"If not for us, for Jade. And everyone else."

There was a bandage on my head when I woke, and a heavy weight on my chest. I couldn’t breathe. With the strength I had, I shoved it off me violently.

   “Ouch, no!” It protested.

   I sat up and met her liquid chocolate eyes.

   “Oh my God!” I grabbed her and held her close, pressing her body against mine and feeling its warmth flood into my heart. “Oh, God, I thought I’d lost you.”

   “I thought you’d lost me too,” she whimpered.

   We sat in silence for a while, comforted by each others’ touch. I looked at my surroundings, and felt a slight pang of pride at noticing how she’d found herself a small cave in one of the collapsed parts of the building. I laid back down and she lay next to me, my arm around her and her head on my chest where my heart was, just like she always did.

   “You comfortable?”

   “Yes,” she sniffed. And then, after another moment’s silence, she said, “What happened to Jade?”

   Oh, God.

   I sat up.

   “Where is she? She fell with me, but...”

   I saw her body in another corner of the makeshift cave, lying peacefully as if she were sleeping. Her pale skin was now even paler, and she bore no expression of dreaming – just a blank look in her closed eyes and pallid lips.

   “Oh, God...” I murmured. I glided a hand over her face – her skin was rough with cuts and dry and solid like stone. “I’m sorry.”

   “What happened?”

   “The soldiers... and then she appeared and fought them off, but the sergeant, he shot her and we fell and...”

   I felt her arms wrap around me from behind.

   “Shh,” she soothed. “It’s alright. I’m here.”

   I nodded. She was, and I couldn’t ask for anything more than to be at home with her in my arms.

   “We have to get out of here,” I said. “If not for us, for Jade. And everyone else.”

   She stood up. It amazed me how she had only had to bandage her right wrist from the fall. Then she looked down at me, her eyes newly sparkling with a determination that spoke a thousand words. She held her hand out, and I took it and hauled myself up.

   We ventured out into the building; amongst the silenced rubble and the settling dust that floated softly in the quiet. There were no soldiers to be seen or heard, and she and I walked the broken corridors of the lab in companionable hush.

   “I honestly thought that’d be the last time I’d see you,” she said. Her tone now reminded me of the time I’d told her that she needn’t even try to hush her voice because it was so naturally soft it soothed me in the most irritable of times.

   “I thought so too,” I replied. “But... you know, it’s our bond thing.”

   She stole me a glance and smiled. I smiled back.

   We came to a huge gap in the floor through which we could see the floor below. There was also a broken sign that told us that down there was the third floor.

   “We need to jump down there,” I said. “Then we can find the main entrance and get out of this hell hole.”

   “How are we going to get down there without hurting ourselves?”

   “Oh, it’s not that high, come on.”

   I lowered myself, hanging onto the edge of the hole and dropping with ease. I looked back up and grinned at her.

   “Come on, your turn.”

   She gave me an uneasy look and held up her bandaged hand.

   “I can’t get down like you did, it’s sore.”

   “This way!” came the distant echo of a soldier’s voice, followed by several heavy footsteps, loud, confident and authorative.

   “Jump, I’ll catch you!” I shouted.

   “I’m heavier than I look,” she hissed.

   “Come on!”

   “I’ll find another way down!”

   “No, just jump! Jump now!”

   “I can’t!” She whimpered. A small tear rolled down her cheek. My eyes welled up.

   “Please.”

   “Hey!” shouted a soldier, his voice booming down the corridor. She turned her head, a look of horror and despair creasing her delicate features.

   She put both hands up in surrender.

   “Don’t shoot!” She shouted. “Please!”

   I heard a clatter as metal collided with concrete. And then an arrogant scoff. The soldier strode up to her and put his face close to hers. I ran back against the wall so he couldn’t see me.

   I kicked myself. I shouldn’t have jumped down first – she was so fragile, and her emotions often got the better of her. I should have seen this coming – and now I was going to have to listen to her torture, catch her broken body when she gets shot and falls.

catch.

“Why are you surrenderin’, honey?” The soldier’s strong American accent burned through my mind. I saw red. What I would give to charge in and strike him down, save her.

   “You plannin’ on jumpin’ down? Huh?”

   “Mhm,” she whimpered. I could picture her beautiful face, pale, and her dark eyes, frightened and tense.

   “You need a hand?”

   “No,” she sniffed.

   “Looks like it,” he said. “What happened to your hand?”

   “Nothing,” she said.

   “Nu-uh! Hands in the air!”

   I heard her cry out, choked by the soldier’s grasp. I could see his hands around her throat, strangling her to death just inches from his face.

   “Let go,” she whispered. “Please.”

   “Get your gun!” He shouted to another soldier behind him. I heard it click as the other soldier took aim.

   “You ready?”

   “Ben,” she whimpered.

   I froze.

   “Excuse me?” He sniffed.

   “Catch me,” she said.

   “What –”

   I leapt out and caught her expertly in my arms, elation leaping and bounding in my heart.

   “Run!” She shouted, wriggling out of my grasp and grabbing my hand.

   We bolted down the corridor together, turning as many corners as we could. We found a staircase and jumped down, skipping every four or five steps. My chest was burning, but I felt so giddy with happiness and energy that I kept going. I stole a glance at her and I could see the smile wide on her face.

   Eventually we found ourselves in the main foyer, crumbled to pieces and home to the flipped over chairs and tables of the café and the turned over drinks and snacks machines littering the floor. We stopped, panting heavily and laughing breathlessly.

   “Thank you,” she said. She turned and hugged me tight. I hugged her back, smelling the sweetness of her hair, even through the dust clinging onto it. “I thought for a second maybe you weren’t going to catch me.”

   “Well it’s a good job I did, isn’t it,” I laughed. “It was a very good plan.”

   “Thank you,” she replied, smugly. “It’s good we’re on the same wavelength.”

   Then her vision switched to something behind my head and the sparkle in her eyes dimmed.

   “Oh, no,” she murmured.

   I turned around. “What’s up, baby?”

  And then I saw it. The huge bar across the double doors of the main entrance, even though the glass was cracked. There was also a huge amount of rubble out there that would be a death trap to climb over. It seemed our chances of getting out of here were slimmer than I thought.

swift.

“What are we going to do?”

   “The parachute. Remember?”

   “The one on the rooftop? But that had holes in it,” she replied.

   “Did you see holes in it?”

   “Well, no, but –”

   “Well, then, let’s go!”

   I grabbed her hand – her left one – and pulled her to the staircase.

   “Wait!”

   “What?”

   “There are soldiers up there.” She suddenly seemed younger, frightened like a small child. I wanted to hug her and tell her it was alright, that I would make the bad things go away – but I couldn’t, and she was right: there were soldiers up there. With guns. I sighed indecisively.

   “What are we going to do?” She whimpered.

   “Come on, it’s our only hope.”

   We made our way up the staircase, slowly and trying to dampen our footsteps as we walked. We made it to the third floor and stared up at the hole we’d jumped down through earlier. We walked through the corridors looking for ways to get up to the next floor. When we got back to where we started, she sighed heavily and stopped.

   “This is no use. We’re stuck here forever,” she sobbed.

   I put my arm around her. “No, we’re not, baby, we’ll find a way.”

   I looked around for things to use to get up through the hole. It wasn’t that high – if I jumped I could touch the ceiling. If I just had something to stand on...

   To the right there was a broken door. Behind the broken door was an office of some sort. And in the office there was a desk, a little battered, but still able to stand on its four legs.

   “Look, here,” I pointed. I dragged the desk with little effort to just underneath the hole. Then I stood on top of it, cautiously raising my head just in case those soldiers from earlier were still there. The way was clear, and I hauled myself up. Then I turned back and held out my hand for her.

   “Climb on the table and I’ll pull you up.”

   She climbed up and I grabbed her hand, pulling her up with ease.

   “Pfft,” I scoffed. “Heavier than you look, eh?”

   She grinned. “Let’s go.”

   We carried on down the corridors of the floor, looking for a staircase. We found it, and were about to start climbing when we heard voices.

   “They’re somewhere in this building,” a man sighed. “They can’t get out – the entrance is blocked. So they’re somewhere in here. Find them and kill them.”

   She froze, her hand tensing harshly in mine.

   “Shh, come on,” I whispered, pulling her the other way and into a room on the left. It was another office, destroyed worse than the one on the floor below. We overturned the desk and sat behind it in the corner of the room and listened.

   “Check all the rooms again and then we’ll go down a floor,” said one of the soldiers, apparently the lead.

   The heavy boots scattered, quietening slowly as they walked in the opposite direction. We heard doors opening, furniture being thrown and moved around. I could feel her shivering next to me, and I held her hand tighter.

   “It’s okay,” I whispered. She turned and gave me a weak smile.

   Suddenly the door to the room we were in slammed open, and there were footsteps, heavy, menacing, pacing the room. I held my breath. I felt her hand tighten around mine.

   The sun outside was setting, dusk was falling fast and it cast long shadows into the room through the window. We could see his shadow morphing around the broken furniture of the office, gliding about the walls like a ghost.

   He cocked his gun.

   Her hand flew to her mouth and she screwed her eyes up tight. I held onto her tighter still and braced myself – seeming already to feel the wall of bullets slam into us, killing us instantly...

   He fired. The gunshot was louder than thunder in my ears, seeming to rip right through my skull and drill into my brain. She shrieked as the bullet tore a hole in the desk and in the wallpaper behind her head. I put my hand over hers over her mouth and held her close, praying the soldier hadn’t heard her.

   Too late.

   The soldier tossed the desk away and I came face to face with a merciless, malicious murderer – I could see right through his fiery eyes and into his soul; a soul that had killed thousands and wished to simply kill more and more. And this time was no exception.

   He aimed. I stared helplessly down the barrel of the gun.

   Suddenly she threw herself at the soldier, knocking the gun out of his hand. The soldier fell to the floor with a startled cry, and she picked up the gun and shot him in the head. A menacing silence descended on the room. She turned to me.

   “Let’s go.”

   I held onto her hand as we made our way through the corridors of the fourth floor, looking for the staircase. When we found it, we made our way cautiously up the staircase. We came to a T-junction in the corridors. Both of the ways looked exactly the same.

   “Maybe we lost them,” she said.

   “Maybe,” I replied warily.

   “Maybe,” said another, deeper, rougher voice.

   We turned to face another soldier. She held the gun up at him.

   “Ooh,” he mocked. “Very clever.”

   “I’ll kill you,” she growled.

   I tightened my hand on hers as he took aim. Tension lay thick and heavy. She tightened her finger on the trigger.

   An empty click.

   She cursed under her breath. The soldier laughed.

   “Right, then,” he said, strengthening his aim.

   “Split up!” She yelled, running down the left corridor.

decision.

I sprinted down the right, coming straight away to a staircase and leaping up it three steps at a time.

   When I got to the top of the stairs, I decided to keep going. Part of me wanted to turn back and run and find her, make sure the soldier hadn’t got her. It didn’t sound like he’d followed me, after all. But she was smart – and she had a gun. We both knew the plan: to get to the rooftop.

   So I kept going.

   I ran through all of the corridors and up all of the staircases. Then I sighted the door that opened up onto the roof – opened up onto freedom. I burst through it into the wind and the rain that sprinkled down from the sky. It was refreshing and cold.

   But I spotted something that took my attention away from the refreshing rain and the cold air.

   My machine, the one I’d created in the first place, stood battered and dented at one side of the roof, on the other side of a huge crack. There was also another door, leading back into the building. There had been two staircases – and she had taken those and was already there. She was staring into the core of the machine that had been exposed. I cupped my hands around my mouth and called her name.

   She spun round and I saw her eyes light up. She ran towards me and skidded to a halt on the edge of the fracture in the building. It was way too wide to leap across, even with a good run-up. And the parachute was on this side of the building. I could see it laying to the side, a huge hole ripped in it. My spirits sank. Our plan was foiled.

   “Ben! It still works!” She cried. I drew my attention back to the machine with its icy blue glowing core. I suddenly hated it – hated my idea of being able to stop time and hated myself for trying.

   “We need to destroy it!” I shouted.

   “But... you created it,” she said, confused. “Why would you want to destroy it?”

   “Look what it’s done!” I cried, waving my arms at the pit before us.

   She hesitated, and then decided she’d lost the argument and destroying the machine was the only thing for it. She turned back to the machine and looked blankly at the buttons around it. She pressed one and the patterns in the glowing core fluctuated and morphed.

   “What do I press?”

   “Uh... well, you need to... it’s hard to explain without showing you!” I struggled. “Maybe I should go round and come up there?”

   “Don’t touch that machine!” The sergeant shouted.

   We froze. About twenty soldiers poured out of the staircase on her side of the building. Twenty guns cocked and twenty soldiers took aim. The wind blew and tossed her hair about her shoulders. She looked deadly beautiful in the face of death.

   And then she slammed her hand down on the keypad of the machine. The blue core fizzed and sparked, and the soldiers opened fire. She held her arms up in front of her face and turned her back on the bullets.

   The bullets that froze mid-air.

   A steady beeping echoed hollowly around the still air – frozen in time by my creation for a limited amount of time.

   “What happened?”

   “Grab my hand!” She screamed. She leant over the gap and outstretched her hand.

   “Wait – it’s still... the countdown...”

   “Help me, please.”

   Her fingertips were so far away. The gap was too wide. There were soldiers around us, frozen in time. The countdown was nearing its end – there was no time left.   

fear

I ran.
   I ran and ran and ran until my chest was on fire and my heart was thumping in my throat. I felt like being sick, but I couldn’t gather enough breath to retch. I had to get away from the madness I had created, and yet I couldn’t just leave her. I had to go back for her, but I couldn’t set another foot on that roof without going insane.
   And so there I stood, on the edge of sanity – should I go back? Maybe I should just keep running.

   “Ben!”

   An angel’s voice echoed through the empty hallways of the building and punched a hole in my chest. My breath picked up and I turned to see her waving and running towards me. She stumbled every few steps and had one arm wrapped round her waist. I ran up to her and swallowed her up into my arms.

   She screamed.

   I let go.

   “Baby?”

   I caught her just before she hit the floor. My hands were suddenly wet. Her eyelids flickered and her vision was distant, like she was struggling to focus on things close to her.

   “Oh, God, no,” I murmured. I sat beside her and slid her into my lap. She was bleeding ferociously from a gash down the side of her cheek and a gunshot wound in her stomach. Her brow was matted with a cold sweat and her face was flushed with pain and effort.

   “Ben,” she groaned. “You left me.”

   I shivered.

   “Oh, God,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry... Oh God...”

   She moaned and convulsed in my arms, her eyes screwed up in pain. My heart skipped a beat and my chest flared with pain.

   “No, no, open your eyes, baby, look at me,” I panicked.

   She stared up at me.

  A lingering moment passed in which I could feel the pain firing through her body and the alarming rate at which she was slipping away.

   Suddenly deep voices and heavy, running footsteps echoed across the walls.

   I scooped her up in my arms and ran.

   I ran and ran and ran until my chest was on fire and my heart was thumping in my throat. The thought of losing her spurred me on. I didn’t want to die either. Not like this.

   I turned several corners until we escaped through a crack in the wall on the ground floor and out into the outside world; a crack that I kicked myself for missing before. I welcomed the damp air and abandoned streets, gulping the air in huge breaths. The sound of the attack behind us had subsided, lost in the winding hallways of the building. We’d lost them.

   The explosion propelled me forward, but I managed to stay on my feet with her in my arms. Everything was gone – the machine, the soldiers, the lab...

   But now what?

the end.

   The feeling was unbearable.

   The deserted streets of the town haunted me with their silence, staking at the pain in my heart and yanking it forward, like ice-cold hooks of anguish clawing at my soul. She was growing heavy in my arms as she clutched at my neck for her life. I could hear her hoarse breathing and, combined with my exhaustive panting, sounded like thunder in my ears; a whole ten thousand glaciers roaring and tumbling over and over through my head, inflamed with grief and ache and remorse.
   “Baby,” I groaned, stopping in the middle of the street.
   She looked up at me through murky eyes glazed with torture. It started to rain.
   “I don’t know where we are.”
   She strained to lift her head away from my chest and looked around.
   “Me neither,” she said. Then she buried her head back into my t-shirt.
   I continued to walk.
   Every part of the street looked exactly the same. Every house, every car, streetlamp, manhole cover and slab of pavement was splattered with raindrops and totally abandoned. Some of the houses still had lights on, even in the middle of the day. Everyone was gone.
Not a bird sang, not a dog barked, not a cat mewed. Complete silence bellowed danger in my ear.
   She was growing heavy in my arms.
   She whimpered my name.
   “I can’t go on any further,” she struggled. She coughed and it shook her whole body. I stopped.
   “No, we can make it. We’re nearly there, promise.”
   She held on tighter, shook her head. “No, I can’t.”
   I walked over to a car and sat down against it. I heard her sigh, heard her heartbeat loud and slowing, the panic in my head rising and my breath quickening.
   “Look at me,” I said. I turned her head and she stared up at me, the liquid gleam in her eyes glinting in the fading sunset. The clouds were pink and the air was fresh, but I didn’t notice.
   She whimpered my name again. It tugged at my heartstrings hard.
   “Shh,” I soothed. “It’s alright, I’m here.”
   “Don’t leave me,” she said. “Don’t leave me.”
   I stroked the tears from her face, the tears she probably couldn’t tell she was shedding. Her skin was ice cold and rock hard.
   “Your hand is so warm,” she said. Her eyes closed. I jolted.
   “No, baby,” I panicked, “look at me.”
   Her eyes opened again and she reached up to put a hand on my face. I felt it glisten with moisture, but ignored it. It scared me how she was still alive after everything we’d been through, and yet I wanted this moment to go on forever. I was disgusted in myself for the thought – the longer this went on, the more she suffered.
   And yet, I couldn’t face losing her. I wouldn’t face losing her.
   “I’m so cold,” she said. Her eyelids flickered and her features creased in an agonised frown. Her body convulsed, she tensed – like she did when she stretched after she’d woken up from a sleep – and relaxed. She focused on something behind me, past my head – something I knew wasn’t really there – like she was bordering on the edge of where the dying make the grovelling journey to the dead. “It hurts.”
   “Shush, now, baby,” I whispered. I wanted to hold her so much closer, and I would have if I knew it wasn’t going to hurt her. “Don’t leave me. Stay with me, baby.”
   There was a long silence in which I could hear the patter of the rain on the pavement get harder. The slash in her cheek was bleeding ferociously, the rain droplets dragging streaks of blood down her cheek and into her hair. I stared down at her, looked her deep in the eyes and was almost lost in the glittering dusk and the dazzling eternity she seemed to hold inside them. Many a time had I told her how amazing she was, and many a time had she laughed my favourite laugh, smiled my favourite smile, and told me: “Not as amazing as you, Benjamin.”
   I would never hear those words from her again.
   “You’re so amazing,” I whispered.
   She smiled and her eyes twinkled for a lingering moment. She opened her mouth slightly to say something, but closed it and nodded once – as if she, in this moment of excruciating bliss – finally understood how amazing she really was.
   The sunset faded and the clouds peeled back to make way for a clear night sky that showcased more than a million glittering diamonds, watching down on us sorrowfully.
   “There it is,” she said.
   I smiled. I didn’t need to look up. She was talking about our star – the one we had so often looked up at together, in a loving embrace under the thick blanket of gems and their absolute, infinite canvas.
   And it was fading.
   The one star that had been so bright and full was now waning into the darkness of the universe beyond it.
   She exhaled. Her grip loosened and her eyes closed. She looked as though she had only fallen asleep in my arms like she had done several times in the past. I leant down and kissed her, her lips still soft from the subsiding rain. I closed my eyes and breathed in her heavy scent – the one that had often been so much of a comfort to me was now mixed with ache and anguish, blood and tears.
   And she was gone.
   A mixture of emotion washed over me, overwhelmed me, consumed me wholly and took away my ability to breathe. I couldn’t think straight. Before me I held the empty soul of one I had once loved, and yet she looked somewhat hopeful as she lay there, still, in my arms. I gathered her closer and held onto her tighter than I ever had before, as if it could bring her back – save her from... But where she was going now would be peace far better than anything I could give her. There she would meet those that truly belonged to her, while she watched down and saw me shed tears for the life she could have lived.
   I could do nothing but bury my head in her sweet smelling hair and cry.

~