The End (38 page)

53

‘We’re going to help.’ Wormwood was standing in the doorway to the birds gallery, holding some equipment and dressed in leather armour. If it hadn’t been for his stupid green bowler hat he would have looked like a proper warrior from ancient history, ready to do battle with the Romans, his face streaked with fearsome green warpaint. The gear he was carrying looked like
more bits of armour and an assortment of weapons. He must have been over to the Victoria and Albert Museum next door to collect it all.

‘You mean …?’ Skinner felt a stab of panic.

‘I mean we’re going to the battle,’ said Wormwood. ‘So you’ll need some protection. I’ve persuaded a group of kids to take us up there. Don’t look so gawpy – it was your idea.’

Wormwood put the
gear down on a display cabinet and Skinner rummaged through it. With his extreme skin condition, it was hard to find clothes that fitted, but there was an ornate filigreed breastplate that wasn’t too uncomfortable, and a helmet that looked like a wide-brimmed steel hat.

‘I’m not sure what difference we’re going to make,’ he said, aware that he must look completely ridiculous.
Like something from a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

‘We’re taking our own special skills to the fight,’ said Wormwood.

‘Fish-Face too?’ said Skinner

‘Fish-Face especially,’ said Wormwood. ‘We’re going to get inside their heads. They’re being controlled, directed; there are strong voices calling to them. If we can interfere with all that then we can help these kids.’

‘Really?’
said Skinner. What if this was just madness? What if Skinner had been fooled by the apparently normal way Wormwood was behaving? What if he was being taken in by a lunatic?

‘I know one of the voices,’ said Wormwood. ‘I’ve felt him out there for a long time, calling to his flock. I’ve heard his whispers in my head like curling smoke. Didn’t know who it was before. There was just
this huge dark presence. I know him now, though. They call him St George. He’s strong. We’ve got to go out there and mess him up.’

Skinner looked at Fish-Face. She’d been standing there, not speaking, rubbing her thin hands together anxiously. Moving her head from side to side with jerky little movements. Skinner had always thought that she looked more like a baby bird than a
fish. She was so delicate. So frail. You felt that if you jumped out on her and shouted boo she’d break like a Christmas bauble. He’d seen her startled into gibbering hysteria by a daddy-long-legs. How was she going to react to a full-scale battle?

‘Are you really sure about this?’ he asked Wormwood. And Wormwood looked at him with his pale, watery eyes, his head tilted to one
side.

‘I’m coming out of a fog,’ he said. ‘I’m coming down to earth. Like Beauty’s Beast or the Frog Prince. Einstein’s medicine kiss has turned me back into …’

‘Into what?’ said Skinner, grinning. ‘A prince?’

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ said Wormwood. ‘But these kids here, they’re extraordinary. What they’re doing could be the only hope of a future. Look at me …’

He grabbed
Skinner, putting his face close. There were still patches of green mould on his skin, but they were clearing up, leaving behind rawness, spots and deep sores. Despite the damage done, however, he looked healthier than when he’d been totally covered in green fuzz.

‘It’s working,’ said Wormwood. ‘The disease is beaten. Us three here, we don’t really matter that much. This cure
is more important. So we have to go out there and do what we can.’ He let Skinner go and tapped his head.

‘I can feel him in my brain, scraping at the insides of my skull – St George. But we can shut him up. We can help direct Fiona.’

‘Fiona?’ said Skinner.

‘Don’t you know?’ said Wormwood. ‘That’s her name.’ And he put an arm round Fish-Face’s narrow shoulders. ‘With my
insight and her power, with your shout, we can make a difference.’

54

Boggle was waiting out on the front steps of the museum with four of his friends and a big-nosed kid called Andy, who’d arrived at the museum with the Holloway kids. Andy was telling them about how he wanted to join up with Matt’s believers.

‘They know the truth,’ he was saying. ‘They know that if we pray then the Lamb will protect us.’

‘Sure,’ said Boggle.

‘Matt
predicted this whole thing.
Everything
. And he’ll protect me. I used to think a gun was all you needed, but the Lamb is stronger. His blood will save us.’

‘Whatever,’ said Boggle. ‘But I guess it’s brave of you to go to the battle.’

‘I’m not being brave,’ said Andy. ‘I just know I’ll be safer with Matt. You’re the one who’s brave, going out there with no protection. No Lamb
to watch over you. Nothing to help you except the weapon you carry in your hand. That’s brave. Not to believe in anything. I wish I was brave like you, but I’m not.’

‘You’ve lost me, soldier.’

Boggle had never thought of himself as brave. As soon as he’d heard that there was an option not to fight, he’d taken it. But now his guilt had got the better of him. His
guilt and
the weird green guy. And there he was now, coming out of the big main doors with the girl who looked like a reflection in the back of a spoon and the boy who looked like a Shar Pei dog, his hands and face covered by overlapping folds of skin.

‘You sure you know the way?’ said Wormwood as he got close.

‘It won’t be hard to find a battle,’ said Boggle.

And they were off.
Moving fast. Only way to do it. Move fast and don’t stop to think. Go straight there and take it as it comes. He had friends there. Offering their lives. He couldn’t hide at the museum any longer, knowing they might be dying. Oh crap, though. Oh crap. What was it going to be like?

He’d seen a programme once about the First World War. He’d known about the trenches and how terrible
they were. How it felt like being in hell. A world of mud and death and horror. He’d done all that at school. But, in the programme, they’d shown that just a little way behind the trenches life went on as normal. Locals were living in their villages and farming the fields. They could see the flashes and flares of the artillery, hear the booms, but they ignored them.

Now Boggle
was leaving the safety of the village and moving up to the frontline.

Soon they were hurrying along Exhibition Road, with its weird zigzag of coloured paving stones. There was a sound in the distance, growing louder with every step. Not quite the big guns of the trenches, more like what you used to hear when there was a football match on – a distant sort of roaring. Boggle had
grown up near the Chelsea ground and that sound had been a familiar part of his childhood.

They ran across Kensington Gore and went in through the park gates. So far they’d seen nothing. Boggle hadn’t known quite what to expect. He knew there was a huge army of sickos here somewhere, but had no idea whether they’d have taken over the whole park, or whether Jordan’s army was
holding them in one place. They saw some figures up ahead, but they were children. They’d created a sentry point and Boggle asked them the best way to go.

‘The bridge is blocked off,’ said the girl who seemed to be in charge. ‘If you want to get to the fighting you need to take a boat over the Serpentine.’

Boggle’s group hurried on and turned right, past the sad, crappy circle
of the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, into Rotten Row. This was where people used to ride horses up and down, a wide, straight, tree-lined walkway. A little way along there was a café on the edge of the lake where more armed kids were waiting. They were in charge of the rowing boats that were ferrying people and supplies across to the camp. A boat was just coming in and Boggle
saw that it contained several wounded kids, one of whom was wailing and crying. Boggle looked just long enough to be sure he didn’t know any of them and then turned away.

They were still too far from the battlefield to clearly see what was going on, but the football-crowd roar was louder, a mix of kids shouting and that strange hissing, swishing noise that large groups of sickos
made.

Boggle’s group clambered into two different boats and they were rowed across the water, the oars splashing rhythmically.

When they landed on the other side, Boggle found himself desperately short of breath, even though he hadn’t
been one of the ones rowing. He realized he was having a panic attack.

‘Hang on a moment,’ he said and then leant over with his hands on his
knees, waiting for the panic to pass. Waiting for the fizzing and bubbling in his head to die down and his knees to stop trembling. One of his mates patted him on the back.

‘It’s OK, Boggle,’ he said. ‘It’s OK.’

That’s what this was all about.
Friends
. Looking out for each other. He should have been here earlier.

He straightened up. The others were all staring to the north
where the fighting was. Past a stretch of open ground were the kids at the barricades, and, beyond them, what looked like a living black wall, or a single disgusting creature, like a giant slug. What exactly was happening he had no idea. It was all just chaos and confusion. He could see kids running. Weapons rising and falling.

He looked around the faces of his little group. His
four mates were pale and glassy-eyed. The weird girl, Fish-Face, looked like she’d gone into some kind of trance. The Green Man was muttering into her ear. Skinner was just standing there, staring. Amazing how expressive that face could be when all you could really see were the eyes.

But there was no doubting the expression.

It was pure terror.

He turned to Boggle.

‘I
should’ve stayed in bed this morning,’ he said. ‘It was very warm.’

Boggle gave him a quick hug.

‘If we win this we can have as many lie-ins as we want.’

‘Then let’s go fight for our lie-ins!’ said Skinner. ‘For warm beds and nothing more to fear!’

55

Jordan Hordern closed his eyes. He could tell much more clearly what was going on if he wasn’t distracted by the blurred shapes he saw when he looked out through his cracked glasses. With his eyes shut, he could picture the battlefield as if it was a chessboard, or a gaming board, with all the troops like well-ordered little figures. Bill’s running commentary told him
exactly what was going on. Bill had a genius for reading the world. For counting everything in it.

The sounds also helped. Nearby were the grunts and yells and screams of the kids. The clash and scrape of steel. Beyond that, falling away into the distance, was the hiss and drone of the sickos. So many of them.

It was as if he was looking down on the battle from above. Like
when you looked at a satellite map on Google Earth. He could clearly see the kids in a small area, hemmed in by the stretch of water at their rear, the barricaded road by the bridge to their left, and the longer barricade to their right, where most of the fighting was, joining up with the north-east corner of the lake. That was a weak spot. The sickos couldn’t outflank them and get round
to their rear because the Serpentine created a huge barrier there. But if they could get in at the corner,
between the barricades and the lake, they might be able to flood into the enclosure.

Jordan knew that. He had to hope that the enemy didn’t.

He could clearly see the barricades, like three sides of a long rectangle. And outside the rectangle – sickos. Bill couldn’t
count them all because he couldn’t see them all, but at least Jordan knew how many were in the front ranks. There was no fog of war here. Just absolute crystal mathematical clarity.

But the numbers were scary. He was letting through a few sickos at a time to reduce them. Bill was feeding those numbers into his head and Jordan was constructing a world out of them. Like a computer.
In the end that’s what the universe was. Just numbers. You could make anything out of numbers.

But numbers couldn’t lie. Two and two could only ever make four. That’s why Jordan liked them so much – numbers. You didn’t need to think about it, to read clues, to interpret what you could see. Not like people. People were complicated. You couldn’t always tell what they were thinking
or why.