The Abandoned Trilogy (Book 1): Twice Dead (Contagion) Read Free Page B

you!” she squealed and skipped off down the path to find her friend so they could get my CD player from my room.
    “She will break it,” Seb looked up from his work on Lewis. He was tightening some bolt and the clicking of metal on metal was rhythmic as he spoke.
    “Be quiet!” I responded.
    “Just saying,” I turned away from him, surprised that he had managed to irritate me. I was very rarely irritated by Seb, mainly because I could shut him out of my line of internal thoughts, but today was different.
    I tried to get on with my reading, but became aware of shouting. I looked up again. Stevie was stamping out of the French doors to his favourite “sulking place” as Seb called it, his Downs Syndrome face like thunder. Walking calmly behind him was Adag the Assistant House Manager.
    “Stevie,” she was saying to him in a consolatory voice “We told you that your mum and dad weren’t coming down for this weekend, we told you last week remember?”
    “They promised!” he shouted throwing his arms into the air, “They promised!”
    “They had to go to London to help your sister, that’s why they couldn’t collect you this weekend,” Adag’s voice was soothing, full of patience and understanding for this unhappy young man’s feelings.
    Seb snorted as he watched them disappear into the copse toward the knee-deep stream that surrounded Thorncroft before meandering underground to some sort of limestone pool that was apparently hundreds and thousands of years old, “Help his sister? That’s a bloody laugh, it’s his sister’s graduation weekend, they could have taken him with them, but little sister snooty pants didn’t want him there, I heard Adag talking to his mum on the phone, seems like she doesn’t want anyone to know she has a Mong for a big brother.”
    “Don’t call him that,” my head shot up and I snapped my book shut.
    Seb laughed, “What do you care Lady of Shadows?”
    “I might not care,” I said in a hard voice, “But I don’t go around calling people hateful names, that makes you as bad as the people you profess to despise.”
    Seb’s lips thinned out into a line. He didn’t like my reply. I had hit a nerve. Seb hated people who treated him as if he was a third class citizen because he was now in a wheelchair. He hated that he was now dependent on others for help. Until the car crash, he had been able-bodied, disabled people didn’t cross his radar, he was a golden boy living a golden life.
    Now he was a cripple in a wheelchair, living in a residential home, under a court order because he refused to slow down, refused to give up his love of speed.
    “She should tell him the truth,” Seb said taking up a position of defense, but not being so belligerent, “Tell him that his sister is ashamed of him.”
    “And what good will that do?” What the hell was I doing talking to Seb, had I lost my marbles since coming out into the garden?
    “At least it would be the truth,” Seb muttered and he viciously turned the handle on the ratchet and the metal creaked under the pressure and then spun when he released it and cracked his knuckles, making him swear and put his hand to his mouth and suck on the bruised flesh. He would be good looking if didn't always have a sour expression on his face I thought as I flipped open my book again.
    The truth. What was the truth? It was a question that was going to haunt all of us for a long time to come, but not for the reasons behind Seb and my conversation that particular day.
    Oh no, the truth we would have to deal with soon enough was going to be something else, something that would rip us all apart and put us on a collision course with a brand new world.
     
    We first started to notice something was wrong when we put the TV on at lunchtime and all we got was white and grey static on the wall mounted 52-inch screen. Seb who was one of the home’s techno whiz’s fiddled with it and the satellite box for ages, and then grumpily turned to the