Текст книги "The Dead"
Автор книги: Charlie Higson
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PUFFIN BOOKS
THE DEAD 
CHARLIE HIGSON
Charlie Higson is a well-known writer of screenplays and novels, and is the author of the phenomenally successful Young Bond series. He is also a performer and co-creator of The Fast Show, Swiss Toni and Bellamy’s People. Charlie is a big fan of horror films and is hoping to give a great many young people sleepless nights with this series.
Books by Charlie Higson
Young Bond series
SILVERFIN
BLOOD FEVER
DOUBLE OR DIE
HURRICANE GOLD
BY ROYAL COMMAND
DANGER SOCIETY: THE YOUNG BOND
DOSSIER
SILVERFIN: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL
THE ENEMY
THE DEAD
THE DEAD
CHARLIE HIGSON
PUFFIN
PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
puffinbooks.com
First published 2010
Copyright © Charlie Higson, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-141-96556-7
For Alex
I have a lot of help from some wonderful people in researching parts of this series, but I would especially like to thank:
James Taylor and Terry Charman at the Imperial War Museum.
David Cooper at the Tower of London.
Daniel Armstrong at Waitrose Holloway Road for helping me to understand how supermarkets work.
And Jon Surtees at the Oval for a great guided tour that was slightly wasted on a non-cricket fan like myself.
I would thoroughly recommend a visit to any of these fine institutions, whether you want to check out the locations from the books or whether you are interested in English history and culture.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
One Year Later
The Scared Kid
When the video is posted on YouTube it’s an instant hit. Within days everyone’s talking about it.
‘Have you seen the “Scared Kid” video?’
‘It’s really freaky.’
‘At first I thought it was a joke, but it looks so real.’
‘It’s definitely fake, but it’s still scary.’
‘I can’t watch it. It’s too frightening.’
‘Who is he? Do you know who he is? Who’s the Scared Kid?’
‘Nobody knows …’
Maybe it’s a clever trailer for a new horror film? Maybe it’s a viral ad for something. A new car or a chocolate bar? Or just maybe it’s real …
There’s something about it. Something about the kid. No ten-year-old is that good an actor. And if someone’s playing a trick on him they are really sick and they’ve done way too good a job. Who would do that? Who would deliberately scare a young kid that much? And why has nobody come forward to explain it all?
Even after everything that happens, when the whole world changes forever, when everyone knows that the video wasn’t a hoax, but the start of something terrible, people will remember the Scared Kid. His poor frightened little face.
It’s like the last thing everyone saw before the lights went out.
He sits there at his computer talking into a web cam. It’s clear he’s been crying for ages, his eyes are red raw, his face streaked with tears. He’s shaking uncontrollably and his teeth are actually chattering. You can hear them. It would be funny if it wasn’t so weird. He can hardly get his words out. They tumble over each other.
‘I don’t know what to what to do I don’t know they’ve killed Danny and Eve they killed Danny and Eve Danny and and Eve and Eve and and … they’re outside now I can see them I can see them outside there are three mothers and a father …’
That’s the freakiest bit, the bit that sticks in people’s minds, that he calls them mothers and fathers.
‘They came to the house and they killed they killed Danny and Eve there’s blood omigod – omigod there’s blood three mothers and a father they’ve killed Danny and Eve make them go away please make them go away …’
Then he picks up the web cam and turns it to point out of the window. It veers all over, lights smearing the screen. Now you can see the street. It’s night-time. The picture’s awful but you can just see these four people under the street lights – three mothers and a father – three women and a man, and near to them what looks like a dead body. The body of a child.
There’s something not right about the people. They don’t look like actors. The way they’re standing. And when one of them looks up at the camera it’s the most awful thing … a dead-eyed look, like an animal. Are they actors? The picture’s so bad it’s hard to tell.
Then the Scared Kid’s voice again.
‘Can you see them? They’ve gone crazy – three mothers and a father – they’ve been trying to get back in into the house but Danny and Eve they’re dead they’re dead and I don’t know where my mum and dad are there’s nobody else here they’ve all gone it’s only me …’
The camera moves again. You can hear crashing and smashing in the background. Shouting. Now the kid’s back at his desk, staring into the lens, like he’s staring into the grave. Even more terrified than before. Shaking. Shaking.
‘I’m going to post the video – Danny showed me how – they killed him three mothers and a father I have to do it quickly I don’t know what’s happening I don’t think anyone will help me I think I’m going to die like like …’
And that’s the end of it.
Some other kids do impressions of him, and post them. There’s a remix of the kid done to a death metal soundtrack. But the thing is – the video is scary because it seems so real. People watch it over and over, trying to understand it. And when adults start dying, when it becomes clear that some terrible new disease is striking everybody over the age of fourteen, the Scared Kid begins to look like some kind of prophet.
Within a very short time ‘Scared Kid’ becomes the most watched YouTube clip ever. After a month it’s taken down. There’s a message saying it’s been removed. The day after that the whole YouTube site is taken down without any explanation.
And the day after that the Internet stops working.
It just disappears.
That’s when people finally realize that something serious is happening.
THE ACTION IN THIS BOOK
BEGINS JUST OVER A YEAR
BEFORE THE INCIDENTS
DESCRIBED IN THE ENEMY.
1
Mr Hewitt was crawling through the broken window. Sliding over the ledge on his belly. Hands groping at the air, fingers clenching and unclenching, arms waving as if he was trying to swim breaststroke. In the half-light Jack could just make out the look on his pale yellowing face. A stupid look. No longer human. Eyes wide and staring. Tears of blood dribbling from under his eyelids. Tongue lolling out from between cracked and swollen lips. Skin covered with boils and sores.
Jack stood there frozen, the cricket bat held tight in sweating hands. He knew he should step forward and whack Mr Hewitt as hard as he could in the head, but his right arm ached all the way down. He’d been swinging the bat all night and the last teacher he’d hit had jarred his shoulder. Now it hurt just to hold the bat, which felt like a lead weight in his hands.
He knew that wasn’t the real reason, though. When it came down to it, he couldn’t bring himself to hit Mr Hewitt. He’d always liked him. He’d been Jack’s English teacher for the last year. He was one of the youngest and most popular teachers in the school, always talking to the boys about films and TV and console games, not in a creepy way, not to get in with the kids, simply because he was genuinely interested in the same things that they were. When the disease hit, when everything started to go wrong, Mr Hewitt had done everything he could to help the boys. Trying to contact parents and make arrangements, keeping their spirits up, comforting them, reassuring them, always searching for food and water, making the buildings safe …
And when it had got really bad, when those adults who’d got sick but hadn’t died had started to turn on the kids, attacking them like wild animals, Mr Hewitt had helped fight them off.
He’d been tireless and it had looked like he might escape the sickness.
He’d been a hero.
And now here he was, crawling slowly, slowly, slowly into the lower common room like some huge clumsy lizard. He raised his head, stretching his neck, and wheezed at Jack, bloody saliva bubbling between his teeth. Jack could see two more teachers behind him, attempting in their own mindless way to get to the window.
Jack swallowed. It hurt his throat. He hadn’t had anything to drink all day. They were running low on water and trying to ration it. His head throbbed. This was the second night the teachers had attacked in force. Jack’s second night without sleep. The stress and the tiredness were turning him slightly crazy. His heart felt all fluttery and he was constantly on the edge of losing it, breaking down into uncontrollable sobbing, or laughter, or both. He was seeing things everywhere, out of the corner of his eye, shapes moving in the shadows. He would shout a warning and turn to look and there would be nothing there.
Mr Hewitt was real, though, something out of a waking nightmare, slithering in, inch by inch.
The last hour had been a chaotic panicked scramble of running around in the dark from room to room, checking doors, windows, battering back any teachers that got past the defences. And then they’d heard breaking glass in the lower common room, and he and Ed had come charging in to see what was happening.
And there was Mr Hewitt.
Jack couldn’t do this alone. He looked for Ed and saw him crouched down behind an overturned table, his grey face poking over the top, eyes white-rimmed and staring. Ed, his best mate. Ed who everyone thought was cool. Clever without being cocky or a suck-up. Good-looking Ed who all the girls went for. Ed who beat him at tennis without really trying. Jack had always felt second in line to him, even though the two of them did everything together, hung out all the time, shared books and comics and music, played on the same football team, the same cricket team.
Last year the school had produced a glossy booklet advertising itself to new parents, and there on the front cover was Ed – the boy most likely to succeed. The happy, smiling, confident face of Rowhurst.
Well, this was the new face of the school, hiding behind a table, scared halfway to death, while the teachers crawled in through a broken window.
Ed reminded Jack of someone.
The Scared Kid.
Ed was totally bricking it, and his fear was making him next to useless.
‘Help me,’ Jack croaked.
‘I’m keeping watch,’ said Ed, a slight catch in his voice.
Yeah, right, keeping watch … Keeping safe more like.
Jack sighed. His own tiredness and fear were turning him bitter.
‘If you won’t help,’ he said, ‘at least go and get one of the others.’
Ed shook his head. ‘I’m staying with you.’
‘Then do something,’ Jack shouted. ‘Hewitt’s nearly through. I need help here.’
‘What …? What do you want me to do?’
Jack rubbed his shoulder. He’d had enough of the school. He’d had enough of this mess, night after night, the same bloody ritual. Right now he’d rather be anywhere else than here.
Most of all he wanted to be at home, though. Back in his own house, in his own room, with his own things. Under his duvet, with the world shut out.
Home …
He tossed the bat to Ed. It bounced off the table and ended up on the carpet.
‘Hit him, Ed,’ he said.
‘I’m not sure I can,’ Ed replied.
‘Pick up the bat and hit him.’ Jack felt tears come into his eyes and he squeezed them tight then pinched the wetness away.
‘Please, Ed, just hit him.’
‘And then what?’ Ed asked. ‘They just keep coming, Jack. We can’t kill them all.’
‘Hit him, Ed! For God’s sake, just hit him!’
2
Ed looked at the bat, lying in a strip of moonlight on the worn-out carpet. The electricity had gone off three weeks ago. Nights were blacker than he had ever known they could be.
He didn’t know what to do. He knew he should help Jack, but he was paralysed. If he did nothing, though, wouldn’t it be worse? The teachers would get him, just as they’d got Jamey and Adam and Will. They’d come in with their horrible filthy nails and their hungry teeth. They’d grab him …
Maybe that would be better. To get it over with. All he could see ahead of him was a never-ending string of dark nights spent fighting off adults, as, one by one, his friends were all killed.
Get it over with.
Shut your eyes, lie down and that would be that …
He saw a hand reaching out towards the bat. As if he was watching a film. As if it was happening to someone else. The fingers closed around the handle.
His fingers.
He picked up the bat and raised himself into a standing position. The blood was pounding in his head and he felt like he was going to throw up at any moment. If he came out from behind the table and ran forward now, he could get Mr Hewitt before he was fully through the window and on to his feet. He could help Jack. They’d be OK.
Yes.
He pushed the table out of the way and crept forward. What if Mr Hewitt sped up, though? What if all the diseased adults weren’t slow and confused? It was easy to make a mistake. Every boy who’d been taken had made some stupid mistake. Had been careless.
Ed raised the bat just as Hewitt flopped on to the floor. For a moment he lay there, unmoving. Ed wondered if he was dead. Then the teacher rolled his head from side to side and forced himself up so that he was squatting on the sticky carpet. He belched and vomited a stream of thin clear liquid down his front. It smelt awful.
‘Hit him, Ed.’
Ed glanced over at Jack. He was stooped over, breathing heavily, his eyes wild and shining. Exhausted. The strawberry birthmark that covered one side of his face and gave him a permanently angry look was like a splash of blood.
‘Hit him now.’
When Ed turned his attention back to Mr Hewitt, the teacher had straightened up and was shuffling closer. There were three long jagged tears down the front of his white shirt. Ed’s eyes flicked to the window frame where a row of vicious glass shards stuck up along the lower rim. Mr Hewitt must have raked his torso across them as he crawled in, too stupid to realize what was happening. Blood was oozing from behind the rips and soaking his shirt. His tie had been pulled into a tight, stringy knot.
There was a noise from outside. Already other shapes were at the window, jostling with each other to get through.
Hewitt suddenly jerked and lashed out with one hand. Ed staggered back.
‘Hit him, Ed,’ Jack hissed angrily, on the verge of crying. ‘Smash his bloody skull in. Kill him. I hate him. I hate him.’
The thing was, Ed hadn’t hit a single one of them yet and he didn’t know if he could. He didn’t know if he could swing that bat and feel it smash into bone and flesh. He’d never enjoyed fighting, had always managed to avoid anything serious. The fact that most people seemed to like him and wanted to be his mate had kept him out of trouble. He’d grown up thinking it was wrong to hit someone else, to deliberately hurt another person.
And not just any person. It was Mr Hewitt, who until about two weeks ago had been friendly and normal …
Normal. How Ed longed for things to be normal again.
Well, they weren’t ever going to be normal again, were they? So swing that bloody bat. Feel the bone break under it …
He swung. His heart wasn’t in it, though, and there was no force to the blow. The bat bumped feebly into Mr Hewitt’s arm, knocking him to the side. Hewitt snarled and lunged at Ed who cried out in alarm and jumped backwards. One of the table legs poked him in the back, winding him and knocking him off balance. He fell awkwardly, his head bashing against the table. He lay there for a moment in stunned confusion until a shout from Jack brought him back to his senses.
Where was the bat? He’d dropped the bat. Where was it?
It had fallen towards Mr Hewitt who had stepped over it. Ed couldn’t get to it now and neither could Jack. Not without shoving Hewitt out of the way.
And Hewitt was nearly on him. There was just enough light to see the pus-filled boils that were spread across his face. He raised both his hands to chest height, ready to make a grab for Ed, and his shirt pulled out of his trousers.
‘Help me, Jack!’
But before Jack could do anything there was a bubbling, gurgling sound, like a clogged-up sink unblocking, and an appalling stink filled the room. Mr Hewitt howled. The glass had evidently cut deeper into his belly than any of them had realized. He looked down dumbly as his skin unzipped and his guts spilt out.
Now it was Jack’s turn to vomit.
Mr Hewitt dropped to his knees and started scooping up long coils of entrails, as if he was trying to stuff them back into his body. Jack moved at last. He kicked Hewitt over, grabbed the fallen bat then ran to Ed.
‘Come on,’ he said, seizing Ed’s wrist and pulling him to his feet. ‘We’re getting out of here.’
3
They bundled out into the corridor and Jack pulled the door shut.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ed. ‘I can’t do this.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Jack, and he hugged Ed. ‘It’s all right, mate, it’s all right.’
Jack felt weird; it had always been the other way round. Ed helping Jack, Ed cool and in control, gently mocking Jack, who worried about everything. Jack never sure of himself, self-conscious about his birthmark. Not that Ed would ever say anything about it, but it was always there, like a flag. What did it matter now, though? In a list of all the things that sucked in the world his stupid birthmark wasn’t even in the top one hundred.
‘Should we try and block the door somehow?’ said Ed, making an attempt to look like he was in control again.
‘What with?’ said Jack. ‘Let’s just get back upstairs to the others, yeah?’
‘What about the teachers?’ said Ed, looking fearfully at the door.
‘There’s nothing we can do, Ed. Maybe the rest of them will be distracted by Mr Hewitt. I don’t know. Maybe they’ll stop to eat him. That’s all they’re looking for, isn’t it, food? You’ve seen them.’
Ed let out a mad laugh. ‘Listen to you,’ he said. ‘Listen to what you’re saying, Jack. This is nuts. Talking about people eating each other. It’s unreal.’
But Ed had seen them. A pack of teachers ripping a dead body to pieces and shoving the bloody parts into their mouths.
No. He had to try not to think about these things and concentrate on the moment. On staying alive from one second to the next.
‘All right,’ he said, his voice more steady now. ‘Let’s get back to the others. Make sure they’re all OK. We’ve got to stick together.’
‘Yeah.’
Ed took hold of Jack’s arm.
‘Promise me, Jack, won’t you?’
‘What?’
‘That whatever happens we’ll stick together.’
‘Of course.’
Ed smiled.
‘Let’s go,’ said Jack, dragging his torch from his pocket and shining it up and down the corridor. There were heavy fire doors at either end that the kids kept shut to slow down any intruders. This part of the corridor was empty. They had to keep moving, though. They had no idea how long the other teachers would be delayed in the common room.
Ed suddenly felt more tired than he’d ever felt in his life. He wasn’t sure he had the energy just to put one foot in front of the other. He knew Jack felt the same.
Then one of the fire doors banged open and Ed was running again.
A teacher had lurched through. Monsieur Morel, from the French department. He’d always been a big, jolly man, with dark, wavy hair and an untidy beard; now he looked like some sort of mad bear, made worse by the fact that he seemed to have found a woman’s fur coat somewhere. It was way too small for him and matted with dried blood. He advanced stiff-legged down the corridor towards the boys, arms windmilling.
The boys didn’t wait for him; they flung themselves into the fire door at the opposite end but as they crashed through they collided with another teacher on the other side. He staggered back against the wall. Without thinking, Jack lashed out with the bat, getting him with a backhander to the side of the head that left him stunned.
Jack and Ed came to a dead stop. This part of the corridor was thick with teachers. God knows how many of them there were, or how they’d got in. Even though they were packed in here, there was an eerie silence, broken only by a cough and a noise like someone trying to clear their throat.
Ed flashed his torch wildly around, and almost as one the teachers turned towards him. The beam whipped across a range of twisted, diseased faces, dripping with snot, teeth bared, eyes staring, with peeling skin, open wounds and horrible grey-green blisters.
They were unarmed and weakened by the sickness, but they were still larger and on the whole more powerful than the boys, and in a big group like this they were deadly. The boys had fortified one of the dormitories on the top floor where they were living, but there was no way Jack and Ed could make it to the stairs past this lot.
They couldn’t go back and try another way, though, because Monsieur Morel was even now pushing through the fire door, and behind him was a small group of female teachers.
‘Coming through!’
There was a loud shout and Ed was dimly aware of bodies being knocked down, then Morel was shunted aside as a group of boys charged him from behind. At their head was Harry ‘Bam’ Bamford, champion prop forward for the school, and bunched next to him in a pack were four of his friends from the rugby team, armed with hockey sticks. They yelled at Jack and Ed to follow them and cleared a path between the startled teachers who dropped back to either side. The seven boys had the muscle now to power down the corridor and into the empty entrance hallway at the end. They kept moving, Ed running up the stairs three steps at a time, all tiredness forgotten.
They soon reached the top floor and hammered on the dormitory door.
‘Open up! It’s us!’ Bam yelled. Below them the teachers were starting to make their way on to the stairs.
There were muffled voices from the dorm and sounds of activity.
‘Come on,’ Jack shouted. ‘Hurry up.’
Monsieur Morel was coming up more quickly than the other adults, his big feet crashing into each step as his long, muscular legs worked like pistons, eating up the distance.
At last the boys could hear the barricade being removed from the other side of the door. They knew how long it took, though, to move the heavy wardrobe to the side, shunting it across the bare wooden floorboards.
There had to be a better system than this.
Jack turned. Morel was nearly up.
‘Get a move on.’ Ed pounded his fists on the door, which finally opened a crack. The boy on the other side put an eye to the gap, checking to see who was out there.
‘Just open the bloody door,’ Bam roared.
Morel reached the top of the staircase and Jack kicked him hard in the chest with the heel of his shoe. The big man fell backwards with a small, high-pitched cry, toppling down the stairs and taking out a group of teachers on the lower steps.
The door swung inwards. The seven boys made it through to safety.
