He opened his eyes and it was still dark.
Not the dark of his bedroom. That dark was soft. The lamp on the timer made it softer. This dark was thick and close and smelled of dust and old paper. He blinked. Nothing changed. He blinked again. Nothing.
His neck hurt. His shoulder hurt. He was on the floor. The floor was freezing through his jumper — smooth and hard. Linoleum. He could feel the ridge where two tiles met, pressed into his back. He'd been there a long time. His mouth was dry and tasted sour. He swallowed and it stung. His glasses were digging into the side of his face, one arm bent wrong. He pushed them back into place.
Shapes. Shelves. Paper stacked on the shelves. A thin grey line at the bottom of a door.
The storage room. The one behind the English classroom. Mrs. Calloway sent him here once for construction paper. Red and yellow and blue. For a project about planets. Jupiter was too orange. He remembered the smell. He was in the storage room.
Why am I in the storage room?
He tried to remember. Pieces came back, but they wouldn't line up.
The English lesson. Mr. Alderman. The wet sound of his finger on the newspaper. The radiator ticking. Maya writing. Benny saying something about chickens. Michael saying cows. Cows are calm. Maya had said it back to him.
He'd been writing about Lennie. Two sentences. He couldn't think of a third. He was so tired.
The argument. The kitchen. His mum's face. The thing he'd said.
Jamie. The bus stop woman. Jamie's hand on his shoulder.
Mr. MacAllister on the floor. Blood from his mouth.
Mrs. Calloway screaming. Then stopping.
Break. Maya holding his sleeve.
He put his head down. The radiator was warm. Just until the bell.
And now the floor. The dark. The gap between then and now was smooth and blank. He'd fallen asleep and something had happened and he didn't know what.
He looked at the light under the door. Grey. The same grey as the morning. But different now. Lower. The shadow stretched further across the floor. Late-afternoon light. The kind you got when the sun started dropping and the shadows got long. But that couldn't be right. That would mean he'd been asleep for hours. The whole school day. That couldn't be right.
He put his ear to the door. Nothing. No radiator ticking. No lights humming. No footsteps. No voices. No announcements on the intercom. No chairs scraping. No doors closing. No one coughing. No one laughing.
The school was never quiet. He knew the sounds of this place. He'd been here since he was seven. There was always something — someone walking, someone talking, the pipes in the walls, the boiler in the basement. Always.
Now there was nothing.
The quiet made his stomach hurt. He wanted to call out — to say hello, to say is anyone there — but the words wouldn't come. Something in him didn't want to break the silence. Something in him was already scared.
He pushed the door open.
---
The classroom was a mess.
He stood in the doorway and couldn't move. Papers everywhere. Worksheets and pages torn from books. A pencil case tipped over near the door, pens and a ruler and a sharpener spilled across the linoleum. A little eraser shaped like a panda. Someone had stepped on it. There was a shoe mark on its head.
The desks were knocked over. Chairs on their sides. One desk was upside down, its legs pointing at the ceiling. Another had been shoved against the bookshelf — hard, by the look of it. The bookshelf had fallen forward. All the Of Mice and Men copies lay scattered across the floor, pages bent, covers torn. The books they'd been reading an hour ago. On the floor. Someone had walked on them.
The Shakespeare poster hung by one corner, curling up. The sentence diagram was gone. Just a scrap of tape left on the wall.
The curtains were drawn. But there was glass on the floor — small pieces catching the pale light. And a draft, cold on his face. Coming from somewhere behind the curtains. The window was broken. He couldn't see it but he could feel the air.
The radiator stood silent and dead. He touched it. No warmth at all. It had been ticking all morning, hot against his side. Now it was like touching stone. It had been cold for hours.
Everything was wrong. Everything was broken. Everything was on the floor.
He looked at the clock above the door.
4:17.
The hands were still moving. Battery-powered. The power must have gone out but the clock didn't care. It had kept ticking while he slept.
He stared at the hands. The last time he checked it was — what — half eleven? Quarter to twelve? The English lesson. He put his head down. Just until the bell.
That wasn't a minute. That was more than four hours. The whole afternoon. Lunch. Afternoon lessons. The final bell. He'd slept through all of it. The bells rang and he didn't hear them. Everyone packed up and left and he didn't move. No one woke him. No one shook his shoulder. No one said Owen, come on, school's over, time to go.
Or they tried. Or something else happened.
Mum's shift ended at four. She'd be here by now. Outside in the car, in the pick-up lane, engine running. She always waited. Even when he was late — even when he stopped to scratch Arthur behind the ears and lost track of time — she waited. She'd be there now. Watching the doors. Checking her watch. Wondering where he was. Maybe getting out of the car. Maybe walking toward the main entrance to look for him.
He had to go. He had to get outside. She was waiting.
But the classroom. The desks on their sides. The books on the floor. The broken window. The glass. Someone had been running. Someone had been screaming — he didn't know how he knew that, but the thought was there, sitting in his head. The room looked like people had been trying to get out. Or trying to stop something from coming in.
Mum was outside. Mum was waiting. And the room was destroyed. Those two things didn't go together. He couldn't make them go together.
Except his desk.
His desk was still there. Still in its place. Still upright. His exercise book open to the page he'd been writing. His pen on the floor beside it. His backpack hanging from the back of the chair. The little wolf on the zip — Jamie's wolf, three Christmases ago, the tail broken off — catching the light.
Everything around his desk was wrecked. But his desk was fine. Like the chaos had parted around it. Like someone had left it for him.
He walked over. Paper crunched under his shoes. He picked up his backpack. The wolf was cool against his fingers. He put the backpack on. The straps were too loose. He didn't fix them. He didn't have time. She was waiting.
Maya's desk was tipped over. Her chair on its side. Her exercise book closed on the floor, her name on the cover. Maya Okonkwo. Neat letters, each one perfect. Her pen was still on the desk. She hadn't put the lid back on. Maya always put the lid back on.
Benny's desk was upright. His pen still there. His paragraph one sentence. Lennie is lonely because no one understands him except George. The jagged line where his pen had slipped.
Michael's chair on its side. Nothing on his desk. Michael's hands had been shaking all morning and he'd pressed them flat against the wood to stop them. Owen looked for a mark. There wasn't one.
They were gone. All of them. He was the only one here.
Where did they go? Why didn't they wake me?
He walked to the front of the room. Glass crunched under his shoes. Small pieces. He stepped over a fallen book.
Mr. Alderman's desk. His newspaper still open. The coffee cup stone cold, brown stuff dried at the bottom. Mr. Alderman's chair pushed back. Like he'd stood up fast and not pushed it in. Like he'd left in a rush.
And a piece of paper.
Torn from an exercise book — the edge rough. Sitting in the middle of the desk, on top of the newspaper. Like someone had put it there on purpose. Like someone wanted him to see it.
His name was written at the top. Owen.
He picked it up.
Owen,
When you wake up, please go home and...
I love you
Maya
He read it. He read it again.
When you wake up. She knew he'd wake up. She knew he was asleep and she knew he'd be alone when he woke up and she wrote this for him. While everything was happening — while the room was getting destroyed, while people were running — Maya stopped and wrote him a note.
Please go home. Telling him what he already knew. Go home. Get to Mum. That's where he was going. That's where he was always going. But she'd written it anyway. Like she wanted to make sure.
And... The word just stopped. Space after it. Like she was going to say something else and then didn't. Or couldn't. Or changed her mind. Wait for me. I'll find you. Don't come looking.
I love you. Smaller than the other words. Squashed up at the end. Like she'd written it fast before she could stop herself. A little blot of ink after the you. Like she'd held the pen there, thinking about what she'd just written.
Maya. She'd signed it. She wanted him to know.
Maya wrote I love you. Maya, who sat next to him. Maya, who held his sleeve at break. Maya, who said he noticed things about people. Maya, who asked to come over after school.
His face went hot. Why would she write that? Why now? What happened that made her need to say it? He read the words again and his stomach hurt. A good hurt and a bad hurt at the same time. He didn't know what to do with it.
There was blood on the corner of the page. A fingerprint. Her thumb. Brownish red. Dried. She'd held the paper down while she wrote and her hand was bleeding. He remembered — she'd been coughing all morning. Coughing into her palm. When she took her hand away there was blood. She'd look at it and wipe it on her skirt. She didn't say anything. Just kept writing about Curley's wife.
She was sick. She was coughing up blood. And she still dragged him into the storage room. And she still wrote him a note.
He folded the paper. Carefully. Once. Twice. Small enough to fit in his hand. He put it in the front pocket of his backpack. The pocket with his notebook. His drawings. The birds. Arthur the cat. Now Maya's note was in there too. That felt right. He didn't know why.
He had to go. She was waiting. He'd been standing here too long. She'd be checking her watch. She might come inside. She might see the corridor. She might see whatever made the room look like this.
He closed his eyes for a second.
And he remembered things. Fragments. Pieces. Like sounds from a dream that hadn't finished fading.
A door slamming. Not this door. Somewhere else. The sound had cut through everything.
Voices. Shouting. Kids and grown-ups. Someone screaming. A real scream.
Running. Feet on the floor. Fast. Someone knocked something over. Metal.
Mrs. Kimura on the intercom. Her voice high and scared. Trying to say something and not finishing. Then screaming. And the scream changing. Becoming something like a gurgling sound. Then the intercom going dead. Just a hum. Then nothing.
More screaming. A girl shouting Liam! Liam! Over and over. A boy shouting Ryan! Someone crying. Mummy. Mummy, I want my mummy. The voice stopping. Not fading. Stopping.
Someone shaking him. Maya. Owen. Owen, wake up. Please. He couldn't wake up. He was too tired. She was shaking him and he couldn't move.
Other voices. Leave him. You'll get yourself killed. And Maya: No. He's my friend. I'm not leaving him.
Being pulled. His body heavy. His shoes scraping. Someone small. Someone coughing. Stopping. Starting again.
A door closing. Click. Dark.
He opened his eyes. The room was still empty. Still silent. The light still pale and gold. The draft still cold on his neck.
Was any of that real?
The sounds in his head — the screaming, the running, Mrs. Kimura — had he dreamed that? He'd been half-asleep. Maybe his brain had twisted ordinary noises into something worse. A door slamming could just be a door. Someone in a hurry. It didn't have to mean something bad.
But the room was real. The overturned desks. The broken window. Maya's note. The blood on the page. That hadn't been a dream.
Something happened. Something bad. But maybe it was just a drill. A fire drill. People knock things over in fire drills. Everyone goes outside and stands by the fence. Maybe the intercom broke. Maybe that's why her voice sounded wrong. Maybe she wasn't screaming.
Mum's in the car. She's waiting. I just have to get out there.
The note said go home. That was the same thing. Mum was outside. He had to get to the car.
Unless she wasn't there. Unless something had happened to her.
He pushed that thought down. As far down as it would go. She was there. She was in the car. She was waiting. She was always waiting. He'd get outside and she'd be there with the engine running and she'd see him and smile the way she always smiled and say there you are, everything would be fine.
He needed to get to the car.
He walked to the classroom door. His legs felt strange under him. His chest was heavy. The note sat in his pocket. The wolf rested against his hip. The clock ticked on the wall. She was waiting. She'd been waiting so long. He'd never been this late.
He opened the door.
---
The door opened a few inches and stopped.
Something solid on the other side. He pushed harder. A scraping sound — wood grinding on linoleum, a pitch that made his teeth ache. He put his shoulder against the door the way Jamie did with the sticky bathroom door at home and shoved. The gap widened. He could see the corridor now — a slice of darkness, the lights dead, the air cold — and the edge of something large wedged against the doorframe.
A desk. The heavy one from outside Mrs. Calloway's room, the one with the chipped corner and the old gum stuck underneath. Someone had dragged it across the corridor and braced it against the door at an angle, its weight jammed under the handle.
Why is there a desk behind this door? Who put that there?
He squeezed through the gap. His backpack caught on the door handle. He yanked it free. The wolf clinked against the metal. His glasses slipped — caught on the strap, the arm hooking — and then they were falling. He grabbed for them. Too slow. They hit the linoleum with a small clatter, and he stepped forward to catch his balance, and his foot came down on something hard that crunched.
He froze.
Looked down. In the dim light, he could see the frames. One arm bent the wrong way. One lens cracked across the centre, a spiderweb of fractures. The other lens had popped out entirely.
No. No, no, no.
He crouched and picked them up. The frames sat wrong in his hands — lopsided, sharp at the edge where the plastic had splintered. He tried to put them on. The cracked lens made the world a shattered kaleidoscope. The missing lens was just a hole. He took them off again.
They're broken. I broke them.
His chest was getting tight for a different reason now. He needed his glasses. He couldn't see without them. The corridor was becoming a dark blur. The exit sign was a green smear. How was he supposed to get home if he couldn't see?
Spare pair. In my room. On the nightstand. I just have to get home.
He left the broken glasses on the floor. They were useless now. He just had to get home. Mum was waiting. The spare pair was on his nightstand. He'd put them on and everything would be clear again.
He stood in the corridor. The world was a watercolour — shapes bleeding into shadows, edges dissolving into haze. The lockers were long dark smudges. The floor was a flat expanse of nothing.
And it was so quiet.
---
The cold hit him. A deeper cold than the classroom, seeping through the walls from the broken windows and the open doors. His breath came in thin white puffs. The heating had been dead since morning. The building was freezing around him, pipes contracting, walls giving up their warmth. The cold had a smell — damp plaster, frosted metal, something faint and mineral. And underneath it, something else. Something sweet and coppery and wrong. Like the smell of the bin when it needed emptying, but worse. Much worse.
What is that smell? Don't think about it. Just go.
The silence pressed in from all sides. He could hear his own breathing. The rustle of his jumper when he moved. His heart, a soft steady thud in the back of his throat. Every small sound he made was swallowed and returned by the dark.
He looked down the corridor toward the gym. His vision blurred the distance into a wash of shadow. But something moved. A glint of metal — a chain, catching the last light from the windows. And something else. Small pale shapes pressing against the darkness of the gym doors. Hands. They were hands. His stomach dropped before his brain understood why. The hands were small. They were pressing against the glass. They were —
Stop. Stop looking. Just go.
His chest was getting tight. The thing that happened when the world got too big. Too much space. Too much quiet. Too much wrong. He could feel it starting — the shortness of breath, the way the corridor seemed to stretch and narrow at the same time, the way the walls felt closer than they were. The hands on the glass. The chain. The cold. The dark. The smell. The broken glasses in his hands that weren't in his hands anymore, he'd left them on the floor, he was blind, he was alone, he needed —
The Walkman.
His backpack. The front pocket. His fingers were cold and clumsy but they found the zip. Past the notebook. Past Maya's folded note. The cool plastic of the Walkman. Jamie's old one. Scuffed. The play button worn smooth from years of being pressed. The headphone jack loose. He pulled it out. The headphones went on — the foam pads pressing against his ears, a pressure he could control, a sensation that belonged to him.
He hesitated. The headphones would block everything. The silence, yes. But also footsteps. Voices. Anything that might be coming. He wouldn't hear it. He'd be deaf and blind at the same time.
But if I don't put them on, I'm going to fall apart right here. I can't breathe. I can't think. I need it to stop being so quiet.
He slotted the tape in. Pressed play.
The hiss. The click of the mechanism engaging.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡrvVNdxFzVP
9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡSJP4lOPkXH
Then the guitars. Soft, then building. "And I'd give up forever to touch you..."
"Iris." The song from the kitchen this morning. The song that was playing when his mum was drinking water from the tap, when Jamie was stealing his duvet, when Dad was frowning at the television. The kitchen was warm. The kitchen smelled of bacon. The kitchen was a hundred years ago.
He turned it up. The drums kicked in. The voice filled his head — high and aching, filling every space where the silence had been. His shoulders dropped. His jaw unclenched. His breathing slowed. The corridor was still wrong. The wrongness was still there. But it was further away now. Muffled. Manageable. The music was a wall between him and the dark.
He started walking.
Don't look. Just walk. The exit's ahead.
---
The floor felt wrong under his shoes. Sticky in places. Don't look down. Keep going.
The blood stretched from the lockers to the centre of the corridor. A wide dark stain — almost black in the dim light, spreading outward from a point near the wall. A body had lain there. A body had bled there long enough to leave a mark that size. And then the body had got up. The drag marks led from the pool — not footprints, not yet, just the smeared evidence of something heavy pulling itself across the linoleum, the blood feathering at the edges where it dried as it moved. Further down, the footprints began. Small ones. A child's trainers. The pattern of the sole printed in dried blood, step after step, leading around the corner toward the gym.
Handprints on the lockers. Small hands. Child-sized. Pressed against the metal at shoulder height, the fingers leaving streaks where they'd slipped. Someone had fallen. Someone had pushed themselves up. Someone had crawled.
Owen walked past. His vision turned the blood into shadow, turned the handprints into smudges on the metal. It's paint. Or mud. Something spilled. Not blood. It can't be blood. His shoes left prints of their own on the clean patches of linoleum between the stains.
The alcove near the water fountain.
She was in there.
A girl. Year 6 maybe. Her school jumper was the same grey as his, the sleeves too long, the cuffs stiff and dark with dried blood. Her hair hung across her face in lank curtains. She was crouched on the floor. Her back rose and fell with a steady, mechanical rhythm — unhurried, patient, the rhythm of a body that had been doing this for hours and would keep doing it until there was nothing left.
The custodian lay beneath her. Grey overalls. The radio on his belt still hissing static — a low crackle, the only sound in that corner of the corridor besides the feeding sounds. His mop had fallen beside him. The bucket was overturned. The water had mixed with the blood and spread across the linoleum in a pale pink tide.
His chest was open. The girl's head was down. Her shoulders moved. The sounds she made were soft and slick and private — a tearing sound, a grinding sound, the scrape of teeth on something hard. A tendon snapped. The sound was sharp and wet and final. She adjusted her grip, her fingers finding new purchase, and went back to work. The blood pooled beneath them both, still spreading, running in thin lines along the gaps between the tiles.
She was someone's daughter. Someone had braided her hair. The braid was coming undone now, the elastic loose, the strands dark with grease and blood. Someone had bought her that jumper at the start of the school year, two sizes up so she'd grow into it. She had not grown into it. The sleeves were still too long. They dragged on the floor as she ate.
Owen walked past. Ten feet away. His shoes on the linoleum. Don't look. Just walk. He didn't look to the side. He didn't see the custodian's open eyes. He didn't see the radio hissing. He didn't see the girl's face lift.
She stopped.
Her head turned. The movement was deliberate, unthinking — the movement of something that had forgotten how to hurry. Her hair parted. Her face was drained of colour, the skin drawn tight, the lips cracked and dark with old blood. Her mouth was wet. There were pieces of something between her teeth. Her eyes found Owen's back. Her head tilted.
She stood up. Her hands dripped onto the linoleum. She took a step toward him. Then another.
The radio on the custodian's belt hissed. The girl walked away from it. The hiss faded behind her. She did not look back.
Owen's shoe scuffed on a loose tile. He stumbled slightly, caught himself. For half a second, the headphone jack wobbled and the music cut and he heard — something. A wet step. A shuffle. Close. He pushed the jack back in and the guitars crashed and the sound was gone. Just the building settling. Just the pipes. Keep walking. His heart was beating too fast. He kept walking.
---
A classroom door to his left. Open.
Inside, the room was dark — curtains drawn, lights dead. A figure. An adult. He was on the floor, hunched over, his back rising and falling with the same patient rhythm as the girl in the alcove.
Mr. Hendry. Year 5. His striped tie — the one with the coffee stain from break, when he'd told Mrs. Barnes about the checkpoint — was stiff and dark. He'd been the first adult to say out loud that something was wrong. He didn't run. He didn't abandon anyone. He was still shouting Stay in your classrooms when the front entrance gave way. He was a good man.
Now he was on his knees in a dark classroom. His face was ash-coloured. His mouth was dark with blood, the jaw working in small automatic circles, chewing on nothing. His eyes were fixed on nothing.
The shape on the floor in front of him was small.
The room was too dark to see clearly. A child's trainer, white with red laces, one foot still in it. The other foot bare. A school jumper rucked up. A small hand, palm up, fingers curled. Still. The child had been crying. The tears had dried on his cheeks. He had been running. He had fallen. Mr. Hendry had been the one to find him. Or the thing that used to be Mr. Hendry.
His head lifted.
The chewing stopped. He turned toward the open door — his neck moving before his shoulders, the movement unthinking, automatic. Through the doorway, he saw the outline of a boy walking past. Headphones over his ears. The boy didn't look. The boy didn't stop. The boy was already passing, already moving toward the light at the end of the corridor.
Don't look. Don't look. Keep going.
Mr. Hendry stood up. His shoulder hit the doorframe — too hard, the wood cracking slightly. No flinch. No sound. He stepped into the corridor behind the girl. Behind Owen.
The classroom was dark again. The small hand on the floor didn't move. The trainer stayed where it was. The room was silent except for the drip of something from the desk onto the linoleum.
---
The junction where the corridor split. To the right, the lobby and the double doors of the gym.
The chain was thick. Industrial. The kind from the janitor's chemical cupboard. It had been wrapped through the door handles and pulled tight. A padlock held it shut. Someone had locked it from the outside. Someone had turned the key and walked away.
Behind the doors, the gym was full.
Bodies pressed against the wood — a constant, shifting pressure, the weight swaying as the crowd inside moved and shuffled. The doors creaked. The chain rattled. The screws holding the handle were pulling out of the wood, the metal warping, a gap widening between the door and the frame. A crack had spread across the small window from one corner to the centre. Hands pressed against the glass. Small hands. Children's hands. Bloodless and pale. They slapped and left smears. They slid down and pressed up again. The crack widened a fraction every time the weight shifted.
No one called out. No one screamed. The gym was silent except for the shuffle of feet, the thud of weight, the creak of the doors, the groan of stressed metal. Everyone inside was dead. Everyone inside was walking. The chain was not going to hold forever.
Owen passed the junction. His blurred vision caught the chain as a glint of metal, the hands as a smear of pale against the dark. Why would someone chain the doors? Stop. Don't think about it. Just walk.
He walked on.
---
The side door. The one that led to the staff car park.
Mr. Alderman was spread across the floor.
His torso lay near the door, chest-up, the tweed jacket torn open, the leather-patched elbows dark and soaked. His stomach was open. The cavity was a wet red hollow, the ribs visible through the torn muscle, the edges of the wound ragged where hands had pulled him apart. Something grey and coiled had spilled out and lay in a glistening rope across the linoleum. His intestines. They stretched from the open cavity to a point several feet away, where they disappeared under an overturned chair.
His left arm was still attached, bent at the elbow, the hand resting palm-up near his head. The fingers — the ones he'd licked to turn the pages of his newspaper — were curled inward. One of them was missing. Snapped off at the knuckle. The bone protruded, white and splintered.
His right arm was not attached. It lay against the lockers on the opposite side of the corridor, the shoulder a mess of torn ligaments and exposed bone, the hand still gripping nothing. The tweed sleeve had been peeled back to the elbow. The watch on the wrist was still ticking.
One of his legs was bent under him at an angle legs didn't bend. The other was gone at the knee. The lower portion lay further down the corridor, near the water fountain, the shoe still on the foot. The shoe was the same brown leather as the one still on his remaining foot. The sock was white. The blood had soaked through it and dried to a dark crust.
His head was intact. His glasses were gone. His eyes were open. His mouth was open. His face was bloodless and slick. There was blood in his mouth. There was blood in his hair. His expression was not terror or pain — it was surprise. The surprise of a man who had been running for his car and had discovered, in the last half-second of his life, that he was not fast enough.
The briefcase lay a few feet from his torso. The clasp was broken. Papers had spilled out — worksheets, a newspaper, a pension statement. The newspaper page was the one he'd been reading in the classroom. The corner was still damp from his finger.
The side door behind him was open. The staff car park beyond was still and silent. A brown Datsun sat near the door. The driver's door was open. The keys were still in the ignition. He'd made it outside. He'd almost reached the car. And then something in the car park — several things, by the look of it — had caught him. Had pulled him back through the door. Had torn him apart on the linoleum.
His newspaper was still on the desk in the English classroom. The coffee cup was still beside it. The coffee was still cold.
Owen walked past him. The body was a dark mass on the floor. An outline. A stain. His eyes passed over it without stopping.
The exit was ahead.
---
He pushed through the main doors.
The afternoon light hit him — pale and gold, the sun low behind the buildings, throwing long shadows across the school grounds. The air was sharp and freezing. It smelled of smoke. It smelled of something chemical, something burning, something wrong.
The pick-up lane was empty.
Mum's car wasn't there.
He stood on the steps. His vision was a wash of gold and ash and red — the cars in the lane were ghost shapes, their colours bleeding into one another. The blue Ford was a shape he couldn't find. He blinked. Squinted. The light stabbed at his eyes, made them water. Without his glasses, the brightness was too much — everything overexposed, halos around the wreckage. He shaded his eyes with his hand and looked again. The space where she always parked was just tarmac. Empty. Slate-coloured. Blurred.
She's not here.
He stared at the empty space. His chest was getting tight again. She said she'd pick him up. She always picked him up. Even when he was late. Even when he stopped to scratch Arthur behind the ears. Even after the argument. She said we'll talk about it later and she meant it. She was going to talk to him. She was going to pick him up.
But she wasn't here.
Maybe she's angry. The thing I said this morning — maybe it was worse than I thought.
Maybe she'd decided to stop picking him up. Maybe she was at home right now, waiting for him to walk, teaching him a lesson. That's what parents did sometimes. When you did something really bad, they stopped doing the nice things. They made you think about what you'd done.
But Mum doesn't do that. Even when she was angry — even when he'd really messed up — she still picked him up. She still made him dinner. She still kissed the top of his head when she thought he wasn't paying attention. She didn't leave him places. That wasn't who she was.
But the alternative —
He looked at the street. The cars stopped at strange angles. The overturned one with its wheels still turning. The glass on the tarmac. The backpack in the gutter. The shoe near the crossing. The smoke rising from somewhere further down. The helicopter thudding over the city centre. The siren that wailed and cut out. The dog barking and barking and not stopping.
Something happened here. Something really bad. This isn't normal. This isn't an accident. This is —
He pushed the thought down. As far down as it would go.
No. She's angry. That's it. She's angry and she went home and she's waiting for me. That's all. That's the only thing that makes sense.
Jamie wasn't here either. The spot near the gate where Jamie usually waited — tall, letterman jacket, hands in his pockets — was empty. But Jamie had friends. Jamie had Megan. Jamie probably went home already. Or Mum called him. Or he got a ride. That made sense. That fit.
She's angry. She's at home. I'll walk. I'll get home and she'll be in the kitchen and I'll say I'm sorry and she'll stay angry for a while and then she'll forgive me. Because she always forgives me.
He adjusted the headphones. He looked at the empty lane one more time.
She wasn't coming.
He stepped off the school steps. His foot caught the edge of a broken kerb. He stumbled, caught himself on a lamppost, the metal freezing against his palm. For a second the music wobbled — the headphone jack slipping, the world rushing back in a blast of cold silence — and behind him, close, he heard a shuffle. A wet step on tarmac. Then he pushed the jack back in and the guitars crashed and he was walking again. The world was a blur of ash and gold. He turned right, toward Cedar Avenue, toward home.
Don't look back. Just walk.
---
The boy was on the grass near the low wall.
The wall where Owen had sat with Benny and Michael and Maya at break. The wall where Maya had held his sleeve. The wall where she'd asked to come over after school. The boy was older. Fourteen, fifteen. Raccoon Central High School t-shirt — the same logo Jamie wore on his letterman jacket. He was standing. Not eating. Not moving. Just standing, swaying slightly, the way a drunk person sways, or someone listening to music only they could hear. His hands hung at his sides. One of them held a woman's handbag — a dark leather strap wrapped around his wrist, the bag dragging on the ground. His mouth was stained reddish brown, the colour faded at the edges like old paint.
At his feet, the body of a woman. Her clothes were dark and soaked. Her face was gone. A wedding ring caught the pale gold light on her left hand. A small silver chain around her wrist, nearly hidden by the blood. She'd come to pick up her child. She'd parked her car and walked toward the school and never made it to the doors.
The boy's head turned.
He saw the shape of a smaller boy — moving, headphones on — walking toward the street. His grip on the handbag tightened. His feet began to move. He left wet prints on the grass, then on the tarmac.
Owen didn't see him. The boy was a flicker at the edge of his vision. He was thinking about the spare glasses on his nightstand. He was thinking about what he'd say to Mum when he got home.
I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I'll drink the water. I promise.
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Behind him, the school doors hung open.
The girl from the alcove stepped through first. Her jumper sleeves dragging. She walked into the back of a parked car, her body hitting the metal with a soft thud. She stood there, hands pressing against the boot, her legs still moving, feet sliding on the tarmac. It took her several seconds to work her way around it.
Mr. Hendry stumbled over the kerb. Went down on one knee, rose without flinching, kept walking.
The boy from the grass made it further before an overturned bin stopped him. He walked into it, scraped it across the tarmac for several steps, then veered around it.
In the pick-up lane, the overturned car creaked. The driver — still strapped in, hanging sideways — reached through the shattered window. The glass cut his palm. He didn't notice. His hand opened and closed on nothing. The seatbelt held him.
The woman in the road — torn blouse, missing shoe, jaw hanging loose — turned her head. Her bare foot came down on broken glass. The shards ground into the sole. She took another step. The glass crunched.
Shapes emerged from the playground. The climbing frame. The low wall. Children. One of them — small, Year 3 maybe, in a Raccoon Sharks sweatshirt — clutched a red plastic truck. The wheels spun uselessly, clicking against the plastic body. The child's eyes were fixed on Owen. Its mouth was wet with something dark, the lips chapped and split. The truck clicked and clicked. The child didn't put it down.
The gym doors rattled. The crack in the window spread another inch. The chain creaked. The screws holding the handle groaned, pulling further out of the wood. The padlock held. For now.
Owen walked on. The world was a blur. A watercolour. The street stretched ahead — wrecked and burning and full of the dead. He didn't see them. He didn't hear them. The note was folded in his pocket. The wolf was cold against his hip. The spare glasses were on his nightstand. He just had to get home.
Behind him, the dead followed. They bumped into cars and tripped over kerbs and got caught on debris. Their feet dragged. Their hands reached. Owen walked with the steady pace of a boy who knew his route, who'd walked it a thousand times, who wasn't stopping. The gap between them held.
He walked. The sun was low and gold. The smoke smudged the sky. Somewhere far away, a helicopter was beating its way across the city — thud, thud, thud — like a heart that wouldn't stop. The dog barked and barked and barked.
He didn't look back.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡvEPVkswK2s
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