The End

‘Stay with her,’ he said, pointing to Yo-Yo, and Zulficker nodded.

  Shadowman put his hands on Yo-Yo’s shoulders. ‘It’ll be all right. Zulficker will look after you.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Yo-Yo, her lips pressed so tightly shut they’d turned white. She had tears in her eyes.

  Shadowman grabbed his short spear and ran out, slamming the door shut. Ryan and the rest of his guys were ahead of him. Shadowman took the stairs five at a time, the sounds of a fight getting louder and louder. When he got to the kitchen, it was chaos. The glass doors to the garden were smashed, jagged pieces of glass still hanging in the frame, and the room was already full of sickos – about twenty of them – and more were swarming in. Shadowman gagged on the reek of massed bodies packed into a small space, sour and fetid and earthy. The smell of decay. Of death.

  Their skin was dark with filth and grease, erupting with boils, ravaged by deep sores. Their eyes were mad and yellow, inhuman, their clothes ripped, damp, sticky. Many had body parts missing – fingers, hands, noses, ears, eyes, lips. One mother had lost half her face and, as Shadowman butted her with the shaft of his spear, the other half exploded in a shower of blood and pus and grey jelly.

  Ryan and his hunters were jammed against a row of cabinets at the back of the room. Shadowman raised his spear. It was awkward manoeuvring in these cramped conditions, but he managed to shove and kick a knot of sickos back until he had enough room to fight. He jabbed at a mother who was getting too close, striking her in the throat, and she fell back, gurgling. A father immediately took her place and he too went down, his belly pierced. Now Shadowman moved forward – shove and stab, butt and jab.

  ‘Force them out,’ he called over to Ryan. ‘We need to secure the doors.’

  Easier said than done. The sheer weight of numbers gave the sickos an advantage. That, plus the fact that they had no fear of the kids’ weapons, meant they were going to be hard to shift. Slowly, though, the kids gained the upper hand, creating a wall of sharp steel and pushing forward, shoulder to shoulder, forcing their way, step by bloody step, towards the garden, stumbling over fallen bodies, avoiding grasping hands and snapping teeth. One of Ryan’s guys had got in behind Shadowman and they’d set up a rhythm together. As Shadowman lunged with his spear and then pulled back, the hunter leant in past him with his club and cracked skulls, then Shadowman would lunge again. It worked well, and they were moving ahead of the other kids. Then there was a grunt and a cry off to Shadowman’s right and he saw Dom go under, pulled down by several mothers. Shadowman and his teammate stepped in, and while Shadowman cut into the sickos with his spear the hunter managed to get Dom out from the tangle and on his feet again. His face was bleeding, but otherwise he seemed OK.

  He thanked Shadowman and then puked on to the floor. Shadowman felt someone grab at his sleeve and turned to drive an elbow into their face. He was back in the fight again, trying to keep his own face away from long nails and grasping hands. He felt like puking himself. Up close, the sickos’ hot breath stank like they’d been feasting on the slime from a cesspit.

  Ryan gave a great yell and the hunters around him shoved forward together like a rugby scrum, pushing the unprepared sickos on his side of the kitchen almost out of the doors. This opened up space for Shadowman, his partner and Dom to really go to work, cutting, slashing, clubbing. At last he felt something give and the sickos fell back en masse. They were retreating, going out through the broken doors, cutting themselves on the glass as they went. Shadowman shouted, ‘Come on!’ and all the kids went into a killing frenzy, forcing the last sickos away, leaving a carpet of bodies on the black and white geometric tiles.

  A mother turned, in a last act of defiance, snarling at Shadowman, showing broken, blood-reddened teeth. Shadowman had fought enough sickos not to get freaked out, and he raked his spear point down her face. Her nose came away, allowing a torrent of grey jelly to burst out and pour down her chin. Now a father with an empty eye socket turned on Shadowman and he looked like he had a head full of jelly. It seemed to be moving, squirming inside his skull. Shadowman’s partner whacked him with his club and he split like a burster, disintegrating on to the terrace just outside the doors.

  And then the room was clear. A squad of hunters came running in, carrying doors they’d torn from their hinges in other rooms. They quickly erected a barricade, blocking the damaged garden doors. Other pieces of furniture were brought in to secure them as Shadowman’s partner went round the room finishing off wounded sickos.

  ‘Are they done?’ asked Dom, pressing a hand to his face to stop the bleeding.

  ‘Think so,’ said Ryan, but they weren’t done. Shadowman heard a sound from upstairs – heavy feet on the floor, crashing and banging.

  Yo-Yo.

  Without thinking, he was out of the kitchen and pounding up the stairs.

  And then he was back in the living room. Too late – Zulficker was lying dead on the floor, his eyes gouged out. And there, near the windows, was Yo-Yo, her small body gripped by three sickos. Mouth open in a silent scream, her eyes staring at Shadowman. Still alive.

  Had the sickos somehow swarmed up the front of the house and got on to the balcony? No. No. Not possible. This didn’t make any sense. They didn’t have the intelligence, the skills needed to plan and to climb.

  What other explanation was there, though?

  Shadowman ran at them, bellowing at the top of his voice.

  ‘No … Leave her! No …’

  But when had it ever made any difference speaking to a sicko? They ignored him and carried Yo-Yo out on to the balcony.

  He got close enough to stab one of them, blood spraying into the air; he barged a second one over the balcony. She fell on to the railings below and was skewered. Now Shadowman saw that the sickos had made a sort of human pyramid up the side of the house. They’d climbed over each other to get in and were now passing Yo-Yo down to the massed sickos below.

  He speared two mothers at the top of the pile and they tumbled down, but the others were already breaking up the tower and dropping off. He couldn’t reach them without climbing out himself. He looked down to see Yo-Yo being swallowed up by the milling horde. He gave a wordless shout of frustration. Hot tears were running down his cheeks. This shouldn’t have happened. From out of a clear blue sky. This was supposed to have been a good day.

  There was a change in the crowd, a movement. They were parting, like a shoal of fish or a flock of birds, moving as one. And a woman stepped forward. She was very tall and very thin, her arms stiff at her sides. Long, straight grey hair hung down in curtains around her head. She looked up at Shadowman and he felt hypnotised, as if she’d somehow got inside his head. His thoughts were filled with a jumble of terrifying images. He felt sick and giddy. He squeezed his eyes tight shut and swore to himself. He wasn’t going to give in to her. He opened his eyes, pulled his arm back, hurled his spear with all his strength, but at the last moment a father stepped in and took the spear in his ribs, falling dead at the mother’s feet. The crowd closed around her and, just like Yo-Yo, she was gone.

  Shadowman stood there, gripping the balcony railing, and watched, amazed and appalled, as the sickos started to move away, heading north. In that awful link with the long-haired woman he had grasped some sense of the sickos’ purpose. And their power.

  Ryan and Dom joined him.

  ‘Where they going?’ said Dom.

  ‘I think they’re a second army,’ said Shadowman. ‘With a second leader. And I think they’ve been called in.’

  ‘You mean they’re joining up with St George?’ said Ryan.

  ‘If they are then this is way more serious than we thought.’

  In a few minutes the road was empty, as if the sickos had never been there.

  Shadowman slammed his fists on the metal balcony.

  ‘I was supposed to bring her back safely. This has to end.’

  35

  Maxie had a headache. Too much talk. Too much stress. In the past headaches were no big deal. Yo
u’d just down a pill without thinking. Take your pick – paracetamol, Neurofen, ibuprofen, aspirin. For Maxie it had usually been paracetamol. Now paracetamol was like gold dust. You could get rich and rule the world if you had a stash of headache pills.

  Headaches, cold, fever, random pain, all were magically got rid of by the little white pills. She’d read somewhere that aspirin originally came from the bark of the willow tree – no idea where paracetamol came from. If she could find a willow tree maybe she could strip the bark, chew on that. Ta-dah. No more headaches. Only thing was she had no idea what a willow tree looked like or where to find one. There was so much to relearn, so much that had been forgotten, so much that she’d taken for granted.

  OK. Yeah. They could scavenge stuff for now, but eventually it would all run out. Then they’d have to make their own things. Not just headache pills – clothes, weapons, food, tools, tampons …

  But none of that made any difference, none of that mattered one tiny bit if they couldn’t defeat the grown-ups.

  Everything came down to that. Every argument ended up in the same place. Every train of thought stopped at the same station.

  Panic Station.

  They’d all seen them come through the other morning, after the red moon had turned the sky to blood. Maxie had been alerted by the guards at the museum – ‘You have to see this!’ The kids had pressed their faces to the windows. Too scared to go outside. Watched, horrified and fascinated, as the horde of grown-ups had dragged themselves past. So many of them coming into London. Could Maxie and her friends really hope to defeat them? That’s what everyone had been arguing about here at the Houses of Parliament. Another damned meeting had been hurriedly called once everyone was sure it was safe to walk the streets again.

  It was Shadowman who’d done the scouting. Checking it really was as quiet as it looked. He was badly upset by what had happened to Yo-Yo. He looked tired and slightly crazy. He’d spent hours out there. Punishing himself. Desperate to do something. Not that anyone else blamed him for Yo-Yo’s death.

  Didn’t stop him blaming himself, though.

  Maxie felt sorry for him. Nobody could have known that the red moon might have been a warning that a new grown-up army was going to come pouring into town, like an unstoppable tide. A flood, an avalanche, a sudden deluge from out of nowhere.

  Shadowman had spent ages with Sam and The Kid and the other young ones, talking to them, comforting them, explaining … but no matter how hard he talked he wasn’t going to bring Yo-Yo back.

  Maxie did miss Yo-Yo. Some evenings she used to play her violin down in the main hall, the sound echoing up to the roof. Sweet and sad. Music was one of the things Maxie missed most. All those tracks on her phone, on her laptop – dead. She’d held on to her things, her electronic devices, for ages, hoping that one day the power would miraculously come back on. But you couldn’t carry all that useless stuff around with you forever. Books still worked. Thank God for that. They held all of human history now, all human knowledge. Whatever else happened, they had to protect the books. Protect their memories. If they were to have any hope of rebuilding the world they would have to study the books.

  But first they had to defeat the grown-ups.

  Defeat the grown-ups. Defeat the grown-ups. Defeat the grown-ups.

  ‘Panic Station, end of the line, everybody out!’

  The one truly impossible thing they had to do before all the other impossible things could happen.

  That’s why this argument in the House of Lords was going nowhere. Because deep down, whatever anyone said, they all secretly felt the same thing – they’d been training and drilling and preparing in Hyde Park, but not for this mega army.

  David was up and speaking now. Saying what a lot of the other kids thought.

  ‘We can’t beat them. How can we? You know it. It’s crazy to even try. You all saw how many of them there were. And that’s not even counting the ones Jester saw in Kilburn.’ He paused and looked over to where Einstein was sitting with Justin a couple of rows in front of Maxie. ‘You say you’re working on a cure. Brilliant. That’s the way to go. It’s obvious. We stay safe within our bases. No sicko can break into Buckingham Palace.’

  David looked over to where Jordan Hordern’s guys were sitting together on the opposite side of the chamber.

  ‘You should go back to the Tower of London,’ he said. ‘Its walls are three metres thick. No sicko could ever get in there. We’ve survived this long by staying safe, by protecting ourselves and not taking stupid risks. None of that’s changed. We sit it out. The sickos are all diseased, dying. We sit it out and wait for them to drop dead.’

  ‘But they’re going to spawn,’ said Einstein. ‘They’re going to throw out a cloud of fresh parasite spores. We could all be infected. We could all be finished.’

  ‘Yes,’ said David. ‘And I just pointed out that you’re working on a cure.’

  ‘It could take us months, years. We don’t know.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said David, in the manner of someone who was going to slickly switch their argument. ‘You don’t know, do you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You don’t know for certain about this cloud of spores you’ve been going on about. Where are you getting your information from?’

  ‘From the Twisted Kids. They communicate with each other. They’re picking stuff up – like a radio signal.’

  David laughed. ‘So you’re telling us that your facts come from some deformed freaks who claim to be using telepathy to communicate with – with what? The ghost of Wikipedia?’

  A laugh rippled round the chamber.

  ‘All I’m saying is that we can’t rely on a cure,’ said Einstein angrily. ‘We might not ever be able to actually make one.’

  ‘So most of what you’ve been telling us is nonsense, then?’ David was enjoying himself. It seemed to Maxie that it was more important to him to score points here and look clever than it was to actually do anything about the grown-ups.

  ‘Why should I listen to any of you?’ he was shouting. ‘None of you know anything. You’re all in the dark. But I can tell you one truth. If you’d all just listen to me we can survive. We have to cooperate. Not in a pointless, warlike manner, but safe behind our walls. Let me organize things, set up a proper barter system, sharing food and water and weapons. We stay out of danger, we do all we can to stay alive, but the one thing we don’t do is fight because that would be suicide.’

  ‘If we let them spawn, that’ll be the end of us all,’ said Einstein. ‘We’ll catch the second wave of the disease.’

  ‘But that’s just a theory,’ said David. ‘That’s just what you want us to believe.’

  Blue stood up now. Maxie could tell he was angry. He had that cold, tense look about him.

  ‘We hit them,’ he said. ‘We hit them bare hard like we planned it. We destroy them. Can’t you see that now is the best chance we’ve ever had? They’re all in one place. We can massacre them while they’re gathered. We can wipe them out. We’re strong, we’re armed, we’re ready. For the first time since this started we’re all united. We make a final battle plan and we kill them all, for all time.’

  ‘But we can’t,’ said David scornfully and he laughed at Blue. ‘They’re just too many. Words won’t beat them. Our weapons won’t beat them. The disease will beat them. If we just sit and wait. It’s stronger than all of us. The sickos will all simply burst.’

  Now Jordan Hordern spoke out. His face blank and unreadable.

  ‘We can defeat them,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s changed. We have a plan and we stick to it. Just because there’s a few more of them it don’t make no difference. One final massive hammer blow and it’s over.’

  ‘It’d be over all right,’ sneered David. ‘Over for you, for us. We’d all be dead. They must outnumber us ten to one, a hundred to one, a thousand to one for all I know.’

  ‘I’ve killed a bare lot of sickos in my time,’ said Jordan. ‘More’n a hundred. It’s no p
roblem. We got warriors. We got roadmen like Blue, like Achilleus, Ollie, Ryan. I seen ’em practising. We got Amazons like Jackson and Maxie and Hayden. We fighters. We killers. Is what we do.’

  ‘Yeah, great speech, big man,’ said David. ‘And I say let the intelligent kids sort this one out. It’s not about fighting. Go home. Look after your own kids, like I’m going to look after mine, and they’ll thank you for it.’

  ‘You’re weak,’ said Jordan. ‘You’re a coward.’

  ‘No. I’m sensible. Sometimes it takes more courage not to fight.’

  The awful thing was Maxie thought maybe he was right. Trying to take down so many grown-ups might be the end of them. Why not just wait for them to die? Did Einstein really know that this whole spawning thing was going to happen? For sure?

  But she’d stick with Blue. If he wanted to fight then that’s what they’d do. He wouldn’t take them into a battle he didn’t think they could win.

  Would he?

  Don’t think negative thoughts, Maxie. Stay on message …

  I mean, what if? What if they could kill them all? How good would that be?

  Now Nicola stood up.

  ‘I’m not sure any more,’ she said. ‘I think maybe David’s right. Maybe we’ve moved too fast on this. We might need to rethink.’

  ‘We can’t fall apart now,’ said Blue. ‘We’ve worked so hard to build a fighting force. This don’t change nothing. I’m with Jordan. A few more sickos. So what?’

  ‘No,’ said Nicola. ‘I vote for more time to think about this. David’s talking sense.’

  Maxie felt like everything was slipping away from her. She vividly remembered Jordan marching his army across the bridge. The high hopes, the expectation, the sense that victory was almost theirs. The memory felt so fresh it might have been this morning. And then the moon turned red and a new army marched into town.

  How quickly things could fall apart.

  ‘I agree with Nicola,’ said Justin, joining the discussion again after a long silence. ‘We do need to think about this.’