‘Unless what?’
‘Unless you went on the river, I suppose, took a boat.’
‘Hold your tongue,’ The Kid shouted, slightly too loudly, surprising Sam and Ed. ‘That just won’t wash. Sorry to get on my high horse, Mister Ed, but Charlie don’t surf. No boats for me. Not gonna play Pugwash. Water and me don’t mix. In a nutshell – The Kid don’t swim.’
‘Well, if you won’t go on the river I don’t see how you’re gonna get through the zone.’
‘Did it once before, we can do it again,’ said The Kid.
‘All right, listen,’ said Ed. ‘I’ll do a deal with you. But you’ve got to stick to it.’
‘Depends.’
‘No, it doesn’t. You have to agree now. Up front. I’ll help you get to the palace, I promise.’
‘Sure, OK,’ said Sam. ‘So what’s the deal?’
‘Until we know what’s out there, you’re not leaving the castle.’
‘Well, how long’s that going to be? That’s not fair.’
Ed looked at Sam. ‘Some guys set out from here the other day,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. It was a sort of exploration party. They were going west. Upriver. A mate of mine called DogNut and seven others. They took a boat. They’ve been gone a while now, so they should be back soon. The deal is, when they turn up and we know what’s out there, and I think it’ll be safe enough, I’ll take you to Buckingham Palace. Myself. OK?’
Sam thought about this for a while. Certainly the idea of setting off alone was something he didn’t want to think about. A huge part of him wanted to forget all about Ella and stay here forever with Ed and The Kid. But just as Ed had made a promise to him, he’d made a promise to Ella. He was her big brother. He’d told her that he’d always look after her.
‘OK,’ he said at last. ‘It’s a deal.’
They shook on it and slapped palms.
Ed gave him a hard stare. ‘You’re not to even think about it until DogNut comes back, OK? You can rest up, eat properly, learn how to use your weapons, do some basic training, and when he comes back … ’
‘What if he never comes back?’
‘He’ll come back. He knows what he’s doing.’
6
‘The Fear’ were on the move again.
That was the name that Shadowman had given to St George’s army of strangers.
The Fear.
During the night they’d flushed out a small group of kids from a big house next to Hampstead Heath and sent them running. They’d caught and killed one on the spot; the others they’d tracked through the local streets and finally across the Heath. A few got clean away, but The Fear managed to catch several of the younger ones, the ones who were slower and weaker than the rest. The strangers had cornered them in a steep-sided hollow. The kids had been disorientated in the dark, exhausted and frightened, but the adults, using their sense of smell, had followed them easily. They’d fallen on them as a pack, killing them quickly. But what came next was not some mindless feeding frenzy. Having ripped the small bodies apart, The Fear had divided them up, St George taking the lion’s share. There was a pecking order among the strangers, with St George and his gang at the top. The oldest, feeblest and most diseased of the strangers got nothing.
Shadowman wondered how long the weaklings could survive like this and how soon the stronger ones would turn on them and eat them.
The sun was coming up now and The Fear were moving off the Heath. If they followed their usual pattern they would find a house and settle down to sleep until it got dark again.
From his hiding place, high up in a tree, Shadowman watched them closely. The way they congregated around St George. The way they seemed to move together, with a sense of purpose. How did they do that? How did they know what St George wanted them to do, beyond brute, slavish copying? They were organized the way an ant colony is organized or the bees in a hive. There was a sense of purpose in everything that they did. Somehow they managed to arrange themselves into distinct groups, with set tasks. Nothing was said. Strangers’ brains were so eaten away by disease they’d lost the power of speech.
Until now Shadowman had thought that all adults had lost the capability of rational thought. They hadn’t. Their brains had changed, that was all. The higher level, the conscious reasoning level, might have been destroyed, but the animal part of their brains was still going strong. The brainstem it was called. Shadowman had learnt about it in science. It was the oldest, simplest part of the brain that humans shared with all other creatures.
And even the smallest creatures, worms, insects, microbes … even they had some kind of functioning brain. Maybe flies didn’t actually think. It didn’t stop them from taking over the world, though.
Did the malaria parasite know what it was doing when it infected someone? Did it wonder what it was going to have for supper? What the other parasites were talking about? No. It just did what it did. Plasmodium falciparum, that’s what it was called. He’d studied the parasite at school. A very successful creature. Spreading itself worldwide. It wasn’t evil. It had no plan. It had no idea what it was doing. Like all animals, it simply had an in-built programme that allowed it to survive. You couldn’t blame the parasite for killing people, any more than you could blame a shark for having big teeth. Sharks were no more evil than hedgehogs or fluffy bunny rabbits.
So were these strangers evil? Or were they just doing what they needed to do to survive? And were they any more conscious of what they were doing than Plasmodium falciparum?
It made no difference. Scientists hadn’t worried about morality when they’d set about trying to rid the world of malaria. Now the healthy, undiseased kids had to not question it when they killed strangers. And it was down to Shadowman to somehow try to stop The Fear from spreading.
The strangers had to be wiped out, because, like malaria, it was a case of us or them.
When Shadowman thought about the disease, he couldn’t help but picture adults shuffling about like zombies. They had become the model of their own sickness. They acted like the disease itself. Spreading, destroying, growing, showing outward signs of purpose and intelligence, but with each individual member, each human cell, being essentially mindless.
They reminded him of something. A flock of birds. The way they seemed to anticipate each other, to move as a single unit, a single coordinated creature.
A flock of birds, a shoal of fish, a pack of hunting wolves …
A disease.
7
‘There’s something going down.’
Ed looked up from his breakfast of lumpy porridge and blinked at Kyle. He’d been up late on guard duty and wasn’t properly awake yet. As Captain of the Tower Guard, he was meant to be ready for anything at all times, but the one thing he struggled with was early starts.
‘How serious is it, Kyle?’
‘Well, you know, like, pretty serious.’
‘What? A red alert? Orange? Purple?’
‘Oh, come on, Ed. You know I can’t get my head around those stupid colours.’
‘OK, on a scale of one to ten then. I’ve only just started breakfast and I don’t want to come back to cold porridge. It was never very warm to begin with.’
‘I’d say a ten.’
Ed swore and threw his spoon into his bowl. He slid the porridge across the table to one of his team, a quiet, curly-haired girl called Ali.
‘Look after this for me, will you?’ he said, standing up from the table. ‘Don’t eat it.’
Ali peered at the grey porridge and wrinkled her nose.
‘It’s safe.’
Ed buckled on his sword and looked around the guardroom, which was situated at the bottom of the Bloody Tower. He picked out three girls and a boy who had finished eating and were playing cards at another table.
‘You lot, come with us.’
They hustled out of the tower after Kyle who explained what was going on as they went.
‘The look-outs on Middle Tower heard shouting ou
tside the castle about an hour ago. It was quite far away and they couldn’t tell what was going on.’
‘Kids shouting?’
‘You ever hear a zombie shout?’
‘Guess not.’
‘It was definitely kids,’ Kyle went on. ‘I was on early watch so they sent for me.’
‘They stayed put?’
‘Yeah.’
Nobody was allowed out of the castle unless authorized by Jordan or one of his captains.
‘So have you seen anything?’ Ed asked. They had come to Byward Tower. The gatekeeper hauled the gates open to let them through and they ran across the causeway to Middle Tower. In the last few days the Sappers had made good progress in the moat; there were only a couple of centimetres of standing water left and in some places patches of muddy ground showed through.
‘We searched the whole area with our bins,’ said Kyle, struggling to keep up with Ed. ‘At first we couldn’t see nothing then Macca spotted someone.’
‘A kid?’
‘Far as we could tell.’
‘Just one?’
‘Just one kid. A whole mess of sickos, though. The kid was running from a gang of them.’
They had arrived at Middle Tower where they clattered up the spiral stairs to the roof. Four kids were waiting for them. Ed took a pair of binoculars off one of them.
‘What direction?’ he asked, putting the glasses to his face. ‘Where did they come from?’
‘No-go zone,’ said the boy, Macca, who had given Ed the binoculars.
Ed swore.
‘Since then they’ve moved northwards, up by Trinity House.’ Macca had a screwed-up face and was always mucking about, but he had good eyes.
Ed switched direction, swinging the glasses round to the right, up past the ticket offices to the main road that ran along the north side of the Tower. They weren’t in the best position to see what was going on up that way and, despite scouring the area for a couple of minutes, he could see nothing. He could hear something, though. A voice calling out, thin and high-pitched. A girl by the sound of it or a very young boy.
‘They shouting for help?’ he asked. The look-outs looked blank, apart from a tall, athletic girl called Hayden.
‘Could be,’ she said. ‘It’s what I’d be shouting.’
‘OK,’ said Ed. ‘We’re going to have to find out.’
There were groans from the other, all except for Kyle, who smiled and nodded his head, running his fingers along the blade of his new battleaxe. He was always up for a fight.
Ed stared the complaining kids down. ‘Macca, you come with us,’ he said. ‘And you, Hayden. Kate, you stay up here. Use these.’ He slapped the binoculars into her hands then turned to the last of the look-outs. ‘Carly, you go round to Devereux Tower. There’s a better view from there. Scare up some help on the way. Keep watch from there, OK?’
‘OK.’ Carly grinned as she hurried off, evidently relieved that she wasn’t going to have to go out on to the streets. Ed leant over the wall to shout down to her as she crossed the causeway. ‘And tell Jordan what’s happening!’
Ed now surveyed his war party: Kyle, Macca, Hayden, plus the four card players he’d dragged out of the Bloody Tower. He’d picked them just because they looked like they weren’t doing anything, but he realized they’d make a good team.
Adele was a tough, chunky girl who could win a fight with almost any boy. It always amused Ed that Adele, as well as being one of his best fighters, was also one of the girliest girls in the Tower. Her hair was always full of sparkly hairclips and pins and she didn’t bother with armour or protective leather, preferring layers of bright colours and pretty patterns, beads and badges and bangles. To see her charging into a fight, all in pink and swinging her club like a baseball batter, was really something. She was very popular with the little kids in the Tower and you’d often see her walking around with several of them following after her, like a mother duck with her ducklings.
Partha and Kinsey were good, fast runners and often worked as a team with Hayden. Sometimes running was a more useful skill than fighting. Then there was Will. Will was smart and cool-headed, reliable, a good balance to Macca who could be cheeky and undisciplined.
‘OK. There’s eight of us,’ Ed said. ‘Should be enough. If it looks too dangerous we won’t engage. Follow my lead and do exactly as I say. We haven’t lost anyone in weeks and I’m not losing anyone on my watch.’
The kids nodded, their eyes shining and glassy. That familiar look of fear and excitement.
In less than a minute they were jogging north across the open space next to the ticket offices. It was a cold morning, the sky grey. Spots of rain were starting to fall. Ed realized he wasn’t dressed for this. He should have put on a waterproof jacket of some sort, but hadn’t been fully awake when Kyle had grabbed him.
Litter blew across the car park and pigeons wandered around, nosing through the piles of crap that had collected in every corner. When it rained heavily, the streets flooded. All the drains were blocked and there was no one to unblock them.
Ahead, the gleaming glass top of the Gherkin rose above the older buildings below it, including the ornate Trinity House, which looked like someone had looted a load of pillars, arches and statues from ancient Rome and piled them up as high as they could, like a hyper kid with a Lego set. It was completely OTT and Ed’s favourite building around here.
He didn’t have time to admire it now, though. His mind was on other things. Adrenalin was pumping through his system. He was preparing to fight or flee, depending on what they found. The others were jittery, red-faced, working themselves up, but Ed felt a familiar calm begin to settle over him, a weird detachment. A coldness. When it came time to fight – if it came time – he knew what would happen. He would explode into a ruthless killing frenzy. All the time, though, a part of him would be sitting back watching. Watching that other Ed. Ed the killer. It frightened his friends when they witnessed it. In battle he was the most ferocious of them all. It’s what kept crazy Kyle loyal to him, always at his side.
The main difference between the two of them was that Kyle enjoyed all this running, fighting, hunting, killing.
Ed hated it.
Avoided it if he possibly could.
But a kid in peril. Chased by sickos. That was something he couldn’t avoid.
8
As they neared the main road, they could tell that there were sickos close. They were hit by the smell before they saw them. Sour, rotten, pungent; a mix of dog shit, bad drains, food left out of the fridge, Haribo sweets, toilet cleaner and armpits.
Ed raised his hand and his team slowed down, moving more cautiously now, not wanting to run headlong into a swarm of grown-ups. You could always smell them, but you rarely heard them until you were on top of them, they made so little noise.
The kids turned the corner and there they were: sickos. About thirty of them, some wandering in the road, but most gathered in the porch at the front of a Victorian office building next to an American-style rib joint called Bodean’s. The sickos were clamouring round the doors and windows, trying to get in.
There was a subway entrance on the other side of the arched doorway, and as Ed watched, three more sickos emerged from it. There must have been a nest of them down there. Jordan regularly organized sorties from the Tower to flush sickos out of the many tunnels in the area and the kids were always trying to block them up. It would take them ages to make the area totally safe, though.
Ed quietly told his team to hold back. They hadn’t been spotted yet. The sickos were too intent on trying to get into the building and Ed wanted to keep it that way as long as possible.
‘I thought we’d cleaned out all the nests around here,’ he whispered to Kyle. They were squatting down, trying to keep a low profile.
‘So did I,’ said Kyle. ‘But as quick as we get rid of them, they come back again.’
‘We’ll bring a full unit later and properly sort that subway out. For now we’ve got to see
what they’re after, deal with them and get back into the Tower quick.’
‘Why don’t we just leave it?’ said Kyle. ‘Go back now, round up an army and come back and twat the lot of them?’
‘Maybe we should.’
It wasn’t like Kyle to avoid a fight, which told Ed that he wasn’t sure about this. And if Kyle wasn’t sure of attacking then it was bad. Maybe there were too many sickos to take on.
‘This ain’t our problem,’ Kyle added.
Just then a girl appeared at a first-floor window, opened it and looked down at the sickos squabbling at the door below. She looked understandably frightened. She then looked over towards the Tower. She hadn’t seen Ed’s squad where they were hiding. She put her hand to her mouth and called out.
‘Help me!’
Ed sighed. ‘It just became our problem.’
‘Why?’ said Kyle. ‘We don’t know her. She ain’t one of us.’
‘You can be a right shit sometimes, Kyle.’
‘Yeah, I can, can’t I?’ Kyle sniggered.
‘I thought you were always up for a fight.’
‘I’ve got one rule, Ed. Never start a fight you can’t win.’
‘That is a girl, Kyle. A kid. And any kid is one of us.’
‘All right,’ said Kyle. ‘Let’s play Batman then. Charge in to her rescue.’
‘We need more of a plan than that.’ Ed put his hand on Hayden’s shoulder.
‘Hayden. You take Partha and Kinsey. You’re the fastest runners. I want you to get the attention of the sickos over there. Look tasty, yeah? I want them dribbling.’
‘Here he goes,’ said Kyle. ‘Ed with his plans.’
Ed ignored Kyle and carried on giving Hayden her instructions. ‘Get as many of them to go after you as you can. Lead them away eastwards, along Tower Hill. You’ll have to play it carefully. Keep close enough so that they don’t get bored and come back here, but not so close that you risk getting caught.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Hayden. ‘We won’t be getting too close to them. Trust me.’
‘Go on then and shout out to the girl. Let her know we’re going to help her. Tell her to stay put until we get in there. We’ll stay hidden here until the odds are a little better.’