The End (21 page)

‘What if we get there and it’s empty?’ said Bernie.

‘Then
we try Tottenham, QPR, Chelsea … We keep looking till we find what we want.’

‘What about Arsenal?’ said Bernie.

‘Stadium burned down,’ said Shadowman.

‘Cool,’ said Bernie. At school the sporty kids had teased and bullied the two of them. They’d become a team, drawing strength from each other, laughing about the macho kids. But when the older kids had found out that Ben
and Bernie could fix their, mostly stolen, scooters and mopeds they’d gained some respect and the bullying had stopped.

Now everyone had their place. And Ben and Bernie were going to try to help defeat the enemy in their own way. With skill and ingenuity and knowledge. Sure, in a war you needed foot soldiers, to fire the guns and drive the tanks and fly the planes. But they wouldn’t
get far without people to design and build the guns and the tanks and the planes, to build the bridges for the tanks to drive over.

Every army had its engineers and, without them, they were useless.

Ben knew how to fix engines, had learnt to fix guns, but high explosives?

That was something else.

The trick was going to be not blowing themselves up before they got anywhere
near the enemy.

29

TV Boy was worried. The Warehouse Queen was having a major weird-out, jerking and gibbering. She was thrashing her head around so wildly that the bony lumps that grew out of her skull in the shape of a crown were bashing against the cardboard cut-out of a throne that was fixed to the back of her wheelchair and threatening to smash it to pieces.

Monstar looked worried.
He was hugging himself, his long arms wrapped round his hugely muscled and misshapen body.

‘She’s getting worse and worse,’ he said and TV Boy had to agree. He shuffled closer, loose-jointed arms and legs going in all directions, knees up around his ears. When the Queen had these fits, she was often exhausted afterwards. Sometimes she was even physically sick.

‘What’s going
to happen to us?’ he asked. The three of them were on the communal platform, high above the warehouse floor. They felt incomplete, out of sorts, not having the others here – Trinity and Fish-Face and Skinner. They’d lived all their lives together, had shared everything in their own little group, separated from the rest of the world. Pencil Neck had been the first to leave, slithering
off to lose himself in the corners and crevices of the warehouse.
But he’d never really been one of them. He was so far gone he was more animal than human. He was still out there somewhere, crawling through the heating pipes, and along the wiring ducts, catching insects and rodents.

It was very different when the others left. It had felt like the end of something. TV Boy often
thought about the Inmathger, the rainforest tribe whose first contact with other humans had been the moment the disease escaped their tiny part of the jungle and entered the wider world. They had wandered out of the rainforest into the sunlight, and one day soon the warehouse kids were going to have to come blinking out of their own jungle and mix with other people. They couldn’t
stay an undiscovered tribe forever. Let’s face it, they’d already
been
discovered. Blue and Einstein and their gang had tipped up and turned their world upside down. TV Boy wondered when Skinner and the others would return. That had always been the plan. They were supposed to report back on what was out there. But judging by the messages the Queen was getting from the voices in her
head, which only she could hear, it seemed that what was out there was a whole lot worse than they’d feared.

Maybe the others would never return?

The Queen bit the edge of her hand and Monstar went to her, tried to calm her down by holding her.

‘What’s she hearing?’ TV Boy asked and Monstar made a face.

‘The usual stuff,’ he said. ‘She tries to make sense of the voices.
I worry about what it’s doing to her.’

Monstar may have been a big, muscle-bound hulk, but he was soft inside. Perhaps, like the rest of him, his heart was unusually big as well. Out of all of them he was the one who cared most.

And TV Boy knew that the thing he cared most about was the Queen. Monstar worshipped her. The big, soft, gooey marshmallow.

Suddenly the Queen
fell very still and her eyes opened wide. She stared into the distance, looking at something that only she could see. She raised a hand and pointed, horrified, then her hand flopped down and she relaxed, normal again. As normal as she ever could be.

‘It was him,’ she said at last.

‘Who?’ asked Monstar.

‘Mister Three. I heard him as if he was here with us. He’s the loudest
of them all.’

‘I usually hear him,’ said Monstar. ‘But he’s too far away for me now.’

TV Boy was sometimes jealous of the way the others could communicate like this, but he was quite glad not to have crazy Mister Three yelling away inside his head.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

‘They’ve split up,’ said the Queen. ‘Trinity has gone west with a boy called Ed; they’re
looking for a girl – Ella. Skinner and Fish-Face are still in London, at the museum. I need to connect them. Mister Three’s going batshit. I can amplify all their signals and help them, but Three’s too loud. It hurts. Take me
to the roof. I need to hear everything.’

Monstar sighed and blew out his cheeks. He was ridiculously strong and could easily lift the Queen out of her chair,
but carrying her up the steep steps to the roof was tough. Which was why she never usually went up there. Monstar would do whatever she asked, though. Gently, he lifted her out of the wheelchair they’d disguised as a movable throne and carried her towards the steps that led to the roof. TV Boy followed, his legs painfully twisting and buckling as he went.

‘What did they tell
you this time?’ TV Boy asked once they were safely up on the roof. They could see a long way in all directions from here. In the past there had usually been grown-ups hanging around below, trying to get into the warehouse, but since Blue and his friends had left it had been quiet.

‘There are so many voices now.’ The Queen closed her eyes. ‘All shouting at once. It’s hard to
tune them, to concentrate on just one.’

TV Boy had heard the words, Monstar too, but the Queen hadn’t moved her lips; no sound had come out. Hers was the only voice TV Boy could ever hear like this. None of the rest of them knew how to get inside his head.

‘I’m trying to find Skinner and Fish-Face,’ she went on. ‘After Three, Fish-Face was always the loudest. But she’s been
quiet lately.’

‘Not quiet,’ said Monstar. ‘Drowned out.’

‘You’re right,’ said the Queen. ‘There’s so much noise. I thought it was white noise at first, but it’s not. It’s them. The grown-ups. All screaming at once. Three can cut through, when he wakes.’

‘He’s been waking more and more lately,’ Monstar explained. ‘Can you feel it, TV? It’s all changing out there. The
grown-ups are being called away.’

‘Hopefully, when they’ve all gone, I’ll be able to hear the others better,’ said the Queen. ‘And if I can amplify the signal we can all link up properly. It’s tiring, though. It’s hard work. And the voices, I hate what they talk about. There’s one – getting stronger and stronger, from the east, from the city. Calling them in. Everything’s changing.’

‘What should we do?’ Monstar asked. ‘Do we stay here?’

‘We can’t go out there by ourselves,’ said the Queen. ‘We don’t know how to fight.’

‘We have our own weapons,’ said TV Boy. ‘Some skills.’

‘We’ve survived by staying here,’ said the Queen. ‘We have to wait for Skinner and the others to return. They can set us free.’

‘What if they don’t return?’

‘Then we
live out our days here. Skinner was brave to go. They all were. I’m not so brave. I’m not sure I can ever leave. I’m Queen here, but out there what’ll I be? A freak. Something to laugh at.’

‘You can stop them laughing,’ said TV Boy. ‘You can get in their heads and mess with their minds.’

‘I always thought that what I wanted was to be found, to be rescued by outsiders, but
when they came I changed my mind.’

‘We might have to do it,’ said TV Boy. ‘We might have to help.’

‘I’m too scared,’ said the Queen.

‘We’re all scared,’ said TV Boy. ‘But maybe we’re like we are for a reason. Maybe it’s wrong to stay hidden here.’

The Queen looked at him and then suddenly her eyes rolled up in her head and she zoned out again. TV Boy glanced at Monstar,
who looked worried.

And then TV Boy winced. The Queen had done it, amplified a signal, broadcast it … and it was Mister Three again. The effect of his voice in TV Boy’s head was as unpleasant as he’d feared. What he was shouting about was even worse.

30

Einstein’s lab was busy, kids in white coats working everywhere, peering in microscopes, doing complicated experiments that Jackson would never understand, mixing stuff in test tubes and beakers. Leaving slime and smears in little flat dishes. Did
they
even know what they were doing? Or were they just trying to look busy? Trying not to think about what was going on outside.
Play-acting. That’s what it looked like to her. Doctors and nurses.

And it was a nurse she needed right now. It had been a long day and the kids out in the park had got tired. One of her boys, Cameron, had been injured in a mock battle. He had a knack for getting hurt. A wooden club had smashed his hand. He was standing there now, his bad hand jammed in his armpit. It wasn’t
too bad, swollen but hopefully no broken bones. He was making a terrible fuss about it, though. There were a few kids here in the labs who acted as doctors. They would check Cameron out and Jackson could leave him with them. She’d brought him here with Achilleus, who thought the whole thing was a big joke. Jackson just wanted to say goodbye and go flop somewhere. If Achilleus joined her
that’d be a bonus. Maybe he’d cut her hair like his, with the razor patterns in it. He’d been promising to do it for days. But she was tired enough
not to care too much. Some quiet time by herself would be nearly as good.

She couldn’t see any of the medical staff, but she spotted Einstein. He was talking excitedly to a group of kids, waving his arms about. His tangle of dark
hair madder than ever, his teeth yellower than ever, his manner snootier than ever.

‘Are Alexander and Cass around?’ she asked him, not worried about interrupting, even though he looked well hacked off at her.

‘Not now, Jackson. I’m busy.’

‘Yeah,’ said Jackson. ‘Me too. I’m busy training to save your arse. And so was Cameron. He needs some help.’

‘Show me.’

Cameron
explained what had happened while Einstein checked out his hand.

‘What is it with you?’ he asked, looking at the white-faced boy. ‘First you let Paul nearly cut your head off and now you let some kid break your hand.’

‘Is it broken?’ Cameron asked.

‘Might be. Someone find Cass. She’s here somewhere.’

‘You gonna be able to fight?’ asked one of the kids with Einstein.
She was a new arrival from the Tower. Jackson didn’t know her name.

‘Hope so,’ said Cameron, forcing a grin. ‘Don’t want to miss the battle.’

Jackson kept quiet.
Really?
The battle was going to be horrible. She knew that. She’d been out on the streets, had seen massed bunches of sickos first hand. It wasn’t fun on any level.

‘How’s it going, prof?’ asked Achilleus. ‘You
solved the mystery of life yet?’

‘Maybe.’ Einstein offered Achilleus a mad grin. ‘You’re fighting sickos – we’re fighting germs.’

‘Parasites actually.’ They all turned to see Skinner coming in with Fish-Face and the Green Man. Jackson was surprised at how quickly she’d grown to accept the Twisted Kids, how quickly she’d forgotten how peculiar they looked. Fish-Face with her
distorted fish head, Skinner covered in great folds of skin.

She wasn’t sure if she’d ever get used to the Green Man, though. It wasn’t just that he was an adult. There was something so creepy about him. Pervy. Not at all helped by the fact that he never wore any clothes. Just went around wrapped in a blanket with a ridiculous green bowler hat stuck on his fuzzy green head.
He’d always looked bad, with his covering of green mould and his long hair and fingernails, but he looked worse than ever now. He was sweating and it left nasty green rivulets down the mould that grew on his skin. He was shaking and feverish, his eyes darting about. Jackson had heard that Einstein was experimenting on him, trying out cures and antidotes or whatever.