F*** Cancer, This One Did Us All In.

9

And now all those feeling I felt were coming up, all that vomit I refused to puke and the tears I couldn't let out, as if they had somehow been trapped inside me as Mrs Hobkins had been trapped inside her dead corpse. So I let them all out.

I started with the vomit that fell behind the truck and just hit the floor with a gooey splat. I puked some more and I really took the time to carve out the contents of my stomach and throw it out of my mouth. I realised I was crying as I vomited, big wet tears that rolled down my face. I tried to stand but I felt an intense pain on my back and I fell again. It was too much. The running. The climbing. The falling. The fighting. I felt my body give up as I slumped against a garbage bag. The noise still raged all over me but I just sat there, with my eyes facing the passing road where somewhere back there, the body of my Maths teacher was curled up.

The screaming got worse. The violence got worse. The fires got worse. So many people were dying and running and fearing and fighting and killing and eating and – and somewhere out there in all that my family is trapped.

They're somewhere out there and I have no idea how I'm going to find them. I seemed to be completely drained, I wasn't aware whether I was asleep or not but I could hear the others talking to each other as the truck drove through the chaos-stricken city with seemingly no intention to stop. I just laid there with my eyes closed and I thought of Mrs Hobkins. Questions I had never even bothered to ask began to surface in my mind.

Was she married? I mean, she had to be because we called her missus. I wondered what her husband was doing, whether he was still even alive, and how he would react if he found out four teenagers had just kille – that his wife was dead. I'm sorry, I just can't bring myself up to think it but we did. We ended her. I ended her.

I wondered if she had children. What was her home like? Why was she a teacher?

All those questions raced through my mind like angry bees that kept on stinging my brain with painful queries I would never be able to answer. And all the time I saw Mrs Hobkins body, it was so far away but it was as if the image had seared itself to the back of my eyelids. I just kept on seeing her body, so torn and broken and twisted and dead. Her skull broken and brains a mess on the street that nobody would clean up. Like those scrambled eggs I had dropped once during breakfast and had only cleaned if after my mother noticed and gave me a very hard look and a very hard smack. That memory seemed to calm me down (somehow) but then the image of Mrs Hobkins was suddenly replaced by my mother, her body lying on the ground with half her skull cracked open and that woke me up.

All of a sudden my eyes snapped open and I lurched forward.

"We need to get off this truck!"

The words seemed to spill out of my mouth as I stared frantically at my friends and Eric.

"Welcome back to the land of the obvious, Theo." Eric said but I could see a sense of queasiness behind his eyes.

"Theodore, are you okay?" That was Mfundo.

He was looking at me with concern and worry on his face but it did ease up slightly when I nodded.

"Theodore, we can't get off this truck." Amelia said. "It's going too fast. We're stuck."