The Fallen (44 page)

I don’t know. Maybe there is no God, but if there is one I would like to be with him when this is over. I know I shouldn’t be writing so much about myself and my thoughts and feelings, they are not important really. But there’s no one else, to be honest. No one else to write about, that is. There is only me now. I wanted this to be a great adventure. Something to put in the history books to show how we survived after the disease. Chris says the history of our lives is important. Well, I suppose this is the history of my life. Even though it was just a short one.

So this is what happened. I hope you will read it and remember me.

Hold tight to the book.

Some of it is written quickly so it might not be well written. I have looked at my last entry and it is just a scribble, not properly written at all. It was dark and I was on the top of the steeple and desperate so I didn’t properly write about what had been happening. My last proper entry was when I was writing about the banging on the door and would we open it and was it our friends or was it sickos.

I wish now we had kept that door shut. When we opened it we let all the evil of the world into the church. But we couldn’t leave it shut because our friends were out there and they were being attacked by sickos and we could hear their shouts and their screams. So you see we had no choice. Still, though, I wish we had kept it shut. I know it is a bad thing to say and maybe I won’t get to heaven after all for thinking it and writing it. It is a selfish thing to have in your mind. I am only thinking of myself. Only it wasn’t just me, was it? There were five of us still in the church then and four outside. Those five would all still be alive. The four outside would have been killed anyway, whatever happened. They were doomed as soon as they went outside. I wish I didn’t have to write this. I have to tell the truth, though. Chris says we must always tell the truth and the truth is that I wish I wish I wish we had kept those doors closed.

It was Aiyshah who opened them. She said she had to, she said we couldn’t leave our friends to die out there like dogs, and she opened the door and there was Jasmine and Reece on the doorstep in the porch all covered in red blood and unable to stand up. We went to pull them in and that was when there was a big thump, a loud bang as it were, and a rushing dark shape. Actually two dark shapes, the shapes of men. Two sickos came running over and barged the doors open, bashing into them as loud as anything. I screamed and someone else screamed and I was the first to run. I let go of Jasmine, who I had been holding up, and I ran back into the church towards the altar. I cannot fight. I am too scared to fight. I was almost too scared to run, my legs didn’t seem to do what I was telling them to do. I was all wobbly and feeble and shaking. There were two of us running together and we got to the altar and there was nowhere else to go.

There were two sickos in the church, the two big fathers who had barged into the door. One of them had all animals tied to his belt. Cats and things. And it made me think, not then but after when I had time to think and there was nothing else to do except think. I thought it was interesting that sickos don’t always only just eat us children. They eat other things as well. They will eat anything. Whatever they can get their hands on. They do not eat us because they hate us, they eat us because we are food, the only fresh food they can catch. Except maybe cats and rats and small animals. In the same way that I didn’t used to hate cows and chickens and, when I was smaller, I had a book about a farm and some farm animals I used to play with. I didn’t hate them, I loved them, and I knew we ate animals, like the cows and chickens, and that’s all we are to the sickos – cows and chickens.

The big father with animals on him came down quickly, his arms swinging to the sides, and we ran this way and that, trying to get away. More sickos had come in through the door as well. Luckily the animal man got hold of Aiyshah instead of me. I say luckily: it was lucky for me not lucky for Aiyshah. I didn’t look what he did to her and a bad part of me thought that it served her right for opening the door, although I knew I didn’t really mean it. I liked Aiyshah and I was just relieved that I hadn’t been caught. Now I feel ashamed to have thought that and wish the father had got me instead of her. I don’t deserve to be alive. I feel sorry for Aiyshah and wish she was still alive, but that was the last I saw of her. I could hear her, though, moaning and wailing for a long time as the father did awful things to her.

While he was distracted I got away and ran to the other end of the church. I was not alone. Scott and Caspar were there and there were also three horrible sickos. They were sort of joined together as if they were one horrible creature. They only had two arms to share between them and the one in the middle had no arms at all and he just used his mouth to attack. He would tilt his head back then bring it biting down forward with his top teeth sticking out. I saw him get Caspar this way. Caspar was too weak to defend himself. He couldn’t run.

When things were normal and life was ordinary I used to like playing a zombie game on my dad’s iPhone. It was called Plants vs. Zombies. It was good and fun and quite hard and quite funny as well. You had to put like special plants in the garden and they shot seeds or threw things at the advancing zombies and when you hit one a bit fell off, like their arms. And that’s what the three sickos reminded me of. The middle father had already lost his arms and now he was all teeth and used his head in a bobbing forwards way.

As well as the normal zombies in the game, there was a zombie with a ladder who always had that same action when he had used up his ladder – bobbing forward and cutting down with his teeth. That was always the scariest zombie in the game cos he was quite fast as well. He looked like an old man and he bobbed down and down again with his teeth. That’s what the real sicko did to Caspar, bobbed down so that his top set of teeth jabbed into the top of Caspar’s head, while the other two held him still with one arm each, and every time he bit him, Caspar screamed. There was blood all down his face and his hair was sticking up where the man was biting it.

All around me now were screams and shouts and the sickos were going crazy, like foxes in a chicken run that I read about when I was interested in farms. Foxes are wicked and kill chickens for fun without wanting to eat them.

I was still running around like a mad thing and everywhere I turned there was a horror, another sicko attacking another child. I was sick with worry and fear and panic so that I didn’t know what to do. In the end I saw a doorway. It was the doorway up to the tower. The steeple where Daryl had been. I didn’t know where he was now, I hadn’t seen him since the sickos had got in, or been let in I should say.

I ran to the door and hoped it wasn’t locked. It wasn’t and I got it open and I looked around to see if there was anyone else I could let in. There was only Scott that I could see. The others had all been taken.

I called out to him. ‘Over here,’ I called, and he saw me and a look of hope came into his face and I smiled with happiness and he started to run and I called, ‘Come on!’ and I thought I would have a friend with me behind the door. He didn’t in the end get far because the three fathers got to him and the bad one brought his horrible teeth down, crack, on to his head, and he fell over and I didn’t see him any more so I shut the door and found a key in it and I locked it fast as anything. Which meant I had locked out any of my friends who might still be alive. There was nothing else I could do, though, I hope you understand that.

It was dark in there, and there were winding stairs going up to the top of the steeple. I went up slowly and carefully and nearly jumped out of my skin when someone grabbed me. I gave a big scream, but it was only Daryl, though. He was panicked and crying and very relieved to see me, but disappointed that I was only one person and a girl and quite small. We both asked each other what we were going to do over and over, what are we going to do? I said the others must be back soon and they would save us, and he said yes, they would save us and we would be OK. I wish now that he had been right. The others have abandoned us, though. We don’t matter to them and we didn’t know it at the time, we still had some hope.

We went carefully to the top of the stairs and out on to the top of the steeple and looked down. There were several sickos outside. They had killed our friends and we didn’t want to look at what they were doing. And it was getting dark now and I realized everything had taken longer than I had thought. Everything seemed very dark and bleak and there was no hope for us. That was when I wrote my last entry. On the top as the dark came on us. It was a sort of prayer for rescue. Praying that the others would come back.

Downstairs we could hear the sickos banging on the door. I could imagine the one with no arms banging his head on it and I knew nothing would stop him. He wouldn’t ever stop until he had broken through.

And time passed slowly. So I was up on top of the steeple with Daryl, and the sickos were banging and banging and battering at the door, thump, thump, all night long, they wouldn’t stop. And Daryl went down to see if it was all right, if the door was breaking, and I looked up at the stars in the sky and the way that they went on forever and it made me feel small and that my problems down here were small and to a starman I would hardly even exist. One moment this would make me feel not so scared and unhappy, because my problems didn’t matter, and then I would feel bad because I thought I won’t exist any more and nobody will know about me. I am still Lettis Slingsbury now, but when I am dead what will I be then? I won’t still be me, I will be nothing.

Daryl came back and said the door was strong. He wanted to stay up on the top outside. It got cold at night, though, and we had to go inside. I didn’t like to because the noise was louder in there. There was the banging and also a scratching and snuffling like animals trying to get in. Daryl remembered he had a small candle in his pocket and we lit it and it made it not so bad on the stairs, but still we couldn’t sleep. We held on to each other for warmth and it was warm and not so bad, but we were crying. Sometimes it was me crying and sometimes it was Daryl and sometimes it was both of us.

In the deep and dark of the night, when all was lonely and lost, I slept a little bit I was so exhausted and also weak from hunger and thirst. We didn’t have anything to eat or drink with us, but we did have the candle and a torch I used when the candle burned away, but I didn’t leave it on to waste the batteries. When I woke up I was more wide awake than ever and Daryl was sleeping. That was when I had a lot of thoughts about me and my life and the sickos and my farm and praying and all the other stuff I have written down.

We had this RE teacher at school called Mister Pinker who was always trying to get us to think about things. He had a game he played where he would use what he called thinkazoids. These were things that were supposed to make us think. He’d say, ‘OK, here’s today’s thinkazoid! Did Adam and Eve have belly buttons?’ Or something like that. And there was one thinkazoid he did that I never really got at the time, but I’ve thought about it since and maybe I do get it now. He said if a tree fell down in a forest, and there was nobody there to hear it, would it make a sound? I think what he meant was that sounds only become sounds when we hear them, otherwise it’s just waves that go through the air. So if there were no ears there to pick up the sound waves then is there any sound at all? Something like that. If things happen, and there’s nobody there to see it, do they happen at all?

Well, I’ve been thinking about this book I’m writing and I have a thinkazoid of my own. If you write a book and nobody reads it, does the book exist? Stories in books, characters and things, you know, like places and monsters or whatever the writer has made up and written down, they only really come alive when we read them. Otherwise it’s just a jumble of squiggles on bits of paper. So I’m writing this book now, but if nobody ever reads it does that mean it never really existed, and nobody will ever know my story? Does it mean that I never really existed? I think it’s really sad to think about all the books there are in the world now, many millions and millions of them, that are sitting there in people’s empty homes, and in bookshops and libraries and on miles and miles and miles of shelves, but nobody will ever read any of them again and all those people in the books won’t exist any more. Like me.

In the end the only way I could forget about what was happening and the shapes in the dark and the smell of the sickos at the door and the nasty little noises they made, sniffing and sniggering and scratching and moaning and whining like animals, was to read my journal and to write this all down using my torch to see. It gave me a little hope.

And now I have finished writing and there isn’t anything else. Eventually the sickos will get through the door and nobody will come to rescue us. I am alone and I am going to die and I am scared. If I was braver I would throw myself off the tower, but I’m not brave enough. I am not brave at all, like I have said here before, so first I will hide the book so that the sickos do not get it and then I will sit and wait. I have finished writing and there isn’t anything else.