Group Z

Chapter 21

I am running as I have never run before, each breath coming out in short pants. For all that I pound away at the ground I don't move a single centimetre. Instead the ground seems to give way beneath my feet and with each desperate kick of my legs I sink deeper and deeper, to my knees, then my thighs, my waist, my chest, my chin, over my nose. Then, blackness. I can't see anything, can't breathe, can't move.

A weight presses on me from all sides, a weight I can't shift, suffocating me. Just as I feel my chest about to collapse, I blink and find myself blinded by sunlight. I'm back in the meadow but this one is desolate and barren. No streams, no flowers, only the red-hot sun, and earth that looks strangely red. The colour is so strange that I reach down to run it through my fingers and am struck by the rusty scent of it, the earth is moist, and my fingers are instantly stained just like Lizzie's holding the berries. Straightening up a breeze blows across my face bringing a scent that makes me gag, the stench of death. Mounds of earth begin to appear and shift above the grass and rippling currents show the movement of things coming towards me getting closer and closer. I don't want to watch, don't want to see what these things are, and I try to close my eyes but it's as if some invisible force holds my eyelids open, not even allowing me to blink as the mounds disappear and the grass parts before them.

The first mound I see has red hair and an evil grin, Lizzie but not Lizzie crawls towards me. Her face stretches, seeming to morph and change when I look directly at it. All around me several other mounds come into view. I shut my eyes and this time I'm allowed to close my eyes but it's worse in the blackness, all I feel is a hand grasp my ankle and pull me to the floor, but I don't want to open my eyes and see who is grabbing me. On the floor I feel hands all over me scrabbling like spiders, tearing at my hair, my clothes. I curl up into a ball and begin to hyperventilate as the hands start slowly dragging me towards the grass but I'm powerless to stop them. I curl myself tighter and tighter wanting more than anything for them to just let me go.

I jolt awake with a start that results in me hitting the back of my head against the tree. I raise a hand to rub it and look around the clearing. I haven't been asleep for very long, Malcolm, Sofia and Damon are sat huddled together talking quietly. My breathing begins to slow, and I lie back down between Sapphire and Lizzie. Sapphire has, at some point moved so that she's on my lap, her weight presses into my legs and her arm wraps around my waist.

High above through a tiny gap in the canopy I can see just a sliver of night sky. So far away from any form of light pollution the number of stars I can see in just this tiny space is dazzling. They all attempt to outshine each other yet I get the vague impression that these stars may not even exist anymore as the light they are giving off takes so many years to get to earth, I frown, trying to remember how I know that. I allow this knowledge to wash over me and am rewarded when I dimly remember learning that in one of the very few actual lessons we had as children within the Hub in a small classroom with a teacher that we never saw again after that. The sight of that small sliver of sky reassures me that even though we have no idea where we are, some things will stay the same, like the night sky.

I find that I can't fall back asleep after the nightmare so instead I stare at the night sky in a way that eventually leaves me catatonic watching as the stars make their slow progression across the sky in breathless ethereal dances that I've never taken the time to truly notice or appreciate before. I'm glad that I no longer have to live a life that takes more than it gives.

Killing innocents truly took a toll and I'd never before allowed myself to entertain the possibility that I could one day be free from it. Yet here I am and I realise that even though the journey here has been difficult I'm glad for my freedom and I wouldn't have it any other way because along this road I've met my Sapphire, Lizzie, Benny who all make life worth living and who almost make me feel like I could one day be free from the burden of death that I carry.