BETWEEN FOUR JUNCTIONS

The cell was becoming hazy, a musky, blurry haze. Jackson lay in front of the gap between the floor and bed, blocking Jamie from the gas as much as possible. He knew the hallucinations were about to start and he waited, but nothing happened. He tried to keep himself awake and focused, but he felt increasingly dizzy every second. Lights suddenly came on above all the cells, illuminating everything in a pink glow as the gas became visible. Then the children in the opposite cell began to melt to the floor and crawl towards him in a mess of colours. He blinked and they took form again, crawling up the walls and across the ceiling, their smiling faces never turning away from his. They merged into faces of the dead – of Annie and Fred, of Clara, and all the other children he had known, their bodies leaving a trail of blood along the white walls. Fear palpitated through his body. His face was wet with tears. His t-shirt, sodden with them.

The figures were growing closer to him, following each other down the wall, their smiles growing wider and wider. Jackson scrunched his eyes shut but still they came to him, touching his face, stroking and caressing it, leaving the metallic wet of blood as their fingertips melted away. He could hear himself screaming, joining in the chorus of the Block and he knew the fear this would bring for Jamie and the others but he couldn’t stop the sounds coming out. He felt detached from his body, like he was leaving it and floating upwards. Then the gentle squeeze of Jamie’s hand on his arm brought him back down to earth. He felt the panic subside, like a bad dream does when you awake, and he hazily opened his eyes.

The cell seemed exactly as it should have been, apart from the faint dusting of pink light. Then Jackson heard the faint sound of laughing, high pitched childish laughter that echoed around the now silent block. He pushed Jamie back under the bed and waited, fear pulsing through every vein.The laughter grew louder and closer, invading every inch of his ears. Jackson tried to ignore the voices and block them out as the sound of Clara’s delicate laugh rang out louder than the rest and his heart filled with grief once again. The laughter began to deepen, turning unrecognisable in a devilish scream that no human could possibly have ever made while the colours reappeared, seeping up through the cracks in the floor and bubbling like rivers of paint, back through the bars and across the floor. Jackson was transfixed, as if under a spell from the majestic array of colours, and followed its trail up to his own cell door blindly. He watched through blurry eyes as the colours took their final form, climbing up the walls and moulding into the figures of Holly and Rose, dead against the bars, just a single trickle of blood running from each of their mouths. He blacked out.

28 out of 80 survived. Jackson sat, bitterly looking out across the children playing as the sun crawled into the sky, leaving a scorched tail of red that traced back down to the distant horizon. He could hear the little, chattering voices of the younger children who sat in a circle nearby, and he smiled in spite of himself as he heard them trying to pronounce the new nickname the Centre had gained for itself – ‘The Chambers’. It had been renamed, and Jackson knew that this one would stick. He saw the two guards watching him as always. They spoke quietly together for a brief moment before making their way across the playground towards him.

The Guard

‘Dear Diary, Hopefully one day, this will serve as a reminder of what power can do to a world. The Third Wars is one reminder, and The Centre should serve as a second. I feel stupid writing this, but I need to write everything down to make myself realise that it is real, and that I am partly to blame.

After the nuclear war, most of the world was destroyed.Whole populations were wiped out and we had no way of knowing how many were left. We could be the last ones, just a tiny speck on the baked earth that our ancestors destroyed. For five years we all lived in warehouses, a jumble of people who didn’t match together in any shape or form, attempting to survive. There were so many orphans, young children that had been sent there as evacuees during the war and now relied solely on us older ones to look after them. I was only sixteen at the start, barely out of childhood myself but, for a while, it worked.We collected material, building rooms for the children to share out of the tonnes of metal left from the war, even putting up football posts outside so that they could play.We slowly created a community that began to feel normal again. It was a happy place.

Four years on, and you wouldn’t have recognised it. The temperature had begun to increase, slowly at first and then alarmingly quickly, claiming the life of the orchard, then the river, whilst the sky turned a deeper shade of colours every day. The older boys became frustrated, taking their anger out on the younger ones as the situation got more and more desperate.Then one night, after a particularly stifling hot day, we were called into an underground room that I didn’t even know existed, nestled beneath one of the warehouses. It was thick with smoke, a new habit that the boys had taken up after finding a supply of cigars and cigarettes buried in the nearest town. Jamie’s newly grown moustache flopped limply across his face with sweat and I remember distinctly noticing the feeble attempts of the others around me, who stared at