The Sacrifice (27 page)

He struggled out of bed, groaning as his
muscles cramped and twitched with pain.

He hobbled over to the blinds and tugged on
the cord. They rose up to reveal … 

Nothing. No window, just more blank wall
behind.

Weirder and weirder.

He’d thought there was something too
neat about this room, too perfect, and as he looked at it again, he realized the whole
thing was fake, like a stage set. It wasn’t a real bedroom at all. He went over to
the door. Knew what he was going to find – it would be locked. He was a prisoner
here.

His fingers closed on the handle, turned
and … 

The door popped open.

It wasn’t locked.

He raised his eyebrows. Let go of the
handle.

Stupid
.

If he was a prisoner here why would they
have left his weapons? His clothes? He wasn’t thinking straight. He’d always
lived by his wits, had been a quick thinker. One step ahead of everyone else. He hoped
the blows to his head hadn’t permanently affected his brain.

He got dressed. Picked up his machete.
Better to be safe than sorry. He slung his backpack over his shoulder and went over to
the door again. Swung it slowly open and peered out. There was an almost identical room
opposite, except it had one wall missing. He saw other rooms, odd bits of furniture
standing around. Prices on them. Funny Swedish names.

He laughed. He was in a furniture showroom.
And not just any showroom.

He was in IKEA.

He’d been here before a couple of
times with his parents.

They’d bought tea lights, hundreds of
them, in big plastic bags.

He spotted a couple of kids sitting reading
books by candlelight, another boy writing in a pad of A4. He looked up at Shadowman.
Smiled. Came over.

‘You’re awake.’

‘I guess so – unless this is a
dream.’

‘It isn’t – least as far as I
know. Sometimes wish it was. I’m Dan.’

‘Carl,’ Shadowman lied and they
slapped hands.

‘Yeah, Johnny said.’

‘Johnny? He’s alive?’

‘Yup. And so are you, thanks to him.
Come on. He’s been waiting for you to wake up.’

Shadowman followed Dan through the maze of
the showroom. It had been designed to make shoppers pass as many items as possible, to
encourage them to buy things they hadn’t intended to. Like tea lights.

Shadowman could see where the kids who lived
there had made living spaces for themselves in the dummy rooms. It all seemed very
peaceful and quiet. Shadowman felt the pain and tension slipping away.

Dan led him to the front of the building
where there were windows and natural light. They went down a stairway to ground level
and out into the huge car park. Johnny was waiting there by himself, sitting in a
wheelchair, his leg propped up and heavily bandaged. He was surrounded by garden
furniture, umbrellas and tables, a carpet of fake
grass, walls made
out of trellis and plants in pots. Shadowman smiled. The local kids had made a sort of
garden for themselves.

It was a grey day but not too cold and it
felt good to be out in the fresh air.

Johnny grinned at Shadowman when he saw him,
but made no effort to move. He looked tired, his face pinched and drained. One of his
eyes was twitching. Shadowman went over to him and they gripped each other’s
wrists for a moment.

‘I thought you were toast for
sure,’ said Shadowman.

‘Me too.’

‘What about Jaz?’

Johnny shook his head.

‘I’m sorry,’ said
Shadowman.

‘Yeah,’ said Johnny.
‘Still can’t believe it. It’s unfair. It’s too bloody
unfair.’ Tears came into his eyes and he wiped them away, sniffing.

‘There was a body underneath me when I
came round,’ said Shadowman. ‘I thought it was you.’

Johnny shook his head again.

‘She was wounded by the spear,
battered in the crash,’ he said. ‘But then she had the bad luck to lie there
with her foot sticking out of the car. Stinking zombies chewed it off. She died from
loss of blood.’

‘So what happened then?’
Shadowman asked, sitting down in a bright blue plastic garden chair. ‘I still
don’t get how we’re both here.’

‘Crazy bastard crawled all the way
here,’ came a voice from behind him.

Shadowman turned as a group of kids arrived
carrying weapons. The boy who had spoken was tall and fit-looking
with
glossy black hair twisted and tangled into something like dreadlocks. There were various
bits and pieces knotted into his hair: lucky charms, ribbons, tiny bones and plastic
figures. He reminded Shadowman of a character from
Pirates of the Caribbean
. He
was good-looking and he knew it. His shirt was unbuttoned to his belly and he was
wearing the tightest pair of black jeans Shadowman had ever seen on anyone.

‘It’s thanks to Johnny that
you’re still alive, dude,’ said the boy. Shadowman didn’t need to be
told that this guy was in charge here at IKEA. He carried himself with a certain
swagger. Shadowman had been expecting a cool, understated, blond Scandinavian type. This
guy was very much not that.

‘I’m Saif,’ he said.
‘Welcome to my yard.’

Shadowman nodded. ‘You got a good
thing going here.’

‘I know it, brother.’

I bet you do
, Shadowman thought.
You really fancy yourself, don’t you?

‘This is my kingdom,’ Saif went
on. ‘We got bare space. Dirty big fence all the way round. Good lines of sight.
Plus – it gets better, dude – I got rides. Yeah? Ain’t no one else in London got
what I got.’ He shook his hand, snapping his fingers together. ‘They was
even food when we first come. The joint was well rammed. Had all we needed, furniture,
food, water. Now of course we got to go out scrounging for stuff. But there’s bare
houses round here, the pickings is good.’ Saif stopped and gave Shadowman a cold
look. Poked him in the chest with a long, thin finger.

‘Yeah, my friend,’ he said.
‘All was going well until you showed up.’

‘Wasn’t me killed your
people,’ said Shadowman. ‘It was
zombies
. Ricky didn’t stand
a chance. He was swamped. Didn’t expect them to use weapons. One of them cut his
arm off with a machete and then Bluetooth got Jaz with a spear.’

‘Say what?’

‘A zombie stabbed her.’
Shadowman felt a fool for letting that slip. Pushed on, running out of steam. ‘And
then she crashed the car.’

Saif wasn’t going to let it go.
‘No, before that, man,’ he sneered. ‘What’d you say?’

‘A zombie got her with a
spear.’

‘That’s not what you said,
though.’ Saif turned to his friends. ‘That’s not what he said, is it?
Noob said something about a man.’

‘He said “Bluetooth”, I
think,’ said a short boy with a flat head.

‘It’s nothing,’ said
Shadowman. ‘Just a name.’

‘A name for what?’

‘One of the zombies I was following.
He has a Bluetooth phone thing stuck in his ear.’

‘You give them
names
?’
Saif had an exaggerated look of amazement on his face. ‘Whaffor? They your friends
or
something? You know them personally? You want to be in their gang?
Have tea with them?’

‘It’s not like that.’

‘Listen, noob.’ Saif flicked his
fingers dismissively at Shadowman. ‘Zombies don’t bother us, man.
They’re no sweat. Jaz could have coped with them fine. The only thing different
yesterday was you.’

‘I told you, Saif,’ said Johnny.
‘This guy tried to help us.’

‘Lot of good that did.’ Saif
slumped down into a deckchair, tried to stare Shadowman out. Shadowman held his gaze
until Saif looked away.

Shadowman turned his attention back to
Johnny.

‘You really crawl all the way
here?’

‘Nearly all the way. I was picked up
by a patrol who were out on the streets looking for us.’

‘But you could hardly move.’

‘I guess when you want to keep on
living you can do things you couldn’t do normally. Luckily I wasn’t hurt in
the crash and could get out of the car, but the front was all, like, squashed in and I
couldn’t do nothing for you and Jaz.’ He paused as fresh tears welled in his
eyes. ‘I tried. I really tried. Jaz was still alive then. By some weird luck
we’d taken out all the nearby zombies in the wreck. But I could see there was more
coming for a look. That’s when I started crawling.’

‘Thanks, man,’ said Shadowman.
‘How you doing now?’

‘Not good. My leg’s all chewed
up. Don’t think I’m gonna feel up to walking for a good while.’

‘Gotta watch out for infection as
well,’ said Saif. ‘A zombie bite’s got more germs in it than a fresh
dump.’

‘Nice,’ said one of Saif’s
friends and giggled.

‘You got medicine here?’ Shadowman
asked. ‘Antiseptic? Otherwise I got some.’

Saif gave Shadowman a withering look.

‘Course we got medicine, dude. What do
you think we are? Savages? I told you, I fixed this yard up the finest in London.
Everything was cool here until you showed up.’

‘And I told you it’s not my
fault,’ said Shadowman. ‘I’ve been tracking that bunch of zombies for
days.’

‘What for?’

‘What do you mean what for?’

‘I mean what I mean,’ said Saif.
‘Why was you tracking zombies?’

‘You know … to find out
about them. They’re different, this lot. They’re organized.’

‘Hah!’

‘Listen to him, Saif,’ said
Johnny. ‘He ain’t bullshitting. I saw them, they’re weird, not like
other zombies.’

‘Zombies is zombies,’ said Saif.
‘We’ve had a year to get to know what they’re like. They don’t
change, man. They do their thing and we do our thing, by which I mean we splatter
them.’

Shadowman sighed. ‘That’s what
Jaz said,’ he pointed out. ‘And that’s what got her killed.’

‘No, sir,’ said Saif, hauling
himself up out of the chair. ‘Like I say – the only thing different yesterday was
you. You are what got her killed. You pulled her out of the car and your pal, Bluetooth,
speared her. You gonna deny it? No. Soon as you are ready, I want you gone from my yard.
Seen?’

Saif made a sign to his friends and they all
trooped off across the car park towards the main road, checking their weapons as they
went.

‘He’s well proud,’ said
Johnny, watching them walk away. ‘But he knows his business. He’s a good
leader.’

‘Good leaders listen to
intelligence,’ said Shadowman. ‘Good leaders show some
signs
of
intelligence.’

‘He ain’t stupid.’

‘Come on,’ said Shadowman,
rubbing his face. ‘I’m not making this up. I’m not imagining it. You
were
there
; you saw what they were like. They’re different. And they get
cleverer every day. I mean, like, did you see any of the sentinels?’

‘Sentinels?’

Shadowman stood up and adopted the pose –
arms stretched out, staring up at the sky.

‘Yeah,’ said Johnny. ‘I
did see a couple when I was getting away. First one I saw I thought she was gonna come
after me, but she just stood there.’

‘You ever seen anything like that
before?’ Shadowman asked.

‘Don’t think so.’

‘So what’s it all
about?’

‘Reminds me of this wildlife programme
I saw once,’ said Johnny. ‘One of those, like, David Attenborough things,
you know? Was about jungles or insects or something.’

‘Reminded you how?’

‘There was all these, like, ants,
yeah?’ Johnny fiddled with the piece of knotted cloth that held his long hair in a
loose ponytail. ‘Soldier ants or some shit. In the Amazon, I think. And there was
millions of them, but they all had their own things to do, as if they’d had a big
meeting and agreed on it. “OK, you, like, you’re going looking for food, you
guys is gonna guard the queen, you’re gonna protect
the workers
and you big guys, you’re gonna just stand on the edges like signposts, making sure
the other ants don’t get lost.” Reminded me of them.’

‘Yeah,’ said Shadowman. ‘I
know what you mean. They’re, like, showing the other zombies the way.’

‘One of the look-outs spotted another
one this morning,’ said Johnny, pointing in the direction that Saif and the others
had gone. ‘She’s still there, over the other side of the North Circular.
Been standing there all day. Saif’s gone to sort her out. Said he was gonna use
her for target practice.’

Shadowman saw that Saif’s group had
climbed up on to a footbridge that crossed over the main road and were waiting
there.

‘I gotta talk to him.’ Shadowman
went over and squeezed Johnny’s shoulder. ‘Thanks again, Johnny,’ he
said. ‘What you did was well brave.’

‘Carl?’ Johnny had something on
his mind. Shadowman waited.

‘What I did back there? It
wasn’t because I was brave. It was because I was scared. More terrified than
I’ve been before. I never want to feel that way again. Alone. Do you ever have
those dreams where you’re in a house somewhere with a bunch of mates and
something’s trying to get at you, only you can’t wake anyone up?’

‘Used to,’ said Shadowman.
‘When I was little.’

‘It was like that. A nightmare. You
and Jaz were spark out. I was alone and the zombies was coming closer. It was fear made
me crawl away. Desperate bloody fear.’

‘Doesn’t matter why you did
it,’ said Shadowman. ‘The thing is you saved my skin. I’ll always owe
you one.’ He smiled at Johnny and set off across the car park.

He saw that the IKEA kids had fenced off the
bottom of
the footbridge with barbed wire and concrete blocks so that
no grown-ups could climb it. They’d made a way to get to it from the car park,
however, by building a protected ramp.

Shadowman clambered up the ramp and on to
the footbridge. Climbed the steps to the top. Saif and his gang were laughing as one of
the boys fired a crossbow.

‘Nah, missed,’ the others
jeered.

‘Jaz got
herself
killed,
Saif,’ said Shadowman.