Free Die Now or Live Forever by Anne Rooney Page A

stop breathing. Shallow, fast breaths to her left. She didn’t dare to turn her head, let
it
know she knew it was there. She signalled to Juliette with her eyes.
Please notice
, she willed her.
    The bird rose high, then swooped over the distant lake. Juliette started walking towards Ruby and the others followed, but Ruby still didn’t move, expecting at any moment that some madman would leap out at her. She wanted to run, but her legs took no notice. As Juliette drew alongside her, she touched her arm.
    ‘You OK?’
    Ruby shook her head and pointed to where the breathing came from.
    Juliette signalled to the others. They all moved towards the tangle of bushes, hearts pounding. A shape – small, slender – went crashing through the undergrowth as they approached, blonde hair flying out behind and catching in the branches.
    ‘It was a girl!’ Ruby said in surprise. ‘Did a girl murder him?’
    ‘More likely she thinks we did,’ said Finn. ‘No point going after her – even if we catch her, she won’t understand us.’
    ‘Why do you think she’s not the murderer?’ asked Omar. ‘Just because she’s a girl? Girls can kill people, too, you know.’
    Juliette flinched. Omar pushed the bushes aside with his foot. A dropped tent peg glinted amongst the dead leaves.

Two
    Alistair fumbled with his phone, panic making his fingers clumsy.
    ‘There’s no signal. There’s no signal here! What are we going to do? How will we know where to go?’ His voice rose as though he would cry, but for once no one laughed at him. They all felt the same.
    ‘We’ll have to camp somewhere around here,’Omar said. ‘It’s taken hours to get here – there’s no way we can get anywhere tonight. We have a map – we don’t need GPS.’
    ‘I’m not camping near a dead guy!’ Alistair was visibly trembling. Finn curled his lip in disgust.
    ‘Not here, goon. We can walk on for a while. We’ll go to the lake. It’s only about an hour away. Then we can pitch our tents with the water behind us and no one can creep up on us. Backs to the wall. Old trick. Tomorrow we’ll give up and get back to civilisation. We’ll be OK tonight if we stick together. We can take it in turns to stay awake.’
    ‘What about the mad axe-woman?’ said Juliette.
    ‘She hasn’t got an axe, she’s got tent pegs. Thereare five of us – we’re more than a match for a skinny kid with a bunch of tent pegs,’ Ruby said.
    It seemed to take years to get to the lake. Every snapped twig, every rustle in the bushes, every animal running or snuffling made their skin prickle.
    At last, they pitched their two tents side by side on the shore of the lake. With the water behind them and some space before the trees, it looked safe enough. They lit a fire, cooked and tried to act as though everything was normal. But it wasn’t. Life isn’t normal if you’re in the middle of a forest with only two other people, one of them dead and the other their killer.
    ‘We should put out the fire – the light will make mosquitoes come,’ said Alistair.
    Omar and Juliette snuggled closer to it, leaning into each other. No one wanted it to be dark.
    ‘I can’t help thinking about that boy,’ said Juliette. ‘To die like that, with no warning. He must have thought he had forever.’
    ‘Not forever,’ said Omar, ‘but maybe seventy years or so.’
    ‘What would you choose,’ mused Juliette, ‘if you could die now or live forever? I mean, truly forever?’
    ‘Live forever,’ Omar answered. ‘No brainer.’
    ‘Die now,’ said Ruby. ‘If you truly lived forever, you’d still be here when there were no more people, when the Earth was frazzled up by the Sun or blasted to bits by a huge meteorite.’
    ‘It wouldn’t work, would it?’ added Finn. ‘You couldn’t just be whizzing around in space with no air and no food. It’s a stupid question.’ Ruby took no notice, but gazed out over the lake.
    ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘We never see the Milky