The End (15 page)

Nothing.

‘Daddy?’ He turned from the window and there was his twisted treasure, his little girl, who had come out wrong. She was walking round the big table in the middle of the room where his minders were sitting looking bored – bored and just a little bit scared.

His baby. She put her arms round him and he held on to her. She was crying.

‘Daddy. They’re
going to hurt you.’

‘No,’ said Wormwood, his mind fizzing and spinning. ‘I’m hurt already.’

‘I saw her. On the lorry. What they did to her. They want to do it to you.’

‘I need to help them,’ said Wormwood and he held her where he could see her. ‘You see? You understand? I came from the big green and already I can feel it slipping. The blood is rising. Good blood will
drive out the bad. Wormold is getting stronger while Wormwood grows weak.’

‘I wish I understood, Daddy. I never did. But I need you.’

‘Then let me help them,’ said Wormwood. ‘I don’t want to go back to the big green. I don’t want to go back to the stars. I only wanted to be happy here. You see? I only wanted to live. I was never strong enough to be alone, though. I’m sorry.
The thoughts are there, but my brain is slippery. They can’t hang on. In the green, before all this, I wanted to ride the monkeys. Books and bees and fleas – they were my friends. I never meant to kill them.’

‘Books, Daddy?’

‘Books or birds or baboons. Beasts. The beasts of the big green. I never meant to harm them. I just wanted to ride in them. Back there.’

‘The jungle?
South America? You weren’t there for that long, Daddy. You’re getting confused.’

‘I was there for a hundred thousand years. Not me, not Wormold, but this thing inside me. You see? The bug, darling. The sickness. It lived there, moving from beast to beast, working its way up, from bugs, to fleas, to bats, to monkeys, to men and women. Finally it found people. It never meant to
hurt them. Only to live. We never meant to twist them and make them sick. Honestly I didn’t, I
didn’t. But I can feel the big green dying in me, the leaves falling from the trees, my home from home from home from home. This is my home now, but my house is on fire. You see? Or do you not see?’

‘You talk as if you’re two different people sometimes,’ said his girl.

‘Not two,’ said
Wormwood. ‘Two million. There’s me, your father, Mark Wormold, and there’s the others. The bugs in my pipes, the stars inside me, a constellation. A universe. I’m plugged in. They were strong, but they are growing weak. They can be beaten, but only if we protect him. And the others.’

‘Protect him? Protect who?’

‘The boy, the bogey boy, the golden boy.’

‘Small Sam?’

‘Yes. Yes, him. They’re scared of him; they’ll try to stop him, to kill him. Because his blood is the good blood. And he is not alone. Not here, not near, but there are others. They must be saved, you see? They must be protected. So that we can use their good blood. Starboard staff for dead star …’

‘What?’

‘I used to be a star. I used to be a god. They used to sacrifice to
me. I lived in a palace. A dark palace. There was no light in there. It was my world. After I’d left the big green this was, must have been … I went to the dark palace. They fed me what I needed. Only the boy came, not the golden one, the mad one. He turned on the lights. He showed me that I wasn’t living in a palace, I was living in a prison. They fed me scraps to keep me happy and
told me it was ambrosia and nectar. It wasn’t. It was children. I needed what was in them.’

‘Daddy, don’t. I don’t want to hear. You’ve done bad things, but I never want to hear. They told me how they found you, underground, and how Sam’s friend, The Kid, rescued you. Make it a happy story, Daddy, with a happy ending.’

Wormwood laughed.

‘They got it wrong,’ he said. ‘They
were confused. They tried to sacrifice the wrong one. Ha, ha, ha! The stars were calling to them; the shout went out and they got it wrong. The boy there, the one who gave the orders, he’s got the bug in him. He’s halfway to the stars. You’ll see! You’ll see it. But he didn’t listen properly. He didn’t send me the golden boy. He sent me the mad one, madder than me. I so wanted to
eat him … I was so hungry …’

‘Daddy, stop!’

‘Darling girl. You’re my angel. You came out wrong, but you were still my girl. I should have loved you. I should have saved you. I should have protected you and instead I became one of them. I let the green in – the bugs and bees and stars went in me until I was mad. I became Wormwood the poison star, out to spread the word, to bathe
the world in bad blood. I became the Green Man. And the Green Man can destroy everyone, or he can save everyone, but only if you let them use the boy’s blood in me. Then the Green Man can save the world.’

‘No, Daddy, they’ll kill you.’

‘I deserve to die. I killed so many of them. So many children. In my palace prison under the ground, my dark home from home. And I abandoned
you. My own little girl. But you were stronger than you looked. Weren’t you? Look at you. You’re my angel. How many brothers and sisters do you have out there? Around the world.
Children of the green. My children. I will do it, for all the children of the world. I will make the blood be good, and it will drive out the bad. You’ll see.’

‘And will it kill you?’

‘I don’t know,
darling girl. But I must let them try.’

19

‘You tricked me, didn’t you?’

‘Did I?’

‘You tricked me well bad. Saying I was too scared to come out this way.’

‘So you’re not scared then?’

Will and Finn and Ryan’s hunters were crossing Westminster Bridge towards the south side of the river. This was the route Will had taken with Ed when they’d gone back to St Paul’s to rescue Small Sam. Will could have
gone the more direct route, along the Embankment on the north side, but he figured this route had been lucky for them last time.

Stick to what worked.

Whatever the case, there were definitely fewer sickos around. They’d seen none on the way to the Houses of Parliament from the museum, and none since. The streets felt eerily quiet.

‘Scared?’ Ryan grinned at him, his acne-covered
face ugly and raw-looking. Maybe that was why he usually wore the horrible mask he’d made out of a sicko’s face.

‘Not scared, soldier, no. I mean, if what Jester was saying back there is, like, the
truth
then all the –
sickos
– that’s what we got to call them now, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah. So all the sicko bastards is now down Kilburn and this part of town is clear. We’re free
to roam. Tell you the truth, bro, I’m well curious to find out what’s out your way. I never gone east since all this started. Those streets were always bad. The dogs was always spooked. But look at ’em now. Chilled.’

Indeed, the dogs were trotting along happily at the hunters’ sides, wagging their tails, happy to be on the move. Sniffing and weeing and doing everything that normal
dogs did.

Will hoped they’d stay that way. It meant they were safe.

‘That’s why we call it the no-go zone,’ he said. ‘The badlands. I’m hoping Jordan’s gone in there and cleaned the sickos out. Last I saw of it, it was mental, though. A whole army of sickos was, like,
besieging
St Paul’s Cathedral. We got to pray they’ve all moved north.’

‘That’s where the greens live?’
said Ryan. ‘St Paul’s?’

‘Yeah,’ said Will. ‘That’s where Mad Matt and his religious freaks hang. Provided the sickos haven’t killed them all.’

‘Is true he tried to sacrifice Sam’s friend?’ Ryan asked.

‘Yeah. Mad times, man.’

Will thought back to that night. When Adele and Tish and Brendan had died holding the bridge. Will had hoped that it had all been for a good reason.
That Sam was worth it. With everything that had happened at the museum, the new antidote that Einstein was working on, he reckoned it probably was.

He stared down at the churning grey waters of the Thames. That night the river had been thick with the fallen bodies of sickos, like black seals in the water. And he
remembered early days at the Tower. How you’d look out and see the
river clogged with crap – dead, bloated bodies, all kinds of rubbish, foam and oil, boats that had slipped their moorings – but it had had a year to clean itself, to dump all the crap out to sea. Must be the cleanest it had been for hundreds of years. A flock of seagulls came swooping and squawking and squabbling. Something splashed in the water. Might have been a fish, might have been
anything.

‘We rowed up this way with DogNut on a boat,’ said Finn. ‘If we’d’ve had one now we could have gone back that way. All the way to the Tower. Our boat sank, though. When this is over, we need to get back on the river.’

‘You never tried to go home?’ Ryan asked.

Finn raised his right arm. It was bandaged.

‘I could run but I couldn’t fight,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t
any use to anyone. Didn’t want to put mates in danger by having to look out for me.’

‘How’s it now?’ Ryan asked.

‘Nearly better.’

‘Nearly’s not good enough, man!’ said Ryan. ‘You saying you’re still useless? You’re telling me you can’t swing that axe you carrying?’

Ryan was only half serious.

‘I can swing it if I need to,’ said Finn, settling his axe comfortably on
his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t stand back and watch you get killed. I used to be good with a sword. It’s gonna take a bit of practice and a bit more healing to get back to where I was.’

‘Well, you plenty big enough,’ said Ryan. ‘We’ll use you as a human shield, yeah?’

‘Deal.’ Finn laughed.

Will smiled. The weather was holding up. The sky was half cloud, half blue.
Not hot. Not cold. A neutral kind of a day. Will hoped it would stay that way. Neutral. Nothing. Nothing to tell anyone. Boring.

They reached the south side of the bridge and started to work their way eastwards. Then they could either cross back over at the Millennium Footbridge, as they’d done before, or carry on along to Tower Bridge. Will decided he’d wait and see what it
looked like when they got there. This part of London south of the river had been badly damaged in the big fire and there had always been fewer sickos down this way. The buildings were cracked and blackened, quite a few had collapsed and sometimes the boys had to make their way round piles of rubble and debris.

They’d been walking for about ten minutes when they saw their first
sicko. A sentinel. He was unmoving. Like one of those living statues that used to hang around Covent Garden. Arms held out, face tilted to the sky. His skin was grey and ruined and bloodless, stretched tight over his skull. He looked dead. And as they got closer they saw that he was oozing grey jelly from his mouth and nose and several burst boils on his face. The jelly was moving a
little. It looked more alive than him.

‘Jelly bugs,’ said Zulficker, one of Ryan’s hunters.

‘You want to chop him down like a tree?’ Ryan said to Finn, who smiled but shook his head. His axe stayed on his shoulder.

Zulficker stepped right up close to the sentinel and yelled into his face.

‘You are in our way, sir! Kindly move or I will kick your arse into the river.’

He laughed, and then jumped back as the sentinel opened his eyes. Glared at the boy.

‘Whoa!’ said another boy who moved quickly, cutting the father’s head from his shoulders with a machete. He then walked over to the fallen head, knelt down and started to cut the ears off with a sharp knife. Will looked away.

‘Let’s keep moving,’ he said and they carried on, the boy catching
up with them when he was done.

They only saw two more sickos before they got to the footbridge. Sentinels, off in the distance, looking as dead and dry as the first one. When they got to the bridge, they found two kids from the Tower standing at the barricade that guarded the entrance. A girl and a boy whom Will recognized. They were amazed to see him and Finn and they opened the
barricade to let them through.

‘We thought you was both dead for sure,’ said the boy, Abdullah.

‘Well, we’re not,’ said Will. ‘Disappointed?’

Abdullah grinned, gave Will a big hug.

‘What is all this?’ asked Finn. ‘What are you doing this far from the Tower?’

‘There’s been some changes around here,’ said Abdullah. ‘Big changes. Come on. We’ll show you.’

And so they
crossed the bridge towards St Paul’s. And Will felt safe. Felt like he was nearly home.