The Enemy (15 page)

While the main group of grown-ups had been waiting, a splinter group had come around the side, trying to get at the smal er, weaker kids. A gang of them blundered across the road toward the pathway, and a father charged, breaking through the bigger kids at the end and taking hold of a screaming girl. His face was so swol en with boils he looked like some ghastly sea creature, a puffer fish.

“No you don’t!” Whitney bel owed, and she punched him so hard that his boils exploded and half his face fel away as he let go of the girl and flipped over backward.

Maeve, Ben, and Whitney picked up the stunned father and dropped him over the railing, where he landed with a smack on the pavement below.

Meanwhile, Lewis shoved his way through the crowded kids and back out into the road, yel ing at the other grown-ups.

“Stay back!”

The grown-ups froze.

Lewis would keep them away for as long as he could. He prayed that the main fighting force would hold out, or else the chances of any of them getting to the palace alive would be very, very slim.

Maxie was next to Arran now, fighting almost back-to-back. The kids kept in a tight pack, and it was hard for the mostly unarmed grown-ups to get at them. Some were breaking through, though. Arran saw two of his fighters go down, swamped by numbers. Then one of the Morrisons crew screamed as three big mothers grabbed hold of him and dragged him off. The grown-ups were chipping away at them. At this rate it wouldn’t be long before they were overwhelmed.

Arran looked around. Jester was nowhere to be seen. And where the hel was Blue? When the fighting kicked off he’d disappeared.

Had he run or had he been taken out?

Arran hated grown-ups.

His neck was throbbing, and it reminded him of what they had done to him. Anger bubbled up inside, almost like a physical thing, something hot and writhing, waking up and struggling to get out. His blood sang in his ears and boiled in his veins. He wasn’t going to let any more kids die.

He gripped his club tightly in his hands, swatted a mother out of his way, and stepped forward.

“We’ve got to break them!” he shouted. “Take the fight to them!”

“I’m with you, boss,” said Josh. “They don’t scare me!”

One by one the other fighters joined him, hacking through the massed ranks of the grown-ups.

Ol ie was stil behind the fighters, loosing off a shot whenever he got the chance. He had lost track of the other skirmishers, who had either picked up fal en weapons and joined the fighters or dropped back to the rear. The only one of them stil with him was the Morrisons kid who had laughed at him earlier for worrying too much. Ol ie couldn’t even remember his name. The two of them were firing off shot after shot, but the other kid was running low on ammo.

Arran and the others had moved forward, but Ol ie could see that they’d gotten bogged down. The grown-ups would soon have them surrounded.

There wasn’t much more Ol ie could do to help. He was doing his best, but it was like throwing pebbles into a raging river.

He wondered if this was the end. If they were al going to die here.

And then there was a roar, and a BMW thundered around the corner from Royal Col ege Street. It plowed into the grown-ups, knocking them flying.

Ol ie saw Blue at the wheel, grinning madly. He must have hot-wired the car. There was suddenly a rush of grown-ups blundering down the road, trying to get out of the way.

“Let them go!” he yel ed, but the Morrisons kid was wound up for a fight. He grabbed a spear off the ground and waded into the stampede, stabbing at them. A short, stocky father with one eye was obviously also stil up for a fight, though. He hit the kid hard with a lump of concrete. Ol ie watched him fal and get trampled by the retreating grown-ups. He put a steel shot into his sling and kept an eye on the father.

He picked his moment, and the shot hit the father in the back of the neck. He too fel , and he too was trampled.

Lewis had been joined by the remnants of the skirmisher team and Jester. Jester had immediately ducked down the pathway to join the smal er kids.

Lewis figured that was how he’d stayed alive when al his friends had died on the way up from the palace.

Lewis didn’t blame him. Not al kids could fight. Sometimes hiding was a better option. The skirmishers were armed with an odd assortment of weapons, but it was enough to keep the grown-ups away. Lewis just had to hold out long enough for the front-rank fighters to come back and help.

If they lost the main battle, though, then al Lewis and the little ones could do was run.

A flood of grown-ups came down the road from the front. On the run. Maybe the tide had turned. Lewis pul ed the rest of his fighters back into the pathway. It was more important to stay alive now than to kil the enemy.

He al owed himself a smal smile of satisfaction.

He hadn’t lost a single kid.

Blue kept in low gear, his foot hard on the accelerator, carving up the grown-ups, but careful to keep wel clear of any kids.

He saw the girl, Maxie, working hard with her spear. She looked like some kind of warrior queen. He steered the car toward her, clearing the attackers out of the way. And there was Arran. That boy was tough. He was badly wounded but nothing could stop him. Blue smiled. He wished he had teamed up with the Waitrose kids before.

Arran knew how Freak had felt last night, when the madness had taken hold of him. Anger burned like rocket fuel inside him. He was drunk with it. He waded in among the panicked grown-ups, swinging his club in vicious, punishing arcs. He was no longer tired or sick. His body felt nothing. It was as if he had left it behind and was watching it from somewhere else, like a film or a computer game. Yes. A first-person shooter. He kept pressing the X button and watching the club swing. It smashed into a skul . It shattered an arm. It snapped a spine.

He could see a long, blurry trail behind it as it moved through the air. And when a head exploded, there was no blood, just multicolored blobs of light.

They’ve turned off blood mode, he thought. They’ve made it suitable for under-fifteens. But this game was too easy. The enemy’s AI was set too low.

They were too slow, too stupid, too easy to kil .

Smack!

Look at them go down.

Slam!

He laughed. The kids were going to win this battle today.

Crack!

Sure enough, the grown-ups were fal ing back, trying to get away. He caught sight of the big father with the swol en head. He had a group of fathers around him and seemed to be surveying the carnage. He shook his head, which rol ed backward and forward over the gold necklace at his chest, then he turned and retreated.

Yes. Run, you cowards.

Arran couldn’t let them escape, though. Not after what they’d done. He ran after them.

Someone was shouting behind him.

“Leave it, Arran, they’re finished.”

“Let them go!”

“No!” He was a lion among wildebeests. A hunter. A kil er. He ran with them; he would track down every last one of them and smash them into oblivion.

The grown-ups fel to left and right as he powered on. He funneled them onto a tree-lined side street, past a car wash. They scrambled clumsily, frightened and careless. And they fel . Silver bolts shot from his eyes, and they fel . He yel ed with joy. He didn’t even need a club. He threw it away. It was only slowing him down.

He had left the other kids behind. It was just him and the grown-ups. He saw them tumble, the silver bolts sprouting from their ugly broken bodies.

And then it was like he had been punched hard in the chest. He wasn’t running anymore. He looked down. There was a silver bolt sticking out of him.

No, that couldn’t be. He couldn’t have shot himself. He tried to laugh, but it hurt too much. What was going on? He had fal en. He was sitting down, his legs straight out in front of him. Dead grown-ups lay al around him.

Nothing moved.

He couldn’t breathe. His lungs were ful of liquid.

He looked up. The sky was flickering.

From far away he heard a shout.

“A-r-r-a-a-a-a-an!”

S
mal Sam was cycling like a demon. There were grown-ups everywhere. The roads were crawling with them. Where had they al come from? There was something going on. Every time he tried to get back toward Camden he’d come up against a group of them and had to turn around and cycle furiously the other way. He had gone in such a roundabout route and taken so many side roads and turnings that he wasn’t exactly sure where he was now. He was coming down a main road of grimy low buildings that looked like it hadn’t been much even before the disaster. And then he saw something he recognized.

Pizza Express. This must be Kentish Town, then. He remembered his mom and dad talking about which Pizza Express to go to. “Let’s go to the one in Kentish Town.” It was big and had a very high ceiling. There used to be a strange wire statue of a man standing in one corner. He’d found it a bit scary when he was younger.

How sil y to be scared of a statue.

As far as he knew, Kentish Town was next to Camden. So maybe he hadn’t got as lost as he’d thought. Al he needed to do was keep going downhil .

There was a cloud of black smoke fil ing the road ahead. A shop was on fire. He held his breath and zoomed through, screwing his face up. Luckily the road was clear on the other side. Grown-ups didn’t like fire. They would keep away.

And there was the back of Sainsbury’s, a funny-looking metal building on the canal, like something out of
Star Wars
. This was it. He’d made it. This was Camden. But with so many grown-ups out on the streets, he wondered where his friends might be. And El a. He hoped she wasn’t too scared without him.

He remembered the feeling he’d had when he’d first seen the mob of grown-ups marching down Camden Road, like an army. He knew what his fear was now. That the grown-ups were ganging up to attack his friends. Maybe the kids had also had to take another route to be safe?

He pedaled harder and soon came to where several roads met near the tube station. He stopped at a traffic island in the middle. In the past there would have been cars and trucks and buses rushing past in al directions, and the sidewalks would have been fil ed with kids going to the market. Now it wasn’t like being in a city at al . The buildings might just as wel have been rocks and cliffs. The abandoned, stationary cars were boulders. The road a dried-up riverbed.

There was even a sound, a rushing, swirling noise like water. He’d heard it before today. It wasn’t water. It was the sound of massed grown-ups.

Breathing, sighing, hissing, their feet scuffing on the asphalt. But where was it coming from?

He looked around.

There. In the direction of Hol oway, up the road that led past the front of Sainsbury’s. A great mob of grown-ups was moving toward him. Even from this distance he could smel them.

He would have to go faster.

Which way to go, though? Which route would the other kids have taken?

There were so many choices here. And now there were more grown-ups coming along the other roads. Maybe they were trying to see what was going on? The only clear route was the one heading back the way he had come, toward Kentish Town and the fire, which he could see now was spreading. The whole of the sky in that direction was hazy with a purple-gray smudge.

Come on. Which way was the center of London? The road signs were too confusing. They pointed to places whose names he didn’t know.

The most obvious route was down the high street. It was the widest road. There were a few grown-ups wandering about on it, but if he went fast enough he could get around them. He shunted the bike forward, put his ful weight on one pedal, then the other, and soon his feet were a blur as the pedals spun around and the chain rattled over the sprockets. He passed a knot of grown-ups, who made a feeble lunge at him, but as he glanced back at them, his front wheel hit a hole in the road. The whole bike jarred. He lost control and flew over the handlebars, landing in a painful heap on the asphalt. For a few seconds he was too stunned to move. His pants were ripped and his elbows and knees were bleeding. Then he sensed someone coming near and shook himself awake. He looked up just as a skinny young mother with no hair and dribble streaming down her chin made a grab for him. He rol ed away from her groping hands and kicked out. He got her in the knee and she went down face-first.

Sam was up. He looked at his bike. The front wheel was bent out of shape and the tire had burst. Al that work. Wasted. He would have to walk now.

He might never be able to catch up with the others.

Actual y, he would have to run. There were more grown-ups closing in on him.

He stumbled forward and felt his legs wobble. He was dizzy from the fal , and limping. He forced himself to move, though, watching his dirty sneakers as they slapped down on the road in front of him. He needed somewhere to hide. He passed some steps going down to a public toilet. No. He didn’t want to get trapped. He remembered the tube station. Maybe if he could get in there, in the dark, he’d be al right. Just so long as he got safely off the streets.