The Fallen (20 page)

Lettis, in her funny robes, was sitting at the other end of the pew, scribbling away in her big book by the light of a candle. She was very dedicated, keeping up with her journal entries. She had a serious expression on her face and her tongue was sticking out between her teeth.

‘Look at them all,’ said Einstein. ‘Children. That’s all they are.’

As far as Ollie could see, he and Einstein were the only two kids who were mixing it up right now and he was going to take the opportunity to get some more stuff straightened out in his mind.

‘Can I ask you something else?’ he said, and Einstein grunted.

‘You want to ask me some more about whether you’re going to die?’

‘Not really, no. Don’t want to think about that too much.’

‘What then? You’ve got a lot of questions. Why now? Why me?’

‘Because you might have some answers. You think about stuff.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Yeah.’ Ollie winced as he discovered another bruise, this time on his leg. ‘You’ve seen what the others are like,’ he said. ‘Achilleus isn’t exactly a deep thinker. And Blue … I don’t know him well enough, to tell you the truth.’

‘I thought you were all friends,’ said Einstein. ‘A gang.’

‘No. I’ve only really known him for a couple of weeks. Before that we kept to ourselves. They had one camp. We had another. Didn’t mix. We were all fighting over the same things, with food running out everywhere. Didn’t trust each other.’

‘No time to think,’ said Einstein.

‘No. So we had this guy in charge called Arran and he thought about things. I could talk to him. He was clever. That’s why he was our leader.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He died.’

‘Stupid question really.’

‘Yeah. Only, listening to Caspar shouting his head off, it made me think about Arran, about when he got injured. You see, he was bitten by a grown-up, got really sick and then got hit by an arrow in a fight. That’s what finished him.’

‘So what’s the problem exactly? What do you want to know?’

‘This weird thing happened when he got bitten. At the time I didn’t think too much about it. There was too much other stuff going down.’

‘And what happened then?’

‘We were out on a scav hunt, looking for food, and we decided, well, some of us decided, I never thought it was a great idea … So the others wanted to look in this swimming pool. See if there was anything in the vending machines still.’

‘And was there?’

‘Yeah, there was; only it was a trap. All these grown-ups were, like, waiting for us, under the water. They ambushed us.’

‘Great story and all that.’ Einstein sounded bored and impatient. ‘But what’s the question?’

Ollie hesitated before going on. Was it all going to sound stupid when he came out with it?

‘It’s just
that
– an ambush. Like they’d worked it out. Like they were waiting for us.’

‘And?’

‘It’s not like grown-ups to do that. I’ve never seen them that organized before. That clever.’

‘You sure it wasn’t just random?’

‘No. And then there was the fact that they were underwater.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Somehow they were under the surface of the water, waiting. How did they do that? How did they breathe under there?’

‘They didn’t,’ said Einstein with a slightly snotty tone to his voice. ‘Human beings can’t breathe underwater. We’re not fish.’

‘I know. It was like they were a new breed of grown-up.’

‘Not possible,’ said Einstein.

Ollie wasn’t going to give up, despite Einstein’s negative vibe.

‘You’ve studied grown-ups,’ he said. ‘You’ve studied the disease. Could it change people somehow?’

‘No. A disease can’t give people new skills. We can’t suddenly grow gills or something. Illness doesn’t add anything, it just takes things away.’

‘So how did they do it then?’ said Ollie. ‘How did they survive underwater? How did they plan it all?’

‘As I say.’ Einstein sounded more dismissive than ever. ‘They didn’t. You must have imagined it.’

‘I’ll admit it was all a bit confused and way intense. I suppose they could of maybe, I don’t know, had their noses sticking out or something.’

Einstein laughed. Ollie would have laughed himself if someone else had told him this story. Whichever way you looked at it, it didn’t make a lot of sense.

‘It was messed up,’ he went on. ‘It freaked us out, took us all by surprise. One boy, Deke, got killed there, and Arran was wounded, as I said. Died later. Because we weren’t ready for it. We never expected grown-ups to behave like that. I mean, they can’t get organized, can they? Not really. They can’t get clever.’

‘I’ve never seen any evidence of it,’ said Einstein. ‘The way I see it, you worry too much, Ollie.’

‘I think too much.’

‘Same thing.’ Einstein stood up, signalling that the conversation was over.

‘
You
think, though,’ said Ollie. ‘Does that mean you worry? You don’t seem too cut up about what happened today.’

‘I think I’m a bit like your Achilleus.’

Ollie snorted. He couldn’t think of anyone less like Achilleus.

‘What are you talking about?’ he said.

‘I don’t think I really care about people.’

‘That’s nuts,’ said Ollie.

‘Oh, I long ago came to the conclusion that I’m nuts,’ said Einstein and he chuckled and walked off.

Ollie shook his head. Einstein was one of those kids who couldn’t help making snotty comments and had probably been badly bullied at school. Now he’d found a place for himself at the museum. He had some useful survival skills
after all and he was making the most of it. It wasn’t enough just to have good fighters; without clever kids there was no hope of getting through this.

He was aware of a movement and he turned round to find that Lettis had scooted along the pew and was sitting looking up at him.

‘OK?’ he said and she nodded, keeping her lips tightly pressed together. Looked like she’d been crying.

There was a shout from the other side of the church. Achilleus was giving little Paddy a hard time about something. Ollie could see Paddy rubbing his shoulder where the strap of the golf-bag had dug into him.

‘That poor kid,’ he said. ‘He lugged that heavy bag full of weapons all this way without making a fuss. That’s real hero worship.’

Lettis didn’t say anything. Just sat there staring at him.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s find you somewhere to sleep.’

31

A stripe of bright early-morning sunlight lay across the laboratory floor illuminating a small crimson spatter.

‘It looks like blood.’ Maxie was squatting down inspecting the tiles.

‘Could be anything,’ said Justin. ‘Food, blood, something from an experiment.’

‘Don’t suppose you can do DNA testing?’ said Maxie.

‘Not really, no. It’s a very complicated process and it’s not like it is in films basically …’

‘Justin.’ Maxie straightened up. ‘I was joking. I know you can’t do DNA testing.’

‘Oh, right. Yeah, OK.’

They’d waited ages for Samira to return last night. In the end Maxie, Maeve and Boggle had led a party over to the Darwin Centre laboratories. They took along some of Lewis’s fighters and Gordy, the last person to have seen Samira. He talked all the way, trying to shift any blame.

‘She didn’t want me to stay … She was just picking something up … I thought things were safe now.’

In the end Maxie had snapped at him. ‘Yeah, but even so, Gordy, with everything that’s been going down here, you might have thought to wait.’

The lab doors were still unlocked and they could find
no sign of Samira in the darkness. So they abandoned the search and went back to the minerals gallery, left someone on guard at the entrance just in case she did show up.

She never did, and in the morning they’d organized a proper search. All that they’d found was this small patch – not much bigger than a 1p piece – and even then they couldn’t be sure it had anything to do with Samira.

Maxie watched as Gordy went down on his hands and knees and started scraping whatever it was into a small plastic envelope. He was still feeling very guilty from last night and Justin had taken over from Maxie giving him a hard time about it.

‘If you want to be in charge of the labs while Einstein’s away,’ he said, ‘you’ve got to be more responsible.’

‘It’s not my bloody fault,’ Gordy muttered. ‘Anything could have happened to her.’

Now Gordy turned on Maxie.

‘What do you think happened then?’ he snapped. ‘I thought you’d cleared all the sickos out of the museum. Or maybe you’re not as great as you make out.’

For a brief moment Maxie considered laying into Gordy, really letting rip. But she held back. He was scared and turning his guilt on someone else. It took an effort, but she was going to be bigger than him and let it go. Instead she nodded to Justin to follow her and walked through to the lab next door, which was unoccupied.

She looked back through the glass wall at the lab they’d left. There were a few kids there, too distracted to work, standing in small groups, talking excitedly. She closed the door.

‘What we talked about the other day. About one of your lot having a problem. A saboteur, a traitor – I don’t know
what you want to call it … What have you done about it?’ she asked Justin.

Justin looked a little shifty and unsure of himself. ‘I don’t want to start a panic,’ he murmured.

‘You don’t think Samira disappearing is going to maybe do that for you?’

Justin walked Maxie over to the windows, where they could look down to the main floor of the Darwin Centre eight storeys below. The great curving white wall of the Cocoon that filled the huge space was shining in the sunlight.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have done something. I was just hoping, I don’t know, that you’d find something in your clean-up. I don’t want it to be one of us. I want it to be safe here again.’

‘We can sort it,’ said Maxie. ‘But you have to tell people that someone can’t be trusted. No one should be going anywhere alone at the moment.’

‘Will you help me set up a committee?’ he asked.

Maxie tried not to laugh. She wasn’t quite used to Justin’s adult way of speaking. ‘A committee?’

‘Yes, to investigate what happened. We’ll have to interrogate everyone here, try to build up a picture of who was doing what and where on the night of the attack.’

Maxie had to admit that out on the street life had a certain simplicity to it. All you had to do was stay alive. To kill grown-ups. This was different. This was complicated. This was old school.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘But we have to go about it the right way. You’ve got a killer among you, remember.’

‘We don’t know Samira’s dead. Is she dead?’

Gordy came in, wiping his hands on his white lab coat.
It was several sizes too big for him and he’d had to roll the sleeves up.

‘I took a look at that sample under the microscope,’ he said. ‘As far as I can tell, it’s blood.’

‘Even if it is blood,’ said Justin, ‘we don’t know it’s hers. And if it is … She must still
be
somewhere. She can’t have just disappeared.’

32

So much blood. He’d never expected so much blood, especially as when he’d killed her she’d hardly bled at all. Once her heart stopped beating it couldn’t pump anything out of the wound. But when he’d opened her up it was like sticking a knife into a ripe peach. He’d had to quickly find some sheets of newspaper and had then rolled her on to them. Even so the blood had spread and spread and spread, a great dark pool of it, dripping down through the floorboards.

He had to hurry. He quickly hacked off a piece of fatty flesh from her side. It was somehow soft and chewy at the same time, and the raw skin was too tough to get his teeth through.

Suddenly he had an image of himself, crouching over Samira’s body, and he spat the grey, mashed-up gobbet out on to the floor.

What was he doing?

He retched. Held his mouth, trembling. And mercifully his mind flipped again. One second he was a boy, alone, sick, appalled at what he’d done, and the next Boney-M was screaming in his ears and he was a stone-cold killer, a sicko, hungry and ruthless, and then it flipped once more and threw him into a strange place. He was a half-naked,
brown-skinned tribesman living in the jungle, butchering a monkey to feed his family.