NO ONE IS LEAVING by Stephen Barnard

Author:Stephen Barnard [Barnard, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

**

They moved away from the barricade, apart from Elliot who volunteered to keep watch on Benjamin. The latter was just standing still at the top of the slope, peering in through the furniture. The rest of them moved deeper into the house, some on the remaining sofas, others around the breakfast bar.

Ten minutes.

Time for another drink.

Lucy couldn’t really process everything that was happening, but then she wasn’t sure any of them were, not properly. She watched them jostle for position: Kieran tried to take charge, then Danni, then Brooke. Even Justin: this whole thing had been his idea after all and she could tell he felt responsible. He went round all of them, checking they were okay, or as okay as they could be, all things considered.

Even Hayley. Lucy had told him that he shouldn’t have invited her; she’d never brought anything of worth to any gathering Lucy could remember. But he had been soft, and called her anyway. Now look what she’d brought: death, on all their heads.

Unless they were one of the four chosen. Then they would live, but a completely different life than the one they currently had. But a life nonetheless.

She could drink to that. She poured a couple of fingers of gin. Didn’t bother hunting down a new bottle of tonic water.

Of course, there would be the issue of their daughter, Rosalind. Lucy supposed that they could collect her at a later date, and once they knew how to perform the transference themselves, they could make her just like them.

They just had to make sure they were chosen by Hayley. She’d laid some good groundwork earlier, presenting her and Justin as a couple, knowing that he was a bigger draw than she; all that school history they shared seemed to go a long way with Hayley. Lucy had to assume then that she wouldn’t want to split up couples. She saw it as being her and Justin, and Danni and Elliot.

She sought out Kieran and Alicia, the other two to have known Hayley since short trousers and snotty noses. They’d both been quite confrontational, and if she got a chance in the next few minutes she would remind Hayley of that. Currently Alicia was grilling Hayley about something and throwing rhetorical questions at her; Lucy didn’t think she would interrupt yet as there was a chance Alicia might do enough damage herself. Brooke was leering over her like her frigging shadow, as always. Hayley was shrinking into what was becoming her sofa. She’ll make her own butt crease in that thing before we go home. And she had knitting with her. Jesus wept!

Kieran was pacing behind one of the sofas in an intermittent dialogue with that young, tight body he brought as his plus one. Surely a place wouldn’t find its way there?

But then, Lucy didn’t know who had tried to worm their way into Hayley’s affections while she’d been snoozing on the sofa. She didn’t feel better for it at all; she wished she’d just powered through the day.

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