The End (9 page)

‘Do you have to?’

‘There’s a reason it’s been quiet, Jester. There’s something going on, man. We got to work out what.’

They’d been skirting round the edge of the main body. Moving slowly east and north,
then west, in a wide circle. So far Shadowman’s bad leg was holding up. He was only limping slightly and apart from a dull ache he could ignore it most of the time. He was trying to get a fix on how many strangers there might be and exactly where their centre was. He was also looking for a high point where he could get a good view of them. He didn’t want to go blundering in any deeper
without full reconnaissance. The outliers were harmless. He knew it wouldn’t be the same story when they got closer to the pack.

It had been the same all the way, for street after street – sentinels standing facing outwards. Occasionally they came across a lone stranger, or a small group of them, stumbling in past the sentinels, drawn from God knows how far away. These walkers
might be more dangerous, so Shadowman kept Jester well away from them, hiding in gardens, behind walls, watching. As far as Shadowman could see, though, even the walkers weren’t interested. They just wanted to get to where they were going. Like
festival-goers heading for the main stage. Except there was no noise. No sense of a huge crowd. It was like there was just a big black hole.
Shadowman knew they were there. The main body of them. They had to be. And there had to be a lot of them. But what were they doing?

‘Why’s it so important to see them close up?’ Jester asked for the tenth time, and Shadowman decided to answer him.

‘Why, why, why? Don’t you get anything, Doctor Why? You’re so tied up at the palace with your plans and your schemes and worrying
about what other kids are doing, you’ve not been watching the match. You’re on the wrong channel even. You’ve forgotten who the enemy is. But they’re in there. Grown-ups, strangers, oppoes, sickos, bastards – whatever you want to call them – to me they’re just the enemy.’

‘And when we’ve seen the enemy?’ Jester whined. ‘
Then
what?’

‘I’ll let you know. I’ll text you, yeah?
For now you’re safe, though. OK? This lot aren’t gonna attack. They’re too busy talking to God. Even the ones in there …’ Shadowman nodded towards where he knew the main body must be. ‘Even they must be sleeping now. We’ve only seen sickos heading into the centre – none coming out.’

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ said Jester. ‘You’re getting a big kick out of it.’

‘Not really. But at least I feel at home here. Since you abandoned me at King’s Cross, apart from the last few days when I’ve been resting up and waiting for my leg to stop hurting, this is where I’ve been, out on the streets, with this lot. Living alongside them day after day, watching them grow stronger, grow smarter. I understand them, yeah? I
understand how they live, how they hunt,
how they work together. I understand how dangerous they are.’

‘So do I,’ said Jester wearily. ‘OK? I mean, you’ve, like, made your point.’

‘No, I haven’t. I keep telling you – these ones are dopes. They’re not dangerous.’

Shadowman had spotted a tall building some way along the Kilburn High Road. He wanted to get a better look at it.

‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’ve
been looking for.’

‘What?’

Shadowman pointed to where a tall grey tower jutted up into the sky and they started to walk. Pushing past the still and silent sentinels. Jester stuck close to him, muttering under his breath, shaking with fear. They saw evidence of feeding, bones and bits of skin and hair, bloody clothing, lying in the streets, but the scraps looked old and there
surely wasn’t enough food around to feed them all. They must have cleaned out the area for miles around.

And then stopped.

As they got closer, Shadowman saw that the tower was part of an old building that looked like it might once have been a cinema, built in the days when cinemas were a big deal. The tower must have been at least thirty metres high, and the word
STATE
, in big
red letters, was spelled out on each face. Indeed, it looked like a miniature version of the Empire State Building in New York.

The building hadn’t been a cinema for some time by the look of it. Its last incarnation had been as a church of some sort, and the doors at the front were boarded up. Shadowman took his crowbar from his pack and easily removed a
couple of boards, then
used the bar to smash the glass doors behind. The sentinels standing nearby ignored them completely, just stood there, blissed out, at one with the sky.

‘You don’t think all this noise is going to attract more of them?’ said Jester. ‘I mean, you’re the one keeps going on about how dangerous they are.’

‘I can feel it, Jester,’ said Shadowman. ‘They’re not buzzing. It’s like
they’re dormant. Waiting.’

‘What for?’

‘Keep telling you. I don’t know.’

‘And I thought you knew everything.’

‘I know enough. Come on.’ Shadowman took out his friction torch and went through the broken door. Inside it was like a palace, with painted walls and ceilings, columns and pillars, chandeliers and a great marble staircase. The vast auditorium was even grander,
large enough to seat at least four thousand people. Shadowman’s torch could only give them glimpses of it.

‘Cool,’ he said. ‘This is like that scene in
Alien
where they go inside the alien spaceship, and they’re like ants in there.’

‘Nice image,’ said Jester sourly. ‘Alien, yeah. And next minute some face-hugger is gonna jump out and rape us.’

‘There’s no strangers in
here,’ said Shadowman. ‘I’d smell ’em.’

He’d have loved to explore more, but there was work to be done. It took them a while to find their way up into the tower, and they had to break open two more doors. The stairs were dusty and half blocked with old bits and pieces that had been dumped there years ago. They eventually made their way to the top, though, to where the windows
gave them a 360-degree view. Once they’d wiped off the
dust and grime and crap, they were able to look out over London.

‘There,’ said Shadowman after a few seconds of scanning the area. ‘That’s what I wanted to show you.’

‘What?’ Jester was squinting and frowning. ‘I can’t see anything, only … Oh Jesus …’

A few streets away was what looked like a cemetery, and it was
filled with black, greasy bodies, all pressed and huddled together, radiating out from a central spot in great concentric circles. Shadowman knew what would be in the middle. St George, with his lieutenants.

From the cemetery the bodies spilt out into the surrounding streets, densely packed at first, but thinning out the further they got from the hub. That was why Jester hadn’t
spotted them at first. A black hole was the right description. They were an awful dark stain, like an infestation of insects, packed in so tightly they must be on top of each other.

‘Jesus,’ said Jester again. ‘There must be a thousand of them. Five thousand. Ten. How could you even count them? It must be every stranger in London. But what are they doing? What are they eating?’

‘They’re not eating,’ said Shadowman. ‘Food doesn’t seem to matter so much to them at the moment. They’re getting ready for something. Something more important.’

‘Like what?’

‘Next stage of the disease maybe. They’re massing. For some event. Like salmon before they spawn.’

‘You talk like they’re organized.’

‘They are,’ said Shadowman. ‘In the middle of all that, like
a queen bee in her hive, is the king of the strangers. A mean, ugly, vicious killer I call St George. He has the
power to make them do whatever he wants. They’d follow him over a cliff if that’s where he was going.’

‘No such luck, I guess.’

‘He’s planning something, and walking off a cliff isn’t it.’

‘So he’s intelligent?’

‘It’s a sort of intelligence. An animal intelligence.
A hive mind.’

‘How does he do it then?’ said Jester. ‘How’s he communicate with them? Can he, like, talk?’

‘It’s more of a mind-control thing. Secret signals, ultrasound. I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out.’

‘But we might be able to communicate with him?’

Shadowman looked at Jester. ‘Why would you want to do that?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jester. ‘We could negotiate
with him.’

Shadowman let out a burst of laughter. ‘Negotiate?’ he snorted. ‘What are you talking about? You don’t negotiate with dangerous animals. You kill them. It’s simple.’

‘Or we could just leave them alone. Let them do their thing and die.’

‘Didn’t you hear me?’ Shadowman shook Jester. ‘They’re getting ready for something. And you’ve seen enough of how strangers
are to know that it won’t be nice. We have to stop them.’

‘Stop them? Stop that lot? Are you nuts? Look at them. They’re an army.’

‘And how do you stop an army?’ said Shadowman.

‘You don’t,’ said Jester. ‘You run away.’

‘No,’ said Shadowman, wishing Jester wasn’t being so deliberately dumb. ‘You create your own army, and you take the battle to them. You beat them,
Jester. Imagine that, if we could destroy this lot. You said it yourself –
that’s every stranger in London. And we could wipe them out. They’ve made it easier for us. They’re all in one place.’

‘Except,’ said Jester, ‘we attack them, they’re liable to get up off their arses and fight back.’

‘We can do it,’ said Shadowman. ‘We can take them down.’

‘What?’ said Jester mockingly.
‘Us two?’

‘It’s possible,’ said Shadowman, ignoring Jester’s joke. ‘If we got an army together.’

‘Don’t be stupid. Look at them.’ Jester banged the window. ‘Look at them …’

Shadowman looked. The thought of taking on that lot was terrible. He could imagine the stink they generated. The heat. All those rotting bodies oozing pus. He pictured himself standing with a pitifully
small army of children as the sickos came on.

Too many to count, Jester had said. Too many to kill …

‘We can’t fight them,’ Jester whispered, shaking his head.

‘We can,’ Shadowman shouted, trying to drown out his own doubts and fears. ‘Scattered around London there are hundreds of kids. They just need to be united, persuaded to join together. If we did that we could
win.’

‘Where do we start?’

‘Come on. Let’s go.’ Shadowman jerked his head at Jester and they made their way back down the stairs, through the cinema and out of the front.

There were two sentinels outside, who hadn’t been there before. Shadowman ignored them. Started walking north. The rotten stink of strangers seemed heavier in the air.

‘What about David?’ Jester asked
after a couple of minutes. He’d obviously been thinking about what Shadowman had said.

‘What about him?’ said Shadowman.

‘He’s gonna want to be in charge.’

‘That jerk?’ Shadowman laughed. ‘He knows sod all about war. He lucked out getting into the palace before anyone else. Took control by lying and cheating and dumping on other kids. What would he know about taking
on an army like that?’

‘That’s what I meant,’ said Jester. ‘He won’t go along with it. Won’t want anyone else telling him what to do.’

‘Then maybe I’ll sneak into Buckingham Palace and slit his chicken throat one night.’

‘You wouldn’t …’

‘Wouldn’t I? You’ll need to watch your back, Jester. Sleep lightly. This isn’t over.’

Jester stopped walking. ‘Leave it out, Shadow,’
he said. ‘I know you’re kidding.’

‘Do you?’ Shadowman raised his crossbow.

Jester sighed. Blew his breath out from between puffed cheeks. He’d had enough.

‘Let’s go back now, yeah?’ he pleaded.

‘Nope. We’ve one more thing to do today.’

‘I am
done
,’ said Jester wearily.

Shadowman spotted something over Jester’s shoulder and walked close to him, put his face right
in the boy’s face.

‘This isn’t about you,’ he hissed.

‘No? I thought this was national kick Jester’s arse day. What
is
it about then?’

‘That.’ Shadowman pointed back down the road and Jester turned to look.

A group of strangers was walking towards them, their stink filling the street, thick and almost physical. Jester swallowed, looked like he wanted to puke.

‘We need to run,’ he said.

‘Uh-uh.’ Shadowman held him in place. ‘Look at them. They’re rubbish. They don’t want to eat. They’re catatonic. Zombies.’

‘Zombies …’

‘Harmless ones.’

The strangers seemed to be wandering aimlessly. Shadowman stood his ground. Testing them. Testing Jester. He wanted to rub his face in it. Make him understand – This was it. This was this.

The strangers, a mix of mothers, fathers and older teenagers, were filthy, black with grease and dirt. Most of them were bald. One or two had clumps of hair that was long and matted. All were diseased, bits missing, skin made inhuman by boils and growths and sores – eaten away by open, weeping wounds. How they were still alive at all was a mystery. Some sort of invisible puppet strings
were keeping them upright as they came shuffling on.

‘OK,’ said Jester, and he was trembling, his face covered in sweat. ‘You’ve made your point. This is crazy. We need to fight or we need to run. Let’s run, yeah? Let’s go home.’

Shadowman held him still until the strangers were right upon them. They parted as they came close and then brushed past. Not interested.

‘We’re
going,’ said Shadowman. ‘But we’re not going home.’

‘Where then?’ The relief on Jester’s face when the strangers had simply walked past was comical.

‘We’re going shopping,’ said Shadowman.

‘Shopping? Where?’

‘IKEA.’