The Fallen (37 page)

‘That is so
cool
!’ said Achilleus. ‘Let me look at you, Skinboy. How the hell did you end up looking like that?’

‘I didn’t end up like this,’ said the boy, ‘I started out like this.’

‘You were born that way?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘No.’

‘So is there, like, a proper medical term for it?’

‘Nope. Nobody else has ever been like this. All of us, we’re all different.’

‘Are you, like, experiments, or something?’

‘In a way, but not the way you mean. No person made us like this. It wasn’t a mad scientist, or an evil Nazi doctor. A disease did it.’

‘
The
disease? I thought kids couldn’t catch it.’

‘Sort of. It’s connected. Hard to explain. Our parents all worked for Promithios.’ Jackson could see that the boy had some trouble speaking as the folds of skin hung down over and around his mouth, giving it the muffled sound she’d noticed before. She also saw that he had no teeth.

‘Our mums all got sick, though they didn’t know it until a long time later. They went to the rainforest to work with this lost tribe. And they were really careful not to pass on any germs and diseases to the natives there. They knew they’d have no immunity. The tribe was fine. They didn’t get sick. But instead they passed on a disease to our parents. Our parents had no idea. It wasn’t any disease they knew about. It showed no symptoms. Except one.
Us
. We were the first symptom.’

‘You?’ Jackson was trying to make sense of this information.

‘Yes,’ said Skinner, forcing the folds of his skin into a sort of smile. ‘We got the disease in the womb. We were born like this.’

‘That’s harsh,’ said Achilleus.

‘It’s all we’re used to.’

‘You’re like the X-Men,’ said Paddy. ‘You’re mutants who’ve teamed up. Do you have any special powers?’

‘Yeah,’ said Achilleus. ‘He has the power to frighten kids at Halloween without wearing a mask …’

Paddy started to laugh, but then stopped suddenly as Skinner opened his mouth wide. Jackson clamped her hands to her ears and screamed. Skinner was shrieking, a
terrible high-pitched siren sound. Jackson didn’t so much hear it as feel it, right inside her brain like a dentist’s drill tearing into her head. She fell to her knees. Saw that the others were also collapsing in pain. And then Skinner closed his mouth and the sound stopped. The cat, seemingly not bothered by the noise, jumped into his arms.

‘We do have some talents,’ Skinner said quietly, stroking the cat. ‘We haven’t lived this long by being defenceless.’

Jackson stood up, rubbing her temples. She looked at Skinner with a new respect. The others looked shaken and wary.

‘You shouldn’t have done that, man,’ said Achilleus, and Skinner shrugged.

‘We’ve been too long alone together, here in our warped little world, living on top of each other,’ he said. ‘We don’t really have any perspective. Life’s become a sick joke. We talk and we talk and we tease each other and play tricks and we shuffle about the place, living off drugs and medicine. We make up jokes and songs, and TV Boy does his shows, and we laugh at what’s going on out there. We laugh at ordinary kids like you. We need to get out of here. We need to get some fresh air. We need to mix with other people. I don’t know if we can, if it’s too late, if it’s been too long, though. I’m scared it’s going to be too hard, too painful. There’s a lot of hurt out there. We’ve gone sour, shut away here with our games and our stories. We’ve got snotty and arrogant and turned in on ourselves.’

‘Do you really want to risk it?’ said Jackson, getting shakily back up on to her feet.

‘Yes,’ said Skinner. ‘All I want, all I really want … is for you to take me away from here. I’ve had enough of this place. We all know, though, that we couldn’t make it on
our own. Not out there. I’m not scared any more. Whatever happens. Just as long as I get out.’

‘It’s cool,’ said Achilleus, massaging his jaw, as if he’d been punched. ‘We can do that. You are one ugly little bastard, Skinner, and I don’t know what you just did to us, but you’re on my team now.’

64

There was a mob of grown-ups outside the reception area now, growing bigger by the minute. Pressing themselves against the glass walls, pawing at the doors, smearing the windows with their pus and snot and dribble and blood. The dirty bastards. It was disgusting what could come out of a human body. This was one badly diseased bunch of meat-bags. Some looked barely human, just a mess of growths and swellings and open, gaping wounds, like extra mouths. And they were falling apart. There wasn’t one of them that didn’t have some part missing – eyes, ears, noses, lips, arms, legs. One mother’s arm was hanging half off and she was holding it with her other arm. The father next to her looked like he’d been skinned alive. Something from a medical exhibition. Just raw muscle and flesh. Wet. Dripping. Sick …

‘They’re gonna get in,’ said Kamahl. ‘I know it, they’re gonna get in and there’s nothing we can do about it.’

He was sitting on one of the benches, side on to the doors. Not wanting to look. Holding his spear between his knees, his head hanging down.

‘Well, they’re not in yet.’ Brandon was standing near the doors, looking at the stinking wall of flesh outside. He had Kyle’s club in his hands. Ready and waiting. If the grown-
ups did manage to burst in he was going to take down as many of them as he could.

Yeah, right.

He knew full well that if the adults did get in then he and Kamahl were dead meat. He’d seen what had happened to Mick and Jake outside. Jake dragged off, Mick wounded, limping after him. Brandon had to accept that they’d probably seen the last of them. Seemed impossible. Not Jake – that had always been on the cards. He’d always been a bit reckless, wading into fights he couldn’t win. Brandon was amazed he’d got this far, coasting on luck, scraping by. But Mick – Mick was different. Mick had been so big, so tough, so unafraid. He’d been such a good fighter. The best in their crew. And now he was gone. While Brandon had stayed inside. Done nothing. Told himself they were trapped. No way of helping Mick with all the grown-ups round the door …

‘Maybe we should go and find Blue,’ said Kamahl quietly, sounding miserable, his voice small.

‘And tell him what?’ said Brandon, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

‘Tell him what happened.’

‘That we sat here and let them get killed?’

‘There was nothing we could do.’

‘Yeah, we stick to that story.’

‘Shall we go then?’ Kamahl sounded a little brighter, perking up with the thought of getting away.

‘I don’t know,’ said Brandon. ‘We’re supposed to be guarding this entrance. So we’ve got a way to get out of here.’

‘Hah!’ Kamahl finally looked round at the horde of grown-ups. ‘Does that look like a way out to you?’

‘Why isn’t he back?’ Brandon swung the club uselessly at thin air. ‘All they had to do was get the stuff and come back. An hour maybe. Two hours tops. How long have they been gone? I mean, what if it’s just us? What if we’re the only ones left?’

‘Shut up. Shut up, Brandon. Don’t say that. Let’s just go and find him.’

Brandon looked towards the back of the reception area, in the direction that the others had gone. ‘In the dark?’ he said. ‘Down under the building? Not sure of the way? You want to do that or do you want to wait?’

‘I don’t know.’ Kamahl’s brief spark of optimism had died out. ‘I don’t know, Brandon. I wish we’d never come. I wish we’d stayed in Morrisons. We knew where we were.’

‘Yeah, we knew where we were. Up the bloody creek.’

‘And this?’ said Kamahl. ‘What’s this? Disneyland? What’s that out there? The Disney parade? Snow White and the seven hundred zombies …?’

Brandon laughed at that, hysterical, couldn’t stop himself. He laughed until he was crying. Looked at Kamahl, who was crying too. They sat down together on the bench and Kamahl put his arm round him and they held on to each other, waiting for the grown-ups to smash their way in, as the light slowly faded from their world.

65

I can’t write much. It is getting too dark. I can hardly see the paper in this journal. Sorry if my writing is not very clear and neat. I don’t know where they are. I don’t know why they’re not back. I don’t know why they have just left us here. Please come back. We really need you now. Please come back.

66

Maxie was standing by the main entrance at the Natural History Museum looking out as Boggle and another local kid called Cameron got ready to close the great heavy doors for the night. With Robbie still out of action, and Jackson off on the expedition, Boggle was temporarily in charge of security.

‘You’ll need to move so we can shut these,’ he said.

‘Wait a minute longer,’ said Maxie, scanning the darkness.

‘They should be closed already,’ said Cameron.

‘I know,’ said Maxie. ‘I’ll take responsibility.’ Boggle and Cameron waited there, anxious and unsure, keen to be secure. Brooke appeared, stood next to Maxie. She had a fresh bandage on her forehead, but still looked like death. She was worst around the eyes, puffy and bruised. Maxie wondered what she might have looked like before.

‘Still no sign?’ said Brooke.

‘No,’ said Maxie. ‘Where are they?’

‘It must have taken them longer than they thought,’ said Brooke, staring out through the doors. ‘They’re probably holed up somewhere for the night; it’s too dangerous to travel in the dark. You worried about them?’

‘Blue can look after himself,’ said Maxie. ‘Only we don’t know what’s out there where they’ve gone.’

Brooke put a hand on Maxie’s arm. ‘They’ll be back. Don’t stress, yeah. We need to close up, though. We’ll make sure the night watch don’t go to sleep, just in case Blue rocks up in the middle of the night. But my guess is they’ll be back when it’s light. Is a bare long haul to Heathrow Airport.’

Maxie gave Brooke a quick hug. Hoped she was right. She couldn’t stand the thought of losing Blue so soon after finding him. Just her luck, she thought, to have the only two boys she’d ever really liked die on her within days of each other. She tried to be strong, but there was a limit to how much she could take. She’d seen people crack before. People who had coped great for months, lost friends, killed grown-ups, survived … and then it was usually something little that did it. One of her old girlfriends, a girl called Lila, had found a cat with a kitten. She’d taken them in and fed them, made them a cosy sleeping place. But the mother had got some kind of cat flu. She died and the kitten couldn’t look after herself. Lila tried everything but couldn’t get her to eat and slowly the kitten starved to death.

Lila had been heartbroken, couldn’t stop crying and saying how unfair the world was, how mucked up it all was, how there wasn’t any God.

One day she threw herself off the roof. Didn’t die straight away, but had terrible internal injuries. In the end she drowned in her own blood.

Maxie didn’t want it to end like that.

‘We can close the doors,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to wait up. Stay down here. I can sleep in a chair if I need to.’

‘You sure, girl?’