The 13th Horseman (14 page)

Like dominoes they fell, those closest to the school first, then the row behind, then the row behind that one. It took just seconds until the only movement beyond the school gates was the steady flashing of the police car lights.

“Did... did you kill them?” Drake asked.

“What do you take me for?” said Pest, slapping him on the upper arm. “Temporary narcolepsy. They’re all just having a bit of a nap. Be right as rain in twenty minutes.”

“Then we’d better move fast,” War said. He pointed up to the window the police had been so fixated on. “Is that the classroom?”

“Uh, yeah. I think so,” Drake said. “Looks about right. Should we wait for Famine?”

“He’ll only slow us down,” said War. He was already unsheathing his immense sword as he strode towards the door. “It’s up to the three of us. Let’s go and get this over with.”

T
HE WOODEN DOUBLE-DOORS
at the front entrance to the school were closed over when they approached. Drake turned the metal ring handles and the doors swung outwards, revealing a solid metal barrier behind them.

Drake rapped his knuckles against the metal. They made a sound like the chiming of some ancient bell. “He’s sealed himself in,” Drake realised. He set off running. “There’s a hole round the side,” he said, racing towards the spot where Dim and Spud had torn through the wall.

He stopped, mid-way across the school yard. A wall of shiny chrome covered the hole like a sticking-plaster. “We can’t get in,” Drake cried. “He’s blocked us out.”

“You know your problem? Well, one of them, anyway?” War growled. “You give up far too easily.”

The giant hurled his sword. It flipped, end over end, before the blade buried itself in the rectangle of metal. Gripping the hilt with both hands, War dragged the blade across, then down. He pulled the sword free, then fired a kick against the damaged metal. It
squealed
, then swung inwards.

“Nae bother,” he said, ducking his head as he led the other two horsemen into the school.

“Up here,” Drake told them. He took the stairs two at a time until he reached the top. In moments, he was outside Dr Black’s classroom. He didn’t even wait for the others to catch up before pushing into the room.

The first thing he saw was Toxie. The cat-faced Hellhound was on his side, half buried by broken furniture. His chest rose and fell in shallow breaths, and a puddle of dark, almost purple blood pooled on the floor around him.

“I figured, if I killed him, he’d only come back.”

Drake spun to find Dr Black sitting behind his desk. His clothes were torn and scorched in places, but otherwise he seemed none the worse for his battle with Toxie.

“So I let him live. But only just.”

“You
monster
!”

Drake hadn’t even heard the other horsemen enter the room, but Pestilence’s voice was suddenly there in his ear.

“Yes,” Dr Black chuckled. “I know. So good to see you again, Pest.”

“Yeah?” Pest sniffed. “Well... well... not likewise.”

“Still as devastatingly witty as ever, I see,” Dr Black noted.

“We’ve come to stop you,” Drake told him. “To stop... whatever it is you’re doing.”

The teacher blinked, then threw back his head and laughed. “Stop me?” he said. “Didn’t they explain to you how this whole thing is supposed to work? This is the end, boy. This is the
Apocalypse
. That word mean anything to you? You can’t stop me. No one can stop me.”

War took a step closer, his hand tightening round his sword. “Remember me?”

“Ah, War. I advise you to stay where you are,” Dr Black warned. He was on his feet, suddenly serious. “You know why all those police are out there? You know why the crowd has gathered?”

He beckoned with his finger for them to follow, as he made his way to the cupboard. “Because I have hostages,” he said, in a sing-song voice. With a kick, he opened the door to reveal Mel sitting on the floor beside Mr Franks. The young teacher was awake, but still flat on his back.

“Drake?” Mel cried, before the door was pulled closed again.

“She came back to check on him. Isn’t that noble?” Dr Black asked. His face was lit up with a manic glee as he strolled over and leaned an elbow on the windowsill. “But now I have them both.”

“In the cupboard,” War said.

“Precisely!”

“But you’re not in the cupboard. And neither are we.” With two big paces, War positioned himself directly in front of the cupboard door. “And now you can’t
get
in the cupboard, either.”

Dr Black’s grin remained fixed, but his eyes had begun darting left and right, as if War’s meaning was very slowly becoming clear.

“So, what he’s saying,” Pest explained, “is that you have now effectively lost your hostages.”

“And we’re free to kick your ass,” Drake concluded. He pointed to the bearded giant on his left. “Well, mostly him.”

Dr Black’s smile had gone completely now. “There’s only one little problem,” he said.

“What’s that?” asked Drake.

“You’re going to have to catch me first!”

With a
crash
, the teacher hurled himself through the window behind him. The horsemen raced over in time to see him crunch face-first on to the concrete twenty metres below.

“Ooh, that’s going to hurt,” Pest winced. Even before the sentence was out of his mouth, though, Dr Black had begun to move. He got quickly to his feet, looked up at the window, and smiled.

“That’s not right,” War frowned. “He shouldn’t be able to do that.”

Dr Black was off and running, racing towards the two steeds standing together by the school gates.

“The horses,” Pest gasped. “He’s going for the horses.”

“Bugger that,” War growled. “After him!”

With a twitch of his legs, War propelled himself through the window, taking a large chunk of wall out with him. Drake leaned over and watched as War landed on his feet, then began to sprint across the school grounds after Dr Black.

“Ready?” asked Pest, taking a series of quick, deep breaths.

“For what?” Drake asked. “We’re not... We can’t jump that!”

“Yes, we can. We’re the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. We can do lots of things,” Pest said. A rubber-gloved hand caught Drake by the sleeve and pulled him towards the hole.

Drake screamed as gravity took hold. The wind whipped around him and he felt Pest’s grip slip from his arm. His limbs flailed wildly. The wind continued to whip around him. He screamed some more. Flailing. Wind. Screaming.

He had just begun to think it was taking a very long time for him to hit the ground, when he hit the ground. His knees crunched on to the concrete first, then his shoulder, then the top of his head as his momentum bounced him over on to his back. He lay there, quite still, looking up at the broken window and idly wondering if he were still alive.

“See?” said Pest, leaning over him. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Dr Black raced across the school yard, moving faster than any human being had any right to. Each bound covered well over a metre, like a triple jumper preparing for take-off, but never quite reaching that final spectacular leap.

Had any of the gathered crowds been awake to watch him, they’d have thought he was running impossibly fast. But they would also have thought that the bearded man behind him was running faster. And they would have been right.

Dr Black glanced over his shoulder, realised he wasn’t going to have time to get on a horse, and so carried on past them. He tore through the yellow police tape and went rushing out on to the street beyond.

There, surrounded by the unconscious forms of his former pupils, he stopped, turned and waited for the coming of War.

“Given up, have you?” War boomed, slowing to a jog, then finally, to a stop. “Realised you can’t escape?”

“I wasn’t trying to escape, you idiot,” Dr Black told him, as Drake and Pestilence ran up to join them. “I was drawing you away.”

“What?” Drake asked. “What are you talking about?” He glanced nervously at War. “What’s he talking about?”

“It’s not him,” War said. “He was never Death.”

Dr Black’s eyes lit up.
Literally
lit up. “Can you say
decoy
?” he grinned. He was still grinning as War brought his sword slicing down towards his head.

There was the sound of metal slicing metal, and the tip of War’s blade buried itself in the concrete at his feet. Something gave a faint
fizzle
, and sparks began to flicker along the thin line that now ran the length of Dr Black’s body.

“You can’t stop him, you know,” the robot informed them, even as both halves of it began to fall in opposite directions. “The world ends today, and there’s nothing you can do to—”

The halves hit the ground. The voice faded and the glow in the android’s eyes grew dark. War yanked his sword free of the tarmac, then poked one half of Dr Black with his toe. “Techno-magic mumbo jumbo,” he said.

“What...? But...? How did you know?” Drake asked. “It was him. I was sure it was him!”

“I had my doubts, but I couldn’t say for sure until I’d seen him with my own two eyes. He fought a Hellhound, then face-planted twenty metres on to concrete without winding up a messy splat. Death Nine’s human now, and no human could do that. Besides, you said yourself, he’d been there for ages,” War shrugged. “He couldn’t be Death. Death’s barely been human a few weeks. He would have to be someone new.”

An icy needle of shock pricked at the centre of Drake’s chest. “New?”

“Aye. Stands to reason.”

It hit Drake like a sledgehammer. He reached for the fence to support himself, but his hand slipped and he lurched to one side. “Mr Franks,” he said in a barely audible whisper.

“Who?”

“Mr Franks.
Darren Franks
. D.F.”

“What you on about?”

“The other teacher. The one in the cupboard.
He’s
the old Death, and we’ve left him with Mel!”

“Helloooo!” called a voice from nearby. Famine was slowly approaching on his scooter, waving enthusiastically with one hand, while frantically trying to steer with the other. “Be with you in a minute.”

Drake didn’t wait for Famine, and he didn’t wait for the other horsemen. He ran back towards the school gates, his pounding heart making his legs move faster than they had ever moved before, until...

PZZZZKT!

A shock of pure agony exploded across Drake’s skin and through his skeleton, hurtling him backwards on to the ground. He rolled in pain, his legs refusing to function as he kicked and struggled to stand up.

In the depths of his shock-addled brain, he knew the pain, recognised it as the same sensation he’d experienced when he’d tried to shoulder-barge the Deathblade Guardian. Only worse. Much, much worse.

It took both War and Pestilence to get him to his feet and keep him there. They were still supporting him when Famine dismounted next to them. He gave the scooter a firm pat on the back of the seat, and it trundled over to a patch of grass on the other side of the road.

Famine looked at the sleeping children and police officers around him, and at the two halves of Dr Black on the pavement at War’s feet. “Missed anything?” he wheezed.

Leaving Pestilence to support Drake, War slowly made his way closer to the school gates. He stopped just in front of them and turned his head slowly left and right.

A pale blue glow hung in the air in front of him. It stretched up, down and side to side. It was barely there, barely
anything
. If War hadn’t been looking closely, he would never have seen it.

Cautiously, he raised a hand and touched one finger against the glow. A gasp of pain burst through his beard as he drew his arm sharply back. He shook his hand around and clenched it into a fist a few times, never taking his eye off the glow.

“Some kind of magic barrier,” he said.

“What, like a force field?” Drake asked. He pulled away from Pest and hobbled over to War. “Can you break through it?”

“I can barely even touch it,” the big man replied.

A sudden scream from within the school cut Drake off before he could say anything else. He looked up to the first floor, and caught a brief glimpse of Mel at the window, before a shadow appeared behind her and she was dragged back into the room.

“We have to do something!” Drake yelped. “We have to—”

The Earth trembled beneath his feet. On the other side of the force field, the horses
neighed
and stamped their hooves against the concrete.

A low rumble shook the ground, making them all stagger away from the glowing blue barrier.

“Can I just make it clear,” Famine said, “that that wasn’t me?”

“Earthquake?” Pest asked. “That’s one of the signs! It’s one of the signs of the Apocalypse. Oh, God, what if we’re wrong? What if this really
is
the end?”

The ground vibrated again. From inside the barrier there was the sound of falling rubble. Narrow cracks began to split the pavement beneath the horsemen’s feet.

“It’s not an earthquake,” War said grimly. He followed the lines of the cracks. They led all the way back to the school.

“Then what is it?” Drake asked. He was still looking up at the window on the first floor, and so he was the first to notice when it started to move. With a
crack
of snapping concrete, the extension on the front of the school building began to rise slowly up, revealing an enormous chrome construction below.

“What... What is that?” Drake muttered, his eyes following the first storey window as it rose higher and higher into the air, revealing more and more of the metal shape beneath it. “What’s happening?”

War groaned. “Something bloody spectacular.”