The Sacrifice (26 page)

‘You what?’

‘Ignore him,’ said Sam.
‘He’s in one of his weird moods. He hasn’t said anything that makes
sense since they shut me in here with him.’

‘Harry, Harry, I’m back,
I’m back. Tell Frank.’

‘Who’s Harry?’ said
Brendan.

‘I don’t know,’ said Sam.
‘Harry Hill? Harry Potter?’

‘Harry Houdini,’ said The Kid.
‘Escape artist. Now there was one clever piece of work. Harry will look after us.
He’ll find a way to spring us. God bless Harry and God bless me. Thank you and
goodnight.’

‘You’ve thought of a way to
escape?’ asked Sam, his face lighting up.

‘Not yet,’ said The Kid.
‘Give me time.’

‘Mate, you haven’t got any
time,’ said Brendan. ‘I heard them saying they’re going to come and
sort you out in a few minutes. That’s why I came over. I had to explain.
It’s not my fault.’

‘No,’ said Sam feebly.

‘You’re out of time, guys.
I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t slow down!’ Ed
yelled.

They were running through another underpass.
This one went beneath Cannon Street station. The last few minutes had not been fun.
There were sickos coming out of the woodwork on all sides now. Waking up from their
hidey-holes. Crawling into the light. There was no telling what had triggered it, but a
big pack of them were on their tail, lumbering along the road behind them, and Ed could
see more of them silhouetted against the light at the far end of the underpass.

‘Up ahead!’ Hayden yelled. She
was out in front, her long legs pounding the tarmac. Running came easily to her.

‘Yeah, I’ve seen them,’ Ed
shouted back, drawing his heavy sword from its scabbard. ‘We have to keep
moving.’

‘How long do we run for?’ Macca
asked, short of breath.

‘As long as we need.’

‘We should turn back.’

Ed glanced over his shoulder; the road was
thick with sickos.

‘No chance,’ he said.
‘There’s a lot more behind us than there is in front. We push on. Cut
through them if they try and stop us.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Kyle,
overtaking Ed. ‘They’re gonna try!’ And he let out a war-cry as he
burst into the sunlight and slammed into the waiting sickos.

The kids hacked and slashed their way
through the first line of sickos before they knew what had hit them. They left five of
them lying dead and five more reeling from their wounds.

The kids ran on, whooping and cheering, but
their joy was short-lived.

The whole road in front of them was filled
with a great crowd of sickos. They were streaming across Southwark Bridge and spilling
out as they hit the junction with the road the kids were on. They were way too many for
them to be able to batter their way through. Ed had to make a quick decision. They could
go back, they could turn northwards and head away from the river, deeper into the tangle
of streets that made up the no-go zone, deeper into the part of town that the sickos
themselves seemed to be heading for, or they could go the other way, down towards the
river. Take their chances there. It was low tide, so there might be enough beach to walk
on. It was possible they could use it to get past this milling horde.

‘This way!’ he shouted, and
turned to his left into a narrow alleyway called Cousin Lane that ran along the side of
the station.

‘Are you insane?’ Macca
screamed. ‘We’ll be trapped down there.’

‘It’s our best bet,’ Ed
replied. ‘Believe me. You can take your chances with that lot if you want, but
I’m getting out of here.’

‘Stick with him,’ said Kyle.
‘He knows what he’s doing.’

‘It’s crazy.’

‘Yeah,’ said Kyle.
‘Innit?’

Cousin Lane sloped gently downhill, with the
great brick arches that supported Cannon Street station running down one side, each with
some kind of workshop built into it. At the far end was a pub, The Banker, also built in
one of the arches. It reminded Ed that before everything had fallen apart this area of
London had been the financial centre. Past the pub was the wide expanse of the Thames
with the Cannon Street railway bridge jutting out across it.

Just before the pub there was a dark opening
to their left with a sign saying Steelyard Passage. One of the arches was open there,
and as the kids drew level with it, a group of sickos lunged out at them and they found
themselves in a desperate, sweaty, close-up fight. Ed laid into the sickos with a cold,
brutal fury. The first few went down quickly and the others shrank back into the
passageway underneath the station.

The killing frenzy had come over Ed. He
wanted to follow the sickos and kill every one. Chop them into small pieces. He had
retreated into himself, withdrawn all the nice civilized parts of his personality and
hidden them safely in a hard shell, leaving only the harsh, emotionless, animal part of
him. The part that hacked and cut and killed and delighted in the bright sprays of red
blood.

‘Ed, come on, they’ve
gone!’ Will shouted and Ed stopped, taking a big shuddering breath. He stared at
Will and Will backed away from him.

‘Christ, Ed,’ he said.
‘You look like you want to kill me.’

Ed sighed and wiped his face. ‘Sorry,
Will.’

There were some steps next to the pub that
led down to the water. Ed led his group over to them.

‘Yes!’ He punched the air
triumphantly, flicking drops of blood into the air from his sword. ‘What did I
tell you, Macca? Stick with me and you’ll be all right.’

There was a narrow strip of muddy beach,
about two metres wide. They leapt down the steps and were soon squelching their way west
again, their feet sinking into the thick London clay.

No sickos
, thought Ed and no Sam
either. As he’d feared, his plan to get a feel for the streets, to look for any
clues as to what might have happened to him, had gone out of the window as soon as
they’d come across their first sicko. If the poor kid
had
come this way
yesterday he wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.

They clambered over two beached rubbish
barges laden with rusting containers that were blocking their way. Will stopped on top
of one of them.

‘Would you look at that?’ he
said. He was gazing ahead at Southwark Bridge, its jolly green and yellow ironwork
looking out of place on this grey day filled with violence. There was a steady flow of
sickos crossing over it from the south.

He started to recite some lines.

‘
Under the brown fog of a winter
dawn,/A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/I had not thought death had undone
so many.
’

‘What’s that?’ Ed
asked.

‘Just some poem I had to study at
school. It’s near here.’

‘What is?’

‘My old school. City. It’s on
the river near St Paul’s. We’ll be able to see it from the other side of the
bridge. We’ll go right past it. I haven’t thought about it in all this time.
That poem just came to me.’

‘That’s typical of you, Will. You
see a bridge full of sickos and you think of a poem.’

‘What do you think of?’

‘More killing, more blood. No end to
it. That’s why we need people like you, Will. To stop us all turning into, I
don’t know, turning into Kyle.’

Will hesitated before going on.

‘You really looked like a monster back
there, you know, Ed? You really looked like you were going to kill me.’

‘It’s this scar. Makes me look
creepy.’

‘No, it’s not. It’s
you
, Ed.’

Ed shrugged, went to move on. Will put a
hand on his shoulder.

‘Are we going to live?’ he
asked.

Ed carried on moving.

‘Yeah.’

They slogged their way under the bridge, the
mud coating their lower legs and making their trainers thick and heavy. There was a
strong smell from the river. But it wasn’t a bad smell. Not compared to the
sickos. It was the smell of life.

Ed looked at the flow. The tide was rising.
The beach wouldn’t be there much longer. He sped up, urging the others on.

They came to a big building that looked like
a classical Greek temple. Will explained that it was Vintners’ Hall. Something to
do with the wine trade in the City. Its fancy architecture would only be visible from
the far side of the Thames or on the river itself. There was a raised terrace with steps
leading down to the beach. Ed wondered whether maybe barges had once put in there to
unload wine barrels, but then he noticed that the building was actually quite modern,
faked up to look old.

They climbed the steps and leant on the
balustrade, exhausted, staring out at the great grey-green muddy Thames.

‘Anybody hurt?’ Ed asked.

‘No,’ said Hayden.
‘Don’t think so.’

‘I grazed my finger,’ said
Macca, wincing.

‘You grazed your finger?’ said
Kyle, wide-eyed, and left his mouth hanging open.

There was a moment’s silence and then
they all started laughing, relief flooding out of them. They’d done it,
they’d got this far in one piece, and Macca’s complaint about his grazed
finger seemed to them to be the funniest thing they’d ever heard. They held on to
each other and heaved and groaned until the tears were rolling down their faces.

‘He grazed his
finger
!’
Kyle gasped.

‘You idiot, Macca,’ said
Adele.

At last they stopped, settled down into
silence, each of them alone with his or her thoughts.

To their left was Southwark Bridge, to their
right the Wobbly Bridge, as everyone called the Millennium Footbridge, and opposite, the
burnt-out ruins of the old power station that had been converted into the Tate Modern
art gallery.

All that art
, thought Ed,
up in
smoke
. All those paintings, sculptures, gone forever.

All those people.

The end of the world.

I had not thought death had undone so
many.

‘So what now, boss?’ Kyle asked,
propping his elbows on the low wall next to Ed.

‘We can carry on along here,’ Ed
replied, putting his arm
across Kyle’s shoulders. The laughter
had cleared his head and cleaned out the blood fever. The over-friendly hug was half
taking the piss and half for real.

‘When it looks safe, we’ll go
back up on to the road.’

‘Or if the tide gets too high,’
said Kyle.

‘Yeah.’

‘We ain’t gonna find the boys
down here, though, are we?’

‘Nope.’

‘Let’s face it, Ed, we
ain’t gonna find those boys nowhere.’

‘I’m not giving up on them,
Kyle.’ Ed straightened up, feeling bone-tired. ‘And we’ve done OK so
far. If the worst we got to worry about is a grazed finger then … ’

‘
If
that’s the
worst,’ said Kyle.

‘Yeah. Thanks for that. Always look on
the bright side of life, eh? Let’s go.’

Shadowman realized he’d been awake
for a while, staring at a ceiling light without really understanding what it was. He
hadn’t expected to be looking at a light fitting, so his brain hadn’t
accepted it. He blinked, trying to get his eyes to focus. He wasn’t supposed to be
here – wherever
here
was. It didn’t fit. The last thing he remembered he
was in the Lexus and they were dragging him out … 

Must have blacked out again
. A
toxic mix of pain, fear and shock had switched his brain off.

One thing was clear: he wasn’t in the
car any more. He was indoors. He forced himself to sit up and look around. His felt a
single massive throb in his head, as if someone had attached a bass drum pedal to his
skull. It was followed by a queasy lurch from his stomach. He fought not to throw up and
closed his eyes for a moment until the pain and the nausea went away.

He opened his eyes.

He was in bed. In a neat, orderly room.
Almost too clean and perfect. The world wasn’t like this any more. Fresh, crisp
sheets. Matching pillows. Walls covered with subtly patterned wallpaper. Some wooden
blinds. Closed, so that he had no idea what time it might be, whether it was even day or
night. All the furniture looked brand-new. A chair,
a chest of drawers
and a wardrobe. A rug on the floor. A bedside table with a lamp on it. None of the
lights were working, of course. No electricity. The room was lit instead by a tea light
in a glass holder.

The door was closed.

He rested back against the pillows.

This was weird.

He rubbed his head. It was pulsing like it
was about to hatch. Was it possible, he wondered, for a head to just spontaneously split
open? Certainly it happened to strangers occasionally. They burst in the sun like
overripe fruit.

There was a glass of water on the bedside
table. He sniffed it then took a sip. It tasted clean. He noticed his clothes, neatly
folded on a low table, his backpack and weapons leaning up against it.

He was wearing his T-shirt and underwear. He
felt dirty in this clean, orderly room. He was aware of how much he smelt.
Couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a bath or a shower. He tried to
fumigate his clothes in smoke whenever he could and used the smell of it to mask his own
pungent scent. Out on the streets, surrounded by evil-smelling strangers, he was
positively fragrant. In this sterile room, though, he was a stinking, grubby
monster.

And he hurt all over.

He ran his fingertips over his scalp. There
were some fresh lumps to go with the one he’d got when his friend Jester had
accidently whacked him with a baseball bat. If he kept on getting knocked about like
this he was going to become punch-drunk. It couldn’t be doing him any good. He
pictured himself as a shambling, dribbling headcase, fitting right in with St
George’s army.

He coughed and felt a sharp pain in his
chest. He lifted
his grimy T-shirt. There were some nasty bruises
across his ribs.

Oh well, could be worse
. At least
he was still alive.

But where the hell was he and how had he got
here?