The End (26 page)

David looked over to where Jordan Hordern’s guys were sitting together on the opposite side of the chamber.

‘You should go back
to the Tower of London,’ he said. ‘Its walls are three metres thick. No sicko could ever get in there. We’ve survived this long by staying safe, by protecting ourselves and not taking stupid risks. None of that’s changed. We sit it out. The sickos are all diseased, dying. We sit it out and wait for them to drop dead.’

‘But they’re going to spawn,’ said Einstein. ‘They’re going
to throw out a cloud of fresh parasite spores. We could all be infected. We could all be finished.’

‘Yes,’ said David. ‘And I just pointed out that you’re working on a cure.’

‘It could take us months, years. We don’t know.’

‘Precisely,’ said David, in the manner of someone who was going to slickly switch their argument. ‘You don’t know, do you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You don’t know for certain about this cloud of spores you’ve been going on about. Where are you getting your information from?’

‘From the Twisted Kids. They communicate with each other. They’re picking stuff up – like a radio signal.’

David laughed. ‘So you’re telling us that your facts come from some deformed freaks who claim to be using telepathy to communicate with –
with what? The ghost of Wikipedia?’

A laugh rippled round the chamber.

‘All I’m saying is that we can’t rely on a cure,’ said Einstein angrily. ‘We might not ever be able to actually make one.’

‘So most of what you’ve been telling us is nonsense, then?’ David was enjoying himself. It seemed to Maxie that it was
more important to him to score points here and look clever than
it was to actually do anything about the grown-ups.

‘Why should I listen to any of you?’ he was shouting. ‘None of you know anything. You’re all in the dark. But I can tell you one truth. If you’d all just listen to me we can survive. We have to cooperate. Not in a pointless, warlike manner, but safe behind our walls. Let me organize things, set up a proper barter system, sharing
food and water and weapons. We stay out of danger, we do all we can to stay alive, but the one thing we don’t do is fight because that would be suicide.’

‘If we let them spawn, that’ll be the end of us all,’ said Einstein. ‘We’ll catch the second wave of the disease.’

‘But that’s just a theory,’ said David. ‘That’s just what you want us to believe.’

Blue stood up now.
Maxie could tell he was angry. He had that cold, tense look about him.

‘We hit them,’ he said. ‘We hit them bare hard like we planned it. We destroy them. Can’t you see that
now
is the best chance we’ve ever had? They’re all in one place. We can massacre them while they’re gathered. We can wipe them out. We’re strong, we’re armed, we’re ready. For the first time since this
started we’re all united. We make a final battle plan and we kill them all, for all time.’

‘But we can’t,’ said David scornfully and he laughed at Blue. ‘They’re just too many. Words won’t beat them. Our weapons won’t beat them. The disease will beat them. If we just sit and wait. It’s stronger than all of us. The sickos will all simply burst.’

Now Jordan Hordern spoke out.
His face blank and unreadable.

‘We
can
defeat them,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s changed. We
have a plan and we stick to it. Just because there’s a few more of them it don’t make no difference. One final massive hammer blow and it’s over.’

‘It’d be over all right,’ sneered David. ‘Over for you, for us. We’d all be dead. They must outnumber us ten to one, a hundred to one, a thousand
to one for all I know.’

‘I’ve killed a bare lot of sickos in my time,’ said Jordan. ‘More’n a hundred. It’s no problem. We got warriors. We got roadmen like Blue, like Achilleus, Ollie, Ryan. I seen ’em practising. We got Amazons like Jackson and Maxie and Hayden. We fighters. We killers. Is what we do.’

‘Yeah, great speech, big man,’ said David. ‘And I say let the intelligent
kids sort this one out. It’s not about fighting. Go home. Look after your own kids, like I’m going to look after mine, and they’ll thank you for it.’

‘You’re weak,’ said Jordan. ‘You’re a coward.’

‘No. I’m sensible. Sometimes it takes more courage not to fight.’

The awful thing was Maxie thought maybe he was right. Trying to take down so many grown-ups might be the end
of them. Why
not
just wait for them to die? Did Einstein really know that this whole spawning thing was going to happen? For sure?

But she’d stick with Blue. If he wanted to fight then that’s what they’d do. He wouldn’t take them into a battle he didn’t think they could win.

Would he?

Don’t think negative thoughts, Maxie. Stay on message …

I mean, what if? What if they could kill them all? How good would that be?

Now Nicola stood up.

‘I’m not sure any more,’ she said. ‘I think maybe David’s
right. Maybe we’ve moved too fast on this. We might need to rethink.’

‘We can’t fall apart now,’ said Blue. ‘We’ve worked so hard to build a fighting force. This don’t change nothing. I’m with Jordan. A few more sickos. So what?’

‘No,’
said Nicola. ‘I vote for more time to think about this. David’s talking sense.’

Maxie felt like everything was slipping away from her. She vividly remembered Jordan marching his army across the bridge. The high hopes, the expectation, the sense that victory was almost theirs. The memory felt so fresh it might have been this morning. And then the moon turned red and a new army
marched into town.

How quickly things could fall apart.

‘I agree with Nicola,’ said Justin, joining the discussion again after a long silence. ‘We do need to think about this.’

Maxie groaned, and before she knew what she was doing she found herself standing up next to Blue.

‘Not you too!’ she yelled. ‘You know how serious this is, Justin. Didn’t you listen to a word Einstein
said?’

‘Sit down,’ said Justin angrily. ‘You’re not in charge. I’ve thought about this and I’ve changed my mind. That’s the whole point of a discussion.’

‘What?’ said Maxie. ‘To just agree with everything that slimeball David says?’

‘You’re being childish,’ said Justin, sounding horribly like a teacher. ‘Name calling. You’re better than that.’

Maxie muttered a much
more obscene name under her breath and sat down.

‘We can’t risk all our fighters getting killed,’ Justin went on. ‘We’ll need them. I think we should all go back to our camps and discuss this properly among ourselves.’

‘What are fighters for?’ said Blue. ‘Fighting!’

‘Defence is always better than attack,’ said Justin, sitting down. ‘We’ll concentrate on helping Einstein
find a cure.’

‘You are fools!’ came a strong, sharp voice from the back.

Maxie sank into her seat. This was all they needed. Mad Matt and one of his nutty religious outbursts.

‘The Lamb has sent us a sign. The blood moon. The blood of the Nephilim will flow. The Lamb will give us his strength. We can defeat the old ones. I have seen the kings of the earth and their armies
gathered together to make war against the beast and his army.’

‘Right,’ said David, laughing. ‘That kind of wraps it up for me. Are you going to listen to this nutter? Is this the voice of reason? Or are you going to listen to me? A boy who has kept his people safe and well. Come along, we’re going back to the palace.’

David got up and walked out. Soon the whole meeting had
broken up, leaving Blue yelling at them to come back and calling them all idiots. At last he went over to Justin, filled with a cold, shaking fury.

‘How could you do that?’ he said. ‘How could you ruin all our work?’

‘Because I’m scared,’ said Justin. And there was no arguing with that. ‘Because if we lose the battle then it’s the end,’ he added.

‘And if we win?’ said Blue.

‘We can’t win, Blue,’ said Justin sadly. ‘It’s impossible.’

36

‘OK. It’s a type of flatworm. Its scientific name is
Ribeiroia ondatrae
. It’s tiny. Microscopic. And it starts out by getting inside snails.’

‘Ew. Gross,’ said Zohra. ‘Is this going to be yucky?’

‘Yes,’ said Wiki with a big grin. He had a fat scientific book open in front of him on the carpet.

The smaller kids and Wiki were all sitting on the floor of the library,
crammed together in a corner. Since Yo-Yo’s death they’d been sticking in a tight group.

‘It’s gross,’ said Jibber-jabber, who also had a book open. ‘But it’s also really interesting. Me and Wiki have been studying all about parasites, yeah, and what they do, yeah, how they control other animals, like how the parasites in the sickos control them, yeah, and you two …’ He turned
to Fish-Face and Skinner, who’d been spending more and more time with the smaller kids lately. ‘You might find it really interesting, I think, but we don’t mean anything mean by it – it’s just stuff we found out. It’s like, see, you know, yeah, we found out loads of stuff, like parasitic wasps that turn ladybirds into zombies, horsehair worms that can grow up to thirty centimetres
long inside crickets, and, when they’re ready, they make the crickets drown themselves in pools of water so that they can
emerge and swim away. That’s cool, but the flatworms in the bullfrogs, they’re the really cool ones.’

‘What bullfrogs?’ asked Froggie, obviously wondering if this had something to do with him. ‘You said snails.’

‘We’ll get to the bullfrogs in a minute,’
said Jibber-jabber. ‘First we got to tell you about the snails. Water snails that live in ponds.’

‘Yeah,’ said Wiki. ‘You see, the flatworms have three different hosts and they control all of them. They start off by getting into the snails’ reproductive organs and turning them into parasite-making machines. And then at night, when they’re ready, they come out, the flatworm larvae,
thousands of them, and swim off to look for their next host.’

‘Is that the frogs?’ asked Sam. He’d been really depressed lately. Yo-Yo’s death had made him think even more about Ella and grow even more scared that he’d never see her again. Whenever he saw Zohra and Froggie, he got jealous. He knew he shouldn’t, but all he could think was how unfair it was, that they were together
and he’d lost Ella. He hated himself for having these thoughts, even sometimes wishing he could swap Ella for Zohra, but he couldn’t stop having them.

He looked around at his friends. They had nothing to worry about. Zohra had Froggie; Fish-Face had Skinner; Wiki had Jibber-jabber and their little dog, Godzilla. What did Sam have?

He had The Kid. That was the one thing that
made him happy. He knew The Kid would never let him down. The Kid looked out for him.

The Kid had made him come along to the library today. Sam didn’t want to join in anything, but The Kid had
insisted, and now, Sam had to admit, he was interested despite himself, even if he could see what Wiki and Jibber-jabber were doing. They were trying to distract the other children. Stop
them from thinking about Yo-Yo. Sam hoped it would work with The Kid, but even
he
had been depressed since that morning when Shadowman came back to the museum with bad news and a violin with no one to play it. Now The Kid, who was usually one of the chattiest boys, was sitting with his knees drawn up to his chin, staring at the carpet. Sam made up his mind that he would work much harder
keeping The Kid happy, just as The Kid worked hard to keep him happy.

‘Not quite frogs yet, Sam,’ said Wiki. ‘Just tadpoles. The larvae burrow into them and make their way to where their arms and legs are starting to grow.’

‘This is getting worse and worse,’ said Zohra, though Sam could see she was really enjoying it.

‘Yeah,’ said Wiki. ‘What they do is create cysts that
turn the frogs into mutants.’

‘Mutants?’ said Skinner, his voice muffled by the folds of skin around his face.

Wiki looked a little embarrassed.

‘I didn’t mean to be rude,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to say that you and Fish-Face are mutants.’

‘Well, we are,’ said Skinner, his skin forming into something like a smile. ‘We’re proud mutants, like the ones in X-Men.’

Fish-Face
giggled, and then put her hand to her mouth to hide it. Shy.

‘So what sort of mutants do the frogs turn into?’ Skinner asked.

‘The cysts affect the growth of their legs,’ said Wiki.
‘They sprout extra ones, three or four sometimes, growing in all directions, or not enough legs, or deformed legs.’

Wiki showed them a picture of a frog with weird extra sort of half-legs coming
out in clusters from its back end.

‘That is too much,’ said Zohra and she laughed.

‘But how does that help the flatworms?’ Sam asked.

‘The frogs can’t move properly,’ said Wiki. ‘They can’t hop away from danger. So, even if they see a bird coming, they can’t avoid it.’

‘So they get eaten?’ asked Froggie, who was taking this personally.

‘Yeah,’ said Jibber-jabber
and he made a pecking motion with his hand at Froggie, who scuttled away from him.

‘Big birds like herons come down and gobble up the mutant bullfrogs,’ said Wiki, ‘and all the parasites inside them. Then the parasites grow again and mate, inside the birds, until the birds poo them out into the water and they can get into more snails, then more frogs, then more birds, round and
round and round, yeah, all controlled by these tiny parasites.’