And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin

Author:Malcolm Devlin [Devlin, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

5

Leila was bundled up in a blanket, leaning against the wall, but she wasn’t sleeping. She was looking out the window, her expression far away. It was too dark to see if she had been crying, and I wasn’t going to ask. I was reminded of the time before we first spoke, seeing her sitting in the canteen, staring out the window while everyone speculated about what she was looking at.

After so many nights sleeping in the room next door to her, it was the first time I imagined I understood the nature of her silence properly.

It wasn’t so much a personal silence. It was an external stillness that served to balance an internal cacophony. It was a hyperawareness, a heightened alertness. I saw how knotted-up she was, how much the struggle to maintain her own personal order cost her. I wondered if her secret was simply that she never slept at all.

I didn’t say anything because I knew it wouldn’t help. I remained alert for her so she wasn’t alone. I stayed awake, silent in my own way, waiting with her for the morning.

* * *

Macey once told me the worst way a story can end is by someone waking up and realising everything that happened was only a dream.

“It’s a cop-out,” she said. “All that carefully constructed world building, all those people who you believe in and then . . . nah, it’s a lie and none of it really matters. No one wants that. We read stories, watch shows on TV, and we appreciate they’re fiction. But when they come out and outright admit it, it pisses us off.”

We were the last ones up around the fire. We’d been camping in the forest park for the past couple of weeks. Moving from clearing to clearing every few days, setting up patrols to watch for Others in the area. There must have been ten of us by then, our group snowballing as it bounced from one short-term sanctuary to the next.

Many had come to us in ones or twos, strangers lost in the ruins they saw of the world; drawn to the same fire of Macey’s belief that had also drawn me. Even when we met different groups with their own leaders, people would peel off to join us as though her force of personality was strong enough to unseat them, send them reeling. I had known her since before the infection, but I wondered if it was something she’d always had about her. She had only needed the right time to be taken seriously, the right kind of chaos to allow her to rise gloriously to the top.

“When I was little,” Macey said, “I sometimes used to have this dream. I’d have it a lot, back then. In it, I would see my mum sitting on the end of my bed. She wasn’t watching me sleep, she was simply sitting there, completely relaxed, her head turned away from me. I would see the shape of her in

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