The Dead (39 page)

She’d figure it out.

She was clever now.

Cleverer than them …

Ed couldn’t get the reek of smoke out of his nostrils. It was everywhere, blown on a hot wind. It stung his eyes so that he wept as he cycled. He felt itchy under his skin. On edge. There was a weird, tense atmosphere to the day as if the world had been screwed up tight. Everything felt wrong. It was dark when it should have been light, so that it was somehow day and night at the same time.

The wind tugged at him, like an annoying child, making him jumpy. He had every reason to be nervous. The events of yesterday had really shaken him up and he’d lost two good friends.

His last friends.

It looked like today wasn’t going to be any easier. The empty street he’d seen from Jack’s window had given him a false hope. There were more sickos out on the streets than he’d ever seen before. They were everywhere, spooked by the approaching fire just as badly as he was. He expected any minute to be attacked again.

He had an awful feeling of hopeless doom he’d never known before. The dark sky seemed to press down on him with an awful heaviness. It was a lid, slowly closing, suffocating the world, trapping the smoke and the fire and wind. He was reminded of all those myths and legends where the sky was a solid thing that had to be held up. There was a giant, wasn’t there, who lifted it on his shoulders?

Atlas. That was it. Atlas holding the sky up.

Well, it felt like Atlas had fallen.

He cycled as fast as he could, but it wasn’t easy. The roads were blocked everywhere by abandoned vehicles, so that he had to keep swerving round them. It hadn’t been so noticeable yesterday when they were walking, but riding a bike was different. You were aware of every bump and hole and obstruction. Driving a car would have been nearly impossible.

In fact, every now and then he would come to a car that had been set on fire, and was reduced to a pile of twisted metal and plastic. There was other debris as well, strewn everywhere, rubbish and bins and dead bodies, occasionally a burnt-out run of buildings that had collapsed. He longed for an open stretch, but he had resigned himself to the fact that it wasn’t going to happen.

He had already had to change the route he’d planned. The area around the Oval was an inferno. The flames had rapidly spread to the surrounding buildings so that there were now two big fires that threatened to link up and engulf the whole of south London. He had to stop every couple of minutes to check the
A to Z
and adjust his plans based on which roads he felt were safe to ride down.

The sickos didn’t help either. There seemed to be gangs of them whichever way he went, standing in the road looking up at the sky, or just wandering aimlessly. Once he had to make a detour round a small group of them who were fighting like drunks, the sort of addled street people you used to see in the cities, arguing with each other and throwing clumsy punches.

He kept moving, though, and in his roundabout way he was getting gradually closer to the museum and safety. He just wished his heart wasn’t beating so hard against his ribs and his breathing wasn’t so quick and painful.

As he rode, images flashed through his mind, switching backwards and forwards. Jack and Bam, alive and laughing. Bam doing his Maori war dance. And then Bam lying in the gutter, cold and still, and Jack in his bed holding Floppy Dog. The living and the dead.

The dead.

All those bodies at the Oval. The red fountain of flesh rising over them when the first canister went off. He wondered how many other sites there were around London like that, stacked with corpses. He knew a lot of people had left the city when the disease had started killing people. He’d seen it on the news – traffic jams miles and miles long. Those were some of the last images they showed on television before it went off air. It had all happened so fast.

Ed tried to picture the rest of the world like this, falling into chaos and ruin. The numberless dead bodies everywhere. And, worse, the living. Zombies. Stranded between life and death. He remembered the sensation of being pressed up against Greg. The stink of him, the heat and the damp. The craziness in his eyes. Struggling over the meat cleaver …

And Greg was still out there somewhere.

With poor little Liam.

He told himself to just concentrate on the road and not dwell on anything else. But try as he might he couldn’t get those images out of his head.

What was it about Greg?

There was something more. Something worse.

When Ed had looked into his eyes, seen the madness there, he’d recognized something and now he understood what it was. They were the same, the two of them; they’d both been helpless in the grip of a killing frenzy. When Ed had found his courage yesterday, he’d lost something precious in the bargain. He’d lost part of what made him human.

He was a different person now, and not a better one. Oh, yeah, he could fight, he could swat sickos like flies, he was a bloody hero, wasn’t he? He was death himself. Riding a bike. But in the end all he was doing was adding to the score of the dead.

Was that all a hero was, then? A killing machine without a heart?

Stop it, Ed. Stop thinking. Keep pedalling, keep those wheels turning. Get back to the museum. See the others. His new friends.

That would help fight the sadness and blow away the darkness inside him that was spreading, suffocating him like the black clouds in the sky.

Jack lying there on the bed, cold and still with Floppy Dog in his arms.

Pedal. Just pedal. Those tears were caused by the smoke
 …

Concentrate on the living. Justin the truck-driving nerd and the little kids in his Brains Trust, mouthy Brooke and the girls, big Courtney and little Aleisha, strange Chris Marker with his face in a book, even Mad Matt and his acolytes. He missed them all.

And don’t forget Jordan Hordern and DogNut and Frédérique …

God. Frédérique. What was he going to tell her? She really liked Jack. She’d come to rely on him. How could he break the news to her? She was most likely going to be tipped deeper into her own sadness.

Ed wasn’t used to giving people bad news. Up until a few weeks ago there hadn’t really
been
anything bad in his life. Bad news was something that adults had to deal with. Not kids. Oh, yeah, he’d had a mate whose mum had died in a road accident. He’d left school. But it hadn’t really touched Ed. He’d soon forgotten about it. Now the sickness had forced them all to behave like adults. To take on adults’ worries and responsibilities.

He stopped.

The way ahead was completely blocked.

He’d come to a railway bridge where there had been a train crash. Something had derailed an engine and it had tumbled off the bridge, dragging the lead carriages behind it and half demolishing the structure. There was a pile of mangled metal and bricks in the road. Two cranes stood nearby next to several emergency vehicles and there were bodies under tarpaulins, a few more still on the train. They’d all just been left there. Abandoned.

No, not completely abandoned. Now that Ed looked closer he saw a bunch of sickos, squatting down, eating a corpse.

They hadn’t spotted him yet, but he’d obviously have to go a different way. He checked his options and saw that more sickos were approaching from the direction he’d come. The only other route was along a side-road that branched off at a right angle, but that, too, was busy with people.

He had to get off the street. He made a quick decision and darted into the front garden of one of the houses that lined the road. He dumped his bike behind the hedge. Even if any of the sickos did find it they wouldn’t know what to do with it. Keeping low, he checked out the building. Steps led up to the front door. If he went up them, though, he’d risk being seen. There was a wide bay window on the raised ground floor and beneath that a narrow basement window that overlooked a sort of shallow well below the level of the garden.

That would have to do.

He crawled over to it. It looked just big enough for him to fit through if he could get it open. He turned round, dropped on to his belly and kicked out a pane of glass, hoping the sickos wouldn’t be attracted by the noise. Then he slithered down into the well, reached through the broken section and lifted the latch. In a few seconds he had swung the window up and was crawling through the opening feet first.

He lowered himself down until he was on solid ground, then quickly took up a position from where he could see out of the corner of the window.

Sickos were passing on the street. Luckily none of them made a detour into the front garden. He’d got away with it. All he had to do now was sit it out until the coast was clear.

He pulled his pistol out of its holster and rested against the wall, nose close to the glass. For the moment he was safe. He could rest, recharge his batteries that were being drained by the constant stress. He was so tired all the time.

He closed his eyes and let out his breath in a long sigh. Then froze. There was an answering sigh. Then the sound of movement behind him. He hadn’t checked the room out properly when he’d climbed in backwards. It had been dark and he’d been concentrating on what was going on outside.

Slowly he turned round, hardly daring to look. There was just enough light from the broken window to show him that he was in a large basement kitchen.

And it was filled with people.

They were lying on the floor, packed together, too many to count. Sickos. Hiding from the daylight. And they were starting to wake up, blinking in the gloom. The smell of smoke in the air had masked their stink, but now Ed became aware of it. A horrible toilet smell. And he could feel the heat coming off them. The one nearest to him belched and sat up, sniffing. He reached out towards Ed’s leg and he kicked him away. That caused a commotion and soon a gaggle of them were struggling to their feet.

Ed thought about trying to climb back out of the window, but all the sickos around him were awake and clawing at his clothes now. They’d pull him down before he could get halfway.

To the right, about five metres away, there was a staircase leading up to the next floor. Ed shoved a tall pockmarked father aside and set off towards it. A mother stood up, barring his way, and without thinking Ed put the pistol to her chest and pulled the trigger. The bang startled all the other sickos in the room, and for a moment they stopped. Ed seized his chance and ran for it, barging through the few remaining adults who blocked his path.

He raced up the stairs and crashed through the door at the top into the hallway. He kept on moving until he reached the front door, then started fumbling with the various locks and chains that secured it. The sickos were evidently using some other way to get in and out of the house, but he didn’t have time to look for it. He could hear them coming up the stairs, their feet thudding on the wooden steps, their arms brushing against the walls. The last lock didn’t want to open, though, he obviously needed a key. He pulled at it and swore at it and battered the door violently.

‘Come on!

It made no difference. He was stuck here.

He turned round and fired off a shot at the lead sicko, who tumbled backwards. And then he had an idea.

In how many films had he seen it done?

Did it really work?

He aimed his gun at the lock and pulled the trigger three times.

The hallway was instantly full of flying bits of metal and splintered wood. A piece took a chunk out of his neck, but he hardly felt it.

He tugged the handle, the remains of the lock fell away with a clatter and the door swung open.

To hell with what was out there – anything was better than being trapped inside with a bunch of them. He leapt down the front steps, holstered his pistol, grabbed the bike and charged out into the street.

There must have been twenty or thirty sickos, stretched right down the length of the road. They were a bad bunch, far gone, walking corpses, rotten and confused. But they were still a threat.

The side-road was about fifty metres away. If Ed was quick, he might just make it. The sickos weren’t in a pack. They were mostly in ones and twos. There was a chance he could get round them.

He got back into the saddle and stood on the pedals, swerving round a couple of warty-looking mothers, then careered through the middle of another group. He ignored two ancient fathers with no hair or teeth, who flailed at him with stick-thin arms as he passed. The side-road was approaching fast. He leant into the curve and pedalled hard.

But as he turned the corner he saw nothing but more sickos, packed into this much narrower space. He skidded to a halt and thought about turning round. But the sickos from the main road were filtering down this way now. He was trapped.