The Fear (27 page)

‘Very funny.’

There was a metre or so of clear space inside the lorry before it was blocked by hanging black drapes.

‘Climb aboard,’ said Justin, and the three of them clambered up. It was hot inside and the smell was worse, but Justin and Paul seemed not to notice it. DogNut was fighting not to puke up everywhere.

‘How are they today?’ Justin asked Paul.

‘Quiet,’ was all Paul said, and he yawned and rubbed his neck through his roll-neck jumper. He looked very tired.

Justin grabbed a torch that was hanging from a hook and switched it on as Paul rolled the door back down.

‘We need to keep the light out,’ he said.

Once the door was closed, Paul stepped over to the drapes and pulled them aside like a magician revealing a trick.

A row of bars had been fixed across the lorry and behind them sat three half-naked sickos, two fathers and a mother, chained to the side of the lorry.

Seriously freaking nuts.

Justin’s torch played across the three adults, picking out features.

They didn’t look too badly diseased. DogNut had seen a lot worse. These three showed some signs of the blistering to the skin that was the most obvious symptom, as if something evil was bubbling up from deep inside their bodies, but there were no signs of rot or decay or the livid fungal blooms that adults showed in the more advanced stages of the illness. There were other signs. The whites of their eyes were yellow and their skin tone in general was greyish. They looked half starved as well: desperately thin, their bones showing, their bellies swollen. They were dressed in the tattered remains of clothing that had become blackened filthy rags. They were losing their hair, the mother almost completely bald.

The three of them stared at DogNut, mouths hanging open, showing their purple gums and brown, rotten teeth. One father, the older of the two, started to drool, a long rope of saliva hanging down off his dry and cracked lower lip.

Justin sniggered. ‘He wants to eat you.’

The father’s tongue started to slowly squeeze out of his mouth. Muddy-coloured, swollen and blistered, it looked horribly like a turd.

‘Oh, gross!’ said DogNut.

‘He’s getting worse,’ said Paul.

DogNut noticed that the other father was muzzled like a vicious dog, with leather straps tight round his face.

‘He’s a biter,’ Justin explained when he caught DogNut looking. ‘We have to be very careful, obviously.’

‘Obviously. You wouldn’t want your pet sicko to do you an injury.’

‘They’re not pets,’ said Justin. ‘We don’t keep them for fun.’

Fun?
thought DogNut. How could anyone possibly think this was fun?

He kept his hand clamped over his nose and mouth. The stench in here was appalling. There were piles of excrement on the floor and more of it was smeared up the walls. There were a couple of overflowing buckets at the back. The smell of their waste fought with the smell of the grown-ups themselves. They gave off the distinctive sour odour of decay and what the kids thought of as the sickness smell, a sort of mix of cheap sweets, school toilets and old ladies’ perfume that stuck in your throat.

‘We keep them out here in the car park,’ said Justin, ‘so that if they did escape, which I seriously doubt they ever could, they wouldn’t be able to get at any of our kids. It makes everyone feel safer, knowing we don’t keep them in the building.’

‘Why do you keep them in the dark like this?’

‘It keeps them fresh.’

‘Fresh? Why? What are you planning? To eat them then? Yeah, I’ll have the mother. Deep fried. She might crisp up a bit.’

‘Of course we’re not planning to eat them.’

‘Then what the hell
are
you planning to do with them?’ said DogNut. ‘Teach them to dance? I mean why have you got three bloody sickos chained up out here? I don’t get it.’

‘Well –’

‘Oh, Justin,’ DogNut butted in. ‘I gotta get out of here. I can’t stand this smell any longer.’

‘Sure, OK. Sorry. I guess we’re used to it.’

He and Paul replaced the drapes, opened the door and climbed down off the lorry before Paul pulled the door back down and locked it.

DogNut stood bent over, drawing in great gulps of clean air, trying to clear the cloying stink from his nostrils. He was fighting not to be sick. Rocking back and forth, swearing, as slowly his head stopped spinning. Finally he sat down on a little camping stool that Paul obviously used.

‘Right,’ he said, his voice husky. ‘What are they for then?’

‘We need them for our experiments,’ said Justin.

‘Experiments?’

‘We’re trying to find out about the disease. Those three in there are guinea pigs. They’ve lived much longer than any of the others we’ve caught.’

‘You’re telling me you carry out experiments on them?’

‘We take their blood, tissue samples …’

‘Tissue samples? You mean you cut bits off them?’

‘That makes it sound worse than it is. We take skin samples, saliva, anything that oozes out of them, really, excrement …’

‘You collect their shit?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘You guys sure know how to party, don’t you?’

Justin grabbed hold of DogNut’s forearm, squeezing it tight.

‘If we’re going to find out how the disease works, we have to know everything about it.’

‘Can’t we just wait for them all to die off, and forget all about the bloody disease?’

‘How old are you, DogNut?’ asked Justin.

‘Fifteen, why?’

‘That’s good.’

‘Why?’

‘What happened when the disease hit?’

‘Everybody over the age of fourteen got sick, the rest of us …’

‘We were fine, right?’ Justin was getting excited, his voice rising in pitch. ‘But what happened when you got older?’ he went on. ‘When you turned fifteen?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Exactly. You didn’t get ill straight away.’

‘Far as I can tell, you don’t get ill full stop.’

‘As far as you can tell?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But what about in the future?’ Justin asked. ‘Can you guarantee that won’t change? Do you know for sure you’ll never get ill?’

‘I got no idea, man. I try not to think about that sort of thing.’

‘Exactly. You’ve got no idea. And do you know whether you can catch it off a grown-up?’

‘No. If you get too close to them, they usually kill you, so who knows?’

‘Who knows? That’s right. That’s exactly one hundred per cent right. Who knows? And what if you get bitten? Could it be passed on to you that way?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Right again. You don’t know. Loads of kids have been bitten and most of them have died of some infection. Not from whatever new disease it is that killed most of the grown-ups off. There are plenty of old diseases banging about inside sickos, like cholera and typhus and, I don’t know, dry rot, and if you get bitten you’re just as likely to die of blood poisoning as anything else. But can they pass on the prime infection with a bite?’

‘Stop asking me questions, Justin.’

‘It’s what scientists do. Ask questions.’

‘Well, they don’t ask me.’

‘Listen, DogNut,’ said Justin, ‘so far nobody’s lived long enough after being bitten for us to tell what might happen. What we need to do is test the blood of someone, a child, obviously, who’s been attacked.’

‘I expect you’ve got volunteers queuing round the block,’ DogNut scoffed. ‘Me! Me! Me! Bite
me
!’

‘DogNut. You have to take this seriously,’ said Justin. ‘If we can find the causes of the illness, how it works, then maybe we can find a cure.’

‘A cure?’

‘Yes!’ said Justin, grinning like a madman now. ‘Imagine if we could turn all those sickos out there back into real mothers and fathers. All you can think about is fighting them, killing them, wiping them out. We’re thinking about curing them.’

‘What do you want to cure them for?’ said DogNut incredulously. ‘Let them die, I say. Then the world will belong to us.’

‘What kind of world, though?’ said Justin. ‘And how will we survive in it?’

‘We ain’t doing too bad.’

‘DogNut’s right!’ said Paul. He’d been lurking by the generator and DogNut had forgotten all about him. ‘We should kill them all.’

‘How can you say that, Paul?’ asked Justin. ‘After all the work you’ve done with us on those three in there?’

‘How can I say it?’ Paul was wide-eyed and getting hysterical. ‘Because they killed my sister. And if you’re on their side then you killed my sister too.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Paul.’

‘Oh, I’m ridiculous, am I? You think it’s funny my sister died?’

‘No, I don’t. Why would I think that? It’s awful. I am really sorry for you. But this is why we need to find a cure so things like that won’t happen again.’

‘It won’t happen again if we kill them all.’

‘Listen, Paul, you really should go and rest. Lie down somewhere.’

‘You don’t want me here, do you?’

‘Quite frankly, no. Not if you’re a danger to the patients.’

‘A danger to
them
!’ Paul screamed. ‘You’ve got it all round the wrong way, Justin. You’re on
their
side. You all are.’

‘Please, Paul, go and chill. I’ll find someone else to look after the lorry.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m going!’ Paul snapped, and he stormed off, swearing at a couple of little kids who were feeding some chickens inside a big pen.

DogNut watched him go. Not sure what to think. Paul’s aggressive attitude was making it hard to feel any sympathy for him.

‘He’ll be all right,’ said Justin.

‘He did have a point, mate,’ said DogNut. ‘It’s seriously screwy keeping those sickos in there.’

‘He’s been looking after them for ages,’ said Justin. ‘He was always good with them. Like a zookeeper. I always thought, in a funny way, he was quite attached to them.’

‘It ain’t right, Justin.’

‘What if you got sick, DogNut?’ Justin snapped, finally losing his temper. ‘What if you found you had the disease? You’d want a cure then, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t laugh at what we’re doing here.’

‘True that. But just how d’you think you’re going to go about finding a cure? You? Huh? A fifteen-year-old kid?’

‘Come with me and I’ll show you,’ said Justin.

‘No way,’ said DogNut. ‘You ain’t showing me any more pet sickos.’

‘We don’t have any more. At the moment it’s just these three,’ said Justin. ‘No. I want to show you the labs.’

‘The labs. Of course. Every mad scientist needs a laboratory …’

Jester’s party were standing by the long-empty departures board in King’s Cross station, tensed and alert, their darting eyes stretched wide as they adjusted to the dim light – not fixing on anything, looking in every direction for any signs of movement. The last hour had been incredibly stressful and their bodies were so pumped with adrenalin they felt wired to the mains. They gave off a pungent reek of stress and fear. Shadowman hadn’t had time to tell the others to try to mask their scent, and was worried that the smell might attract any strangers who might be hiding out in here. Strangers loved dark places and the tube tunnels beneath the mainline station were a perfect nesting place.

It appeared to be deserted up here, however. Nothing moved. The shops had long since been looted. Trains that would never again go anywhere stood dead at the platforms.

They’d been driven steadily eastwards as they tried to avoid the roving gangs of strangers who seemed to be everywhere in this part of town. Any moves to go north, the direction in which they had originally been intending to head, or south, back towards the palace, had been blocked. A particularly determined group of strangers had followed them for the last half-hour as they’d meandered backwards and forwards, trying to find a hiding-place or a safe path away from the danger. In the end they’d taken a route that ran roughly parallel to the Euston Road and had eventually come to King’s Cross station.

It had been Jester who’d suggested they should actually go into the station. He’d pointed out that the train tracks were wide and clear and open and some distance from any buildings. It was unlikely that any strangers would be hiding out on the rails, and if any did approach they’d be able to see them from a long way off.

As none of the others had a better suggestion, they hadn’t argued, and they’d trooped in off the street.

Jester was trying to sound confident. ‘The tracks run straight north from here,’ he said. ‘We can make good time and cover a lot of distance pretty quickly.’

‘What do we want to go north for?’ said Tom.

‘You’re not seriously thinking of carrying on with this stupid trip, are you?’ Kate added.

‘The best thing we can do is find some other kids to help us,’ said Jester.

‘What bloody kids?’ Tom was getting angrier and angrier.

‘Listen, Tom,’ Jester pleaded, ‘we’re not going to find any train tracks running south, are we? Not from round here. We’re on the wrong side of London. So let’s just get well away from this place, OK?’

‘Crap.’

‘Shut up,’ said Shadowman.

‘You shut up,’ said Tom. ‘You ain’t exactly been a lot of help so far.’

‘Don’t have a go at Shadowman,’ said Jester.

‘Both of you shut up,’ Shadowman snapped, and Jester looked shocked.

‘What –’

‘Listen!’

Shadowman said this so urgently they all fell silent and listened. There was the familiar shuffling sound of approaching strangers.

‘Crap,’ Tom repeated. ‘Crap, crap, crap.’

They emerged from the shadows into a pool of light on the station concourse, a long line of strangers much more diseased than the ones they’d seen out on the streets. Some of them looked barely human. Huge chunks of their faces were missing, and what flesh remained was swollen and bloated and popping with boils.

‘Crap.’

‘Too many to fight,’ Shadowman shouted. ‘On to the tracks!’

They raced past the departures board and vaulted over a set of ticket turnstiles, then careered along the platform. There was a long Intercity train parked on each side, the type of trains that seem to go on forever. The kids’ feet pounded on the hard concrete of the platform. They might have looked like any group of passengers running to catch a train if it wasn’t for the collection of diseased and rotting adults that followed them.