The Fear (16 page)

There was a crack. She spun round. The glass had broken – jagged lines ran across it – and still the man pushed and pushed. He seemed to cover the entire window. His face expressionless. Squashed out of shape. One eye right against the glass. Staring at her. He was something disgusting and slimy in a tank at an aquarium.

The glass cracked again.

Olivia climbed up onto the brick wall that ran along the edge of the balcony. She stood there swaying, her head fizzing, tears hanging from her chin and then dropping away, down, down into the darkness. Falling had always been her biggest fear. She hated going on aeroplanes, she hated cliff tops and tower blocks and bridges.

She couldn’t believe they had just left her. Run off like that. It was so unfair. She couldn’t do anything by herself. She couldn’t fight. They knew that. She drew in a series of racking sobs that jerked her small body as if someone was kicking her chest.

‘No, no, no, no, no …’

Another crack. Then another. The whole window was bowing out. Any moment now it would give way and he would be there, outside, with her. Just the two of them. And he would do to her what he had done to those other children downstairs. The ones in the kitchen she had thought were waving at her. How long had they taken to die? Surely falling would be quicker? But it would still be long. The garden was so far away. And all the way down she would be alive, and waiting for the thud as she hit the ground.

Would it hurt? Or would she be unconscious before …

She mustn’t think about that. She closed her eyes. Tried to put herself back home. Yes. It was bedtime. She was going to kiss her dad goodnight and go upstairs. She would be brave and go up by herself tonight. Listen to a story tape. The tapes were very old and worn. Most of them had belonged to her cousin who was much older than her. Paul had had them first. She’d listened to them through the thin wall and couldn’t wait for them to be hers.

She loved those stories.

Dad was watching television with his new girlfriend.

No!

It was before then. Mum was still there. Even though Olivia couldn’t really remember her. But she was still there. Yes, that was better. Mum and Dad together on the sofa watching TV. They were so close. On the other side of the door. All she had to do was open the door and there they’d be. She turned the handle. Kept her eyes tight shut. Didn’t want to spoil the surprise.

The door was open. She sucked in a deep breath and then took a small step …

She wasn’t falling – she was floating – and there were Dad and Mum. They were reaching out their hands to her and everything was all right.

They would catch her. They would make sure she was all right. That’s what grown-ups did.

They looked after you.

They –

‘I promised her. I said I wouldn’t leave her. She was counting on me.’

‘She was counting on all of us, DogNut,’ said Courtney. ‘It’s not your fault. We all forgot about her. It was crazy up there.’

‘I can’t just leave her.’ DogNut started to walk off.

Felix looked alarmed. ‘You’re not going back, DogNut!’ he shouted, running after him. ‘You can’t go in there again. He’d kill you.’

‘That’s not the point.’ DogNut angrily shrugged Felix’s hand off his shoulder. ‘The point is I promised I wouldn’t let her down and now –’

‘And now she’s dead,’ said Felix bluntly. ‘Face it. So what would be the point in going back?’

‘Exactly,’ said Marco, coming over to the two of them. ‘We can’t change what happened. We’re lucky any of us got out, and it was thanks to you that we did.’

‘I was supposed to look after her. I can’t let it end like this.’

‘It ain’t over, dude,’ said Marco. ‘It ain’t over by a long way yet. It’s dark and we’re still on the streets. What we got to do now is make sure that the rest of us don’t wind up –’

‘Dead!’ shouted DogNut. ‘She’s dead and it’s my fault.’

‘It’s been a hell of a day,’ said Marco. ‘We’re lucky any of us are still alive. We’ve been through it and then some. The boat sank, the gym bunnies nearly got us, David tried to trap us in the palace, and then a humongous sicko nearly added us to his collection of dead bodies. But the thing is, DogNut, we’re still here, us five. Out of the eight of us that set off this morning we’ve only lost one.’

DogNut laughed bitterly. ‘Oh, so that makes it all right, does it?’

‘Yes,’ said Finn quietly. ‘It does.’

He turned and started walking on. When Finn made up his mind to do something, there was no arguing. The others looked at him, and then followed, all except DogNut who stubbornly stayed behind.

‘Come on,’ said Courtney, returning to where he stood in the middle of the road. ‘You got to try and forget, Doggo.’ She gently took his arm. ‘Move on. And I don’t mean in a huggy-kissy, teen-advice-column way. I mean we really do have to literally move on, because it ain’t safe to stay here.’

It was no good, though. DogNut wrenched his arm away and stomped off a few paces in the opposite direction. He was crying.

‘DogNut!’ Courtney yelled at him. ‘You’re putting the rest of us in danger now!’

‘Then leave me alone. I’ll go by myself.’

‘No, you won’t.’ Finn had come back to see what was happening. He spun DogNut round and looked into his face.

‘What’s done is done,’ he said. ‘You’re not going back in there.’

‘I’ll do what I bloody like,’ said DogNut, his voice rising in pitch as he became more and more hysterical. ‘That poor little girl is all alone in that house with a monster. And I can’t leave her. I can’t. I’ve got to go back and I’ve got to see for myself. Perhaps she ain’t dead, perhaps I can help her, perhaps I could save her, rescue her, perhaps …’

Finn slapped DogNut hard in the face, stunning him into silence. Then, before he could do anything, Finn scooped him up with his good arm and put him over his shoulder as easily as if he’d been a bag of rubbish that Finn was taking out to the bins.

Finn walked on. DogNut’s skinny body bouncing up and down. He struggled for a few paces before the fight went out of him. Despite everything that had happened, Courtney smiled, almost laughed. She had always known that Finn was strong, but to do what he’d done, with one arm, was beyond awesome.

‘You’re a good bloke, DogNut,’ Finn said. ‘You did enough. You got us out of there. We’re not heroes. We’re just kids.’

‘But I won’t be able to live with it,’ said DogNut miserably.

‘Yes, you will.’

‘Yeah? And how would you know that?’

‘After my mum and dad died,’ said Finn, ‘I tried to look after my three younger brothers. And I couldn’t do it. I messed up. They all got killed. I try not to think about it. That was my old life. This is my new life.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said DogNut. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘I don’t talk about it. Now shut up and stop wriggling.’

‘But, Finn –’

‘I said shut up. How do you think I’ve felt all day, being like this? My arm out of action? Not being able to do anything to help? I’ve felt useless. But there was nothing I could do about it. Just as there’s nothing you can do about Olivia now. What happened to her, we’ll all share it. OK? It’s all our fault.’

‘OK,’ said DogNut. ‘You can put me down now.’

‘You won’t do anything stupid?’

‘No.’

Finn dropped DogNut back on to his feet and the five of them walked on in silence for a while.

They were slightly disorientated and weren’t a hundred per cent sure where they were, but Marco had a pretty good sense of direction and managed to lead them back on to the Brompton Road without any major detours. The main road was busier than the side-roads, however. Small clumps of sickos skulked in the doorways of buildings.

The safest way to get past them was to run, so the kids sped up, first jogging then hammering full pelt as they started to attract the attention of the grown-ups who wandered after them.

The kids were sprinting now, as fast as they could go, trying to ignore the burning in their lungs and the tiredness in their legs.

Running helped clear DogNut’s mind and he was able to close himself off from his thoughts. All he had to do was put one foot in front of the other and keep pushing himself. There was nothing more to his existence. He had to build a little box and put Olivia in it, and leave it back there in the sicko’s house. He had to forget about her, just as he’d had to forget about so many other friends since the disease had changed everything forever.

It was working. He was running from her.

‘Look out!’

Marco’s shout alerted him to the fact that a big knot of sickos had spread out across the road in front of them.

‘Keep going!’ DogNut yelled, and they smashed into the grown-ups. Apart from Finn, they were all still armed. Felix had lost his spear, but had a big hunting knife. Courtney had her golf club, and she used it to crack the skulls of two slow-moving mothers. DogNut’s sword slashed right and left. Marco was busy with his spear. And Finn used the heel of his good hand to shove anyone aside who got in his way. They hit the sickos so hard and so fast and so unexpectedly that they rammed their way through and out the other side before the grown-ups even really knew what was happening.

Their small victory gave the kids fresh hope and energy, and they sprinted on, feeling like they could run forever. They were aware, though, that they were picking up more and more sickos behind them as they went. True, the sickos were slow and lumbering and couldn’t keep up – very few of them had anything like the speed and fitness of the gym bunnies they’d met earlier – but, nevertheless, once they had your scent they’d doggedly follow. You couldn’t afford to slow down or stop until you were well away. The kids felt like they were dragging every sicko in London along behind them in a big net, drawing in more and more of them as they went.

They were all too aware that there was a shambling, shuffling, mindless army of the half dead following them. They couldn’t keep running all night. If they didn’t get to somewhere safe, they were going to be in trouble.

It was all DogNut’s world consisted of now, running, running, running … About three months ago one of the search parties at the Tower had discovered a small warehouse crammed with Nike trainers. They’d carted boxes and boxes of them back to the Tower. So now the kids might not have clean clothes and fresh food, but they were never short of fresh trainers. DogNut was glad he was wearing a new pair now as he pounded down the centre of the road, his heavy sword clutched in his hand.

‘How far is it?’ Felix gasped. ‘I can’t keep this up much longer.’

‘I don’t know,’ said DogNut. ‘Just keep going.’

‘You idiots!’ Marco called out, half laughing, half wheezing. ‘We’re there! That’s the museum!’

DogNut couldn’t believe it. They’d been barely a ten-minute walk away when they’d been ambushed. If only they’d known they were so close, maybe they wouldn’t have made the detour at Harrods, maybe they wouldn’t have ended up in the sicko’s house, maybe Olivia wouldn’t have died, maybe, maybe, maybe …

In their panic, in the dark, eyes focused on the ground directly in front of them, they hadn’t noticed the vast gothic building to their right, with two great lines of arched windows along the front, and a pair of tall towers spiking up into the starlit sky on either side of the entrance. With more towers on either end, the building looked more like a cathedral than a museum.

The museum ran down the whole of one side of the road, almost as far as they could see, opposite a row of grand houses. It stood behind a strip of open ground edged by the type of black iron railings you saw everywhere in London. A group of well-armed boys was watching them suspiciously from a small pointy-roofed gatehouse beside the main gates. They bristled when DogNut and his gang ran over, and stayed put on their side of the gates.

DogNut and his friends were suddenly hit by a wave of exhaustion and for a moment none of them could speak. They stood there, hearts hammering, panting and gasping, doubled over, fighting for the breath they needed to talk.

Finally one of the boys from the museum walked over to the gates and looked at the new arrivals, chin raised, giving nothing away.

‘Where you from?’ he asked.

DogNut managed to blurt out the words ‘Tower of London’ and the boy nodded. He was short but beefy-looking, about fifteen years old, with spiky, gelled hair and wearing a battered leather jacket. His nose was flattened, broken. It must have happened after the sickness or a doctor would have fixed it.

‘You the kids Ryan the hunter took to the palace?’

DogNut straightened up. Stared at the boy, a look of pained amazement on his face.

‘You what?’

‘Is one of you called DogNut?’

‘Yeah. I am. But I don’t get it.’

‘Ryan was here before on business. Told us about you.’

‘You gonna let us in then?’ DogNut gasped.

The boy looked away, in the direction the kids had come from.

‘They with you?’ he asked, and DogNut turned to see what he was looking at.

The sickos were arriving.

‘Open the gate, man,’ DogNut pleaded.

‘First you tell us who exactly you’re looking for. See that it all checks out.’

Courtney had her breath back now. ‘We’re mainly looking for Brooke,’ she said. ‘She here?’

‘You’re friends of Brooke’s, yeah?

‘Course we are!’ Courtney shouted. ‘Now open this bloody gate, will you?’

‘Brooke recognized your names when we told her,’ said the boy.

‘Just open the gate!’ Marco shouted.

The boy unlocked the gates and casually swung them open.

‘Nice to see you got a sense of urgency,’ said Felix as he pushed past him.

The boy made a dismissive gesture and nodded to where the group of sickos had stopped and were holding back on the far side of the road.

‘They know better than to come over here,’ he said and waited for the last of the new arrivals to come through before slamming the gates closed and locking them.

‘My name’s Robbie,’ he said. ‘I’m in charge of security here. You cause any stink and you got to deal with me, OK?’

‘Yeah. Good to meet you, Robbie,’ said DogNut, and they slapped palms.