The Sacrifice (30 page)

The newcomers fought well and hard, as
merciless as Kyle and as cold-blooded as Ed. Very soon there were only wounded or dead
sickos left. The others had moved on, heading eastwards, drawn by something the kids
could only guess at, some silent call on the wind.

‘Let them go,’ said the leader
of the newcomers, a wild-looking boy wearing a leather mask.

Ed’s group stood there, panting,
exhausted, drenched in sweat, their clothing stained dark red, their weapons hanging
limply by their sides. Ed wearily checked the numbers, a bored shelf-stacker counting
tins of soup.

They were all still standing. A thought came
into his mind – it was good that they were still standing, but there was no emotion to
go with the thought.

Just that.

It was good.

‘Who’s in charge here?’
asked the boy in the leather mask, his voice muffled.

Ed was still too wired to speak. Kyle nodded
towards him and the newcomers came cautiously closer. Ed just stared blankly back at
them.

‘Where you from?’ the boy asked.
Ed shrugged. For the moment he couldn’t remember. He’d wanted to say,
‘Kent – Rowhurst School.’ For years it had been his automatic response to
that question. A deeper, wired-in memory than the memory of his time at the Tower.

But that was a long time ago. Another life.
With Jack and Bam and all the others he had lost.

‘Tower of London,’ Kyle replied
for him. ‘Out east along the river.’

The boy in the mask sniffed and took a long
look in the direction that Kyle was pointing.

‘That’s the badlands,’ he
said. ‘We don’t go nowhere near there. The dogs don’t like it. They
can hear something we can’t, start whining and pulling on they leashes.’

‘We don’t usually go through
there either,’ said Kyle, still speaking for Ed. ‘I mean, like, we
don’t
never
go through there.’

‘These is twisted times,’ said
the masked boy.

‘True that.’

‘You guys look like you can take care
of yourselves, though.’

‘We were just a bit
outnumbered,’ said Kyle.

The masked boy chuckled. ‘About a
hundred to one.’

‘We’re looking for
someone.’ Ed finally spoke. He was slowly returning to life, like a dead leg
coming awake. It was painful. If it was possible to get pins and needles in the brain
then that’s what it felt like to Ed.

‘Looking for someone?’ the
masked boy asked.

‘Yeah. That’s why we came
through the badlands from the Tower. We were looking for someone. Didn’t know how
bad it was going to be.’

‘Ain’t usually like
this.’

‘No?’

‘No. Strange
days … I’m Ryan Aherne, by the way.’ Ryan offered his hand for a
high five and Kyle slapped it.

‘Ain’t nothing goes down on
these streets I don’t know about it.’ Ryan pushed the mask from his face. He
was an ugly bugger, covered in acne.

‘We’re hunters,’ he said
as if he expected Ed’s lot to understand what that meant. His whole gang, maybe
twenty-five of them in all, were dressed in leather and furs and Ed noticed that Ryan
had a string of dried human ears hanging from his belt.

Noticed – but didn’t feel any
reaction.

The kids all introduced themselves and
started chatting. There was a lot of news to share. Ed watched Adele and Hayden and Will
and Macca. He was glad that none of them had been killed. That was down to Ryan and his
hunters. Ed at last felt human enough to thank him and they locked grips.

‘I saw you making hamburgers of them
bastards,’ said
Ryan. ‘I don’t know your story, man,
but if you ever want to join my pack there’s a space for you.’

‘Thanks.’ Ed forced a smile.
‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

He felt a growing sense of relief that he
was alive, but it was soured by a heavy weariness and a headache. Behind it all lay a
gloomy depression. The fight had taken a lot out of him.

‘We been chasing down bastards since
we woke up,’ said Ryan, scratching his dog’s head. It was a big Rottweiler,
with a thick studded collar. ‘Streets round here are usually safe in the
day.’

‘We thought we’d be OK once we
were through the badlands,’ said Ed. ‘Never expected this.’ He
indicated the vile mess in the road. A truckload of blood and guts, already covered in
flies.

Ryan went over to one of the bodies and
poked about with his boot.

‘They’ve started arriving a
couple of days ago,’ he said, and spat into the road. ‘First just a few,
ones and twos, you know, heading east mostly, into the badlands. Then they’ve
started coming over the bridges. At first they’ve only come at night, then
they’ve started coming at all hours.’ He kicked a head and sent it
skittering across the road. ‘It’s messed up,’ he said, and then
spotted something, knelt down next to a heap of dead flesh.

‘Would you look at that,’ he
said. Ed joined him. There was a pile of grey jelly, slick and slimy. It looked a bit
like frogspawn and there were what looked like translucent eggs in it.

And something else.

Something moving.

Like tiny grey maggots.

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

‘No.’

Ed straightened up. He didn’t want to
think about any of this right now. ‘You said it, Ryan. These are twisted
times.’

‘Too right. We need to get you
somewhere safe. Let’s roll!’ He called this last command out to the waiting
kids and they set off down the road in the direction of the Houses of Parliament. Ed
could see the familiar tall tower that housed Big Ben, like something out of a dream.
Something from the past that was lost a long time ago.

‘So who you looking for then,
soldier?’ Ryan asked Ed as they trudged along.

‘A boy, two boys, travelling with a
girl.’

‘Through the badlands?’

‘Yep.’

Ryan sucked his teeth and then whistled.

‘Don’t fancy they chances much,
to tell you the truth.’

‘Me neither.’

‘I ain’t seen no one
about,’ said Ryan. ‘Anyone with any sense is staying off the streets till
these bastards pass through.’

‘But not you?’ Ed smiled.

‘Told you, soldier.’ Ryan
grinned back at him. ‘Is our job to keep the streets safe. We’re like the
Old Bill, I guess. Your friendly neighbourhood police force. Where was your friends
trying to get to anyways?’

‘Buckingham Palace,’ Ed
replied.

‘Wouldn’t advise rocking up that
way right now, to be honest. There’s bare sick bastards coming through. Besides,
we don’t have a lot of truck with them palace dudes. You guys need to rest up for
a bit, get yourselves clean and
pukka before you go dancing in that
party. Safest bet is I take you to Nicola. She’ll look after you.’

‘Nicola?’

‘Yeah.’ Ryan laughed.
‘She’s the prime minister, man. Didn’t you know?’

Now it was Ed’s turn to laugh.
‘You’re not serious.’

‘Well, in her own mind she the prime
minister. She’s holed up in the Houses of Parliament. Bunch of well serious kids
she got with her. They have votes and everything in there. Makes no difference to anyone
else, but if it keeps them happy, you know? She’s good news, though, Nicola. She
does all right by us. Not like some. You’ll like her.’

The air was suddenly filled with screams.
Shadows swarmed across the road. Ed flinched and then looked up.

Seagulls.

Hundreds of them, wheeling and swooping,
come to clean up the mess. Like vultures.

There were rich pickings for them back
there.

It was dark as midnight down in the hole
and there was a right stinko in the air. The Kid knew that stink.

Old man’s stink.

Sick and rotting. Plus the other thing.

Everybody poops.

The Kid stood very still, feeling the
vibrations in the room. He was bat and moth and radar, all in one.

The bad boys upstairs had stripped him of
his precious jacket, frisked him and whisked him away. Four of them, the two with the
dog chains and two others, bristling with spears and slick with fear. They had the
shakes on them bad. They’d tied his wrists with leather twine and taken him to a
hole that they’d knocked through a wall in the warehouse. Big black hole it was
and they’d slipped him through it, stepping from the new world into the old. From
concrete and breeze blocks, ducts and cables and metal shelves into a musty, dusty,
fusty, dry old world of stone and brick and wood that had stood there so long it had
turned as grey as a pensioner in a Werther’s ad.

There were Roman buildings down here. His
granddad had told him that. It was the Romans who had first built London, long time no
see. Like in the olden days. Dates had never been his thing. And underneath all the new
stuff was
the old stuff. Buried deep. Whenever they wanted to put up a
new building these days, they had first to excavate. Send in the Time Team. See what the
Romans had left behind.

The Kid wondered if this old place
they’d walked through had been built by some long-gone Julius or Claudius or
Caligula, back in the days of Latin and sandals.

There were stone steps down, all worn and
broken up, taking them deeper between narrow walls, pressing in from the sides. Then the
corridor had opened out into a vault with brick arches holding up the roof. Wine barrels
hiding in niches, forlorn and forgotten.

The Kid had smiled, felt a familiar,
friendly warmth in his belly. This was
his
world. The underground.
Alberich’s realm. He was the tunnel king. He’d been in cellars like this
before, exploring beneath the city.

That was the olden days too. Many moons ago.
There had been a heap of them back then, girlies and boyos, all mucking in together
where they’d lived in Spitalfields Market. They’d done all right for several
good months. And then they’d got sick. Not the old man sickness of the grown-ups,
some other disease, the flu or the pox or the flux. It had come to walk among them and
one by one by one they’d passed away.

The Kid knew then he’d have to
skedaddle. Being another victim wasn’t for him. He’d taken his chances on
his own.

And then he’d met Sam I Am, his
right-hand man. Never had a friend like Sam before. He hoped he’d be all right up
there without him.

These thoughts had clattered about in the
haywire tangles of The Kid’s mind as down they’d gone, the candlelight
slipping and crawling over the old grey and yellow stone walls.

And then at last they’d come to a
door.

Big door. Black door. Iron studs and a key
as big as your head. Nathan had unlocked it.
Rattle-click-clunk-clank
. The Kid
had thought of the Clickee Cult, up there, banging away until kingdom come. And
he’d thought of sweet Yo-Yo, his violinist. He had to get back to her somehow.
Make her see sense. He liked Yo-Yo. He liked anyone who could play music like that. His
granddad had made him hear music. All music. What there was inside it. Where it took
you. How the best music didn’t shout at you and tell you what to do. How you could
find your own way through it.

Then the big boys had made ready, spears
held out, the fear dripping off them so you could almost see it. They didn’t like
what was on the other side of that door.

Nathan had turned on a powerful bright
torch. Dazzling it was. And they’d counted … 

One … two … three … 

Then it was door open, spears jabbing into
emptiness, the torch shining bright, all shouting and yelling fit to frighten the devil
away. And they’d shoved The Kid through the door.

There were more steps on the other side and
he’d almost fallen, but somehow he’d danced down them and by the time
he’d reached the bottom the door had banged shut behind him, and –
BANG
–
the lights went out.

He’d had half a moment to get a
picture of the place they’d flung him into like a dirty rag. It was another
ancient wine cellar, most of the barrels gone, arches and dust, lots of dust. Tracks in
the dust where something had walked … 

Then darkness.

The smell of death.

It was the darkness he stood in now, trying
to herd his thoughts somewhere useful.

He wasn’t alone down there. The
vibrations told him that. And the smell. Poo. Wee. Worse.

The smell of a hungry fellow.

He’d smelt that smell many times
before, in the tunnels, knew if he got a whiff of it he had to turn back and go another
way. There wasn’t no other way to go down here, though, was there? This was the
end of the line. This was a dungeon. And there was a dragon in it.

He kept very still, keeping his breathing
quiet, trying to sense where the monster might be. Trying to build up a picture.

Not much luck.

Give it time
.

He waited, still as a frightened mouse, and
at last he heard it. Sniffing. Snivelling. The monster was sussing him out.

And then he heard something else.

A voice.

‘Hello.’

A man’s voice. Soft and low and
gentle. A kind voice.

Don’t be fooled, kiddo
. It
was the monster, all right. The blimp, Frank, it was the blimp.

The Kid held his counsel. Didn’t deign
to reply.

‘Don’t be frightened,’
came the kindly voice, floating over the darkness. Like honey it was. ‘I only want
to talk to you. It’s lonely down here. What’s your name, child?’

Everybody wanted to know his moniker of
late. Well, that was between him and the gatepost. He had to keep some things to
himself. A person needed secrets, private things, needed to keep a part of himself
hidden away in a
money box for a rainy day. You never knew when you
might need it. His name was his to have, his to hold, his and his alone.

If you shared too much of yourself you
eventually found there was nothing left.

Hold your counsel. Still your tongue.
Let the cat have it
.

‘Why don’t you come over here
and sit with me? You must be scared in the dark there. I’ll look after you. There
are rats down here, you know.’