The Forevers Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  BOOKS BY CHRIS WHITAKER FOR ADULTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Acknowledgements

  Chris Whitaker

  Copyright

  BOOKS BY CHRIS WHITAKER FOR ADULTS

  Tall Oaks

  All the Wicked Girls

  We Begin at the End

  For Isabella, who never lets me sleep

  ‘The chances that an asteroid or comet of potentially catastrophic size will come hurtling towards Earth are exactly 1-in-1. It’s 100 percent, a sure thing, a lead-pipe cinch. The only variable is when.’

  Gordon L. Dillow

  1

  Mae expected to feel more the first time she saw a dead body. Blind panic, breathlessness, dark clouds and thunder.

  Instead gentle waves rolled in beneath a sky so bright she raised a hand to dull it. The world turned like it didn’t know, like it didn’t care.

  She’d skipped English and crossed the hockey pitch to the woodland beyond, found the cliff edge and followed the track down to the beach.

  It used to be her place, where she went to forget.

  She glanced back and saw him following.

  Hugo Prince was everything she hated. ‘We need to talk about last night.’ He flashed a practised smile, but when he saw the body he staggered back, the golden tan drained from his face.

  ‘What is it? Is that –’ He tried to grab her arm but she shook him off.

  ‘Go and get someone,’ she said.

  Too calm, that’s what Hugo would later tell the policeman. Mae was too calm, like nothing about her was human.

  He went to speak but she cut him off. ‘You really want people to know why you followed me down here?’ She watched the shame fill his eyes. ‘You heard me screaming. You came to help.’

  ‘Listen, Mae …’

  She hated that he knew her name, that he looked at her at all. He existed in an alternate dimension where being good at sport meant you were good. Where girls laughed at your crappy jokes, twirled their hair and played at being dumb so you could feel superior.

  ‘Go.’ She screamed it, so loud he broke into a sprint, climbing higher, sending birds from the treetops as he burned through the woodland.

  The dead girl lay face down, ashen hair fanned out like she’d been posed. Some kind of terrible masterpiece Mae knew she’d never forget.

  She found a school bag on the rocks, inside was a purse. Mae pulled out the notes and stuffed them into her pocket.

  Waves crossed and broke, a thousand blues pared back to white as she reached down and turned her.

  Abi Manton’s eyes were as empty as her soul.

  Mae saw the tattoo creeping from behind Abi’s gold wristwatch.

  Dark scrawl over blue veins.

  On Mae’s wrist was that same word, like they were two parts of one whole.

  The third body in a month.

  James Wilson and Melissa Rowen, they’d been found together, hanging from the oak tree by the school gates.

  Mr Silver talked about suicide like it was contagious, some kind of pollutant that smoked through impressionable minds, replacing hope with despair. He told them inner strength was a choice, during the kinds of assemblies where teachers dabbed at their eyes and shook their heads in disbelief.

  All the while Mae saw the others exchanging wary glances.

  They all knew it would come.

  They all knew it was just the beginning.

  2

  They said when the news broke Mae walked out into the garden and looked to the sky like it was on fire.

  Seven years old, first day of summer, her worries limited to mastering cursive, number bonds and what to wear to Abi Manton’s party.

  It seemed like a hundred years back, not ten.

  Sometimes she would close her eyes and try to remember before, when minutes and hours dripped into an endless pool of future and history. But then she thought maybe life began and ended the night her parents stood side by side in front of the television as BREAKING NEWS edged out the movie they’d been watching.

  She felt her father turn and stare at her.

  He held her mother’s hand tightly, their fingers interlinked. They didn’t tell her, not till later, but hearing talk of space, she dropped her book to the floor and walked outside.

  She stood barefoot on the grass and faced the moon as fireflies sparked from the heathland behind.

  Either side the neighbours did the same.

  Stan and Mary. Luke and Lydia.

  And Abi.

  They stood in a line separated by low picket fences and watched the dusk air like Selena wasn’t a billion miles from them. It didn’t feel like the end then, more like a phenomenon, a miracle born from impossible fate, odds so spectacularly long they could only have been preordained.

  ‘Are we going to die?’ Abi said.

  ‘No,’ Mae said.

  Abi reached through the fence.

  Mae took her hand.

  Over the coming days the newspapers bulged with expert opinions, doomsday preachers and armchair scientists. The man who first saw it, he worked for NASA and his name was Juan Martin Morales. He was the person who stood in front of the microphones, dabbed sweat from his forehead and rubbed at three-day stubble while a selection of carefully vetted journalists lobbed questions at him.

  Morales named it Selena.

  Its real name was Asteroid 8050XF11.

  They would later learn Selena was the name of his daughter, and that she’d died at the age of three, from a disease so secular Morales ignored all reference to Last Judgement and laid out simple fact.

  If this was ever going to happen, we’d always hoped to spot it early enough to do something about it.

  We have a decade to save our planet.

  That last sentence would echo through Mae’s childhood and beyond. She would see it graffitied on the bus stop each morning as she walked to school. They would play it on the radio, on the television, and print it on the cover of a thousand magazines.

  Though they looked at time differently, it went on, unknowing, uncaring. Seasons changed, sun to snow, trees shed leaves as school years ended and began.

  Mae watched the trouble from her coastal town, so far from the cities it was like the rioting faces belonged to another species. Each night the news was painted with rage, fear and faith.

  On the morning of Mae’s tenth birthday she huddled on the sofa, her
hand on her mother’s growing stomach. The dawn chorus sang as they switched on the television and watched a rocket break the sky but nothing more.

  Morales became the face of the world, the combined hope of every nation. After each attempt at salvation he would take to the podium and field questions like an ailing politician, while most would read the failure in his tired eyes. He’d scratch his beard, long and peppered with grey now, and he’d say Selena would be easier to tackle the nearer she came.

  And come she did.

  She blazed a relentless trail, shrugging off solar storms and recoil. Millions of miles away but her impact was felt each day in countless ways. In science Mae would learn about gravity tractors and impactor probes, in maths it was relative velocity and the necessary angle of deflection. She learned they would need to slow Selena by a centimetre per second to send her off course. Each night Mae would hold her thumb and forefinger a little apart.

  A centimetre is almost nothing, she would say, as her father stood by the window and watched the stars like they were blinking out before his eyes.

  As the world reeled from a new kind of terror, Morales and his team sent up the Saviour 3 spacecraft in another attempt to change its fate.

  Mae went into London to watch the launch on the large screen by Tower Bridge. In a crowd of a million her grandmother gripped her arm tightly as fireworks lit the Thames and weary men peddled glowsticks and commemorative T-shirts. Her sister slept through it all, at peace in her pram, too young to breathe the panic in their fleeting air.

  The carnival lasted two weeks.

  And then Morales took to the world stage and once more shook his head.

  Before then Mae had never seen her grandmother cry.

  Most nights Mae would lie on the beach with Abi and Felix and watch the night sky in all its perfect, endless glory. She wondered about faith and its limitations, its blindness to everything she knew and everything she hoped for.

  Lauda finem, the Sacred Heart school motto.

  Praise to the end.

  In philosophy Mae stared at the whiteboard and the bold lettering:

  If you take away consequence, if you can do anything, right any wrong, however slight, how would you spend your final days?

  The topic was ethics. The debate turned so fierce Mr Norton had to hold Liam Carter and Sullivan Reed apart.

  It was a question that Mae dwelled on. It was the answer that kept her awake at night. Though it would take until the failure of Saviour 9 before she allowed herself to face up to the overriding, overwhelming facts.

  She was seventeen years old.

  She would die in one month.

  3

  WELCOME TO WONDERFUL WEST-ON-SEA.

  The sign swung gently in the breeze as Mae smoked the last of a cigarette and watched a storm cloud edge in.

  Rusting fishing boats bobbed in a marina that opened on to a vista of girls turning cartwheels on the beach, the falling sun blinding through the Vs of their legs.

  When the heavens opened they screamed and lay back on the sand, arced like angels as rain pinned them down.

  They hadn’t yet heard.

  Another dead girl.

  Another reminder of paradise lost.

  In the small police station she took a seat opposite Beau Walters, whose uniform swamped him so totally he looked like a child dressing up in his father’s clothes.

  He placed an old tape recorder on the desk and hit record with a trembling hand.

  ‘Was Abi Manton depressed?’

  Mae picked dark varnish from her nails. ‘Depression is the inability to construct a future. Seeing as we have no future, we’re an army of depressives, Beau.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘It’s Sergeant Walters now … till my dad comes back from the city.’

  She glanced up at the photograph on the wall, Beau’s father, the chief constable, glared back. The kind of man who looked cold to the touch, who bled judgement from his unforgiving eyes.

  ‘We’ll stop Selena,’ Beau said. His hair was the colour of sand, his cheeks reddened by acne.

  She wondered where that hope came from, that belief. She guessed it was what Morales told people to keep from total social breakdown.

  This was a close call.

  Life had stalled, but this was not the end.

  This was a time for self-reflection.

  ‘What were you doing in the woods with Hugo Prince?’

  ‘You want me to draw you a picture?’

  He slid a pencil and paper across the desk, calling her bluff.

  She got to work, then slid it back.

  He glanced down once, then again. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  She stared at him through damp hair, unflinching till he looked away.

  ‘I need you to tell me what you saw.’

  Rain drummed on the roof. Her arms were scratched, she licked at a small cut on the inside of her lip. Sometimes she drank so much she lost a whole night.

  ‘There was blood by her head. Her foot was twisted.’ She spoke without emotion, like she was reading from a schoolbook.

  ‘When was the last time you talked to her?’

  Mae turned from him, though remembered Abi’s sweet sixteen. Abi’s father hired a yacht, seventy feet of gleaming white. The invitation had been placed in her locker, a long time after Abi left her behind. Mae put on the only decent dress she owned and headed down to the marina, only to see the boat leaving without her. Abi stood on the deck, raised a hand and mouthed, Sorry, like it was an accident Mae’s invite showed the wrong time.

  ‘Hugo said he heard you scream and came to help. I’m not sure I believe him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t imagine you screaming.’

  An old fan turned the close summer air.

  ‘You and Hugo, it doesn’t make sense to me. I see him with Hunter Silver, the headmaster’s daughter. And she’s … I don’t want to say the opposite of you, but … she’s the opposite of you.’

  Mae swallowed. ‘Maybe I’ll do things Hunter won’t.’

  Dusk fell.

  Bruised sky over purple water.

  She caught her reflection, dark hair and light eyes and too much attitude for a body that clung hard to a childhood she’d never known.

  ‘Tell me about Abi.’

  Mae took a cigarette from her bag and gripped it between her teeth. ‘She was a bitch.’

  He snatched it from her. ‘I know you don’t get on with my father, and you think he looks at you every time something bad happens in this town, but the Mantons … they’re broken.’

  She felt her jaw tighten as she stared at the desk and finally talked. Abi used to live in the house next door. Her father built shelters, panic rooms, bunkers. Saviour 8 made him rich overnight as people scrambled for the illusion of safety. The Mantons moved to an Ocean Drive beach house and Abi jumped several rungs up the social ladder. Her hair, her clothes, the parties she held.

  ‘You’re saying she was popular.’

  ‘She was bland and beautiful and hateful. So, yeah, Abi was popular.’

  Mae watched a fishing boat carve waves. On her arm were other tattoos, a moon and star, some dates that meant something to no one but her.

  ‘Abi’s boyfriend is …’ he checked his notes, ‘Theodore Sandford. The boy from the choir. I saw him sing last autumn at St Cecelia. That voice …’ He tapped his pen on the desk like he was lost in the memory. ‘I forget where the song is from –’

  ‘The Marriage of Figaro.’

  She wore a short skirt and beneath that an old hunting knife strapped high on her thigh. People talked about her like they didn’t know, like she ever stood a chance.

  ‘Abi would have left before the dance. The Final – morbid name. Are you going?’

  She ignored that.

  ‘She was wearing a purity ring. Theodore wears a matching one.’

  ‘Everyone’s looking for their angle.’

  ‘You know you can talk to the school counsellor,’ he
said.

  Mae thought of Counsellor Jane and her taut church smile, imploring eyes and beige trouser suits. ‘She’s not a real counsellor. She records the conversations. If she’s worried, if she thinks we might blow our brains out, then she sends them to someone qualified.’

  ‘Resources are stretched.’

  She glanced at his badge. ‘No shit.’

  ‘Hugo … he said the popular kids have targets on their backs now. What does that mean?’

  She spoke more to herself than him. ‘Maybe they’re trophies. Maybe the kid that gets bullied finally brings his father’s shotgun to school. Maybe the hot girl that treated the boy like dirt is finally forced to see him. What’s the worst that can happen? Maybe it’ll all be over long before punishment is served.’

  ‘It’s not the end, Mae.’

  ‘The way things are going, maybe we should all pray that it is.’

  ‘One last question. It’s just a formality. Where were you last night, Mae?’

  She felt sweat roll down her spine.

  And then the windows began to rattle as the ground shook beneath her feet.

  4

  She followed him out into the street.

  The first rumble was slight.

  The second stopped the town dead.

  Mae crouched low and pressed a hand to the road, the trees across barely swayed, the air too calm.

  She imagined the clouds parting right then, catching them all unawares.

  A streak of red and yellow, a white flash bright enough to blind.