The Fear (17 page)

‘Let me ask you one question,’ said Robbie. ‘How come you never asked the hunters about Brooke?’

‘We
did
ask them,’ Courtney protested. ‘I’m sure we did.’

‘We told them we was looking for David,’ said Marco, taking off his helmet and wiping sweat from his forehead. ‘I’m not sure we ever mentioned Brooke or Justin to them.’

‘That was stupid,’ said Felix.

‘You calling me stupid?’ said Marco.

‘We’re all stupid. We was so thinking about David we never mentioned the others.’

‘How long ago was Ryan here?’ DogNut asked.

‘Couple of hours, maybe.’

‘I can’t believe we’ve been so dumb,’ said DogNut. He wanted to punch something. If he’d only thought to ask the hunters about Brooke then Olivia wouldn’t be dead now.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Courtney. ‘We didn’t know. All that matters is we’re here now.’

‘I’ll take you inside,’ said Robbie, and he led them past some trees on to a long ramp that curved up towards the museum doors. DogNut got a glimpse of crops planted in what had once been lawns along the front of the building.

The main doors were set into a vast carved stone archway, and another guard was waiting here. He exchanged a couple of words with Robbie then opened the doors to let them in.

DogNut was impressed with the set-up. It reminded him of being back at the Imperial War Museum, where their leader, Jordan Hordern, had insisted on strict discipline and round-the-clock security. There had always been guards posted at the entrance. And since they’d moved from the Imperial War Museum to the Tower of London the routine had been even more military. DogNut wasn’t sure exactly what he’d been expecting when he got here, but not this. It struck him, though, that if anyone was going to survive in London these days they’d have to be well organized and well prepared. He was thinking all this as he wandered into the massive, candlelit hall inside and was further distracted by the fossilized skeleton of a dinosaur standing in the centre, with a huge long neck and tail. So it was that he didn’t really register that someone was asking him something. A brown-haired girl wearing an old-fashioned dress and carrying a lamp.

‘I’m sorry, what?’ he said finally. ‘Did you say something, babes?’

The girl tilted her head to one side and gave him a dirty look, and it was then that he realized.

It was Brooke.

DogNut shouted with joy and threw his arms round Brooke, before she pushed him off.

‘You dozy sod,’ she said. ‘You didn’t recognize me, did you?’

‘Course I didn’t,’ he said. ‘Look at you! You ain’t blonde no more. You ain’t wearing no make-up, plus you got on some kind of weird dress out of a boring history film.’

‘So you’re saying I ain’t pretty no more?’

DogNut held her at arm’s length and studied her face. ‘You’re more beautiful than ever,’ he said, and he meant it. ‘Though I do prefer you blonde. You telling me it was fake all along? You bleached your hair?’

‘Duh,’ said Brooke. ‘Of course. There ain’t half as many blondes in this world as you think, Donut.’

‘It’s DogNut.’

‘No it ain’t,’ said Brooke. ‘To me you’ll always be Donut.’

There was a shout from across the hall. ‘Hey, what about me?’ And Brooke spotted Courtney. She screamed and ran over to her, and the two of them held on to each other, dancing around, shrieking.

‘I don’t believe it! It’s you! My God! This is so cool …’

‘And what about Aleisha?’ Brooke said at last, breaking away from Courtney and looking around. ‘Did you bring her with you?’

Courtney was instantly subdued; the life went out of her. Brooke knew what had happened without needing to ask and all she said was, ‘Where? When?’

‘That night,’ said Courtney sadly. ‘When we came across the river. After we got split up we found a boat, but we hit a bridge and it sank. Aleisha had already been wounded. She didn’t stand a chance.’

Brooke hugged her friend and the two of them started crying, leaning against each other for support. DogNut didn’t know what to do. Whether he should go over and try to comfort them, or leave them to it. In the end he decided this was between the girls. Not his business. He had hardly known Aleisha, but he knew that the three of them had been inseparable.

Courtney was sobbing into Brooke’s shoulder. She was aware that she was soaking her friend’s dress. But she couldn’t stop. Didn’t want to ever let go. Brooke felt warm and soft. Why had she ever thought that she didn’t want to find her? They belonged together. All the tension of the day was flowing out of her, and Brooke was absorbing it. Everything was going to be all right now.

The spell was broken by DogNut who strolled up, rolling his head to loosen the tension in his neck.

‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘You gonna show us round or are you gonna just stand there snotting over each other?’

The two girls separated, sniffed, and that was that. It was finished. They couldn’t mourn the loss of their friend any more. It would hurt too much. Aleisha was gone, but they still had each other. The words Courtney had said to DogNut earlier came back to her.

They had to move on.

‘Yeah,’ Courtney said, looking around at their bizarre surroundings and wiping her face dry. ‘I wanna see how you’ve pimped this place up and then you are gonna have to, like, tell us everything that’s happened since we seen you last.
Everything
 …’

‘I will, girl, don’t worry. Is a long story, though. Don’t you want to wash and eat and rest up first? You look worse than crap.’

‘Oh, thanks.’

Brooke laughed. ‘Still the same grumpy old Courtney I know so well.’

‘I ain’t old, I ain’t grumpy …’

‘But you’re still my Courtney.’

They burst into tears and hugged once more.

‘Oh, not again,’ said DogNut, and he made a big show of being appalled by this display of affection. Secretly, though, he was fighting back tears of his own and had a painful lump in his throat.

‘Enough of that,’ he said at last, pulling them apart. ‘I want to introduce you to the rest of our crew.’

He called Marco, Felix and Finn over. Brooke vaguely remembered Marco and Felix, but had never met Finn before. He asked after his friends from Forest Hill School, and Brooke sadly shook her head.

‘I don’t recognize the names,’ she said.

‘It’s all right,’ said Finn. ‘They could be anywhere.’

He displayed no emotion. DogNut knew he must be gutted, though.

‘Come on,’ he said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘We want the tour.’

‘Follow me.’

They walked with Brooke past the dinosaur skeleton.

‘This is Dippy,’ she said. ‘He’s a diplodocus.’

‘And who’s that up there?’ DogNut asked as they climbed the wide stone steps at the back of the hall. ‘He looks like God.’

Sitting halfway up the stairs in an armchair, as if waiting for them, was the larger-than-life-size white marble statue of a bald, bearded man.

‘That’s Charlie Darwin,’ said Brooke, patting him affectionately on the head. ‘I love his shoes. They look so real!’

DogNut studied the shoes. Brooke was right. It was hard to believe they were carved out of stone. They carried on to the top of the steps and walked through a gallery that ran along the side of the exhibition hall back in the direction they had come. There were monkey skulls here, alongside skulls from Stone Age man. Other cabinets contained stuffed apes and figures of people. There was something spooky about them in the half-light.

‘What’s all this?’ asked DogNut. ‘I didn’t know they kept humans in museums.’

‘It’s something to do with evolution,’ said Brooke. ‘Showing us where we come from. I’ve given all the monkeys names. That one’s Brian.’ She pointed to a hairy orang-utan with its arms in the air.

‘You need to get a stuffed sicko in there,’ said DogNut. ‘The latest stage in our evolution.
Homo zombiens
.’

Brooke laughed and then stopped, leaning on the wall overlooking the great hall below. From here they could see just how massive the place was. Even the diplodocus looked small.

‘It’s like Hogwarts,’ said Courtney.

‘I often think that,’ said Brooke.

‘It’s bare big,’ said DogNut. ‘How many kids you got here?’

‘Seventy-three,’ said Brooke. ‘But we don’t use most of the place. Is way too big. Eight hundred people used to work here. There’s other buildings, office blocks, labs, everything. It goes on forever. We just use this bit round the main hall, couple of galleries off the sides, like the dinosaur one and the mammal galleries over there.’ She pointed to the opposite side of the hall. ‘We close most of it down at night. It’s too big to patrol and make safe. In the daytime we go all over. Except down to the lower level.’

‘Why not?’ Courtney asked.

‘There’s sickos down there.’

‘For real?’ said Courtney, eyes widening in fear.

‘For real.’ Brooke laughed and punched her playfully in the arm.

‘Ain’t nothing to get scared about, girl. Is just, when we got here, there was some sickos still in the museum. Staff, I guess. We chased them off, killed a load. Some went down into the basement. Is like a maze down there. All these rooms and corridors and secret hiding-places. This place is just too big to be able to control the whole thing. Goes on forever. We’ve locked all the doors we can to keep the sickos out, but you can hear them down there sometimes, in the sealed-off bits, moving around. Others get in from outside and they nest in the dark. They can’t never get up here, though, not any more. We fixed all that. Come on. I’ll show you where we all sleep.’

At the end of the primates gallery there was a doorway leading to a long room off to the side.

‘This is the minerals gallery,’ said Brooke quietly. ‘It’s big and has lots of light and can easily be secured. They used to keep lots of valuable rocks in here, you know, like crystals and meteors and diamonds and things, so there’s heavy gates this end, and a sort of vault at the other end. If we were ever attacked, we could easily fortify ourselves in here.’

DogNut looked. There were heavy iron gates and grilles all round the doorway. The room itself looked like something out of a medieval castle. It was illuminated only by the odd tea light burning in a little dish here and there, and stretched away into the gloom, the length of a football pitch. There were arched windows down both sides, and two rows of square columns holding up the ornate ceiling. Old glass and wood display cabinets were ranged among the pillars and the kids had adapted the spaces between them into little sleeping areas, personalizing them and decorating them with screens and awnings and bits of furniture.

‘I’ll show you properly in the morning,’ Brooke whispered. ‘Most of the kids have already gone to bed. We usually go to sleep as soon as it gets dark. I was waiting for you to arrive. Come on, though, we’ll get you something to eat.’

She led them through the gallery. As they passed each cubicle space, they saw that not all the occupants were asleep. Some kids sat murmuring with friends, and they looked round curiously at the new arrivals as they went past.

A door at the end led to a short stairway that took them down to the gallery below, from where another staircase climbed to the old staff canteen. It was like being in a tunnel up here, the ceiling arched over in a semicircle with large curved windows set into the bottom. There were modern tables and chairs and it was well lit with oil lamps, similar to the one that Brooke carried.

There were three kids waiting for them.

‘We kept you some grub just in case you turned up,’ Brooke explained, and they sat down to a simple meal of boiled eggs, rice and cabbage.

The kids wolfed the food down and Brooke watched them with amusement.

‘So tell me,’ said Courtney when they’d finished. ‘Why you wearing such weird shit, girl?’

Brooke looked down at her old-fashioned clothes and laughed. ‘You remember Kwanele? That African kid who was always really well dressed? Even when we was escaping from the sickos?’

‘Wheeled that little posh suitcase around the whole time?’ Courtney asked. ‘Yeah, I remember him. Don’t tell me he made that dress!’

‘No way,’ Brooke shrieked. ‘But there’s this other museum just over the road. Is called the Victoria and Albert. We broke in there cos we saw from the maps there’s this big courtyard in the middle. We built all these planters in there, is a well safe place to grow food, but you should see what’s in the museum itself.’

‘What?’ asked DogNut, intrigued.

‘Well … Is mostly art and stuff, you know, like statues and paintings, but they got, like, furniture, plates and jewellery and things, even fashion. All clothes from history and, like, movie-star dresses, you know, hundreds and hundreds of them. It’s wicked. We get all our stuff from there that we need to make this place like home. Home for a king, that is. Honestly it’s like a palace in there. You got to see it. And Kwanele, he’s in charge of clothing and that. Making the stuff fit. We dress up and we’re princesses.’ Brooke stood and did a little twirl in her dress, then stopped in a fit of giggles.

‘You should get yourself something, Courtney,’ she said. ‘We should glam you up a bit.’

‘You saying I ain’t well dressed?’

‘No.’

‘You saying I need to be more glam, though?’

‘Yes.’ Now Brooke put on a simpering, lisping little girl’s voice. ‘You could be a lovely princess! Princess Courtney!’

‘Courtney?’ DogNut scoffed. ‘Courtney ain’t no princess.’

‘You what?’ Courtney turned on DogNut with an angry scowl.

‘You’re a queen,’ he said hurriedly. ‘A warrior queen.’

‘Maybe we can find you a crown in the Victoria and Albert,’ said Brooke, and Courtney laughed.

‘So, you gonna tell us then,’ she said. ‘What the hell you all doing here? And why you pissed David off so much?’

Brooke smiled at her friends. ‘I’m telling you, is a long story …’

‘Going back to that night. I can close my eyes and watch it like a DVD, remember everything that happened, as clear as if it was, like, you know, happening right now. The rest of the time I can switch off, put the DVD back in its box and stick it away somewhere and not think about it no more. But I close my eyes now and I’m there, back on the bridge, the lorry slowly moving across, and Justin driving. Jesus, I ain’t never seen a more worried-looking nerd. He was sweatier than a fat man eating chillies in a sauna. If I hadn’t of been so scared I would’ve been laughing, but behind us half of London was blazing, and we was trying not to run over any of the kids who was squashed on to the bridge, all panicking, crazy with fear. It was hard; there was broken-down buses, broken-down cars blocking the way, people hollering. We didn’t wanna get out and look, was way too dangerous, but we could hear screaming and then this, like, fresh wave of panic seemed to pass through the kids on the bridge. We couldn’t exactly see what was going on behind, but when I’ve looked in the mirror there was smoke and fire and a mash of, like, scared faces. So we knew. We knew the sickos was attacking the kids who couldn’t get on to the bridge. We just kept on driving, slowly, slowly, slowly. We was getting across, but
that
David. What a freak! He and his boys in their red jackets and with their guns they’d got from your museum. Like little soldiers they was. I know we had a deal – he was supposed to protect the lorry and we was supposed to share some of our food with him once we was safe. I know we had a deal … But when I seen what he was really like I didn’t want nothing more to do with him, man.’