The Dead (42 page)

She didn’t. She just kept slowly walking towards the main entrance. When she got there she halted. Cringing away from the sunlight, hunched over. Ed came up behind her.

‘You have to go,’ he said.

She turned and gulped at him. She looked so sad suddenly, so normal, just a frightened little girl. She shook her head.

Ed turned his rifle round and prodded her with the butt.

‘Please, Frédérique. Just go.’

There were blood-stained tears running down her cheeks. Her lower lip was trembling.

‘Ed,’ she said.

‘Just go!’ Ed snapped, and shoved her so that she went sprawling on to the front steps.

DogNut swung the doors shut.

Frédérique got up, came over to the glass and pawed at it. DogNut winced when he saw the ragged tear where her thumb had been. She was pleading in French and sobbing.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Ed, and Frédérique threw herself at the window, slobbering against it, smearing it with filth. An animal again.

Ed didn’t want to see. He turned away and left her there, thumping and mewling and clawing at the glass. He couldn’t believe how quickly she’d got sick, how fast she’d changed, fallen apart.

Would it be worse now that she was outside in the light? Quicker? He didn’t know how the disease worked, but he’d seen enough to know that sunlight accelerated it.

He tried to shut her out of his mind. Walked away between the lines of silent boys.

DogNut stayed where he was. Not looking at the girl, but up, at the sky.

He felt a cold hard lump in his guts.

Jordan Hordern was sitting at his desk. He had taken over the director-general’s office in the corner of the museum on the first floor. He had a bed against one wall and spent a lot of time in here reading and planning. The rest of his boys slept in the boardroom next door, which they’d turned into a dormitory. Both rooms looked out over the park and had good lines of sight.

David King was sitting opposite Jordan at the desk, his legs neatly crossed, listening as Jordan explained the rules. They were no different for David than they were for the coach party. If he and his boys could feed themselves, they were welcome to stay.

‘We might not want to stay.’

‘That’s your decision.’

‘You said yourself we can’t have two people in charge,’ David went on. ‘I think I know best, and I don’t want to be told what to do by anyone else.’

‘Fair enough, soldier. Where were you heading anyway, before you found Ed?’

‘Somewhere central. Somewhere with a good supply of food and water. Somewhere safe. Somewhere like this, really.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m afraid we got here first.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why London, though?’ Jordan asked. ‘Wouldn’t you have been better off in the countryside?’

‘For the next few years we are going to be a scavenger society,’ said David. ‘Living off what the adults have left behind. This place, for instance, is full of weapons that we couldn’t hope to make ourselves. Not until we learn the skills.’

‘True.’

‘So London is the obvious place to come. The countryside will be fine when it’s safer, when the Strangers have all died off, when we can learn how to grow our own food. But at the moment it’s pretty terrible out there. Funnily enough it’s quieter here in town.’

‘You’ll find somewhere else to hole up,’ said Jordan.

‘I doubt we’ll find somewhere else with as good a supply of weapons, though.’

‘OK,’ said Jordan. ‘That’s what this is all about, then? Weapons?’

‘You’ve surely got more than you can use.’

‘Not necessarily. Who knows how things are going to go? Who knows what we might need in the future?’

‘Twenty rifles,’ said David. ‘That’s all I’m asking for. Give me twenty rifles. You must have hundreds here.’

‘What about bullets?’ said Jordan.

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘Most of these guns are useless. There’s no ammo for them. We did find some others in the armoury, and some bullets, but I ain’t Father Christmas.’

‘Well, then, if some of the guns aren’t any use to you,’ said David, ‘why not give them to us and let
us
worry about ammunition?’

‘If I give you guns, will you move on?’ Jordan asked, but David wasn’t listening. He had his head cocked to one side.

‘Can you hear that?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Sounds like shouting.’

A huge argument was raging in the atrium. David’s boys against Jordan’s. It seemed that with their leaders not around both crews had lost all their discipline. There was a lot of childish name-calling going on. David’s boys were from a privileged public school; Jordan’s boys were mostly from the local estates. No one was quite sure what had started it, but there was now a fierce slanging match going on with both sides insulting the other in the crudest possible way.

David and Jordan came down the stairs shouting and trying to restore some sense of order. But the argument had been allowed to get out of hand and there was no easy way of stopping it. The two sides were acting like rival football teams who had got into a fight on the pitch and were using Jordan and David like referees. And the coach-party kids were acting as spectators, nudging each other and pointing, enjoying the spectacle.

It looked like there were going to be a few red cards today. The big rugby player, Pod, was particularly angry.

‘You have to get them to apologize, David,’ he kept saying, and David kept ignoring him.

In the end David lost his cool and snapped at him.

‘Just shut up, Pod!’ he shouted. ‘All of you shut up.’

The noise died down a little.

‘What have you two decided, anyway?’ Pod asked. ‘Although to tell you the truth I don’t really want to stay here with this bunch of morons.’

‘Loser,’ someone shouted.

‘We hadn’t finished talking if you must know,’ said David, sounding calmer.

‘Can’t they give us some guns and we’ll get going?’ said Pod.

‘Yeah, get lost!’ came a voice from the crowd.

‘There’s a lot to sort out,’ said David. ‘And you lot aren’t making it very easy for me. You’re behaving like a bunch of kids.’

‘David,’ said Andy, the guy with the big nose, ‘we
are
kids.’

‘I won’t have you fighting like this. I can sort things out, but I have to be able to leave you alone for five minutes without you fighting.’

‘They started it,’ said Pod.

‘We did not!’

‘It might not matter, anyways,’ said DogNut, coming in from the front entranceway. ‘You’d better come take a look at this.’

Ed, Jordan, David and DogNut were on the roof of the museum. The sky was almost completely covered by roiling black smoke, which was visibly spreading from the south-east, like ink staining a bowl of water. There was a roaring, crackling sound like a distant waterfall and they could see great flames leaping into the sky in the distance. The hot wind carried ash and cinders. Birds were flying past, and skinny moth-eaten dogs were appearing, trotting along the roads with their tails between their legs.

‘The fire’s driving them this way,’ said David.

‘Is getting serious,’ said DogNut.

‘We’re in open ground here, aren’t we?’ Ed asked. ‘I mean, the park goes all the way round, doesn’t it?’

‘Not at the back,’ said Jordan. ‘We’re close to some other buildings there. If the fire gets really out of control, it could spread to the museum. I guess we could maybe try and fight it off somehow.’

‘The thing is, though,’ said David, ‘if everything around you burned down, you wouldn’t want to stay here, would you? It would be a wasteland.’

‘At least there’d be no sickos left,’ said Ed.

‘There’d be nothing,’ said David. ‘You’d be stranded here.’

‘We’re not leaving,’ said Jordan. ‘We fought hard for this place.’

‘But you said yourself it could catch fire,’ said Ed.

‘We’ll take that risk.’

‘For real?’ DogNut was alarmed. ‘I do not like fire, captain. I’m telling you, if them flames get too close, I am
out
of here.’

‘DogNut’s right,’ said Ed. ‘I saw what happened at the Oval. When a fire gets hot enough, it just burns everything.’

‘Maybe the wind will drop?’ said Jordan. ‘Change direction.’

This was the first time Ed had seen Jordan show any doubt, any hesitation.

‘I saw a programme about bush fires once,’ said David, staring at the sky. ‘In California and Australia. Whole towns just turned to ash and rubble. Cities rely on fire brigades. Without them fires can spread unchecked, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. I’m taking my boys and I’m going. But first you’re going to give us some guns, Jordan. There’s no point in leaving them here to get burned.’

‘I’m with David,’ said Ed. ‘I’m going to at least get ready to pull out. You should too, Jordan. Pack everything up, put it on the lorry if you want.’

‘I can’t leave the museum.’

‘Bloody hell, Jordan. Look at that! The whole horizon’s covered with fire. You can always come back afterwards. See if the museum’s still standing. I’m not risking it, though. I’m going to start loading our food back on to the lorry. If it looks too hairy, we’ll head north, across the river. At least the Thames will stop the fire spreading any further. Honestly, Jordan, just let it burn itself out and come back when it’s all over.’

‘I’m not leaving.’

After the dogs came the children. A steady trickle of them, heading for the bridges. Boys and girls, bedraggled, exhausted, terrified. In small groups mostly, some riding bikes, some pushing shopping trolleys full of belongings, quite a few with suitcases on wheels, a handful packed into cars, driving slowly down the choked streets.

Jordan posted guards at all the entrances to the museum to stop anyone from trying to break in, but nobody wanted to stop. They’d seen the fire, they knew what it was capable of and just wanted to get well away.

Ed organized the coach party into a team and they grabbed all the food they’d carefully unloaded the day before and packed it back on to the lorry along with their sleeping bags and blankets. DogNut helped, and stayed outside with Ed making sure no passing kids nicked anything. Twice a small group of tough nuts made a detour and came over for a look, but when they saw the boys’ weapons they carried on by, jeering and throwing things.