Survivors

The argument went on for a very long time. It involved a lot of shouting; a lot of things that were just insults, quite a lot of stuff that made no sense at all, assumptions about assumptions and lots of things that were dragged up from the long distant past. In other words everything that is needed for a really good satisfying prolonged argument.

Luke was absolutely dead set against the idea of being any part of “Bretnels lunatic” experiments as he called them. Joe on the other hand was pretty tempted by the idea of becoming a sort of superman. He liked the idea of being able to bash up the Aliens, sprout wings, swim like a fish and run like a cheetah, but most of all he liked the idea of being able to belch fireballs!

Holly spent much of the time as the boys argued listening and thinking. Actually she did more thinking than listening because as usual Joe and Luke’s argument had turned into volley after volley of personal insults rather than anything to do with what they were supposed to be arguing about.

She did try to butt in a couple of times to the various rants that were going on and had been completely ignored. So after a third attempt she had decided enough was enough. She had picked up a mug and hurled it across the room so that it smashed in an explosion of tea and china on the wall opposite. It had been a calculated act to get their attention rather than a true outburst of emotion and is absolutely did the trick. They stopped mid bawl and stared at her open mouthed. Her following little speech only dropped their jaws even further.

“I’ve made up my mind” she’d said “You two can make your own decisions. This is an chance to do something different with our lives. If we stay as we are we will only ever be what we are now. We’ll always have to be hiding, scraping around to find enough to eat and do nothing more than live our lives in the shadows. I don’t want to do that anymore. If we take Bretnel’s drugs and learn how to transform like he does just think what we could do! We could help people escape the camps, we could help them protect themselves, we could help them to be free. Even if we die it will be good to know we did something with our lives, something for ourselves and something for others as well.

One thing I know I’m going to do is to find out what happened to Darius, Mamma and all the rest of them. We owe them that much, we owe them because it was our fault. And when I do find out I will either set them free or...” And this was the only time in her speech that her voice began to falter “... I will avenge them”.

Joe and Luke had listened dumbstruck and intently to everything Holly had to say. They had been a little bit awed, a little bit inspired and a lot more than a little bit scared. The “I will avenge them” bit had sent a shiver down their spines. There was a chilling intent that they’d never heard from Holly before. It was as if she’d begun to change already. They never spoke about what swayed their decision but they both had know the decision was made, they were two more volunteer guinea pigs for Bretnel to experiment on.