Dragon Shield (13 page)

The Officer braced a hand on either door and pushed back against the lion-women.

‘Come on then!’ he shouted. ‘Get a bend on!’

The grenadier jumped in behind him and threw his weight against the doors.

One of the lion-women looked round the edge of the door and snarled.

‘Soldiers!’ she roared. ‘Soldier statues!’

Will saw the door begin to close again.

The Officer waited until Will was right on him, then he let go of the door, grabbed Jo and threw himself backwards. The doors began to slam, but Will’s shield jammed the gap open. The strap parted and he tumbled out onto the steps.

Looking back inside the museum he saw the blue lights begin to flicker faster and faster and heard a voice that appeared to come from everywhere roar in anger as the whole building seemed to vibrate into a blur.

‘ALL WHO BEAR ARMS AGAINST US, TREMBLE AND BOW DOWN! ALL SOLDIERS AND WEAPON BEARERS, HEAR THE WORD OF MIGHTY BAST THE HUNTRESS!’

The shield holding the door open began to buckle under the pressure of the force being exerted on it, and then two things happened at once: it flexed and spanged out, flying over Jo’s and Will’s heads, and as the door slammed shut with a noise like the crack of doom itself, the dog Filax hurtled out of it.

Will stared at the closed doors and realized what it meant.

‘George!’ he cried. ‘The George is stuck in there—’

‘No I’m bally well not’ said a voice.

He looked down to see the knight was holding on to the shaggy mane of the dog, which he had ridden to safety.

Will’s heart leaped with elation. Everything was going to be all right.

Even Jo’s hand, which seemed to be clutching his own, was reassuringly warm.

He grinned at her. He didn’t have the words. She grinned right back at him.

Epilogue

There was still some struggling and movement going on outside as they hurried back toward the road. The small knight riding the large dog patted its side and grinned up at them.

‘Always wanted a horse of my own,’ he said. ‘But I think this plucky mutt is rather better. What I like about this fell—’

Will was about to introduce Jo when the bad thing happened, and the happy ending changed into something else entirely.

‘BE STILL!’ roared the voice from inside the museum.

The walls flexed with a silent detonation, and a ring of blue radiated out across the ground. As the thin blue curve that marked the blast radius passed over them, each of the soldier statues froze in whatever position they were in.

The George never got to finish what he was saying about the dog, The Officer was stuck with his mouth open, the two Georges who Will now saw had been detained outside the museum by a pair of dragons, stopped dead, and one by one the soldiers stopped moving.

‘Will?’ said Jo. She was groggy, like someone who has been asleep. ‘Will, what’s that?’

There was a terrible crash as something fell out of the night sky and bounced off the roof of the museum.

It was the Pilot. Stiff as a bar of iron.

The only thing that moved was a small bronze boy who had obviously escaped the Gunner’s custody, and who ran over and dragged Jo and Will into motion, yanking them out of their shock and leading them away from the museum and the still ominous vibration within.

‘Come on! We got to get out of here,’ he said. ‘It’s all gone for a ball of chalk!’

‘Will!’ said Jo. ‘Really. What’s happening?’

Will couldn’t speak. He was staring at all the terrible frozen soldiers. The Duke’s words about London being safe because it had so many military statues rang hollowly in his ears.

‘He saved you,’ said Tragedy.

‘Of course he did,’ she said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘He’s my brother. And he’s not a coward, even if he says he is.’

Will stopped, stunned.

‘You heard . . . ?’

‘. . . the last thing you said to me before I was taken here? Yes I heard that and no: you’re not a coward, stupid. Annoying, yes. A coward, no.’

She might as well have suckerpunched him.

‘But I didn’t jump Jo, when you thought I’d jumped like you did, I hadn’t . . .’ he said.

‘I know’ she said.

He stared at her.

‘Doofus. I saw you! You lowered yourself halfway and jumped the rest. I was watching from the bushes before you came and found me with your big dare.’

‘You never said . . .’ he began.

‘You said quite enough,’ she laughed.

‘When?’ he said. ‘When did I say anything? I didn’t! I should have but I didn’t.’

She shook her head in disbelief.

‘When you jumped down after me? When you tried to help me stand up, before we realized how bad my leg was and I fainted, you were gabbling all about it, saying sorry and explaining . . .’

She trailed off.

‘You don’t remember?’

He remembered gabbling in terror, he remembered the panic. But he had no clue what he’d said.

‘I told you?’ he asked. ‘But why, why didn’t you tell me I’d told you?’

‘I thought we’d just sort of silently agreed not to talk about it,’ she shrugged. ‘Will. You double-doofus! Is this what you’ve been sulking about all year?’

He didn’t know what to say. His head was buzzing with a heady cocktail of relief, adrenaline and deep fear of whatever was going on behind them in the museum. But most of all it was the relief of Jo looking normally at him. He was about to say so when Tragedy hopped between them.

‘I don’t want to interrupt all this nice chat, but in case you hadn’t noticed, all the soldiers is froze stiff as the Regulars. Never seen nothing like it.’

His words reminded Will of something, a thought he’d pushed to the back of his mind ever since he had touched the roller-skating girl back in the supermarket. He stopped and reached out to touch the hand of a woman frozen in the act of opening an umbrella. She was not just cool. She was cold. An answering chill went through him. She was almost frozen in more ways than one.

‘The people are losing their heat,’ he said. ‘Feel. This woman’s hands are freezing . . .’

Jo reached over. Touched the hand. Then the face. Then she touched the face of a street-sweeper emptying a bin beside her.

‘They’re all going to be frozen in more ways than one if they keep on like this,’ she said, her voice rising. ‘It’s not over then Will, is it? We can’t just . . . wake up now, can we?’

‘No,’ said Will tearing his eyes from the unmoving soldiers as they ducked into a narrow street and picked up speed.

‘No. I don’t think we can. We got you back – but I think I broke everything else. And I think we need to stop this before everyone gets too cold ever to wake again.’

He saw her suck it up in one long breath.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Fine. That’s what we do then.’

And then they pounded down the road for a long time, turning right and left as Tragedy led them, in silence.

After a bit Jo stopped hobbling at speed and slowed. And after a shorter bit she stopped completely and rubbed her leg.

There was a noise behind them. Will instinctively stepped protectively in front of Jo as the creature hurtled round the corner.

It was Filax.

He was carrying something.

He dropped it at Will’s feet and looked expectantly at them.

It was the bent Dragon Shield.

Jo bent and ruffled the dog’s ears. Its tail thumped happily on the ground. She met Will’s eyes.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘Me too,’ said Will. ‘We’ll get you a bike or something. Maybe find another chair.’

‘So this isn’t the end,’ she said looking at him, clear-eyed for the first time since he’d rescued her.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I think it’s worse than that. I think it’s just begun.’

She looked over at Little Tragedy. He smiled at her. She nodded and looked back at Will.

‘At least we’re together,’ she said. ‘However bad things are going to get, that’s a good start.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, picking up the shield and patting the dog. ‘Yeah. That’s good.’

And for now, just for now, it was.

. . . 
to be continued
.

If you liked
Dragon Shield
, then you’ll love
Stoneheart
! Set in the same world, George finds himself plunged into a world he doesn’t understand after he breaks a carving in the Natural History Museum . . . Read on for a sample . . .

George never spent any time wondering why he wanted to belong. He just did. Things were like that. You were in or you were out, and in was a lot safer. It wasn’t the sort of thing you questioned. It was just there.

On the class trip before this one they’d been to the War Museum and learned all about trench warfare. George had thought that’s what life felt like: just keeping your head below the parapet so you wouldn’t get hit.

Of course that was last year, in the past, like all the other things about being a kid. He still thought about them sometimes. He still remembered what being a kid was like. But he was over that. He was twelve. Real Twelve, not ‘Only Twelve’, as his father had called it the last time they’d spoken. He knew
his
twelve wasn’t anything like his dad’s because he’d seen pictures of his dad as a kid looking clueless and speccy and fat, all of which – in George’s twelve-year-old trench – would be the equivalent of sitting on top of the parapet with a big round target painted on your head yelling, ‘Cooee, over here’.

George could remember talking and laughing about stuff like that with his dad, before his dad moved out and there was too much talking altogether.

He didn’t say much at home any more. His mother complained about it, usually to him, but sometimes to other people late at night on the phone when she thought he was asleep. Somewhere inside it hurt when he heard her say that – not as much as when she said he used to have such a lovely smile – but nearly.

And nowhere near as much as never being able to say anything to his dad ever again.

The thing was he wasn’t
not
saying anything on purpose. It was something that seemed to have just happened, like his baby teeth falling out, or getting taller. Mind you, he wasn’t getting taller as fast as he would have liked, and right now that was part of the problem.

He was average height for his age, maybe even a bit more – but somehow he
felt
shorter, the same way he sometimes felt older than he was. Or maybe it wasn’t exactly older, just a bit more worn and rumpled than his classmates – rather like his clothes. His clothes were all thrown in the same washing machine, colours and whites together, and though his mother said it made no difference, it did. It made everything pale and grey and washed out, and that’s exactly what George felt like most of the time.

It was certainly what he felt like today, and not being able to see properly was making him feel more insignificant than usual; all he could make out was the whale’s belly and the back of his classmates’ heads as they clustered round a museum guide showing them something interesting. George tried to push forward, but all he got was an elbow in his ribs. He sidled round the pack and tried to get another view, careful not to push anyone.

He found a place where he could nearly hear and edged closer, peering through the thin gap between a circular stand full of pamphlets and a boy about four inches taller than him. As he rattled the stand with his shoulder and reached to steady it, the boy turned and registered him.

George found himself smiling at him on reflex. The boy didn’t return fire on the smile. He just looked away without comment. George wasn’t too worried about being blanked. In fact he was relieved. The boy was the name-maker, the one with the gift for finding the cruellest nicknames for his peers, then making them stick. He’d almost been a friend of George’s when they’d all been new together, but finding his gift had given him a kind of easy invulnerability, a power that meant he didn’t have to have friends any more, only followers. That’s what made him dangerous.

The boy turned back round. This time he spoke. ‘Something I can help you with?’

George froze. Then tried to hide the freeze with another smile and a shrug. ‘No. Uh. Just getting a better—’

‘Don’t stand behind me.’

The boy turned away. But several others had seen, and in their eyes George saw something he recognized. Not interest, certainly not sympathy, not even much dislike. Just a pale gratitude that they weren’t the target this time.

So George swallowed and stayed where he was. He knew enough not to be seen being pushed around. He knew once you did that you were sunk. He knew there was a level below which you couldn’t afford to sink, because once you were down there, there was no ladder back up. Once you were in that pit, you were fair game for everyone, and everyone unloaded on you.

So he looked down at the square of marble he stood on and decided he’d stick to it. There were teachers present, anyway. What’s the worst that could happen?

The boy calmly reached backwards and toppled the stand, right into George. He stepped back, but there wasn’t enough room, so he batted at the metal column with his hands to protect himself. It hit the floor with a loud metallic crash, spilling pamphlets all across the tiling around George.

The room went suddenly very quiet. Faces turned. The boy turned with them, innocent-looking amazement quickly morphing into shocked surprise.

‘Chrissakes, Chapman!’

The cluster of boys around him dissolved into hooting anarchy, and the three adults, two teachers and a guide, were left looking for the culprit. And with everyone else doubled up and pointing, there he was, head above the parapet, feet bogged down in a landslide of bright-coloured paper booklets.

Mr Killingbeck fixed him with a sniper’s eye, crooked a bony trigger finger at him and fired a one-word bullet.

‘Chapman.’

George felt his face reddening. Killingbeck snapped his fingers at the other boys.

‘The rest of you clear Chapman’s mess up! You – follow me.’

George walked after him as he stepped away from the mob.

He followed him out of the whale room back into the central hall of the Natural History Museum. Mr Killingbeck stopped in the middle of the room beneath the dinosaur skeleton and beckoned him closer.

George had enough experience of Mr Killingbeck to know not to start what was coming. So he just waited. The man’s mouth worked slowly. He always worked his mouth as if everything that he said tasted bad, and had to be spat out before it caused him more pain and discomfort.

‘Mmm, tell me, were you trying to be rude, Chapman, or does it just come naturally?’

‘It wasn’t me, sir.’

‘Who was it then?’

There was no answer to that. No answer George could give. He knew it. Killingbeck knew it. So he didn’t say anything.

‘Moral cowardice and dumb insolence. Neither very appealing, Chapman. Neither what you were sent here to learn, are they?’

George wondered what planet Killingbeck was on. Planet 1970-something probably. Not a planet where George could breathe. He began to get choked up. His face began a slow burn that he could feel without seeing.

‘That was unforgivable, boy. You behaved like something wholly uncivilized. Like that ape over there.’

The bony finger jabbed at a monkey in a glass cage, baring its teeth in the grimace that would be the last message it ever sent to the world. George knew what it felt like.

‘You’re uncivilized, Chapman. What are you?’

George just looked at the monkey, thinking how strong and frightening its teeth looked. More like fangs really.

Killingbeck worked his mouth.

George found the blob of Plasticene in his pocket and began kneading it with his fingers. It still had the knobbly contours of a face he’d made on the bus.

‘I think it’s worth something more than sullen silence, Chapman. I think it’s worth an apology for a start.’

George’s thumb coasted over the open mouth in the Plasticene face and wedged it a bit wider.

‘Get your hands out of your pockets.’

George smashed the nose on the Plasticene and pulled his hand out of his pocket.

‘You’re going to say sorry if you have to stand there all day. Do you understand?’

George worked the Plasticene in his fist.

‘Or you can tell me who you say did it. Do you understand?’

George understood. There was a rock. There was a hard place. And then there was him, jammed up between the two. He couldn’t grass on another boy, even a bully, because grassing would drop him into a place so low in the eyes of the other boys that not only was there no ladder back up, but there was no floor either. Grass someone up, and the rest of your life would be spent in free-fall down a pit that just got deeper and darker and never stopped.

That was the rock.

That was simple.

The hard place was less simple, maybe because it was so big, so immovable.

The hard place was everything else.

The hard place was his life.

The hard place was everything that led to this moment.

And the moment was clamping round him and giving him nowhere to run.

‘Chapman?’ Killingbeck’s finger tapped impatiently on the side crease of his trousers.

George looked at the monkey’s fangs. How easily they’d snap through that impatient stick of flesh and brittle bone. He’d like to have those teeth in his head. He’d like to bite that finger off and spit it back at Killingbeck. He’d like it so much that he could feel the crunch and crack and almost taste the blood. The feeling was so immediate, so nearly real that he was suddenly frightened by it as it hung black and treacly in his mind. He’d
never
had a thought like that. The shock made him reel inside and forget he wasn’t speaking.

‘Sir?’

‘Well?’ Killingbeck’s voice jerked him back into the now, back between the rock and the hard place. He didn’t know what he was going to do. But he suddenly knew from the prickling in his eyes that there was one treacherous possibility.

George was not going to cry. And knowing what he
wasn’t
going to do suddenly made it all clear. He knew what to do, what to say. And he knew to say it very slowly, very calmly so as not to let the thing rising in his throat choke him.

‘I understand that’s what you think I should do, sir.’

Killingbeck looked at him with the surprise of a hungry man whose dinner just bit back. His mouth stopped chewing at the next thing he was going to say.

‘I just don’t agree with it.’

The pupils in Killingbeck’s eyes irissed down to the size of full-stops.

George knew he’d made a mistake. He knew, with a sudden flash of intimacy which scared him more than the finger-biting image, that Killingbeck wanted to hurt him. He could feel the itch in the man’s hand as the bony fingers blunted into a fist.

‘Well. Well, well, well. That’s fine.’ Killingbeck closed his eyes and ran his free hand through the thick grey hair that curled back round his skull, as if he was trying to massage the very thought of George out of his head. ‘You’ll stay here until you decide to apologize. If you haven’t done so by the time we leave, you will be in more trouble than you can imagine. You will stand straight, you will not sit down, you will not put your hands in your pockets, you will not chew at sweets, you will not move from this spot. The museum guards will not let you out unless you are with the rest of the party. We will pick you up in an hour and a half and you will apologize then, in front of everyone. Do you understand
that
?’

His eyes snapped open. George didn’t flinch. ‘Yes.’

Killingbeck 180’d and strode off after the rest of the class.

George listened to the click of his heels across the stone floor.

Then he put his hands in his pockets. Then he sat down on a bench. Then he put a piece of chewing gum in his mouth.

And then he got up, walked to the door and out into the drizzle that was soaking the steps in front of the museum.

The guards didn’t give him a second look.