The End

  ‘That kinda makes sense,’ said Blue. ‘Could be a description of the sickness.’

  ‘That is not science!’ Maxie had never seen Einstein get genuinely angry before. ‘That’s just a book. It’s made-up stories. His name’s Mark Wormold and his scrambled brains have picked up on a load of claptrap from the Bible and so now he’s Wormwood, the death star.’

  ‘Poison star,’ said Andy.

  ‘I was Wormwood, the exterminating angel, the great flea. I was king of the bats and bugs. That was long before I got into this broken body and stepped down from being a Starchild, became a human bean.’

  Maxie had noticed the way the Green Man talked about himself almost as if he was two different people: the Mark Wormold part and the Green Man part. He was like someone possessed, switching between two minds. A man possessed by the disease, as if it had a voice, a mind of its own.

  ‘Forget all that,’ said Einstein. ‘Forget the jungle and the birds and the bees. Forget about the big green for a minute, can’t you? Tell me about the blood.’

  ‘My blood,’ said Wormwood, ‘is bad blood.’

  ‘You can say that again.’ Einstein had his eyebrows raised in a slightly camp way. ‘And my blood?’

  Wormwood made a dismissive noise.

  ‘Not good. Not bad. It’s just blood. It’s everyday quaffing blood. A nice snack is all.’

  ‘Charming.’

  ‘Your blood couldn’t drive out anything.’

  ‘What about me?’ said Blue. ‘What about my blood?’

  ‘The same, the same, the same. All of you. You need to find the good blood.’

  ‘What for?’ said Einstein. ‘For you to drink?’

  ‘No. To drive out the bad blood.’

  ‘Do you mean like a kind of vaccine?’ said Maxie. ‘Are you saying that if we could find the right blood, the right kind of healthy blood, we could use it to fight the disease? Make a cure?’

  ‘Oh, the girl’s smarter than she looks.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Maxie sarcastically.

  ‘The girl’s got the right idea,’ said Wormwood. ‘The good blood will drive out the bad.’

  ‘Yeah, you can stop the love-in,’ said Einstein. ‘It’s not like that’s a new idea or anything. What do you think I’ve been doing here? Making cupcakes? All I need is some kid who’s survived being bitten by a sicko. But so far I can’t find any. Not any that stay alive.’

  ‘There was one here,’ said the Green Man. ‘I could smell him when I arrived.’

  ‘You mean Paul?’ said Maxie. ‘The kid who went crazy?’

  ‘I don’t know names. I’m just a wormy old ratbag of rot and decay. Don’t throw names at me.’

  ‘Is it possible Paul was bitten by one of your sickos?’ said Maxie, using the museum kids’ term. She knew that Einstein had kept some grown-ups for research, locked up out in the old car park, and it had been Paul’s job to look after them.

  ‘Possible,’ said Einstein. ‘That could explain why he went postal. But he’s buggered off.’

  ‘His blood was better,’ said the Green Man. ‘Smelt pretty good. But not the best. There’s another, though.’ He gave a sly smile. ‘Best blood of all. Sweet and clean and pure and …’

  ‘Another kid who was bitten, you mean?’ said Blue.

  ‘Not bitten, no. Born with the good blood.’

  ‘A kid born with immunity?’ said Maxie. ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘Anything’s possible,’ said Einstein. ‘But the question is – who is it?’

  ‘Not telling.’ Wormwood twisted away, like a little boy with a secret. ‘Not unless you give me something to eat.’

  ‘We give you plenty to eat, you greedy bastard,’ said Einstein. ‘We’ve been feeding you three meals a day since you got here.’

  ‘No,’ said Wormwood petulantly. ‘Something good to eat, the real sweet stuff.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Blue moving towards the Green Man and raising the club he had with him. ‘No way, man.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Andy, coming alive, sensing danger.

  ‘He wants to eat one of us.’

  ‘You must be able to spare one, a little one, a weak one. I need the flesh. I need the blood. My brain is going cloudy. Can’t help you any more. The other ones. They fed me. They gave me sweet flesh.’

  ‘Ed told me how he was kept locked up by the religious freaks at St Paul’s,’ said Maxie. ‘Like you kept your grown-ups here. Only they fed him children.’

  Einstein laughed. A couple of the other kids swore.

  Maxie went over to the Green Man. ‘We’ll give you blood,’ she said, feeling almost sorry for the pathetic creature. ‘We’ll give you the good blood, yeah? We’ll try to cure you. You can be our guinea pig.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Blue. ‘You can be our crash-test bunny. But you’re not eating no one. You so much as sniff one of our kids and I will cut your head off with a blunt knife. We’ll inject you or whatever we have to do – you tell me. I ain’t no scientist.’ He gave a questioning look to Einstein. ‘Help me out here. What do we do, make a serum?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Blue walked closer to the Green Man, his club still raised, giving him the hard stare. ‘You got that, wormhole?’

  ‘You’re cruel.’ The Green Man shrank away, looking hurt and self-pitying. ‘It’s not fair. I’m an important person.’

  ‘You’re a tool. A green stain. Now tell us who it is. Who’s got the good blood? Who was born with immunity?’

  ‘I’m not telling you. You’ve been mean to me. I’ll never tell you. Not unless you feed me properly.’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ said a voice and Maxie turned. It was Fish-Face. She’d come up to the Darwin Centre with some of the younger kids. She was the shyest person Maxie had ever met. She twisted herself into contortions to keep her head turned away, staring at her shoes.

  ‘Don’t tell them,’ said Wormwood. ‘I need my good stuff.’

  ‘You need a good kicking,’ said Blue.

  ‘How do you know?’ Maxie asked Fish-Face. ‘Did he tell you?’

  ‘He didn’t need to. I know everything he thinks. It’s almost like we share one brain.’

  ‘So who is it?’

  Fish-Face didn’t say anything, but Small Sam stepped forward.

  ‘She says it’s me,’ he said.

  10

  Shadowman was shocked how close the main body of the grown-ups was. He and Jester hadn’t gone far past the Bayswater Road, that ran along the north side of Hyde Park, when they’d come across the first sentinels standing, waiting patiently, unmoving, burning in the weak sun. Jester went a sickly pale green colour and started babbling about running, or fighting, or getting help – scared silly by these harmless outliers.

  ‘These are nothing,’ Shadowman said. ‘You wait. These losers aren’t anything to wet your knickers over.’

  ‘You make me jumpy.’ Jester’s voice was tight and high-pitched. ‘Pointing that crossbow at me all the time. I keep expecting at any moment to feel a bolt in my back.’

  ‘So it’s me you’re scared of, yeah? Not the strangers?’

  ‘I just wasn’t expecting them so soon. It’s been so quiet lately. We never see them round the palace.’

  ‘That’s why I wanted you to come and see,’ said Shadowman. ‘Or you wouldn’t have believed me.’

  ‘OK, well, I believe you now, so can we go back?’

  ‘Nope. I want you to really see.’

  So they pressed on, Jester moaning every step of the way. Half an hour later the two of them were peering round a corner and looking down a long, straight stretch of Kilburn High Road, which ran roughly south to north. There were sentinels strung out all along it, closer together than Shadowman had seen before.

  ‘OK. Point made,’ said Jester. ‘I can really see.’ And he pulled back, worried about being spotted, even though the sentinels were completely ignoring the two of them.

  ‘You don’t listen,’ said S
hadowman, giving Jester a playful slap. ‘This is nothing. I want to show you the hard stuff. I want to show you their army.’

  ‘Do you have to?’

  ‘There’s a reason it’s been quiet, Jester. There’s something going on, man. We got to work out what.’

  They’d been skirting round the edge of the main body. Moving slowly east and north, then west, in a wide circle. So far Shadowman’s bad leg was holding up. He was only limping slightly and apart from a dull ache he could ignore it most of the time. He was trying to get a fix on how many strangers there might be and exactly where their centre was. He was also looking for a high point where he could get a good view of them. He didn’t want to go blundering in any deeper without full reconnaissance. The outliers were harmless. He knew it wouldn’t be the same story when they got closer to the pack.

  It had been the same all the way, for street after street – sentinels standing facing outwards. Occasionally they came across a lone stranger, or a small group of them, stumbling in past the sentinels, drawn from God knows how far away. These walkers might be more dangerous, so Shadowman kept Jester well away from them, hiding in gardens, behind walls, watching. As far as Shadowman could see, though, even the walkers weren’t interested. They just wanted to get to where they were going. Like festival-goers heading for the main stage. Except there was no noise. No sense of a huge crowd. It was like there was just a big black hole. Shadowman knew they were there. The main body of them. They had to be. And there had to be a lot of them. But what were they doing?

  ‘Why’s it so important to see them close up?’ Jester asked for the tenth time, and Shadowman decided to answer him.

  ‘Why, why, why? Don’t you get anything, Doctor Why? You’re so tied up at the palace with your plans and your schemes and worrying about what other kids are doing, you’ve not been watching the match. You’re on the wrong channel even. You’ve forgotten who the enemy is. But they’re in there. Grown-ups, strangers, oppoes, sickos, bastards – whatever you want to call them – to me they’re just the enemy.’

  ‘And when we’ve seen the enemy?’ Jester whined. ‘Then what?’

  ‘I’ll let you know. I’ll text you, yeah? For now you’re safe, though. OK? This lot aren’t gonna attack. They’re too busy talking to God. Even the ones in there …’ Shadowman nodded towards where he knew the main body must be. ‘Even they must be sleeping now. We’ve only seen sickos heading into the centre – none coming out.’

  ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ said Jester. ‘You’re getting a big kick out of it.’

  ‘Not really. But at least I feel at home here. Since you abandoned me at King’s Cross, apart from the last few days when I’ve been resting up and waiting for my leg to stop hurting, this is where I’ve been, out on the streets, with this lot. Living alongside them day after day, watching them grow stronger, grow smarter. I understand them, yeah? I understand how they live, how they hunt, how they work together. I understand how dangerous they are.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Jester wearily. ‘OK? I mean, you’ve, like, made your point.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I keep telling you – these ones are dopes. They’re not dangerous.’

  Shadowman had spotted a tall building some way along the Kilburn High Road. He wanted to get a better look at it.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’ve been looking for.’

  ‘What?’

  Shadowman pointed to where a tall grey tower jutted up into the sky and they started to walk. Pushing past the still and silent sentinels. Jester stuck close to him, muttering under his breath, shaking with fear. They saw evidence of feeding, bones and bits of skin and hair, bloody clothing, lying in the streets, but the scraps looked old and there surely wasn’t enough food around to feed them all. They must have cleaned out the area for miles around.

  And then stopped.

  As they got closer, Shadowman saw that the tower was part of an old building that looked like it might once have been a cinema, built in the days when cinemas were a big deal. The tower must have been at least thirty metres high, and the word STATE, in big red letters, was spelled out on each face. Indeed, it looked like a miniature version of the Empire State Building in New York.

  The building hadn’t been a cinema for some time by the look of it. Its last incarnation had been as a church of some sort, and the doors at the front were boarded up. Shadowman took his crowbar from his pack and easily removed a couple of boards, then used the bar to smash the glass doors behind. The sentinels standing nearby ignored them completely, just stood there, blissed out, at one with the sky.

  ‘You don’t think all this noise is going to attract more of them?’ said Jester. ‘I mean, you’re the one keeps going on about how dangerous they are.’

  ‘I can feel it, Jester,’ said Shadowman. ‘They’re not buzzing. It’s like they’re dormant. Waiting.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Keep telling you. I don’t know.’

  ‘And I thought you knew everything.’

  ‘I know enough. Come on.’ Shadowman took out his friction torch and went through the broken door. Inside it was like a palace, with painted walls and ceilings, columns and pillars, chandeliers and a great marble staircase. The vast auditorium was even grander, large enough to seat at least four thousand people. Shadowman’s torch could only give them glimpses of it.

  ‘Cool,’ he said. ‘This is like that scene in Alien where they go inside the alien spaceship, and they’re like ants in there.’

  ‘Nice image,’ said Jester sourly. ‘Alien, yeah. And next minute some face-hugger is gonna jump out and rape us.’

  ‘There’s no strangers in here,’ said Shadowman. ‘I’d smell ’em.’

  He’d have loved to explore more, but there was work to be done. It took them a while to find their way up into the tower, and they had to break open two more doors. The stairs were dusty and half blocked with old bits and pieces that had been dumped there years ago. They eventually made their way to the top, though, to where the windows gave them a 360-degree view. Once they’d wiped off the dust and grime and crap, they were able to look out over London.

  ‘There,’ said Shadowman after a few seconds of scanning the area. ‘That’s what I wanted to show you.’

  ‘What?’ Jester was squinting and frowning. ‘I can’t see anything, only … Oh Jesus …’

  A few streets away was what looked like a cemetery, and it was filled with black, greasy bodies, all pressed and huddled together, radiating out from a central spot in great concentric circles. Shadowman knew what would be in the middle. St George, with his lieutenants.

  From the cemetery the bodies spilt out into the surrounding streets, densely packed at first, but thinning out the further they got from the hub. That was why Jester hadn’t spotted them at first. A black hole was the right description. They were an awful dark stain, like an infestation of insects, packed in so tightly they must be on top of each other.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Jester again. ‘There must be a thousand of them. Five thousand. Ten. How could you even count them? It must be every stranger in London. But what are they doing? What are they eating?’

  ‘They’re not eating,’ said Shadowman. ‘Food doesn’t seem to matter so much to them at the moment. They’re getting ready for something. Something more important.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Next stage of the disease maybe. They’re massing. For some event. Like salmon before they spawn.’

  ‘You talk like they’re organized.’

  ‘They are,’ said Shadowman. ‘In the middle of all that, like a queen bee in her hive, is the king of the strangers. A mean, ugly, vicious killer I call St George. He has the power to make them do whatever he wants. They’d follow him over a cliff if that’s where he was going.’

  ‘No such luck, I guess.’

  ‘He’s planning something, and walking off a cliff isn’t it.’

  ‘So he’s intelligent?’

  ‘It’s a sort o
f intelligence. An animal intelligence. A hive mind.’

  ‘How does he do it then?’ said Jester. ‘How’s he communicate with them? Can he, like, talk?’

  ‘It’s more of a mind-control thing. Secret signals, ultrasound. I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out.’

  ‘But we might be able to communicate with him?’

  Shadowman looked at Jester. ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jester. ‘We could negotiate with him.’

  Shadowman let out a burst of laughter. ‘Negotiate?’ he snorted. ‘What are you talking about? You don’t negotiate with dangerous animals. You kill them. It’s simple.’

  ‘Or we could just leave them alone. Let them do their thing and die.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ Shadowman shook Jester. ‘They’re getting ready for something. And you’ve seen enough of how strangers are to know that it won’t be nice. We have to stop them.’

  ‘Stop them? Stop that lot? Are you nuts? Look at them. They’re an army.’

  ‘And how do you stop an army?’ said Shadowman.

  ‘You don’t,’ said Jester. ‘You run away.’

  ‘No,’ said Shadowman, wishing Jester wasn’t being so deliberately dumb. ‘You create your own army, and you take the battle to them. You beat them, Jester. Imagine that, if we could destroy this lot. You said it yourself – that’s every stranger in London. And we could wipe them out. They’ve made it easier for us. They’re all in one place.’

  ‘Except,’ said Jester, ‘we attack them, they’re liable to get up off their arses and fight back.’

  ‘We can do it,’ said Shadowman. ‘We can take them down.’

  ‘What?’ said Jester mockingly. ‘Us two?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Shadowman, ignoring Jester’s joke. ‘If we got an army together.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. Look at them.’ Jester banged the window. ‘Look at them …’