The Sacrifice (16 page)

Shadowman stayed down, hugging the wall,
pulling out his knife just in case. He heard the three of them coming back over the
road.

Well, he wasn’t going to let himself
be killed like this.

‘I’m one of you,’ he said,
just loud enough for them to hear. ‘I’m a kid.’

‘Show yourself.’ The
girl’s voice. Making no attempt to keep quiet.

Bloody idiot.

‘Keep your voice down,’ he said.
‘There are strangers nearby.’

‘What are you talking
about?’

‘Please … Be quiet. Whatever
you call them. Grown-ups, zombies. There’s a hundred of them over the road. If you
disturb them we’ll all be up shit creek.’

‘Why should we believe you?’

‘Why shouldn’t you?’

‘Show yourself.’

‘As long as you promise not to fire
another bloody bolt at me.’

‘OK … ’

Shadowman was furious. All the time
he’d put into studying The Fear, tracking them, learning about them, could all be
wasted by these bloody kids. They were going to ruin everything. If the strangers woke
now it was the end
for all of them. He had to try to convince the
others of the danger they were in.

He got into a crouch then gently eased his
head up over the top of the wall. The three kids were spread out, weapons ready, the
lethal crossbow trained at his chest.

‘Put that crossbow down,’ he
whispered as loudly as he dared.

‘Who are you?’ asked the girl.
‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes. But please believe me. We have
to get away from here now and we have to do it fast.’

‘I’m sorry, mate.’ The
girl was doing all the talking, seemed to be in charge. ‘We don’t trust no
one.’

‘You have to listen to me. You have to
trust me. There are adults in there and they’re not nice ones. If you disturb
them … ’

‘We know there’s something in
there,’ said the boy with the spear. ‘And how do we know you ain’t
lying to us? Might be food or something. Something you want.’

‘There’s no food in there, only
grown-ups.’

‘We ain’t scared of no
zombies,’ said the second boy. ‘This is our turf and you shouldn’t be
here. Where you come from?’

‘Buckingham Palace.’

‘Yeah, right. Where you
from?’

‘The centre of town,’ said
Shadowman wearily. ‘I’ve been following these grown-ups for days.’

‘What for?’

‘Jesus Christ! That’d take too
long to explain. And you lot are making too much noise. Now I’m going to come out
from behind this wall and I’m going to start walking slowly away from here. I want
you to follow me.’

‘You might just lead us into a
trap.’

‘Why the hell would I want to do that?
I’m one of you. I’m a kid. We have to get away from here now. And when
we’re at a safe distance, I’ll explain everything.’

‘We don’t trust you,’ said
the girl.

‘Well then, just let me go. I’m
no threat to you. The mothers and fathers inside that building are the enemy.’

‘We’ll merk them,’ said
the boy with the spear. ‘They don’t scare us. We cleaned out every zombie
round here. We own Kilburn.’

Shadowman wasn’t listening. His sharp
ears had picked up a noise coming from inside the tyre centre. He was sniffing the air.
The three kids didn’t move.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Please
get away from here. I’m going to start running any second now. You don’t
know how dangerous these grown-ups are.’

‘Course we do,’ said the boy
with the spear, almost shouting. ‘How d’you think we’re still alive?
We know everything there is to know about zombies and we kill any we find, that’s
why we’re here. We saw some last night and we’ve been hunting them. And now
we’ve found them. So now we’re going to kill them.’

Shadowman saw movement in the tyre yard.
Dark shapes emerging from the buildings. He vaulted over the wall, yelling at the kids
to run.

But he saw that it was already too late.

Somehow two groups of strangers had got out
another way and were advancing down the road from both directions.

‘I don’t get it, Ed. Yesterday
you were telling everyone we shouldn’t mess with the zone. Now you tell me you
want to get in there.’

‘Things have changed, Jordan.
It’s like this game … ’

Ed pointed to the two armies set out on the
tabletop. He and Jordan were in Jordan’s rooms in the Queen’s House,
re-enacting the Battle of Austerlitz, where Napoleon had crushed the combined armies of
Russia and Austria. Jordan was obsessed with war games. He’d brought a load of
tiny painted soldiers with him in his backpack of essentials and had found loads more in
a collection at the Tower. He liked to recreate famous battles and see if there could
have been a different outcome. He studied the rulebooks for hours and ate up history
books, learning all he could about the different troops and their abilities.

The soldiers on the table were an odd mix:
about half were authentic Napoleonic figures, the others were mostly made up from later
wars, the Crimean War, the Boer Wars, the First and Second World Wars, but there was
also a regiment of Greek hoplites standing in for French grenadiers. Truth be told, Ed
found these games a bit boring – they could go on for hours – but he knew that if he
wanted to
talk to Jordan for any length of time the best thing to do
was suggest a war game.

As usual, Ed was losing, even though he was
commanding Napoleon’s superior army, the army that won the original battle.

‘What d’you mean?’ Jordan
narrowed his eyes, magnified behind his thick glasses, and studied the troop layout,
leaning in very close to check he hadn’t missed anything. ‘What’s like
this game?’

‘Well.’ Ed leant back in his
chair, relieved not to have to think about the game for a minute. ‘You know what
it’s like. You decide on your tactics, but you have to change them as the battle
goes on. What’s that quote you’re always throwing at me? About
tactics?’

‘
No battle plan ever survives
contact with the enemy
?’ said Jordan.

‘That’s it.’ Ed nodded.
‘That’s exactly what I mean. We both started this game with a plan. We both
thought we were going to win, but you didn’t do what I wanted you to do. Your
moves didn’t fit my plans. So I changed my plans and you changed yours, and, the
way it goes – things change.’

‘Yeah,’ said Jordan.
‘Things change. You’re right. You got to keep an open mind.’

Ed nodded. ‘And you need to change it
now and then,’ he said. ‘Like I’ve changed mine. Because things have
happened that I need to react to. Yesterday I wasn’t sure about charging into the
no-go zone and getting people hurt. And for what? To stop people from getting bored? To
expand our territory?’

‘Yeah, all of that.’

‘But, as far as I can remember, I sort
of agreed to it in
the end. When we were ready for it. But now –
things change. Sam’s gone. And it’s my fault. He kept on asking me to go
with him and I kept telling him to wait. He didn’t wait.’

‘What were you waiting for, Ed? For
DogNut to get back?’

‘Mainly.’

‘He ain’t coming back,
Ed,’ said Jordan. ‘I think we got to accept that.’

‘Yeah, maybe you’re
right.’

‘Which means one of two
things.’

‘What?’ Ed sneaked a look across
the table at Jordan. He knew Jordan didn’t like people to look at him, but
sometimes, when you were having a conversation, it helped to look at the person you were
talking to. He wanted to know what Jordan felt about DogNut. He never discussed his
emotions, so Ed had to try and read them in his face.

It was hard, though. Jordan’s face
rarely gave anything away and his glasses changed his eyes. Right now the general had
his eyes fixed on the game, bent over, his nose almost touching the little soldiers, so
he wasn’t aware that Ed was studying him.

‘It means that either he’s
dead,’ said Jordan, ‘or he’s found a sweeter deal than what he can get
here. Found some place he’d rather be. That boy always was ambitious. Never liked
being the underdog. Top dog was the only position he wanted. The soldier knew he could
never be better than number two as long as I was here. So maybe, just maybe, he found
somewhere he could be number one.’

‘Maybe.’ Ed looked away as
Jordan raised his face. ‘But DogNut was loyal. He had respect. You know that. He
wouldn’t do something like that without reporting back.’

‘Wouldn’t he?’

‘I don’t know.’ Ed
shrugged. ‘As I was saying, things change.’

‘They surely do. Your move,’
said Jordan, nodding at the two armies.

Ed sighed and set about laboriously moving
blocks of troops, checking everything with the rulers and charts, the various compasses
and protractors, that were strewn all over the table.

‘My heavy cavalry division is charging
your Jaeger Regiment.’

‘You sure?’ Jordan frowned.
‘They’ll come within range of my grenadiers.’

‘Yeah. I just want some action,
Jordan. All this creeping about is getting frustrating.’

‘It ain’t creeping about, Ed,
it’s manoeuvring.’

‘It’s dull is what it is,
Jordan. I want to see some blood on the table.’

‘Go ahead, man, but you’ll be
wasting a lot of troops.’

‘Unleash hell!’

In this case unleashing hell wasn’t
quite as dramatic as it sounded; it meant rolling several dice and making complex
calculations on a piece of paper, and the end result was exactly as Jordan had
predicted. Ed took out a few skirmishers, but came too close to the grenadiers, who shot
his cavalry to pieces.

At least it had livened the game up a bit.
Ed didn’t have the patience to be a great tactical player. He would have made a
terrible general. It had always been the same with him. He was happier playing sports
like football or cricket, where all you had to do was go out there and do your best.
Games like chess did his brain in. He’d always start well,
bold
and decisive, and then he’d get bogged down. Couldn’t cope with the strain
of trying to think ten moves ahead, checking all the possible outcomes of shifting one
small piece on the board. He’d do something reckless, take down a bishop, say,
even though he knew it was risky and would leave one of his own more valuable pieces
exposed. And if he was playing someone like Jordan, who was patient and calculating,
never flustered, able to look twenty or thirty moves ahead, he would lose.

Every time.

Just as he knew he was going to lose this
battle.

Jordan now set about marshalling his own
forces.

‘So how many people you want to take
with you?’ he asked as he slid some hussars a few centimetres across the
table.

Ed ran his fingers through his hair. It had
come to the crunch. ‘Twenty,’ he said. ‘To be on the safe
side.’

‘Can’t spare twenty,’ said
Jordan bluntly. ‘We need all our troops to guard the forage parties or we
won’t be able to bring enough food back.’

‘I’ll only be gone a
day.’

‘Is what DogNut said.’

‘Yeah. Well, I thought you might say
that.’ Ed smiled and shook his head. ‘So over to you. How many can you
offer?’

‘I don’t want you to go at all,
Ed. You know that. You’re important to me here. The kids like you. If anything
goes belly-up you’re a good man to have around. Specially now that everyone seems
spooked by what I done to Brendan and them two little boys tipping up. Baa baa black
sheep and all that. I mean, what if you do a DogNut on me?’

‘I won’t. You know me, Jordan.
You can trust me.’

‘Yeah. You could get taken down,
though.’

‘Not if you give me enough fighters I
won’t.’

‘What’s your plan?’

‘Sam wanted to go to Buckingham
Palace. That’s miles away through the most dangerous part of town. He got a head
start this afternoon. We only just realized he’s gone unfortunately.’

‘And the other two? The weird kid and
the girl?’

‘Yeah. She must have gone with them. I
can’t try to follow them now. It’s too late. It’s getting dark, dark
and dangerous. I’ll leave tomorrow when it’s light.’

‘You’ll move faster with a small
squad.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Pick from your own unit. You and five
others. I can’t spare no more than that.’

It wasn’t enough, but Ed knew that it
was all he was going to get. Jordan liked to play it safe, keep troops in reserve. It
was one of the reasons he always won these war games. ‘All right,’ he said.
‘Thanks. I just need to know Sam’s all right. You understand?’

Jordan looked at Ed for the first time. His
eyes seeming to bulge behind the lenses. ‘Ed, dude,’ he said. ‘If
something was going to happen to the youngers it would have happened today. It would
have happened in the first hour they was gone. That out there is the
badlands.’

‘I know. And it’s my fault he
went there. I promised to look after him and I didn’t and now he’s
gone.’ Ed was on the verge of tears. He had made himself responsible for Sam and
he’d let him down. He knew it was just his own guilt that was making him mount an
expedition. The chances of finding Sam if he was in trouble were pretty small. But he
had to do
something
.

‘I’ve lost friends before,’
he said. ‘People I should have looked after. I don’t want it to happen
again. I don’t care how dangerous it is. I’ll risk that.’

‘It’s happened, though, Ed.
It’s done.’

‘No. I’m not going to believe
that Sam’s dead. He might be holed up somewhere. Under attack. Praying that
someone will come and get him, Jordan. And I can’t just leave him. I
can’t.’

Sam was sitting wide-eyed at a table that
had been set up in the centre of the main aisle in the cathedral. A feast was laid out
on the table. There was chicken and rice, tinned vegetables, dried fruit, biscuits, cans
of Coke, even chocolate. Sam couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a meal
like this. He was drunk on the luxury of it all. Shaking. He still couldn’t quite
believe what was going on. He’d stumbled into a strange dream and he had to admit
that at this moment it was a very nice one.