The Fear (28 page)

They ran past an endless blur of doors and windows, but at last came to the end of one train and were able to jump down on to the tracks. Then they were out past the great overhanging canopy of the station roof and into the daylight. They slowed down. Every time they were forced to run it took more out of them – their legs ached, their lungs burned, their throats were dry, their feet sore and blistered in their grubby old trainers.

They kept moving, looking down so as not to lose their footing as they stepped from one sleeper to the next, avoiding the loose clinker that lay between them.

Tom, crippled by a stitch in his side, stopped and bent over. Acid had risen in his gullet and he wanted to be sick. Surely they didn’t need to run so hard now. The strangers had appeared to be a particularly badly infected bunch, and unlikely to keep up. And hopefully their fear of the sun would hold them back.

Tom straightened up.

‘Oh, crap.’

Now they all stopped. Appalled at what they saw ahead of them. A tunnel, and every single train track ran straight into its huge black mouth.

‘That’s just great,’ said Tom. ‘Well done, Jester. We’ll find some tracks to lead us north, will we? Have a nice walk in the fresh air?’

‘How was I to know?’

‘Why did we listen to you?’

‘I ain’t going in there,’ said Alfie, staring at the dark tunnel, trying not to cry.

‘We’ll just have to get off the tracks,’ said Shadowman, hoping to avoid another pointless and tiring argument. He’d been holding back, biting his tongue, not wanting to step on Jester’s toes, but he was beginning to wonder whether he should take charge. It would at least take the pressure off Jester.

‘Yeah?’ said Tom. ‘Good plan, Batman. I’d never have thought of that.’

‘Piss off, Tom,’ said Shadowman.

‘Leave Tom alone,’ said Kate, moving next to her boyfriend.

‘All you two do is moan,’ said Shadowman. ‘How does that help, exactly?’

‘Sod you,’ said Tom bitterly. ‘Once we’re away from here, I don’t care what any of the rest of you say, me and Kate are going back to the palace.’

‘They’re coming,’ said Alfie.

They looked back to see that the strangers from the station were trying to slither down off the platform on to the train tracks.

Shadowman looked around – there was a bank on one side, too steep to climb. A mess of fences and building works on the other. They could run or they could fight. He saw a way to unite the group and lift their spirits. The strangers would only be able to get down in ones and twos. They were groggy and uncoordinated, they struggled with their balance and climbing was something they found difficult.

‘Come on. We can at least get rid of that lot,’ he said, striding over to where the first of the grown-ups was crawling across the tracks. He went straight up to it and as it rose to its feet he swung his club like a batter, splattering its brains over the back end of the train.

Tom and Kate cheered.

‘Yeah!’ Tom shouted. ‘Now you’re talking. Let’s take them out!’

The next few minutes were merciless. The confused and feeble strangers carried on trying to get down off the platform and Shadowman’s calculations were correct. They were arriving singly, making them easy targets. His club rose and fell, smacking into bone. Tom and Kate’s swords were soon covered in blood from the tips of their blades to the pommels on the end of the grips. Alfie was throwing stones and yelling madly.

Only Jester held back, shouting instructions, but keeping clear of the bloodshed.

Soon thirteen strangers lay dead or dying, and the rest of them realized they were beaten. They retreated back along the platform towards the station.

The kids cheered again and hurled insults after the limping, defeated grown-ups. They looked at each other, covered in gore, exhausted, sweaty, but exhilarated.

‘Slice and dice,’ said Tom.

‘Mincemeat,’ said Alfie.

‘You still look very clean, Jester?’ said Kate, staring at his patchwork coat that had only a couple of spots of blood on it. ‘Didn’t see you doing much damage.’

Shadowman kept quiet. He wasn’t looking at Jester, wasn’t interested in whether or not he’d pulled his weight. He’d noticed something. While they’d been fighting, a smaller group of strangers had emerged from the tunnel down the tracks, no doubt lured by the noise and the smell of blood. There were six of them, and they looked considerably tougher and less sick than the ones from the station.

‘The party’s not over yet,’ he said wearily, and pointed to the new arrivals.

Jester erupted angrily. ‘You think I can’t do any damage? Think I don’t know how to fight? Yeah? Well, watch this!’ He grabbed Shadowman’s club from him and strode towards the oncoming strangers who slowed down, not sure if it was safe to move in for an attack.

Jester broke into a sprint, charging full pelt at the strangers, and smacked the first one, a tall father with long fair hair, hard in the neck. He didn’t go down, though, and the other strangers managed to close in on Jester so that he had no room to properly swing the club again.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ said Shadowman. ‘We need to help him.’

The four of them dashed over and started to lay into the strangers. Tom, Kate and Alfie concentrated on the ones who were hanging back. Shadowman headed for Jester, intending to pull him free of the two big fathers who had him by his left arm. But, just as Shadowman got close, Jester swung the club back with his free hand and it struck Shadowman square between the eyes.

It was like being hit by a firework. A shower of sparks exploded in front of Shadowman’s eyes and he suddenly didn’t know which way was up or down. He collapsed to his knees with a grunt, and his bladder emptied, soaking his jeans. Everything had gone a sickly yellow colour and was flipping over and over. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. His head felt as big as the moon and he was shivering, suddenly freezing cold.

The voices of the other boys boomed around him, but he could make no sense of them. The sound hurt him, though. He held his temples, wanting to scream, trying to hold his expanding head together.

He was dimly aware of the strangers being beaten down, of Tom and Kate yelling at Jester, then running off, Jester shouting after them.

Where were they going?

Come back …

I’m still here.

I need your help.

Now Jester was looking at him. His lips moving. Words buzzed in the air, but Shadowman couldn’t catch them. Jester and Alfie tried to pull him to his feet. Every time he stood, though, his legs gave way. In the end they dragged him to the side of the tracks.

‘Can you walk, Shadowman … can you walk … can you walk …?’

Shadowman couldn’t even speak, let alone walk.

‘There’s more of them coming … more of them coming … more of them …’

Where?

Shadowman tried to focus, but the image just flipped and skipped. He forced his face round towards the tunnel mouth. Another gaggle of strangers was emerging.

‘We’ll have to leave him … we’ll have to leave him … have to leave him …’

No …

‘I’m sorry … sorry … sorry …’

No …

The sky was pulsing. Shadowman threw up. Made a last effort to stand. For a moment he was up, then he was overcome with dizziness and he hit the ground with a hard, painful thump.

Everything went black.

He could taste dirt in his mouth. He opened his eyes. He was lying on his side. Staring at the tunnel.

Jester wasn’t there any more. Alfie gone too.

More strangers were coming out. No chance of counting them as they jumped about in his vision. They looked to him like a horde, an army, thousands of them.

Coming along the tracks towards him.

Where were his friends?

Oh yes. They’d run.

He had to hide.

Or something.

No. He was all right. The strangers weren’t coming towards him, after all. They were veering off, going after Jester and the others. They hadn’t seen him where he lay in a tangle of weeds. He was safe. It was going to be all right.

And then he felt a tug at his foot.

With a supreme effort he rolled his throbbing head round to look. It was one of the strangers from the battle. The father with the long fair hair. He wasn’t dead. He was slithering towards Shadowman on his belly, and he had his fingers clamped tight to his shoe.

Shadowman moaned.

It was the dead fighting the dead.

‘We going inside that, are we?’ said DogNut, bending his neck back to look up at the curved windowless walls of the building in front of him. It rose up eight storeys, looking like nothing so much as a giant concrete nut. The structure stood inside a modern extension to the Natural History Museum that was all glass and steel and hard surfaces.

‘Yes,’ said Justin proudly. ‘It’s where the museum laboratories are.’

‘You sure it ain’t stuffed with sickos?’

‘No. Just kids. Kids and millions of specimens.’

‘Why did the museum need labs?’ DogNut asked as they set off up the stairs. ‘Were they studying diseases, like?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Justin. ‘I think they studied plants and animals, fossils, that kind of thing. We’ve found some amazing scientific apparatus. A lot of it we’re still trying to work out how to use, but there’s loads of things we’re already using, like microscopes, computers, fridges …’

‘I think even I could figure out how to work a fridge,’ said DogNut.

‘We have to keep our specimens cold,’ said Justin.

‘Yeah, I know. You wouldn’t want your sickos to go off.’

There was an entrance to the pod on the third floor and Justin led DogNut into the dark interior, his torch shining over the walls and floor.

‘This building is called the Cocoon,’ Justin explained. ‘Before the disaster it had all sorts of displays and interactive stuff in here, projections on the walls, audio playing …’ He ran his torch beam over the walls like an archaeologist in a prehistoric cave. ‘All dead now, of course, but the museum’s collection of stuffed animals, seeds, insects, bones, weird things preserved in jars – that’s all still here, the physical things, the real things, not digital … bleeps and pixels and ones and zeros.’

There was a series of sloping ramps in the Cocoon that gave occasional glimpses of deserted labs as they climbed inside it, but as they rounded a corner near the top DogNut saw light up ahead. Electric light, burning inside a busy lab full of kids.

DogNut looked at the bright lamps and the glow of monitors attached to functioning computers as if they were some kind of magic. They had a generator at the Tower and one night a week they fired it up so that they could listen to music and watch DVDs in a communal room, but it was the warmth and cosiness of the lights that the kids enjoyed most.

Looking through the windows into this bright laboratory was like looking into another world. The world that had existed before the disease wiped it all out. Except there was an unreal quality to it, since all the scientists wearing the lab coats were children – fourteen, fifteen years old. As if they were involved in a school film project or something, playing at being grown-ups.

They were making a pretty good job of it, however. DogNut had to admit that life at the Tower was little better than medieval. This was something different.

‘So you got another generator in there to power it all?’ he asked.

‘Not in there,’ said Justin. ‘The fumes would kill us. There’s a couple up on the roof.’

He took DogNut inside, and they wandered among the desktops. Kids were peering in microscopes, looking at things in dishes, writing notes, reading books … DogNut’s brain was beginning to ache.

‘How d’you have time to run the museum and all this?’ DogNut asked.

‘Oh, I don’t run the labs,’ said Justin. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m not great at biology – physics is more my thing.’

‘I thought it was all the same. Just science.’

‘No. Ah, here he is …’

DogNut saw a boy approaching across the laboratory floor. He was tall and wearing a grubby white lab coat over black jeans, a tweed jacket and a tatty old sweater. He had a shock of untidy dark hair and would have been quite good-looking if his teeth hadn’t been yellow and blackened, jutting out like horse’s teeth from rotten, receding gums.

‘This is Einstein,’ said Justin.

‘For real?’ said DogNut, grinning.

‘Yeah, obviously for real,’ said the boy sarcastically. ‘I really
am
Einstein. Justin regenerated me from cells found in a preserved lock of his hair.’

‘So it’s a joke name?’

‘Yes. My real name’s Isaac Newton.’

‘OK. Cool. Hello, Isaac.’

The boy snorted and looked to Justin then back to DogNut.

‘You’ve never heard of Isaac Newton, have you?’

‘Nope. Should I of?’

‘He was only the most famous British scientist of all time, the man who discovered gravity, worked out the laws of the universe.’

‘I didn’t really do a lot of science at school,’ said DogNut.

‘You surprise me. What
did
you specialize in? Finger painting?’

‘I liked history.’

‘Give the man a banana. History. Not a lot of use in the modern world, but it’s better than nothing, I suppose.’

DogNut stuffed his hands in his pockets. Otherwise he was in danger of hitting the boy, whose superior, sarcastic manner might have been even more devastating if his breath hadn’t stunk.

DogNut made a last effort to be polite.

‘So, if you’re not really Einstein, and you’re not really Isaac Newton, then who are you?’

‘Stephen Hawking.’

‘Listen, dickwad,’ said DogNut, grabbing the boy’s throat. ‘Stop taking the piss or I’ll knock your green teeth out.’

‘Oh, how brave.’

DogNut slapped him and let him go. The boy looked shocked for a second and then laughed in DogNut’s face.

‘I can see that the world of meticulous, patient, scientific enquiry is not for you. I rather think what we do here is going to be lost on you.’

‘Whatever.’

‘But at least you seem to have heard of Stephen Hawking.’