FULL LOCKDOWN (Book #1)

𝕹𝖎𝖓𝖊

"I'm so hungry," Carmen murmurs.

"They are too," Jace nods in the distance.

Maybe not a good thing to say at this moment in time but okay. On the school grounds, there weren't many lurkers, just a few wandering around in the distance. I wonder where most of the students are. At the border? Airports would be fucked with that many people. Anyway, we had taken weapons from dead soldiers for protection.

"Wait! Sh!" Jace pauses.

I look at him perplexed with my hold tighter on the gun.

"...I gotta take a piss," he smiles, heading to a sycamore tree.

I exhale, relaxing my group. This guy.

"Ditto," Brayson joins him.

"Ditto x2," Carmen puts her hand up. "Don't look," she flips her platinum hair over her shoulder and finds a bush.

Alright, toilet break it is. I guess with the adrenaline dying down, everyone's just starting to realise they've got bladders. The school canteen had already been half-rummaged out when we got there. So we stuffed our bags with whatever was left – meat pies, dry hash browns, some chips and a few sodas.

I stare out the dented open roller shutter of the canteen. The night is dimming briskly. It's silent. Dead silent. The type of silence where you know... where you can sense something chilling's about to happen. We can hear the rustling of leaves and the distant empty Coke cans rolling about. It's just gloomy and melancholic but a nice kinda melancholia. Maybe I'm getting confused, maybe it's nostalgia? Like an evening baseball game on the hilltop or doing laps with the boys when the heat finally dies down.

It's been what? Half a day? And I'm already missing life as I know it. 

A huge lightning bolt strikes. A deep purple/blue colour. Violet. Strikingly beautiful and strikingly dangerous both at once. Another one happens. Its intensity is more vivid. I fear the third one.

"We better get goinnn'," Jace pats the countertop.

We zip up our backpacks and head for the school gates. Brayson hops on one end of the huge black gates and swings himself open with it. We're in the driveway of the school now. I breathe in and out calmly, glancing at Ella as she glances away. You know, I never catch her looking in time. I'm always half a second too late. But maybe I just like the feeling of her looking, of her checking me out...

When we round the first corner of the street, we arrive at a standstill. It's the very early hours of the morning but the bright light of the moon is enough to see it all. Everything, and I mean, everything, is in ruins. Windows bashed in, cars on fire, doors with the cross nailed upside down, leftover belongings on the roads, papers stapled to trees with names or religious stuff written on it – you know, all that biblical shit.

"What in the world happened out here?" Jace takes in the view.

"World War Tres," Brayson says in a hushed voice.

"It's like a painting," Ella words softly.

Kinda is.

BANG!

I cover my ears, dropping everything.

BANG!

I fall to the ground, screaming.

BANG!

I struggle to keep my eyes open.

The banging sounds get excruciatingly loud. But it's just me. I'm the only one that's hearing it, that's feeling it, that is affected by it. The rest seem to be staring at something in the distance. I follow their line of sight. I see it. So many of them.

Lurkers.

Then I see something else, someone else. My heart shatters into a million pieces, anomalies bursting everywhere. I try so hard to keep my eyes open, to make sure that what I'm actually seeing is actually there. To even believe it is there. As if the lurkers weren't enough to mess up my sanity, I didn't need this too...

"Mum?" I murmur.

They had never evacuated.

I pass out.