The Fallen (43 page)

This is how you make mistakes. How you wind up dead. Don’t let your emotions get hold of you. Don’t take stupid risks … 

But he wasn’t listening. He wasn’t listening to anything except the blood singing in his ears and his own tangled thoughts screaming at him. Blue shouted something, but he didn’t register the meaning until it was too late and the next moment, as the words ‘Look out!’ formed in his brain, he collided in the doorway with a father who was coming out of the church. Ollie was sent spinning, the breath
knocked out of him, and he went down heavily, crashing on to his arse on the hard, cold stone of the porch. The father was still standing, though he looked slightly stunned, not understanding what was going on.

Blue had got caught up in the collision as well, and was thrown off balance, his timing out. He was squaring up to whack the father, raising his club.
Too slow
. He hadn’t spotted another father coming up fast behind the first one from out of the darkness. Ollie wanted to shout a warning, but was still gasping for air, his head spinning.

Blue was going to be taken down, and it was all his fault.

Blue swung at the first father, who was ready for him and batted the club away with his arm. And then Achilleus was with them. He barged Blue aside and let the charging father run on to the point of his spear. He turned with him as he came, and twisted sideways, letting the father slide off the spear and smack head first into the ground. Achilleus hadn’t finished yet. He kept moving and punched his spear into the first father. In and out in one swift movement that killed him outright and sent him tumbling down on top of the other grown-up.

Achilleus paused long enough to pull Ollie to his feet and then carried on into the church. Ollie caught his breath. Waiting. The collision had knocked some sense into him and he’d calmed down. Achilleus was way better than him at this sort of thing. Ollie fitted a shot to his sling and went in much more cautiously after him and Blue.

The first thing he noticed when he got inside was that there were other people in here. It took him a couple of seconds to make sense of it in the gloom. A bright flame of hope burned briefly.
Was it the rest of the children?
The flame died as quickly as it had flared. The people were too
big. They were adults. There was a large group to the right, down by the altar, and another smaller group to the left.

There were no signs of any children.

No. That was wrong. There
were
children in here. But they weren’t moving. Ollie saw that there were bodies all over the floor. Mangled and trampled.

He had paused just inside the doorway and was now pushed aside by more of his gang coming in from behind. He grabbed Ebenezer as he went past.

‘We’ve got to slow down,’ he said. ‘It’s not good in here.’

Ebenezer muttered a prayer and kissed the crucifix that hung on a chain around his neck.

Blue and Achilleus had already piled into the group of adults to the right. Ollie switched his attention to the smaller group, fired off a shot too quickly, without really taking aim. Ebenezer was about to throw one of his javelins when the incoming kids got in the way. This was not the right terrain for ranged weapons. There was really nothing Ollie could do now except hang back and try to stop any grown-ups who tried to make a run for it. His eyes had at last grown used to the lower light levels and he watched as Jackson cut down a pair of emaciated mothers.

He moved to a better position in the aisle and stumbled on something. It was a young girl from the museum. He hadn’t known her long enough to learn her name. She looked quite peaceful, almost as if she was asleep. There was another girl lying next to her, however, whose face was screwed up in fear and pain. He knelt down to check her pulse, just in case. Nothing. She was already cold, her flesh hard and solid.

He closed his eyes, wishing he was somewhere else. Fighting back tears.

‘Look out, Ollie,’ Ebenezer shouted.

Ollie looked up just as three fathers came hobbling down the aisle towards him. They had got away from Jackson and were moving fast. They were very close together, as if they had their arms round each other, and then Ollie realized that the father in the middle didn’t have any arms at all, and the other two only had one each. They appeared to be working as a single unit. And they’d been busy. The lower half of the face of the father in the middle was painted thick with blood and his teeth were stained pink.

As Ollie struggled to pull his knife free, someone stepped in between him and the attacking fathers.

It was Trinity.

The three fathers stopped dead in their tracks and stared, mesmerized. A hideous, distorted mirror image of Trinity.

Trinity’s arms were in the air, hands extended. The middle father began to whip his head from side to side as if trying to shake something loose. The other two hissed, but wouldn’t attack. And then Jackson’s war party stormed over and chopped them down from behind.

Ebenezer came over to Ollie.

‘That’s twice you nearly bought it, Ollie,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should get out of here. We’re just in the way.’

‘Yeah.’

The fight looked to be nearly over anyway. The grown-ups, bloated from feasting on the kids, had been surprised and quickly swamped.

Ollie felt breathless and dizzy. He’d been more scared than he’d known, and the shock of finding all the kids slaughtered was getting to him. There was a stink of blood in here, and human waste, rotting flesh and fresh meat all mingled in a foul stew.

Ebenezer was right – Ollie wanted nothing more than to get out into the fresh air before he was sick. First, though, he had to check there was nobody left alive. He forced himself to stand, willing his shaky knees not to buckle. He swallowed hard and walked towards the altar. Kids were strewn everywhere, too badly injured to possibly be alive. The grown-ups had pulled the small bodies to pieces, and now they lay dead among their victims.

Ollie caught Blue’s eye. For once Blue didn’t look like he was too cool to care. There was a haunted look about him. Ollie knew how he was feeling. He must look the same. They’d let these kids down. Should have been here for them. Should have come back sooner. Even Achilleus looked cut up. He was stalking the church, sticking his new spear into every grown-up body and twisting it with a foul curse.

‘What we gonna do?’ said Ollie.

‘Bring the other bodies in from outside,’ said Blue. ‘All of them.’

‘And then what?’

‘Then we’ll burn this stinking place down. It’s all we
can
do. Burn their bodies.’

Ollie helped Blue organize a work party and they collected anything that would burn and piled it in the middle of the church: old prayer books, the little square cushions for kneeling on, the wooden pews, the cloth off the altar. They dragged the small broken bodies close to the pile and when it was ready Blue set light to it. It was slow to catch, but in a few minutes a flame had taken.

Ollie forced himself to stay a little longer and he and Ebenezer double-checked that there weren’t any survivors. The last place they looked was the tower. There was an open door at the bottom; it had been splintered and broken
in. They climbed to the top of the spiral staircase and out into the light. Ollie could see some of the children down below, the ones who hadn’t come into the church with the war party, sitting or standing in silence.

And a big expanse of empty grey sky.

They went back down and walked outside where Ollie found Einstein and Emily sitting on a bench with their arms round each other. Einstein looked very pale.

‘All of them?’ he said.

Ollie said nothing. There was nothing
to
say. He left Ebenezer and walked away from Einstein into the trees. Managed a few paces before he sank to his knees, overcome with tears. He sobbed and wailed and beat his fists in the dirt till he had no strength left. And then it was over.

He crawled to a tree and sat with his back against it, hidden from the others by the shade. There didn’t seem to be any more grown-ups around out here and he didn’t have the energy to look. Let someone else be responsible. He’d had enough. He emptied his mind and let it become a blank. An empty shell of nothingness.

Smoke was drifting from the church. He watched it rise up and dissolve into the sky, like a cloud of angels escaping from the earth and returning to heaven. It was the souls of those poor dead children.

He had no idea how long he’d been sitting there when he became aware of a movement nearby. Before it had even properly registered he instinctively threw himself to the side.

A father was standing there. Tall and long-limbed. His arms were wet with blood up to the elbows. His face wasn’t too badly affected by the disease. He had a few spots and had lost most of his hair, but otherwise looked fairly
normal. He was wearing a long coat and Ollie saw that he had several small animals hanging from his belt, which was tight around their necks. Cats, a rabbit and a squirrel. Some were still alive and writhing. Most were dead. One cat was bent double, its back legs up and clawing at the belt, its eyes bulging from their sockets.

Three times.
Three times in one day Ollie had been caught by surprise. It wasn’t good.

The father smiled. He had something in his hand. He swung it at Ollie, who scrambled away on his back and then bumped into another tree. He used it to shuffle upright against. The father swung again and Ollie couldn’t get out of the way in time. The blow took him in the side of the head, stunning him temporarily. The next thing he knew the father’s arms were crushing him and he could feel his hot breath on his neck. Whatever happened he couldn’t let the bastard bite him. He swung round, thumping the man into the tree and then kicked at his legs with his heel. It was enough to make the man loosen his grip and Ollie was able to duck down and out of the circle of his arms.

Ollie didn’t let up. He had to go on the attack. He grabbed at the man’s throat, locked his fingers into the skin and pressed hard, at the same time pushing forwards so that the man collapsed backwards with Ollie on top of him.

Ollie made sure he didn’t let go. He could feel the animals on the man’s belt struggling, trapped between their two bodies. The father was gurgling and scratching at Ollie’s hands, but Ollie could feel him weakening. He had dropped whatever it was he’d been holding and Ollie saw it lying there. A large, leather-bound book, stained with bloody handprints.

He made a quick decision. Let go with one hand, picked
up the book and brought it crashing down on the man’s forehead. The man gulped and jerked and went still. Now Ollie was finally able to get his knife out and he stabbed it upwards at his face, ramming it through the roof of his mouth and into his brain.

It was over.

Gasping and shaking, Ollie stood up and kicked the body, then untangled the cat. It hopped away, one of its legs broken. It probably wouldn’t live much longer, but at least it was free.

Ollie left his knife where it was. He didn’t want to look at the man again. Didn’t want to touch him. He could get another knife. He also couldn’t face the other kids yet. If he didn’t have to talk about what he’d just done then it hadn’t happened. He moved away and sat down again. This had been a private thing, between him and the man.

He looked at the book. Recognized it. It was the one that the little girl, Lettis, had been writing in. This book had been precious to her. She wouldn’t have let it out of her sight unless …

Ollie looked over at the church. He could see flames at the windows now. Her body would be among all the others in there. By the end of the day it would be ashes. This book would be all that was left of her.

It was a journal, wasn’t it? It struck him that it might contain some clues to what had happened here. He opened it and read the first line from the final entry …

This is the journal of Lettis Slingsbury.

He flipped through the pages and felt a tightening in his throat every time he saw her name, the way she kept
repeating it, each time smaller and scratchier than the last. He worked back, found what she’d written about being left behind at the church, and then the discussions about burying the body. As he got to the part where the kids had got attacked outside, the writing became messier and more scrawled.

Finally he got back to where he’d started. The last entry in the book.

77

This is the journal of Lettis Slingsbury. I am writing my name in the hope that it sticks. That it is a mark of me and my existence. I think this might be the last thing I write, so I hope someone finds it and takes it back to
Chris Marker
at the museum. He will want it for the official records. And I hope it will explain everything that happened to us and why.

Maybe if my bones are still here with the book whoever finds this could bury me and say a prayer for my soul. Even though we used to go to church I’ve never really thought much about GOD before and praying and my SOUL, but I suppose being with someone who really strongly believes in God (that is Jasmine) has made me think about that sort of thing properly for the first time. It was Jasmine that gave me the idea of asking someone to pray for me when I’m dead. She said that prayer is very powerful and as we were in a church she was praying a lot obviously. Which is something that I have written before.