And now, I present to you the reason why I entitled this story The Flood. Well, part of the reason. The rest of it will be in the A/N at the end.

Calm as it may be, if you managed to sail into the eye of the storm, you wouldn't actually stay there very long.

This scenario was no exception.

Mere seconds after Bailey destroyed the brain of the system, Jody, who was still kneeling on the floor next to Ryan's corpse, felt the slightest vibrations coming from the ground underneath her. Her sickness meant she was too sluggish to react to them at first, but the vibrations escalated to stronger tremors wracking through the sacrificial chamber.

"What's going on?!" Bailey panicked, who was now feeling them too.

"I had a feeling this would happen!" Jody let out.

"Then why did you let me do it?!" Bailey shrieked, struggling to keep his balance.

Before Jody could respond, an alarming cracking sound sounded throughout the chamber - at the wall where the core was embedded in its compartment, a lightning bolt-shaped crevice was creeping up towards the ceiling. Through the channel, they could see the same polonium-coloured light that had been behind the core earlier, providing minute illumination to add to the now-dim bulbs of the arachniwraiths.

A trickle of liquid appeared at the base of the crack, slightly luminous like a plastic glow-in-the-dark children's toy. Bailey tried to bend down to inspect it, but lost his balance in the process, falling onto his hands and knees. He winced as the pain shot through his sprained wrist.

"Bailey, look out!" Jody called, her eyes as wide as dinner plates as the crack started splitting into two, as one kept inching up the wall and across the ceiling, while the other spread sideways. She could tell that wall wouldn't stay standing for long, and Bailey was right next to it!

Bailey scrambled out of the way just in the nick of time as a large chunk of the wall fell away and crumbled to shards. As it did so, however, more of the glowing, slightly viscous liquid gushed out from the space where it had been. It would've been a beautiful sight had they not been in the middle of it.

"What are we gonna do?!" Jody yelled, trying to shuffle away from the disintegrating walls with what little strength she had, but there wasn't much either of them could do about the collapsing ceiling.

More liquid was flowing out from the holes in the wall, causing the level to rise up to about ankle depth. It was incredibly cold and about the consistency of cooking oil, but the sight of some smaller pieces of rubble floating on top of it gave him an idea. Clambering over to where Jody was, he had to practically drag her to sit on a larger piece of wall, in a corner of the room where the wall and ceiling had already completely collapsed so there was no danger of any more crashing on them.

"What do we do now?" she asked, still gripping his arm.

"We wait," Bailey said. "Hopefully we should be able to float away on this."

"But what about Ryan?" she went on, her gaze falling on the cold cadaver that was once her friend, which was now partially obscured by dust and rubble, half-submerged by the liquid.

Bailey bit his lip, feeling his eyes prick. "We're gonna have to leave him here."

"No, we can't!" she insisted, tears evident in her voice as she tried to crawl off the slab, but Bailey held her back.

"Don't!" he yelled. "You'll be crushed if you do!"

"So will he!"

"He won't feel it!" Bailey shouted, before composing himself and toning his voice down. "Look, he sacrificed himself so we could get out of here alive. Don't waste that, please."

Jody stared at Bailey for a few seconds, before she dragged herself back onto the slab and - much to his surprise - sloppily slumped her arms around him in a clumsy hug. He returned it, though he kept his grip firm to keep her upright.

The moment was rudely interrupted by a sudden smash mere feet away from them. A slab of ceiling had given way, plummeting to the ground with an almighty crash like a meteor. The shockwaves caused the cracks in the walls to grow and more liquid to come spewing out from behind them. They felt their tiny raft bob upwards under its own buoyancy.

"We're gonna make it out," Bailey declared confidently.

They kept rising, and Jody stayed clinging to Bailey the best she could in order to stay on the raft. After what felt like ages, it finally rose up past where the ceiling had been - by which time the walls and ceiling of the tunnel above had begun to give way under the tremours. As fragments of the ceiling fell away, faint shafts of moonlight appeared through the holes. They saw the cylindrical chute at the end of the tunnel, surrounded by corpses of arachniwraiths.

"We're gonna make it!" Jody yelled, scrambling off the raft in excitement.

"Jody, no!" Bailey warned. "You'll get-"

CRACK.

A chunk of ceiling had collapsed. It wasn't that big, only a bit bigger than a rugby ball. But it was obviously far denser than that.

It had landed square on Jody's head.

The resulting noise made Bailey feel sick to his stomach. He probably would've thrown up had he eaten a thing over the past 18 hours.

He could hear the sound of fluid sloshing below and behind him. The whole system was flooding!

He pushed himself up and rushed over the Jody, wading through the liquid. He managed to haul her over his shoulder just in time for the flood to catch up with him, sweeping him off his feet. The cold was blinding, and he tried to keep his and Jody's faces above the fluid, to partial success. The current carried them down what was left of the tunnel, towards the exit. He braced himself for impact.

It never came - instead he found himself being sucked up the chute in the stream of fluid, as if being sucked up a straw.

Finally, finally, he broke the surface, pulling himself and Jody onto the dry, twiggy forest floor.

"Jody, Jody!" Bailey yelled, shaking her shoulder. "We're out! We're finally out! Now we just have to ... Jody?"

She hadn't reacted at all to his jubilant celebrating, and when he brought his hand up to touch her head, it came away streaked with warm blood.

Trying to avert his mind from the sour, sick feeling festering in his abdomen, he cast his eyes about the surrounding area. He couldn't see a whole lot as it was still past 4 o'clock in the morning, but the pale moonlight provided a degree of illumination. He could see vast fissures in the ground from where the tunnels and the entire system had given way. The magnitude had been staggering.

This made a thought occur to him - if the quake had been so strong that it had opened up the forest floor, surely they must've been felt by some people nearby, right? Wouldn't people come to investigate, discover him and Jody, send for help? Wouldn't there already be a search party out looking for them? It had only been a day, they wouldn't give up that quickly.

With that thought in his mind, Bailey allowed sleep to overtake him, hugging Jody to himself like a teddy bear as she gradually grew cold and stiff in his arms.


Once the investigation team had received reports of the small but immensely powerful quake with the epicentre being at Ashdene woods - the same spot where three adolescents had mysteriously vanished barely a day before - it took them less than an hour to arrive on the scene. They chose to take the helicopter there, and once they saw the full extent of the damage, they immediately concluded that they had made the right choice.

The crevices in the ground were each at least a mile long, and when they looked down them, they saw that the bottoms of them were strangely visible due to what appeared to be a glowing fluid lying on the floors.

After strenuous searching, at long last they turned up a result.

Bailey Wharton lying out cold on the floor at the end of one of the pits, with Jody Jackson's corpse in his arms.

"My Lord," one of them breathed, unable to take his eyes off of the sheer tragedy in front of him. "What on Earth could've happened to them?!"

"Call 999!" ordered the leader of the search team. "Tell them to air lift, there's no way the ambulance will work here."

With that, he strode over to the two children, with the intent on getting as much information as humanly possible out of them.

"Hey," he coaxed, gently nudging Bailey. "Can you hear me?"

Slowly, Bailey's bleary eyes peeled open, glazed over with exhaustion. He became more alert at the unfamiliar face, however.

"What's-goin'-on?" he slurred, frowning slightly.

"You're being rescued," the man said calmly. "It's gonna be okay, we're gonna get you home."

Bailey's eyes shifted to Jody, who was in the exact same position as she'd been in when he'd fallen asleep.

In daylight, he could see just how brutal radiation sickness had been on her. In the space of several hours, her face had sunken inwards and her hair was not nearly as thick and healthy as it had previously been. A thin, pearly film of the liquid - which he would later learn was the ectoplasm that had held the trapped souls - clung to her clothes, skin and hair, glinting under the harsh light that he still hadn't properly adjusted to, having been in the dark for so long.

He thought of Ryan, buried somewhere under the rubble and fluid, down in the macabre chamber. A crude grave - Ryan had deserved so much better.

It was all too much. His eyes started pricking, his face contorted and he suddenly found himself blubbering like a toddler in front of the stranger in uniform.

The man didn't judge. He pulled Bailey close to him, didn't force him to speak and just let him pour his emotions out.

It didn't take long for the paramedics to arrive in their helicopter.

"C'mon, son," said a paramedic, shaking Bailey's shoulder as he stayed firmly pressed into the investigator's chest. "Let's get you fixed up."

Hardly worth trying, Bailey thought. There was no hospital stay long enough to heal the wounds in his heart - heal the wounds in Ryan's heart. Nonetheless, he went with them. They let him hang on to Jody, knowing they could not pry her off of him.

At the hospital, when he came face-to-face with Mike and May-Li again, he immediately received the longest, tightest hug he thought anyone could ever receive, especially as it was from both of them at the same time. It made him feel like a wafer-thin slice of ham in a very large sandwich.

"I'm never letting you out of my sight again," he heard Mike whisper tearfully into his ear.

Eventually, Bailey was taken for what had to be the longest medical examination to date. He was given a physical checkup, along with a full-body X-ray, CT scan and a full-body MRI scan.

By the end of it, the prognosis was dismal to say the least. He was forced to tell, re-tell and re-live his story from his hospital bed.

The earthquake squad had to be called to carry out an extremely thorough search of the pits. No stone was left unturned in searching for Ryan's body. They had also been ordered to carry out this search in radiation-proof suits, as the post-mortem of Jody and Bailey's examination showed that they both had varying degrees of radiation sickness. While the search team was down there, they reported the presence of large arachnidan monsters, the likes of which had never been seen or even theorised.

They eventually managed to find the young teen down at the deepest point in the pit, submerged in the mysterious, luminous liquid. Though his body was broken, the expression on his face was serene and peaceful.


Word soon spread around those working in the ICU that young Bailey Wharton was fading fast. The extent of radiation exposure was on par with working in the X-ray room without any protection.

They feared that the radiation had even affected his brain. After all, how else would you explain his incoherent murmurings about hearing a frog croaking inches away from his ear?

Dr Afia even reported to Mike and May-Li that he'd been heard talking to two people by the names of Ryan and Jody.

Upon hearing this, May-Li had to sit down heavily and bury her face in her hands. "Oh Lord, what if he doesn't know?"

"He knows," Mike replied, his voice laboured with grief. "The post-mortem results say that Ryan died not long before they were found - of a knife wound to the chest."

May-Li sighed deeply, her hands running through her hair. "Oh Mike, what on Earth could've happened to them?"

"You heard Bailey's story."

"What, giant radioactive spiders trying to steal their souls?!" May-Li let out sarcastically. "Anyway, that's not what I mean. I mean, what did they do to deserve this? How could this have gone so wrong?"

Mike bit his lip and squeezed his eyes. "This is all my fault. I shouldn't have told them the story about the pit."

"You weren't the one that drove the knife into that boy's chest," Dr Afia said calmly.

Meanwhile, Bailey was lying motionless on the bed. He looked truly awful - frail as a twig, hair thin and scraggly, his skin flaky.

He no longer had the strength to speak out loud through his cracked lips, but he still spoke to his deceased friends in his mind.

My arm hurts, it feels all swollen up, I shouldn't have used it. I don't want to cut it off, not like that guy who had to cut his own arm off ... what was that guy's name again, Ryan?

"Aron Ralston."

Yeah, that was it ... wait, are you here?

"Yes."

Slowly, labouriously, Bailey opened his eyes.

There, standing over him, was Ryan. It had only been a week since the other's boy's death, but when you're lying deteriorating in a hospital bed, for Bailey, it felt like an eternity.

I'm dreaming.

"No you're not," Ryan said, taking a seat on the bed next to Bailey.

But you're dead ... aren't you?

"Sadly, yes," Ryan replied. "But I'm still real, mate."

What are you doing here?

"Thought I'd come and visit you," Ryan explained. "Much as I hate to admit it, I missed you."

Me too.

A frog croak sounded in Bailey's ear. It had been an occurrence so regular that it no longer startled him. That didn't mean he wasn't curious, however.

What's that?

"That's Fritz," Ryan said, picking up the amphibian off of the pillow. Bailey recognised the jet black and electric blue colouring on his skin. "He seems to like you."

Perhaps it had been a figment of his befuddled mind, but Bailey swore that the frog looked happy to see him.

What's it like up there?

"Want to find out?"

This wasn't Ryan's voice. In the corner of his eye, he saw Jody standing next to the bedside table. She looked different than from when he'd last seen her - vibrant and healthy as opposed to the radiation-afflicted walking corpse she'd been in her final living moments.

I can't.

"Why not?" Jody asked.

I don't want to die. Not yet. I need to talk to Mike and May-Li, see them one last time.

"He doesn't have long left," Dr Afia's voice came in from just outside, before they heard the door open and she walked inside, with Mike and May-Li in tow.

"Hey, Bailey," May-Li whispered, sitting on a chair next to Bailey's bed, trying to crack a smile. "Good to see you."

Dr. Afia, Ryan and Jody temporarily backed off, to allow their former guardians to make their goodbyes uninterrupted.

"Did you hear what the doctor said?" Mike asked, taking a seat next to his colleague.

Bailey couldn't speak, but he managed a minute dip of the chin.

"We're really sorry," May-Li said, tearing up as she ran a hand through what was left of Bailey's hair.

"No, I'm really sorry," Mike said, squeezing his eyes. "It's my fault that Ryan and Jody are dead, and that you will be soon."

Bailey mustered up his strength to dip his head from side to side, communicating as best he could that he didn't blame Mike. It had been his own brilliant idea to find the pit in the first place. He was the one responsible, not Mike.

Ryan and Jody stepped forward again. "You ready?" Jody asked.

Yes.

She extended her hand. Bailey attempted to lift his non-injured hand to meet it, but Ryan shook his head. "Your other arm."

Perplexed, Bailey tried - and to his surprise he was able to lift it as easily as if he had full strength. He brought it forward to meet Jody's hand, and the second their fingers touched, he felt lighter, stronger.

She tugged gently, and he felt himself rise into an upright sitting position, then a standing. He saw his friends and even Fritz beaming, and they instantly embraced.

Dr. Afia turned the lights down in respect as Bailey's heart monitor flatlined. But as Mike and May-Li were standing up, making to leave, they swore they saw all three deceased children standing next to the bed, hugging and clinging onto each other as if they could not bear to let go.

They say there are two types of authors in the world - those that cry when they kill the best character(s) and those that smile, laugh, and have a cup of tea with Satan.

I'll admit, it was actually very hard to kill our two other leads here. I just needed them all to be together again with little Fritz, who was named courtesy of Dark Heart 945, who is probably out for my blood right now.

I was struggling to come up with a title of this story, but then it came to me when I put my playlist on shuffle and the first song that came up was Take That's song The Flood. The title of this chapter was taken from a lyric from that song.