The Falling Stars (The Vamps and One Direction Zombie Apocalypse)

Chapter 11- Goodbye...angel

“Maddy. We will miss you so much around here darling. You lit us all up from the inside, and made us all happy when we were not. I do not know why you had to be so cruelly taken, by your own hand in fact, but I guess heaven needed more angels and you knew you fitted the bill. We will always love you and cherish you in our hearts, and as long as we live, we will remember you. Goodbye.” Benjamin finished his speech, smiling sadly.

We all stood around the grave of the woman who made us all happy, silently weeping at the loss. She hanged herself, you see. No one was sure why, but everyone feels the guilt and stress, and I don’t think there was a person in that place that had not considered suicide at some point. We just didn’t expect it to be her. Our Maddy.

“Maddy,” I began. My hand shook as I reached out to pat the earth that now covered her completely “I only knew you for 6 weeks, but you were amazing. You made me laugh when I wanted to cry, and made me feel so much better when I was injured. I don’t think anyone can fill the hole you have created in our lives, but they never will be able to even try. I hope heaven brings you the love and fulfilment you deserved. I just wanted to say I love you. Because, although heaven is gaining the best angel they could get, I have lost one of the best friends I could ever get.”

A single tear rolled down my cheek as Lars spoke his words. Melody was clinging onto my shoulder, shaking and crying, and Megan was staring at the ground, not crying but not meeting anyone’s eyes.

I found her, while she was dying. It was too late save her, we didn’t have enough technology to fix that broken neck. It didn’t break her nerve though. She must’ve been in great pain, and when I cut her down nothing about her moved except her face. I stroked her hair out of her eyes and she cried, as single sparkling tear falling into her hair. The broken bone had obviously cut something, and a little blood coughed from her lips as she tried to speak.

I whispered words to silence her, but she persisted.

“I...I...It was worth it...t..t..to be alive” she whispered and smiled. I cried silently as her eyes glazed over, staring into the distance to a spot I couldn’t see. I used my fingers to close her eyes, and carried her weak body down to the medical bay.

Everyone could hardly believe it. If anyone was to kill themselves, we wouldn’t have expected it to be Maddy. She was too happy, though she obviously was not. I just wished that we could have seen that when there was still time to save her. And now she was gone, forever.

I took one last look at the pile of earth, and the small stone with her name inscribed on it. The grounds behind Army Base 1 were slowly but surely turning into a graveyard. There were 8 piles of dirt in a neat row, and only one of them was someone I knew the name of. 4 were there when we arrived, and the other 3, including the girl who warned us where Ellie was, lay in unmarked graves, forgotten forever.

Cat walked towards me defiantly, something clasped in her hand and concealed in her grip. She silently shoved it into my hand.

“She would have wanted you to have this.” She muttered, almost sounding angry, as she ran for the kitchens. I looked down at the small item in my hand, and almost gasped. It was Maddy’s ipod.

I figured the small portable music player would have been buried with her, since it was her prized possession, but there must have been a reason it was given to me. It was weird seeing a piece of technology that was not just a lifeless lump of plastic and metal, and it almost felt like a sigh of relief that something was vaguely normal again.

Usually, when bad things happened, I made an effort to lock myself away, but this time I had decided to skip the moping part and go and hang with the guys again in the meeting room. I hadn’t really spoken since I fetched Maddy from the room, except at her funeral, so I decided to change that.

It’s what Maddy would have wanted.

“Chins up! Smiles on! I’m talking to you Connor!” She used to say, like that woman in the hunger games with the massive hair. It always made me laugh when she said it. It was a bizarre feeling to think that she’d never make me laugh again.

I guess zombie apocalypses are just more fucked up than I thought. It was never fun, I mean, I lost part of my hand! But what I really mean is I didn’t think that there would be so much death around me. I knew there would be death, and a lot of it, the second I saw those creatures in the studio, but I didn’t think it would happen to people I cared about. Like Maddy. Or Tristan.

In the meeting room I was glad to see that a bottle of scotch was being opened. I didn’t know where they’d got it but I didn’t care. We just needed to forget. Forget that such an amazing friend to all of us had been taken away.

I was handed a glass and I drank a gulp. I regretted it immediately, as it was very strong and not at all what I was expecting. I choked, and sprayed a little onto the scratched oak table. Some of the others who had not drunk this strength of alcohol before were giving similar reactions, and it looked a little like we were doing spit-take practices for a really crappy movie.

There were less tears now, and more happiness. It had turned from us mourning our friend to us celebrating her life. And that was true. We were grateful that she had lived.