Page 90 of Monsters within Men
“You don’t need to be jealous of Oliver.”He’s probably about to die anyway,lingered unspoken between them. “Anyway, you’re the first guy I’ve properlyliked,if that makes you feel any better.” Zeke mussed Noah’s hair.
“What about girlfriends?”
“Loads of them. Thousands. Kicking down the door.”
“I can believe it.”
Zeke laughed. “I’ve had a couple of casual things. Nothing too serious.” There was a beat before he said, “Can you tell me about Rotterdam?”
“Rotterdam?” Noah went rigid, the word a trigger for thousands of memories, not all of them good.
“Only if you want to.”
“What do you want to know?”
“About you. Your life there. And what happened in the end? Only if you want.”
Noah considered what to tell him. How to summarise a lifetime into a few sentences. “I’m the oldest of five. It’s just me now. Well, me and Uncle Nathaniel.”
“Five? What was that like? Zaya and I struggled with sharing things between two.”
“It was… it was pretty great, actually.” He must have sounded sad, as Zeke squeezed him tighter against him. “I ended up looking after my younger siblings a lot. But I didn’t mind. I enjoyed protecting them.”But ultimately I failed to do that, in the end…
“What about your parents?”
“Farwas away a lot—he was a major in our military, with my uncle—soMorraised us, really. But we all loved and respected and idolised our father—three of us followed in his footsteps, myself included obviously. Let me find you some pictures…” Noah reluctantly untangled himself from Zeke to find a tablet, digging deep into folders he hadn’t opened in years. Soon Zeke was flicking through decades’ worth of beaming smiles.
Noah tore his own eyes away, focussing on the ceiling. All he saw in the photos was loss, pain, lives unlived. His throat tightened.
“I’m sorry,” said Zeke, biting his lip, eyes crinkled with concern. He threw the tablet onto the floor.
“It’s fine. It’s nice to talk about them.” He sighed. “To answer your other question. About the last days of Rotterdam. It was fuckingawful. I can’t even put it into words, Zeke.”
“Then don’t. I’m sorry, I feel bad, I didn’t mean to spoil everything—”
“Stop that.” Noah stroked Zeke’s chest, lightly tugging at the light, downy hair. “It’s sweet you want to know about it.” He took a deep breath. “We got no warning. One day everything was fine, then one day it was all sirens, fire, types on our city streets and ten bombers in the sky.”
“Shit.”
“It was, it really was. I was one of the lucky ones. They herded us onto transport flights and brought us across to here. It didn’t feel lucky at the time. Most of us felt awful for abandoning everyone. Friends. Family. All the civilians.”
A familiar image bubbled to the surface of his mind, the one his mind tortured him with in his darkest moments—Noah, in the cargo plane, looking down at Rotterdam burning as he was lifted higher and higher into the air. The sound of screaming audible even over the engines. Or was that detail only supplied by his imagination?
“There was nothing you could have done.”
Zeke was correct, but Rotterdam was a car crash. A blazing inferno of teeth, blood and death. And soon, would London meet a similar fate?
Noah looked up at Zeke, his face haloed by his hair, golden in the light. He looked blissfully happy. What good would it do to tell him what he knew? He was already an anxious wreck on the field. But if London really was falling, he wanted him to be ready.
He opened his mouth. Shut it. Then opened it again to say, “I’ve got something I want to tell you.”
twenty-five
Zeke
Zekegazedoutofthe window from the passenger seat of the car as the world whizzed by, a blur of green and brown. Ahead of them, a marigold-yellow sunrise inked the dark sky. Noah held the steering wheel lazily as he leaned back into his seat, flicking through now ancient songs on the stereo from the timebefore.
It was twenty days since Zeke’s return to Avantis, each ending with atraining sessionin Noah’s bedroom, late at night. Each morning, he’d crept back into the dormitory room before Habib, Luo and their new addition, Brodie Campbell, awoke. If they wondered where he was when they all went to bed, they didn’t ask.
