The Dead (33 page)

‘You don’t know how to work that bloody thing,’ Ed snapped. ‘We can outrun them, though.’

He looked around for an escape. There was an external staircase here leading to the lower seating levels. They charged down it, crashing into the metal sides as they rounded the corners, until they reached the bottom. They quickly took in their situation. The nearest exit was blocked by one of the ominous stacks of blue canisters. The boys realized that the best means of escape would be to get down on to the pitch where a narrow strip of open grass had been left around the side of the corpse piles. They started to climb over the seats, pushing past the bodies that had been dumped there.

As Ed was clambering over a middle-aged mother in a weird floral sun hat, however, she reached out a hand and tried to take hold of his jacket. He jumped back. The mother hauled herself up out of the seat and puckered her lips and dribbled at Ed, as if she was getting ready to kiss him. Ed shoved her away and she fell into the next seat, waking a hairless father who flailed at Ed with long dirty fingernails.

‘They’re not dead,’ Ed yelled. ‘They’re not all dead!’

All around them sickos were rising from the seats and shuffling towards them, and now Ed saw that there were more live ones down on the pitch, moving along the narrow pathways that divided the mounds.

The boys vaulted over seats, knocking sickos out of their way, stepping on dead bodies, slipping in filth, doing whatever it took to get down. As they reached the bottom, two young mothers on the edge of the pitch made a lunge for them and Bam fired off both barrels of his shotgun, not taking any chances.

The mothers went down and Bam fumbled to reload his gun.

One barrel at a time, he told himself, jiggling the shells into the holes. Just fire one barrel at a time. Keep something back.

‘There’s a way out over there,’ Ed shouted, pointing to an exit from the pitch over near the old stand. They sprinted towards it past a wall of decomposing flesh on one side and the live sickos in the stands on the other, who were all coming down towards the pitch, some walking, some crawling, the younger ones moving faster, others stumbling, barely able to move, and as they came they dislodged the ones that had given up, who fell out of their seats.

It was impossible to tell which were dead and which alive. They were all covered in sores and boils and soft rotten patches.

The boys thought they were home free, the exit was just metres away, but then something moved ahead of them, and a cascade of dead bodies tumbled down from one of the piles directly into their path.

They had no choice. They would have to climb over them.

They tried, but it was like wading through deep mud. The bodies were so soft they gave way beneath their feet and the boys found themselves treading in shredded skin and innards.

‘Look out!’ Ed shouted.

A large group of sickos had got on to the pitch and was approaching from behind.

Jack raised his machine gun, fiddled with it, tried the trigger.

Nothing.

The sickos moved nearer.

He thumbed off the safety catch.

Tried the trigger again.

Nothing.

He swore and shook the gun. Tried another catch.

He yelled as the gun suddenly jumped and jerked in his hands, seeming to fire itself, spraying bullets everywhere except at the advancing sickos. Jack let go of the trigger in fright, but one of the bullets must have struck a canister, for the next moment there was an almighty bang and flames leapt into the air along with an ugly mess of body parts and a horrible reddish-brown spray.

The boys, along with most of the sickos, were knocked off their feet. They went sprawling against the hoarding around the edge of the stands and smashed painfully into the wood and plastic. They landed in a pile of sticky wetness and Ed was insanely grateful for the mask that was still clamped to his face.

This really was hell.

It was raining rotten flesh. A fire had started. A clutch of sickos ran past them, clothed in flames. They crashed into another stack of canisters and there was a second explosion.

The whole stadium seemed to be alight now.

The boys seized their opportunity and stumbled, dazed and disorientated, towards the exit. The open gate was tantalizingly close. But they had to wade through body parts and unmentionable filth to get there.

‘Come on!’ Ed yelled, breaking away from the others. ‘We can do it –’

The next thing he knew he was running in silence in mid-air. The ground beneath his feet seemed suddenly to rise up and then just disappear. At the same time the air contracted around him, squeezing the breath out of him, crushing his chest, popping his eardrums. He didn’t hear a bang so much as feel it. There was a blinding brightness and a bottomless darkness at the same time. Up became down and inside became out. Slowly, slowly, slowly an avalanche of dead bodies collapsed on top of him and smoke billowed towards him in a grey mushroom cloud that grew and grew until he was embraced by sweet, soft, silent oblivion.

Frédérique was alone in the women’s toilet at the museum. Only her hands showed any signs of life as they fiddled in her lap, twining and intertwining, her fingernails picking at the skin. A drip of moisture fell from her nose and she shivered. Inside, though, she felt hot, like she was cooking. Her insides were writhing and churning. Her stomach cramping. Her heart beating too fast. Every few minutes she gave a little dry cough that sent a spasm of pain through her lungs.

She was in one of the stalls, sitting on a toilet with the lid down. The kids in the museum didn’t use the toilets any more. They had buckets for that, which they emptied outside. The water they had was too precious to waste flushing down the loo.

She had come here to be alone, away from the noise of the other kids. Their constant chatter was starting to hurt her ears. She knew she should be happy. The day had gone well. Justin had eventually managed to get the lorry back to the museum, and they’d stopped round the back near to some loading-bay doors. The boys at the museum had been ridiculously over-excited when they’d seen what Justin and DogNut and the girls had brought back for them. It had lifted the younger ones out of their state of hungry, depressed boredom, and they’d celebrated by having a proper lunch. Or as proper as you could get out of cold tins.

It was while they’d been eating lunch that Frédérique had started to feel unwell. The food tasted weird and smelt of rotting plants and cows and fields and compost and toilets. Even now, thinking about it, it was making her mouth fill with vinegary saliva, and bile was rising up her throat. She thought she might be sick. She could picture what she’d eaten, sitting in her belly, sending out roots and tendrils and spores, living inside her …

Sitting there in the café, trying to eat, a headache had lodged behind her eyes that she couldn’t shift, despite digging into the precious supply of painkillers she kept in her purse. The noise in the café, with all the kids talking at once, had slowly driven her mad.

She needed quiet. Only she couldn’t find any quiet. Not even alone here in the toilets. There seemed to be a constant babble of voices inside her head, all shouting and arguing at the same time. Screaming sometimes. The pressure was awful. Just awful. Every now and then she put her head down between her knees and moaned softly, then the pressure would press down hard on her eyes and she got scared that they were going to fall out on to the toilet floor or simply explode.

She rubbed the back of her head, at the base of her skull, trying to massage the tension away. It didn’t make any difference but she carried on anyway, rubbing and rubbing until her hand came away bloody.

If only Jack hadn’t gone. She could talk to him. Jack would know what to do. She’d been frightened of him at first with that strange birthmark on his face. But not any more. He was the nicest of them all, the kindest.

So why had he gone? The bastard.

The sudden flare of rage burned itself out as quickly as it had come on.

Her stomach was gurgling. A boiling mess of acid bubbled up her throat, scalding it. She had eaten something bad. That was it. The food had been on the lorry for a long time, after all. The stuff in cans had sell-by dates months away, but even so …

The voices in her head erupted, yelling at her.

It’s not the food – not the food – you know what it is – why won’t you admit it – you coward – it’s not the food – the kids – they’re all bastards – Jack left you – nobody gives a shit
 …

‘
Tais-toi!
’

She clamped her hands either side of her head and her fingers ran over a cluster of little bumps that were nestling behind her ears, like insect bites.

They hadn’t been there before.

She stood up. All her muscles felt stiff and it hurt to move, but she forced herself to stand and walk out of the cubicle. The toilet was underground and she had brought a little candle down with her that she had left by the basins. It seemed suddenly very bright and Frédérique gave a cry and shielded her eyes. She staggered over to the row of mirrors, eyes pressed nearly shut, and looked at her reflection.

She didn’t like what she saw.

She was thinner than ever. Her lips were cracked and dry, peeling. Her eyes and nose rimmed with red. She lifted her long hair to look at the side of her neck.

‘
Oh, mon dieu, non
 …’

Bam didn’t know if his eyes were open or not. He was in a world of blackness. As far as he could work out the explosion had ripped through the ground and he’d ended up somewhere below the pitch. All he knew for sure was that he was sitting on a cold hard floor with his back against a wall. The air was thick with dust and his mouth full of grit. He was bruised and aching all over, but the pain was bearable, which was something. His legs hurt the most. He could wiggle his toes, though, so he assumed that nothing was broken.

He could cope with a few bumps and bruises. What he couldn’t cope with was the complete darkness. Either the light had been blocked by falling rubble or the explosion had blinded him.

He had felt around with his hands when he had first regained consciousness. There was a dead body next to him. Long dead. It was cold and soft and putrid. He wanted to get away from it, but he was too scared, because there was something else moving about down here with him, snuffling and sniffing and searching in the dark. Every few seconds he could hear its feet scrape on the floor.

Bam was trying to keep utterly still and utterly quiet. It wasn’t easy. He had to keep breathing. The dust in his mouth and nose made him want to sneeze. His left leg was at an awkward angle and he desperately wanted to move it. But he couldn’t risk it. He was scared even to swallow in case it made a noise.

He still had the shotgun in his hand, which was something. As far as he could remember, he had reloaded it and cocked it before the cave-in, but he wasn’t a hundred per cent sure. There was a strong chance that he might pull the trigger and there would be a small, pathetic click and nothing more. He couldn’t check it. It would give him away. He gripped the double triggers tightly. If the thing came too close he would pull them and hope for the best.

He had no choice.

The thing, whatever it was, a mother or a father, there was no way of telling in the dark, moved again. He heard the dry rasp of its feet.

They could smell you, couldn’t they? That’s what they did. They sniffed the air. And there was probably more than one of them down here. They’d find him and he wouldn’t be able to fight back because he couldn’t see them. He couldn’t see anything. He could imagine them, though, a group of them slowly creeping towards him in the darkness, worm-eaten, puffy and insane. Closing in, step by step, leaving slippery trails of saliva on the floor.

There!

The scuff of a shoe.

It was definitely closer.

He could hear it breathing.

Bam was beginning to feel faint. He wasn’t taking in enough oxygen. The darkness seemed to be closing in on him, shrinking around him, crushing him. He wanted to be out in the sunshine, in the fresh air, running up a sports field with a ball in his hands.