‘But I looked in the mirror, the cracked mirror in our bathroom that the vandals had smashed. I was still a little feverish and I had a vision that it was me – my ugliness – that had cracked the mirror, like in a cartoon. I was worried that if I went out on the streets looking like that any kids who saw me would think I was a grown-up.
‘But I had no choice. I couldn’t make it on my own. I knew I had to get help or die. So I grabbed my secret emergency food stash that I’d been saving just in case – don’t know how I’d got through the madness without cracking and eating it all. I had some cans of Coke and some chocolate bars left over from our supermarket heist, Mars and Snickers and stuff. I filled up a carrier bag and went out on the street.
‘It was the middle of the day. The sun was at its highest and brightest. From watching before I’d noticed that this seemed to be the quietest time. There were way less grown-ups out and about in the day. I was still more nervous than you can imagine, expecting at any moment to be mobbed by a gang of mothers and fathers. I passed the car that killed Andy, a twisted metal skeleton, and carried on down the street, limping along. I must’ve looked like Gollum’s ugly cousin.
‘I worked my way towards the centre of town and at last, after what felt like hours but was probably only about twenty minutes, I saw some kids. They were throwing stones at a house, smashing windows, maybe thirty of them, all laughing, all armed, wearing hoodies, their trousers hanging off their arses. They were the sort of kids my mum used to tell me to avoid when I was home in the holidays. They didn’t like posh kids who went to private school. Muslim kids called Malik. I could see that some of them were holding beer cans.
‘They didn’t notice me until I was quite close. I wanted to shout out to them, but was worried my voice would be too weak; my throat was still really painful and swollen. In the end one of them turned and pointed, getting his mates’ attention. I raised a hand to wave to them and tried to speak, but it just came out like a strangled croak, not like speech at all, like I was some mad frog. I panicked that my throat was totally damaged, that the disease had broken it and I’d never speak again, and that made it worse. I tried again. Epic fail. And then they started throwing stones at me. Their aim wasn’t brilliant, but a couple of them hit me. Not big stones luckily, but it still hurt.
‘I couldn’t go any closer, they were keeping me away, so I grabbed a handful of chocolate bars out of the bag and I held them out as an offering, ducking my head to protect it from their stones, cringing in the road. They just threw more stones, laughing. I sat down, still holding the bars out, waiting for them to either stop or run out of ammunition. Feeling stones bounce off my shoulders. One got me on the top of the head and I heard them cheer. And I just sat there and waited for it to stop. At last one of them came over to me, prodded me with a stick and I looked up, tried to smile, tried to speak, held the bars out to him. He looked at me like I was some weird animal in the zoo, head tilted to one side, checking me out.
‘He was like – “What are you then?”
‘I croaked and shook the bars, showing him I had more in the bag. He took the bag off me, stuck his nose in it.
‘“That for us, is it?”
‘I nodded my head.
‘“You can understand me?”
‘I nodded again.
‘“You a kid?”
‘I nodded. He poked me once more with his stick then turned and shouted back to his friends.
‘“He thinks he’s a kid.”
‘Their leader came over, checked me out.
‘“We don’t want him,” was all he said. They took all the sweets off me and left me there, just walked off. I tried to follow and they threw more stones to keep me away. I didn’t give up, I had no choice. I followed them all the way back to their base. They were living on the trading estate in an old factory that had a big metal fence all the way round it. They shut me outside the gates, laughing like it was a game.
‘But I stayed there. Sat there all night with my back against the fence. And all the next day. Now and then some of them would come out to look at me, and they’d shout things at me, but at least they’d stopped throwing stones. I had my backpack with me, which had the last of my food and water in it. If the kids didn’t take me in I’d eventually starve or die of thirst. There was nowhere else to go, though, was there? To be honest, I didn’t really care right then, because as far as I could see it really didn’t matter if I lived or died.
‘And then on the afternoon of the second day a group of them came over to the gates. They opened them and, while two of them grabbed me and held me still, a third one put a big studded dog collar round my neck, attached to a heavy lead, like you might use for a Rottweiler, or a bulldog or something.
‘And that was how I became Tyler Keene’s bitch.’
23
‘Tyler Keene, I’ll never forget him. I hated him from the start. I’d seen him before, figured out he was the guy in charge there. He was a fat kid with short curly hair and a face that looked like it was smiling but wasn’t. He was a vicious psychopath, to tell you the truth. I’m not sure anyone there liked him, but they were all scared of him so they’d made him their leader.
‘“You’re my dog now,” he said as he put the collar on me, and he laughed. From that day until I escaped from him he made my life hell.
‘He had a girlfriend called Josa, nasty, pinch-faced girl with no teeth, cruel as him. I don’t know which one was worse really. When the two of them got together, they could be really evil, like they were showing off to each other. See who could think up the worst things.
‘They didn’t take me inside just then; they were heading out on a hunting party, looking for food. They made me walk at the front, out on the lead like a dog, prodding me forward with their weapons, laughing at me, calling me names. I couldn’t say anything. Sitting out in the open hadn’t helped my throat. But they had taken me on, and I thought at least they might feed me.
‘It was a miserable day. They spent the time breaking into houses, picking up anything useful, trashing everything else. I lost count of how many houses we went into, and always I was forced to go in first as they shouted things like, “Sniff ’em out, dingo-boy,” and “Take ’em down, bitch.”
‘That’s what they mostly called me, if they called me anything – “bitch”.
‘We didn’t find a lot: a few cans and packets of food. Some crisps that Tyler scoffed straight away. And then in one house there were grown-ups. They attacked me as soon as we went in, but I managed to duck out of the way and keep out of it, though I was still on the lead. The kids were too distracted to make me do anything else, as they hacked at the mothers and fathers who were hiding in there. Not laughing now, deadly serious. And I could see that Tyler was a mean fighter, lethal. It was pretty gross, fighting in there, close up, all packed in, the noise and the smell, the grunting and shouting and yelling.
‘I got used to it gradually, over the weeks, got braver, I guess, probably because I cared less and less whether I got hurt. Bravery and stupidity are pretty close. And it’s easy to be brave if you’ve got nothing to live for. I learnt to attack as well, though they wouldn’t let me have any weapons, treated me like an animal. I went in with my bare hands and teeth. Keeping low like a dog, going for the grown-ups’ legs, biting them in the ankles, so they’d go down. I thought it might make the kids like me, accept me, if I fought well. Didn’t make any difference, though. They kept me chained up the whole time, out in the yard at their camp. Fed me on rotten scraps in a bowl, made me go on all fours to eat and drink.
‘There were three girls, came out now and then to give me some better food. I guess they felt sorry for me, but most of the kids would only come out to take the piss, to tease me, watch me squirm. I suppose they liked having someone in a worse-off condition than themselves, made them feel better. You know what? A couple of them I even recognized from primary school. I knew them. But they didn’t recognize me. I was just the dog, the bitch, the ratbag.
<
br /> ‘Josa was the worst. She was clever. She really thought about it. About how to make someone feel like the lowest piece of crap on the planet. She was a very creative sadist. She’d lead me on and offer me hope and then … I can’t tell you the things she did, Ella. Tyler was just a bully, a stupid bully. He loved to torment me, to torture me. He’d whip me occasionally with a piece of wire flex, just for fun, pretending I was a real dog. He’d kick me and make me do tricks like play dead and roll over. Once he actually pissed on me. The other thing he did, that he thought was hilarious, was use me as bait.
‘They’d take me to a nearby area where they knew there were grown-ups hiding out and they’d chain me up to something and leave me out in the open. All I could do was sit there and wait while Tyler and his gang kept out of the way. For hours I sat out like that. And in the end the grown-ups would come crawling and sniffing out of their holes, and when they came up to me Tyler would pounce, come yelling and screaming out of his hiding place with his boys and girls, and they’d kill the grown-ups.
‘The thing was, Tyler left it later and later to attack, because he’d seen that the grown-ups wouldn’t go for me. They’d come up, curious, they’d sniff around me, peer at me with their stupid diseased eyes, but they hardly ever actually tried to attack me.
‘I’ve noticed it since. Grown-ups are like wild animals. They use smell more than anything to hunt. Children seem to give off a powerful scent that they can detect, and it sends them crazy. But my scent doesn’t seem to be anything like as strong. That’s how come I can hunt the way I do, because they don’t know I’m coming. Doesn’t always work. Not if they’re really hungry. Mostly, though, they think I’m one of them. And, you know, sitting there, looking into their eyes as they tried to make sense of me, I felt in many ways that I was one of them. I certainly had more in common with them than a jerk like Tyler.
‘The whole time I was there, living in the factory, I didn’t speak. At first because I couldn’t and after a while, when the swelling went down in my throat … I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be one of them, part of what they were. I didn’t want to be a kid any more. I was happier being a dog.
‘Quite a few of them lived in the factory, and more came to join all the time. It was sort of balanced by some of them getting killed in fights, or else dying from illness, or doing something stupid like falling off a roof. I’d watch them carry the bodies out and dump them in the yard next door. They didn’t try to bury them or burn them or anything, and of course that just meant that whatever illness had killed them was spread more. The kids who’ve survived, and there are lots around here, are the ones who were organized, the ones who were clever. Josa should’ve been running that place, not Tyler. Yeah, she was a psychobitch, but she had smarts.
‘I heard a bit about what was going on in other towns. News spreads, gossip spreads. There was another gang in Maidenhead, the next town over, to the west, and more in Bracknell, where Harry and Sonya and the others came from; others further out in Sandhurst, the old military academy there, and at Ascot.
‘The biggest, most organized bunch of kids, though, live in the castle at Windsor, just to the south. Everyone knows about them. Their leaders are two kids known as the Golden Boy and the Golden Girl, the Golden Twins. Tyler used to laugh about them, calling them the Golden Gays. He thought that was pretty funny. But he had nothing on them. They were clever, they were twenty-first century, and he was just a Viking. A moronic thug. He didn’t have a chance in the long run. Didn’t know enough about staying alive. He was squeezing all he could out of the situation before things totally fell apart. Maybe even he knew the clock was ticking.
‘It takes a lot more than being a good fighter to survive. You’ve got to understand how the world works. I mean, Tyler was a good fighter, he was awesome in battle – there’s not many I’ve seen could’ve beaten him – but what he had going on at the factory, it couldn’t last. As the weeks passed, his kids got paler and thinner and were getting ill all the time, coughing and sneezing, bad guts, diarrhoea, puking; they started to look as sick as the grown-ups. Compared to them, I didn’t look so bad any more.
‘What made it worse was a rival gang of kids in town, camped out in Arbour Vale School to the north, led by a kid called Kenton who was into DIY tattoos, thought it made him look tougher, I guess. Kenton’s lot and Tyler’s lot were squabbling over what few resources there were in Slough. Instead of joining together to get rid of the grown-ups they were fighting each other, sometimes killing each other.
‘It finally went into meltdown when the Arbour Vale kids found their way into a cold-storage place on the estate. It had been there all along, right under Tyler’s nose, but he’d either never investigated, or thought it was too hard to get into. So Arbour Vale got in there first. We were setting off to search a new part of town one morning, taking a different route through the estate, when we heard them. It sent Tyler crazy. This was his turf. That place was stuffed full of food. It was the jackpot. The Arbour Vale kids were busy hauling out anything that hadn’t gone off too badly. Boxes and boxes of stuff.
‘So Tyler steamed in there, with me at the front as usual, and, well, I wasn’t going to attack other kids and that made Tyler even madder, kicking and punching and calling me “bitch”. Luckily, though, he was outnumbered, hadn’t bothered to find out what he was up against, acted before thinking. All the best Arbour Vale foot soldiers were there, including Kenton, who was a pretty good fighter. They’d been prepared for trouble, and Tyler only had a small scouting party. He was just bright enough to send runners back to their camp, but he was soon in the middle of a really vicious battle, and I was only holding him back as he had to keep me on the lead. He got so badly cramped in, he needed both hands free – and he let go of the lead. First time ever.
‘Last time.’
24
‘I didn’t wait. I bolted. Got well away from there. The Arbour Vale kids didn’t know what to make of me, left me well alone, and I was able to climb up into the top of the warehouse. Right up into the roof where I hid, watching the battle below. It was bad. Lots of kids got hurt; half of them were wounded, some so badly it was obvious they weren’t going to live much longer. It was all so stupid. Seeing them lay into each other like that. I was lucky to be out of it.
‘In the end Tyler’s reinforcements turned up and the Arbour Vale kids made a run for it, carrying as much as they could. Tyler acted like he’d won some major war, strutting about the place, punching his chest and bellowing. King of the rotten food …
‘He left some kids there to guard the place twenty-four hours a day. They mostly camped out in a little office near the main doors. There were rows of giant freezers in there, big enough to walk into. Whole rooms kept below zero. When the power had gone off, they’d taken a long time to thaw. Most of the food had gone bad, but there was still a lot you could eat if you weren’t too fussy, and water too, from all the ice that had melted.
‘I found a crawl space and for the next few days that’s where I lived. I’d come out at night and go down while the guards were sleeping and steal food and water. They never knew I was there, the idiots. I’d eat whatever I could get my hands on. Just to stay alive. I’d long forgotten the idea of only eating halal – not that I’d been that strict before, unless I was with some of the more, like, devout members of my family. You know what? I figured that if there was a God, and he had a whole universe to look after, he wouldn’t be too bothered about what we put in our sandwiches and what type of hats we wear.
‘I’d mostly sleep in the day and explore at night, poking about in all the back rooms, picking up useful stuff. I found a load of paper bags and I used to crap in them, chuck the poo outside through a skylight, so that there was no evidence of me. I mean, I was a bit weird then, to tell you the truth. I’d been Tyler’s dog for so long. I’d get flashes too, of the fever. See things in the dark. Talking bugs. My sisters. There were pigeons up there, flapping about and crapping and nesting. I used to talk to
them. Imagined I’d made friends with them. For a few days I convinced myself that I was dead. A zombie. That my body was rotting. Luckily I never went completely over the edge, imagining I could fly or anything like that. I kept alive. Alive but weird.
‘I played nasty games with Tyler as well. I’d get out on to the roof and wait for him. He turned up most days to organize the food collection. Well, not exactly “organize”, more just standing there, shouting at people and showing off. You could see he was still thinking he was Mister Big Shot, and he was going to let the whole world know. He’d seen off the Arbour Vale kids and now had the biggest source of food around. Well, I found a good spot where nobody could see me and I’d wait for him and I’d lob bags of shit down at him. Twice I got him, and that was enough for me. Made a real mess as well. I still smile at that memory. It’s childish, I know. But oh, it was funny. You should have seen him. He went mental. Never worked out where it was coming from. Stupid idiot, probably thought it was giant pigeons.
‘As I say, I hated him, but did I want him to die? I don’t know. I dreamt of killing him. Pictured myself doing it … But it was never real.
‘The Windsor kids fixed all that. I don’t know, it might have gone on like that for ages if they hadn’t showed up. It was all Tyler’s fault. He’d been bragging so much about his stash that word got around. Windsor’s not far from Slough and one morning, while Tyler was lording it up, a shout went out.
‘“Windsor! Windsor are here!”