Mike Lancaster - 0.4

I sucked in a deep breath and readied myself.

The Naylors started towards her but she stood her ground. I felt proud and sick and scared. The Naylors kept moving forwards, and for a horrible couple of seconds I thought the old man was going to stay behind to guard Annette, but then he followed the rest of his clan, and together they moved in on Lilly.

They were thirty metres away.

Then they were twenty-five.

Then twenty.

It was show time.

I broke from the shadows, hunched down, and hurried over to Annette Birnie. She was staring into the silo, her eyes filled with the uncanny alphabet within, and I had to physically touch her, on the shoulder, to get her to notice me.

‘Annette,’ I said calmly. ‘It’s me. Kyle. I’m here to help you. To get you away from here.’

She looked at me blankly. For a moment I thought she didn’t even recognise me. Then her eyes seemed to show a sudden awareness and her brow furrowed with confusion.

‘Kyle?’ she asked, almost robotically. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘We have to get out of here,’ I said. ‘There’s no time to explain. But there are more of us. There’s me and Lilly and Mrs O’Donnell and Mr Peterson. We know what’s happened. We want to help you.’

‘Help me?’ Annette’s gaze met mine and I saw that there were tears in her eyes. ‘No. There’s no help. There is only… in there.’ She pointed at the silo.

‘I really don’t think you want to go in there, Annette,’ I said.

I sneaked a quick look over to where the Naylors had almost reached Lilly.

‘You want me?’ I heard her yell. ‘Then you’re going to have to catch me!’

She turned and ran away from them, deeper into the darkness of the farm.

Time was running out.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Come with me.’

Annette shook her head. Her eyes were wide and all pupils. She looked helpless and defeated.

‘In there I can become one of them,’ she said slowly, as if explaining something very simple to a rather dull child. ‘In there it all ends.’

‘You don’t want to be one of them,’ I said.

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ Annette Birnie looked at me and I saw all the fear that was running through her head, through the dark windows of her eyes. ‘I don’t want to be alone.’

I was aware that I was using up all the time Lilly had bought me, but I really hadn’t planned for the contingency of Annette not wanting to come with us. I’d thought that she’d be looking for a way to escape, not looking forward to joining them.

Another glance told me that the Naylors weren’t going to give chase. They were standing, looking into the distance, but they weren’t following Lilly.

‘You won’t be alone,’ I said, in what I thought was a soothing voice. ‘Come on, we can help you.’

‘Help me?’ she said in a puzzled voice. ‘How do you know what I want? ’

The question baffled me.

‘Look,’ I said, taking her arm and trying to drag her away from the silo. ‘Just come with me…’

She didn’t let me finish.

‘NO!’ she said, and she said it very loudly.

So loudly it attracted the attention of the Naylors.

Time had completely run out.

The Naylors had spotted me now and were making their way back towards us.

‘You want to be like them?’ I asked, a cruel note in my voice.

Annette’s tears came thick and fast now.

‘That’s all I ever wanted,’ she said, and turned on her heel. Before I could stop her she moved into the silo.

The moment she entered, the alphabet seemed to sense she was there.

I watched, terrified, as the characters started to twist and flex through the air towards her, the hooks extending to reach her with something that looked like hunger.

‘ANNETTE!’ I screamed, but she didn’t appear to hear me.

Instead, she threw her arms apart and made a cross shape of her body – like a sacrifice – and then the hooks and eyes and squiggles and lines closed in around her, superimposing their alien message over her. At first they fizzed and skated across her skin, and then they stopped moving and seemed to sink into her flesh.

There was a smile on her face as her body absorbed the letters of that terrible language, and I think that scared me more than anything else I was seeing.

Her smile.

I turned and ran, back the way Lilly and I had come.

Lilly caught up with me before I made it back to the road. She wasn’t even out of breath.

‘Where’s Annette?’ she asked.

I shook my head.

‘She wouldn’t come,’ I said. ‘She actually wanted to become one of them.’

I thought Lilly would be angry that I couldn’t persuade Annette, but instead she just nodded.

‘I guess she finally found a way to fit in…’

I looked at her blankly.

‘A few years ago me and Annette were at camp together. Girl Guides, if you must know, but tell anyone else and you’re dead.

‘Anyway, long story short and all that, we kind of paired up while we were there. We were talking one night, out under the stars, and it was probably because we weren’t really friends that she confided in me.

‘She told me about how she had never felt like she fitted in, that there was this huge weight of expectation that everyone put on her, but that no matter how hard she tried she always felt like an outsider, an impostor, a fake. She’d even thought about killing herself because she couldn’t bear the idea of going through life alone.

‘Nothing I said helped, and after camp she never spoke to me again. She showed me a part of herself that was secret, and it would have got in the way if I’d been the one to approach her.’

Lilly took a deep breath and continued.

‘You did your best, Kyle. You’re a nice guy, you know that?’

She gave me a smile, but I didn’t feel like a nice guy.

A nice guy would have found a way to save Annette.

‘So the silo can turn us into one of them?’ Lilly said. ‘Are you tempted?’

I shook my head.

‘Not even hardly,’ I said.

Lilly raised an eyebrow.

‘My parents were barely getting along,’ I explained. ‘Now it’s like nothing ever happened to disturb their happiness.’

‘Is that so bad?’

‘Not if you like lies so much you want to live one,’ I snapped. ‘My dad ran off, and I don’t see why we should forget it. Forgive it? Sure, we could do that. But forget? Forget the sadness he caused? That would be plain wrong.’

‘You think that sadness is better than happiness?’

‘No. But it is important.’

‘Because we learn from it?’ Lilly asked.

I nodded.

‘The real question is do we tell the others?’ I said.

‘Tell them what?’

‘That they just have to go to Naylor’s farm and the nightmare’s over for them.’

‘There are few enough of us around as it is,’ Lilly said. ‘Why on earth would we want to tell them that?’

A secret then.

Shared between Lilly and me.

I liked that.

We walked down the road to meet the other two.

We joined up with the others and we told our lie.

Nothing happened, we said.

It almost made me want to retract the lie when Kate O’Donnell gave us a triumphant I told you so look, but Lilly and I had made our pact of silence, so we just fell into step with her and Mr Peterson and carried on down the road.

My stomach felt empty and hollow and I wished one of us had had the foresight to bring some kind of provisions along. It had been a long time since I had last eaten.

That made me think of the second can of Red Bull, and I put my hand in my pocket to pull it out. There was a dull, metallic sound as if the can had hit against something in my pocket, but I didn’t think about it at the time, because I was already greedily pulling the ring pull and taking a couple of sips. I handed the can to Lilly and she smiled, drank a bit, handed it back.