M. Marshall - The End Is Nigh

“Elizabeth get in, they’re coming!” I pulled the door shut with all of my strength just in time to hit one of Lynda’s cronies in the shoulder. I kicked out my leg and felt it connect with her hip successfully managing to boot her off the car and watched as she rolled back on to the sodden dirt beneath her.

We drove off down the dirt track and away from the Bunker as fast as that car would take us. The only thing I could think about was Rosa and the danger I had put her in.

What had I done?

IT WAS A long drive from Essex to the Lake District, and it would be even longer with a sick child to look after. Rosa was seriously ill. The parent in me was losing their shit. Rosa was burning up. She fought against sleep and squirmed constantly on my knee.

“What’s wrong with her?” Liam looked down at her. When she did close her eyes, she was restless and unsettled, thrashing around like she was having nightmares.

“I don’t know. I think they gave her something to make me stay in the Bunker. They said they had medicine for her there, so it has to be something which has an easy fix. But what?” They valued children in that place far too much to murder one. Didn’t they?

“Shit.” Liam’s face fell. I could tell that he felt partly responsible for the situation. I shouldn’t have risked so much to help him.

“We need to find something to bring down her temperature.” All of Rosa’s things I had kept in the bag which I had left with Emma, but of course that was long gone. Left behind us with the rest of the Bunker. Apart from the few boxes of formula, which I had kept stashed in the back of the SUV, I had nothing for her. Unless you counted the mud covered clothes she had on her back. In my heart, I knew that I had let her down. Instead of worrying about a complete stranger I should have been putting her safety first. What I had done ate away at me and turned into resentment towards the man sitting beside me. Who the hell was he anyway?

“Why don’t I know anything about you? You seem to know everything there is to know about me.”

He didn’t take his eyes off the road to reply. “Well, I certainly know a lot more about you after the last week.” I watched as the corners of his mouth turned up, and he suppressed a grin.

“Not funny.” I wasn’t in the mood, we’d just almost been mobbed getting away from that crazy place. I was beginning to wish I’d left quietly with Rosa and left him there to rot.

“What would you like to know? I didn’t have a fairytale life. I doubt that you would have been seen with the likes of me before all of this.” I narrowed my eyes and looked at him. What an ungrateful prick.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to know anything about Liam if that was his attitude. As soon as Rosa was sorted I would leave him to sort himself out and go to find Kate on my own. We could start again there and be a family. Rosa cried. “What does she need?”

“Like I said. She needs something to bring down her temperature, paracetamol or something for kids and we need clothes, clean water. Everything. She needs everything.” I shouted at him. I was angry. With him, with myself. “Everything that we haven’t got because we just risked it all breaking you out of a place you didn’t even look that sad to leave. I should have left you down there. I’m sure you could have laid back and thought of England over and over again without any complaints.” He pressed heavily and suddenly on the brakes and we stopped in the road. He pulled on the handbrake and turned in his seat to look at me.

“Elizabeth, I am very grateful that you got me out of that place. I’m aware that you didn’t have to and I am sure that it was difficult for you to do what we did after losing your husband.” I prayed that he couldn’t read my face because that part really wasn’t as difficult as he suspected. I shook the thought out of my head.

“If you had been the only one visiting me I might have been able to live quite happily.” I scowled. “Okay, I’m joking. I would have hated it. The pills they gave me had a strange effect on my memory and there is a huge amount of time that I can’t account for.”

I felt like he had reprimanded me like a little girl, which only served to make me more pissed off with him. I rested my gaze on top of Rosa’s head who was staring up at us listening mesmerised to our conversation. Her face full of confusion looked up at us, her body was limp and exhausted. She lay still on my lap.

“Can we just keep going?”

“Will you listen!” He turned my face forcing me to look at him. The touch wasn’t unkind, but it did demand compliance. “Despite what you think, I did not enjoy my time in there. I’m not the kind of man who gets kicks out of being forced to get women pregnant. I never wanted any more kids.” That got my attention.

Beneath the frustration of his situation I saw a great deal of sadness which I hadn’t noticed before, or maybe I just hadn’t been looking. It was sexist and a little idiotic of me to think that every man would enjoy being held captive by a group of women, even if they weren’t very appealing. I forced myself to admit that I had needed someone to blame for the position in which we found ourselves. Liam was my patsy.

“I didn’t realise you had kids. Sorry.” He said nothing. “They’re dead?” I didn’t dare look at him as he answered.

“I don’t know if the kids are alive. I tell myself they are.”

Liam released the handbrake and pulled back onto the road.

“I didn’t live with my family. My ex-wife left me for an American banker four years ago. She left and took the boys with her. Connor was ten and Jason almost thirteen when she moved. I didn’t have the money to pay for a decent lawyer.” I was speechless. My heart went out to him.

“Surely that was illegal.”

“Everyone had said it was no good to try and fight her. The mother always wins custody. The last I heard from them, they were living in Seattle. I have no way of getting in touch with them now to check if they’re alright.”

“Why didn’t you follow them over there?” He looked down at his hands on the wheel as he drove and shifted in his seat. He cleared his throat.

“I was in prison when she left me.” I was stunned. He was the good guy. That was the last thing I had expected to hear him say. We spent the next few moments in silence, and then he began to talk. “You think differently about me now. Don’t you?”

“No… I’m surprised. But-”

“You seem like a nice well brought up girl. You’ve never met someone like me before have you?” I was confused. Liam seemed rough around the edges. Just like all of us who survived.

As we continued on our journey North, he told me about his life. Of course, I understood why he hadn’t been so eager to share his story with me. Over the next two hours, he told me about the person he used to be before the events on the 21st of June. The afternoon when everything in the country stopped, and we tried to run or hide from death in those thirty precious minutes before everything in our world exploded.

Liam came from a family of Irish travellers and grew up living in a caravan around Ireland before his family had moved to Manchester.

“I guess I had what smug people with nice tidy childhood memories would call a tough life. My parents died when I was thirteen. I was pushed from one foster home to another. Eventually, I landed in a sort of halfway house for homeless kids.”

“But you had a family?”

“Yeah. It all started when I began to make some pretty good money from fighting.”

“Boxing?”

“Bare-knuckle mostly. It’s a traveller thing. In the back room of a pub, a cellar or something. You can make a lot of money if you don’t get yourself killed, but I was good. Runs in my family.” He puffed out his chest. This claim was apparently something, of which he was quite proud.