The Hunted (36 page)

Kyle looked around the arena. His dad had brought him to Ascot once. He remembered coming back here to watch the horses being paraded round the arena before races so that punters could check them out and see which ones they fancied betting on. His dad had been showing off, telling Kyle all about ‘form’, which horses were fit, the right weight, running well.

He still lost all his money betting on the wrong ones.

Well, the arena was being put to a very different use today. When Kyle had heard what this event was all about, he’d begged Sean to let him join in. The fat kid, Green, had been going to fight with Sean, and Kyle could see that he was secretly glad to be out of it.

Kyle asked Sean about the scary-looking guy with the shaved head who stuck to the King like glue. He’d seen how everyone was a bit scared of him. He was obviously handy. So why wasn’t he on the team instead of the likes of Green?

‘The only event he goes in for is the last part of the Royal Tournament,’ Sean explained. ‘Dunno why. Nobody questions him. Nobody ever really talks to him. He is what he is. Has his own way of doing things. Nobody even knows his name.’

‘Yeah? So what do you call him then?’

‘We don’t call him anything. As I say, he is what he is.’

Kyle was high on excitement. This was almost a medieval tournament, like something from
Game of Thrones
. He’d always liked stories and films about knights when he’d been little, and
Lord of the Rings
. One Christmas he’d been given a Playmobil castle. Wondered where it was now. Would have loved to get it out of its box and set it up and have another battle. This was better, though. All the kids arriving at Ascot on their horses with their weapons and armour. The racing, the fighting. Shame there wasn’t gonna be any jousting. Maybe he’d suggest it for the next meeting.

Not that he’d be here, he supposed. He’d be back in London by then, back at the Tower. So how about he got Jordan Hordern to set up his own races? His own Royal Tournament?

That’d be well cool.

Kyle was at home here. He liked fighting. It was that simple. All the other problems in the world disappeared when you were fighting. Nothing else mattered. It was just beat them before they beat you. His brain was clear in a fight. It was when the fighting stopped that things got complex. Confusing. Difficult.

He looked across the arena and saw Josa and Kenton. They were gonna be well sore from this morning. He hoped they wouldn’t try anything stupid. Kenton had a club and Josa carried a narrow-bladed sword.

Kyle realized the crowd had fallen silent. Arno was standing there with the King and old bald bonce, the nameless one. Arno waved his long stick in the air, like Gandalf on the bridge at Khazad-dûm, and the King
started yelling something that Kyle couldn’t understand. Then Arno cut in.

‘His Royal Highness, King Loopy-Lou the Ninety-ninth, thanks you, noble fighters,’ Arno shouted. ‘I thank you, and the crowds gathered here today thank you, you mighty morons, you brain-dead dummies, prepared to suffer for our enjoyment. In a moment our merry band of musicians will give a crappy fanfare and then you will kick the bogeyman into touch!’

Arno dropped his staff. Trumpets and trombones blared, tambourines rattled, drums thumped and the gates opened to let in the enemy.

A father limped into the arena carrying a length of metal piping, confused and blinking, his semi-naked body a mess of sores and boils and weeping gashes. Ed rubbed his scar, which had started to throb. He hated sickos. Hated them more than anything else in the world. He had no problem slaughtering them.

So why did this feel different?

‘I’m not sure I want to watch this,’ said Brooke.

‘Remember the golden rules of this contest,’ Arno called out from his seat next to the King. ‘There are no rules. This is war now. And we can’t let any of them live.’

Behind the father came two more fathers, then a mother, then a whole group of them, the last being prodded in by Ascot guards carrying long spears and pikes, until there were thirty-five, maybe forty of them in the arena, huddled together. Some armed with crude weapons. Most unarmed. Apart from their fingernails and teeth.

The gate was pulled shut across the entrance. The only way these grown-ups were getting out of there was being dragged by their heels.

The gladiators now turned to the King and raised their weapons in a salute.

‘They honour you, crazy Caesar,’ Arno shouted. ‘And we offer you the blood of these bastards to make us stronger, and to help us win in the weeks ahead, until the next games. Now go to it, brethren, do it for your King, the King of Chaos. This is the death of all bad things, the triumph of the cool. You who are about to die, we salute you!’

The King tipped back his head and howled at the sky, and the howl was taken up by all the kids, like a pack of wolves, and the big hench from Sandhurst strode across the arena towards the sickos and cut one down with his sword with a great cry.

‘
Rahhhh!
’

Ed was both horrified and fascinated. Next to him Brooke was hiding behind her hands like a little kid watching
Doctor Who
. Ed noticed that the crowd had thinned out a little. Some kids had gone, unable to watch the slaughter.

‘Do you want to leave?’ Ed asked Brooke.

‘This is sick,’ she said. ‘And not
good
sick. I mean bad sick. Real sick. I never thought I’d feel sorry for one of ’em. But this is wrong.’

‘If it keeps the peace …’ Ed didn’t really know what else to say. ‘If it keeps these kids from killing each other then …’

‘This is cool,’ said Lewis. ‘It’s well sick. And I mean sick as in a good thing.’ And then he jumped out of his seat with half the other kids as Josa cut a mother’s arm off. Ed had never seen Lewis this lively outside of a fight.

It was a full-scale massacre now, and it was hard to keep up with the action as the arena became a riot of swarming bodies. Kids running in and chopping at the
sickos, stabbing, kicking, gouging. The adults fighting back now. They’d looked like a scrawny, mangy bunch, made stupid by disease and being out in the daylight, but they fought like banshees, roaming in little packs.

Ed had never watched a battle like this before; he’d only ever been in the middle of one. He figured that people had always liked watching violence, from the Romans throwing Christians to the lions, to the public executions of the Middle Ages, to slasher movies and awful stuff on the Internet.

This was still shocking, though. The grass was starting to turn red.

Those kids who had stayed to watch were loving it. This was revenge. Payback for everything that had happened in the last year.

Ed tried to pick Kyle out in the confusion.

Couldn’t see what had happened to him.

He turned to Lewis.

‘Can you see Kyle?’

Kyle was in among a tight bunch of sickos. They’d got around him quicker than he was expecting and he was too hemmed in to swing his axe, so was having to use it to shove them away to make some space.

He gave an almighty shunt, swore at the ugly bastards and now there was room. And then he felt the world shift sideways. He was reeling. It took a moment, but then his head exploded with pain. Something had smashed into the side of it. Must be an armed sicko. He’d seen one with an iron bar just now. He staggered in a circle, looking for him, worried that he might black out. Instead he puked and that seemed to clear his head. The next moment, however, he felt a terrible, cold, aching jolt up his right arm and he dropped his axe.

He’d been hit again. This time on the bicep. His whole arm had gone numb. He could barely move it.

Bastard sicko, where was he?

And then he heard a voice.

‘You gonna pay for this morning, wasteman.’ It was Kenton, looming out of the melee with a grin on his ugly, tattooed face, casually swinging his club in the air. Was it Kenton who’d hit him? He picked up the axe Kyle had
dropped so that he was now holding two weapons, one in each hand.

‘And you gonna pay for the other day an’ all.’ Josa had come up behind Kyle. ‘That car was ours.’

‘Well, I ain’t got my wallet on me,’ said Kyle, manoeuvring for space. ‘So I can’t pay you right now. How about I just kick your arses?’

‘How about you try?’ said Josa and she lifted her sword. It glinted in the afternoon sun. It was two against one and Kyle was unarmed.

The sensible thing to do would be to run. You can’t argue with a blade. Stab wounds were bad. Hell –
any
wound was bad. He didn’t want to end up bleeding to death in some stinky bed like Macca, as his poo leaked out of his punctured guts.

Trouble was, Kyle wasn’t a bolter. He had too much bloody pride. To run now would be a loss of nerve, a loss of face. Fighting was his thing. The only thing he was good at. The thing that made him who he was.

An idiot, sure. But a fighter too.

Well, if it meant dying with his boots on.

Bring it on …

Kenton certainly looked impressive with his two weapons. Like some ninja, kung fu warrior, or a badass
World of Warcraft
dude. But Kyle remembered him at Slough, twirling that damned shotgun. How easily Lewis had taken it off him. And two weapons at once were hard to control, especially when one was as heavy and hard to control as Brain-biter. Kenton wasn’t the worry, though. Josa was.

Kyle badly needed something to defend himself with,
give him an edge. What could he do? His arm still hurt like hell. He doubted he’d be able to use a weapon even if he could get hold of one. There wasn’t time for that anyway. If he switched his attention to look for something, Josa and Kenton would be on him like dogs on a bone.

A thought came to him. All sorts of things can be weapons.

He moved.

Ran hard at Kenton, getting inside his swing, going to his left, where he was struggling to raise Brain-biter with his weaker left arm. That put Kenton between Kyle and Josa. Kenton swung the axe feebly and the shaft batted harmlessly off Kyle’s back. And Kyle was in. He grabbed hold of Kenton by the shirt with both hands, ignoring the pain that clawed at his wounded arm. Kenton hadn’t been expecting this and had no hands free to do anything, unless he wanted to drop a weapon. And Kyle was giving him no time to think. He shoved hard, piling Kenton backwards and into Josa, who couldn’t get out of the way quickly enough and was now being forced back into a knot of sickos. Kyle kept moving and, as he felt the two of them start to go down, he gave one last push and they collapsed.

As they fell, Kyle grabbed Kenton’s club, twisting it. Kenton, falling backwards, had two options: let go or risk having his arm broken. Kyle helped him make the decision by kicking hard at his elbow. Kenton cried out in pain and the cudgel was free. Kyle jumped over the falling bodies and ran clear, tensed, ready. Kenton, who had landed on Josa, was first up, fumbling with the axe. Kyle didn’t give him a chance. He gripped the club in both
hands, feeling a stab of pain that shot up his arm into his head, and swung.

He got Kenton full in the mouth. It was like hitting a tomato with a baseball bat. Bright red blood splattered out and Kenton was down for good. The shock wave up Kyle’s arm made him scream. It was shuddering and twitching in spasm.

He gritted his teeth and looked at Kenton, who was kneeling on the ground, moaning, Brain-biter dropped and forgotten.

‘Now you’re a matching pair,’ said Kyle. ‘The toothless twins.’

Josa was up, though, and coming at Kyle in a low crouch, the blade ready in her hand. Kyle was about to lift the cudgel to a strike position with his left arm when he was grabbed by two fathers. If he hadn’t been hurting so much already he might have thrown them off, but he was powerless to do anything except curse and try to avoid their teeth.

Josa moved in for the kill. She had Kyle just where she wanted him.

And then Ed was there. And Josa went down again, punched in the side of the head. Stunned. Ed picked up Kyle’s axe, cut the sickos away and brought it around on Josa as she tried to get up.

‘This ends now,’ he snapped. He had a look of cold, hard fury on his damaged face that even Kyle found frightening. Lots of people had made the mistake of thinking that Ed was a nice, gentle guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Kyle knew him better. He knew that, if it came to it, Ed would drive that axe right through Josa’s skull. And Josa knew it too. You could see it in her face.

‘You shouldn’t even be in this fight,’ she said.

‘Show me the rule book.’ Ed hacked a mother aside as she came close and Kyle could see that Josa was scared that she’d be next.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘It’s over.’