The Dead (45 page)

The fire had reached the museum. Fanned by the strong winds it had torn through the houses at the rear and leapt up into a line of big trees at the edge of the park. Now, finally, one of the trees toppled over and crashed into the corner of the museum, ripping it open.

Smoke started to spread through the galleries.

Jordan was up in his office making plans with a small group of boys. DogNut was outside by the naval guns, watching the chaos and confusion. Smoke wafted in clumps across the park that was garishly lit up by the nearby fires.

DogNut was beginning to wish he’d gone with Ed and the others. The sheer power of the fire was terrifying. He’d never known anything like it. It was an unstoppable elemental force. Could they really hold out here?

He went back inside. Boys were sitting with their heads bowed, exhausted by the fear and stress. DogNut blinked. His friends looked vague and hazy, as if there was a veil hanging in the air between them. He looked up at the Spitfire dangling from the ceiling. It was lost in a grey fog.

DogNut swallowed. His throat hurt.

‘Look at that.’ One of the boys was pointing to the back of the atrium.

A long tendril of smoke was crawling across the floor. It looped around one of the tanks.

Then DogNut became aware of a hissing, shuffling sound. Like waves raking over small pebbles on a beach.

Was it fire making the sound, or something else?

Footsteps. Heavy breathing.

A father came shambling up the stairs, drool hanging from his lower lip. Behind him, other dark shapes were emerging from the smoke.

DogNut drew his katana from its sheath.

‘They’re in!’

‘Get up!’

Ed tilted his head back and squinted at David. He was standing over him, clutching his rifle, a black shape against a fiery sky.

‘Why?’

‘Get up, Ed.’

‘What’s the point?’

David took hold of Ed’s jacket and hauled him to his feet.

‘You might want to sit here and get barbecued,’ he said, ‘but I don’t. Everyone needs to do his bit. I’ve sent Pod and three others forward to try and find out what’s happening on the bridge. The rest of my squad are guarding the lorry. We can’t let anything happen to the cargo.’

Ed took a deep breath. ‘Maybe we should just abandon it,’ he said. ‘If everyone got out and walked it’d be a lot easier to get across.’

‘Is that really what you want to do?’

Ed sighed.

‘No.’ In truth he couldn’t bear the thought of abandoning the lorry. It had their whole lives on it, as well as being a safe place for the kids. There was no getting away from the fact, though, that the conditions on the bridge were only going to get worse. More and more kids were arriving from every direction and filling the space around the roundabout, and the longer they sat here waiting for it to clear, the closer the fire was going to get. The wind was still blowing strongly in this direction. The smoke was so thick in the air it scoured Ed’s eyes and throat so that he couldn’t stop coughing.

David shoved him back against the side of the lorry and fixed him with a cold hard stare.

‘Are you just going to give up?’ he asked.

Ed shrugged. He just wanted to curl up under the lorry and go to sleep.

‘Is that what your friends would have wanted?’ David went on.

‘No.’

‘Then do it for them.’

David was right. What had it all been for? To have come through everything, to have fought so hard, for Jack and Bam and the others to die …

Ed wearily picked up his rifle.

‘I’ll fight,’ he said.

‘Good.’ David looked at his watch. ‘It’s gone six o’clock. We have to push on. What we haven’t considered is exactly what’s on the other side. The Strangers will all be coming out of their hiding places. The quicker we get to a place of safety the better.’

There was a shout and David turned to see Pod returning with his scouting party.

‘Some morons in cars have crashed,’ Pod explained when he arrived. ‘They’re arguing and fighting with each other. More cars have come up behind and tried to get past and they’re just making it worse. They’re blocking the whole bridge.’

‘We’ll have to clear it,’ said David.

‘How?’ Ed asked, amazed at David’s confidence.

David raised his own rifle. ‘We’ve got these, haven’t we?’

‘You can’t shoot everyone on the bridge.’

‘I’m not going to,’ said David, as if he was talking to a complete fool. ‘But it’ll give us some authority. Come on, Pod, bring everyone, we’re going to make a path for the lorry.’

David’s troops marched towards the bridge, David yelling at the milling kids to get out of the way. Miraculously they did. Ed went along to the cab and shouted at Justin to follow but now they were vulnerable to the hordes of angry kids who couldn’t go anywhere. They were tired and hungry and desperate. If they knew what was in the back of the lorry they could easily be tempted to attack.

As the lorry rolled slowly forward, Ed jumped up on to the footplate and leant in the driver’s window.

‘Don’t let the gap close,’ he told Justin. ‘David’s going to try and cut a way through. Keep your doors locked and your windows up. Brooke, you stay here with Justin. You’re in charge of the lorry now.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Stay out here and make sure nobody gets any bright ideas about jacking us.’

‘OK.’

Ed dropped down and pushed his way to the back of the lorry. The shutter was rolled halfway up, the kids staring out at the crowds from among the cages.

‘I need help,’ he said, climbing up on to the tailgate. ‘David’s lot are going on ahead and I need more bodies down here protecting the lorry.’

At first nobody moved, then Matt and Archie Bishop and their acolytes clambered down, awkwardly carrying their banner. Courtney and Aleisha, looking scared but determined, came after them. Kwanele, Chris Marker and the younger kids made no move to follow.

Ed couldn’t blame them. It was getting pretty intense out there.

‘You two stay at the back here,’ Ed said to Chris and Kwanele as he swung down into the road. ‘Keep off anyone who tries to get in. We won’t be far away.’

Chris nodded, his face white. Kwanele picked up a rifle with a fixed bayonet and came over to the opening. The weapon was shaking in his hands. He looked out. There was a field of faces looking up at him from the road behind the lorry and behind them there was a flickering red and orange glow above the buildings. Every few seconds a great shower of sparks would blossom up and spiral into the sky.

For a while it went OK. The lorry crept forward and Ed’s small band patrolled the back and sides. So far nobody was bothering them; they were all too intent on trying to get over the bridge themselves. The people being barged out of the way at the front weren’t too happy about it, but when they saw the rifles in David’s boys’ hands and the massive lorry rumbling and fuming up behind them they didn’t argue.

Justin managed to get the lorry across the roundabout but as they approached the start of the bridge there was shouting from behind and the crowd surged forward. People were being knocked over in the panic and others were rushing to fill the gap David had cleared in front of the lorry. The crush of kids was soon going to be too great to let them move any further.

Ed thought at first that the fire must have got close, but when he looked up he could see no change. The flames still seemed to be a few streets away.

So what was spooking everyone?

He rounded up his little band.

‘We need to see what’s going on,’ he said. The others nodded, though he could tell they weren’t happy about going too far from the lorry.

‘Stick together,’ he said, and they fought their way back through the crowd towards the rear. It was impossible to see anything in the chaos and Ed was just about to give up when there was another stampede and a whole section of kids fell over almost as one, offering a clear view all the way back to the line of buildings.

Aleisha was the only one to speak, but she summed up what everyone was thinking.

She simply said three words.

‘Oh – my – God …’

Packed together in a featureless mass were hundreds of sickos. Limping and shuffling up the road, angry, confused and as desperate to get away from the approaching fire as the kids. This first wave was going to be the fittest, the least diseased, the most dangerous.

Behind them would come the ones who were nearly dead.

And behind them the flames.

Already the younger boys and girls in the road around them were screaming and climbing over each other as they tried to get away. Ed pulled a little girl to her feet and passed her to her friends to look after.

‘We’ve got to stop them panicking,’ he called out to his gang. ‘We’ve got to hold the sickos back.’

He pushed through the crowd, grabbing anyone who carried a weapon of some kind, or who looked bigger or tougher or less afraid.

‘Come with me!’ he yelled at them. ‘We have to hold them off. We can do it, come on!’

Most of the kids pulled away and swore at him or barged past towards the bridge, but a few understood what he was trying to do and joined him.

When they got to the edge of the crowd they could see the sickos more clearly. They were pouring in from every direction, some of them covered in blood, some of them blackened by soot. Their fear had turned them completely crazy. They snarled and bared their teeth and shook their arms.

Ed saw a girl who looked about ten running towards him. She tripped and was immediately swamped by sickos. An older boy went back to rescue her, and he too disappeared into the mass of bodies. Another group of kids turned to make a stand by the church gardens. They had no choice. There was nowhere for them to run to. But they were too few and only armed with sticks and broomhandles, which they thrashed vainly at the advancing tide. They didn’t have a hope in hell of holding them back. In a minute they were going to be massacred.

Ed drew his pistol, fumbled with the safety catch and fired into the wall of rotting bodies. He had no idea if he hit anything but the noise was enough to draw everyone’s attention to him, kids and adults alike.

For a second it was as if time froze. Ed stepped forward out of the ranks of children.

‘We have to fight them off!’ he bellowed, his voice hoarse. ‘All of us. Together. Turn round and stand your ground!’

He reholstered his gun. It would be a pointless waste of bullets to shoot anything else into that near-solid mass.

‘Anyone with a weapon come to me,’ he said, holding his rifle above his head with one hand.

‘The Lamb will protect you!’ Matt shouted, lifting his banner, and he, too, stepped clear of the crowd. Nobody had any idea what he was talking about or what the banner meant but it seemed to offer some sort of hope and kids began to rally round him.

Now they charged forward to reinforce the smaller group by the church garden. They managed to beat the first wave of sickos back and form a line. Ed found himself with Courtney and Aleisha on his left and a big square-headed boy armed with a garden fork on his right. The boy was swearing under his breath and grinding his teeth.

‘Come on, come on, you sick bastards, come and get it …’

After briefly dropping back the sickos came forward again. And they were soon close enough for Ed to pick out individuals. A mother with no lips; a teenager with a broken arm, the bones sticking through the skin; a fat father with bulging eyes whipping his head from side to side. And there …

Pez.

His lower jaw flapping at his chest.

Ed sensed the blood fever coming on again. He could feel that weird out-of-body calmness settling over him and, behind it, something wild and furious and out of control like a crazed beast rushing out of the darkness.

It was as if he was splitting into two people.

‘Take it to them!’

David was on the bridge with his boys, pushing steadily forward, the lorry inching along behind them. The crush of kids around them was getting worse and they were in danger of being totally overwhelmed. He was aware that something was going on to the rear – there had been shouts and screams, and then a gunshot. This had thrown the kids on the bridge into even more confusion and David was nearly knocked off his feet. The gunshot had given him an idea, though.