Chapter Thirteen

“Zombies don't act like a predator; they act like a virus, and that is the core of my terror.”

-Max Brooks, author of World War Z

Her health was falling from the HP bar to the top left of her vision. Draining out like tomato soup through a sieve, and if the trickle remained as steady as it did, Liza estimated that she had only hours left. It was likely, though, that it would drain rapidly for a little while and then begin to drain a little more slowly as her blood began to clot.

Bandages. She had the headset on, which meant that medical supplies had a fairly magical effect on her — as if she were a character in a video game.

She wanted bandages to quell the pain just as much as to staunch the flow of blood. The lower her HP fell, the more distracting the pain was.

“Oh, Eliza,” she said firmly to herself, giving herself just the slightest tinge of a Russian accent and sounding as disapproving as she could; channeling the ghost of her paternal grandmother. “What a burden you have become.”

The phrase came out as such a spot-on impression that she let out a chuckle, which devolved quickly into a cough as the pain wracked her body from the inside out.

She looked around. On a white-painted roundabout a block away from the high street, a block and a half away from a shuffling horde of undead, and a long walk from anything she could ever have called home.

Damn. Home. If she had just stayed there (after hauling out the bodies of the looters before they began to stink) and used her points to repair the door, she would never have met Blazer. She would never have been shot. She could have quietly fortified the place and gone to bed.

Liza was exhausted, and the blood she had lost was only adding to it. She was beginning to run out of adrenaline. After the adrenaline had gone, there was only pain, fear, and a fatal kind of fatigue that, in the new world, only ended in death.

She gingerly lifted up her shirt to check the dark stained patch of skin above her waistband, to her left. In the car she had twisted her body to look up at him. He probably thought he was shooting her in the abdomen, but he had just shot her hipbone. It was agony. After wailing through her teeth for long enough to check the back of the entry point, Liza determined that there was no exit wound.

There was a chunk of murder metal still inside her body.

“Fuck you, bullet,” she told her hip. At least the presence of the thing was probably doing a bit to keep her from bleeding too much, too fast.

Blazer hadn’t even had the balls to shoot her point blank in the head. He hadn’t had the guts to watch her die instantly right in front of his eyes.

Liza took a couple of steps just to test it out, and tears instantly sprang to her eyes. It was difficult, but it wasn’t impossible. She took stiff, shallow breaths and blew them out with force between her lips.

Desperate as she might have been for a fiery wreck, to watch him crash and die horribly, it seemed like he was away, free and clear. He’d gotten away with no consequences. Screw him.

Liza had thought they were getting along pretty well, too; she had been ready to accept him into their fold of survivors when she found her friends, to tell the others that he was annoying and arrogant, and couldn’t shoot for anything, but he was alright really.

That would show her.

Visions of her family flitted through her mind. Her father, shouting on the phone in Russian that she had barely bothered to learn herself. He was unstoppable. His mother, her grandmother, sitting in her dirty armchair, exuding hate. Always. Exuding. She would probably never die, either. Olga Volkov. A name like knives.

She would be posthumously disowned if she died so easily. What would they say?

Be more careful who you trust.

“In a crisis, trust no one,” her father had told her once. “Everyone is out for themselves in a world that wants them dead. And don’t believe anything else for even a second.”

“I should have listened to you more,” Liza muttered to herself as she walked, slowly, towards the menacing spikes of the cathedral in the near distance. Talking quietly gave her something to focus on; to distract herself and stay lucid. “I thought you were crazy.”

She turned a corner out of necessity, and found herself walking perpendicular from the cathedral instead of right to it, blocked by recently abandoned buildings.

She wished that she knew where all of those people were. Were they alive? Inside waiting for rescue?

The almost total lack of parked cars anywhere told her that most people had left at the first whiff of danger. Gone elsewhere to see the state of things. Most of them, presumably, to London. That was where the bulk of the help would be. The army, the police, the helicopter aid … whatever there might be.

When London was secure, they would come here. And to other tiny cities or towns — Fairacres was a town, for all intents and purposes, but it was technically labelled a city since it housed a cathedral. Rules were arbitrary, and Liza found herself unreasonably angry at the people who had made those decisions. It was better than pointlessly directing her anger at her impending demise.

And the thought she couldn’t banish: that her father would be so disappointed if she died on day one of the apocalypse.

The sun had set on the first day of the end of the world, and the cathedral was beginning to glow like a beacon in the low light. The electricity hadn’t shut off quite yet, which was good. Fairacres Cathedral was set up with white light from top to bottom, and it looked gorgeous at night.

It also made it impossible to miss.

That was where the survivors would be, she was sure of it. Certain. If she made it there, she wouldn’t be alone.

And hopefully nobody there had stupid nicknames. She refused to be friends from now on with anybody unless they had a good, proper first name.

Fucking Blazer. Fucking everything. Fucking fuck.

She gritted her teeth and leaned against a glass wall for a second to suck in a couple of breaths. “Ow,” she whispered, as if saying it out loud would help. She had read somewhere that cursing could curb pain to some extent. “Fucking … fuck.”

If it helped at all, it wasn’t enough to write a scientific essay on it.

When she finally raised her head, coated with a sheen of sweat, it was just in time to see the man in a bloodied suit lurching towards her. She took in three breaths in quick succession and she looked around for safety, knowing that even with an improvised weapon she wouldn’t be able to take this thing out in her current state. Zombies were a lot scarier when they were real, it turned out. On TV they barely seemed like a threat most of the time.

The glass windows she had been leaning on were those of a mini supermarket. A corner shop. Its familiar, comforting green signage was almost more of a beacon of hope for her right then than the literally glowing cathedral standing proud somewhere to her left.

Water. Food. Supplies. There would be things in there that could save her life. She was certain that some little convenience stores like this one sold bandages, and had painkillers behind the counter. Wonderful painkillers.

By some beautiful stroke of luck, pushing on the door actually worked, and it opened inward with barely any resistance. No one had bothered to lock up before fleeing, and Liza wondered what had actually happened here.

It didn’t take her long to piece it together.

Inside the store the wares were strewn across the floor, the shelves picked clean by quick-acting looters and thieves. One display shelf was lying across the floor, and there were push pins scattered by the counter. Liza had no way of knowing if someone had done that as a form of panicked defence, or if it had just been an accident. The counter itself was smeared with thick, dark, congealed blood.

She looked away from it and grimaced. It had slid down in rivulets and pooled on the floor beside the tacks, which — if they had been placed tactically — had done nothing at all to save the poor soul.

She needed to worry about saving her own soul, though. Pain sliced through her more vehemently before, as if her body was reminding her to work to stay alive.

It took her longer than it should have to find the right aisle in such a small convenience store. Her first clue was when she almost stepped in a stream of errant conditioner and slid four feet into the wall, but since her head was hanging low and her every step was deliberate, she managed to avoid it.

Conditioner, shampoo, deodorant, medication … bandages.

“Yes,” she breathed, plucking a small roll from the shelf, the last one left, and unpicking it as best she could. Her vision was growing dimmer. Though she had not lost enough blood to slip into death, not quite yet, she had lost enough — and experienced enough shock — to slip into a deep, several-day-long sleep.

And if she did, she was dead.

Finally the roll came undone in her hands and unravelled down to touch the conditioner puddle on the floor. “Noo,” she whispered at it, and gently pressed one end to her side, trying to figure out the best way to do this. She should really clean the wound first. It didn’t need to be perfect, since this stuff was partially going by game rules, but she didn’t feel good about wrapping herself up when she was still coated in her own sticky blood.

So she let out a breath and eyed the rest of the sparse shelving for answers. Wet wipes. She tore into the packet and dabbed around the wound to remove the stains from her skin. Her eyes were watering, her limbs all violently shaking, but she managed to just about clean herself up. What next? Rubbing alcohol.

Of course, there was none. She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for.

Her sights turned to the counter again. More accurately, behind the counter.

Alcohol and painkillers.

“Yes please,” she said hoarsely, and staggered her way over the scattered wares to get to the flap that let her behind the counter.

It occurred to her momentarily to try to get into the till to snatch the money, but … that made no sense. Who cared about money in a world of the dead? Currency was a product of civilisation, and civilisation was no more.

She allowed herself one pitiful cough, shaking with pain, and lifted the flap with her remaining strength. Her fist closed around the closest bottle of vodka, which happened to be the kind that she had never been able to afford but she had always wanted to try.

She let out a chuckle, wondering if that was irony and feeling certain that it wasn’t, and unscrewed the cap. She angled herself backwards, letting out a squeak of pain as her wound stretched and leaked blood, and then upended the bottle above the bullet wound.

Liza screamed.

At first she stifled it, but the burn was too intense. And when she started to scream, she found that she couldn’t stop.

It felt so luxurious to make noise like that; to open her mouth and screech and feel like she was never going to stop, but she knew that she had to. She was in no state to fight anything that came through the—

“Mrrr.”

The throaty, gargling growl from around her ankles made her pause, and she could feel her heartbeat in her vodka-soaked bullet wound. A tear of pain and resignation made a track down her filthy cheek. Her breathing was ragged as she turned to the source of the noise.

She had thought the pile of bloody clothing peeking out from beneath the counter had been just that, but it wasn’t. It was a man so torn apart that, try as he might, he couldn’t even make himself move the four inches to wrap his half-eaten hands around her ankles and make her one of them.

Even with no stomach left, the creature on the floor was so, so hungry.

It blinked its one remaining eye at her, the other socket a mess of red flesh, and bared its teeth to let out a predatory rattle once again.

Liza shook her head and stepped away, just as it managed to turn onto its side and thrash an arm out across the space she had been occupying. On his shirt she could just about make out a nametag that said ‘Hello, my name is GREG’.

“Sorry, Greg,” Liza said. She grabbed a handful of painkillers and shoved them into her pockets for the road, as many as could fit, and then after a small pause took a swig of the vodka, and then gagged. It would take the edge off her pain.

She wrapped the bandages around her middle then as fast as she could, knowing that the bullet was still in there but not willing to carve it out of her own flesh — she would pass out, for sure, if she did that.

Filled with more painkillers than the label recommended, and crudely wrapped up at the middle with just a small blooming red stain at the side, she knew that she was going to be alright. She was going to survive long enough to get to the cathedral. To find someone there who could dig a bullet out of her side and keep her from dying.

Maybe there was something that the system could help her to do? All the game required were the basic components and a fairly intimate knowledge of how the thing worked, and it could be created.

Could she get Celia to make guns for them? Ammo?

Where the fuck else was she going to get weapons in England?

There was a military store in the middle of town. But, again, this was England. They sold air rifles and camo jackets. Liza had been there to buy a utility belt for a friend’s superhero costume. They obviously didn’t sell guns. Not real ones.

She had picked hers out of a crate, as part of that promotional event. Was it possible there were still guns in that crate? Almost certainly not. And the fields by campus were in the opposite direction to where she wanted to go.

With no space to carry much except a bottle of much-needed water, Liza forced herself to eat a small amount of carby food, resisting the urge to heave it back up, and made her way outside again. It looked like her roar of pain hadn’t attracted that much attention. There was a shuffling zombie at the other end of the street, and after that scream the entirety of that horde would probably be seeking her out, but the road looked almost clear but for the abandoned or smashed cars, rubble and glass.

A few doors down was a luggage shop with a smashed-in window, which made Liza crack a smile. Who, during the first hours of a zombie apocalypse, decided that what they really wanted was expensive luggage?

Her smile fell again when she realised it was probably because they were fleeing their homes at the last minute. That wasn’t that funny, actually.

Gingerly, she stepped inside the cracked storefront and crunched over the glass as quietly as she could to grab a big leather tote bag. Just for fun, she glanced at the pricetag and her mouth fell open.

“I could never afford this,” she mumbled. “Should I splurge?” She slung it over her shoulder and stepped out again. It wasn’t anywhere near as convenient as the backpack had been, but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing. She shoved the bandages, the water and the rest of the sandwich she hadn’t been able to stomach deep inside, and continued onwards towards the cathedral.

The roads were not too cluttered to drive down if she went slowly and carefully avoided the glass. She was tempted to spend some of her considerable hoard of points on doing up a random semi-crushed car on the side of this small offshoot of the high street, but the engine would only draw more monsters towards her.

And after a little while, the repetitive motion of walking was beginning to make her side feel better. A quick glance at her HP had it creeping very slowly upwards again, which confirmed that whatever the trick was, she had done it right.

Three blocks, give or take, from the cathedral. She was going to make it. The walking was soothing, and quiet, and she took a couple of turns down side streets — making sure she always had a few yards of empty space in each direction so nothing could jump at her — to try to lose any masses drawn by noise.

At the next corner she had long since passed the pileup of cars on the train tracks. She stood outside a pub and stared towards the rest of the high street, the river running beneath the road under her heels.

Standing underneath the crumbling archway of the Fairacres jail gates — the old castle gates that now stood alone, like some theatre prop in the middle of a modern street, leading to a pedestrian-friendly high street — was a formation of police officers in full riot gear, complete with shields.

“Oh, thank g—” Liza began, but then stopped herself instantly, in speech and in motion, when she realised that none of them were human. Of course. That would have been too good.

The shields were splattered with blood. They were rasping and gargling audibly even from where she stood. Their teeth clacked together as if practising for when they would be clamped around skin.

They were completely blocking the path to the cathedral. It was, as far as she knew, the only way to get there from where she was. If she went another way it would, at the very least, be a long and winding path filled with other horrors. She didn’t know the way, and she was in pain.

The zombies were milling about, but they were remaining in a fairly tight formation underneath the crumbling stone arches, completely blocking her path. There was no way for her to fight through, even with a full selection of weapons. Even without an injury. They were protected from most injury, and they didn’t even know it. Their formation made Liza wonder if an echo of their past remained with them even after death; they seemed to feel as though they should be blocking the street, though they clearly didn’t know why.

Or maybe she was just being whimsical in her old age. (Because maybe this was the oldest she was going to get.) She let out a sigh, which turned into a strained grunt of pain, and she pulled back to lean and compose herself against the wall of the pub.

Her health was not dropping, but it was not climbing either. She concentrated briefly on the cylindrical symbol underneath the red bar, hoping it would tell her more.

You have a Bullet in the Body.

Your health cannot rise higher than 30% with the aid of bandages alone.

Remove the bullet within 48 hours or you will contract Lead Poisoning.

“What?” she asked it, but it had no answers for her.

Clutching her stomach, she remembered to look around in a full 360 degree arc, since she hadn’t for a while, and noticed that the pub she was leaning on was positively packed with the things. Thank god she had checked. They hadn’t noticed her yet, since she was being quiet and leaning against the brick, not the glass, but on seeing their staggering, slack-jawed faces she nearly let out a noise of surprise.

She took a couple of determined steps around the corner, and blew out a breath. Soon the cop zombies would look her way and see her, and honestly she was running out of energy to keep moving.

Day was officially night now; the sun had set on the first day of the new world. She could still see alright, but a fair few of the streetlights had not turned on, and Liza knew that the next night it would fewer, and the night after that fewer still. Cars would crash into them, bulbs would fail, and then the power grid would say goodnight, for good.

Liza was struck by the overwhelming urge to take a nap. The horde was not heading straight for her now, but they would be spreading out, and she would be found soon. Her eyelids were heavy.

Maybe she could just give up.

But … her brothers. They would laugh at her. It was day one.

And she would become part of the horde.

Unacceptable.

“Goddammit, fine,” Liza muttered, getting back to her feet — she had barely even realised that she had slid down to a sit against the wall. She pulled in a couple of deep, painful breaths, and she tried to think of a plan.

But, oh yeah, there wasn’t one. She was screwed. Zombies to the left, zombies in front, zombies behind. Volley’d and thunder’d.

She rubbed her head hard, feeling a lot like she was descending into a state of mind that was not helpful for survival. Survival was all that mattered.

Plan mode engaged, Liza instantly looked over at the crushed vehicle beside her. A van caved in at the side, covered in scuffed red paint from the offending car beside it. She probably had enough points to fix it up, integrate the second car into the first to make it tougher, and add a couple more bells and whistles, but that would pour a huge number of points into something that would be incredibly hard to pull off without drawing attention.

She could have the van drive into them, and then remotely ignite the gas to create a last minute explosive, but that level of noise would draw the thousands of wandering monsters from every direction and then … she would be dead. Boxed in.

She could make a small amount of noise and draw the zombies away from the road, and then gun it through the archway, but without a car, and injured, she wasn’t able to move very fast. Trapped. Dead. Eaten.

A rattling from her right had her turn her head. Great. A herd of at least twenty was making its way towards her from back near the train line pileup. There were twenty inside the pub she was leaning on, and she counted ten blocking the road up ahead. That meant that three of the four directions were now, for all intents and purposes, blocked.

If she still had rope or something she could cordon one of the groups off, but her head was swimming with pain and she was finding it incredibly hard to be inventive.

She was under the pressure of maybe four different timers, and she had no way of knowing when one of them would go off and end her life.

“Psst.”

Hope was running out. Time was running out. Her limited energy was nearly done. And … wait, what was that noise?

“Hey. Hey.”

Liza whipped her head around left, and then right, and then upwards, to see the hard expression from under a map of messy red hair, big eyes blinking rapidly at her from a window.

“Come here. Are you stupid? You’re gonna die.”

“Am I stupid?” she replied quietly, then looked down at the floor, eyebrows scrunched together with concern. “Am I?”

“Wait.”

The head ducked back inside and Liza was left with the faint impression of thick, bright red hair when she blinked. There was a rattling noise by the black door she had barely even noticed she was standing next to, and then it swung open.

“Get in,” the girl hissed, looking over Liza’s shoulder with wide pale blue eyes. “Get in, you idiot.”

She ducked back inside and slammed the door shut the second Liza managed to clear the threshold, and bolted and chained it, blowing her already generous cheeks out with her brows raised.

“What were you doing out there?” the girl demanded, rounding on Liza before she could make her way through the dark hallway to see where exactly she had ended up. So far it seemed like a house. “What’s your name?” She had a haughty, demanding way of talking and her demeanour in general had Liza convinced that she had grown up getting everything she wanted.

“Liza Volkov,” she said, for some reason giving her full name as if she were at a job interview. “Who are you?”

The girl clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and looked away as if she wasn’t sure if she wanted to give this information away. “Lilian,” she said finally, and then turned and walked further into the house without another word.

It was a house, she confirmed. It had probably been owned by whoever ran the pub next door, in fact, as it seemed to stretch on quite a way back, meaning that whoever lived here would need to be alright with the constant noise through the walls.

It was gaudily decorated, with big Persian rugs overlapping and covering almost every inch of hardwood floors, and Liza counted at least four cuckoo clocks on her way through to the stairs that Lilian led her up.

“Is this your house?” she asked. Lilian didn’t respond, and instead opened a door to the reception room, with the window that looked out onto the street. Liza crossed the carpet, behind a floral sofa, and peeked down at the spot where she had just been standing outside. When she looked to the right, the twenty-strong herd was already close to sweeping over where she had been.

And she still had no plan. Would she have just … died? Probably not, she reasoned. There was a van to hide out inside, but how long would that have lasted? There were only so many last minute explosive plans in her. Her points would run out, and so would her energy.

The squishy, hideous couch was looking pretty good to her now.

“I … need to get to the safe area,” she told Lilian, turning around to see the other girl fumbling with tea-making instruments. She was boiling water on a burner that she had raised up with very flammable National Geographics — presumably to ensure that the Persian rugs remained unscorched. The setup was giving Liza anxiety, especially as she was certain that the electricity was still generally working.

“The safe area?” Lilian repeated, jolting Liza out of her extended staring. She pulled in a breath and circled around to flop on the sofa. In front of her was a tiny box television, dwarfed further by an enormous landscape painting that depicted what looked like an invading armada at some sort of harbour.

“I need to find someone to dig a bullet out of my side,” she said, glancing up to see that the indicator was still underneath her health. “Otherwise I’m going to get lead poisoning.”

“You got shot? By a bullet?” Lilian shook her head. “Did they mistake you for a corpse?”

“A zombie?” Liza half questioned, half corrected. “No, uh, someone stole all of my supplies.”

Lilian looked up from the mug she was stirring, with those watery blue eyes wide again. She would have looked like a delicate china doll, with her porcelain skin, button nose and big eyes, if she were a more delicate kind of size.

“Your friend?” she asked, and Liza could hear something akin to concern in her voice, and it made her feel warm.

“I guess not,” she mumbled. The cushions beneath her cheek were cool and downy soft and she could feel the pressure lifting from her skin like steam, and soon the pain in her side was just a dull thud, like her heartbeat’s twin in her hip. Someone else’s problem.

A clink right by her head had her sitting up with a jolt, which made the pain in her side much more real, and she cried out, clutching her abdomen.

“Shush, hush, are you an idiot?” Lilian chided, swatting at the air between them, getting up real close and personal in Liza’s face. “Noise. It’s noise that pulls them to where you are.”

“If you call me an idiot one more time,” Liza began in a low growl, but she trailed off as Lilian gestured to the steaming mug of treacle-coloured liquid she had set in front of her.

“I put in a sugar, whether you take one or not, because this has been quite a stressful day,” Lilian said bossily, hands on her hips.

“Oh.” Liza looked at the cup, and picked it up, bringing it to her lips.

“Are you rude as well as slow?” Lilian tutted, shaking her head. “I’m really asking, I’m just trying to figure out what kind of a person you are, just sitting on the street when it’s full of dead people.”

“They’re zombies,” Liza said. There was a pause, and she looked back at the mug. “Sorry for being rude.”

Lilian stared at her with her thick eyebrows raised high.

“And thank you for the tea,” Liza added quietly. Lilian smiled, the first genuine smile she had given since they had met, and she already looked a whole lot less irritating.

“Now,” Lilian said, “since you’ve taken up the entire sofa.” She settled herself into the armchair at the other end of the room and slurped at her own mug of tea, but Liza was too tired to be annoyed anymore.

Her eyes fluttered shut and once again she slipped away.

For twenty minutes, or so; it was a fitful sleep, full of vivid images of the dead, the undead, and the bloodied. She jerked awake at the sensation of cold, grasping, dead hands at the hem of her shirt, and sucked in a breath when she found herself face to face with Lilian’s big, watery eyes.

Their noses almost touching, and still with the very real sensation of the other girl’s hands on her shirt, Liza gently cleared her throat.

“Can I help you?” she asked quietly.

Lilian didn’t have the decency to look embarrassed, and instead her brow twitched as if the implication was annoying to her. “I wanted to look at your bandages; you said you had a bullet wound.”

“Right, but usually people ask before they lift up my shirt,” Liza said, looking down at the aforementioned haphazard job she had done to clean herself up.

“I’m going to unravel them,” Lilian said, deadpan. “Please stay still.”

“Um, I think maybe I’ll wait for a medical…”

“I’m a nursing student,” Lilian interrupted, her irritable words swatting away Liza’s objections. She relaxed into the cushions at this. “Or, I suppose, I was. I’m not sure when class will start up again after all this.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, have at it, then.”

Lilian didn’t need to be told twice — or once — and soon the bloodied bandages were bunched up and placed on the coffee table beside the half-drunk tea. On a coaster, of course, to be hygienic.

“This looks bad,” Lilian said. Liza grimaced. Maybe the bedside manner classes happened in the final year. “Really bad, actually. Point blank. There’s so much bruising. The bullet is still in there?”

“Yes,” Liza said.

“It’s probably stopped by the hipbone.” She poked and Liza sucked air in through her teeth. “You might get lead poisoning, like you said, but … you probably won’t, to be honest with you. It’s the worst case scenario. I think it might be better just to leave it in there until we can get you an x-ray.”

How did Liza explain that she didn’t have control over this? Removing the headset might work to remove the future lead poisoning status, but it could also just be reading her body, instead of physically creating issues within it. It was unclear.

“I’d rather get it out,” she said. “Now, preferably.”

“Your flesh is really torn up. But it has stopped bleeding. Obviously, digging it out would start the bleeding up again, and there’s no way to get new blood inside you.” Lilian straightened up and shrugged. “My professional opinion is to clean it, wrap it, and carry on.”

“My personal insistence is that I need to remove the bullet,” Liza said through gritted teeth. “And I don’t need your permission.”

Lilian raised her hands in mock surrender. “Go for it, then.”

“I need to get to the cathedral.”

“The cathedral?” Lilian repeated, glancing over her shoulder at the wall in its direction. “Why?”

“It’s the safe area, isn’t it? It’s where the medicine is; where the survivors are.” Liza pulled herself painfully up to a semi-sitting position. Lilian let out a chuckle, a patronising chuckle, and shook her head, her orange curls swishing. “No..?”

“There aren’t any survivors,” Lilian said, and let out another laugh, a far more bitter one. “There are no emergency services. There are no people. There’s only death.”

“What are you saying?” Liza spluttered at her.

Lilian flicked her gaze to the ceiling and then back down again. “I saw everyone leave. Buses. Coaches. They’re all gone.”

“They can’t be.”

Lilian sighed. Rolled her eyes. “It is. I’m telling you. We’re the only ones left.”