The Fallen (33 page)

57

Ollie knelt down by Seamus’s body, put his hand to the collar of his shirt.

‘I saw him, when we went in there; the first thing he did was do up his top button. Why?’

‘I haven’t got a freaking clue. Maybe he was cold.’

‘Only one reason you’d do a thing like that.’ Ollie yanked the front of the shirt down and the buttons popped off and clattered on to the floor. There was a circle of lumps around Seamus’s neck, sores and boils. A couple of them had burst and were oozing pus.

Blue swore.

‘You still didn’t know for sure, though, Ollie. When you topped him.’

Ollie shrugged. Wouldn’t catch Blue’s eye.

‘Let’s look at this.’ Einstein had joined Ollie and was studying Seamus’s face. He peeled back the bandage that covered his bad eye. The eye was missing and the socket was filled with more growths and boils. Einstein prodded a growth with a biro and then shrank back as it burst and some sort of grey jelly bubbled out.

‘Nice,’ said Achilleus. ‘That’s dinner sorted.’

Einstein leant closer.

‘It’s moving,’ he said.

‘You’re joking.’

‘No, no …’ Einstein was furiously scrabbling in his backpack for something. Finally he pulled out a plastic box with a peel-off lid. He wrenched it open and poked some of the jelly into it with his biro.

‘Sorry to interrupt your picnic,’ said Jackson, backing towards them. ‘But aren’t we forgetting about the monsters?’

‘We don’t know they’re monsters,’ said Ollie. ‘That’s just what Seamus told us, and he obviously wanted us to kill them before we found out what they really were.’

‘Doesn’t mean they’re not still monsters,’ said Jackson. ‘I mean, did you see that thing?’

Blue walked to the edge of the group and shouted into the shadowy depths of the warehouse.

‘Hey! Come on. Whoever you are. Show yourselves.’

For a moment nothing happened.

‘We passed your test!’ Ollie shouted. ‘We’re here and you’re going to have to deal with us.’

Achilleus wandered over to a shelf and put the sharp point of his spear against a box.

‘Come out or the box gets it!’

Paddy laughed.

‘Can you understand us?’ Blue shouted.

‘We’re kids like you,’ said Ollie. ‘Didn’t you want us to come in here?’

‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’ Achilleus called out in a sing-song voice. ‘I warned you – the box dies in five!’

At last they had a reply. A voice from out of the darkness, a boy’s voice, starting to break so that it was a little croaky.

‘How do we know you won’t attack us?’

‘We killed the grown-ups, didn’t we?’ said Blue. ‘Isn’t that what you wanted?’

The boy’s voice came back out of the shadows.

‘I’ll warn you. We’re watching you. Anything weird, anything we don’t like, and we’ll attack. We haven’t lived this long by taking risks. We’re hidden all around you.’

Blue sighed and quickly glanced up and down the aisles of shelving. He could see nothing. There were a thousand places to hide. The shelves were high, going right up to the ceiling. It would be easy to have people perched above them, armed with God knows what.

‘Do you want us to drop our weapons?’ Einstein shouted and Blue hissed at him.

‘Don’t be a dick. We ain’t dropping our weapons. You heard what the man said. We ain’t lived this long by taking risks either.’

‘We don’t want to hurt you,’ said Jackson.

‘Much,’ Achilleus muttered under his breath.

‘Then what are you doing here?’ came the voice.

‘Good question,’ Achilleus replied, quiet enough so that only the kids nearest to him could hear. ‘If this goes on much longer it’s no more mister nice guy. I am going postal on these noobs.’

‘We’ve come to get drugs,’ shouted Einstein. ‘Medicine. We’ve been trying to find out about the disease, maybe find a cure. We thought there might be, like, useful stuff here.’

‘Oh, there’s useful stuff here all right,’ came the voice. ‘But it’s not yours. It belongs to us.’

‘To be fair,’ said Blue, ‘it belongs to Promithios, but I take your point. Salvage rights. We get it. But maybe we can just talk?’

‘Come and find us then.’

‘OK …’

Silence. One by one the candles went out. Jackson edged closer to Blue.

‘We don’t know what they are,’ she whispered. ‘We don’t know what any of this is.’

‘If you’re telling me to be careful,’ said Blue, ‘save your breath. I’m always careful.’

‘I mean, like, did you see that thing?’

‘Yeah. It didn’t make much sense, but … Did it look dangerous to you?’

‘There were others. He might have been, like, a trap or something, a decoy, you know, like a lure, like hunters use.’

‘Torches on,’ said Blue. There was still a pale haze coming in through the skylights, high up in the roof, but they were dirty and didn’t let a lot of light in. Without the glow from the candles the place became even murkier. Blue fished out his torch and snapped it on. He heard Achilleus and Ollie and the other Waitrose kids winding theirs up.

‘Where do we go then?’ asked Einstein.

‘Towards the music, I guess,’ said Blue. ‘Stick close together. Ollie, watch our backs. Achilleus, take the right. Jackson, you can have the left. Let’s move.’

58

Mick, where are you when I need you?
Blue felt horribly exposed without his friend by his side. At least he was guarding their way out. That was comforting if they needed to make a speedy exit. But Blue hadn’t gone it alone like this for a long time. It was like blundering into a fight without a familiar weapon in your hand. He sent out a silent prayer for Mick to give him some of his strength.

The kids crept forward, eyes scanning the gloom. Trying to see if anything was hiding among the stacks of boxes.

Blue became aware of a movement, something shuffling on the other side of a row of shelves.

What was it …? Impossible to tell.

Somewhere he heard laughter, sounded like a girl; it seemed to skitter away and get lost in the huge space, and then there was a scraping sound off to their left.

‘Anything behind us, Ollie?’ he asked.

‘Nothing.’

It was hard in the half-light to pinpoint exactly where the music was coming from, too many hard surfaces for the sound to reflect off, and as they wove among the shelves it seemed to sometimes get quieter and sometimes louder. Blue listened hard until he was fairly sure he had pinpointed
the direction they should be heading. Of course that didn’t mean the things, whatever they were –
monsters
? – would be there. But it was all he could think of at the moment. He kept expecting that croaky voice to come floating out of the darkness again, shouting ‘Warmer’ and ‘Colder’ like in a child’s game. At last they cleared the end of a row and he saw an open metal staircase leading to a raised platform. There was a lit candle on every step. At the top was what looked like some kind of an office, some four or five metres above the warehouse floor.

‘Do we go up?’ Einstein asked.

‘It’s what they want,’ said Blue.

‘Is it what we want?’

‘Do we have a choice?’

‘Guess not,’ said Einstein.

‘Achilleus, you take point,’ said Blue, almost whispering. ‘We’ll follow on behind.’

‘Sure.’ Achilleus shoved Paddy out of the way. ‘Paddy, dress back, yeah?’

‘I need to stick close to you, I’m your helper. I can fight.’

‘No to all three, soldier. Not right now. I want a proper fighter at my back, not a caddie. We don’t know what’s up there and I don’t want to be worrying about you.’

‘But Achilleus.’

‘Shut it and do what you’re told, you little rat.’

Scowling and muttering, Paddy dropped back and Jackson took his place. Achilleus looked her up and down and nodded his acceptance. The stairs would only take two people safely side by side, and even then they’d be getting in each other’s way if they had to fight. So Achilleus made sure he was in front with clear space around him. He gripped his spear with both hands widely spaced. It wasn’t
the best weapon to use in cramped conditions, but it was the best he had.

He started to climb. The stairway had one return halfway up, where it switched back on itself. Achilleus reached that point safely and waited for the others to join him before proceeding. He wasn’t taking any chances.

They clattered on up to the top. The sound of the jazz was much louder here, though it was slightly tinny and distorted. It was a long time since Blue had heard any recorded music. A couple of his mates had played guitars back in Morrisons, but this was different. He’d almost forgotten what proper music sounded like. This was all brass and drums and piano, a driving beat, but something from ancient history. Old and weird to Blue’s ears.

The noise of their feet on the stairs partly drowned the music out and when they got to the top Blue realized it had finished; there was just a weird, repetitive clicking noise. At least nothing had attacked them. There was another candle burning in the office; he could see its flickering glow through the window.

‘A game,’ Ollie had said. And that’s what it felt like. The things, the monsters, the creatures … whatever they were, were playing with them. Blue wanted this over now. Wanted his questions answered. He’d had enough. If there was something nasty waiting for them in the office then he was ready for it. He’d smash it to pieces. He shouldered his way to the front of the group where Achilleus had halted again, pushed past and went on through, three of the others coming in behind him.

There was nothing waiting for them in the office except an old-fashioned record player standing on a desk. It was a wind-up one with a big, shiny brass trumpet thing where
the music came out. The sort of record player you saw in old movies. There was a black plastic record turning on it, the heavy needle clicking over and over at the end of the track. Blue went over to it, lifted the needle off and pulled a lever that acted like a brake, stopping the turntable from rotating.

‘They got us where they want us,’ said Jackson. ‘Now what?’

‘It’s up to them now,’ said Blue. ‘I ain’t playing their games no more.’

Ollie came in and lifted the record off the turntable. Read the label.

‘“Take the ‘A’ Train.”’

‘You take it,’ said Blue wearily and Ollie laughed.

‘It’s what the track’s called. Duke Ellington.’

‘If you say so.’ Blue was too strung out to try and get his head round this piece of information. Was the track important? Was it a message? Or was it just …

‘In here.’ A voice called to them from somewhere behind the office, through an open doorway. Blue glanced at Ollie and Jackson. Shrugged. He was the leader. It was up to him to lead. He wasn’t sending Achilleus ahead this time. The ‘monsters’ had had plenty of opportunities to lay traps for them. He set his face hard, raised his spear and started to walk, brushing the door frame with his shoulder as he went past it. Ollie and Jackson followed him.

There was a large raised area back there, a platform with a floor made of wooden boards. It extended out above some lower shelving units and had protective railings around the edges. It had something of the feel of a secret den, or a kids’ tree house. A selection of furniture had been dragged up there: armchairs, sofas, rugs, tables, some beds, a sideboard
with an empty goldfish bowl on it, a fat, old-fashioned TV set with no workings inside it.

And monsters.

That was the word that had lodged in Blue’s mind. Planted there so firmly by Seamus that he couldn’t get rid of it, even though he could see that the three people up here weren’t technically monsters. They were kids. Like him. Only not like him.

Blue’s team were filtering out on to the deck. Achilleus appeared, eyes wide, mouth open in a sloppy grin.

‘Freak of the week,’ he said.

‘Shut up,’ said Ollie. ‘That’s not funny.’

‘Freak lives.’

‘I said shut up. Can’t you see they’re kids?’

‘Nope.’

It was hard. They obviously
were
just children. But something had changed them.

There were two boys and a girl. The girl sat in a big, high-backed chair that looked a bit like a throne, and indeed she was wrapped in some sort of robes and had a crown on her head. Although, as Blue looked more closely, he saw that it wasn’t a crown; she had a ring of bony growths on the top of her bald skull, jutting up and stretching the skin. And he saw, too, that she was sitting in a wheelchair, and the ‘throne’ part of it was just painted cardboard, or maybe thin sheets of wood, that had been fixed to the back of it. Her face was slack and expressionless, but her eyes were glittering and intelligent, watchful. The boy standing next to her was only wearing a pair of ragged jeans. His body was huge and bulging with muscle, like something out of a comic book. His muscles, however, had grown in an unbalanced, misshapen way, giving him a lumpy look.

A badly drawn comic book.

Blue used to read a lot of comics. One of his favourites was about an ancient Celtic warrior called Sláine, who went into a warp spasm in battle, so that his whole body distorted. Well, here was the living Sláine, in permanent warp spasm. The boy’s head appeared small in relation to his body, and one eye was unnaturally large, maybe five times the size of his other eye.