And all the while the rain fell in a steady monotonous drizzle. It was a dull, damp, grey day. A typical English day. Boring and flat. A day for staying indoors and waiting for tomorrow. And here they were, dying on this dreary industrial estate.
Ed spotted Frédérique, still hanging on to her cat carrier. She was standing frozen, staring a hundred miles into the distance, while the fight raged around her. He grabbed her and pulled her away from where four teenagers had Johnno on the ground and were trying to bite his stomach. Then Ed saw Wiki and Arthur, cowering behind a pile of boxes. Ed grabbed Wiki and hoped that Arthur would follow.
‘We have to get away from here,’ he shouted, but there was nowhere to run. Wherever they turned there were more of the older kids.
Ed dragged his gang towards the Sullivan brothers, who had made it back to the road and were holding out, fighting back clumsily but effectively with garden spades. There were just too many of the teenagers, though, and before Ed got to the brothers he watched helplessly as a fat teenager got Anthony from behind and sank her teeth into his neck. Anthony yelled and clutched at the wound, dropping the spade. Instantly two more were on him, girls with maniac twisted faces covered in spots and blisters.
Damien tried to batter the girls off his brother, but he was overpowered by a mob of bigger boys and he went down struggling and cursing.
Ed switched direction and bumped into someone running the other way. He went sprawling, pulling Frédérique and Wiki down with him. He let go of them and rolled to his feet. Both Sullivan brothers were on the ground now and it didn’t look like they’d be getting up again. And there was one of the Field House boys, trying to run with two girls on his back and another with her arms round one leg. He fell over with a yell.
Ed made it out of the estate and into the road but was knocked over again and ended up with someone on top of him. He laid into them desperately with knees and elbows.
‘Ow, stop it!’ It was one of the nerds, his shirt torn half off his back. Ed apologized and they helped each other up. The nerd – Justin – picked up a bit of bed frame that had been dropped by a rugby player and started lashing out around him in a blind, red-faced fury, keeping the circling teenagers at bay.
Ed looked around for Frédérique and the younger boys. Wiki and Arthur had disappeared but Frédérique was standing frozen again. A slobbering, wet-faced teenager was crouched in front of her, sniffing her, his head moving up and down her body. For some reason he wasn’t attacking her, maybe because she was standing so still he couldn’t tell if she was alive.
Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do if you were attacked by a bear? Play dead?
Whatever, the teenager was just dribbling and sniffing and Frédérique wasn’t moving.
Ed had just enough time to register this before he was flattened again. And no sooner was he up than he was down once more. There was such a confusion of sprawling bodies that he couldn’t remain standing for more than a few seconds at a time. Sometimes he was knocked over by the older kids; sometimes it was one of his friends from school.
He was weeping in fear and rage and frustration.
He didn’t want to die. Not here. Not like this …
14
As he walked, Jack constantly scanned his surroundings, keeping alert for any movement, any signs of danger. It felt very strange being out on the streets after all those long days cooped up in the school and he had had no idea how dangerous the outside world was now. There were signs of violence. They’d seen wrecked shops and a few dead bodies, but so far no living ones. No kids, no adults. Nothing. Just a dreary parade of boring houses sitting grey and damp in the rain. Matt and Archie were so absorbed in their conversation about the Lamb that they seemed to have completely forgotten that they might be in any danger at all. That wasn’t clever of them. The sudden attack that came from nowhere was the most devastating. You had to be prepared.
Jack wanted to scream at the boys to shut up and pay attention, but feared that they would only try to involve him in their discussion. There was no way of getting through to Matt – he was utterly obsessed. He really seemed to think that the Lamb, whatever the hell that was, would protect him from anything.
He was reciting something by heart as he walked, without needing to look at the pages, which he’d put away to protect from the rain.
‘I was dead, and behold I am alive forever and ever! He who overcomes will not be hurt at all by the second death.’
‘Will it be clear when we meet the Lamb what it is?’ asked one of the younger boys. ‘What will it look like?’
‘Not it,’ said Matt. ‘He. The Lamb is a boy like us. His hair is golden. His face is white and shining, and he walks with a shadow.’
‘You keep saying that, Matt, but what does it mean?’ Archie Bishop asked. ‘Surely we all walk with a shadow.’
‘The Lamb’s shadow is a living shadow, like a doppelganger.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s a fancy word for a double. It’s like his dark half, his dark brother. He’s a demon who speaks in tongues.’
‘My older brother, Robert, went on an Alpha Course,’ said Archie. ‘They speak in tongues. He did a bit for me. It sounded mad.’
‘Should we speak in tongues, do you think?’ Matt asked, getting excited.
‘We could try.’
‘How do you do it?’
‘Well, you just sort of let the spirit guide you and you sort of go, blah laa laa, baba babala laaa la la al ba ba ba blaaa …’
Matt joined in, going, ‘Blaa maa kaaa baa laaa …’ but soon broke down into helpless giggles.
‘We need to practise that a bit,’ he said.
The acolytes started up and soon all of them were chirruping away, laughing and spouting gibberish.
Great, thought Jack. I’m on marathon walk to London, likely to be ambushed by diseased nutters at any moment and I’m stuck with a load of idiots who sound like they’ve escaped from the set of In the Night Garden.
15
When he was eight, Ed had gone on a family holiday to the west coast of France. There had been signs everywhere reading CÔTE SAUVAGE, wild coast, and the waves had been huge. One day his dad had taken him out to brave them. It had been amazing, rising up on the swell, diving through the breakers, body surfing, but then one had taken him by surprise and knocked him off his feet.
It had been terrifying, being rolled over and over, not knowing which way was up or down, a hideous churning confusion of water and sand. Whenever his feet had found the bottom, they’d been whipped away and he’d been spun again, like being inside a giant washing machine.
At last his dad had grabbed him and pulled him up.
That’s how it felt being in this fight. And his dad wasn’t here to rescue him today. His dad would never be able to help him again. Winded once more against the hard concrete, he didn’t have the strength to get up. He drew in a painful rasping breath, rolled on to his back, and the next thing he knew one of the teenagers was on him. A sharp-faced boy who looked to be about eighteen. It was hard to tell, though, because his eyes were bulging out of his head and his face resembled a margherita pizza, livid red with crusty yellow patches, like the worst case of teenage acne Ed had ever seen.
With a mad, terrified burst of energy Ed just managed to get his hands round the boy’s neck and hold him off at arm’s length.
The boy was snarling and snorting, which made green snot bubble from his nose. Pinkish-looking saliva foamed from between his rotten teeth, flecked with blood. It mingled with the snot and formed into a dribble that hung down like a rope, dangling over Ed’s mouth. A drop fell from the end and spattered on to Ed’s lips. He jerked his head to the side and spat. More warm dribble pooled in his ear.
Ed shook his head.
The teenager looked horribly diseased. Ed didn’t understand how the sickness worked, nobody did, but the thought of catching it off this drooling, pizza-faced git was horrifying.
He lay there on his back, a
rms straight out, squeezing the boy’s neck and trying to keep him away at the same time. He had a horrible image of one of those rubber toy heads that when you squashed them the eyes and tongue popped out. The teenager had shorter arms. He couldn’t quite reach Ed, but he scrabbled wildly at him, scratching his skin with dirty, black fingernails. Ed could do little to stop the crazed attack and he felt his arms shaking with the strain. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold out.
And then the boy would fall on him and press that gaping mouth into Ed’s face.
There was a shout – ‘Look out, Ed!’
Out of the corner of his eye Ed saw Bam pounding over.
Bam shouted ‘PUNT!’ and Ed let go of the boy just as Bam swung his leg in a mighty drop-kick. His boot connected with the boy’s head and sent him spinning over backwards. Ed scrambled to his feet and glanced at his attacker, who lay still for a moment then got to his knees and started to crawl about in circles, his head bent at a crazy angle. He appeared to be looking for something, and then Ed realized that the force of the kick had knocked one of his eyes out.
Ed felt faint and turned away to be sick. Bam caught him and held him up.
‘No time for that, mate. Gotta keep moving.’
‘I can’t,’ Ed sobbed. ‘I can’t. I can’t do this.’
‘Yes you can.’
Before Ed could say anything else a fresh group of teenagers jumped Bam and he was at the centre of a thrashing brawl, arms and legs working furiously to keep his attackers off him. He seemed to have lost his weapon and was fighting bare-handed.
Ed had nothing left. He was alone. Exhausted. Terrified. He was sick of the sight of blood. His ears were filled with the sound of screaming. He fell to his knees, looked up at the sky and opened his mouth wide, but his throat had closed, his vocal cords had gone tight and all that came out was a long hopeless, silent shout of despair.
And then the screams of the other boys were drowned out by a rumble and a roar. Something huge was approaching down the road, looming out of the misty rain like a breaching whale. There was the blast of a horn.
Two of the teenagers let go of Bam and turned to stare, dumbly. They were flattened with a bone-breaking crunch.
Ed’s lungs had stopped working altogether. His chest was gripped by bars of iron. It felt like his heart had stopped as well. He couldn’t move or make sense of what was happening as the hulking leviathan headed straight for him where he knelt in the middle of the road.
16
With a final mighty hiss and a screech of metal scraping against metal the thing stopped, centimetres from Ed.
It was a bus. A bloody coach. A monster of a thing, two and a half metres wide and twice as high. White, with smoked windows. Ed could feel the heat coming off it.
It seemed so out of place here. A thing from the past. Ed wouldn’t have been more surprised if a dragon had just landed snorting fire and smoke. He scrambled round to the side, half crawling, half running, and the passenger door opened with a sigh.
Ed froze.
There was a man in the driver’s seat. Stocky and round-faced with a big head and close-cropped fair hair. Thirty-five, maybe forty – Ed was never very good at judging. The thing was, though – he was a man. An adult. The enemy.
‘Get in!’ he barked at Ed.
Was this a rescue or a trap? The man didn’t look diseased, but that didn’t mean anything. You couldn’t trust any adults at all. And yet he was driving a coach. None of the other adults, whose brains had been rotted by the disease, could drive a coach. Most of them could hardly even walk.
‘Get in, or I’m going.’
Before Ed could do or say anything Wiki and Arthur pushed past him and scurried up the steps, Chris Marker and Kwanele, still lugging his designer suitcase, followed hard on their heels.
Ed turned back to where the last survivors were still fighting.
‘Get on the coach!’ he screamed. ‘Come on, quickly!’
He saw Frédérique and grabbed her again, almost throwing her up the steps. Then he got hold of Justin, the nerd who had fallen on him earlier, and dragged him away from three vicious-looking teenage girls. Four boys from the chapel pushed past, then Bam came barrelling over with his arm round one of his rugby players. It was Piers, his red hair soaked with blood. Ed helped them on to the coach, but as he climbed on board himself he felt a hand close round his left ankle and tug him backwards. He fell painfully on the steps.
‘Stay down!’ the coach driver shouted, and Ed did as he was told.
There was a flash and a bang. Ed felt something skim over his head, brushing his hair, and whoever had hold of him let go. He looked up to see the driver pointing a shotgun out of the door, smoke rising from the end of its double barrels. Ed crawled up the rest of the way, the doors closing behind him, and the coach started to move.
He hauled himself to his feet and slumped into one of the front seats, too shattered to take another step. Every part of him felt bruised and battered.
‘That’s not everyone,’ he croaked. ‘There must be more?’
‘I couldn’t wait any longer, pal. Too risky by half,’ said the driver. ‘You’d better say goodbye to whoever you left behind.’
‘We have to check. We have to make sure.’
‘No, we don’t. We have to get away from here.’
Ed felt the coach speed up. Heard the thump of bodies being hit.
‘You’re not safe yet, sunbeam,’ said the driver, grimacing as he wrenched the wheel round, and the whole coach jolted and juddered as its wheels ran over something – or someone. ‘Not till we’ve put this lot behind us.’
Ed twisted round in his seat and looked along the length of the coach – how many of them were missing? Half? More?
‘Look out!’ the driver yelled, and Ed turned back just in time to see a teenage girl squashed against the windscreen like a giant bug. The driver turned a switch and the wipers sped up, smearing pus and blood over the smoked glass.
‘That’s the last of them, I reckon. Looks like a clear run ahead.’
Ed was shivering. He pulled his knees up and huddled in a ball on the seat, trying to shut the world out. He looked at the man driving the coach. He had a thick slab of a body, with skinny legs and fat, muscled arms. He seemed fit and healthy. Ed should have been curious. Who was he? Where had he come from? Why was he not sick like all the others? But he couldn’t care less. The man might as well have been someone in a film. A boring film about a coach driver.
There was a boy sitting quietly behind him. He looked like a smaller version of the driver – slightly fat, with a big round head and close-cropped hair. The only real difference, apart from the size, was that the boy wore a pair of wire-framed glasses.
The driver must be his dad.
Who cares? Who bloody cares?
The boy noticed Ed and gave him a shy smile.
Ed ignored him.
He closed his eyes. And the boy’s smile was replaced by Malik’s smiling face. Malik had one of those faces that always seemed to be smiling.
Terrible thoughts crowded in on him and he couldn’t keep them out. He’d left Malik behind. He’d abandoned his friend because he was scared. He was a coward. There was no other word for it. He was a stinking, useless coward. He slapped his hand against his forehead.
Coward.
He sniffed and brushed a tear from his damp cheek. He was in the grip of a dark shadow; it seemed to wrap around him like a physical thing. A black cloud of misery and despair. This was a new feeling for him. He’d always been a cheerful boy, untroubled by anything. His life had run very smoothly. He’d passed every exam, won every cricket match, got texts from every pretty girl, sailed along without a care, not really thinking about anyone other than himself. He’d been happy because there had been nothing to make him unhappy. There had been no upsets.
He had no way of dealing with being unhappy. He felt helpless and broken. With Jack and Malik gone he didn’t even have anyone to talk to, to share hi
s problems with.
He slumped down in the seat, staring ahead as the wipers went left-right-left-right across the rain-flecked windscreen, clomp-squeak-clomp-squeak-clomp-squeak … gradually removing all traces of blood.
Clomp-squeak-clomp-squeak …
The coach trundled on, back the way they’d just come. Past the common. Past Tesco. Past the dentist and the empty silent houses, the doctor’s surgery, the Hop Sack, the little row of shops.
Clomp-squeak-clomp-squeak …
There was the school now, and a knot of teachers wandering in the road. Ed barely noticed as the coach ploughed through them, knocking them aside.
Clomp-squeak-clomp-squeak …
‘Where are we going?’ he said, surprised by the low droning sound of his voice. He had only meant to think the question, not ask it out loud.
‘London,’ said the driver. ‘The big smoke.’
Ed gave a short, bitter laugh. So much for his dreams of the country life. The sunny commune packed with wenches, milking cows, fattening pigs, collecting eggs, making babies, building a bright new future with Malik and his other friends. All gone now. All gone.
Clomp-squeak-clomp-squeak …
They drove along the high street. The driver had to slow down to manoeuvre the coach through a jumble of cars that had been left in the middle of the road. Once they were through the obstacle they sped up again and were soon passing the railway station and leaving town on the long straight road that led to the M25. There were buildings nearly all the way along here. The little villages that had once been distinct and separate had joined together into one continuous ugly strip of housing, garages, shops and offices.