Contagion (Toxic City)(16)

“Oh, Andrew,” she said. The tears came at last because she knew he was gone. He echoed to her now, but there was no future for them.

“Quickly,” he said, moving backwards, pointing south. “I'll tell you while you walk.”

He made her feel safe. She wasn't sure why. He'd seen off the ape-like people, true, but he was hardly there at all. Perhaps it was simply the fact that she no longer felt alone.

“I ran,” Andrew said. “After I found Mum and Dad dead in the hotel room I left and ran, as fast as I could, directionless. The streets were filled with bodies back then, so soon after it had happened. And sometimes other people. But most were so scared, so shocked, so alone, that they hid. So I just ran, and I was already dying. Whatever killed everyone else seemed to be acting much slower on me. I didn't know why. I felt myself fading. My strength was filtering away. I fell, and I dreamed myself alive again.”

“So you dream, too,” Lucy-Anne said, but she should not have been surprised.

“I dreamed of a folly on the hill, and knew what was happening. So I ran on until I found it, and then let everything take its course.”

Lucy-Anne reached into her jacket and shirt and brought out the chain and signet ring given to her by Nomad. Andrew's chain, his ring.

“I showed Nomad where to find me,” he said.

“You…”

“I laid down and died,” he said. “Leaning against a wall, still dreaming about not dying, because even as I felt myself closing down…my heart stopping, my senses fading…I was always thinking of you. My poor little sis left all on her own.”

“You made yourself a ghost.”

“Whatever I am is because of my dreams.”

“So, all this time?”

“I've been waiting. But don't be sad for me. It's different for me now.”

They left the industrial area behind and moved into residential streets again, countless houses now home only to dried bodies and memories. Lucy-Anne walked with another memory. And even though she knew, the wrench of loss was going to hurt all over again.

“I dream,” she said. “And I'm always scared.”

“Things change,” Andrew said. “Dreams are weird things, the ones we have even more so. I came to learn that they're like movies that never run the same way twice.”

“Movies you can control yourself?” she asked.

“Sometimes you're the director, yes,” he said. “But that never lasts.”

“I don't understand.” She thought of Rook falling into that pit, her dreaming the events again in time to warn him, thinking she'd saved him from that fate. Then he'd fallen again, and the same terrible death had come to claim him.

“I tried so many times when I was your age,” he said. “But changing things in your dreams only bleeds over into reality a little, and those bleeds are soon cleared up.”

“What are we going to do?” she said, hopelessness washing over her. “What am I going to do?”

“Survive,” Andrew said. “You're why I'm still here like this. It's difficult. And once you're safe, I can stop dreaming at last.”

Survive…stop dreaming… Her brother was a ghost, and Lucy-Anne remembered walking across that strange landscape on London's outskirts, the place where countless bodies had been buried, and knowing that beneath her feet lay her mother and father. The certainty had been shocking, but she'd known it was true because she had already dreamt it. Her life now was starting to feel like one long dream. Her imagination had always taken her to strange places, and sometimes she'd found it teasing her when she could not recall whether a memory was a dream, or vice versa. Many times through her childhood she'd remembered going somewhere with her family that no one else recalled, or believed an event was a dream when her parents and Andrew had very clear memories of it. She'd never thought anything of it. It had felt natural. It was ironic that now she was starting to understand herself and how she dreamed, it felt more alien than ever.

“I'm exhausted,” she said. “I can't run forever. I need to…I have to…” To dream, she thought. As she pulled away from Andrew and her surroundings, she could not be certain whether she was falling asleep, or waking up.

People cry out. Flames roar. Someone is wailing as they stagger back and forth across the road, grasping at guts drooping from a terrible wound in their stomach. Their features and hair are burnt away, but Lucy-Anne recognises the clothes.