Final Destination: End of the Line Read online

  PROLOGUE

  The air in the half-finished corridor was chilly and dank, heavy with cement dust from the nearby building work. Now the moment had come, Kate was more afraid than she'd thought possible. She ran a hand back through her tangled red hair and looked round at her fellow students, standing round her in relaxed twos and threes. One of them-Jenny, a sharp-faced blonde-caught Kate's eye and smiled. Kate thought there was an edge to the smile, though; even now they thought she'd back out of it.

  She sure as hell should back out. She was in med school now, not high school-she shouldn't care about hanging with the cool kids. But when, three days ago, they'd asked her if she wanted to play a little game-and then smiled slyly at each other, as if sure that hardworking, cautious Kate would be too scared-she'd been so angry that she'd instantly said yes. How could she have been so stupid?

  But of course she knew the answer. She accepted their challenge precisely because she'd never usually take part in anything so stupid. She was doing it to prove that she could.

  The game was called Sux Racing, and medical students had been playing it pretty much as long as the anesthetic drug, Suxamethonium, had been around. The first "contestant” was getting ready now, standing on the chalked starting line which had been drawn at the far end of the corridor. The contestant, a young man with an overlarge Adam's apple that bobbed as he swallowed nervously, rolled up his sleeve and presented his arm to the woman beside him. She carefully dabbed some alcohol onto it, tongue nipped between her teeth in concentration, then slipped the needle under his skin and depressed the plunger on the syringe.

  He waited a second after she'd finished, as if shocked that she'd actually gone through with it, then set off running down the corridor at full pelt.

  He didn't get very far. After a few paces, the drug began to kick in, quickly paralyzing every voluntary muscle in his body so that his steps began to drag until-with startling suddenness-he collapsed to the ground. His head made a dull thud against the concrete floor.

  As soon as he was down, Jenny rushed forward and began to attach a ventilator to his mouth. Her fingers seemed clumsy with nerves, or perhaps excitement, but after a moment she gave a thumbs up to indicate that the machine was working. There was a round of relieved, too-loud laughter from the surrounding students, and a few ragged cheers as one of them marked off the position of the body on the floor, indicating how far the contestant had managed to run before collapsing. The contestant himself stared up at the ceiling, unblinking, conscious but utterly unable to move. It was impossible to tell how he felt and no one around really seemed to care.

  Kate, her eyes still fixed on the young man, felt a prickling in her back and looked up to find that everyone was staring at her. It was her turn.

  Heart thudding in her chest, she made her way over to the starting line, stepping over the young man's body on the way. As she did, her eyes momentarily met his, and in the blank intensity of his stare she felt something, a threat or a warning. She shuddered, but carried on. Too late to back out now.

  Once she reached the line, she slowly rolled up the sleeve of her loose-fitting green blouse. She knew she was being a coward-that the game only really seemed dangerous and as for the chances of getting caught; that was why they were doing it here, at night, in a wing of the hospital that was still under construction. It didn't matter, though. She was still as scared as hell. She flinched involuntarily away as the syringe approached her arm. The young woman administering the injection frowned, then grabbed hold of her elbow and plunged the needle in.

  There was a sharp, deep pain, worse than she'd expected. She imagined that she could feel the paralysis already, an icy numbness pumping through her veins. Glaring defiantly at the other students, she forced her legs into motion, flinging herself down the corridor towards them. And then, after a moment, she realized that the numbness had not been illusory, that it was spreading, that it had already taken her arm and that-

  -before she could complete the thought, the drug had completed its work and she dropped to the floor with a jarring impact. She'd landed with her head twisted to one side, so she was able to see Jenny as she ran towards her, ventilator and oxygen tank cradled in her arms.

  Through the haze of fear and the horrible feeling of needing to breathe, and being utterly unable to, she clung on to one thought. It would all be over soon. Once the ventilator was pumping oxygen into her lungs the panic would end and she could wait out the easing of the drug's effect knowing that she'd done it, she'd proved something important not so much to them, but to herself. She tried to smile at Jenny as she fixed the mask over her face, but she couldn't. Jenny, though, was smiling at her.

  And then, terrifyingly, her smile slipped. Somewhere, out of Kate's sight, Jenny was frantically adjusting something, but whatever she was trying to do failed and when she looked back at Kate her eyes were wild.

  "Doug! Doug! Get the fuck over here! The oxygen tank's jammed!” Jenny shouted in a voice shrill with panic.

  At her words, everyone gathered round in a tight knot. Kate, trying hopelessly to gasp for breath, felt suddenly claustrophobic, as if all the people around her were sucking the remaining air out of her. There were hands, voices all round her, more exclamations, but it was too late. She could feel a darkness engulfing her, a nothingness from which she knew she wouldn't return. Everything, her vision, her hearing, her identity, began fading to gray.

  And then she wasn't looking up at the people crowded fearfully around her, she was looking down, as if she was floating somewhere near the ceiling. She called out to them, but no sound emerged. She realized she had no mouth to call with. There was nothing left of her except this terrified cloud of consciousness. Frantic, she tried to force her way back down to her body, to make herself live again.

  She got a close look at the people clustered round her fallen body and instead tried to push herself away from them. They were like moving corpses, flesh hanging off their bodies in ragged ribbons, scrubs stained a deep crimson. Jenny's fair hair was matted with gore, and her eye sockets were empty holes. Beside her, a young man ran a hand back through his hair, and Kate saw that his fingers were like a skeleton's, as if someone had run a wire stripper over his bones. Another student was crawling with maggots, moving over and through his rotting flesh. A maggot dropped from his mouth into the body's beneath him as he bent to give it the kiss of life.

  Kate was still screaming when the oxygen being breathed into her lungs reawakened her brain and her body jerked back to life.

  ONE

  The walls and ceiling were literally dripping with sweat. When a droplet splashed onto Rinoka's arm and she licked it off, she could taste the salt. She laughed and turned to tell Cho, but Cho was dancing with a cute boy and Rinoka didn't think she wanted to be disturbed. The music was amazing, amazing, the best she'd ever heard-though a distant part of her mind remembered that she thought this every time she came to the club and that it might have more to do with the drugs swilling through her system than the actual quality of the DJing. Still-what a night!

  For a while, she let the music take her and surrendered to the feeling that her body had a mind of its own and the only thing on that mind was dancing. She grinned round at the other people on the dance floor, shouting out "Nice T-shirt" to one boy wearing a picture of Wakka from Final Fantasy X. He grinned back at her and everything was absolutely perfect. After a while, though, she started to feel a little lonely and wandered off to find one of her other friends.

  Haru was slumped in a corner. He'd been trying K. He'd never done it before and he'd taken too much, but it was okay because she could see in his eyes that whatever he was seeing made him happy,
so she left him to it. Eventually she found Kichi and Takai who were on the same vibe she was. As soon as they saw her they enfolded her in a big warm hug that was damp with sweat, but she didn't care.

  "Isn't this the best?" she shouted out.

  "Yeah, yeah, it's fantastic," Takai said. "It's like...” He drifted off as his eyes glazed over, their whites almost obscured behind the dark full moon of his pupils, and she could tell that he'd lost the thread of his thoughts and couldn't pick it up again. His hair, normally carefully gelled into great brown tufts, was plastered flat to his head, and his mouth was fixed in a rictus grin. She could see his jaw clenching rhythmically around the chewing gum she'd given him eight hours ago at the start of the night.

  "You're beautiful," she told him and he gave her another hug, stroking his fingers up her back in a gesture that was purely sensual, drained of all sexual content.

  "Hey, hey," Kichi suddenly said. "Your flight. Aren't you supposed to be at the airport now?"

  Rinoka looked at her watch. It was 6:30 in the morning. "Not for another two hours," she said. She slipped another pill out of her pocket and bit off half, grimacing at the bitter chemical taste of it.

  ***

  Kate ran as fast as she could, but it was like her legs were stuck in treacle, and no matter how fast she ran the giant maggot humping over the ground behind her crawled faster. She screamed in fear as its mouth opened wide to swallow her whole-and woke to find herself still screaming.

  Desperate, she reached above her for the light switch and yanked it on. She sat up, gasping for breath in the pale yellow light it cast over the room. Her whole body was slick with sweat and her legs were hopelessly tangled up in the bedclothes, no doubt adding to the sensation of being trapped she'd experienced in the dream. Damn it, this was the fifth night in a row! That stupid game was over a week ago, she told herself. Get over it already!

  Beside her in the bed there was a soft grunt as Brad emerged into wakefulness with his customary ill grace. His square-jawed face, which usually seemed handsome and kind to her, was red and creased from the pillow, and the dark stubble on his chin looked like some kind of skin infection. "Jesus, Kate,” he said, but he reached out a hand towards her.

  She grabbed it in her own-too hard, she knew. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Go back to sleep, I'll switch off the light."

  But Brad pushed himself into a sitting position beside her, running a hand through his rumpled black hair. “Again?"

  "No, I'm just screaming for the hell of it!" she snapped. She breathed out, hard, trying to calm herself. "I can't take much more of this.”

  "It's just a dream," Brad told her, his voice equally sharp.

  She managed a slight smile. "Easy to say when you're not the one getting eaten alive every night by giant maggots. I mean, it's so cheesy apart from anything else. I'm being driven crazy by a fifties B-movie.”

  Brad didn't smile back. "You've got to get over this."

  “I know. I'm trying!"

  "I can't understand why you took part in that stupid game anyway. Why didn't you ask me about it first?"

  Kate felt anger beginning to bubble up inside her. "Believe it or not, I don't have to ask your permission for everything I do in my life!"

  "No," Brad said with biting sarcasm. "Because you make such great decisions on your own."

  There was no arguing with him in this mood, she knew that from experience. "Go to sleep," she said again and switched off the light. Brad muttered irritably but didn't say anything further. After a few moments she heard the first faint snores from his side of the bed.

  She lay in the darkness, staring up unseeingly at the ceiling, wishing she dared go back to sleep herself.

  ***

  Peter felt he should be more excited. This was, after all, the first time he'd be traveling outside Germany in his eighteen-year life. But as he packed his suitcase, carefully rolling his T-shirts and shorts into tight little balls, as he'd read in the guidebook you were supposed to do, the main feeling he experienced was apprehension. Maybe it had something to do with the litany of impending disasters his father was reciting to him as he packed.

  "There's crime, of course," he was saying now, his voice crisp and formal and devoid of warmth. Even though in two hours' time he would be driving Peter to Munich airport, his father was dressed in his usual suit and tie, his graying hair slicked back and his beard impeccably trimmed. Peter sometimes wondered if his father ever relaxed, even when he was asleep. “This isn't like some school trip to Berlin, you know. In New York they won't stop at snatching your bag, they'll shoot you just for the fun of it."

  "But father," Peter turned to face him, clutching his wash bag against his chest. "New York isn't that bad these days. They had a big clean up. Zero tolerance. Made everything a lot safer.”

  "So they tell us," Peter's father said, his tone gloomy. "But it's not the physical danger I'm worried about."

  Well, thanks, Peter wanted to say, but he bit his lip. He didn't want to argue with his father just before he left. It would sour the whole vacation.

  "It's the spiritual danger, Peter, that's what concerns me," the older man continued. "America is a land of temptations. Here I've been able to defend you from the evil of the world, but there you'll be on your own. You'll have to look into your own heart and ask Christ's guidance for yourself if you're to know what's right or wrong."

  "If I feel myself tempted to sin, I can always give you a call," Peter joked.

  Unsurprisingly, his father didn't smile. "Better you don't put yourself in the path of temptation in the first place."

  “Yes, father," Peter said obediently. Any other response would only invite a further lecture. Besides, he was worried himself about what New York would confront him with. When he'd been accepted for a place on this student cultural exchange four months ago, he'd been ecstatic. Finally, he'd get away, see the world and learn something that wasn't taught to him by his father. But as the day had drawn nearer he'd begun to wonder if it was all a terrible mistake. Maybe his father hadn't been hiding the world from him, but shielding him from it. Maybe he wasn't strong enough to face it on his own.

  "I'm packed," Peter told him now. "I think I'll go outside for some fresh air before the drive."

  His father nodded his head and turned back to his study of the map, figuring out the best possible route to take to the airport. Earlier, Peter had actually seen him using a tape measure, testing to see which road was shortest. Fulfilling our national stereotype, Peter had thought and smiled a little.

  Now, as he wandered into the vibrant green richness of the countryside outside their house, he found his feet taking him in a particular direction that didn't really surprise him.

  The graveyard was nestled at the back of the church, hidden by dense trees from the surrounding mountains. At this time of year it was a riot of colors and the grass resonated with the clicking and buzzing of insects.

  His mother's grave was at the back, near the crumbling stone wall. Before he reached it, Peter stooped to pick some pretty pale blue flowers that his father, in a rare unguarded moment, had told him were his mother's favorites. He laid them on the headstone before settling himself on his knees beside it.

  When he'd been younger, he'd often come here to talk to the gravestone of the mother he'd never had the chance to know. He'd always been aware at school of being different, of lacking something very important that the other children all had and this had helped make him feel somehow connected. It had allowed him to kid himself that his mother was with him really, watching somewhere just out of sight.

  He didn't believe that now, of course, but he still found it comforting to visit her. He liked to imagine that his mother had been all the things his father wasn't: loving, kind, full of fun and life. But maybe his father had been that way too before his mother died giving birth to him. The religion had always been strong, of course, or his mother might not have died at all-without the faith that forbade it, his fa
ther might have been able to make the decision to sacrifice his unborn son to save his wife. But he hadn't and so here Peter was now, about to go off to a strange new country. And here his mother was, asleep in the ground.

  He sighed and stood up. Even though it wasn't something he did any more, he wanted to leave his mother some parting words. But he found he didn't know what to say. “Wish me luck,” he said eventually. He couldn't escape the feeling that he was going to need it.

  ***

  In the morning Brad didn't say anything more and when she cooked him a stack of pancakes as a sort of apology he only grunted and ate them while reading The Wall Street Journal, so she knew she wasn't forgiven. She felt another flare of anger, but she reminded herself that he'd been going without proper sleep the same as her ever since the nightmares had started, and it was all completely her fault. Which made it much worse, of course, but she knew Brad wouldn't understand that.

  Brad, as usual, was ready first and hovered accusingly by the door as she brushed her teeth in the small chrome-covered bathroom. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she did and almost recoiled. Her hair was tangled in blood-colored clumps. Her freckles looked like pits in her face and the shadows under her eyes were so deep she looked like she needed to go into some kind of rehab. Great. That was really going to impress everyone at the hospital. It was amazing Brad would even agree to be seen in public with her at the moment.

  In fact, she wondered if he was ashamed. As soon as they stepped out of their Upper East Side apartment he lengthened his stride till he was a good three paces in front of her. She trotted to keep up, brushing against the scaffolding that blocked half the sidewalk and he just quickened his pace further.

  "Brad, slow down," she said, irritated.

  "We're late," he reminded her, "and I need to make a good impression. Do you know how many applicants they get for each surgical residency at St Stephen's?”