The Sacrifice (35 page)

His candle was about to burn out and they
had to find a way up soon or Wormwood would give in and just eat him and then die down
here wedged in the tunnel like a toad in a drainpipe.

‘Is this the way to work?’
Wormwood asked.

‘Come off it.’ The Kid started
giggling. It was that or start crying. ‘It’s a wormhole for a
worm.’

‘I was working somewhere,’
Wormwood went on. ‘Near here. Promithios. I had a white coat then. Not green. It
was washed white. And at night I’d go home and tell stories to my boys and kiss my
wife, and watch the television. Is there still television?’

‘No, sir. That’s all
gone,’ said The Kid. ‘The juice has run dry, old bean. Maybe one day
it’ll come back. Never used to like the old goggle-box myself, to tell you the
God’s own truth. There was too much in there. It used to set my poor head
spinning, fill it up with words and pictures and the old sound and fury. I hear
something, it goes right into my brain and sticks there, you see? Yeah? Sure you do.
Once the words
go in I can’t rattle them loose. Granddad and
Grandma, they said it wasn’t good for me. TV. Said it overstimulated me. That was
a fine big word, overstimulated. That one stuck. There’s a lot of useless words
stuck in my head: testosterone, Toblerone, mallard, affidavit … And sometimes
the words get broken and mixed up with each other if I get overstimulated. Back then,
with Granddad and Grandma, it was the worst thing to be,
overstimulated
. Did
you used to watch the box with your childers, Mister Worms?’

‘Yes. Yes, we did. Me and my wife and
the three boys. Those were happy times. All of us together.’

‘It’s a long way from there to
here,’ said The Kid. ‘And you can’t get back there. No, sir.
It’s a long way from watching TV with the family to eating small fry like me. You
need to join the dots. How did you end up down here playing the Minotaur?’

‘They came to my workplace,’
said Wormwood. ‘I do remember that. All very hush-hush. That was the word they
used, hush-hush.’

‘Hush-hush?’

‘Yes. They came from the jungle, you
see? Little brown men. It was my job to make sure they were healthy, to check them
over.’

‘Who are you going on about
now?’ asked The Kid. ‘Am I supposed to know?’

‘It hurts my head to answer your
questions,’ said Wormwood. ‘These memories hurt. The past is a heaviness.
Because, you see, something got inside me. Something spoiled everything I had. My home,
my wife, my children, all gone. Something got inside me and made me do things. There are
two of me. Like you said. There’s Wormold and there’s Wormwood. We’re
not the same.’

‘Change the record, Mister DJ, that
one’s stuck.’

‘It was all my fault,’ said
Wormwood.

‘You got sick,’ said The Kid.
‘Wasn’t only you.’

‘Oh but I was one of the
first.’

‘Tell me more about you and the boys
and the lovely wife and Christmas round the Christmas tree, Wormy. Those are the bits I
like.’

‘Yeah, that was nice, that’s a
happy memory. You see? We were working for the company. And it was all hush-hush. And
the sickness got in us. The sickness made us do things. Hide things. We had another
child. A girl. I’ve tried to forget her. She was twisted, you see? Didn’t
come out right.’

‘Now here’s a new story,’
said The Kid. ‘Tell me about the poor twisted girl.’

‘She came out all wrong,’ said
Wormwood sadly. ‘She wasn’t alone. There were others. We were all working
there. Hush-hush.’

‘Working where, old
Wormster?’

‘Promithios. I am Mark Wormold. I work
for Promithios. I study tropical diseases. Parasites. How do you do? “No,
don’t shake my hand, ha, ha.” That was my joke. “You don’t know
what you might catch. Have you met the wife?” I’m Mark Wormold and I have a
wife and three boys. We have a fourth on the way, a lovely girl. My wife always wanted a
girl.’ Wormwood fell silent. All The Kid could hear was him snuffling and panting
and wriggling along on his pot belly, fingernails scritch-scraping on the bricks. And
then, after a long pause, he carried on, sounding very sad and lost.

‘But she came out wrong,’ he
said. ‘We were all there, we all had children, and they all came out wrong.
She’d be
about fourteen now. It was hushed up, hush-hush. All
hushed up. You know the only way to make it right?’

‘Lay it on me, daddio.’

‘To eat the world. To taste the flesh
of the ones who aren’t sick. The ones like you. That’s what I hear them
shouting at me. All of them up there. That we must eat the world and I must show them
how. I try to tell them to keep it buttoned, but they won’t shut up. Their
chittering is in my head. They’re louder now. Up there. The bugs. I tell them
there’s another way. But will they listen? No, because like me, they’re two
in one. I tell them there is a way. I tell them that good blood will force out bad, but
they won’t listen. All they want to do is eat the children.’

‘Not me,’ said The Kid.
‘We got a deal, remember? A cast-iron, copper-bottomed, blue-chipped mug of a
deal. You can’t eat me, buster balloon.’

‘No. No, I don’t want to.
You’re right. I’m sorry. I want to talk to you about the old days, the good
old days, the TV and the bedtime stories and the Christmas tree, my three boys, stars in
the sky and the big green all around, back there with the bugs and the bats, thinking
that was the whole world. Oh yes. Things happened, but we got together and promised not
to tell, and we raised the twisted children in secret. And … and everything
went wrong. The sickness got in me from the start, I think, and it got in the bugs, and
then it got in the men, and they came blinking out of the jungle and the sickness came
over the sea and it got in me, and I became the Green Man.’

‘You’re losing me, Doctor Green.
And I was already lost.’

‘It’s important I remember. Good
blood will force out bad.’

‘You know, Wormy,’ said The Kid,
‘you’re really telling
all this to the wrong person. I
won’t remember but one word of it and that’ll be the wrong word.
Toblerone
. I like the stuff about you and the boys and the stories. The
other stuff … Save it for the judge. You and me, right now, we need to
concentrate on getting the hell out of here.’

‘Well, I guess I’m just
stupid,’ said the boy in the policeman’s helmet. ‘I should have stayed
at St Paul’s with Matt. All that food he’s got there. It’s a
survivalist’s dream come true.’

‘Where’d it all come
from?’ Ed asked.

‘Maybe it was something to do with the
government hoarding stuff when the disease started? Making sure they kept the City of
London going, like in a war or something, you know?’

The boy, Bozo, had been telling Ed all about
Matt’s secret store of supplies, his ‘Tree of Life’. Bozo was a couple
of years younger than Ed and the helmet he was wearing was several sizes too big for
him, so that it fell over his ears.

‘Or maybe Matt was right,’ he
went on. ‘Maybe it was a gift from the gods. But it’s definitely
what’s keeping him going. I couldn’t stick it any longer, though.
“Blah, blah, blah, the Lamb did this, blah, blah, blah, the Lamb did that, there
will be endless weeping and sorrow, blah-di-blah-di-blah.”’

‘But how do they protect it from
grown-ups?’ Ed asked.

‘They built a wall, blocked up all the
roads, so no oppoes can get close.’

Bozo drew a circle on Ed’s map with
his finger, ringing
the cathedral. The two of them were sitting in a
great Gothic porch at the front of the Houses of Parliament. The rest of Ed’s
group were waiting nearby, all except for Adele who was playing a game with some of the
younger kids. Small children seemed to be drawn to her, and their game involved a lot of
running up and down a long corridor and screaming. Seeing Adele like this, a blur of
happy pink, it was hard to imagine that less than two hours ago she’d been
smashing in the skulls of deranged sickos with her club.

The others were sitting eating the rations
they’d brought with them. Nicola hadn’t offered them any food and Ed
hadn’t asked for any. It wasn’t up to her to feed every open mouth that
tipped up on her doorstep. Food was precious. People fought over food. That’s why
Matt was on to such a good thing with his ‘Tree of Life’.

‘Yeah,’ said Bozo. ‘Matt
may be mad, but he in’t stupid. Not like me. I could still be there, growing nice
and fat on all that food or, even better, at Buckingham Palace. Yeah. Used to live there
too. David’s like Matt, got it all sorted out – food, water, security. But like
the moron I am, I came here. Now I get to vote on everything and listen to speeches and,
you know what? It’s nearly as boring as Matt’s sermons. I’m just too
stupid to look for something better.’

‘Yeah, OK.’ Ed tried to stop him
banging on. ‘Can we stick to the cathedral? I need to get there, but there’s
grown-ups out on all the streets and now you reckon there’s a wall as well. Could
we get over it?’

‘If you knew the right spot, but
you’d have to fight through oppoes all the way to get there. Matt’s kids
know the ways in and out, the barriers you can climb over, the buildings you can go
through. You’d be chancing it going in blind, probably wind up as an oppo’s
breakfast. No. If
you were cleverer than you looked you’d go
along the South Bank.’

Bozo indicated the route on the map, running
his fingers along the opposite side of the Thames.

Ed slowly shook his head. ‘It’s
a mess over there,’ he said. ‘Not somewhere we ever go. The fire turned it
all upside down.’

‘It’s not so
bad … ’

A loud bark followed by an outbreak of
snarling and yelping distracted the two of them. Ryan’s hunting dogs were chained
up nearby, one of his boys guarding them. Bozo was on gate duty this afternoon, which is
why Ed had brought his team down there to talk to him.

Ryan’s hunter soothed the dogs and
looked over apologetically to where Ed and Bozo were sheltering from the rain that had
just started to fall.

Ed returned his attention to the map.

‘Are you sure the South Bank’s
passable?’

‘Yeah. It’s the way to
go,’ said Bozo. ‘No kids live in the ruins, so there’s no oppoes
around to prey on them. Unless they’re still coming up from the south it’s
usually pretty quiet over there. It wouldn’t be too hard to get right the way
along the river until you were opposite St Paul’s.’

‘I get it.’ Ed was now tracing
the route himself. ‘Then we come back over one of the bridges down that way, but
we’d still have to deal with the wall.’

Bozo jabbed a finger at a line on the map.
‘Not if you use the Wobbly Bridge.’

‘Why the Wobbly Bridge?’

‘It’s one of their ways in and
out. They’ve blocked it at the south end, but you can easily climb over the
barricade. The cathedral kids go foraging over the river sometimes,
for furniture and stuff, materials for the wall. There’s still stuff there;
it’s not all completely burnt out if you know where to look.’

‘So Matt’s got the wall, what
about other defences?’ Ed asked. ‘Does he have soldiers?’

‘Doesn’t everyone?’

‘Yeah, I suppose. Are they any
good?’

‘Good enough. I mean, he’s not
big on fighting. With the Tree of Life, they hardly ever need to go outside the wall,
but the cathedral
is
still surrounded by oppoes. That part of London is
nuts.’

‘Yeah, don’t I know
it.’

There was the stamp of boots and the rattle
of metal on leather as Ryan brought his hunters out of the building. They’d been
fed, because they provided something useful. They were a combined security and messenger
service for Nicola.

Ed stood up and slapped palms with Ryan.
‘You sure you don’t want to come with us?’ he asked.

‘Nah, sorry, mate.’ Ryan hawked
up a big gob of phlegm and spat it out on to the floor of the porch, then pulled down
his mask. Ed realized with a jolt that it was made from a dried-out human face.

‘I told you my dogs won’t go in
there,’ Ryan said. ‘And if my dogs won’t go I won’t
go.’

‘Fair enough.’

Again Ed didn’t blame him. It
wasn’t his fight.

‘Can I ask you something,
Ryan?’

‘Yeah, what?’

‘We saw a few grown-ups acting weird
today. Standing really still with their arms stretched out, like choirboys who’d
had their song sheets snatched away.’

‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ said
Ryan. ‘We seen some too lately. Remind me of the dogs. When a dog sees its prey,
it goes all stiff and, like, raises one front leg, sticking its nose out.’ He
mimed the action, tensed and alert. ‘Is called pointing. That’s what they
are, those frozen bastards, they’re pointers.’

Ed smiled. ‘Yeah, pointers. That does
it for me.’ He looked over to where the rain was spattering on to the road.
‘You any idea what it’s like out there now?’

‘We just had a look from up
top,’ said Ryan. ‘Seems pretty quiet. You going back into the
badlands?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Good luck, soldier.’ Ryan gave
a dark laugh. ‘I’ll see you in hell.’

‘OK, it’s like this.’ Ed
pulled his hood up to cover his head. ‘We’ve got to go back into the zone.
But thanks to Bozo here we have a safer route. I won’t pretend it’s going to
be any better than it was before, though. So if any of you want to duck out I’ll
say it again, it’s not a problem. I can’t order any of you to do
this.’

‘Can we just go,’ said Adele,
pushing past him. ‘You know, without thinking about it too much?’

‘Yeah,’ said Macca.
‘We’ve come this far, we ain’t gonna just abandon you now, are we, Ed?
And on top of everything else we’re going to get well wet. So the quicker we get
this over with, the better.’

Ryan’s squad was out in the rain
getting their dogs ready. The animals had gone into a frenzy of happy barking and tail
wagging. Bozo opened the gates for them and watched as they trooped out.