‘They were advancing down the street. A big group of them, tightly packed, moving in formation, well armed, three big pick-up trucks at the back. And out in front two kids all dressed in gold, riding horses.
‘I was up on the roof. I saw it all. How Tyler thought he could take them on and win, all puffed up and sure of himself. He called his troops together and he marched out of the yard into the street, Josa at his side. She wasn’t all mouth: she was a tough little fighter, and dedicated to her man. Well, I wasn’t going to miss this. I climbed down off the roof and followed them.
‘The Windsor kids looked better organized all round than Tyler’s mob. And the Golden Boy and the Golden Girl were pretty impressive. They were actual twins by the look of it, with long fair hair, and they were wearing gold armour. They must’ve found it in the armoury at Windsor Castle; it was black steel with gold stripes and studs. They had swords at their sides, with gold decoration on them; even their horses had bits of gold armour. The horses were a matching pair – white. They looked like something out of a kids’ picture book. I could see that Tyler didn’t rate them, had no fear of them. He lined his troops up across the road and started name-calling.
‘The Golden Twins stopped and said hello. They were posh, well-spoken, with a kind of snooty air about them, looking down from their horses. Tyler had no respect for posh kids. Nor did Josa, who shouted some really filthy stuff at the twins. She had a grating, husky voice, like sandpaper. A slight lisp from having no teeth.
‘“We’ve come to pick up some food,” said the Golden Boy. “We’ve heard you’ve got some here.”
‘“It’s mine, Gaylord,” said Tyler, and his mates laughed, Josa loudest of all.
‘“It’s not really yours, is it?” said the Golden Girl. “You found it, but that doesn’t make it yours.”
‘“Doesn’t make it yours either, bitch.”
‘“That’s not how we see it.”
‘“Yeah? Well, this is how I see it,” Tyler shouted, and he dropped his trousers and showed his arse to them, which his mates thought was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. And I’ll admit I did smile.
‘“Oi!” Josa shrieked at Tyler, her face mad with laughter. “That’s mine! Don’t you go sharing it out with no Windsor slags.”
‘The Golden Twins didn’t know how to handle this. If they’d been expecting a serious discussion, maybe some negotiation, they were out of luck. They must’ve realized by then that they were dealing with a total moron. It was clear that Tyler wasn’t the sort of person you could have any kind of sensible conversation with. They leant over and talked to each other, and it was then, while they were distracted, that Tyler decided to attack. Bravely leading his men into battle. Well, not exactly “leading”, just charging wildly into the fight, yelling his head off.
‘At first, taken by surprise, the Windsor kids had a hard time of it. They were knocked back and penned in. There was just a lot of pushing and shoving and swearing and name-calling. But the twins had the advantage of being on horseback and they used their horses to push through Tyler’s troops, and once they were out in the clear they could turn and ride along the rear of Tyler’s mob, laying into them with heavy clubs. They could easily have used their swords and that would’ve meant a quick end to Tyler and his idiots, but I guess they didn’t want to kill anyone if they didn’t have to. They had some decency.
‘The fight went on for ages. I couldn’t tell what was going on. Kids were running everywhere and there was no shape to it. All you could clearly see were the twins, riding through the mass of bodies, whacking and hacking. Their kids were better organized. They had some idea of tactics at least, and gradually the fight started to break up. One by one Tyler’s guys gave up – they were too bruised and battered – and either left the scrum and sat on the ground with their weapons at their sides or ran off. Tyler and Josa and their closest friends were still at it, though.
‘The twins had probably been hoping that Tyler wouldn’t hold out this long. In fact I bet they’d expected that he’d simply surrender when he saw he was outnumbered. But Tyler wasn’t the surrendering type. He was more of a fight-to-the-death kind of guy. And that day he got what he wanted.
‘It was the Golden Girl who killed him. She was excellent on her horse, a real expert. Riding rings round him. He kept on going, swearing and calling her all sorts of filthy names, like a Duracell bunny – unstoppable. In the end I guess the girl just wanted it over with, and she sort of poked him in the neck with the point of her sword. It went down through his shoulder, must’ve hit his heart or something, because he dropped quick, like a butchered cow in an abattoir. Bap … and he was dead. Just like that. Josa screamed and ran to him, and it was over. There were about four or five other bodies – whether they were dead or just unconscious I don’t know. Josa was sitting in the road with Tyler’s body in her lap, wailing like a madwoman. And all I thought was, You got what you deserved.
‘That was it for me. I’d had enough of Slough. Should never have gone back there. And I wasn’t going to Windsor. You see, the thing is, I don’t want you to think that I reckon the Golden Twins were any better than Tyler just because they were more organized and knew what they were doing. I didn’t like them any more than him. They were looters, stealing other kids’ food, and they were prepared to kill to get it. They cleaned that cold store out. Didn’t leave a scrap for the local kids. Took everything and loaded it on to the pick-up trucks along with a couple of the bodies and marched out of there.
‘It was time for me to get out as well.’
25
‘I didn’t want anything more to do with kids if this was how they were going to behave. I cut and ran south, out of Slough, over the motorway and into the countryside, such as it was. I mean, you know what it’s like round here – it’s not the deep countryside, but there are fields and woods and lakes.’
‘Where I found you?’ said Ella. ‘You came here?’
‘Yeah. Where I found you.’
‘Where we found each other.’
‘Yeah …’
Malik stopped talking again. Ella listened to his breathing.
‘What happened to the children you left behind in Slough?’ she asked after a while. ‘Without a leader?’
‘I heard later they’d joined up with the Arbour Vale kids,’ said Malik. ‘Like they should’ve done in the first place. They’re doing all right there now, I think. They’ve cleaned most of the grown-ups out of town. Made it safe. Apparently Josa’s in charge now, with Kenton, the tattooed boy from Arbour Vale, as her second-in-command. She was pregnant too. Had Tyler’s baby. So … not somewhere you’d want to go. Maybe you should go to Bracknell, or Maidenhead –’
‘No,’ Ella interrupted. ‘I saw what those children are like. I saw what Louisa and Sonya did. If you won’t have anything to do with them then I won’t either.’
‘I don’t know if I can keep you safe, Ella.’
‘I’m not leaving you.’
‘Listen, Ella,’ said Malik. ‘Sure, kids are still desperate, but it’s a year since I was in Slough. That was all a long time ago. Things have settled down a lot since those early days. For the most part kids have stopped fighting each other and they respect each other’s turf. That’s what the races are all about.’
‘What are the races?’ Ella asked. ‘Isaac was going on about them like I should know what he meant.’
‘It’s what they call these games that the kids have over at Ascot. It’s their way of competing against each other without anyone getting killed. Well, all right, sometimes there are deaths, but that’s not the main idea.’
‘What sort of games are they?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never been, Ella. Since I left Slough I’ve tried to avoid other kids.’
‘Have you been alone for all that time? Did you go straight to the farm?’
‘Not right away. I wandered all over at first, but the countryside can be a harsh place if you don’t know what you’re doing, which I
didn’t back then. I had no idea how to live off the land and there were still grown-ups about. The kids had stayed mostly in the towns, and the grown-ups had been forced out. So it wasn’t safe anywhere. Funnily enough, though, it was grown-ups who looked after me. Saved me. Treated me better than the kids had.’
‘Grown-ups?’
‘Yeah. There was a group of them, sort of survival nuts. They’d got out of town when everything started to go wrong. They’d been ready for it. Looking forward to it, I reckon. They had everything you need to survive, weapons, tools, medicine, armour, traps, tents, water-filtration kits, night-vision goggles. They were living here on the farm. They set up a lot of the traps and things. They’d stay indoors during the days and hunt at night.’
‘Weren’t they sick?’
‘Yeah, they were sick, but fighting it. Looking after each other. There were five of them when I first met them, Brian, Waggers, Mike, Roy and Tomasz. There’d been more to start with, but they’d got the disease worse. The rest of them were going down slower. Learning how to keep it at bay.’
‘So how did you find them?’
Malik laughed. ‘I got caught in one of their traps one afternoon when I was out foraging. An animal trap. Big one. Nearly broke my leg. They found me that night. Like everyone else they weren’t sure what I was – a grown-up or a child. I refused to speak to them. I was done with talking. In the end they decided I was just a kid and they felt guilty they’d trapped me. You know, they were, like, sorry for me, the way I looked, how badly mashed up I was, my leg all bruised and bloody. And I hadn’t been eating well. What with that and the attacks of the fever and everything, I was just skin and bone. Skin and bone.’
‘So what did they do?’
‘They took me in. Looked after me. They seemed to like doing all that first-aid, doctor-type stuff. They were good at it actually. I learnt a lot from them. In fact I learnt everything from them. Except for what I’d got from Tyler, I suppose, which was how to attack like an animal.’
‘You’re not an animal,’ said Ella, and Malik laughed softly and hugged her.
‘Thanks for reminding me. I don’t know, maybe Waggers and Brian and the rest thought I was. They liked animals, when they weren’t hunting them. They had horses. Three of them. Used to go out hunting on them. Tomasz taught me how to ride. He was really good on a horse. Showed me all sorts of tricks. I was rubbish at first, but I got the hang of it. There were more animals on the farm then. They’d collected them – a pig, a goat, the chickens, of course. They showed me how to look after them.’
‘What happened to the other animals?’
‘We slaughtered the pig for the winter and the goat was killed one night when some dogs got in. She was a mean old ratbag. Killed a couple of them before they got her. The horses died too. They’re useless, horses; they get so many diseases, they injure themselves easily, they eat the wrong things. Two of them died of some kind of horse flu thing. The third broke its leg and Tomasz shot it. But for a while it was like a proper farm.’
‘Weren’t there any women?’ asked Ella.
‘Only the goat,’ said Malik with a laugh. ‘They seemed happy enough, the men. They had a big stash of beer and whisky and they’d built their own still, made this foul spirit they called nitrofuel. Tasted like poison, which is pretty much what it was. Afterwards I turned the still into a stove, to heat the place better. They had it well fortified and well guarded. They had all the animals and the food. Plus, they had this big metal barrel half-buried in the middle of the yard. Wouldn’t talk to me about it. Wouldn’t tell me what was in it.’
‘So was it their farm then?’
‘No. Not really. They’d killed the family that lived there. They told me the family were all diseased. They’d eaten their own children. Mike and Waggers and the rest went in there and shot them all. Military-style, they said. Executions. One bullet each to the back of the head. They tried to stick to army rules, army ways. Made them feel legit, I guess, excused what they were doing.
‘They wore, like, full army gear – camouflage, make-up on their faces, black stripes and that. Sneaking around at night with their night-vision goggles, communicating with wind-up walkie-talkies, all that “alpha bravo, target acquired, tango down …” stuff. They weren’t real military, they were just playing at it, but they weren’t bad. They had their guns and their crossbows, they dug holes and built hides and set nets and fishing lines and trapped small animals and birds, rabbits, ducks, swans. Once they got a deer. And they knew how to properly forage for stuff I’d never even heard of: chickweed and yarrow, fat hen, bittercress and elderberries. They taught me how important it was to get vitamins inside me. They kept me alive and healthy.
‘They were sick, though. There was no getting around it. They knew it and I knew it. They were all coughing, runny noses, red-eyed. I’d been with Dr Catell, watched him slowly get worse. I knew what it was going to be like, just a matter of time. But they never talked about it.
‘One of them, the one I liked best, Roy, he was badly wounded in the groin. He’d been in a fight with some other grown-ups and one of them had stuck him with a spear. He had a real nasty wound there, couldn’t walk. The others used to carry him to the river and he’d sit there all night fishing, his gun at his side. They’d bring him back in the early morning, before the dawn, when they’d finished hunting, and they’d sit in the yard and drink and play cards, and talk, and laugh. That’s what I remember most, them laughing. God, could they laugh. Laugh till they were crying or sick or both. Roy laughing loudest of all. They’d laugh at anything. Telling jokes, taking the piss out of each other, remembering things they’d done in the past – mostly involving getting drunk – and just laughing.
‘I’d laugh too, though I wasn’t always sure what at; you just couldn’t help joining in. And they’d sing songs as well. Waggers had this battered old acoustic guitar. He could never get it in tune, but it didn’t really matter. They’d have singalongs round the fire. I remember them as good times. You see, these grown-ups treated me better than any of the kids in Slough. And, talking of kids, they kept well away from the farm. They didn’t want anything to do with the men. We were left well alone.
‘Sometimes sick grown-ups came blundering in and Waggers or one of the others would shoot them. Oh, I wish I still had those guns, but they ran out of ammo eventually, or got broke and I couldn’t fix them. Tomasz buried a stash of weapons somewhere and died before he could tell me where they were, and I’ve been looking for them ever since. All I had by the end was my trusty shottie. And now I’ve run out of shells for that. So all I’ve got left is you.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I was joking, Ella.’
‘But what are you going to do?’ said Ella, trying not to let her voice get too trembly.
‘I’ve got his far, Ella,’ said Malik. ‘I’ve always come through somehow. As I say, maybe God has a plan for me. He’s not going to let me die.’
‘And what about me?’
‘I’ll look after you, don’t you worry.’
‘Yes, but … well …’ Ella didn’t quite know how to say it. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but everyone around you seems to die.’
26
Malik was really laughing, his voice loud in the cramped space under the tree. Ella pictured the army men laughing; they must have sounded like this. She was hurt at first: she thought Malik was laughing at her. Slowly, though, she melted and then joined in, her own high little voice cutting through his great roar.
‘Oh, Ella,’ he said at last. ‘I haven’t laughed this much since … well, since those nights with the lads. You’re right. Everyone I meet does seem to come to a bad end, don’t they? Dr Catell and the kids in his surgery, Susannah and Andy. Tyler … Waggers and Mike and Brian and Tomasz and Roy. They were tough. They held out for a long, long time. Fighting the illness. Trying different drugs and different plants, anything they could think of to keep it away. Nothing worked, or at least nothing did anything more t
han slow it down. They couldn’t shoot it or trap it, or sneak up on it and stab it with a hunting knife. Weak or strong, short or tall or fat or thin, it got you in the end, if you were old enough.
‘Mike was the first to go. As the days passed, he talked less and less, and when he did talk it didn’t always make sense. And then one night he went berserk, kicked the fire all over the yard, cut poor Roy who couldn’t get out of the way, all the time ranting about something none of us could understand. Next night he was very quiet and just before we turned in for bed he took Tomasz aside for a long, intense chat. And Tomasz nodded and the two of them left the farmyard and went out into the fields, and later we heard a single shot. And Mike never came back.
‘I knew what had happened. Military-style. One clean shot to the back of the head. You’d think they wouldn’t laugh so much after that, but if anything they just laughed more. Brian had even made a joke about it as Tomasz and Mike had left. Whispered, “He’s just going outside and may be some time.”’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Ella.
‘Oh, it’s a famous saying,’ said Malik. ‘From Captain Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic, where they all died. They were stuck in a tent in the snow, freezing cold and the food was running out, and one of them, Captain Oates, who was wounded, sacrificed himself, said, “I’m just going outside and may be some time.” Walked out of the tent and was never seen again. It became their catchphrase after that, the lads. Whenever their time was up, one of them would say it and the others would know.
‘About two weeks after Mike died Brian said it and Tomasz took him out into the field. It was Tomasz who was the next to go. He was from somewhere in Eastern Europe. He had an accent. He’d been a builder of some sort, I think. Made most of the platforms in the trees and things. He was younger than the others, with fair hair, and he was very strong and fit, always showing off, doing push-ups and stuff. Never took anything very seriously. And one night he tried to kill Waggers, just suddenly turned on him, eyes red, foaming at the mouth, snarling like a beast.