The Fallen (30 page)

Reece said that Blue had ordered us not to go outside, and I said that I had promised Ollie, but nobody was listening to me and Daryl Painter said he had been up on to the top of the steeple (the church tower) to have a look and there was nothing out there, it was just trees and grass and birds singing, things of that nature.

‘The body will smell more and more,’ said Jasmine, ‘and it will attract sickos from all around. They will come and try and get in. We should bury the body while it is quiet.’

Then Reece made a practical point. ‘How are we going to dig a grave?’ he asked. Jasmine didn’t know how we were going to do that. I think she really just mainly wants to get the corpse out of the church so that she doesn’t have to look at it all day long. Then Demi said something. She had been exploring the church a bit and had found a little room with a sort of office in it, and some keys on hooks. And she went and fetched one of the keys and it had a paper label fixed on by a bit of old string and the label said ‘tool shed’.

So she said there must be a tool shed and they might have spades in there, and other gardening things for looking after the grounds of the church. Daryl, who had been up on the steeple, said he had seen some sheds and things all among the trees and bushes behind the church and Reece said we should go and have a look.

I said it was a very bad idea and that we were not to open the door for anything. Jasmine said I was being stupid and babyish, so I didn’t say anything else. I kept my thoughts to myself. So the next question on everyone’s lips was who should go outside and do it.

As you can imagine, nobody put their hand up. Nobody wanted to volunteer to be the first to go outside.

‘But it’s perfectly safe,’ said Jasmine. ‘The others went off all right, didn’t they? I watched them go, there were no sickos around. If there were they would have followed them or attacked them.’

‘I still don’t want to go out there alone,’ said Reece. And there was an argument.

The argument is still going. I can hear them as I am writing this. I got bored of it, and didn’t want any more of it. Nobody would listen to me. So as an excuse I said I had to write the journal, which wasn’t really an excuse and is certainly not a lie. I do need to write the journal. And finally I had something to write about. The argument obviously and whether we will open the doors and go outside.

I don’t want to go outside. I wish nobody would have to go. What I really want is for the others to come back. They must be back soon. Hopefully the argument will go on and on for a long time and before anyone decides anything there will be a big knock on the church doors and there will be Blue and Ollie and the others and we will all cheer and be safe again.

They will know what to do about the body as well.

That’s what I want. But, as I say, I am only small and unimportant, so who cares what I want?

52

Blue wouldn’t have been able to say just exactly what he was expecting on the other side of the door. But it wasn’t this. This was way outside his comfort zone. A weird day had just got a whole lot weirder.

The door opened into a large room. He’d seen from the plans that the warehouse was divided into two, with this smaller area at the rear, connected to the rest of the warehouse by a big roll-down door. There was a sort of steel cage built around the door, with wire-mesh walls and roof.

To get to the door they’d have to go through the cage.

And inside the cage were four fathers.

They didn’t look like the usual skanky sickbags you saw on the streets. They were thin and pale, with greyish skin, their dark eyes sunk in their cheeks, but showed no obvious signs of the disease. On top of that they were reasonably well dressed, in clean clothes, and they were armed. Two of them had spears and the other two had butcher’s knives and what looked like truncheons. They were like no grown-ups Blue had seen in over a year.

They were still human.

They were sitting on the floor of the cage, staring at the kids as they filed in through the door from the utility room. The cage was bolted to the floor, but Blue could see where
it had been battered and bashed. The mesh was bowed out in one section. The grown-ups had obviously been trying to get out. Now they just sat there. Blue felt slightly awkward, embarrassed, not sure what to do or say. He’d got out of the habit of talking to grown-ups. Hell, they
couldn’t
talk.

It was Achilleus who broke the spell. He walked over to the cage and rattled his spear against it.

‘Yo. Sick dudes. Whassup?’ The fathers slowly turned to look at them. Blue now saw that they had water bottles. He was still trying to figure it all out when one of the fathers spoke, making him jump.

‘You come to get us out of here?’ He was maybe forty, with very black hair, wearing jeans and boots, a denim shirt and a heavy canvas jacket. He had a bandage covering one eye.

‘You can talk?’ said Achilleus, standing back from the cage.

‘So can you,’ said the man.

‘That ain’t a thing,’ said Achilleus. ‘I’m a kid. You’re a gonk. You ain’t supposed to talk.’

‘Yeah,’ Paddy sneered. ‘You ain’t supposed to talk, you’re supposed to die.’

‘Shut it, Paddy,’ said Achilleus and he slapped him round the head. ‘This ain’t a film.’

‘Sorry.’

Slowly the father who had spoken did up the top button of his shirt and got to his feet. He was stiff and tired-looking, groaned as he straightened his legs. Sighing with the effort, he hobbled over to the mesh and Achilleus dropped further back, not sure about any of this. The father was carrying a short spear with a wide leaf-shaped head on it. He rested
it against the mesh and looked into the faces of the kids who were standing there gawping.

‘I asked if you’d come to let us out of here,’ he said, his visible eye glinting. His voice was dry and croaky, with a mild Irish accent. Blue wondered how long he’d been in the cage.

‘Maybe we have,’ he said and the man turned his glare full on him.

‘You in charge?’ he asked.

‘Yeah.’ Blue settled his face. Took control. Turned down the temperature. Set his features in stone. Didn’t want to let this stranger read anything in him. The man held his stare for a few seconds then softened. Smiled.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Got off on the wrong foot there. I expect you’ve got a lot of questions.’

‘I expect we have,’ said Blue. ‘Like how come you can talk for a start? How come you ain’t diseased? Still got your marbles.’

‘You know what this place is?’ the man asked.

‘Course we do.’

‘Then you know what’s through those doors.’ The man jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

‘We got a pretty good idea,’ said Blue. ‘At least we know what we hope’s in there.’

‘Medicine,’ said the man. ‘Drugs. Equipment.’

‘Are you saying you been using drugs from here to fight the disease?’ said Einstein, stepping forward and gripping the mesh. He was almost shaking with excitement.

‘Something like that,’ said the man.

‘So what you doing in that cage, soldier?’ Achilleus asked.

The man sighed again and ran his fingers through his hair.

‘We were doing fine,’ he said. ‘We were surviving. There were more of us. But then the monsters came.’

‘Monsters?’ said Achilleus. ‘Get out of here.’

53

‘Yeah.’ The man stared at each kid in turn with his good eye, daring anyone to challenge him. ‘
Monsters
. That’s the best word for them. That’s the only word. They’re in there right now. They took over, kicked us out. We’ve been trying to get back in, but we’re stuck here. With your help, though, we can do it, we can open this bloody door and we can kill the monsters.’

‘What do you mean, monsters?’ Ollie asked, but before the man could reply Einstein butted in.

‘Are you saying there’s a cure?’ he asked.

‘What does it look like to you?’ The man came right up to Einstein and stood in front of him, separated only by the thin steel mesh.

‘How did you know what to do?’ Einstein went on. ‘Are you doctors? Scientists? What drugs did you use?’

‘Too many questions,’ said the man wearily. ‘Can’t you just get us out of here?’

‘What sort of monsters?’ Ollie repeated. He was holding back, keeping to the rear of the group in the shadows.

‘Freaks, mutants, horrible things, deformed … Clever, though.’

‘What? Like some kind of animals? What are you saying?’

‘Not animals. People.’

‘With the disease?’

‘No, something else. They’re not human any more. As I say – they’re monsters.’ The man seemed to come alive, filled with a sudden flush of energy. He picked up his spear and paced up and down. ‘But together we could beat them,’ he said. ‘Kill them all. If we can get the door open we all go in together. You guys look pretty handy. Must be to have come this far. We can defeat them. Then all the stuff in there – it’s ours.’

Blue thought back to when they’d been in the corridor. Jackson saying she’d seen something. Something she couldn’t explain, hiding on the shelves. A snake thing, she’d said.

At the time nobody had believed her.

‘So how do we get in?’ he asked.

‘The keys are over there.’ The man jabbed his spear towards the wall behind the kids. Blue swung round and shone his torch over the breeze-block wall until it fell on a set of keys hanging from a hook.

‘I don’t get this,’ he said. ‘How did you end up in there?’

‘We came through the door from the main warehouse. We were beaten back, the freaks had been attacking us, we weren’t enough, they killed all the rest. We had a good thing going in there.’

‘They chased you into the cage?’

‘Yeah, and pulled the door down on us. There’s keys there that’ll let you in. And other keys that will get us all through into the warehouse proper.’

For the first time Blue noticed that there was a door into the cage with a heavy-duty lock on it.

‘We go in hard,’ said the man. ‘And kill them before they know what’s happening. We got to be quick, though, cos,
as I say, they’re clever. They’ll fool you. Twisting everything around. They’re more dangerous than I can get across.’

‘So to open the door to the warehouse,’ said Ollie, ‘we have to open your cage and come in there with another set of keys?’

‘What’s the matter? Don’t you trust us?’

‘No,’ said Ollie flatly.

‘It’s the only way in,’ said the man.

‘We can go back outside, force the main loading doors.’

‘Hah! You’ll never break your way in through them, pal. Believe me, we’ve tried. And while you were knocking politely on the doors they’d take you down one by one. It’s like a fortress, this place.’ The man paused, then offered the kids a smile. ‘I’m Seamus, by the way. I’d shake your hands and give you the old how d’you do, but until you open this door I can only wave.’

‘I can’t say as I like grown-ups so much,’ said Achilleus. ‘What’s stopping us coming in there and killing you?’

‘Well, there’s this for starters,’ said Seamus, holding up his spear. ‘But why would you want to go and do something nasty like that? Hmm? Can’t you see we don’t have the sickness in us? We’re the good guys.’

‘Who wrote that stuff on the door through there?’ Ollie asked.

Seamus hesitated, thinking this over.

‘Why do you want to know?’ he said.

‘Did you?’

‘Who else is going to do something like that?’

‘Who were you trying to warn off?’ said Achilleus and Blue heard Ollie swear under his breath. Blue wondered what had made him angry, and then realized that Achilleus
had told Seamus something about what the writing said. Blue was learning that, while Achilleus was a fearsome fighter, he was something less than clever.