Cal shook his head, but there was something there, that same strange, ebbing sense of peace ringing round his skull. He swept his eyes over the car park again, nothing but cracked concrete and small drifts of sand. The toilets were boarded up, which was a definite relief. Some places were just plain creepy. The gun was tucked into the waistband of his trousers, and every time he nudged it back into place he worried he would set it off and blast away half of his backside. He should have left it in the car.
‘See,’ Daisy said. He followed her line of sight to the dunes that hid the sea from the car park. Somebody was walking down them, a tall man with hair so ginger that it glinted like copper in the fading sun. He was wearing jeans and a filthy white T-shirt, and his long, gangly arms were held out to his side, fingers spread.
‘Is he going to hurt us?’ Daisy asked, running to his side. Cal didn’t reply, holding her tight with one hand. He felt the weight of the gun, cold and sharp against his back. Please don’t let me have to use it, please God let him be okay.
The man – it was difficult to tell how old he was – stopped at the bottom of the dune, about ten or fifteen metres away. This close Cal could see the bloodstains on his T-shirt, looking more like chocolate in the growing pool of shadow. Dried blood pocked his face as well, an ugly looking wound above one eye. There was something about the guy that made Cal instantly suspicious, something in the bluntness of his cheekbones, the narrowness of his eyes. And yet there was something inside his head – more the absence of something, really – a feeling that was telling him it was okay, that the red-haired man was one of them.
All the same, for a good minute or so nobody moved, everybody wary of the same thing – that someone was about to start screaming, to charge across the car park fists flailing and teeth biting and eyes boiling. Those sixty-odd seconds seemed to stretch out forever, everything perfectly still, only the quiet lull of the unseen waves and the crack of the trees letting Cal know that time hadn’t frozen.
Daisy was the first to stir. ‘He isn’t attacking us,’ she whispered, looking up. The guy must have heard her because he snorted a laugh. His hands lowered to his sides, but he was still visibly tense.
‘Are you Rick?’ Cal asked.
The man squinted, holding up a hand to shield his eyes. The sun was over Cal’s shoulders, nesting in the treetops, lighting the kid from the chest up. ‘What do you think?’ he said, his brow crinkling. ‘I thought I told you to come alone.’
‘Um, this is Daisy,’ Cal said, feeling suddenly and overwhelmingly protective of the girl. ‘I found her on the way. She’s like—’ he almost said us, but it was too soon for that. ‘Like me, she got attacked too.’
Daisy lifted her hand and gave a flick of a wave.
‘I’m Cal,’ Cal went on. Then he ran out of things to say. The man watched warily, his eyes dodging back and forth between him and Daisy.
‘CalMessiRonaldo,’ he said. ‘You like football, then?’
It was spoken more like an insult than a question so Cal didn’t answer. He could feel his hackles rising. The gun slid further down the waistband of his trackies and he had to nudge it back. It was so heavy that if he wasn’t careful he’d be standing here in a minute in nothing but his pants. The silence that followed was just about as awkward as silences could be.
‘I’m Brick,’ the guy said eventually.
‘Brick?’ asked Daisy. The man smiled, just a slight twitch of his lips but a smile nonetheless. It seemed to make his face more human.
‘Because of my hair,’ he said to her. ‘It’s the same colour as a brick.’
‘No it’s not,’ she replied. ‘Bricks are sort of pink and your hair is bright orange.’
Brick’s smile grew, finally reaching his eyes. Cal could see that, despite his height, Brick wasn’t much more than a boy himself.
‘You can call me Carrot if you like,’ he said. He looked back at Cal and the smile vanished. Seconds of silence ticked away, the gulls circling overhead like vultures. ‘What’s going on out there?’
‘It’s bad,’ Cal said. ‘You’re the first person I’ve seen who hasn’t tried to rip my head off, other than Daisy. It’s like the whole world has gone insane.’
Brick nodded. He glanced to his right, then back at Cal.
‘Yeah, it’s really hit the fan alright.’ He was chewing on something, and after a moment or two he spat it out. ‘Gonna get dark soon. I’ve got a place, a safe place I think. It’s about twenty minutes from here. No food or lights or anything—’
‘We’ve got food,’ interrupted Daisy. ‘Got loads of stuff in the car. It’s Cal’s, not mine.’
‘That’s good,’ Brick went on. ‘It’s not ideal but nobody knows about it. You can come if you want.’
Duh, thought Cal. We just drove all this way to say hi but now we’re gonna hit the road again. Of course we’re coming. But instead he said: ‘Sure, okay, can we bring the car?’
Brick looked at the Freelander as if it was another unwelcome stranger. Cal shifted his weight, and as he did so he felt the heavy knuckle of metal slip from his waistband and down his legs. It hit the concrete with a crunch. Brick’s eyes widened as he saw the gun there. Then, before Cal could say anything, he turned and ran.
‘Wait!’ Cal yelled. The guy was bolting with impressive speed, his arms and legs pistoning him back up the dune. ‘Wait! It was just in case, I wasn’t going to use it!’
Brick wasn’t listening, practically vaulting over the dune in a shroud of kicked-up sand. Cal swore, then bent down and snatched the gun.
‘Wait here!’ he said to Daisy, legging it across the car park. He jumped onto the dune, his feet sinking as he charged upwards. He reached the top in time to see Brick sprinting down the beach.
‘Brick, wait!’ he shouted. The older boy didn’t stop, didn’t even slow. Cal started down the slope, making it four or five paces before realising that, as fast as he was, he was never going to catch up with him. Instead he lifted the gun, pointed it straight up and pulled the trigger.
The recoil juddered down his arm into his shoulder, ending up as a painful cramp beneath his ribs – so shocking that he almost dropped the revolver. His ear broke into a high-pitched song. It worked, though. Brick missed his footing and sprawled onto his face. He spun round, crawling backwards like a crab, the whites of his eyes visible even from where Cal was standing.
Cal kept the gun high, pointing towards the skies, half thinking that the bullet was going to come right back down and cave in his own head. He took a deep breath, gunpowder like firework smoke in his lungs.
‘I’m not going to shoot you!’ he yelled. ‘I only brought the gun in case you were crazy. Look.’ He lobbed the pistol towards Brick. It landed halfway between them, burrowing itself into the sand. Then he held his hands up, ignoring the part of his brain that was screaming at him – You’re an idiot, do you know what you’ve done? He’s going to kill you now! ‘It’s yours, take it, just don’t leave us here, okay?’
Very slowly, Brick got to his feet. He was stooped over, hunched into himself like he was expecting another shot to come from somewhere else. He walked back through the craters of his own footsteps, picking up the gun by its barrel and holding it away from him. It reminded Cal of a kid carrying scissors.
There was a frantic puff of breath and Daisy appeared by Cal’s side, grabbing his right hand with both of hers. They looked at Brick, who stood statue-like, the gun still held out before him, his shadow a huge lower-case ‘t’ on the beach.
‘Please don’t leave us,’ Daisy said. ‘We weren’t going to hurt you.’
It seemed to take an age for Brick to nod at her.
‘We’d better go. The sound of that shot must have carried for miles.’ He turned and walked slowly along the shore, keeping close to the water. ‘Leave the car here. We don’t want to leave tyre tracks. Just grab your stuff and follow me.’
Daisy
Hemmingway, 9.13 p.m.
Daisy walked between the two boys,
breaking into a trot every few seconds to keep up with their giant strides. She was exhausted, her legs aching from the sand and her hands from the two carrier bags she held, but she felt safe. Which was weird, really, considering she’d broken one of the most important rules, one of the things her mum and dad had drummed into her again and again and again. Never, ever talk to strangers. And certainly never, ever, EVER get into a strange boy’s car and let him drive you across the country to meet another even stranger boy and then go with them both to a secret place that nobody else knows about.
She should have been more nervous, but that usual horrid feeling in her chest and stomach she got when she was scared – like there were living things crawling around inside her – just wasn’t there. It might have still been the shock of what had happened. It might have been the fact that in the last few hours everything in her life, everything she knew about the world, had changed.
But there was something else, too.
‘So, where are you from?’ she heard Cal ask.
He was a few paces in front of her, a huge black duffel bag over his shoulder and the last carrier gripped in one hand. The other boy was a few paces in front of him and he wasn’t carrying anything except the gun. They were almost walking in line. The sea was still to their right, huge and shiny like a big bit of silver foil. The dunes rose to their left. The sun had dipped below them now, making the sand look more like wet cement. She jogged forward a few steps until she was by Cal’s side again.
‘Around here someplace?’
He’s from the Larkman, Daisy thought idly. Which was weird because she’d never heard of the Larkman before.
‘Norwich,’ Brick grunted without looking back.
Oh, thought Daisy.
‘A place called the Larkman, actually,’ he went on. ‘You won’t have heard of it.’
‘Cool,’ said Cal. He smiled down at Daisy and she smiled back without having to think about it. Cal was nice, and she could trust him. Even if he hadn’t saved her life she’d have known that. He wasn’t from Norwich, he was from a place called Oak Minster or something. It made her think of a church made of wood. That little piece of knowledge floated in her brain like an ice cube in a glass of water, kind of see-through and almost invisible but definitely there. It made her head feel cold, not in a bad way.
‘You okay?’ Cal asked her. ‘You want me to take those bags?’
‘I’m okay,’ she replied, not wanting to feel even more like a kid than she already did. With her parents not around any more – Not gone, though; remember what Cal said, he could make things normal again – she’d have to look after herself for a while. She couldn’t expect these boys to, because everyone knew boys were a bit rubbish. She looked up at Brick’s back. Even in the dark the bigger boy’s hair seemed to glow orange. He hates it, she thought. Not because of the colour, or because people tease him, but because it reminds him of his dad. Her head was full of ice cubes, each one different, all of them clinking little bits of knowledge over her thoughts.
‘Who did you say attacked you?’ Cal asked. ‘Your girlfriend, was it?’
Brick shot a look over his shoulder that was easy enough to read – Don’t go there – but it softened after a moment. He bent down and picked up one of the little stones that littered the beach, lobbing it out into the sea. It went a long way. Daisy felt sorry for it, because it would be stuck in the cold, dark water for ages. Maybe forever.
‘That’s how it started, yeah,’ he said as he walked. ‘We were making out, y’know? Then she just went mental. She bit me.’ He turned again and pointed at the wound above his eye. It looked dirty and horrible. ‘Wasn’t just that, though, she was proper psycho, tried to claw me to pieces. No reason, I didn’t do anything. Then I went to the garage, to get help, and a load of people came after me. They wanted to kill me.’
He’s not saying something, thought Daisy. And another ice cube floated by inside her mind, a dark corridor and some steps, a locked door at the bottom of them. This thought gave her a bad feeling, an unpleasant tickling in her stomach, and she pushed it away by focusing on the gulls that bobbed on the sea. They peered back at her, and their little eyes reminded her of the people who had attacked her – the ambulance man and Mrs Baird and all the neighbours and people she’d never seen before – because there was nothing at all in those eyes. They were hollow black marbles.
‘You call the police or anything?’ Cal asked.
Brick shook his head. ‘They’d have come after me too. Don’t know how I know that but I do.’ He looked at Cal. ‘You know it too.’
So did Daisy. Everyone would come after them, no matter where they went or what they did. Until they found a way to fix this, the whole world would have the fury. This wasn’t another ice cube thought, this was a big flashing light in her head, impossible to ignore or push away.
‘The fury,’ said Brick, nodding as if Daisy had spoken it aloud. ‘Question is why. Why us?’
The only answer to this was the sound of the sea as it lapped the beach with its foamy tongue, that and the gentle cries of the gulls settling into bed. Did they sleep on the water? That was odd. How did they not capsize in the middle of the night?
They walked in silence for a few more minutes, Daisy falling further and further behind as the soft, uneven ground took its toll on her legs. She tried to make sense of the other ice cubes. She could see one with a pretty girl reading a book. That was Cal’s. There was another of a pier full of arcade machines that was too see-through to make any sense of. There were nasty ones, too: people screaming and biting and punching and kicking and chasing that belonged to both of the boys. Daisy surfed through them like someone channel flicking, not really understanding how these things could be in her head, unless she was imagining them.
After a while Brick moved off to the left, towards the dunes. Up ahead the beach narrowed, and she could make out a weird wooden thing – like a huge collapsed rope bridge – stretching over the sand into the sea. She jogged to catch up, almost stumbling. Cal waited for her at the bottom of the dune, Brick already halfway up.
‘You sure you don’t want me to take them?’ he asked, hiking his bag up over his shoulder. ‘I don’t mind.’
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I think we’re almost there.’
How did she know that? She wasn’t quite sure, she just did. Just like she knew she’d see a big wheel even before it rose over the top of the dune like a rusty metal sun. The ice cube image was almost exactly the same as the real one, laid over it and shimmering ever so slightly. Only in the ice cube the wheel was actually turning, people visible inside the rocking carriages. Could she smell doughnuts too? She blinked and the ice melted. The wheel was ancient, nothing like the big one in London she’d been on. Bits had even fallen off it, some of the metal poles in the middle and three or four carriages too. It looked like a giant that was missing some of its teeth.
Brick flapped gracelessly down the other side of the dune, towards a huge fence. Daisy saw that there wasn’t just a Ferris wheel ahead but a whole theme park – there were two roller coasters, by the looks of things, and one of those rides that whizzed up and down and made you feel sick just looking at it, and a large square building with a roof like waves. Her heart lifted when she saw a carousel too, although she could only make out the painted, cone-shaped roof over the fence. She loved carousels! It was the closest she’d ever really come to riding a horse.
‘It’s a theme park,’ she said.
Brick turned and somehow a smile managed to land on his sour face again.
‘It used to be,’ he said. ‘Don’t get excited, though. Nothing works any more. But it’s safe, nobody ever comes here apart from me.’
It didn’t matter if nothing worked, there still might be horses. In fact couldn’t she see them now, like another one of those weird half-invisible thoughts that made her brain feel cold? She could see their kind eyes and their long noses and that horrible dark corridor and the steps going down and the locked door a
nd something behind it that moaned.
Her skin went prickly and she ran to Cal, walking by his side as they followed Brick down the dune onto a concrete walkway. It ran alongside the fence, and about halfway down Brick squeezed through a gap and disappeared. He was waiting for them on the other side when they caught up.
‘Watch you don’t scratch yourself,’ he said to Daisy. ‘The wire is pretty sharp.’
Cal grabbed the fence and pulled it open and she looked at the gap. She searched inside herself, looking for warning signs, looking for those little electric currents that told her something bad might happen. But they weren’t there. Other than that corridor and the locked door – which might not even be real, which might just be in your head – she felt absolutely one hundred per cent safe.
She crawled through the gap on her hands and knees, standing and dusting herself off as Cal followed. Brick shushed them out the way, grabbing a huge piece of wood on which she could make out the letters NDYFLOSS AN. He rested it over the fence, giving it a shove to make sure it was firmly in place. Even with the exit blocked Daisy couldn’t feel the slightest trace of fear. In fact she couldn’t remember ever being anywhere before where she’d felt quite as much like she was supposed to be.
Brick turned and stretched out his long, freckled arms. This time his smile was nervous, almost bashful.
‘Cal, Daisy, welcome to Fursville.’
Cal
Fursville, 10.02 p.m.
It could have been a romantic dinner, if it wasn’t for the fact that he was eating a packet of prawn cocktail crisps and the person sitting opposite him, on the other side of the candlelit table, was an ugly ginger guy called Brick.
They were on the first floor of the pavilion, in the small restaurant called Waves. One side of the room was made up of floor-to-ceiling windows, but there was no sea view any more. They’d been boarded over from the outside, much of the glass cracked and stained so that the stuttering candle was reflected in it several times, making it seem like the room was alight. The whole place was an inch deep in dust and cobwebs, and the stench of sea rot hung in the air along with the smoke.