The Enemy (4 page)

“Oh no,” said Freak.

“I’m al right,” said Deke. “It’s nothing.” But then he coughed again and there was blood in his spit.

“It’s in your lung, man,” said Achil eus. “The glass.”

Deke’s eyes were rol ing up in his head.

“Hold on, bro,” said Freak.

“I think I’m going to . . .”

“Don’t faint, bro,” Freak shouted, and shook his friend as he fel into unconsciousness. “Arran! We got to get him out of here.”

Almost as Freak spoke, the grown-ups attacked again. At least ten of them blundered up from the pool.

Arran was fil ed with a blind rage. He couldn’t stand it that another kid was wounded. They didn’t have the drugs to deal with it, and the water in the pool must have been swarming with filth and germs. With a great roar he lashed out to right and left, smashing his club into the grown-ups, shattering bones, breaking noses, loosening teeth, closing eyes. He was hardly aware of what was going on around him, only that Achil eus was at his back, cold-bloodedly dealing with the grown-ups in his own way.

When a mother came at Arran, long hair flying, he gripped her by the throat and squeezed. Her head thrashed from side to side, her scabby hands flapped at him. Her hair whipped out of her face so that for a moment he saw her clearly.

Her nose was half rotted away by disease. There were boils and sores covering every inch of skin. Her lips were pul ed back from broken teeth, showing black shrunken gums.

Everything about her was disgusting, inhuman, degraded —apart from her eyes. Her eyes were beautiful.

Arran looked into them, and for a moment he saw a flash of intel igence.

He froze. Time seemed to stop. He had the sudden vivid notion that this was al a stupid dream. He had imagined the whole thing: the col apse of society, the fear and confusion, the months spent hiding out in Waitrose. It wasn’t possible, after al . It wasn’t possible that the world had changed so much.

So quickly. It wasn’t possible that he had become a savage. A kil er.

The mother tried to speak, her lips formed in a ghastly pucker, and a single syl able came out.

“Mwuhh . . .”

Tears came to Arran’s eyes. He couldn’t do it anymore.

He loosened his grip.

The mother wriggled free and sunk her teeth into his neck. Then Achil eus must have stabbed her, because a bright spray of blood hosed out from a wound in her chest. The next moment she was gone and Ol ie was pul ing him toward the turnstiles.

“Move it, Arran!” he shouted, and Arran slithered over the turnstiles in a daze.

“Where’s Freak?”

Freak had been fending off the grown-ups with his bare fists, punching, kicking, butting, trying to protect Deke. But he was losing the fight. The grown-ups had sensed that Deke was wounded. They had given up trying to block the exit and were concentrating their efforts on getting at him. Two of them had taken hold of his legs, and Freak was engaged in a ghastly tug-of-war.

“Leave him!” Ol ie screamed.

“I can’t!”

A grown-up lurched into Freak from the side, knocking Deke out of his hands.

“Deke!”

The name stuck in Freak’s throat as he watched Deke being dragged quickly away, face down on the hard tiles, leaving a long, bloody smear. Freak chased after them, sobbing and screaming insults, but it was no good. There was nothing he could do.

The grown-ups pul ed Deke under the water, and he was gone. The last Freak ever saw of his friend—the boy he had grown up with, shared six years of school with, played soccer with, watched TV with, laughed with, argued with—the last he ever saw, was his bright yel ow hair sliding into the sludge.

“Get out of there, now!” shouted Achil eus. “I’m not coming back for you this time.”

No ...

Freak was going to go after his friend. He knew it would be suicide, but he hated to leave poor Deke at the mercy of the grown-ups.

There was a reason these boys were stil alive, though. Something made them stronger than the other kids, the ones who had died in the early days, who had simply lain down and given up, unable to cope with the terrible things that were happening in the world. These boys were survivors. The wil to live was stronger than any other feelings.

Freak turned on his heels and sprinted out of there.

C
alum was in the crow’s nest. He loved it up on the roof; it was his favorite place. He couldn’t wait for it to be warm enough to sleep out here. You could see the whole of Hol oway spread out beneath you. Like Google Earth. The kids had built the crow’s nest around the dome that stuck up from one corner of Waitrose. They had used scaffolding poles and planks and ropes and any useful bits and pieces they could find. A ladder at the back led to the sloping roof of the supermarket. From there you could climb down across the tiles to a smal tower they had constructed at the edge of the courtyard. The courtyard was a rooftop terrace in the center of the building, enclosed on four sides but open to the sky.

The lookouts could communicate with other kids in the courtyard through a speaking tube. More speaking tubes linked the courtyard with other parts of the supermarket. The system was based on what they used to use on ships to communicate between the bridge and the engine room. It wasn’t much more than a series of long metal pipes that had been slotted and bent through the ventilation and cabling ducts of the building, but it was surprisingly effective.

Cal um felt safe up here. He and Josh were the main lookouts and could normal y tel if there were any grown-ups around. The only blind spot was the parking lot at the rear of the building from where Smal Sam had been snatched. Those kids should never have been out there without a guard. Cal um was ticked off that he had missed the grown-ups sneaking through the gardens, and since the attack he had spotted loads more of them about. He kept a pile of ammo on a special y built ledge—rocks and stones to use as missiles, mainly—and he was itching to have a go at any grown-ups stupid enough to get too close.

He was keeping a lookout for Arran’s scav party. They needed Arran back. Everyone was on edge since Smal Sam had been taken. Arran would calm everyone down, sort things out. Stop the little ones from being scared.

Cal um never went scavenging. He had convinced the others that he was more use to them on the roof. In fact, he hadn’t been out of Waitrose, except to come up here, for nearly a year. There was an invisible rope attaching him to it. In his mind he wandered the streets below, like a character moving around a game, but in real life he never wanted to go out there again. Waitrose was safe. He had everything he needed here. He was happy. Almost happier than he had been before the disaster.

The one thing he longed for, though, was peace and quiet. To be alone, real y alone. That would be bliss. To just sit there, in al the space of the shop, without it being ful of other kids. Sitting here in the crow’s nest was as good as it got.

He put his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the Hol oway Road.

“Come on, Arran, we need you. . . .”

T
hey were limping along. Olie and Achileus were walking ahead of Arran and Freak, who were both silent, lost in private thoughts. Olie knew wel enough not to push it. If the other two didn’t want to talk about what had gone down, then he wasn’t going to try to make them. Freak had lost his best friend, and Arran had been badly bitten. Ol ie hadn’t expected him to take it so badly, though. Arran was tough. Hated showing any weakness in front of anyone else. Something had happened to him back at the pool. He had the look of someone who had stared at something nasty. Stared for too long.

Arran’s skin had been punctured. There would be a big danger of infection. The grown-ups were filthy and riddled with germs and disease. Luckily, Arran hadn’t been in the water, but the mother who had attacked him had looked pretty foul.

Why had Arran frozen like that? Al the fight went out of him. One minute he was cracking skul s with his club, and the next he was just standing there, in a dream. Had he lost his nerve?

Arran had to know that nobody would blame him for what had happened to Deke. It had been Freak’s stupid idea to go into the pool. How could they have prepared for the ambush? It wasn’t like grown-ups—usual y they were stupid and slow and confused. Not much different from the pack of dogs the gang had dealt with earlier. This bunch had acted together. Organized. A team.

How many of the adults had they kil ed? he wondered. He knew for sure he had hit seven of them, but it didn’t mean that each shot was a kil ing shot.

When they’d bundled out through the reception area he’d seen two of his targets lying stil on the floor. He must have fired thirty pel ets, maybe more. It had been too dangerous to try to col ect them afterward. He had a pile back at the camp, but it was a lot to lose in one day. At this rate it would be sooner rather than later that he ran out altogether. He’d have to find some more, or start col ecting pebbles.

Damn. He loved those heavy steel bal bearings.

His ankle was sore; he had landed wrong leaping over the turnstiles. They made a sorry bunch. Freak had been pretty badly mauled. He was covered with filth and there was blood on him, but as far as it was possible to tel , it didn’t look like his own blood. At least Achil eus looked unharmed. He swore that boy had iron underpants.

Achil eus wasn’t particularly a friend of Ol ie’s. He was always having a go at him for being too rich, too clever, too quiet. But Ol ie didn’t let it get to him. The two of them had a sort of grudging respect for each other. When it came down to it, Ol ie valued Achil eus’s fighting skil s, and Achil eus valued Ol ie’s brains. They usual y kept out of each other’s way. Ol ie wasn’t used to being up front. It felt weird.

He remembered driving in the family car. Him and his mom and dad and three brothers. Ol ie had always sat in the back, staring out of the side window, trying to keep out of their arguments and fights. He remembered the few occasions when it had been just him and his dad, and he’d gotten to ride up front in the passenger seat. How different it had felt, like they were equals. And how nice it had been to get his dad al to himself. His dad had been like Ol ie. Quiet, distant, always thinking about something.

They were al dead now. Al five of them.

His dad had been the first to go. One of the very first to die when the il ness struck. He had even been on the news; the headline had said something like “Another Death from Mystery Il ness Sweeping Europe.” Then there had been more and more deaths, and not just in Europe—al around the world.

They’d stopped mentioning individuals;it had been whole streets, then whole towns. It had al happened so fast, people had been stunned and hadn’t real y had time to panic. The whole world had sort of gone into shock. His mother had been frantic after Dad died. She’d packed the house up, ready to try to escape to the countryside and stay with Auntie Susan. But she’d fal en il before they could get away. Then it was just Ol ie and his brothers. They’d tried to leave London by themselves. His oldest brother, Dan, got sick next. He’d been eighteen. Then Wil , sixteen.

His younger brother, Luke, hadn’t been old enough to get sick. He’d been kil ed in a riot up near Finsbury Park. That must have been over a year ago.

It felt more like a century. By then, Ol ie had had no more tears left to cry; the catastrophe had been so immense, so overwhelming, that he had just pushed it out of his mind and concentrated on trying to stay alive. He owed it to his family, as the last one left, not to die.

“We should have never gone into there in the first place,” said Achil eus. “Freak’s an idiot.”

“Leave it,” said Ol ie. “We couldn’t have known.”

“Al for a bloody vending machine,” said Achil eus. “Chips and candy! We’re not babies.”

“Would have been nice, though,” said Ol ie. “I could real y do with a Mars Bar right now, and a can of Coke.”

“Yeah.” Achil eus smiled. “You know what I used to real y like? Jaffa Cakes. I could eat a whole pack in one go. But al we’ve got to look forward to when we get back is roast dog.”

“Better than nothing,” said Ol ie. “We haven’t had meat in ages.”

“Hold up. . . .”