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

Chapter 30- The King and Queen of Awkward Conversations

I was forced into the box room the night Ellie and Brad got back together, although I protested, and violently. Brad was moving into Ellie’s room, which meant L had to move, and as there was really nowhere else if she didn’t want to sleep on the corridor, she moved in with Niall. After the awkward events of my first morning at the radio station, which we all knew about by now, I was forced out of their new room and into Brad’s old one, which incidentally was the cupboard. Brad laughed for way too long when he found out, and I growled under my breath and tried to trip him up.

I even pleaded that I move into Liam’s or even Casey’s room, but for some reason L dug her heels in and persuaded everyone to keep me on her floor, although I didn’t understand why. She probably wanted me to help her care for Louis, as it was becoming a daily (and nightly) thing for us. Technically, it would have been easy to move in with Casey, because although she was supposed to be sharing with Ava Rose, though her roommate spent most of her nights sharing the same room- same bed- as Harry. They were surprisingly open about that, and both almost seemed proud of it though they were everything but dating. They hated it if anyone mentioned them actually being romantically involved, cringing away painfully from the subject as if it was poisonous.

I knew it was possible to be happy in amongst this mess as Zayn and Perrie had proved to us. They recounted the story of their ‘wedding’ one night to us, about how Liam had acted as pretend minister and married them on the roof of the building by the mast. Perrie said that even though they weren’t really married, they felt it and that’s all that mattered to them. This comment pulled a huge ‘Awwwwh’ from Casey, who afterwards looked around like she didn’t know who’d made the sound and wanted to question them about it.

It took me no more than 10 minutes to arrange my things on the shelves around the top of the room. There was actually no floor space at all as it was all filled with this tatty camp bed and there were no windows at all, kind of making the whole room feel like the cupboard under the stairs that Harry Potter had to sleep in at the Dursley’s. I sighed, resigning myself to reside in this room until we had to move on, which, although none of us said, was inevitably going to happen.

I rolled off the bed, landing in the corridor and pulling myself up. Instead of heading to the main room, I walked towards the kitchens where Jake and Liam generally hung out, finding Jake sitting on the countertop, sipping from a cup of instant hot chocolate.

I waved my hand to the side to announce my arrival, and Jake handed me a second cup of the drink which I took gratefully. We sat in silence for a while, before he said

“I need to start experiments soon,” I nodded

“Do you have the right equipment?” I asked, putting my drink down on the side board.

“Most of it” He replied “I have enough to begin experiments, but we’ll have to get into a real science lab or army compound when we have to analyse most of the results.” He drained the rest of his drink “I have enough here for basic physicals, blood testing, tissue sampling, that sort of thing,” He looked around “Everyone needs to be in peak physical condition though, so it’s going to be full on training every day from now on, for all of us.”

As promised, our training began the following day at 7am. Liam and Jake dragged us all kicking and screaming out of bed and had us doing ten laps of the building before we were allowed breakfast, or even time to come round. They took part in the training too, laughing at us because they were awake much earlier and were actually prepared for this strength of physical exercise .

Panting and sweaty after our ten laps in the warm summer sun, we were allowed a small break, half a tin of fruit cocktail and some cereal to kick start our metabolisms. Someone, probably Liam, had brought down two of the tables with chairs attached from the unused dining room on the first floor and put them outside like picnic benches, where we were all to sit when on breaks. Despite this, there was not enough seating for everyone so L, Casey and I sat down in the dewy grass, propping our backs against the wall of the building as if we were sunbathing on holiday.