was stupid, I guessed, after everything else we’d experienced.
I felt Olive trembling beside me, so I held her hand which felt like ice. “It’s alright. I’m right here.”
She nodded, her vacant eyes on the curtains.
When they slid back, I gasped.
“What is it? Olive asked. “What’s happened?”
“The curtains opened,” I whispered. “Do you want me to tell you what I can see?”
She didn’t answer.
A boy stepped onto the stage and bowed at the audience, which was us. He looked like Jonah, but at the same time, he didn’t look like Jonah when I stared closely at his face. A ball rolled onto the stage from the wings, and he bent and picked it up.
The narrator spoke from behind the stage.
“There once was a boy who loved to play football. He showed great potential at all sports and his parents, afraid that they wouldn’t spot his true talent, encouraged him to try every game they could think of. But football was his first love and he played for the school team until, in high school, he was chosen to be captain.”
While the narrator spoke, the boy mimed playing football on the stage, acting like he was in a huddle and backing up to throw the ball or tucking it under one arm and running doing spins around invisible players. I’d seen Jonah do that so many times. He always laughed at me when we would toss the football around because I could never keep it in my grasp.
“The boy was offered a scholarship at an Ivy League college. It seemed that his path was paved with gold. Everyone adored him. His little brother followed him around as though he were a shining light and the world would stop turning without him to light the way, and the boy was happy.”
The boy on the stage faced us and smiled and something in my chest cracked open, like my heart was trying to explode.
“The boy was popular. The more popular he became, the more difficult he found it to slip away and make time for the people he loved. He still loved to play football, but now there were other things that he was expected to do, things that he didn’t always feel comfortable with. One day, he hung around the football field at school long after everyone else had left, doing drills all alone, connecting with the sport the way he had when he was younger, and there was no pressure on him. He was about to leave when he noticed that he had an audience in the bleachers. A little girl was watching him.”
Olive gasped and her hand jolted in mine.
“What?” I whispered. “What’s wrong?” So far, this story had been all for me and I didn’t understand Olive’s reaction.
“Where’s the girl?” she hissed.
“I …” I craned my neck. “I can’t see her.” Then another spotlight was trained on the back of the stage, behind the boy with the ball, and I saw a little girl sitting on a bench that had been designed to represent the bleachers at the field. I recognized her face instantly from the face behind the window in the burning building.
“She didn’t speak to the boy,” the narrator continued. “And when he walked back to the changing rooms, she was gone. For a while, the boy forgot all about the little girl, until one day he was parked outside the mall when he glanced up and saw her peering at him through the window of a apartment building.”
On the stage, the spotlight shifted, revealing the girl’s face behind a window frame. The boy gazed up at her, a hand shielding his eyes.
“The boy began to notice the girl wherever he went. At the park, she would be hiding behind a tree. In school, she sometimes appeared at the end of the hallway, but disappeared before he could reach her. One time, he opened the closet in his bedroom at home and she peeped at him from behind his clothes and said, ‘Boo!’ The boy grew accustomed to seeking out the girl wherever he went, until he felt wary when she hadn’t appeared to him for a few days. He had yet to learn her name, but he felt drawn to her, in a way that he could not remember being drawn to anyone else apart from perhaps his little brother.”
“Is she there?” asked Olive. “Can you see Queenie?” She was still staring at the stage, dry-eyed, only now her eyes were flitting around, tiny fragile movements as though she were desperate to see her sister.
“I can see her,” I whispered, cupping both hands around hers.
“What’s she doing?” Olive asked. “Is she crying?”
I watched the face of the girl on the stage who was still studying the boy. “No, she’s not sad. She looks as though she’s waiting to be found.”
Olive let out a strange sound. “She is waiting to be found. She’s waiting for me to find her!” She stood up and yelled, “I’m coming, Queenie. Wait there.” She stepped forward and almost toppled headfirst over the seat in front of her. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and helped her back into her seat.
“One day,” said the narrator, “the girl plucked up the courage to speak to the boy. She asked him why he chose bad friends when he didn’t need them. The boy was speechless at first—he had known his friends his entire life, and he did not consider them to be bad people. But when he thought about what the girl was asking him, he realized that she meant his friends were bad for him. They were dragging him into situations that made him feel uncomfortable. Until now, he’d ignored the nagging doubts in his head, but the girl had provided him with clarity. ‘Who are you?’ he asked her.”
‘Queenie,’ I mouthed.
“The girl didn’t tell the boy her name. She asked him to play with her. The boy said that he was busy but that he would play with her later in the day, as he had some stuff he needed to sort first, and the girl said that it was okay, she would wait for him.”
On the stage, the boy raised a hand and waved to the girl who vanished when the spotlight cut. He sat on the bench and pretended to be driving, his hands gripping an invisible steering wheel and turning this way and that while he leaned left and right as if driving around corners.
My heart beat faster, and my cheeks grew hot.
“What?” asked Olive. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” I whispered. “He’s driving.”
“And the girl?”
“She’s gone.”
Suddenly, a building appeared at the back of the stage, flames licking the walls. Screams rang out through the theater, and Olive gripped my hand so tightly, my fingers felt numb. The boy who was still holding the invisible steering wheel, peered to his right, his mouth wide open, as a crashing sound filled the auditorium, and Olive and I instinctively jumped, our hands covering our heads.
Screams echoed all around us. A police siren sounded, and there were voices, panicking, yelling. Other calmer voices. A dog barking.
“Don’t move them.”
“Wait for the fire department.”
“Stand aside. We’re paramedics.”
“Anyone inside?”
“My sons …”
“My daughters …”
The spotlights cut and the sounds stopped as suddenly as they had started.
The silence was so complete, the voices still echoed inside my skull, the flames still flickering behind my eyes. Slowly, I moved my hands from my head and peered around the theater waiting for my eyes to adjust. The curtains had pulled across the stage as if they’d never moved at all. The seats remained empty. Olive and I were the only ones there.
For a long time, I sat there, staring at the spot on the stage where the boy had been, replaying the scene in my head. There had been a car crash. Jonah had swerved to avoid an old man and his dog, but another car had been coming in the opposite direction. It was bad. They’d had to cut us out of the vehicle. I saw it now. Flashes of pain. Voices. My leg. The pain was so intense that that my brain had shut down because it was the only way to cope with it.
And Jonah. His injuries were worse. He took the full brunt of the impact. My eyes had flickered open, and I’d seen him, only it didn’t even look like him, not how he was supposed to look.
Tears streamed down my cheeks and I didn’t wipe them away. The pain was still there—not in my leg, but in my heart. I hadn’t lost Jonah when the rowboat vanished on the river, I’d already lost him in the car the day of the accident.
I sobbed. I sobbed until my ribs felt like they would crack with the weight of my broken heart, and even when my shoulders stopped juddering, the tears kept flowing. My leg was trapped in the wreckage of the car. The paramedics had saved me, just not my leg.
They’d saved me.
Beside me, Olive whimpered. I stared at her, but I couldn’t see anything. The theater had been dark when we first came in, but now the darkness was surreal—I couldn’t see my own hands in front of my face, and when I touched my nose with my fingertips, it felt like someone else was touching it, the blackness was so complete.
“Olive?” I whispered. “Olive? Are you still there?”
Nothing.
“Olive?” I was growing frantic now. I waved my hands around in front of me and touched nothing, because it was all gone.












Chapter 27

Mom leaned against the kitchen counter waiting for me. The fine lines across her forehead had smoothed out a little now, but the light behind her eyes would probably never be the same as it was before the accident. She’d curled her hair this morning and now it caught the sunshine from the window, parts of it glimmering over her shoulders. She smiled when I walked in, pretending not to watch too closely.
“Are you sure about this, Eli?” she asked.
I climbed onto the barstool and returned her smile. “Yes, Mom. I’m sure. I can’t stay home forever.”
I blinked and looked away before I could see the tears welling in her eyes. Words like ‘forever’ and ‘future’ and ‘graduation’, the kind of words regular people said aloud without thinking, had become heartbreak-triggers, causing tears to spill in a beat. Life without Jonah would never be the same for any of us, but it was still life, and the seconds still ticked by, and the sun still rose in the mornings.
I swallowed. I could smell the blueberry pancakes Mom had made specially for breakfast. The coffee machine was on, and there were two plates on the counter even though we both knew she wouldn’t touch her food. Her collarbones protruded above the neckline of her dress and she’d cinched the belt in tight around her waist to stop it sagging, but even though she saw me eyeing it up, we would both pretend I hadn’t noticed. Maybe one day I would say something. But not now. Not today.
Today was my first day back at school.
Mom was giving me a ride. Dad had offered, but she’d told him there was no point her staying at home worrying about me, so she might as well be the one to make sure I arrived safely. What she meant was, she wanted to see with her own eyes that I could go into school like a normal kid despite my crutches.
It had taken some getting used to. I still had some pain, but not normal pain. Dr Devine calls it phantom pain. There are times where I can still feel my toes or lower leg. Times it feels like it is on fire, other times where it itches. I've gone through months of physical therapy, mastered my crutches and soon will be getting a prosthetic. I’d stopped wishing I hadn’t lost my leg a while back and started being grateful that I was still alive and soon be able to walk without crutches, even if I would always have a limp. I was never the sporty one anyway.
I swallowed again and turned away from Mom as she set the plate in front of me. I would force the pancakes down and smile at her whenever she glanced at me.
I hadn’t seen my friends since before the accident. Mom said that my best friend Dane came to visit me in hospital when I was in the coma, sat there for hours talking about school, and playing on his handheld. One time, Dane even thought he’d seen my eyelids flicker, but when the doctors checked, there was no change in my condition. They called it a condition, like my batteries needed changing, or my engine needed a top-up. I asked her if she was scared that I would never wake up, and she said she always knew I was still there. I just needed a rest.
I didn’t know how the kids in school would react to my leg, you know, not being there anymore. They’d been told. Mom and Dad had been to see the principal, and he’d said that they would try their best to keep things as normal as possible for me, so I didn’t feel different.
The thing was—I was different.
Not because of my leg. I felt it every second of every day, but even I knew that would pass in time. It was like the time I fractured my wrist on the trampoline. For a while, I couldn’t even draw a basic cartoon character and some days I wanted to scream when I couldn’t hold a pencil, but it heals, and the mind closes a lid on the memories so that new ones can be made. No, I felt different because I’d lost my brother, the person I looked up to more than anyone else in the world. Even more than my dad.
I felt Mom’s hand on my shoulder. “Eli, you don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to.”
I smiled at her. “It’s fine, Mom, really. It’s delicious.” To prove a point, I scooped another forkful into my mouth and chewed, knowing it would struggle to go down.
“I’m ready when you are,” she said.

We pulled into a bay in the school parking lot. I saw Dane climbing out of his mom’s car, bookbag slung over his shoulder. He glanced around at the other cars until he spotted me in my mom’s passenger seat and raised a hand to wave. He must’ve been expecting me.
I picked up my bag and went to open the door.
“Eli.” My mom chewed her bottom lip and went to say something but must’ve thought better of it. “Have a good day. Remember I'll be picking you up to take you to get the fitting done for your prosthetic.”
“I will, Mom.” I couldn't wait to be able to walk without crutches. Dr. Skagan at Shriners hospital was confident he could get me up and walking on a prosthetic in no time, as long as I put the work in and didn't get discouraged right away.
I climbed out of the car and closed the door. She didn’t pull away and I guessed she would sit there until I was inside the school building and there was no possibility of me changing my mind. I walked towards Luke. I was concentrating hard on where crutches landed on the uneven pavement, that I almost fell forward on the sidewalk. Adjusting position of crutches to rebalance so I didn't fall. Please don’t ask if I’m okay, I thought. Please don’t ask.
But Dane came over grinning. “Thought you was never coming back,” he said. “I’ve got this cool new game. You want to hang out after school?”
I nodded and reached into my bag for my Nintendo Switch. “Can't after school, getting fitted for my prosthetic, but lucky I brought this, we can play at lunch.”
Dane chatted as we approached the steps leading into school. A few kids smiled at us, and Scott who was in my art class came over and said, “Good to see you back, dude.”
Inside, the school was exactly how I remembered it. The long hallways with the polished floor, scuffed along the middle from the heavy traffic of shuffling footsteps. The smell of the cafeteria which always made me think of stale biscuits. The principal standing inside the entrance. “Good to see you back, Eli,” he said. “Drop into my office for a chat at some point.” And then just like that, he turned around and spoke to someone else.
If my mom could’ve wrapped me in a cocoon and rolled me along the hallways with a protective barrier around me, she would have, and she would probably have cried at the kids jostling along behind us, some heading in the wrong direction, and others waiting for their mates to catch up. There was even the occasional joker trying to trip someone up. But it made me breathe again, this normality. No one looked at my crutches No one deliberately avoided looking at my missing leg. I was just Eli.
In homeroom, Ms. Fossa had decorated the back of the room with a banner that read:

WELCOME BACK ELI

She stepped forward and surprised me by giving me a hug. “Good to see you back. We’ve missed your artwork brightening up the walls.”
I took my seat beside Dane and grinned at Ms. Fossa.
It was difficult concentrating in lessons, as though my brain was still half-asleep, but if the teachers had expected me to jump straight back in feet first (or would it be foot first in my case?) and with all the answers, they hid it well behind a wall of patience. I felt as though I were wading through marshmallow fluff or a tsunami. Each time I felt myself getting to grips with a topic, I lost it again, my brain sliding backwards down a slippery slope to blank pages.
So, I spent the entire day waiting for my art class, last double period. I was excited when I arrived outside the room, my heart flapping like there was a butterfly trapped inside. I went to reach for the door handle when the door opened for me.
Mrs. Weston stood there smiling. “Eli! Welcome back. Come in.” She waved a hand at me and gestured me inside. “You’ve been missed,” she said, “but I bet you’ve been hearing that all day.”
I nodded. “Good to be back, Mrs. Weston,” I said. I smelled drying paint, and chalk, and pencils, and felt the itch in my right hand of wanting to take a sheet of paper and create a picture from scratch.
There was a tapping sound behind me, different than the clinking of my crutches, and I turned to find a girl walking towards us wearing dark glasses and feeling her way with a walking stick. She wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt buttoned up to her neck, but above the collar I saw a shiny pink scar about the size of a dime on the right side of her chin. There were more scars on her hands too. She kept stepping carefully, and tapping with her stick, until it missed my sneaker and caught the side of my crutches with a dull thud.
The girl hesitated, the stick raised above the floor, and her mouth opened as if she were about to say something.
“Eli, this is Olive,” said Mrs. Weston. “She transferred to the area recently while you … while you were away. I would love for you two to spend some time together and maybe even collaborate on a project next semester. Olive has quite the imagination too.”
I studied the girl’s face. She looked familiar, but my sluggish brain couldn’t quite piece together where I knew her from. “Hello, Olive,” I said.
“Hi.” Olive gave me a brief wave.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Olive,” said Mrs. Weston. “Great work today.”
I watched the girl leave the room and listened to the sound of her stick tapping along the hallway. I turned to Mrs. Weston. “I won’t be a moment. I just need to speak to Olive.” Dashing out of the art room as fast as I could on crutches, I managed to catch up with the girl.
She must’ve heard the clinking of my crutches because she stopped and turned to face me.
“Sorry, Olive,” I said, my heart racing inexplicably. “Have we met before?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Did …” I took a deep breath and blurted it out. “Did you know my brother Jonah?”
I had to confront the thought some time. I would bump into Jonah’s friends, and his girlfriend, and football coach, and there would be awkward conversations while they thought of what to say. And I might feel like he was a shadow attached to my feet, but that was okay too. He would always be a part of me. He would always be my brother.
She hesitated for a beat too long. “No.”
“Okay.” I shook the thought from my head. “My mistake, sorry. It’s just … you look so familiar.”
She shrugged. “It’s okay.”
I turned and walked back to Mrs. Weston’s class. I sensed Olive watching me, but my head was aching trying to snatch hold of the image in my head of us having met before.
“Eli!” she called.
I stopped and peered at her over my shoulder. She was smiling at me now, and the smile made my chest swell with something, joy, hope, something I couldn’t put my finger on.
“Thank you,” she said.

THE END