The Dead (32 page)

‘They’re all dead,’ said Bam, deflated. ‘Apart from those three, they’re all dead.’

Now they became aware of more bodies, scattered everywhere. On the ground, in the vehicles, by the entrance gates to the Oval. It looked as if there had been a battle of some sort. Most of the dead bodies weren’t in uniform. They were mothers and fathers, teenagers, many with bullet wounds.

‘At least we know now what that smell was,’ said Bam, covering his face with his scarf. ‘It was two different things. The smell of the fire was masking the smell of dead bodies.’

‘What d’you think was going on here?’ said Ed.

‘No idea,’ said Jack.

‘It looks like they were guarding something,’ Ed suggested.

‘The Oval?’ said Jack. ‘Why would the army want to guard a cricket ground? What were they – scared the public was going to break in and carry off the stumps?’

‘You got a better suggestion?’

‘Maybe there’s something else inside,’ said Bam. ‘Maybe the government was stockpiling supplies, or weapons, or the crown jewels, or something?’

‘We should take a look,’ said Jack.

‘What?’ Ed spluttered. ‘No way. We get well away from here. This is nothing to do with us.’

‘There’s only three of them moving about,’ said Jack. ‘We could take them easy.’

‘But why bother?’

‘Whatever’s in there,’ said Jack, ‘it was obviously valuable enough for people to try and break in.’

‘Sick people probably,’ said Ed. ‘Sick idiots who don’t know anything.’

Jack sat in the road, his back against the car. ‘It’s definitely worth taking a look,’ he said as the others squatted down next to him. ‘What if it’s like Bam says? A huge emergency food supply? We’d be set up for life. It’d make that lorry look like chicken feed.’

Ed had his hand clamped over his mouth and nose, trying to keep the stench out.

‘Jack,’ he said. ‘I thought all you wanted was to get home.’

‘I know … I do … I really do. But we should still look. If we can get rid of those three mugs, we can find some more guns. There
have
to be guns there. Proper modern working guns. And then we’ll be invincible.’

Ed ground his teeth in frustration. ‘Why don’t we just go to yours?’ he said. ‘Do whatever it is you need to do, then get back to the museum before dark? We could come back here in the morning with some of the guys, DogNut and the others, a proper fighting unit.’

‘You’re such a coward, Ed,’ said Jack. ‘We’ll be all right. Just think what might be inside there waiting for us. The place is huge. I mean it’s the size of, well, the size of a cricket pitch, for God’s sake. There might be food. There might be weapons. There might even be medicine. All three!’

‘Come on, Ed,’ said Bam. ‘We’re here now. Let’s just find out what’s in there, or we won’t be able to think about anything else.’

‘All right, all right.’ Ed realized he was beaten. ‘We’ll look inside. But let’s see if there’s any guns first, like Jack said.’

They stood up and gave each other a high five, though Ed’s slap was pretty half-hearted. Then they carried on towards the Oval, staying low and using cars for cover.

Finally they sneaked across the road to the line of security vehicles.

They checked whether there were any more sickos moving about. As far as they could see, though, there were just the two soldiers and the policeman.

One of the soldiers had a small machine gun hanging over his shoulder on a strap, but now they were closer they realized he was pretty far gone, slow and clumsy, his face eaten away by disease. The other soldier was equally wrecked. In the boys’ experience the sicker the adults were the less likely they were to remember how to use any tools or weapons, and usually attacked with just their bare hands. The policeman was a complete mess, with one ear dangling down by his chin and his features replaced with a cluster of glistening blisters.

‘I’ll take the soldiers,’ Bam whispered, checking his shotgun. ‘You two go for the policeman.’

‘I can’t do it,’ said Ed. ‘I can’t just kill them.’

‘Come on,’ said Bam. ‘Look at them. We’ll be doing them a favour, putting them out of their misery.’

‘No.’ Ed squatted down behind a police van, covering his face with his hands.

‘You do it. I can’t.’

Jack tutted and drew his sword from its scabbard.

‘Wait here.’

‘All right.’

Ed couldn’t watch. He crouched there, hands over his face. He heard his friends’ footsteps. There was a moment’s silence then there came two loud blasts, followed by the sounds of a scuffle and a body hitting the ground.

‘You can come out now,’ Jack called to Ed in a slightly sing-song way, as if talking to a toddler. ‘It’s all safe.’

Ed stood up, still not wanting to look. He walked round the van and over to where Bam and Jack were waiting for him. He was aware of the dark shapes of bodies on the ground.

He told himself that it didn’t make any difference. That these were just three more bodies to add to the piles of corpses that were already here. He forced his eyes round. He had to accept the way things were now. Somehow he had to become as hardened as Jack and Bam.

Jack was wiping his sword clean on the dead policeman’s jacket. Bam was pulling the machine gun off the soldier.

‘You want this?’ he said, offering it to Jack. ‘I’m sticking with my shottie.’

‘I sure do.’

‘Do you know how to use that?’ Ed asked as Jack started turning the gun in his hands.

‘No – but I can find out.’

Parked on the other side of the outer wall that surrounded the grounds were four open-backed lorries. The sort builders used to remove rubble from building sites. They were piled high with corpses. Next to them was a fleet of ambulances, their back doors hanging open, paramedics lying by the wheels.

Whenever he’d watched the news he’d never imagined that one day he’d be part of a story. But now the news had come to town in a big way and there was no one left to record it. The corpses by the TV cameras were blind and deaf. There were no zombified news reporters standing there giving the viewers the statistics.

‘The whole population of London has been wiped out …’

Ed went over to a military Jeep, where two squaddies with blackened faces and hands sat in the front seats as if waiting to drive off. They were wearing white facemasks, presumably to stop them breathing in anything noxious. Above the masks their eyes were clouded. Flies crawled all over them.

They both had side arms in holsters.

Ed carefully unbuckled the belt from the soldier in the passenger seat and strapped it round his waist. The pistol hung heavy and solid at his side. The driver had a pair of binoculars round his neck. Ed fished them off and chucked them over to Bam who thanked him with a big cheesy grin.

Ed did a quick check of the bodies of the other soldiers and policemen. They were all wearing facemasks.

He walked through the open gates and over to the line of ambulances where he jumped up into the back of one. There was a green-clothed paramedic lying on the floor, his face lumpy with yellow spots. His facemask hadn’t prevented him from getting sick, but Ed figured that if he could find one it would at least keep some of the smell out.

With any luck there would be other useful stuff in here as well.

He took off his backpack and went through the ambulance, grabbing anything that looked like it might come in handy and stuffing it in the bag. Painkillers, antiseptic, bandages, antibiotics, scalpels, syringes, rubber gloves, it was all good stuff. And there, finally, in a taped-up cardboard box, a supply of spare masks. He dumped a handful in the top of the bag, but kept three out.

He hopped down off the ambulance. Jack and Bam were walking over discussing how the machine gun worked. Neither of them really had a clue.

‘You ready?’ said Jack when he saw Ed.

‘Here.’ Ed handed out the masks. ‘Put these on. They’ll protect you from the smell at least.’

All the doors in the main stand were securely locked so the boys circled the building looking for another way in. Finally they came to a more modern part where the big glass doors stood open. There were more dead soldiers here, splayed out on the polished floor of a large entrance area. The boys peered cautiously into the gloom.

‘You first,’ said Bam, mock politely.

‘After you,’ said Jack. ‘I insist.’

Ed pushed past them, shaking his head, determined to prove that he wasn’t a coward. The other two followed, laughing and jostling each other. The air inside felt trapped and stale. The boys tried not to gag. Their masks helped a little but there was still a stench of rotting meat mixed with a mouldy, mildewy smell. There was also a humming noise, as if there might be some machinery working somewhere nearby.

They stepped over the bodies of two soldiers, who looked like they were holding each other in their arms, and went up some stairs.

Ed was beginning to feel horribly faint and wobbly. He wanted to check the stadium out and then get the hell away from here as quickly as possible. He knew that dead bodies carried all sorts of diseases, like cholera and dysentery. Whenever there had been a natural disaster – and there seemed to have been loads before the big one, the sickness – earthquakes or hurricanes or terrible flooding, the news bulletins always went on about it – the risk of disease from unburied bodies. Well, there must have been thirty or forty of them outside, not counting the ones in the trucks. The thought of all those germs …

This was a place of death.

They climbed the stairs, trying the doors on every level, until they reached the top and at last found a way out into the stands. Bam was first through. He took a couple of steps and stopped.

Ed heard him say two words.

‘Holy cow …’

Jack and Ed followed Bam out into the sunlight. He was standing there, frozen to the spot, too stunned to say anything.

They were way up in a high-tech modern stand, a gleaming white construction of steel and concrete and glass. And below them was the vast expanse of the cricket pitch, every part of it filled with dead bodies. They were stacked in great mounds like a giant rubbish tip. The ones at the bottom were the most decomposed. If it wasn’t for their bright clothing and the bones sticking out here and there, they wouldn’t have been recognizable as human at all. The ones at the top were the freshest, though even they had been eaten away by disease and decay.

There were several earth-moving vehicles standing idle. Diggers and bulldozers, JCBs, even a couple of cranes with scoops dangling from their gantries. One scoop still held a few bodies.

And there were more bodies in the stands, dumped in the rows of green plastic seats, sitting there, like dead spectators at the ultimate gladiator fight. How many dead? Five thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand? Looking out over the mounds of corpses it was impossible to tell.

The noise Ed had heard was flies, millions of them, swarming over the dead. They were not alone. Crows hopped about, rats crawled, seagulls flapped and screeched and squabbled with each other. Two dogs were digging into one of the piles of flesh to get at the bones.

‘Treasure beyond our wildest dreams,’ said Ed bitterly.

Jack and Bam said nothing.

Ed noticed several towers made out of logs and planks and scrap wood, like giant bonfires. They had large blue plastic canisters strapped to them. There were more canisters fixed around the stands.

‘This place is one giant funeral pyre,’ he said. ‘Looks like they were planning to burn the whole bloody lot. Or blow it sky high.’

‘They had the right idea,’ said Jack.

Ed leant over, pulled his mask down and threw up on to a seat. His head was spinning and throbbed with an intense cold ache.

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ he groaned. ‘This is hell.’

But as they turned to leave they heard the sound of heavy footsteps climbing the stairs.

Ed felt a wave of fear and panic. He didn’t need to look to know what was happening.

The sickos were coming.

They were trapped now. They were going to die here. They were going to join this heap of human compost, forgotten, like bags of rubbish tossed out for the bin men.

Ed’s mind was racing faster than his heart. He couldn’t think straight. A tangle of images were tumbling in his mind like the wheeling knot of seagulls over the corpse pile. Images of death and decay. But one thought kept poking through, beating all the others back, and he clung on to it.

He didn’t want to die. It was as simple as that. He would do anything to stay alive.

The thought was terribly strong and clear.

He wanted to see the summer.

‘We need to find another way out,’ he said. ‘There are sickos coming up the stairs.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘Then who is it, Jack? The undead police come to help us?’

Before Jack could say anything in reply the first of the sickos appeared at the entrance to the stairs. Three fathers. Sniffing the air. Searching for their prey.

Jack raised his machine gun. Ed saw that it was trembling in his hands. ‘We could shoot them?’