Paranoia.
A mental breakdown caused by Danny’s act.
Meningitis.
Swine flu.
Marsh gas.
Maybe my brain just never wired up all that well to begin with and my whole life had been leading up to this moment, where the bad wiring sends sparks of insanity through my skull and makes me into a Jerry Possett, a nutcase to be avoided.
Maybe zero-point-four was simply doctors" jargon for he’s blown a fuse in his brain and we need to get him somewhere secure before he harms himself or others.
How was it even possible to know if your brain was malfunctioning, because the very thing you need to think it all through is the very thing that might be playing up in the first place.
Was that some kind of paradox?
Was I mad?
I arrived at Lilly’s house and didn’t know what to do.
If her family were behaving anything like my family they wouldn’t let her out; they would be finding excuses to stand by the door and make sure she stayed where she was.
Should I throw stones at her window, to attract her attention?
That would be a whole lot easier if I knew which one was her room.
Did I really want to speak to her, anyway?
Did I want to discover that she had no memory of the things I remembered happening to us? Did I really want to find out that all this was happening because my mind was messed up?
I stood there, trying to find a path through it all.
And then the front door of Lilly’s house burst open and Lilly came hurtling towards me.
Chapter 20
Lilly saw me standing there and her face registered both surprise and relief. She sprinted towards me and shouted, "RUN!" with such urgency that I did just that.
Turned around and ran.
Gave into a stampede instinct inherited from an earlier model of humanity, where sabre-toothed tigers stalked the landscape.
I ran, hearing Lilly’s feet slapping the pavement just behind me, and it was as if all the tension of the day had suddenly been given an outlet in one mad burst of energy. I drove my legs as fast as they would carry me, away from Lilly’s house, without an idea in my head as to why we were running.
Nor where we were running to—it didn’t matter.
In those moments, with every thought, breath and muscle focused on the physical act of running, I felt… free.
Someone shouted Lilly’s name from behind us, and Lilly’s footsteps sped up as a result. She gained ground on me, and then she was running next to me.
"Where are we going?" I shouted, feeling the words ripped from my lungs.
"I don’t know," she shouted back. "I’ve just got to get away from . . . from them."
I should have been terrified by her words, but instead they actually made me smile. If Lilly was feeling the same way, and her parents had suddenly turned weird, then I wasn’t crazy.
My mind was not broken.
I could get through this.
We could get through this.
I think I only realized where we were heading when I started recognizing details of the route from earlier. Some kind of impulse had nudged us towards a place we both thought could give us sanctuary from the madness that was hemming us in on all sides.
We stopped running as we passed the Cross house.
My lungs were burning and there was a fierce pain in my side. Bent over double, I gasped and wheezed and Lilly joined me, even placing a hand on my back.
"Thank you for coming to get me," she said.
"No problem," I said. "Thanks for the exercise."
She half-smiled.
"I’m sorry I got into that silly stuff earlier," she said quietly. "You know, the Simon stuff?"
"It’s OK," I said, finally unbending myself and standing up straight. "How is Simon?"
Lilly shook her head. "He’s gone," she told me. "Just like all of them. I mean they’re there, and everything, but they’re not, not really."
She stood up too.
"I must sound crazy," she said.
"Not at all," I said. "I know exactly what you mean. They have changed."
We carried on towards Mrs O’Donnell’s house.
"Has Doctor Campbell been round for a visit yet?" I asked her.
She nodded. "You too, huh? He told me that I had experienced a powerful hallucination, that it was all a dream I was having, but, like, awake. You?"
"Same story." We were at Mrs O’Donnell’s door now. "I overheard him telling my parents that I was one of the zero-point-four."
Lilly looked at me oddly.
"What’s that supposed to mean?" she asked.
I shrugged.
"I haven’t got a clue," I said. "I was hoping you’d have an idea."
I lifted my knuckles to the front door, was just about to knock, and turned to Lilly.
"But I think you’re one of them too," I said.
I knocked.
There were noises from within and we stood and waited for them to get closer. Mrs O’Donnell, it appeared, was in no hurry to open her door. Lilly and I stood there, feeling horribly exposed, and I started thinking that any second two angry sets of parents were going to come around the corner.
Along with Doctor Campbell, no doubt.
Finally, Mrs O’Donnell opened the door. She raised an eyebrow when she saw us, but ushered us inside without a word. She looked around before closing the front door, as if checking no one was following us.
"I wondered if you might come here," she said, showing us through into the living room.
She was watching us oddly. There was a kind of resigned look, but it was mixed with what might have been a little sternness at us invading her home again.
"Sorry to disturb-" I began, but the sudden seriousness on her face shut me up.
"Can either of you tell me what the hell is going on?" she demanded.
Lilly and I just shook our heads.
"Nothing good," Lilly said. "My . . . my parents aren’t my parents any more."
"Mine neither," I said.
Mrs O’Donnell looked at us with a kind of weary acceptance.
"Sit down," she said. "You’re both out of breath."
"We ran here," Lilly explained.
We sat down on one of the two sofas. Mrs O’Donnell disappeared for a few moments and returned with a couple of glasses of orange squash. She handed them out and took a seat on the other sofa.
She asked me what had happened, so I sketched the events since we had parted on the high street. All of that seemed an awfully long time ago, even though Mrs O’Donnell’s clock told me it was just less than an hour. Again, my body and a clock disagreed. Time passed weirdly through the looking glass.
Mrs O’Donnell heard me out, then shook her head and gave an exasperated tut.
"And this thing he called you… zero-point-four . . . you’re sure that’s what he said?"
I nodded.
"Well, what do you think that’s supposed to mean?" she asked.
I told her that I didn’t have a clue.
"Zero-point-four," she mused. "Decimals. Pretty meaningless unless you know what they’re referring to."
She turned to Lilly and her face softened a little.
"And what’s been happening to you, my dear?"
Lilly sighed.
"It hasn’t gone a lot different to Kyle’s afternoon," she said. "Simon was, like, totally weird. I met up with him when everyone got moving again, and I thought he might be a little . . . I don’t know . . . disorientated by the . . . well, you know, whatever it is we’re calling all of this."
She waved a hand in the air as if showing how hard this whole thing was to describe.