‘We been chasing that lot all day,’ said the boy.
‘Are you hunters?’ Courtney asked, remembering what Nicola had told them.
‘Yeah. The gym bunnies moved into the area ’bout two weeks ago. Is our job to move them out.’
‘Gym bunnies?’ Felix looked like he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The last few minutes had been pretty intense, and these new kids didn’t make him feel too comfortable.
‘Yeah, gym bunnies.’ The boy nodded up the road after the retreating sickos. ‘They look like they work out. Toned. They’re much fitter and less diseased than most of the mothers and fathers we hunt down. They’re hard work. We been chasing them all over trying to get them out of the area. Finally found their nest this morning. Must have been about fifty of them in there. An old fitness centre.’
Courtney spotted a string of what looked like dried mushrooms hanging from the boy’s belt. The boy caught her looking.
‘They’re ears,’ he said, still with no expression. ‘Trophies.’
‘That’s sick,’ said Courtney, and the boy shrugged. His friends were squatting in the road, staring at DogNut’s crew in silence.
‘You don’t worry you might catch something? Their disease?’
‘Nah. We ain’t none of us got sick yet.’
‘But those are human ears …’
‘So what? The mothers and fathers are just scum to be hunted down.’
‘And made into decorations for your outfits.’
‘We need proof of what we do,’ the boy explained.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Marco, rubbing his arm where the mother had scratched him.
‘You not from round here?’ said the hunter.
‘No,’ said Courtney. ‘We’ve come up the river from the east to look for friends, yeah?’
The boy whistled. ‘Cool. But if you was from round here you’d know that us hunters work the streets; we get hired by the local settlements. They give us food and water and supplies – clothes, weapons, whatever we need – so long as we chase off any mothers and fathers that come sniffing around. But these gym bunnies is giving us a right headache. My name’s Ryan Aherne, by the ways. Don’t you forget it. You in trouble you ask for me. Other hunter gangs is nothing compared to us.’
‘I’ll remember that.’ DogNut bumped fists with him and introduced his crew.
‘Which way you headed then, Dog?’ asked Ryan.
‘We’re going to the palace,’ said DogNut. ‘We hoping the kids there might know something about what’s happened to our friends.’
Ryan spat on to the pavement. ‘We can get you close,’ he said. ‘But we won’t take you to the doors. We don’t like the man.’
‘David?’
‘That’s him. We did some dirty work for him one time and he never paid us. You can’t trust him. He your friend?’
‘Not really,’ said DogNut. ‘But our friends was travelling with him.’
‘OK, listen up, tourists. We mercenaries. We work for whoever pays us best. But this one time we’ll get you up near the palace for nothing. Special Introductory Offer.’
‘Thanks, blood,’ said DogNut, and they high-fived.
‘You be on your watch up there in the palace, man,’ said Ryan. ‘Guy’s got eyes and spies everywhere, geeks with guns. Check the exits. Your man has a habit of not letting people out once they in.’
‘No worries,’ said DogNut. ‘I reckon I can handle him. He’s just a kid. We’ll be there and gone before he clicks.’
‘Yeah,’ said Finn, walking past DogNut and heading off up the road, Olivia back on his shoulders. ‘This David guy can’t be any worse than the sickos.’
10
Despite the hunters’ skill, despite the fact that they’d learnt to read the signs and always be alert to any danger, despite the fact that they never relaxed and always knew what was going on around them, they none of them had noticed that they were being watched. All the while that they’d been talking to DogNut’s gang someone had been spying on them.
He was sitting alone among some bushes in the shadow of a big plane tree at the edge of St James’s Park, utterly still and utterly quiet. He had a homemade cloak wrapped around his body, the hood pulled over his head so that only his eyes showed. And they were narrowed to slits. He wasn’t taking any chances that he might give himself away. The cloak was camouflaged for the city, with splotches of grey on a dull green and brown background. His face and hands were smeared with soot so that they too were grey. Hidden beneath the folds of his cloak was a long, narrow knife. He gripped the handle in his right hand, ready, not that he thought he would need to use it, but it was always better to be safe than sorry.
He could stay like this for hours if necessary. He was used to it. He had learnt to live in the shadows. When he moved, he moved unseen, patrolling the streets around the palace. There was nothing that went on around here that he didn’t know about. He knew where all the settlements of kids were, where the grown-ups crawled away to sleep, where there were secret stashes of food, where all the good hiding-places were: the dark places.
He’d always been like this – a watcher. Hanging back. It had earned him the nickname Shadowman a long time ago and the name had stuck. He didn’t always use the name now when he mixed with other kids. He used a variety of aliases. A different one for each group so that nobody could properly know him. Even when he was among people he was hidden.
His real name was Dylan Peake. He sometimes wondered how many living people knew that. Maybe four at the most. In this new world, without documents and forms, without parents, teachers, doctors or policemen, without addresses, you were free to be whoever you wanted.
So, in a way, Dylan Peake was someone else altogether. Separate to Shadowman. He thought of him as someone he used to know. That other boy had been born in Wales but brought up in West London. He had lived in a big house in Notting Hill. His father had been a film producer, his mother a make-up artist. Both dead. He had two brothers and two sisters.
Also dead.
Thinking of Dylan Peake as someone else, a character in a story who had lived in the mythical old world – that lost paradise of easy food and clean water and non-stop fun and games – helped him to deal with the pain and loss.
It hadn’t happened to him.
Even back then, though, Dylan Peake had been an unusual boy. As the middle child of a large family, he had learnt to be invisible and hide among his brothers and sisters. His bedroom had been at the top of the house and he’d taught himself to recognize all the sounds that the building made. The creaking of boards as people moved about, the clanking of pipes as taps were turned on and off, the individual sound each door made as it opened and closed. Sometimes he would creep around the house and listen at the doors. Trying to find out what everyone was saying. Spying on his own family.
And not just his own family.
He had taken to roaming the streets at random, following people, going into shops and cafés, eavesdropping, working out the secret patterns and rhythms of the city. He longed to know what people were up to without actually joining in. He developed a knack for gatecrashing. Entering places he had no right to enter. Other schools. Parties. Offices. Concerts. Events. Nothing was closed to him. He could pass unnoticed wherever he went.
He was also a great mimic; within minutes of meeting someone he could impersonate them. It had been very useful on the phone, but also meant that he could mingle in any group, and fit in, pretending to be older or younger than he was, or posher, or more street, on a couple of occasions even foreign.
He moved freely and left no mark.
So in a way Dylan Peake had never really existed. He was made up of all the other personalities he had mimicked. And now Shadowman was just the name for an organization, a collection of personalities.
As the kids moved on, he waited until it was safe then stood up and followed. Keeping behind the railings. If they came into the park, he’d keep on their tail; if they went away, he’d
let them go. He recognized Ryan. He’d been keeping tabs on him for months. He’d even run with him for a few days some time back, but he doubted Ryan would remember him. He’d learnt a lot in that time. Noted all the kids’ names. Worked out their strengths and weaknesses. Ryan’s hunters were probably the best in the area. One day they might be useful to Shadowman.
The other kids were strangers. He’d never seen them before. They intrigued him. He wanted to know where they’d come from, but he could only take on one job at a time. He needed to stay focused. Right now he was getting close to the group of wild kids who’d set up camp at the eastern end of St James’s Park on the drill square at Horse Guards Parade. They’d made themselves a messy little shanty town of tents and shacks built from bits and pieces – old timber, corrugated iron, plastic sheeting – anything they could find.
As far as Shadowman could make out, they’d been on the move around London, stripping an area of anything usable then moving on. He needed to find out all he could about them. So these new kids could wait. One thing at a time. He’d learnt that. Don’t rush. Do things properly. Cover your tracks.
Stay alive.
A lot of kids hadn’t managed to do that.
11
One of his toys was moving about, scuttling across the floor, all jerky. Annoying.
It had woken him up when it had knocked against his legs. He’d been sitting on his sofa. Sleeping. Dreaming. He always slept well after a meal. He’d nearly finished eating the broken toy he’d brought back with him the other night. They didn’t taste so good if you left them too long. Sometimes they started to smell and then they’d make him sick if he ate them. He’d probably had the best of it now. He’d put what was left of it into one of his bags, and the next time he went out collecting he’d take it with him. It was useful if any of the others were around. He could throw them scraps and they’d leave him alone. Some of them had even got used to it. They waited for him, then followed him around like pets, expecting to be fed. He’d had a pet before. He remembered it now. A cat. When he’d got ill, and there was no food left in the shops, and everything became confusing, he’d had to eat the cat. He wondered now if he would have to eat all his new toys before they were broken. This one was pesky, always moving about, trying to get away, dragging its broken bits behind and making that noise, that horrible irritating noise.
Annoying.
He nudged the toy with his foot and grunted at it. Why wouldn’t they just stay still when he wasn’t playing with them? Stupid toys.
He sighed. Belched. A thin trickle of sticky brown liquid squirted from his throat and dripped down his front.
It was a stupid world. Such hard work. He loved his stuff. His collection. He loved to go out searching for more. But it was hard. Avoiding the sun. Always hungry. Always thirsty.
His toys gave him pleasure, except this one. This one was making his life harder. Hard work. Hard, hard work. He’d always hated hard work.
He needed his sleep, needed his rest. Couldn’t his toys see that? Why did they have to be so mean to him? It wasn’t fair. If he was always having to wake up and put his toys back in their box, it was annoying.
He shouted at the toy.
‘’Noying!’
The toy made some stupid snivelling little noise and carried on crawling across the floor. The Collector groaned, shifted his weight and hauled himself up from the sofa. He would have to stop this toy from moving about like this. He had broken its legs, but it was still able to get about by wriggling and shuffling them.
‘’Noying!’
Well, he thought, as he leant over to pick his toy up, if it didn’t have any legs then it would have to stay still.
12
‘The fact of the matter is your friends abandoned us.’ David spoke in a very formal grown-up manner, his pale, freckled face comically serious. ‘We kept our side of the deal, but they simply chose to drive away and leave us to our fate. So, you see, your friend Brooke is not exactly on my Christmas-card list right now.’
The boat crew was sitting with David on a terrace overlooking the gardens of Buckingham Palace. The sunlight glinted off the lake on the far side of what had once been neat lawns, but was now a muddy field of various different vegetables. A small army of kids was busy tending the vegetables, working away with forks and spades and trowels.
If it had felt odd being in the Houses of Parliament with a bunch of children pretending to be the government, it felt odder still to be here in Buckingham Palace. DogNut and his friends had come in through the parade ground, where four of the boys from David’s school, wearing their distinctive red blazers, had been on guard in the sentry boxes at the front of the palace. They’d been suspicious of the new arrivals at first, but luckily one of them had remembered DogNut from when they’d met at the War Museum before the fire. Finally they’d unlocked the gates and DogNut had led his little band across the parade ground into the shadow of the massive building. David had met them inside, in one of the staterooms, and he’d made a big show of welcoming them as if they’d been his oldest and dearest friends. Then he’d given them a tour of the palace, showing off everything, and going on and on about what a good thing they had going there. Finally he’d taken them out into the garden at the back. He called it a garden, but it was more of a small park really, what with the lake in the middle and all the trees and shrubs everywhere. Once again his main aim seemed to have been to show off. He went on and on about how organized they were, how many of them there were, how much food they were growing, how safe it was here.
He’d even got someone to go and make a pot of tea for them all.
Now DogNut, Courtney, Olivia, Finn, Al and Jessica were sitting on white cast-iron garden furniture, sipping tea as the afternoon sunshine slowly faded. Marco and Felix had settled themselves on the lawn, enjoying the last of the sun.
It had all been going so well. David relaxed, bigging himself up, upright in his chair with his cup of tea. Talking of nothing, chitchat, gossip, catching up, and then DogNut had told David about how he was searching for Brooke and David had suddenly turned.
Now he was glaring at DogNut, who had to stifle the urge to laugh.
‘Brooke can rot in hell for all I care.’
DogNut had never met another kid who talked like David.
‘How d’you mean they abandoned you?’ he asked, trying to get to the bottom of David’s anger.
‘I mean exactly what I say. The deal was that my boys and I would escort the lorry over the river in return for a share of the food it carried.’
‘For real?’ DogNut shrugged. ‘I don’t know about none of that. Wasn’t my food. Wasn’t my lorry. I did help capture it, though. Don’t remember seeing you there.’
‘I wasn’t there,’ said David patiently. ‘You know I wasn’t there. As I say, the deal was –’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, you excort the lorry over the river, they give you some of the food. That must have been something you fixed up with Ed and Brooke. Nothin’ to do with me. That wasn’t my crew.’
Two of David’s red-blazered guards stood nearby with rifles at their sides. DogNut remembered those rifles. They were from the museum. He remembered what a fuss David had made about trying to get hold of them, and how proud he’d been when he finally managed it. He also remembered that they’d been given hardly any bullets for them. Were these ones even loaded? Or were they just for show?
‘We kept our side of the bargain,’ said David. ‘We got the lorry over the bridge, which wasn’t easy – it was jammed with children trying to escape from the fire – and then as soon as we got to the other side the lorry accelerated and pulled away from us. We chased after it, but it was no good …’
‘They abandoned you.’
‘Yes,’ said David matter-of-factly.
‘This is something that means a lot to David. He’s talked about it a great deal.’ They’d been joined by an intense kid with a crazy tangle of sticking-up hair who was wearing a coat that looked like he’d made
it himself out of many different mismatched patches of material. He was standing behind David, leaning on the back of his chair.
‘Your friend Brooke hurt David quite deeply,’ the boy went on.
‘Yeah, well, as I say, I don’t know nothing about that,’ said DogNut. ‘I’m sure they had they reasons for driving on.’
‘I’m sure they did,’ said David. ‘And you know what I think their reason was?’
‘Tell me.’
‘They never intended to share any of their food. They used me when it was convenient and then dropped me, as they had always intended to do.’
‘I’m sure it wasn’t like that,’ said Courtney.
‘Were you there?’
‘No, I wasn’t there. That’s the whole point. We got split up. That’s why me and DogNut is looking for Brooke now. But, you see, I know Brooke. I know she’s mouthy and that, but she’s got a good heart.’
‘A good heart?’ David scoffed. ‘You sound like some awful American TV programme. From what little I saw of Brooke I’d say she was a mean and selfish bitch.’
Courtney jumped to her feet and leant over David with her fists clenched. His two guards twitched, but he waved them back with a dismissive little hand gesture. He smiled at Courtney, which only made her madder.
‘You didn’t ought to speak about my friend like that!’ she bawled. ‘I don’t care who you are, and how many mates you got with guns, I’ll break your stupid butters face.’
‘Sit down,’ said David calmly.
‘Not till you apologize.’
‘It’s all right, babes,’ said DogNut, who could tell that David would never apologize. ‘He ain’t worth it.’
‘Yeah, well …’ Courtney jerked her chin at David and sat back down.
‘Maybe I was a bit rude,’ said David, who remained completely unruffled. ‘But you can understand my anger I hope? A deal’s a deal.’
‘Yeah …’ Courtney gave him her best cold stare.
‘And she obviously means a lot to you all,’ David went on, ‘if you’ve come all the way over here from the Tower of London to look for her. That’s quite an impressive feat.’