The Hunted (13 page)

‘The doc said really I shouldn’t have been alive at all. He couldn’t work out how I wasn’t dead. Maybe something
got inside me when I was bitten. Only instead of killing me, it made me stronger. Kept me going. Like the grown-ups you see walking around with bits missing, terrible wounds, arms and legs gone, guts swinging in the breeze, their brains hanging out of their heads. But they’re still walking around. How does that work? I mean, I know they’re not zombies, but they might as well be, the way they look and act, the way you can whack them and whack them and they won’t go down.’

‘Take their brains out,’ said Ella.

‘Huh?’

‘That’s what you have to do to zombies. My brother told me – smash their brains out.’

‘Zombies don’t make any sense,’ said Malik. ‘The dead can’t get up and walk. Unless I’m one, one of the walking dead. A revenant.’

‘I don’t think you are,’ said Ella.

‘I don’t think I am either. But why I’m here, how I survived, I can’t tell you. And, like I said, Dr Chris didn’t know either. I got to know him quite well. We talked a lot. Well,
he
talked a lot. My throat hurt too much to mumble more than a few words at a time. The grown-ups had squeezed it, strangling me. They’d squeezed it and bitten it, and tried to rip my windpipe out.

‘Chris told us something of what was going on outside, how things were just getting worse and worse. I guess I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for him. Everything he did for me. And at first it was taking it out of him. Each day he was paler and thinner and darker around the eyes. He’d managed to stockpile some food when it had all kicked off, but it was steadily running out. He was giving us most of it, not eating much himself. He started to get spots and
sores. I didn’t know if it was the disease or if he was just getting run-down. He was always coughing.

‘And then one night he was acting all crazy and manic, like he was high, might have been drunk for all I knew, or raiding his drugs cabinet. After that he seemed to turn around, started getting a little stronger. He started shaving and washing, became quite, you know, optimistic. I told myself that he was going to pull through. I didn’t know then that there’s no cure. You don’t get better.

‘Me and Abby, though, it gave us hope that maybe not everyone was going to die from the sickness. That guys like the doctor would be OK. He’d tell us, when we played cards, he’d say, “Look at me. I’ve beaten it.”

‘He hadn’t beaten it. It was starting to eat away at him. You’d catch him looking at you funny. His eyes all swivelling around. And he’d say weird, random things. Made no sense. And you’d say, “What?” and he’d just laugh – “Nothing” – like it was nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. After a few days of washing and shaving, he stopped. Started getting careless, his clothes dirtier and dirtier, his hands not clean and his hair all greasy. His eyes, they got shiny. He was shaking. And one day he left Tommy’s room unlocked and I went in to see if he was all right.’

Malik stopped. His last few words had been shaky.

‘Was it bad?’ Ella asked, and at first Malik didn’t say anything. He just squeezed her hand.

And then he carried on …

‘Tommy was a mess. With all drips and bags of blood hanging off him. And, worse than that, he had these wounds all over him. Horrible cuts, bits stitched up. The doc had been eating him. Cutting bits off with his scalpel. From his arms and legs. Worst thing was – the boy was still alive. The doc was keeping him alive. So the meat was fresh, I reckon. But man, he was a mess. Unconscious luckily. I knew how bad that would all hurt. So I put a pillow over his face.

‘When I came out, the doctor was looking at me crazy. I laid into him for what he’d done and he broke down, weeping and sobbing and grovelling. Down on his knees, saying all, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” and stuff. I’d liked the doctor, he’d been doing his best, but this thing wasn’t him any more. I had to be careful, though. I didn’t know where Abby was. If he’d done something to her while I was in Tommy’s room. He was clinging on to my shirt. I dragged him along. “Where’s Abby? What have you done to Abby?”

‘He’d injected her like the nurse. She was lying on the floor in the waiting room as if she was asleep. Don’t know what was in the syringe. Hoped it wasn’t poison. I shrugged him off and went to her, and that was when he
came at me with another syringe. But I was ready for him. I’d picked up a scalpel in Tommy’s room. Cut his hand, across the back, and then I dug it in his wrist until he dropped the syringe, blood going everywhere. He was really sorry for himself now, whimpering like a little baby. He went off to his surgery and I heard him banging around, looking for medicine and bandages to fix himself up, I guess.

‘I went back to Abby. She was still alive, though in a dead sleep. I tried to get her up, but it hurt too much. I was still pretty weak and my hands and arms were much worse than my legs. I could hear the doc moving about. Knew he’d be back soon. I did what they do in films. I slapped Abby, but it didn’t do anything.

‘So I hid. I picked up a fire extinguisher and I hid, round a corner near to where Abby was lying, and when the doc came out of his surgery and went to her I hit him over the head. That wasn’t like the films either. He just said, “Ow,” and fell over, clutching his head, not knocked out at all. He’d dropped one of his syringes, though, and I grabbed it up and stuck it in his back and pressed the plunger down. And he jumped up, with the needle sticking out of him, and he stumbled about, ranting and raving, and I hit him with the fire extinguisher again and again, and in the end he sat down on the floor and blew bubbles and his eyes rolled up and went white. I dragged him into the room with Tommy and locked it shut and, as far as I know, he’s still in there.

‘Then I waited for Abby to wake up, too weak to do anything else. Sitting in one of the plastic chairs like I was waiting to see the doctor, and I thought about how weird the world had become and how horrible and depressing.
I’ll tell you, that was one of my low points, one of the very lowest, and I’ve got a lot to choose from.

‘It took a few hours, but eventually Abby woke up, or at least she choked and puked herself awake. When she was feeling OK enough, we talked about what we were going to do and we both agreed we didn’t want to stay there any longer. So twenty minutes later we were out on the street, carrying as much medical gear and drugs as we could.

‘Turned out Abby had been brought to the medical centre by Rav, same as me. She’d been hanging out with him. Part of his gang. They’d been hiding out in Brockridge Park, near his school. There was a building there called Brockridge House. Some rich family had once lived there and the park had been their land. The house was almost a sort of castle and it had a garden with high walls. Rav had made a good choice. Easy place to defend. Open space around it. It’d been a place where you could get cream teas and things, and there were two big rooms you could hire out for parties and weddings. Upstairs was a gallery, I think.

‘Now it was a fortress.

‘It was about a half-hour walk to the other side of town. The streets were quiet, but that didn’t make them any less scary. I knew what it was like to get ambushed, and so did Abby. She’d broken her arm when a load of sick teenagers had tried to kill her. Luckily we didn’t see anyone. No kids. No adults, nothing. Like in cheesy old films where somebody says, “It’s too quiet …” Only in those films the next thing that happens is some big-ass attack. None came, but we were still way tense and by the time we arrived at Brockridge House we were both done in. Abby
was still throwing up from the injection and I was hurt all over and bleeding through my bandages. Anyway, Rav was there with his little army of kids from the school. They were pretty amazed to see us.

‘Rav said he’d had me down for dead. And there I was, walking around. Well, staggering and stumbling and bleeding all over the place. I really
must’ve
looked like one of the walking dead just then. They were excited to see us at first, especially Abby, as she was one of them. But I could tell they didn’t like having me around. I freaked them out. I was too weird, too much like a diseased and rotting grown-up.

‘I mean, for the first few days I was a hero, escaping from the mad doctor, bringing Abby home. Then the next few days after that I was cool, a curiosity, the boy who’d survived an attack, back from the dead. And then I was a freak. Ugly and mashed up and no use to anyone. Even Abby didn’t want anything to do with me. She was back with her old friends. Siding with them. Soon there were whispers, people giving me dirty looks, complaining – you know, “He’s not one of us. Why should we feed him? What can he do to help?”

‘You can’t blame them, I suppose. They were looking after their own. Trying to get by, to survive. I got talking to a little group of kids I’d sort of made friends with. Kids on the edge. Ignored by the others. Guy called Andy who had cerebral palsy and was in a wheelchair, his friend Susannah who had the thickest glasses I’d ever seen and a permanently runny nose, a big wiry boy with a shaved head called Henry. Henry had some kind of learning difficulties and had been in a special school. Didn’t have a mum or dad. Didn’t really know what was going on. He had fits
now and then and kept swearing really quietly, muttering these rude words all the time.

‘They didn’t fit in, so I hung out with them, my new pals. We’d sit in the garden and talk. I was still recovering, trying to get strong, but hurting too much. I was really weak, slept a lot.

‘We were like a weird little gang. I’d always felt a bit of an outsider at school, at Rowhurst. There were only a couple of Muslims in the whole place. I was expected to be friends with them just because we all happened to share the same religion. But we didn’t have much else in common and I didn’t really get on with them, to tell you the truth. I mean, there wasn’t a lot of crap about me being a Muslim; for the most part the boys had been OK. Obviously there were moments whenever there was anything in the news about terrorists or troubles in the Middle East. Then there’d be comments, jokes, people taking the piss. Same as if we were playing Germany at football, the one German kid at school had to put up with a load of digs.

‘But now I really was different. I looked like a monster. You can’t deny it. I
am
a monster. I frighten people. And you know, when people are all squashed up together and things are going badly, they look for other people to blame. I mean, we had grown-ups for an enemy, but there was never enough food in the house. There wasn’t enough room for everyone. So people got forced out.

‘Rav was doing his best. He was a good leader as it goes, but it was hard for him to keep everyone happy. They were always trying to find more food. And when they went out looking they were often attacked by grown-ups. Graffiti started appearing. The kids were spraying the
walls. A sort of logo of a mouth, with big lips, bared teeth and a tongue sticking out. The words “Too many mouths” next to it. Too many mouths to feed. In the end they had a meeting. Rav tried to fight for me. He was cool. But he was voted down, and he wanted to stay in charge.’

‘So did they throw you out?’ asked Ella.

‘Not just me. All of us. All our little gang. Me and Andy and Susannah and weird sweary Henry. They booted us all out. Told us we were on our own.’

‘Were you cross with them?’

‘I just felt too bad to get angry,’ said Malik. ‘I thought that if it wasn’t for me they probably wouldn’t have kicked the others out. Felt it was all my fault.’

‘What did you do? What happened to the others?’

‘First thing we had to do was find a source of food. I talked to the others. We were sitting out under a tree in the park, hadn’t gone that far from the camp. They told me they knew about a supermarket full of food that nobody could get into. Sounded like a magic supermarket to me, but they claimed it was real. All locked up and the windows impossible to break. So I said we’d go there. Work out a way. It was something to do. The supermarket was just outside town with a big car park and a petrol station. It had been built in the same red brick as the older buildings in Rowhurst, to try and make it blend in, but it was huge and out of scale and still looked like what it was – a big shed full of food – like it didn’t really belong there.

‘There were some cars in the car park and a long line of abandoned shopping trolleys. When we reached the supermarket entrance, we found three dead bodies lying there. A middle-aged woman and two younger men. They’d been half eaten. Whether by animals or by other
humans it was hard to tell. One of the guys was missing both his arms. We all tried not to look at them, tried not to think about them. Pretend they weren’t there.

‘The shop doors were bolted firmly shut. We pressed our faces against the glass. It wasn’t exactly full. That would have been too good to be true, but there did still appear to be
some
stuff on the shelves. How were we going to get at it, though?

‘I asked if anyone knew how to hot-wire a car. Not something they taught at Rowhurst. Well, that set Andy off. He was one of those guys who knew everything about everything.

‘He was all, like – “It’s very difficult with modern cars. Almost impossible with any model built after 2004. They have too many security systems. With earlier makes it’s easier, but you’d need tools, wire-cutters and electrical tape and a screwdriver. I’ve never actually done it, but I’ve seen videos on YouTube. It’s quite complicated.”’

Malik said all this in a squeaky, nasal voice and Ella giggled.

‘Yeah, Andy knew a lot of stuff,’ Malik went on. ‘Couldn’t do a lot, stuck in his chair, but knew a lot.

‘So I’m like – “What about those dead bodies? They might have driven here; they might have car keys on them.”

‘“Go on then,” said Andy, and he was almost sort of grinning. “Why don’t you take a look?”

‘I told him no way and he said it wasn’t like
I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here
, I didn’t have to eat them or anything. “Just got to think of them like a dead fox or something, a dead bird.”

‘Anyway, I couldn’t do it,’ said Malik. ‘The way my
hands were I didn’t want to risk infection. In the end Henry did it. I remember him going over to the armless man, mumbling and swearing. He leant over him, covering his mouth and nose with one hand. He got hold of the zip of his jacket between his finger and thumb and peeled it back. The jacket was stiff with dried blood. A cloud of flies flew up from underneath it and Henry fell back on his arse, swearing and spitting.

‘The others laughed. Henry really went for it then. Searching all the man’s pockets, but he couldn’t find anything. Susannah suggested he try the woman’s handbag. She still had it clutched in one hand, though the flesh had mostly been eaten, or had rotted away. I remember her hand was bony, the sinews showing like strings. Henry picked up the handbag and yanked it, trying to wrench it from the woman’s grasp, and there was a snap as her hand broke off and came away with it. He flapped about, trying to shake it loose, and it flew away and hit the window. Then he opened the bag and tipped out its contents. There were all the things you’d expect to find in a handbag – a purse, house keys, make-up, a brush, mobile phone, tissues and ta-dah! – a car key.

‘He found a rag and cleaned it. Then paraded round the car park, aiming it like some kind of ray gun at the cars and pressing the unlock button until at last a Ford Focus flashed its indicators and there was a
clunk
as the locks popped open.

‘Everyone cheered and we crowded round the car. And then we saw what was inside.’