The Hunted Read online

  Scarface shook his head. He was probably as scared of the kids in Windsor as the grown-ups. Maybe more so. And everything he had was here, on the farm.

  ‘Sonya and Louisa, the girls, they’ve been trying to get in the buildings.’

  Scarface made the grunting noise in his throat and laid his sticks down near the edge of the fire. Ella could see that he’d made another couple of bundles.

  ‘Are we going to die?’ she asked him.

  She didn’t know why she bothered asking. She knew what he would do. Just shrug. That was all he seemed to do.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to die,’ said Ella. ‘So will you please get up and do something? Get ready!’

  Scarface got up creakily from his chair and stretched. She could hear his joints popping and he gave another little groan, deep in his throat. Then he found Ella’s spiked club and her rubber Lego shield and gave them to her. Ella felt like throwing them on the floor.

  ‘I can’t do anything,’ she said. ‘I can’t fight. Look at me. I’m no use. Why did you ever rescue me if you weren’t going to look after me?’

  Scarface shook his head and turned away, went over to a cabinet on the wall that was padlocked shut. When he opened it, Ella saw there was a shotgun inside it, the type that farmers used, and some boxes of shells. He bent the gun in half and slotted in two shells, then filled up his pockets with the boxes. He left the gun bent in half.

  Out in the yard they were able to smell the grown-ups before they could see them. The wind was blowing towards them from the west and bringing with it the unwashed stink of a thousand diseased bodies. A countryside smell of manure and sour urine, mixed with a town smell of drains and sewers and rotting rubbish. Then they heard them, the steady tramp of their feet making a shuffling rumble, and their sighs and hisses, not a roar, just a depressing moan. Like wind rattling at a window, trying to get in.

  The kids moved to the gate. There was still nothing to see in the darkness. The grown-ups wouldn’t be visible until they got to the wire.

  Ella and Scarface found them there, staring into the night. The noise of the approaching grown-ups made her shiver and she wanted to be sick. The smell was suffocating. She heard Isaac calling out and looked up to see that he had moved back over the rope bridge to the platform in the nearer tree. He sounded scared and excited.

  ‘They’re almost here!’ he was shouting. ‘You should see it. You wouldn’t believe it. It’s insane. There’s hundreds of them. Unless they go round us we don’t stand a hope in hell.’

  ‘They have to go past us, don’t they?’ said Louisa. ‘Why wouldn’t they?’

  ‘They have to go past us, don’t they?’ Harry mimicked her.

  ‘Well, they do!’ snapped Louisa angrily. ‘Some of them. They wouldn’t all want to push in here.’

  ‘Unless they’re hungry,’ said Harry and he licked his lips. ‘Mmmm, a nice fresh Louisa.’

  Daniel didn’t laugh. He looked scared. ‘Why don’t we all just climb up there with Isaac?’ he said. ‘They’re not going to get to us up there. We could wait for them to move on.’

  ‘Yeah, and what if they don’t move on?’ said Sonya. ‘What then? If we go up top we’ll be stuck there. Like a cat chased up a tree by a pack of dogs.’

  ‘Just like the hobbits in The Hobbit,’ said Ella. ‘And we don’t have any kind of magic talking eagle to save us.’

  Harry spotted Scarface’s gun.

  ‘You got any more of them?’ he asked. ‘That’d be well useful.’

  Scarface didn’t respond in any way. Didn’t even look at Harry.

  ‘It’s the only one he’s got,’ said Ella.

  ‘He’s a miserable bastard, isn’t he?’ said Sonya.

  ‘I’d be miserable with a face like that,’ said Harry.

  ‘I’d be miserable with a face like yours,’ said Sonya.

  Scarface put a finger to his lips to get them all to shut up. They stopped talking, and they could hear the grown-ups, closer still, a whispering noise like wind in the trees, or a wave coming closer and closer, just one wave that sounded like it was never going to break. A tsunami.

  Ella stayed close to Scarface, looking at the faces of the other kids, just white streaks in the night.

  ‘I can see them,’ said Louisa quietly and they all turned towards the gate. There, across the open ground, was a moving black mass, the pale light from the moon outlining the tops of heads, picking out steam rising into the night air. They filled the space that was framed between the trees that grew on either aside of the road leading up to the gate, taking up the whole field from side to side.

  One by one the children moved to the gate to get a better look. The stink of the grown-ups was growing stronger; it made Ella feel sick. She wanted to hide, to dig a hole and bury herself in the ground, let the wave wash over her. But she had to look. She had to know what was coming. She went over to the gate with Scarface and forced herself to look.

  They were coming slowly, bunched together, shuffling through the long grass, trampling everything in their way. A shapeless wodge of people. Ella couldn’t see their faces yet, but one thing was very clear to her.

  They weren’t going to stop. They weren’t going to go round. They would come straight through the farm …

  ‘We need to get in the barn,’ she said, surprised that her voice didn’t sound more shaky.

  Scarface put a hand on her shoulder, holding her still. She looked up at him. He was staring at the grown-ups, unblinking. He wanted to defend his farm, but what could he do?

  ‘Army ants,’ said Daniel. ‘They’re just like army ants. They’ll eat everything in their way. We should of run. Instead we’re trapped here with a freak and a useless little girl.’

  He started shouting, swearing at the top of his voice, calling the faceless grown-ups all sorts of bad names, his voice getting hoarser and hoarser. And then he stopped shouting, shook his head and dropped to his knees, pressing his face into the ground. He was crying. Harry sniggered, and Sonya punched him in the arm. Scarface ignored them, just watched the approaching army, his gun hanging from his elbow.

  A thin cloud moved across the sky, exposing the moon so that its full blood-red light fell on the fields.

  And now Ella saw their faces.

  Stupid faces, diseased, rotten, lumpy and grey. They were all sorts – mothers, fathers, a few teenagers, their clothes greasy and black, some naked. Mostly so skinny they were just walking skeletons, but one or two were swollen and puffy, like fat grubs ready to burst. And there were bits of them missing, noses, ears, eyes, lips, fingers, hands, whole arms.

  One of them was slightly in front, a mother who seemed to be laughing, with wide, crazy eyes and two rows of gleaming white teeth. She wasn’t laughing, though: she’d lost the skin and flesh from the lower half of her face, and there were two thick ropes of snot coming out of her nose and dribbling down across her teeth to where they hung off her chin, swaying from side to side as she walked.

  Ella put a hand over her mouth as she retched, her throat gulping. Still Scarface would not move. Daniel had got up and he and the other kids were backing away.

  Still Scarface wouldn’t move and still the grown-ups kept on advancing. They were hissing. They’d seen the children waiting on the other side of the gate, heard Daniel shrieking, and they fixed their dead eyes on them, blank but staring, black holes in their horrible, stupid faces. The first of them were coming up the road towards the gate now, funnelling into the narrower gap, so that they were even more tightly pressed together. Any moment now they would be at the wires.

  ‘We have to hide,’ said Ella. ‘We can’t fight them.’

  Scarface calmly snapped his shotgun straight. Waiting.

  And then the lead grown-ups tangled in the wires, tripping and stumbling. Nothing happened. They kept trying to walk on. What was wrong? Why hadn’t they triggered the trap? More and more of them filled the gap, ploughing through the wires. Hadn’t Scarface reset the pole? Had it broken? Ella was
just about to say something when there was a creaking sound, a crack and a rushing noise, and then, with a great thud, the pole swung out. It chopped down a line of grown-ups and thwacked into the backs of the leaders, skewering them on the spikes. They wriggled and writhed there, trapped, five or six of them. Still the others behind them kept on pressing forward, so that the next rank was slowly pushed into the pole and on to the rear-facing spikes belly first.

  It made no difference. It didn’t stop the rest of them. They came trudging on, driving the trapped grown-ups further on to the spikes and bending the pole. There were so many of them pushing that there was soon a splintering sound and a crack, and the pole broke and the front ranks went tumbling down.

  It made no difference. The ones behind came trundling on, walking right over them, treading on them, crushing them beneath their feet. They were at the gate now, only a couple of metres from where Ella stood with Scarface. All around she could hear the sound of other traps being sprung among the trees and bushes. Bangs and thuds and grunts. Hissing.

  It made no difference. The grown-ups were pushing at the gate now, their bodies crushed by the weight of other people shoving from behind, their flesh squeezing between the metal bars. She could hear the breath being forced out of them, ribs breaking. She remembered the Play-Doh set she used to have, the brightly coloured plastic machines for squashing the dough so that it came out in long, wormy shapes. That’s what was happening to these grown-ups as the ones behind kept pushing forward.

  The gate couldn’t hold. There was another crash as the gateposts broke and the gate came slamming down, spilling grown-ups into the yard and setting off more traps from the sides. Long spikes flew out, spearing more mothers and fathers.

  It made no difference. It made no difference. Nothing made a difference. Nothing could stop them. Ella saw the laughing mother; she’d almost made it to the yard. And behind her was another mother, impossibly thin and impossibly tall, with a long, pale face that looked almost sad, her dark eyes sunk beneath jutting brows. She had long hair that hung down to her waist. Black and straight. Ella had never seen a woman so tall and thin. She swayed slightly from side to side as she walked, arms stiff at her sides, fingers pointing at the ground.

  There was something about the woman. Maybe it was just how tall she was, towering over the other grown-ups. Ella wasn’t sure. There was a power around her. The grown-ups around her looked like they were copying her, mimicking her movements. As if she was some sort of general, and this was her army. As if she could somehow silently command them.

  Her eyes fixed on Ella and seemed to look right inside her. Ella felt almost hypnotized. She couldn’t look away. The mother raised an arm and beckoned to her with a bony hand, as if calling her over. Everything seemed to fall away and go quiet and still. Before she knew what she was doing Ella took a step forward and another, and then Scarface grabbed her and the spell was broken.

  She was back in the noise and chaos.

  The first one of the army was through, stepping over the bodies of those who had fallen at the gate. It was a wiry father with a twisted mouth, his lower jaw broken. He held a club in his hand and he raised it, hissing at Scarface.

  Scarface raised his shotgun to his shoulder and fired a blast directly at him, flattening him and several others around him. Scarface fired a second shot, taking out a few more of them, and now, at last, he decided it was time to retreat.

  He took hold of Ella’s hand and they were running.

  13

  They all bundled inside the main barn – it was the first time the other kids had been in here. There was some light from the fire and Ella watched them looking around with feverish, wild eyes. Outside, they could hear the grown-ups moving through the farm.

  ‘They won’t stop,’ said Louisa. ‘Why would they stop? They’ll carry on going to wherever it is they’re going. They’re not interested in us. Why would they stop?’

  ‘Why would they stop?’ Harry sneered.

  ‘They’ll stop,’ said Daniel. ‘They always stop.’

  ‘Why would they, though?’ said Louisa, sounding desperate.

  ‘Because we’re here,’ said Daniel hopelessly. ‘Because there’s food. I mean, did you see them all, how many there were? It would take a lot of food to feed an army like that. What have they been eating? They’ll stop.’

  ‘No,’ said Louisa. ‘They won’t.’

  ‘Just because you say it won’t make it happen,’ said Harry. ‘You are such a moron, Louisa.’

  ‘They won’t stop!’ Louisa shouted and, as if in answer to her, to show her up for being wrong, there was a bang on the metal side of the barn. Then another. And then a third bang as something hit it hard enough to leave a dent.

  ‘They’ve stopped,’ said Daniel. ‘We are dead.’

  Scarface went over to a ladder that led up through the opening in the roof. He climbed quickly up it and disappeared from view. Ella had been up there once to have a look. The top of the ladder was tied to a cross-beam and it looked out over the whole farmyard. The roof itself was too rickety to stand on.

  ‘Sod this,’ said Sonya. ‘I have to see what’s going on.’ And she started to climb up after him.

  ‘There’s only room for one,’ Ella shouted after her, but Sonya ignored her.

  ‘They’ll get in here,’ said Daniel, his voice a harsh whisper. ‘And they’ll kill us. There’s too many of them.’

  ‘There’s too many of them.’

  ‘Admit it, Harry: you’re scared.’

  ‘Shut up, Daniel,’ said Harry. ‘You’re a real downer, you know.’

  Harry was having to speak quite loudly to be heard because there was a banging on the outside of the barn that sounded like rolling thunder as a hundred hands battered the metal sheets. More and more dents were appearing and Ella could hear grown-ups snuffling and sniffing at any gaps or holes. She wished she hadn’t stayed to look at them as they came to the farm. It made them too real. It would have been easier if she had no picture of them and could pretend they weren’t that bad, that they were weak and useless, not scary at all. The banging could be rain or hailstones. The movement outside? The grunts and moans? It could be a herd of escaped cows. Or horses. Or …

  Anything other than diseased grown-ups. If they got in they would take her like they’d taken her brother and so many of her friends. She wished Scarface would come back down. She didn’t feel safe without him. These kids were useless; all they did was argue. Daniel was too scared to do anything. He was walking about in circles, going from one wall to another, listening, looking up at the sky, muttering to himself, crying all the time, and thumping his chest with his fist. Harry was being mean to Louisa, calling her stupid, and she was having a go back. Every now and then Harry would break off the argument and go over to where the banging noise was loudest and smash the wall with his club. Swear at the grown-ups.

  It made no difference. Nothing made any difference. The grown-ups kept banging on the walls – so loud that Ella couldn’t think – and pushing against them so that they were getting steadily more and more bent in.

  Ella had an image that the barn was her head, and the grown-ups were hammering directly on her skull. She wanted it to stop. She wanted it all to stop.

  There was a rattling at the door.

  And then Louisa screamed.

  One part of the wall had been bent in so far at the bottom that grown-ups were able to get their hands through. Ella could see their fingers scrabbling at the concrete floor and gripping the edge of the bent metal. Harry ran over and started kicking and stamping. Louisa joined him, stabbing with her short spear, cursing the grown-ups. She turned to Daniel, her face pale, eyes wide, mouth wide.

  ‘Help us, won’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, sorry.’ Daniel hurried over to join Harry, stamping on the hands that came under the wall. Despite their efforts, the hole was getting bigger as the grown-ups clawed at the metal and forced it upwards and inwards. A mother stuck her head under, tongue fli
cking out and licking the floor, lips pulled back from her teeth, showing purple gums. Harry kicked her in the temple and then kicked her again, and she pulled back out, only to be followed seconds later by two more heads.

  As they stamped on the heads, a section of wall right next to them was thumped so hard that a big bit of it was bent in. Ella turned to look at it and then saw with a shock that they weren’t alone. While they’d been distracted by the hole at the bottom of the wall, some grown-ups had got in from somewhere else. She couldn’t tell how many there were in the half-light, but in her panic they appeared to fill the barn. She’d seen them just in time. Her scream alerted the other three who turned round to defend themselves.

  That was all they could do, though: hold the invaders off. They were backed up against the wall with no room to use their weapons effectively. Ella hid behind Harry, clutching her club and her shield, hoping nobody expected her to fight. She was aware of a high-pitched wailing and realized it was her. She couldn’t stop screaming.

  ‘Shut up, why don’t you?’ Harry snapped, and Ella fought to control herself.

  But the screams were building inside her, bursting to get out. The stench of the grown-ups was even more awful close up. They were hot and damp and dripping, like old food left too long in a kitchen-waste recycling box.

  Finally she could stand it no longer; she opened her mouth wide to scream, but the noise was drowned out by an almighty bang and there was a flash in the darkness.

  14

  Scarface had come back down the ladder and let off a blast from his shotgun. Sonya was with him, and they were attacking the grown-ups from the side. Scarface emptied his other barrel and as he reloaded Sonya laid about her with her spear. Soon they’d cleared a path to Ella’s group and together they forced the grown-ups back the way they’d come.

  ‘I’ll deal with these ones,’ Daniel shouted, returning to the hole under the wall, where three grown-ups had managed to get their upper bodies through.