Rebecca was thankfully quiet after that… for about a minute, after which she mumbled a string of misandric comments that Eric ignored. Kara consoled Rebecca in her usual way, reminding her to think of Sammy and the kindness she’d shown them both.
To Eric’s surprise, Kara then held Rebecca’s cheeks, turned her face toward her own and kissed her on the lips. They held the kiss for several seconds.
Eric was taken aback, not only because he hadn’t realised there was any romance between the two women, but because he suddenly registered how little he’d been paying attention to them.
With nothing but survival on his mind, was he turning into an emotionless robot? His best friend had left him to wander a dying world alone. Had his stoic attitude pushed Kingsley away?
Weirdly, the sight of Kara and Rebecca kissing triggered a memory of something he hadn’t thought about in a long time.
He found himself remembering his first and only kiss; he’d been in high school then, year eleven, and had never had a girlfriend. He hadn’t really wanted one. But to his sixteen-year-old brain, it seemed that pretty much everyone in his year had a significant other, and everyone had experienced their first kiss.
Everyone except for him… and Sammy.
They were both in the same boat, both wanting to have their first kiss because they felt left out. And a naive part of him had hoped the act of kissing another person would snap him out of whatever it was that made him uninterested in having a girlfriend.
Eric and Sammy were just friends. But both found the other attractive enough that the thought of kissing each other wasn’t an awful one, if a bit odd. So they decided to give it a go. Just once, just so they could say they had done it.
There was no spark of romance or connection during the kiss. Nothing came of it. Only later in life had Eric learned that aromantic people existed and that he was one of them.
However, Sammy confessed to him after the kiss that she actually had felt a romantic attraction to him, had hoped they would become more than just friends. And Eric felt awful telling her that he didn’t feel the same way.
Sammy had looked upset at first. But then a remarkably adult resolve settled over her. She assured him she would get over it and she wouldn’t let it affect their friendship. And it didn’t. There was nothing awkward at all between them afterwards, as Eric had feared there might be. They both just acted as if it’d never happened.
That was special for a teenage friendship, he decided as he sat there on the scaffolding, the memories toying with his heart. That they were all still great friends now – Kingsley, Sammy, himself… James – that they hadn’t allowed distance to break them up when they’d moved away from one another to attend different universities and lead different lives, was special.
Eric would protect Sammy and Kingsley with his life, and he knew they would do the same for him. That would never change, even in the most difficult and uncertain times.
Oh, how I’m going to kill you, Mark. For Sammy, for Kingsley, for James. I swear I will snap your neck like a piece of plasterboard.
*
The wind was picking up. It hurled itself at the survivors on their high perch in great intermittent gusts, never quite drowning out the snap of so many pairs of teeth. It seemed to be whipping the snappers into a bit of a frenzy, the ladder jostling and rattling against the scaffolding boards as they clamoured hungrily below.
Eric studied the wall of the house behind them for a little while, squinting up at the roof slates. At the square frosted-glass window under the eaves, too small to climb through. At the smooth beige wall stretching out to the left of the scaffolding where there was a second window about an arm’s length from the edge of the platform; just beyond the right-hand edge, the beige wall ended and the red brick wall of the next house began.
About a metre from the scaffolding was a tiled awning that ran along the entire front of the red-brick house.
Eric studied the awning at length, thinking about how sturdy the tiles would be… how much grip his boots would have on them… But no, the idea was too ridiculous. The three of them could never traverse the awning and hop down on the other side before the snappers surrounding the scaffolding moved the distance of a house front.
Checking his watch, he saw that it had been twenty-seven minutes since they’d spoken to Mark on the radio. By Eric’s estimation, Greenwood Crescent was a fifteen-minute walk from here – which left them with eighteen minutes to find a way down. And that wasn’t accounting for the very real possibility that they would run into more trouble with snappers on their way to Greenwood Crescent, which would slow them down further.
Desperation tightened its icy hold on him. They had to try something soon or they would never make it to Greenwood Crescent in time.
Eric was about to look elsewhere when a suggestion from Kara prompted a new idea.
“The snappers are attracted to movement and sound, right?” she said. “So why don’t we try to shatter one of the windows across the road as a distraction?”
“What with?” Rebecca asked. “There aren’t any more bricks up here.”
“A can of sweetcorn, maybe. We have quite a few of them.”
Eric didn’t think it would work. He didn’t think a window breaking would be enough to distract all nineteen of the snappers he’d counted down there. Also, it couldn’t be movement and sound alone that guided the snappers; there had to be a sense of smell involved, too. After all, what about the ones they’d seen raiding the refrigerator aisles in supermarkets for cuts of raw meat?
Smashing a window
