The Enemy (9 page)

They’d brought him to this place and dumped him on the floor. He had no idea where it was. He was stil in the sack. It had taken them about ten minutes to get here. They’d carried him up stairs. Lots of stairs. They must be somewhere high.

At first, whenever he moved, one of the grown-ups would kick him, and if he whimpered they’d kick him again. Then someone had sat on him for a while, but once he’d stopped struggling, they got off him. He’d lain very stil after that, as stil as if he’d been dead, and they final y left him alone.

So he was stil alive. For now. He knew, though, that unless he was very lucky he probably wouldn’t make it through the night. He had no doubt at al that the grown-ups were planning to eat him. That’s what they did to the kids they captured. The only reason they hadn’t already eaten him was that they were too ful .

While he’d been lying there in the sack, quiet as a mouse, stil as a corpse, he’d heard them eating. They must have caught another kid before him.

The grown-ups moaned with delight as they fed. Chewing loudly, slurping and belching. Sometimes there was a crunch, or one of them would spit.

Once there had been some sort of fight.

Sam was glad that they had something else to eat, but felt awful that it was another kid.

And he was glad, so glad, that he couldn’t see anything. The smel of blood was bad enough. It made him want to throw up.

It was quiet now. He could almost imagine that he was alone.

He’d been so scared, more scared than he’d ever been before in his life, and although his life had so far been quite short, there had been a lot of scary moments in it. Like when his mom and dad had left him. It had happened one night. His mom had come into the room he shared with his little sister, El a. Mom had looked bad. Tired and sweaty and il , with yel ow skin and big black rings under her eyes. Gray lumps around her nose. Zits like a teenager.

She had been shaking, her teeth chattering so loudly he could hear them, rattle, rattle, rattle. She’d woken him up and hugged him, and he’d felt her tears on his neck. She’d told him that she and Dad were going away. She said there was nothing she could do to help him and his sister, and if she stayed it would be dangerous for them.

Mom had told him to look after El a, and he had tried. He had real y tried. But he was only smal . And now he’d left El a al alone. She would be sad without him there. He hoped his mom and dad would understand. The thing was, though, he was too smal to look after anyone, real y. He was only nine.

At least he hadn’t seen his mom and dad die. Sometimes, when he felt sad and lonely, he would picture them alive. Happy. He saw them on a sunny island, like when they’d gone to the Canary Islands. He told himself that they’d just gone away on a long holiday to somewhere where the disease hadn’t happened. They were on a beach in their swimsuits and sunglasses, drinking cocktails with umbrel as in them. That always cheered him up, imagining they were safe somewhere and that they were maybe thinking about him and El a. They were probably planning to come back and rescue them.

Deep down, though, he knew that real y they would never be coming back. They must have died just like al the other grown-ups. Because if they hadn’t died . . .

They’d be like the others.

These grown-ups, the ones who had captured him, weren’t people anymore. They couldn’t speak, only grunt and hiss at each other. They were mad things. Al they thought about was food.

Oh, Mom, I wish you were here now. . . .

He wasn’t real y scared anymore. At first it had been almost too much to bear. He had gone stiff with terror. But it was tiring being scared, and it had slowly worn off, so that now he felt numb. And he was bored.

How long had he been lying here? A tiny bit of light could get in through holes in the sack, and he could see enough to know that it was dark now.

Grown-ups were too stupid to light fires or use solar lamps or even flashlights. They had forgotten everything.

He hoped that they were asleep, because then maybe he could try to get away. He wasn’t tied up or anything. Al he had to do was slip the sack off and make a run for it.

Once he had gone on a school trip to a farm. He had seen sheep and cows and pigs and chickens and he had wondered why they didn’t try to escape. It looked easy. But the thing was, back then the animals were stupid and the humans were clever.

This was different. These grown-ups were stupid and he was clever. Yes, he was only smal , but he was cleverer than they were.

He smiled.

He was going to escape.

He would wait a bit longer, though, until he was real y sure it was safe.

He started to count, not too fast and not too slow. He reckoned that when he got to a thousand, if he hadn’t heard any movement, he would take the sack off and have a look.

One, two, three, four, five . . .

Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty . . .

Counting to a thousand was taking much longer than he had thought; it seemed to go on forever. He got fed up at 420 and stopped.

It had been ages since the grown-ups had made any noise. They must be asleep. Or maybe they had gone out hunting again and left him alone?

Slowly, ever so slowly, he started to wriggle out of the sack, trying to make tiny movements. Every few seconds he would stop and listen, and once he was sure it was okay, he would go on.

Little by little the sack came off, until it cleared his head. Now he was lying on his side on a sticky, stinking carpet.

He looked around without moving his head. At first it was too dark to see anything properly. He could just make out that he was in a long room with windows al down one side. There was a pale stripe of bluish gray against the black.

He waited, unmoving, as his eyes got used to the light, and gradual y bits and pieces of the room came into view.

He could see six grown-ups nearby. The mother and the others who had captured him, as wel as two others—a fat old father with a bald head, and a younger one with a straggly beard. They were al fast asleep and snoring and snuffling.

The room was filthy. There were broken bones on the floor. There were a few greasy chairs, a pile of old rags in the middle, and in one corner was the grown-ups’ toilet. They had done their business on the carpet and there were flies buzzing around it.

He retched. He wanted to use a swearword. He thought of the worst thing he knew and said it loudly in his head.

Bastards
.

They didn’t know better than to poop on the floor.

The dirty bastards.

Back at Waitrose they had a system. They used buckets as toilets, and every day they took turns to empty them into the drains outside.

Not this lot.

He hated them.

The nearest one, a father, let off a long slow fart and rol ed over in his sleep. A shaft of moonlight fel across his face. Sam looked at him. He had never seen a diseased grown-up so close before. He had only seen them lumbering past in the street from a safe distance.

This father was dirty and very ugly. His hair was al stuck together and it didn’t real y look like hair. His skin was orangey-yel ow and hanging loose in flaps, covered in sores and blisters and boils. It had cracked open in places, showing a gooey blackness underneath. He yawned and Sam saw that there was a big hole in his cheek. Through it he could see broken rotten teeth.

Sam got into a crouch and backed away from him.

His heels dug into something soft. He hadn’t noticed a seventh grown-up curled against the wal . It shuddered in its sleep and shifted restlessly. Sam held his breath. It was a mother. She wrapped her arms around one of his legs, nuzzled against him, and relaxed.

She was younger than the other mother, with a tangle of black hair. There was a silver butterfly pin stuck in it. Sam thought it might be a good weapon.

He careful y slid it out and held on to it tightly. It was like a long needle, with the sil y, jeweled insect perched at one end. If any of these filthy bastards came near him he would stick it in. Yes he would. Just you watch him. He would stick it in good.

Dirty bastards.

Bastards, bastards, bastards . . .

It felt good to swear. Even if it was only in his mind.

He tried to pul his leg free, but the mother had too strong a grip on it. If he tugged too hard she might wake up. He studied her. She looked quite nice, quite pretty. Then she turned her head and he saw the other side of her face: it was a nest of boils. Great round lumps covered the whole of her cheek, her neck, her ear, even her eyelid. The skin was stretched tight, and it looked like the lumps might burst at any moment.

Sam had a terrible urge to pop one with the butterfly pin. Instead he leaned over and used the tip of it to tickle her skin. Soon she started to twitch and then let go of his leg to scratch the spot. With a sigh of relief he managed to step clear.

He would have to be much more careful. The more he took in of his surroundings, the more he realized that there were grown-ups everywhere. The floor was covered in them. If he took one wrong step he would tread on one. He remembered when his dad had taken him to the zoo in Regent’s Park. In the reptile house they tried to spot lizards or snakes in their glass cages. When you first looked you couldn’t see any, but if you were patient, you spotted them. Lying in clumps, on top of each other, under rocks, half buried, lazy and bloated.

He had to get out of here.

He moved cautiously to the window. To try to get some idea of where he was.

To begin with, he could make no sense of what he saw. It was a huge alien space. Not inside but not outside. It reminded him of something.

Yes. The amphitheater in a gladiator film.

Of course.

It was the Arsenal soccer stadium. He was in a hospitality box, looking across the rows and rows of red seats toward the field. There were grown-ups out there, some sleeping in the seats, some lying on the floor, some wandering aimlessly about.

Maybe they’d come back here because it was familiar; it meant something to them. There was certainly not going to be any more soccer played here for a long time. Far below, the grass on the field had grown high. A father was standing there, very stil , like a statue. Grass up to his knees. He was fat and, like a lot of grown-ups, looked completely bald. He wore a white vest with a red cross of Saint George on it. Sam had the unnerving feeling that he was looking straight at him.

Sam felt sad. Dad had brought him here once. He remembered how ful of life and sound and color it had been. He’d been scared at first, al those people shouting and singing and swearing and jumping up and down. But he’d gotten into it and had ended up shouting along with them, even though he wasn’t real y a soccer fan.

Now look at it....

There were sliding glass doors here that opened onto the terraces, but even if they weren’t locked, the noise of trying to open them would most likely wake the sleeping grown-ups. Besides, there were more grown-ups out there. If they spotted him it would be impossible to get away from them in such a wide-open space. No. There had to be another way out, a back way. There must be some stairs down behind the stands.

He crept across the carpet. The room was very big; it opened up at the back into a sort of dining area with broken tables and chairs in it. There were stil more grown-ups sleeping here, and Sam had to look away as he glimpsed a half-eaten body lying under one of the tables.

Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.

He tried to pretend that he was in a film. He’d always had a good imagination; he could lose himself in a game for hours and hours. The film was
The
Lord of the Rings
, and he was a hobbit in an orc castle. His dad had been reading him the book at night before he got sick, but it had been a bit old for him. He preferred the movies.

He wasn’t just any old hobbit. He was Sam. Samwise Gamgee, the bravest of them al , and the butterfly pin in his hand was an elf sword.

That’s right, keep thinking about something else.

It was darker back here away from the windows, and the smel was even worse. He remembered the time he lost his lunch box. He thought he’d left it at school. It turned up weeks later under a seat in the car. When Sam opened it, it was ful of stale air and rotting food and horrible green fungus that sent up a cloud of spores when it was disturbed. He actual y had been sick then, the smel had been so bad.

This was worse. His eyes were stinging.

Dirty bastards . . .

He edged his way forward, scanning the floor for any sleeping bodies, feeling gently with his toes, holding his nose with his fingers and breathing through his mouth. This place must be ful of germs. Was it bad to breathe them in?

He spotted what looked like a door, on the far side of the room, past a bar. He headed for it, speeding up slightly. Halfway there a figure loomed up in front of him, and his heart caught in his ribs.

One of the grown-ups had woken.

Sam dropped to the floor and flattened himself against the sticky carpet, pressing his face down so that he would be hard to spot. Sometimes it was good to be smal .

The grown-up shuffled past a few inches from where Sam was lying. As soon as he had gone, Sam scuttled over to the bar and crouched down behind it.

He could sense that the grown-up had heard something, though. It made a strangled sound and began to move about in the dark.

Sam was stil clutching the butterfly pin. It wasn’t enough. He needed to find something else he could use as a weapon. With his other hand he felt around on the shelves behind the bar. There must be something. A corkscrew maybe, or even a knife. His hands closed over a hard plastic object. He ran his fingers over it, trying to work out what it was.

A cigarette lighter.

Better than nothing. It might help him to see where he was going, if he ever got out of here. He slipped it into his pocket and kept on searching.

He found nothing else and eventual y the grown-up stopped moving about. Sam left it as long as he could—he was so close to getting out he couldn’t stand waiting here any longer.