A/N: Here's Part Two! Let me know how I'm doing with the story so far - if there's anything I can take out/put in the make the story/setting/character personalities better, how compelling it is for you guys to read on, etc. Enjoy :D
A/N: Here's also a new "system" that I either came up with or just managed to glean from other books - the "Memorable Short Memory"! :D Those of you who've seen this story before will notice them in Italics.
Part Two: Auckland City, New Zealand, 1:10 AM, 21st December, 2012
It took about seven hours before Blaize regained consciousness. She was on her stomach, and her eyes now beheld neatly grooved steel. Her knapsack and shawl were gone.
Right now, everything was suspiciously silent. Blaize's eyes struggled to become used to the dark night as the smell of ashes and burnt flesh filled her nostrils, and a liquid dripped on the back of her head.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
It was that which had revived her to a dim awareness as the dripping sound continued to fill her ears.
She tried to roll onto her back, but then all of a sudden every part of her began to feel awfully sore. She wouldn't let it stop her from seeing what was going on. She tried again. After a few more attempts, she finally managed to roll onto her back. But it was then she saw something that caused her eyes to widen in shock.
The bus was upside down. The grooved steel she saw as she regained consciousness was the roof of the bus. And above her were the mangled corpses of her schoolmates entangled amongst the seats and broken windows. The liquid that was dripping on the back of her head before now continued to drip next to her. It was blood.
She was having trouble fighting the sheer sense of panic that was rising inside of her when she heard the shuffling of feet outside of the bus wreck.
Was it the others that had survived the attack?
A head popped into view by one of the windows.
It snarled at her. She realized instantly that it was one of the victims of the Sickness, a thing she reflexively labelled as a Sickened, from the name of the virus. She could tell by its creepy, milky-white blank eyes, as well as the fact that it was sporting a massive gash that crossed its face that looked far too deep for any normal human to survive.
Accurately guessing that it would only try to kill her as Captain Cale had presumably killed the cameraman earlier, she quickly reached out from her position on the ruined bus for something she could use as a weapon, panic setting in as the thing started climbing in, drool dripping off its chin as it seemed to savour its next meal.
The fingers from her right hand grasped something hard and cold. She pulled it on desperately with all of her might, adrenaline giving her strength.
After a few tries, it came free, a liquid spraying all over the area as it did, that and the weight of it causing her to assume that it was a fuel pipe. The momentum forced her right arm to arc around her body to her left, which caused her makeshift weapon to strike the Sickened directly on the head just in time with the satisfying crack of bone breaking - the impact caused it to retreat back out through the window it climbed in by in the first place.
The only thing that she saw after that was that the Sickened screeched at the cloudless night sky after it was free of the ruins of the bus, most likely to attract more of its misbegotten kind.
Exhausted, Blaize lost most of the control over her right arm. As it fell onto her chest, she looked at the weapon she had miraculously acquired in the moonlight.
She then dropped it in shock and screamed as she identified it.
It wasn't a fuel pipe. It was the arm of the bus driver. She could tell by the tattoos. And it was still bleeding.
Her scream must've renewed the Sickened's vigour, because almost seconds after she screamed, its ugly head reappeared at the window, a fragment of its skull sticking out from the top of its head. It decided to make another assault, this time by going prone and crawling its way in to make the whole process easier. Blaize was beginning to hate the circumstances she was in as she reached for the arm again.
This time, however, the Sickened grabbed it before she did and tossed it aside as it continued its crawl towards her.
Blaize knew that this time, she was done for. There was nothing she could use as a weapon now.
Suddenly, it stopped just in front of her, its arms thrashing to try and grab her before being dragged backwards out the window by some unknown force. She watched what was going on from where she was as the Sickened was dumped outside. She then saw the end of a shotgun barrel shoved in its face.
She turned away and closed her eyes as she heard the sound of the discharge of shotgun pellets.
'Blaize? You okay?' a familiar voice came from outside the bus a few seconds later.
Blaize opened her eyes and looked out the bus window to find the familiar face of Siobhan Skibursky looking back at her through the same window the Sickened was dragged out from.
'Uh… I think so,' she replied, the sound of her heart beating much faster than usual filling her ears. She tried to wriggle out, but every part of her didn't want to move. 'I might need some help.'
Siobhan nodded.
'Okay. I'm coming over to pull you out. Just don't try to do anything until I get there, alright?'
Blaize coughed nervously.
'Uh… wait a minute. We're in the middle of a contagious, virus-caused apocalypse and you're just going to crawl in here, get me out on your own and without asking me whether or not I've been bitten?'
At this, Siobhan sighed.
'Do you want me to explain my reasons now and risk the other two of us outside getting attacked, or get you out and tell you myself that we saw you being bitten seven hours ago when you were unconscious and that the virus takes a maximum of twenty minutes to turn you into a Sickened afterwards?' Siobhan asked, supplying Blaize with a sly smile to emphasize her point.
'That's more than enough of an explanation for me,' Blaize replied, managing to sport a grin despite the situation. At the very least there were other survivors. At least she was immune from The Sickness, as far as she knew. And, at the very least, Siobhan was the same, perky and humorous self she always was.
With that, Siobhan started climbing in.
'Norm and I managed to stay conscious after the car exploded above us,' she explained as she slipped her slim, prone figure inside the bus. 'We managed to avoid being detected by the Sickened that initially attacked the city by playing dead. You'd think they would've noticed us, and Norm didn't think it would be a good idea, but it worked, although we both still got bitten after. We couldn't go back and get you until we got ourselves weapons. We're immune as well, of course.'
She quickly grabbed Blaize's wrists and began to pull her out. As she was being pulled out, Blaize felt some of her strength returning to her.
'How did you know about the immunity to the Sickness?' she asked, noticing the same shotgun used to annihilate the Sickened's head strapped around Siobhan's back. 'And where did you get that shotgun?'
'Norm, Ben and I managed to get to one of the safehouses that the Auckland City Council set up,' Siobhan explained as she hauled Blaize out. 'There was a radio broadcast out saying that about one in ten people are immune to the Sickness. As for the weapons, turns out, other people who weren't the Government left weapons in there for other survivors, along with lots of ammo for situations like this. It's where we're headed to now-'
'-Wait. My little brother's alive?' Blaize interrupted, halfway through the window, her brain catching up to her ears, and now using her legs to support herself. The corpse of the now-headless Sickened that had tried to attack her had been kicked aside, and a stinging sensation coming from her right ankle notified her of where she'd been bitten hours ago.
'Of course - funny thing is, he was still asleep when we found him about twenty meters from the ruins of the bus. The Sickened probably thought he was dead. Man, he even sleeps like the dead.'
'Hey! That's me you're talking about, innit?' Ben's voice came from behind Siobhan as Blaize finally managed to plant both of her feet on the cold, hard road.
She looked over Siobhan's shoulder to see him standing there in his now slightly-dirtied red t-shirt that read "Kiss Me If You Like Pyromaniacs!" in large, bold white text and plain red shorts. And then he ran up to her and hugged her.
'Sonja!' he exclaimed, hugging her tighter than she would've have liked, 'you're alive!'
'Uh… Ben? I think that's overdoing it,' Blaize squeaked, not surprised that Ben had decided to use her actual name rather than her nickname.
During the whole thing, Blaize noticed that Norman was standing behind his sister, holding a machine pistol that bore the symbol of the New Zealand Army in his hands, a dark green fern, with two black cloth bags draped over his sides, while Ben had two pistol holsters hanging from his belt.
Even though her little brother was in the middle of giving her a bear hug, Blaize couldn't help but observe her surroundings.
Her heart sank as she did so.
Queen Street had transformed. Where once there were flashy and vibrant stores, there were ruins. Where people had walked, there were corpses. Where there had been order, chaos. Light, dark, save for the nightlight of the world above and the occasional still-working pilot light illuminating the nightmarish involuntary transformation of the once-great Auckland City from below.
Car wrecks, corpses, rubble and rubbish were scattered across the street, almost like the forgotten, dejected toys of a child. But even Blaize knew that forgotten toys still had some sentimental value in their owners' hearts, and that the attack, the sheer hell that had been unleashed upon her city, had hit far, far too close to home.
The moment was interrupted by the screeching sound of more Sickened from the ruins of the shops. Ben let go of Blaize, looked around for a second, and drew out the two pistols from the holsters that hung from his belt.
'Here, use this and make yourself useful,' Norman said to Blaize calmly, digging into one of his bags, producing a black metallic object and handing it to her. 'It's fully loaded.'
As she took the object in her hands, her eyes widened.
'Sonja Fiore Ignis! Where are you?'
Sixteen-year-old Sonja Ignis was still staring at the object she now held in her hands when she heard the voice. She was so enthralled by the object that she didn't hear the sound of footsteps behind her.
'Ah, there you are,' Bill Jr. Ignis' voice came from behind her.
Sonja, her trance broken by her father's words, raised her head slightly as she realized what was going on. She was on her knees, staring at and cradling the black metallic object she knew was a gun in her hands in the middle of her father's office.
'I've been looking for you everywhere,' her father continued, his footsteps getting closer. 'I think I found those school books you came up here to look fo-'
Suddenly, Bill Jr. stopped, and Sonja's mind started to race at what that meant.
Oh, shit, she thought. He's seen the gun.
A short period of silence reigned. Sonja reckoned that she was in trouble. Instead, to her surprise, her father just smiled at the nervous grin she now gave him.
'So, you found your Grandpa Bill's old M16A4 Maverick Assault Rifle, eh?' he chuckled, crouching down next to her. He ran his hand through his short blonde hair before continuing. 'Last time this baby saw action was three years ago, back in Iraq when your Grandpa Bill gave it to me as a gift.' He put a firm hand on the gun before turning his gaze towards Sonja, his weathered blue eyes looking into her red eyes intently and then smiling. 'You wanna try this baby out at the firing range?'
Sonja nodded.
'Sure, Dad,' she said, giving her father an uncertain smile, although it was more to stay out of trouble rather than her desire to fire the thing. However, that opinion changed after she'd had a chance to try it out at the firing range, her face beaming with joy like a child opening presents on Boxing Day every time she'd hit a target.
Right now, her mouth was curving into such a smile, before she spotted something etched on the grip – a single word: BOHICA.
Now, Blaize didn't recognise the meaning of the word – apparently, it had something to do with bad things – but the one thing she did recognise was the style it was etched on with – it had the exact same as her grandfather's gun. The very same gun would serve three generations of a single family in a row now.
She had no idea how the gun had managed to get itself back into the hands of an Ignis other than the fact that Fate, apparently, had a very strange sense of humour.
'Holy shit,' she said in awe as the memories flooded back to her, 'where the hell did you get this?'
'The safehouse I found my shotgun in,' Siobhan answered her, vigilantly looking around for any Sickened. 'Ben didn't want it and said you had some experience with it before, so we thought you would.'
She stopped talking, took aim at something moving in the darkness ahead and fired.
It was as if Siobhan had set off the starting gun for the rest of the Sickened lurking in the shadows, because soon after she fired her shot, the sounds of an approaching tide of shoes and bare feet on the cold, shattered and unforgiving road resounded across the street.
'Uh-oh,' Ben said, uncertain as he spotted the first of the Sickened erupting from the darkness around them. 'Norm? Run? Or shoot?'
Blaize spared a glance at Norman and Siobhan, and noticed that while Siobhan was shaking in anticipation, Norman wasn't looking at the horde. He was staring at one of the shop windows ahead of him, which Blaize recognized as the somewhat-untouched Kathmandu store.
'Run or shoot?' Ben asked again, more sternly this time and with an edge of panic in his voice. The Sickened were getting dangerously close now.
Norman gave him a quick glance, his trance broken, before redirecting his attention towards the incoming horde.
'What do you think, Ben?' he asked him sternly. 'Shoot!'
With that, everyone started shooting.
The incoming Sickened fell by the numbers as the survivors quickly fell into line, covering each others' backs, but even so, Blaize realized that the Sickened were not only tenacious, but they learnt quickly. As each of them fell, more filled its place, using the corpses of the fallen as cover.
They were advancing, and there was nothing the survivors could do to stop it.
As Blaize shot another round into the chest of an approaching Sickened and looked behind it after a few minutes of continuous firing, she felt a glimmer of hope. There were no more behind the rest of the horde.
She was immediately thrust back into the situation when she just noticed the Sickened she'd shot close its jaws around her left forearm. Pain instantly shot up her arm, and she rifle butted the thing on the head with her weapon, which caused it to stumble back.
She held the wound on her arm and grimaced, but her expression was immediately replaced by one of surprise when she saw the Sickened that had bitten her.
It was cupping its face with its hands and screeching at the ground, writhing in pain. As Blaize watched it, Siobhan, who noticed what had happened, immediately shot the thing with her shotgun, killing it.
But even as it lay dead, Blaize couldn't help but stare at the Sickened's corpse.
From what she saw, its mouth was leaking green-tinted blood, and it sure as hell wasn't hers.
'Well, that's the last of them,' Ben said, with a sigh of relief.
'Blaize! You alright?' Siobhan asked Blaize as she examined her wound. 'Norman, hand me some dressings, willya? Quick!'
Blaize didn't reply. She just kept staring at that particular corpse.
Norman, after handing Siobhan a roll of dressings, followed her gaze and walked towards the corpse, squatted down in front of it so that Blaize's view was obscured, and examined it.
'Holy shit…' he breathed. 'What the hell is this?'
Ben immediately approached the corpse, and after Siobhan had bandaged Blaize, she followed.
'This… this isn't like anything I've seen before…' Norman continued. 'Blaize? I think you might wanna have a look at this.'
Upon hearing his words, she snapped out of her trance and strode over to the corpse.
What she saw wasn't pretty at all. Norman had moved the Sickened's hands, and now, she saw that its mouth was sizzling. It was as if acid had been thrown on its teeth. The stench of rotting flesh and boiled blood wafted into Blaize's nostrils, and she covered her nose with her hand.
'How the heck did this happen?' Ben asked Norman. 'This looks fresh to me.'
'Blaize got bitten by that one,' Siobhan said as she looked at the corpse.
Norman and Ben glanced up at Blaize.
'How the-' Norman started, but he was interrupted by a loud, bestial roar from further up the street.
Ripping their attention towards the sound, it was obvious that behind the masses of wrecked cars and other detritus strewn across the street, something big, and obviously inhuman, was coming straight for them as the ground started to shake from its weight. The four of them were brought out of their shock by the following sound of a car crash, similar, as Blaize noted, to the one she'd heard before she'd been knocked unconscious.
As a wrecked white car flung out of the shadows and into the moonlight towards them, Blaize instinctively leapt to her right while the others leapt to the left just seconds before the automotive projectile landed with a loud screech in the space where they were standing just mere seconds ago before sliding a few more meters down the road.
Blaize regained her footing and looked up towards the source, and her eyes widened as she saw it.
Even in the shadows, she could outline a silhouette of a Sickened about the size of a jeep approaching, a pair of glowing green eyes bobbing up and down furiously in the dark as it approached. But now, she could smell it – the combined stench of vomit, blood and other, biological, disgusting substances making their assault on her nose almost causing her to gag.
And then it erupted out of the shadows of the buildings and into the moonlight, where she could see in detail what this thing was.
It was humanoid. It appeared human, but that, it seemed, was where the similarities between what this thing was and humans ended. It travelled on two giant arms, each the size of a man, much like a gorilla. Its head, tiny in comparison to the rest of its body, was nestled in the middle of the thing's massive upper-body, and there were rotting patches across its skin, all leaking greenish blood and streams of pus.
As it charged towards Blaize, she aimed towards it and squeezed the trigger. It roared again, revealing a missing lower jaw, and brought one massive arm back to punch her.
Diving to her right, she dodged the punch, and as she landed, she realized that this thing wasn't slow. When she looked up again, she saw its massive fists were already raised up above its head, and her eyes widened as she realized that this Sickened was about to crush her.
Before it could do so, however, a hail of shells from Siobhan's shotgun blast on its back interrupted it in mid-smash, and it turned on her instead as Norman and Ben started shooting at the thing, giving Blaize time to regain her footing and start firing.
Luckily enough for her, Siobhan dodged the Sickened's overhead blow as it pulverized the ground she had been standing on seconds ago before ripping out a piece of road and flinging it at Ben and Norman, who dived out of the way just in time as it embedded itself into another wrecked car.
After taking a few swipes at Siobhan, the thing grabbed the front of a nearby wrecked car and attempted to swipe Siobhan with it, who flung herself flat on the ground to avoid it, and then it flung the vehicular weapon towards Blaize, who dived to the ground once more as the wreck passed over her head by inches before crashing into a ruined shop.
And then it charged towards Blaize again.
As it did so, she rolled on the ground to her left, just barely avoiding it, stood up and turned towards the thing to fire a few more shots only to be met by a punch to the stomach by the monster, which sent her flying across the street.
It was like she had been hit by a train or something along the lines of one. As her body crumpled to go along with the blow to avoid as much damage as possible, she maintained her grip on her assault rifle, but it was all she could do.
She landed on her back, but then the momentum caused her to flip over backwards again and onto her stomach, her weapon just within her reach. The pain in her stomach was excruciating.
'Blaize!' Siobhan's voice rang out.
Someone grabbed her wrists. She looked up and saw Siobhan there, pulling her up.
'Come on! You've got to get up! That thing is coming over here right now!' she said hurriedly.
'Siob! Quickly, your shotgun!' Norman shouted.
Siobhan quickly threw Norman her shotgun as Blaize saw through blurry vision that the giant Sickened was almost upon them. And then Norman stepped in between it and Blaize and Siobhan like a hero.
He quickly shoved the shotgun barrel in front of its face with the end of it just a meter away from it as it drew back its arm to punch him, and with one mighty blast, blew off its head.
For a second, Blaize thought that it would continue its rampage despite the fact that the only thing that remained of its head was a stump of a neck, but then it halted suddenly, collapsed to its knees and then fell just in front of Norman as Siobhan continued to help Blaize up.
'Cripes,' Ben said in awe as he looked at the headless corpse. 'That… that was awesomeness on a stick.'
Siobhan nodded in agreement as Blaize finally managed to get back onto her feet.
'Blaize, you all right?' Norman asked her, looking her over.
She couldn't reply, but instead groaned, holding her stomach as she leaned on Siobhan for support, her face scrunched up in pain. Her insides felt like they'd just gotten a beating, and at the moment, she certainly didn't feel like walking at all.
Norman finished his diagnosis and gave Blaize a smirk.
'Cheer up,' he said, giving her a pat on the back. 'It doesn't appear to be too bad. Some rest in a safehouse should fix that up.'
'But the question is, Norm,' Siobhan asked, 'where can we find one?'
'Hey!' a voice called out from one of the ruins of the shops. Blaize could see a figure in a black trench coat and gas mask waving at them from the Kathmandu store. 'You! Get in here, quick!'
Siobhan looked at Norman, and he nodded at her before the group moved towards the store as fast as they could.
Climbing up the escalator steps, they were greeted by the man in the armour, who had opened a large red steel door, covered by a large, dark green cloth, leading into the safehouse within. They stumbled into the room as the man shut the door behind them.
The safehouse was well-lit, with mattresses, sleeping bags and piles of unused clean clothes in the left back corner of the store, weapons and ammo assorted in neat piles and a radio in the front left corner, an open door that lead to the toilet in the back, where Blaize noticed a makeshift shower inside, and two fridges and a large cupboard in the right corner, with a camp burner in the middle of the room, which was currently gently simmering a pot of potato soup, the refreshing smell of which wafted into her nose.
After the man shut the door and pushed some furniture in the way, he turned and examined the teenagers behind the gas mask.
'What the blimey frak were you fullas doing out there?' he asked them sternly. 'Where did you get your weapons from, and who are you?'
'Saving our friend here,' Norman replied, nodding at Blaize. 'We got our weapons from the IMAX cinemas safehouse.'
The man snorted at the mention of the safehouse.
'Never really liked that safehouse. Sure, there's two exits, but one's through that bloody big fan that still works,' he replied before extending a gauntleted hand towards Norman. 'Sergeant Thaddeus Cyrus,' he introduced himself, 'New Zealand Army, Special Ops Division "Rough Riders". Heavy Weapons.'
'Norman Skibursky, student at St. Monica's College,' Norman introduced himself, shaking the sergeant's hand. 'Excellence-Achiever. Behind me's my sister, Siobhan, and our friends, Ben and Sonja Ignis. All students, by the way, sir.'
'You sure know how to treat the right fullas with the right level of respect, kid,' Sergeant Cyrus noted, slightly sarcastically.
Blaize raised an eyebrow as she tried to stand up straight.
'What exactly are you doing here?' she asked, keeping down the pain from her stomach. 'It sure looks like you plan on staying here for a while.'
'Very observant of you,' the sergeant replied, giving her a respectful nod before removing his gas mask. 'I stationed myself here to help any survivors still trapped in the city get out. Alive.'
Siobhan gasped as she saw Sergeant Cyrus' face.
He was growing a short beard, but the multiple scars on his face explained better than words that he was no stranger to battle.
An eye patch over his left eye covered a lost eye, and a large, straight scar across his face from the bottom right cheek that crossed his eye patch probably was from a knife wound that, as Blaize had guessed, rendered his left eye useless.
The remaining one was looking at the teenagers wearily, as if he'd seen far too much of the horrors of the Sickness to fully trust them.
It wasn't those features that had made Siobhan gasp, however.
'Wait a minute, I know you! You're the guy that had been guarding the Medatech Lab with Captain Cale!' she exclaimed, remembering the sergeant's name from the news earlier.
Again, Sergeant Cyrus snorted before scratching his medium-length military-style raven black hair.
'Guilty as charged,' he replied grimly, as if his own statement was a conviction against himself. 'That bloody lab was my first failed assignment. And here I am, trying to fix up my mistake. I should've shot that bloody chimpanzee instead of letting it escape.'
He shook his head and discarded his gas mask on the ground.
'By the way, I saw what you kids did out there, taking down that Tank with better efficiency than some of the Army units I've seen,' he said, referring to the now-headless giant Sickened that had attacked them. 'Colour me impressed. And that doesn't happen often.'
He gave all of them a respectful nod before he strode over towards the bubbling pot of soup, muttering something under his breath and checking the soup before turning towards the teenagers, who hadn't moved.
'Well, make yourselves comfortable, kids,' he said. 'Soup's ready, and it's going to be a long night tonight.'
Half an hour after dinner, after having a few quick showers and getting changed into cleaner versions of the clothes they wore in the clothing pile, Siobhan helped Blaize lie down onto a dark blue mattress before lying down on another one next to hers. Norman was busy looking at the weapons Sergeant Cyrus had in the safehouse and deciding which ones to choose, and Ben was listening to a few of Sergeant Cyrus' war stories intently.
'Blaize?' Siobhan asked. 'Do you think things will go ever go back to normal?'
Blaize turned on her mattress and smiled at her.
'Yeah. Of course. "I'll bring peace back on Earth if I have to kill every one of these bastards with my own bare goddamn hands,"' she replied, quoting a character from an old game she used to play.
Siobhan just smirked at her, but then sighed.
'Well, do you think your parents are going to be fine? You know, in Fairfield?'
Blaize's red eyes looked deep into Siobhan's green ones for a few seconds before she rolled onto her back, gently pushed aside a few strands of her long, moist crimson hair, and sighed.
'I hope so. And even if there are Sickened over in America, Dad and Grandpa Bill sure know their way around guns, that's for sure.'
She was about to ask about Siobhan and Norman's parents, Timothy and Nicole Skibursky, when she remembered that they had died in a car accident years ago during a vacation to Wellington. She knew, because she and Ben were in the car as well when it happened more than two years ago, and that the four teenagers were lucky to get out mostly unscathed.
All that she and Norman had now as a relative was their uncle. 'How's your Uncle Francis, by the way?'
Siobhan took in a deep breath before answering the question.
'Doing fine, I guess. Being in a motorcycle gang means we don't see him much. He should be in Fairfield, too, if the schedule he gave us is correct.'
She sighed.
'You know, it's ironic,' she said, changing the topic. 'What's going on now, this situation – it's like your unnamed story just suddenly came to life and dumped us in place of the characters.'
Blaize just sighed in agreement. Her bag was gone now, and so was the story. It was of no matter. She'd be able to write it up again. But this time, she thought, she'd actually have a proper reference when it came to describing the infected.
'It's pretty late,' Siobhan continued, looking at the clock on the wall to her right, changing the topic again. It was already two in the morning. 'I reckon we should get some sleep now.'
'Yeah,' Blaize replied.
'Goodnight,' Siobhan said.
'You too,' Blaize replied.
As Siobhan fell asleep, she fingered the silver necklace around her own neck. It was the last thing her mother had given to her before she and Blaize's father left for their visit to Fairfield three weeks ago.
'Sonja – remember to take care of yourself when we're gone,' Stephanie Ignis told Sonja, her brown eyes and her mouth simultaneously smiling at her.
Sonja was at the airport with her parents at the "Departures" terminal. Ben had decided to wait at the car with Siobhan and Norman, no doubt to try and plan out what he could do while Stephanie and Bill Jr. were off in Fairfield for the following month.
'I know, Mum,' Sonja smiled at her mother as she held Sonja's cheek.
Stephanie Ignis just smiled, her crimson-red ponytail bobbing up for a second before she took out a shiny silver necklace from her pocket.
'Here,' she smiled at Sonja as she gave it to her, 'I was going to give you this at Christmas, but, well, you know. Your father and I won't be back until the 28th.'
Sonja accepted the necklace – it was a simple cross on a shield, and despite its simplicity, it was beautiful.
'Thanks, Mum,' she simply said. Her mother beamed back at her.
'Don't worry about Ben's presents – we'll give him his when we get back from Fairfield. Oh, and don't let him near the chest in the attic, by the way – we both know what he does when he gets his presents too early.'
Stephanie was about to continue before Bill Jr. tapped his watch, reminding her that the plane was going to leave soon. Sighing, she picked up her luggage and took one last look at Sonja.
'Oh, and one last thing before we go, Sonja,' she said. 'Watch over little Ben for us while we're gone, okay?'
Sonja just nodded.
'Will do, Mum,' she assured her and smiled. 'I won't let him burn down the house like he did last year.'
Her mother simply smirked at her one last time before she and Sonja's father started walking. Sonja just stood there, watching as her parents disappeared down the "Departures" corridor, never to be seen again.
She smiled at the necklace and kissed it, knowing with a certain satisfaction that she was following her mother's request to the letter.
With that, she dozed off and fell asleep as outside, in the cold morning darkness, some Sickened shuffled around the ruined streets of the city as, for once in the history of Auckland City, it began to snow.
