She smiled.
See.
She was growing clever again. The knife was the key. The rest of the pack, they were too stupid to understand these things; all they could do was follow. Like animals. Hunting together.
Soon they’d go back underground to their new den by the tube tracks. They could only take the brightness for a little while. They’d rest, strengthened by this tiny meal, drink the water that rose up through the ground. And tomorrow they’d be strong enough to risk attacking any children who came past. As long as it was a small enough group. She would fall on them and she would gut them like she had gutted the rat thing.
She chuckled, blood dribbling from between her teeth.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow they would eat properly.
They’d found some children in the night, hiding in a building. The children had tried to use fire to drive them away. But the fire had turned on them, and they’d burned up. She dribbled as she remembered the smell of roasting meat, a pool of spit forming at her feet.
The children were in the kitchen, cooking.
When they’d finally got to them there was nothing left, just charred bones. So she’d brought the pack out to hunt in the daylight. She had to help them.
She was their mother … Was that right? Where had that thought come from? Was she the mother of the children who’d been cooking in the house? Or was she the mother of the pack? Was she the mother of them all?
Mother. Definitely a mother.
Before the worms had got into her body she had had real children. Not roasted ones. Babies of her own. Delicious babies. No, not delicious. That came later …
She snarled. Shook her head, trying to pin down her thoughts. They were tangled up, the threads of disease inside her, the roots of the knife inside her, the black lines on her skin, twisting and knotting, one thing leading to another …
Concentrate.
Where were her babies now? Where had she left them? She had no idea what had happened to them. The hard bright light bounced off the blade and drove deep into her brain. She moaned and her mind emptied. For a while no thoughts troubled her. No memories bubbled to the surface. She saw no pictures except the confusing black scrawl on her wrist. Then the blade turned, the light switched off and her mind flowered back into life. Thoughts came crowding in. She wasn’t looking at a picture of the disease, or roots from the knife, the black lines on her wrist were a tattoo. A Celtic tribal knot. Her boyfriend had one the same round his wrist …
What had happened to him? She had an image of a body covered in boils. The smell of decay. A man screaming as his face split down the middle. She pushed the memory aside and searched for happier ones. A hospital bed. A baby in a cot. A home. Polished wooden floors the colour of honey. A television. A running machine in a gym.
That was the most powerful image – the gym and all its machines. All working away together, parts of one giant machine. And there she was, watching the TV as she ran. And ran and ran and ran. Pictures on the TV now, of hospitals and doctors in white coats, talking. Not the same hospital. Not the one where she had had her baby. That was a different memory. She snarled again. No matter how hard she tried to hold on to the good memories, the bad ones were stronger. Sickness. Death. Pictures on the TV of the disease spreading. Ambulances. Hospitals overflowing with patients. Men in white coats talking …
That was all they’d ever done. Just talked. They hadn’t found a cure. There hadn’t been time …
The light stabbed at her eyes again and her memories twisted away from her, as if someone had pressed the delete button. Her screen was blank. All her memories were gone and she was back, tangled in the lines on her wrist.
Dirty. She tried to rub them off, and realized she was holding something in her other hand.
A knife.
Yes.
She had to hold on to it. Never let it go. It was power. Power over the children and power over her pack. She sniffed the air. Watched the dancing sunlight on her blade. She’d been thinking about something. What was it? Why couldn’t she fix her mind on one thing? She took in a long shuddering breath. Her lungs burned, scarred by illness. Her skin itched. Her eyes were raw; they felt like they’d been peeled. Her brain was too big for her head; the pressure gave her a permanent headache. Only one thing made the pain go away, made her thoughts slow down, only one thing gave her calm.
The blood that ran in the little ones’ veins. The flesh that wrapped their small thin bones. The life they held inside. A shame the ones in the house had got burned up, a terrible shame. It had forced her out in the daylight.
Well, from now on she was going to walk in the light. She had feared it for too long. If they hadn’t been disturbed by the hunters, forced from their den, maybe they’d never have learned.
It hurt. It confused them. But if they were careful they could survive it.
It wouldn’t be easy.
Small steps.
An hour a day. No matter how much it hurt.
Like going to the gym.
Enough. Time to go back into the darkness. She hissed to the pack and led them out of the park. As they walked down the street, shrinking from the sun’s rays, she saw something glinting. Something she needed. She walked closer.
It was a shop, and lined up in the broken window were glasses, and there, at one end, was a model head wearing sunglasses. She laughed.
Clever.
Use tools.
That was how it worked. That was what would make her strong. The mother of the pack. The rest of them were useless. They had no idea that they had once used tools, driven cars, worked in offices; their hands hadn’t just been for stuffing their stupid faces.
‘You’re fired,’ she grunted – the first words she had spoken for as long as she could remember – as she reached in for the sunglasses. Ignoring the broken glass that gashed her arm.
She lifted the glasses off the dummy. Raised them to her face. As she put them on, she started to laugh.
She had been queen of the night, now she would be queen of the day too. Tomorrow she would catch some children.
She turned her face up to the sky and screamed at the sun.
‘You’re fired. You’re fired. You’re fired. You’re fired. You’re fired. You’re fired. You’re fired. You’re fired. You’re fired …’
53
Shadowman was lying on his belly, looking out through the bottom of a floor-to-ceiling picture window. The rest of the glass was filthy with dust and grime, but he’d cleared a patch just big enough to give him a good view of the outside world without being spotted.
He was four floors up in a flat opposite the smouldering Arsenal stadium. It had been a mad scramble getting away, battling through the slow and confused strangers who lived in there. His gang of four had given chase, but he’d been too fast for them. They may have been cleverer and less diseased than most of their kind, but they were still clumsy and uncoordinated. The worst part had been when he’d gone through to the back of the stands and down the access stairs to try to find a street exit. He’d ended up running round and round the lower level until he’d stumbled across an open gate. The inside of the stadium was full of filth, human waste, dying strangers, rotting bodies, piles of unrecognizable rubbish. It was probably all this that was burning now.
Once he was out he’d decided he couldn’t get very far away. He was still light-headed from the concussion and didn’t want to risk moving around too much in the dark in an area he didn’t know. He would put himself in danger of stumbling across more grown-ups.
Once he was sure nobody was on his tail he’d chosen this place to hide out. It was an old industrial building that had been turned into modern flats. He was hoping that any strangers in the area would congregate with the others inside the stadium, but he was still very careful when he broke in. Normally this would have been just the sort of place where they build their nests. He still had a box of matches in his pocket and he’d gone straight down to the basement to thoroughly
search it by their juddering light. Then he’d worked his way up to the top. Any doors that were firmly bolted he’d ignored. Strangers didn’t use locks. The whole of the top floor was a large studio apartment that must have been quite swanky in its day, with polished wooden floors and exposed brickwork on the walls that were hung with abstract art. The door had been hanging open, however, and the place had been ransacked. When the disease had first struck, when half the police force was off sick, and law and order had broken down, hordes of looters hit the streets. Their frenzy didn’t last long, though, as they themselves had quickly fallen ill. In a few short weeks it was over.
This apartment hadn’t escaped the vultures. Anything useful and usable and valuable had been carried off. There was broken glass everywhere, smashed furniture. He was pleased to see that there was no evidence of recent use by grown-ups, however. Like the rest of the building it was deserted, so it suited his purposes perfectly.
First he’d secured the door and wedged it shut. After that he’d tidied up a little and found some old bedding in a cupboard. Together with the cushions from a sofa he’d made a bed by the window and settled down. He figured that if he could stay close to the strangers it would give him an advantage. He would know where they were and what they were doing, and with any luck he could stay hidden from them. The air was full of smoke and the bitter stink of burning rubbish, which would mask any scent he might be giving off. He would learn their movements, study their behaviour, and when he was strong and rested he would set off back to civilization. He hoped that would be sooner rather than later. He mustn’t rush it, though. He felt pretty terrible. There was a big lump on his forehead where Jester had hit him that was round and hard and shiny, and his head thudded in time with his heartbeat.
He had dozed off and on through the night. Waking to squint out through his little spyhole and follow the progress of the fire. It had lit up the whole sky, illuminating the streets as well as any floodlamps. The stadium was set back far enough from the surrounding buildings for the fire not to spread, and it seemed to be reasonably well contained, so Shadowman found it comforting rather than frightening. Now and then strangers would spill out and mill around in the road, not sure what to do. Some of them fought each other in their frustration.
It was quiet now. The sun was riding high in the sky. He warmed himself in the little patch of light that was spreading across the floorboards. He didn’t think he would sleep any more. He was stiff and aching all over. His neck felt like it had seized up. He hoped Jester hadn’t done any permanent damage.
Jester. Just to think of him made his headache ten times worse. How could he have deserted him like that? Left him there to be eaten by strangers?
He’d always known that Jester was self-centred and hard-hearted – that was how he’d survived for so long, after all. But he’d never expected his friend to just dump him. If he ever met him again – and how likely was that? There was no saying that Jester had got away himself – Shadowman thought that he could easily kill him. He really thought he could do it. He pictured himself shoving his knife into his belly.
Only he’d lost his knife, hadn’t he. His knife and his precious pack. He was completely defenceless. He’d need to find a new weapon before he strayed very far from his den.
He coughed. Felt a harsh rasp in his throat. He was very thirsty. He had his precious canteen still fixed to his belt, but it wouldn’t last long. He had to think about finding more water. He could go a few days without food if necessary, but more than twenty-four hours without water and he’d be in serious trouble.
All in all, the message was clear.
He couldn’t stay lying here any longer.
He slid back from the window. There didn’t seem to be any strangers about, but it was best to be careful and never let his guard down.
He did a few exercises to loosen up his muscles. Tried rolling his head on his stiff neck. Groaned. Massaged his temples. Then he took the A to Z out of his pocket, glad that he’d stuffed it there the last time he’d looked at it, rather than into his pack, and looked up the Arsenal stadium.
There it was, just off Holloway Road. When he felt up to it, the walk back to the palace, if he was left alone, could be done in two or three hours, probably.
If he was left alone.
Who knew what waited for him outside the doors to the building?
A haze of smoke hung in the air, even here inside the apartment, and it made him cough again. He had to find water before he could think of doing anything else.
Shadowman had explored enough of the city to know that a building like this would be likely to have water storage tanks in the roof. These could be a useful source of drinking water, so long as it hadn’t gone stagnant. He searched for a hatch of some kind and eventually found one in the ceiling at the top of the stairwell. He stood up on a chair and pushed it open. An access ladder slid out. He pulled it down then climbed up into the roof space. He sat for a while to get his breath back. He found even the smallest movements tiring. Then he lit a homemade torch that he had constructed out of a chair leg wrapped in strips of torn-up sheet. There was just room enough to stand here, and the roof space was enormous. He soon spotted a couple of large water tanks, protected by plastic covers. He eased the cover off one of them and waved his torch over it. It was three quarters full and there was no smell. The water looked clean – no animals had crept in and drowned, or used it for a toilet. He drank the last of the water in his bottle then refilled it from the tank. It would be better boiled, but his guts had got used to eating and drinking all sorts of things that they would have rejected before the disaster.
Feeling more confident he set off back towards the hatchway, and that was when he saw them.
Three wooden boxes behind an old chimney breast. He opened them to discover they contained a secret emergency stash that someone had hidden up here.
They were filled with cans and packets of dry food, another box with a pair of binoculars, a tool-kit and an emergency medical kit, including water purification tablets, and, next to them, a large holdall packed with weapons. Three knives, a machete, two baseball bats, even a crossbow with twenty steel bolts.
He shouted in triumph and punched the air, shouting, ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes …’ over and over again, tears running down his face.
This was salvation.
Forget Jester.
Forget that loser. The Shadowman was back on track.
He could hardly believe it. It was as if some God with a warped sense of humour had decided he’d had enough for a while, and it was time to give him a bit of good luck.
He was reminded of playing computer games. Just when you were out of ammo there’d be a bonus to collect. Something to keep you going through to the end of the level.
He snuffed out his torch and sat down among the boxes, overcome with emotion. He hadn’t realized just how strung out he was. He’d been running on nothing more than adrenalin and fear for a day. He’d been that close to breaking.
Nearly an hour later, well armed and well fed, back to something approaching an even keel, he climbed down the ladder and returned to his spyhole to check whether the coast was clear.
He’d made the decision to move on. Finding the stash had been a sign. He’d been given the tools to get back to civilization.
It was still quiet outside. He laced his boots up tightly, stuck a knife in his belt, loaded the crossbow and left the apartment, carefully closing the door behind him and wedging it shut again. If there were any problems, he could come back here.
He started down the stairs, treading softly, staying alert and focused.
He made it down without incident and peered out into the street.
It was deserted. All he had to do was start walking …
He paused. For a moment gripped by doubt. His confidence had been jolted yesterday. For months he’d been on top of things, and then … In a few short hours it had all fallen apart. He’d realized just how vulnerable he was.
He took some deep breaths. Told himself that he could do it. Told himself he was going to get back to safety. They’d been fools, him and Jester. Wandering off for a picnic in a minefield. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy getting back to central London. These outlying areas were wilder than he’d ever imagined. David and the other kids like him in the large settlements might have been pompous pricks, self-important little Hitlers, but at least they’d cleaned up the streets and made them relatively safe. This was war around here.
Come on … Just do it …
He was about to step out of the doorway when some sixth sense told him to wait. Maybe his ears had picked up a tiny sound, maybe his keen eyes had spotted a movement, maybe there was a new smell of rot in the air, but whatever it was he was suddenly tingling all over and his muscles locked in place.
Don’t move. Wait. Be careful.
He shrank back behind the security desk in the reception area, and looked out into the street.
They were starting to appear. Strangers. Pouring out of the stadium, like the crowd after a match. At their head was St George in his grubby vest, then came his associates, the gang of four – Bluetooth, the One-Armed Bandit, Man U and Mr Ordinary, the man with no name.
Behind them …
An army.
That’s what it looked like. An army of strangers, not exactly marching in step, more a shambling mob, but moving with a purpose nevertheless. The fire must have got so bad they’d been forced from their hiding-place into the open, the bright sun.