Afterlight (30 page)

He pointed silently at the mound.

‘Jake? What?’

‘Th-they’re . . .
real.’

She didn’t understand what he meant by that, nor the significance of the mound his shaking finger was pointing at. She took a dozen steps towards him.

‘What’s real?’

She was now close enough to see quite clearly; the light of her torch picking out long femurs, curled ribs, the instantly recognisable oyster-shell outline of several pelvis bones . . . and the human skull, lying on the floor beside the pile.

Jacob nodded silently, as if reading her mind. ‘They’re real. I . . . I touched one. I touched one of the—’

She instantly put her fingers to her lips to hush his too-loud voice.

‘Shit,’ hissed Nathan. ‘Does that mean there’s some canni—?’

Leona didn’t want to say the word out loud. Somehow that would make it more real if she did. ‘We should leave,’ she whispered, ‘leave right now.’

Both of them nodded.

‘Whoever did this could be—’ She clamped her mouth shut. She didn’t want to think about who or what had stacked these bones carefully into a pile. She stepped cautiously back the way she’d come, wildly panning the fading beam of her torch across the faux stone walls and the dangling plastic skeletons above.

They were approaching the arched doorway when they heard the sound of movement; shuffling of feet, whispering of lowered voices. She pumped the dynamo trigger several times, and the faint glow from her torch pulsed brightly, picking out a startled wall of pale faces glaring back at them.

‘Oh shit!’ she gasped. She turned to the other two. ‘Run!’

They stumbled out of the dungeon and turned right, running along a broad strip of uncluttered carpet. She turned to look over her shoulder to see only darkness. There were noises coming from back there; the slapping of feet.

‘Fuck!!’ bellowed Nathan.

She glanced forward to see more pale faces blocking the way ahead. She jabbed her hand right. ‘This way!’ They scrambled up onto a Microsoft display plinth and across a cluttered press-only marquee, weaving their way through rows of plastic chairs arranged in front of a large projector screen.

‘Come on!’ she screamed after the other two, deftly and quickly picking her way through and exiting the marquee on the far side. A moment later she was clambering over a length of velvet rope and stepping down off a plinth onto cord carpet again. Her torch faded to darkness and she decided to leave it that way, rather than attract attention.

She could hear Jacob and Nathan stumbling and cursing in the marquee. Not far behind her. They must have got tangled in the chairs. They were making too much fucking noise.

‘Come on!’ she called out.

‘Which way did you go?’ she heard Jacob’s muted voice. Further away now. The morons were heading the wrong way.

‘Over here!’ she called.

Chairs clattered. She could also hear the growing noise of footfalls, and an awful keening cry, like a host of mewling babies all teething.

‘Jacob! Nathan! Over here!’ she hissed as loud as she dared to. Those things - children, that’s what they’d looked like, children in rags, with long hair and dirty faces - they were very close . . . closer than the other two.

Don’t call out again, stupid.

In the darkness she could just make out her immediate environment and found a dark nook behind a tall placard and a rubbish bin. She hunched down between the two as quietly as she could. A moment later the darkness in front of her was full of the sound of feet and plimsolls on carpet, gasping laboured breath, mewling and crying. She even heard slurred baby-words uttered between them. And the smell: an awful smell of human faeces and stale urine.

A moment later it was quiet. Her eyes, accustomed now to the dark, picked out the last small silhouettes passing her by; shambling little forms that could have been nursery-aged children.

The last of them gone, she eased herself out of the nook. It was then that she noticed the cold of her damp trousers against her legs and realised she’d pissed herself.

The hall echoed with the sounds of the chase still going on; the clattering of things knocked over; that mewling raised in pitch to a frustrated howling that sent a shiver down her back.

She had no idea at all which way was out now. She’d completely lost her bearings in the panic. She couldn’t even tell from which direction the echoing noises of pursuit were coming. All she knew was that the pack of feral kids that had just rushed past her were to her left.

She turned right.

 

 

 

D
ozens of them, picked out in the flickering beam of his torch; children, pale and gaunt, faces smudged with ages-old dirt beneath long greasy tresses of hair.

‘Shit! They’re all around us!’ yelled Nathan.

Both of them backed up against a smooth curved wall of an Electronic Arts stand. Jacob pumped the trigger on his torch. The dim LED bulb brightened again, revealing more of them poised in a wary semicircle in the darkness, watching them intently.

Nathan held the gun up, sweeping it slowly across them, his finger resting on the trigger. ‘Stay back!’

‘Look! We’re . . . we were just leaving, okay?’ said Jacob.

The things stared back in silence. He realised then that they were just children. He guessed they ranged in age from five to early teens. It was difficult to judge - they could have been another year or two older than they appeared, but prolonged malnutrition might have stunted their growth. Their eyes, wide, stared back at them through tangled fringes of long matted dreadlocks.

‘Look, we . . . we didn’t know this place was y-yours,’ Jacob continued. ‘So, we’ll just go, okay?’

He stepped sideways along the wall, his back sliding against the smooth curved wall of the stand. He tugged Nathan’s sleeve gently to come with him.

‘Yeah,’ said Nathan, ‘we’re leaving now.’

The children remained perfectly still, silent, watching them shuffle along. They reminded him of the orphans in Oliver, lost, smudged faces in ill-fitting clothes. Girls and boys - although amongst the younger ones he struggled to determine which were which.

The wall disappeared behind them, and they found themselves taking a backwards step up onto a courtesy stand of stools and small round metal coffee tables.

The children advanced on them cautiously.

‘Stay back, motherfuckers! I got a gun here!’ Nathan shouted, as if it needed saying.

One of the children, a painfully thin boy - or it could well have been a girl - stepped ahead of the others and extended a slender hand.

‘Ve-weee fuck-in hung-weee,’ it piped in a small mucus-choked voice.

Both of them looked at each other, confused.

‘Hung-wee. You foooo?’

Then they understood. ‘We don’t h-have any food on us.’ He looked at Nathan. ‘Do we?’

Nathan shook his head silently.

Another child stirred, stepped forward and extended both hands. ‘Pwee gee wee.’

Jacob shook his head, struggling to understand.

‘Pwee gee wee foo,’ it said again, taking another eager step forward.

It was like listening to a baby’s first words; toddler-talk. It would be
aww-
cute coming from the mouth of some chubby-faced infant in a buggy, but from these children bordering on teen years it was wrong. Tragically wrong.

His torch began to dim again. He pumped the trigger several times, quickly setting the dynamo whirring in the silence. The children all edged several steps closer encouraged by the momentary fading of light.

‘Woah! Stay fuckin’ back!’ shouted Nathan.

More dirty palms extended - a growing sea of them. ‘Foo . . . pwee. Foo, pwee!’

‘I’m s-sorry,’ said Jacob, ‘I’m SORRY! WE DON’T HAVE ANY!!’

Then he saw a taller child pushing forward. A boy dressed in dark-stained corduroy trousers and what looked like the tattered remains of a blue secondary school blazer. Dark curls draped down across his bone-thin face. The first soft downy hairs of a moustache curled around the edge of his lips.

‘We fuckin’ hung-wee,
init,
’ he barked in a wavering voice that sounded like the recently broken timbre of a pubescent boy. ‘You go’ sum fuckin’ foo or whoh?’

‘Not with us,’ said Jacob, patting himself. ‘Really.’

The boy’s eyes rested on the assault rifle. ‘Cool gun. Gimme tha’.’

Jacob followed his gaze. ‘You want our
gun?
’

‘Yeh, gimme tha’.’

‘Not fuckin’ having it!’ snapped Nathan.

‘
My
gun now,’ said the boy. ‘Gimme, a’ you ca’ fu’ off.’

Jacob glanced at Nathan.

‘No fuckin’ way,’ he replied. ‘S’only one we got.’

And there was no guarantee that, on handing it over, the boy wouldn’t want to try it out on them.

The boy took another step forward. ‘Gimme a’ gun so me ca’ hun’ dogs.’

Jacob swallowed. ‘You eat . . .
dogs?’

The boy was now only a yard away from them, his eyes on the glinting gun-metal grey. He suddenly made an impulsive lunge towards it, grabbing the end of the rifle’s barrel in both hands. Instinctively Nathan fired. The child’s dirty school blazer fluttered like a sail as he rocked back on his feet, pawing at the jagged wound in his stomach.

‘Oh shit man! I’m . . . s-sorry . . . I’m sor—’ said Nathan.

The other children surged forward, edging around the staggering boy; a forest of pale palms and dirty jagged nails reaching out and clawing at them. Amongst the hands and arms, Nathan thought he saw the glint of several knives.

‘Oh fuck, run, Jay!!’ he screamed.

Jacob turned on his heels, clattering across the stools, tangling with the tables. Nathan fired a second shot into the air just above the children’s heads - they recoiled for a moment.

He turned and ran through the wake of overturned stools and tables doing his best not to tangle with the upended legs as he followed the bobbing glow of Jacob’s torch ahead. Dropping down off the far side of the stand’s courtesy platform, he sprinted twenty yards down a broad concourse, flanked on either side by dark silhouettes of gaming mascots and cardboard cut-out superheroes and supervillains.

‘Wait for me!’ he shouted after him.

Jacob stopped, turned and beckoned him on. ‘This way!’ he shouted.

Nathan quickly caught up with him. Looking back into the darkness behind him he could hear the smack of hundreds of feet on the stand’s floor, the clatter of metal tables and stools being kicked aside and a growing cacophony of shrill voices clamouring for them to stop.

‘What about Leona?’ gasped Jacob.

He shook his head. ‘Dunno, I dunno. We got to run right now!’ He looked at Jacob. ‘Jay, which way do we go?’

The drumming of feet grew louder, coming up the concourse towards them. There was only one way they could go. They resumed running up the concourse, Jacob leading the way, dodging an increasing amount of clutter across the carpet; computers pulled out and smashed; wires and circuit boards splayed across the floor like eviscerated organs. This end of the main hall, more than the other, appeared to be the children’s playground. A life-size fake potted palm tree had been kicked over and lay across their path. Jacob vaulted over the trunk. Nathan joined him a moment later, his big feet tangling with the stiff plastic fronds.

‘Hurry!’ hissed Jacob, pumping his torch trigger and turning the beam back down the concourse. Thirty yards back he could see them.

Nathan fired another shot back in their direction. The children ducked and froze for the briefest moment, like a game of grandmother’s footsteps, then resumed.

‘Go! Jay! Go! GO!!’ urged Nathan as he yanked his feet clear of the palm tree’s leaves.

Jacob swung his torch back up the concourse to pick out the way ahead. The pallid wide-eyed face of a child loomed out of the darkness in front of him.

‘Whuh—’

A blur of movement and a dull crack, like willow on leather. The torch danced into the air, spun and bounced on the ground. Jacob flopped down lifelessly beside it, blood already spilling out of his long scruffy hair and across his forehead.

Nathan fired a shot into the darkness sending the flailing child - boy or girl, he had no idea - into a spinning rack of DVD cases.

He stepped forward, dropped down to his knees and picked up the torch.

‘Jake?’

He shone the light down at his friend’s face, now almost entirely smothered with blood.

‘Oh, shit. Jake?’

He pushed a blood-soaked tress of hair out of his face to see that his eyes were open but glassy, fluttering and rolling. Nathan could hear the sound of approaching feet, shrill-pitched screams.

‘Jake!! Get up, man! GET UP!!’

He remained still.

Leaving Jacob was the—

No.

He grabbed one of Jacob’s hands and began dragging him along the carpet, away from the torch left lying on the floor, leaving a smeared trail of blood behind.

‘Come on. Come on!!’ he hissed. ‘GET UP!!’

The plastic palm tree creaked and rustled. The children were clambering over it and coming.

Nathan let his friend’s hand flop to the floor and grasped the assault rifle in both hands. The thundering of pounding feet suddenly ceased and the darkness around him was filled with the wheeze and rattle of their laboured breathing.

A pair of tattered trainers stepped into the pool of torch light on the floor. The light rose, spun round and flashed blindingly into his eyes.

Nathan screwed his face up, aiming down the length of the rifle at it. ‘Fuck off and leave us alone!!’ he screamed.