Dead Connections

Chapter 26 - Killer

Telling everyone that we simply couldn’t rescue Zack was so hard, especially because they couldn’t believe it and I had to repeat the news 3 times. When it finally comprehended in their brains they didn’t know what to think or say or do.

“The boy’s dead,” Ember declared, throwing her hands up in the air with defeat. Dallas gasped.

“Don’t talk like that,” he hissed at her. “We’ll find some way to get him back.”

“Yeah,” Ember snapped back angrily. “But think about it this way: If we don’t give Blake the machine then he kills Zack. If we do, he kills all of us, including Zack. How do we know that he’s not already dead? I’ve got a point. Maybe we should think ‘the lesser of two evils’ here. We either let him die or we let us all die.”

“I can’t believe you, Ember,” Dallas said sharply, crossing his arms and glaring at her with disappointment. “We don’t just give up. There’s got to be something we can do. Do you have any ideas Blond?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied quietly, focusing hard on trying to come up with all the possible ways this could end. There weren’t many that didn’t include at least one of us dying. “Maybe we could…… Maybe we should try and…… No! I have no clue what to do.”

“We have to do something,” Dallas said desperately. “We have an hour before Blake phones up again, expecting us to be ready.”

“It’s less than an hour now,” Ember chipped in, checking the clock on her phone. “We have 52 mintues… Roughly.”

“Then we have to think,” I continued optimistically. “There has to be a way. There has been so far and this isn’t where our luck ends.”

“I hate to break it to out but luck isn’t really on our side at the moment Skylar,” Ember said under her breath. “We’re all dead, aren’t we? I wouldn’t call that lucky.”

We decided to break into the Primary school because it was so cold outside and it began to rain. From there, we ventured up to the 4th classroom and sat around a desk near the pack. Farmborough Primary school was where I used to go to school until I was 11. It’s a really minute school, with only 4 class rooms and about 70 pupils. There are only 5 or 6 teachers in there, although, obviously, when we were in there, there were none. I put my head in my hands and shook it pessimistically.

“What’s the likely hood that we’ll actually be able to pull of something that will save us all?” Ember asked rhetorically. “It’s practically nothing.”

“Not if we plan it right,” Dallas interrupted. “We just need to come up with something that will trick.”

He reached into his pocket and took out the machine, laying it on the table in front of us. “To use the machine it needs to be touching someone’s wrist. There’s a strap on the back of it that needs to be attached to one of us in order to kill us, look.” He flipped the machine upside down carefully revealing a small black band that lolled weakly to the side of the machine, twisted with all the wires. “Maybe if we cut of the strap it might not work anym-“

“It’s too risky,” Ember fought back. “We have to do something that doesn’t include actually altering it at all.”

“What if we make a complete new one,” I suggested, the idea suddenly coming to me as the big solution.

“What?” Dallas asked across the table.

“What if we reconstruct this machine so we make another identical one that doesn’t work? It looks exactly the same, but it will be useless.”

“There’s just one problem with that though,” Ember muttered. “When Blake tries it he’ll know it’s a fake.”

“Yeah, but he would have given us back Zack beforehand,” I explained. “And we would have run, so we’d be far, far away from him by then, going to hide somewhere safe with Zack.”