20 Years Later (2 page)

Zane tensed as pride tugged at a string in his stomach. “It isn't my Mum I'm worried about,” he lied.

In Zane's life, the rule to
Never Go Into Hospitals
was as fundamental as
Don't Touch The Fire and Wash Your Hands Before You Clean The Wound
. Miri had instilled him with not only a respect for nature, but also a pathological fear of the dark concrete buildings that lined the square. It hadn't taken much; only a few cautionary warnings, a tearful reprimand when she had found him entering the lobby to look for fuel on
a bitterly cold day, but the
Never Go Into Hospitals rule
was proving hard to break.

“Then you must be scared,” Dev stuck out his chin as a clear challenge.

Zane thrust his shaking hands into his pockets and stood straighter as Dev pulled his favourite woolly hat out of his pocket and jabbed his hair under it. The ginger fuzz defiantly poked out of several holes across the crown as Dev meticulously tucked in wayward strands away from his forehead and ears. Everything that Dev wore had holes, like all of the other Bloomsbury Boys. The skill of the well-dressed Boy was to make sure that each thin layer had its holes in different places. Lots of layers not only kept out the cold, but also made them look stouter than they were. It no longer worked on Zane as he and Miri had dressed too many wounds on their scrawny arms and legs to be fooled by such a simple trick.

Dev took a deep breath, drew himself up to his full height as he faced the double doors and strode towards them.

Zane's clammy hands clenched deep in his pockets. The old glass of the doors was filthy and cracked, beyond them the hospital was as black as the inside of a poppy. He read the words on the faded blue sign hanging lopsidedly over the door. “National Hospital for Nee-ur-ology and Nee-ur-osurgery,” he sounded out softly as Miri had taught him.

Dev, trying to seem braver than his clever and more handsome friend, reached out with shaking hands and pushed the doors open. He and Zane wrinkled their noses at the stale air that wafted out, carrying a fine dust on it that made Dev cough slightly.

Inside the lobby fingers of moonlight began to tentatively pick their way across the floor. A thick layer of dust covered everything in sight with gentle undulations immediately recognisable from some of the alleyways between the garden and the Boys' square. Bones.

Zane swallowed hard, not noticing that both he and Dev were holding their breath. Their eyes darted around the space, taking in the strange looking doors, how so many things were broken. Internal windows and doors had been smashed and many were hanging off their hinges. Strange wheeled beds were further in, some blocking a corridor in their haphazard arrangement. There were many things neither of them had seen before: signs, symbols on the walls, fire extinguishers, faded and grubby posters from the time before It happened.

A large, rotting staircase was at the farthest point ahead of them, but it was blocked by several pieces of furniture that had been used as some kind of makeshift barricade. Two pillars that were once white stretched up to the ceiling, now grey and streaked with dirt. To the right was a large reception desk, the wood intact, thanks to Miri keeping the Boys out of the hospitals too. Any other building and it would have been scavenged and burnt a long time ago. To the far right, Zane caught a glimpse of an attractive woman with short blonde hair looking out from a painting. He stared at her for a long moment, until Dev finally moved forward, taking a step inside.

Zane followed close behind him, both still enraptured by the alien space but also the sheer sense of adventure. He jumped as the door began to swing closed behind them, and paused to brace it open with an old clipboard he found on the floor near his feet.

“We need the light,” Zane whispered.

Dev frowned. “We need to find another way up,” he whispered back, with a slight tremor in his voice. “Them stairs are no good.”

Zane looked around for another way out of the lobby and saw a sign reading “Stairs to upper floors” with an arrow pointing to the right.

“This way.”

“How'd you know?”

Zane pointed at the sign and began to move forward. His illiterate friend shrugged and fell in behind him, stepping where Zane stepped as Jay had taught him to do when exploring new places.

They clambered over the bones and wreckage, taking care not to touch anything unless they absolutely needed to do so. The corridor to the right was extremely dark; the moonlight could only penetrate so far in, and at several points they could only progress by touch alone. It was only by chance that Zane leant against a door out of the corridor that swung open to reveal a stairwell, lit by moonlight streaming weakly through a skylight high above them. It was sufficient to sketch out the shape of the stairs stretching up above them and the door to the first floor.

“It were four windows up, where I saw it, and on the other side,” Dev whispered. Zane nodded in response, gritting his teeth to stop them chattering. It meant that the light would be impossible to see from the garden or their house.

As carefully and as quietly as possible, they both began to climb the steps. It was slow work, as the steps were also blanketed by the awful grey dust and many of them were littered with bones and skulls. They were careful not to send any crashing down the stairwell. Both boys were used to seeing remains bleached by the sun on the roads that hadn't been cleared by Miri or the Bloomsbury Boys, but somehow the darkness and the knowledge that they really shouldn't be inside this place conspired to make it scary to step over them here.

Zane counted the doors as they went up and thankfully the dim blue-grey light got slightly stronger the further up they went. Finally, he stopped outside the door to the third floor. A small round window was set into it and he stood on his tiptoes to peer through. A long corridor with many doors leading off it on both sides could just be made out through the filthy glass. It
was also very dark.

He turned back to Dev. “Can't see anything.”

“It'll be further along, the window was in the middle.”

There was an awkward pause. “Shall we go and have a look?”

Dev nodded. “Come this far …”

He stepped in front of Zane and slowly pushed the door open. It creaked as if it hadn't been opened for years and they both froze.

Nothing happened.

Dev let out the breath he hadn't realised he was holding and stepped through. A large murky window at the far end of the corridor let in enough moonlight for them to progress. Their shoulders hunched with tension, they both began to creep down the silent corridor, their footsteps muffled by the thick carpet of dust. Thankfully, there seemed to be fewer bones up here.

The clouds outside cleared and the grey-blue light strengthened into silver, describing the streaks of dirt on the window as it reached through. In that moment, Zane saw something that made him grab Dev's shoulder, half to stop him but half out of fear. With a shaking hand, he pointed out the large footprints in the dust that lay from a door at the other end of the corridor and led up to one of the doors just to their left. Only one set. Whoever had made them was still in that room.

In that moment, they both heard a strange rasping sound, like someone struggling to breathe in the winter after running in the cold. Only it wasn't entirely like that; it was slow and it had an edge to it. There was something odd about the exact regularity of the breaths and a slight click that sounded as it changed from intake to out breath. It came from the same room that the footprints led up to.

As they both turned to the door, the crack beneath it was suddenly illuminated by a bright yellow light that spilled out
from underneath and into the corridor to fall over their shoes. Zane and Dev clutched at each other wildly, but the light faded just as quickly as it had appeared. They finally began to relax but froze again when the the light returned and the door handle started to turn.

A footfall with a heavy metallic clang made them both jump, the shock spurring both of them to back away from the door as it swung open. Both boys gasped at the figure emerging from the room. He was huge, at least seven feet tall, but what drained the colour from their faces was the shape of the Giant's head. It was as wide as his shoulders, like a huge square sat on top of his frame. The Giant lurched out of the room as if his feet were made of iron and turned to face the boys. Before they could make out any features on his huge face the bright yellow light swung around to shine on them. Dazzled, they both shrieked in terror and sprinted down the corridor back to the stairwell.

They hurtled through the door and raced down the first flight of steps as the heavy footfalls approached and the yellow light burst through the round window above their heads. They listened to the bizarre breathing as the Giant approached. He stopped on the other side of the door and both boys held their breath, hoping desperately that he wouldn't come into the stairwell after them. After agonised seconds of tense listening to the regular, horrible wheeze, they both sagged as they heard him walk away in the opposite direction. The steady, slow, clanking footsteps grew quieter as the light swept away from their door.

A long time ago, Russell Square, the heart of the Blooms-bury Boys' territory, had a garden in the middle of it just like Miri's square. But since the Boys had claimed it, the garden had gradually died, unable to withstand the constant assault of small, destructive children. When his predecessor had died, Jay ordered it cleared of the last big shrubs to give a clear view across at all times. Now all that was left was a few stubborn trees, tattooed with the markings of every Boy who had lived there.

The concrete area in the centre, where a fountain once entertained small children before It happened, was where the Boys tended to gather. News was exchanged there and the spoils of scavenging were pooled and inspected and fought over. On the mud around the concrete area they kept bits of metal, piles of junk too big to put easily anywhere else after having been cleared out of the rest of the square.

There was also a small fleet of rusting shopping trolleys that provided hours of amusement. None of the Boys had any concept of what they'd originally been designed for, so for every Boy they had only one purpose: racing, with one Boy inside and two to push. The shopping trolleys, or “Wheelies” as the Boys called them, had been responsible for three broken arms, two sprained wrists and countless scrapes and cuts. All of these injuries had been carefully cleaned, set, and bandaged by Miri as she listened to a detailed account of who had smashed into whom and who had won. Not even a broken arm would stop a race.

Almost the entire gang had gathered to hear what Dev had to say after he'd come running into the square yelling for
Jay. Zane had waited at the edge to be invited into the territory, and Grame waved him in, also eager to see what the commotion was about. Zane hung back, giving Dev the spotlight as the Boys drifted in to surround him. Dev's eagerness to impress them and raise his profile was palpable.

“He was twice as tall as you Jay, and at least three times wider … and he couldn't breathe proper-like, he sounded like Tim after he runs lots –”

“Hey!” Tim protested, admittedly one of the shortest and weakest of the Boys. The rest of them sniggered.

Jay had been rubbing the sleep from his eyes when Dev and Zane reached him. Zane had persuaded his friend to wait until dawn before going back to report to Jay, knowing of his bad temper when woken too early. Dev tried to catch his breath and calm down before starting, giving the others a chance to collect around him. The only ones not there were those on watch, but they would soon be filled in.

Jay stood a head taller than the rest of the Boys, even Grame and Mark. It was this, and his thick black hair that he liked to shape into short messy spikes, that made him so easy to spot when the Boys were all together. When the Boys looked up at Jay, they stood straighter, and he only needed to shout “Oy!” once to make any of them stop whatever they were doing and come running if he wanted it. The gang leader walked with the swagger of a young man who knew he was on top. Never afraid to make and hold eye contact, he had the cockiness of one who could fight well and knew it.

A vast array of items adorned the young leader's wiry body. First was his belt, made of several thin black ties plaited together. Then his jacket, made of faded and scuffed black leather, with a variety of patches, some fabric, some metal, sewn over various holes left by different knife fights. Zane's mother had stitched on several of them, usually after sewing up the wound acquired at the same time. On the inside of that
jacket was a collection of small metal badges coveted by all of the other Boys. Jay gave them out as a special reward whenever he felt a Boy should be publicly lauded. Almost all of the Boys had at least one; Grame and Mark both had ten each. Dev had none.

Two knives hung off Jay's hips. They had worn handles and battered sheaths but Zane knew that the blades were sharpened every day. Jay had a spot in the square where he liked to do that, opposite the main barricade at the top of Montague Street, the place where the Gardners attacked the most. His pale blue eyes, framed by long black lashes, stared at that point where he had personally killed several Gardners with the very knives he was sharpening. All the Boys knew never to disturb Jay when he scraped the metal with his special stone, for when he was doing that, all Jay saw was Gardners and blood. When they were sharp enough, Jay would trace a finger lightly over the flat of the blades, still staring at that point, his lips curving into a smile that made anyone who saw it shiver and hurry away.

Jay concentrated on Dev's tale, but when he finished his eyes flicked to Zane.

“This all true?”

Zane hesitated before replying. “He was really big.” He wanted to be truthful but not to discredit his friend who had exaggerated slightly.