The Sacrifice (31 page)

Yeah. One big fat talking rat who smelt of
rotten trainers and toilet gifts.

‘We’ll have a party. I
don’t often get visitors. But when I do, I always make them feel at
home.’

A party? Right. Yeah.
The Kid had
heard enough. It was time to put his four-step plan into action. He raised his hands to
his hair, his joyous, thick tangle of locks. Like an explosion, sprouting from the top
of his head. Stiff as wire wool it was. Matted solid.

His granddad used to read him stories. The
Kid loved stories more than anything. One of his favourites was about the Twits. Old man
Twit had a beard to write home about. Yes, indeed.

He’d kept things in his beard.

And The Kid kept things in his hair. Oh, the
big boys had frisked him all right, but they really weren’t up to the job. They
weren’t professionals. He had all sorts stashed away in his hair. He felt
carefully for one of his razor blades. A good trick that, to keep razor blades hidden in
your locks. If any grown-ups tried to grab your hair and pull you into their dens they
got a nasty shock, and sometimes lost their fingers.

The twits.

In a matter of moments he’d cut through
the leather twine and freed his hands.

Step two. His cigarette lighter. That was
there to be winkled out, nestling in a pocket of hair like a bird’s egg in a
nest.

Step three. He used his blade to cut a strip
of material from the bottom of his dress.

Step four. He started to move slowly to his
left. He’d seen just enough when the boys had shone their torch in to know that
there was a wine barrel over there and some rickety old wooden props and supports.

‘There’s no point in moving
about in the dark,’ said the voice. ‘It’s not safe. You must be scared
and lonely. Come here. We’ll be great friends, you and me.’

The Kid ignored him and kept shuffling
along, hands stretched out in front of him. Had a good sense of space, learnt from many
months exploring in the dark. Went like a blind boy until he felt the hardness of a
wooden post. His fingers ran over it, reading it, looking for a crack. The wood was
ancient and dry and half rotten. He found a loose strip, dug it out a little with his
blade then prised the strip away. It was about twenty centimetres long and slightly
thicker than a pencil. It would do.

‘I’ve got things you’d
like – sweets and chocolate and, I don’t know, sometimes I forget. Do you like
chocolate? What’s your favourite colour?’

The Kid put his blade back for safe keeping
and then wound the length of cloth round the end of the wood and secured it in place
with the leather twine, binding it tightly into a wad, but leaving a strand flapping
loose.

All the while the monster had been talking,
talking, wheedling, syrupy, trying to hypnotize him, like Kaa the snake in
The
Jungle Book
.

‘Come to me, child, sit with me a while.
They always do. In the end.’

The Kid was finally ready. The big boys had
shown him the best weapon to use to slay the dragon. Light. They’d shone that big
brightness of theirs right in here, trying to scare the monster away from the door.

He walked quickly towards the sound of the
voice, and when he was close, he rolled the flint at the top of his lighter, and as it
sparked into life, he put it to the scrap of loose cloth. It flared and lit. Burned
bright for a few seconds.

Long enough for him to eyeball the
monster.

He was a father. Maybe forty years old,
bald, with long skinny arms and legs and a round pot belly. Just sitting there on a
stone bench, his arms by his sides, his hands resting on the bench, with long
fingernails, horny and twisted. He appeared to be naked, but it was hard to tell; his
skin was marked by the disease, distorted by lumps and growths and swellings, and
covered all over with a soft fur of green mould. His skin was pulled tight on his face,
making his pale eyes bulge and exposing his gums. The sort of face The Kid used to make
in the mirror to amuse himself, pulling the loose skin back with his hands.

As The Kid shoved the flames towards him,
the man raised one hand to his face, shielding it, fingernails rattling.

He swore at The Kid.

‘How’d you get that? Why’d
they let you down here with fire?’

‘Because they’re stupid,’
said The Kid. ‘Because they believe too strong in one sole thing. Their brainboxes
is all facing one way. They don’t think that there might be other things in the
world. I’m not like them. My mind don’t go in a straight line. The steering
wheel is loose.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m The Kid. Who are
you?’

‘Who do you think?’ The
monster’s voice turned cold and hard. ‘I’m Wormwood, the Green
Man.’

Shadowman was making his way back to The
Fear. He had a strange, sick, out-of-joint feeling that he was more at home with his
strangers than he was with other children. He hadn’t bothered to argue any more
with Saif. What was the point? The guy was an arrogant prick. Arrogant like Jaz and
Ricky had been, and if Saif wasn’t careful he was going to wind up as dead as
them.

True, he had a lot to be arrogant about. He
had organized the camp at IKEA well. The big car park was secured all around and they
were growing a lot of food there. He had a collection of cars with petrol in them so his
scavenging parties were fast and efficient and relatively safe. The kids were well armed
and the distinctive blue box of the main building was warm and dry.

Something happened to people when you gave
them too much power, though. They started to believe they were special, that they were
always right, all-powerful, invincible.

Saif almighty.

Shadowman had seen it happen to other kids
around London. A girl called Anita had been in charge of the first safe house he’d
camped out in after the illness hit. It had been out west in Notting Hill. Had been her
family home. They’d done well there to begin with, survived the early
days of chaos and rampage. They’d lived through the first weeks
when the streets had been thick with strangers, and Anita had begun to think that it was
down to her, that
she
was the one making a difference. She couldn’t see
that it was mostly luck.

She got cocky, started taking risks, making
rules, ordering her kids to do stupid things.

It had got her killed. Her and most of the
kids in the house.

Shadowman had had to move on. Tried various
groups of other kids, but always found he preferred being alone. The last place
he’d been living had been a wild camp of hooligans run by a headcase called John.
He was violent, stupid, unfair, but his people did what he told them, looked up to him
even.

Then there was David, lording it up at
Buckingham Palace, thinking he was king of the shit heap. That guy was
definitely
nuts, like every dictator that had gone before him. Nero,
Caligula, Henry the Eighth, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Margaret Thatcher,
Colonel Gaddafi, that crazy North Korean bastard who was in
Team America
, Kim
Jong whatever.

The dear leader.

They all thought they were God. Nothing
could knock them down. But they all got knocked down. They all lost it in the end. They
were no more God than he was.

Overconfidence could kill you, believing you
were invincible. Shadowman was all too aware of that. You had to speak softly and carry
a big stick.

Who had said that?
It was a quote
from somewhere. Just another power-crazed tyrant probably.

All that power, that long run of good luck,
had made
Saif overconfident. Stuck there behind his high fence in his
cosy blue box. He couldn’t get it into his head that things might change, might
not always stay the way he wanted them to be. Which was pretty dim when you considered
what had happened a year ago.

The whole bloody world had changed,
hadn’t it? So why couldn’t Saif see that it could change again?

Saif was a moron and Shadowman was going to
have to live with that. He was not going to keep on hitting his head against the
wall.

Leave them to it
.

In the end he hadn’t wanted to stay at
IKEA anyway. It had weirded him out, waking up in that fake room. He didn’t feel
comfortable in a real bed, with clean sheets, any more. And he hadn’t been made
welcome. The kids had their castle and they didn’t want any outsiders coming in
and taking what was theirs. Only Johnny and his friend Dan had wanted to listen to what
he had to say. They’d shown him some kindness and tried to make him feel welcome.
They’d said they could make Saif change his mind about kicking Shadowman out, but
he’d told them not to bother. He didn’t belong there.

At least he’d got something out of it,
though. He’d refilled his water bottle and picked up some fresh supplies. Johnny
and Dan had seen to that, apologizing all the while. He’d tried to assure them
that it didn’t matter and the last thing he did was try to warn Johnny one final
time.

‘Don’t let Saif attack the horde
unprepared,’ he’d said as he was leaving. ‘At least get him to check
them out for himself before he goes blundering in there without enough muscle. Even with
cars and weapons twenty-five kids is not enough to take on … you
know … ’ He had been
going to say ‘St
George’, but worried about how that might make him look. Giving names to zombies
again.

So he’d left it hanging. Johnny knew
what he meant.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ he
said. ‘But once Saif has an idea in his head you can’t shift it.’

‘You don’t say.’

It felt good to be back on the streets,
alone. It felt right, though walking was painful at first. He’d downed some
painkillers. They weren’t enough, only knocked the edges off his pain. Both his
legs were cut and bruised and his chest was extremely sore. He thought he’d maybe
cracked a rib or two. Gradually his muscles loosened, the pain dimmed and walking became
easier. It was late afternoon and the sky was darkening, not just with the sun going
down; the clouds were thickening, massing for a storm by the look of it. That was
something else he’d learnt in the last year, how to read the weather. Hadn’t
ever really given it a thought before. Hardly ever even looked up at the sky.

He’d only been going a few minutes
when he spotted his first sentinel. A father with a collapsed belly hanging over the
filthy, tattered remains of his jeans. He had adopted the standard pose – arms out, head
slightly tilted back, eyes staring – though with one difference. He was missing a hand.
A cloud of flies buzzed round the rotten stump. Crawled up his arm.

He ignored them.

‘All right, Stumpy,’ Shadowman
said as he walked past and laughed at his little joke.

He spotted three more sentinels along the
way, despite switching routes and trying different roads. They seemed to be everywhere.
He got the impression that they were
fanning out from a central point.
Presumably that would be where the bulk of The Fear were. If they’d moved on from
the tyre centre he should be able to find them by following the sentinels.

He remembered what Johnny had said about
ants, and wondered if the sentinels really were part of some kind of primitive
communication network, reaching out to other strangers and drawing them in to join St
George’s army. He’d certainly seen a few lone wanderers heading in the same
direction he was, plodding along in broad daylight. One of them was even carrying the
body of a small child. Like a cat bringing an offering of a dead mouse.

He had to find out what was going on. He
couldn’t live in ignorance like Saif. The sentinels were the most obvious
indication that the strangers were changing, getting better organized. If The Fear were
somehow using the sentinels to attract other strangers their army could grow very
quickly. How many would they be now? Shadowman and Jaz’s crew had taken down a few
yesterday. Twenty maybe? But would that make much difference?

There was only one way to find out, which
was why he was heading back to the tyre centre. Of course the horde might have moved on,
but all the signs told him otherwise.

It took him a long while to get to his
look-out flat and as he got closer there were more strangers about. He had to be very
careful he didn’t blunder into a big group of them. He went slowly and
didn’t take any chances. So it was nearly two hours after leaving IKEA before he
was safely up in the flat. Nothing had changed; his puke was still there, drying on the
carpet. And starting to honk. The dead couple were still on the sofa, holding hands and
staring sightlessly at a dead television.

He went to the window, put his binoculars to
his eyes and looked out.

The Fear were still there. The sentinels
were out in the road and there was a steady trickle of new strangers shuffling up and
going into the building.

Shadowman wondered what would happen next.
If The Fear stuck to their normal routine they’d come out as darkness fell and
start to hunt. Which way would they go tonight? If there were sentinels as far north as
IKEA then St George might know about the kids there.

Was that how it worked? Had they really
become that sorted? A swarm of ants ready to clear the whole area. That was scary.

It would be impossible to attack
Saif’s kids if they stayed put behind their defences. Would St George know that?
How clever had he become? What might he be planning to do?

It wasn’t long before Shadowman got
his answer. He was watching the front of the tyre centre, only about twenty minutes
later, when he saw dark shapes emerging. At first a slow trickle, then a great mass of
them. Too many to count. Shadowman couldn’t be sure, but it looked like
they’d at least doubled in number.

St George was at the front, with two of his
lieutenants, Man U and Spike. As usual, no words were spoken, no commands given, but the
strangers knew exactly what to do, even though a lot of them must have been new
arrivals. They spilt into the road and for a moment it looked like they might go either
way, left towards IKEA or right towards …