The Fallen Read online

  ‘We’re getting out of here.’

  ‘But it’s there. It’s out there.’

  ‘We’re going to run,’ said Jibber-jabber, his voice wobbly. ‘Back to the stairs and up to the gallery, and we’re going to yell and scream all the way and somebody’s going to help us. I’m not staying in this bloody toilet a moment longer.’

  They stumbled out of the cubicle, Ella clinging on to his arm. The guttering tea light sent wild shapes leaping and skittering about the toilet. They stopped by the sinks. They could see something moving outside, approaching the open door, throwing a big shadow across the floor. Crawling, sniffing, inhuman.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Jibber-jabber whispered. ‘We’re going to run.’

  ‘I don’t like it … It’s coming towards us … It’s coming in …’

  ‘Get ready … we’ll barge it out of the way …’

  ‘No … I can’t …’

  ‘Now …!’

  Godzilla stuck his furry face round the door and cocked his head to one side. He barked. In his relief Jibber-jabber relaxed his bowels and unclenched his buttocks and did what he had been unable to do for the last five minutes.

  29

  This is the official report of day one of the expedition to the Promithios warehouse and supply depot near Heathrow Airport. Written by the scribe Lettis Slingsbury.

  SECond ENTRY: Evening.

  After the repairs were mended, and Jackson had fixed the trolley, we carried on. People were nicer about Achilleus now and didn’t moan about him so much behind his back, as they had seen how well he could fight. It was the same with all the new children. My friends understood now that it was going to be dangerous, and without the new children we were going to be in trouble, so they had better just accept it and be grateful for the help. Of course it wasn’t a surprise to Jackson and some others who had seen the new children in action when they had arrived at the museum and fought off the sickos from the lower level. I was also in a fight at the museum when some sickos got into the library, but Chris Marker is writing down that story so I won’t write it down here as well, except I will say that it was frightening and made me more scared of sickos than I was before.

  Sorry, this is getting long. The important thing that happened on the road was that everyone understood that without the people from Holloway we wouldn’t have been able to make this journey at all. Jackson is a good fighter, and some of the other museum people, but we don’t have enough good fighters who are experienced in fighting out on the streets. We all feel safer having Achilleus and Blue and Ollie and Big Mick and the others with us. And more than that. I have seen the way Jackson looks at Achilleus. It is my job to watch and notice things (which is why I am sorry I didn’t watch the battle). Jackson is jealous of him and wants to be able to fight as well as him. Maybe she fancies him a bit as well. She might have a chance. He is ugly and probably doesn’t have many girlfriends, and Jackson is not very pretty. I don’t mean to be mean, but it is the truth and I have to write the truth.

  I hope if Jackson ever reads this she will understand that I am only writing what I see. I am not saying anything about her. I like her, but she is not one of the pretty girls. Maybe she and Achilleus should get together. They are well suited, with the fighting and the not being good-looking and everything. She walks next to him all the time. With poor little Paddy struggling along behind them. They talk all the time. I think mostly about fighting.

  We were going even slower than before, but the road got a bit better as we went. It was all up high, elevated is the proper word, so no sickos could get on it and be where we were. We went past tall buildings and offices with logos on them, still with more good views over London, and I started to really realize that we were actually going a very long way and I don’t think I was the only one who was getting more nervous the further we went. We felt like a very small bunch of people in a very big place. We mostly stopped talking. As we got tireder and tireder, and the people pushing the trolleys got tireder, the journey got harder. The road seemed to stretch on forever in front of us.

  I also realized that I think I must have driven along this motorway, the M4, before with my mum and dad because I have seen signs for the west. My Auntie Val used to live in Bath which I know is west, also there is a church group near Glastonbury we used to visit (also west), so we must have come this way I think. Also I know we have flown from Heathrow Airport. When we went to Corfu one time we flew from Heathrow. So I don’t know how many times I must have been along this road in the car. In the car you could do it really quickly, unless there was traffic, and you don’t really notice things in a car always. I probably never even looked out of the window to see where we were and what we were travelling past. When you walk you see everything and have time to study it. As I wrote before, it is a long way.

  We passed a few cars abandoned on the motorway. But we knew that even if we got them started somehow they would have no petrol in them, that’s why they were abandoned. When the illness came, the big disease, it was amazing how quickly things changed. Ships couldn’t arrive in the ports and lorries couldn’t drive things around the country. The petrol ran out really quickly, then the food ran out, then everything ran out. So now we walk, and we push our trolleys.

  As I am writing this, I know I have strayed from the history of the day, but I don’t want to write about the next bit. I don’t really want to remember it. I know I will have to, though, because it is the job given to me by Chris Marker. My job is to remember things in this journal for all time.

  So I will force myself to remember what happened and tell you about it. We carried on, plodding along, for mile after mile, the road seeming to go nowhere. Then at last we came to some parkland and trees on either side of the motorway and it felt like we had finally got to the edge of London. We were getting worried that we might not be so safe now, though, because the motorway wasn’t high up any more (not elevated). It was running along the ground like a normal motorway, and the trees and grass and weeds came right up to it, and in some places right on to it, so that the road was disappearing. It felt strange to be away from buildings. I’d been among buildings for so long I couldn’t hardly remember what the countryside was like, especially having no TV to look at.

  Instead of making me happy to be out among trees and bushes and twittering birds it made me fearful. It was all too unfamiliar and strange. I wasn’t the only one. All the others were huddling together and they went even more quieter. We had come such a long way it seemed. We were walking along like that, all muddled and huddled together, eyes fearful, nobody laughing or joking, and nobody even complaining any more, when we heard a noise.

  There was this one time we went on holiday to Dorset. A nice little cottage in some fields. This was obviously a long time before the illness came, when the world was normal and everything was all right. But the cottage was near a dog kennels where they bred Alsatians. There were big, scary signs everywhere saying ‘KEEP OUT’. You wouldn’t have gone near it, though, because of the noise of all the dogs. All day and night they seemed to keep it up, barking away like mad, and howling. It sounded horrible. I did get used to it, but sometimes I think the wind would change direction and we would hear them well loud and close and then I’d get scared. I was scared they might get out and come charging across the fields. All dogs together like that make a different sort of noise to one dog barking, they all mix into one big noise. A din it is called.

  Well, I recognized it straight away this afternoon when I heard it. It was dogs, a big pack of them, all barking and yelping and howling one on top of the other, making a din. Blue and Einstein told us not to panic, but I could tell the noise was getting nearer, and there were a lot of dogs coming. We tried to hurry up and run along the road, but the trolleys were making it too difficult. Blue said we should leave them behind and Einstein got really cross. Next thing, instead of running, we were all standing in the middle of the motorway, yelling and screaming at each other in a big row. Blue was pushing E
instein and Einstein was pushing Blue, and Achilleus was just laughing, and they all seemed to have forgotten about the dogs. I hadn’t. I could hear them getting nearer and nearer and nearer, and then I did the only thing I did in this story when I shouted that the dogs were coming. Only it wasn’t dogs, not at first, it was these three sickos.

  Suddenly they came crashing out of the trees on one side of the road and ran right into us. They were really crazy ones, badly diseased, their skin all hanging off, no hair, their clothes just rags. Achilleus and his team snapped to attention really quickly. They thought we were being attacked, and they cut the sickos down fast, Achilleus sticking his metal spear right through the neck of the first sicko, who was a mother, before I could turn away. As I have written, they thought that the sickos were attacking, but they weren’t attacking, they were running away, which became quickly clear, because the next thing the dogs came, hundreds of them, pouring out of the trees.

  I say hundreds, I don’t mean hundreds, I am trying to be descriptive, to let you know what it felt like. At school they said we should write using descriptive language. And metaphors. The dogs were like a wave crashing on a beach. I want to be accurate, but I didn’t count the dogs. There were loads of them, big ones mostly, but also dogs of all sizes, even some small ones, a huge hunting pack. They were all scabby with squinty eyes full of pus, some with red bleeding sores, some starving, with their bones showing through their skin. And they were crazed. Slobbering and hungry as hell.

  They fell on the sickos that Achilleus had killed, to bite at them and eat them, but they also started snapping and snarling at us. There were so many of them, they couldn’t all get to the dead bodies so they started to attack us. Especially Caspar, who still had blood and stuff all over his trainer from where he had kicked the sicko’s body earlier. I saw three dogs attack him and try to bite his foot. They dragged the trainer off him, and his foot was all cut up and bloody. They tore the trainer to pieces and then they went back to Caspar for more. I saw all this. I was there watching with my own eyes.

  There was other stuff going on as well, and the fighters were trying to kill the dogs. They moved so fast, though, and there were so many of them and they were in among us. Half the kids broke and ran away into the woods on the other side of the road. The others stayed to fight, and then some of us went into a tight bundle, trying to protect ourselves. Caspar’s whole leg was badly cut, and Gabby, one of Einstein’s scientists, was pulled down by the arm, and before anyone could help her some dogs had bitten her in the throat. I can still hear her screams and the way they were shut off.

  Big Mick was nice. He came with his fighters to protect us, the ones who couldn’t fight. They were good and brave and Mick killed lots of dogs. The fighters eventually managed to take control and regroup and start to defeat the dogs, fighting them back, and the bigger dogs started to drag the bodies of the sickos away. Blue shouted to let them take them. It was all very confusing, chaos even. Ollie’s team now eventually managed to start getting some missiles fired off which scared the dogs. Big Mick told us we all had to wave our arms and shout really loud. Those with weapons hit them and eventually the dogs were defeated and they slinked away into the trees.

  It was a bad mess. The road was filled with dead animals. As well as poor Gabby, who was dying, and Caspar, who was really badly wounded. Lots of the other kids had bites and scratches, and now Mick had to put a search party together to find the ones who had run off into the trees. I think there was a big park of some kind there or something (maybe a forest?). Mick was gone for a long time and we got worried that he might not come back. He did, though, in the end, with all the kids with him, and he was in a very grumpy mood. They had scattered far and wide, but he managed to find them all.

  We had another meeting then. Sitting in the middle of the road while they tried to help Caspar. We had to decide what to do about poor Gabby as well. She lost so much blood from her neck she went very white and then went into a coma, and her heart slowed down and in the end she died, so we decided to wrap her up and bring her with us, so that she wouldn’t be eaten. By sickos or by dogs, or another animal. We put her in one trolley. Caspar couldn’t walk so he was put in the other trolley. Einstein said it was lucky we had brought the trolleys and Blue said that if we hadn’t been slowed down by them we would have been at Heathrow a long time ago and wouldn’t have been attacked in the first place. They would never agree. It was stalemate.

  Half the people wanted to go straight back to the museum. Einstein spoke for the other half, who wanted to press on. He said that it would all have been a waste to go back, and that Gabby would have died in vain. She was a scientist, she knew the importance of the expedition. If we went home we would only have to come back later and that might be even more dangerous. We had come this far, we should carry on, surely the worst of it was over. Etc.

  They argued and argued, but Einstein won. He is very stubborn and won’t listen to other people. So we limped on. It was late now. The trolley with the wonky wheels was even slower with Gabby’s body in it and it started to rain, which made everyone even more miserable. I don’t mind admitting I was really scared now, crying all the time. I liked Gabby. What else might happen to us? It was hard to keep going. It felt like we were pushing a boulder up a mountain. Which is another metaphor. Strangely it was Einstein who kept our spirits up. He changed a bit, he wasn’t so almighty and sarcastic. He encouraged us, he checked we were all right, he urged us on.

  Roughly about an hour ago, as the sky grew heavy and dark, we got to a red church in among some trees near Heathrow and managed to break inside. It is dry and not too cold. The walls are thick and we can keep a look-out on the tower, or I should say steeple. I feel safe at last here. It is familiar. I feel safe enough to write these words, with sadness in my heart and a fear of tomorrow and what it might bring.

  30

  ‘Can’t you get him to shut up?’

  ‘He’s hurt.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s pretty obvious.’

  Achilleus looked over to where Caspar was lying on the floor of the church, on an inflatable mattress that the museum kids had brought along with them. He was yelling and screaming, lashing out angrily at his friends who were trying to help him. Swearing at them, telling them to leave him alone. He was delirious from pain and his growing fever.

  ‘I got hurt,’ said Achilleus. ‘Didn’t cry like a baby.’

  ‘Leave it out, Achilleus,’ said Ollie, who could see that the museum kids were all pretty freaked out by what had happened earlier in the day. ‘He’s really badly cut up. He could die.’

  ‘Yeah … Well, he should still shut up about it.’

  ‘We can’t all be as tough as you, Akkie.’ Ollie loaded this with edge, and wondered for a moment whether he’d gone too far and Achilleus might have a go at him. It wasn’t beyond him to physically attack Ollie. Ollie tried to hold his cold stare as Achilleus turned it on him. Daring him to say something else. At last Achilleus smiled.

  ‘You’re right, ginge,’ he said. ‘You can’t all be as tough as me.’

  Now Achilleus turned on Einstein. The three of them were sitting at the back of the church on a hard wooden pew.

  ‘You’re a doctor, ain’t you?’ he said. ‘Some kind of scientist, medical expert. So do something for him.’

  ‘We’ve done all we can.’ Einstein sounded tired, his voice slightly hoarse. It had been a long day. ‘We’ve soaked him in antiseptic, and tried to bandage him up, but those dogs tore his leg to pieces.’

  ‘He lost a lot of blood?’

  ‘Quite a lot. But dog bites, they’re not clean.’

  ‘You got any alcohol? Something like that, to calm him down?’

  ‘No. Just painkillers. We’ve given him all we can. We just have to wait.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Achilleus. ‘Wait for him to die so we can all get some sleep.’

  He got up and walked away to where Paddy was waiting for him at the other end of the small church. Paddy had
been making Achilleus a bed of sorts out of stuff he’d found in the church. Achilleus slapped him round the head when he got there, prodded at the bed with the toe of his boot.

  Ollie found himself alone with Einstein.

  ‘Not exactly soft-hearted, is he?’ said Einstein.

  ‘Nope. He’s a dick.’ Ollie rubbed a bruise on his arm. Wasn’t even sure when he’d got it or who’d given it to him. Must have happened in one of the fights. But which one?

  ‘I really have done all I can for Caspar,’ said Einstein.

  ‘Yeah, I know. It’s bad news. But it happens.’

  Ollie looked around the church. Everyone had broken up into their separate groups. Waitrose kids on one side, Blue and Big Mick and the other Morrisons kids on the other. The museum kids were in the middle, clustered round where Caspar was lying on the mattress. About half of them were holding on to each other and crying.

  The dead body of the girl, Gabby, was wrapped tightly in some dust sheets they’d found and lying on the altar. Ollie could see that a reddish brown stain had seeped through the white material.

  Lettis, in her funny robes, was sitting at the other end of the pew, scribbling away in her big book by the light of a candle. She was very dedicated, keeping up with her journal entries. She had a serious expression on her face and her tongue was sticking out between her teeth.

  ‘Look at them all,’ said Einstein. ‘Children. That’s all they are.’

  As far as Ollie could see, he and Einstein were the only two kids who were mixing it up right now and he was going to take the opportunity to get some more stuff straightened out in his mind.

  ‘Can I ask you something else?’ he said, and Einstein grunted.

  ‘You want to ask me some more about whether you’re going to die?’

  ‘Not really, no. Don’t want to think about that too much.’

  ‘What then? You’ve got a lot of questions. Why now? Why me?’