Текст книги "The Dead"

Автор книги: Charlie Higson

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

9

Chris Marker opened his book to the page with the corner he’d folded back. He found that he could stop anywhere in a chapter and start up again at the exact same point without ever having to go back and check anything. He never had to remind himself what was going on. It was as if there’d been no break between when he stopped reading and when he started again. In a funny way the story he was reading became the real world for him, more alive than the world he found himself in when he lifted his eyes from the page, blinking and lost. Real life was nothing more than a tiny interruption to his reading.

The kids were all assembled in the church and they were talking, talking, talking. A repeat of last night in the dormitory … ‘we have to stick together, we need to find food and water, we should go to London, we should go into the countryside, we should go to the moon, blah blah blah …’

Just so much talk. What difference did any of it make?

He heard a sniffle and a sob and looked along the pew. The French girl, Frédérique, was sitting there with Johnno the rugby player, her cat-carrying box held tight in her lap. She hadn’t spoken since they’d arrived at the chapel, but seemed happy for Johnno to look after her.

There were raised voices and Chris looked to the front. Jack and Ed were arguing with each other again. Chris shook his head. Tried not to smile. He wondered if Jack was ever going to tell Frédérique that he’d nailed a plank of wood to her father’s head.

They were very different, Jack and Ed. Ed, the poster boy for the school. He’d never had to worry about anything much before all this. Now he looked tired and scared all the time. Jack, whose strawberry birthmark had always made him look a bit angry and who now really did seem to be in a permanent bad mood. Shorter than Ed, with darker hair, he had the feel about him of someone who wanted to start a fight.

Look at the two of them. Trying to take charge, to be in control. They were only fourteen years old. They were children. They were all only children. And out there … outside the chapel …

Chris didn’t want to think about that.

Now Anthony Sullivan joined in.

‘How far is it?’ he asked. ‘To London? How long would it take to get there?’

‘About twenty-five miles, I think,’ Jack answered. ‘Same distance as a marathon.’

‘It’s twenty-one miles to Trafalgar Square,’ said Wiki. ‘So at an average human walking speed of three miles an hour, that would be roughly a seven-hour walk, if you did it in one go.’

‘What time is it now?’ Anthony Sullivan asked.

‘Quarter to eleven,’ said Matt. ‘We could be there by six o’clock.’

‘Provided there are no delays,’ Ed butted in. ‘You make it sound like it’s a stroll in the park, lah-di-dah-di-dah, let’s all skip to London and take in the sights from the top of an open-topped bus. We don’t know what’s out there. If you go to London, you might be having to fight every step of the way.’

‘You don’t know it’s going to be any easier going to the countryside,’ said Jack.

‘I’ve never liked London,’ said Bam. ‘I grew up in the country.’

‘You’re a yokel, Bam,’ said his friend Piers, and Bam grinned.

‘Ooh arr!’ he said, and the little kids laughed.

‘I’m with Bam,’ Piers added. ‘I vote we go to the countryside.’

Chris stayed with his head bent over his book.

He wasn’t going to get involved in any stupid voting. He’d go along with whatever the others decided. As long as he had some books with him, he’d be all right. He had a sack-load he’d looted from the school library. There’d be other libraries, bookshops, houses with bookshelves, a world of books …

He’d always loved reading. Even before the disease, he’d retreated to the safety of stories. Books were a gateway into an alternative universe. They were magic. A book could hold anything inside it.

A book could hide Chris inside it.

He turned a page. He was reading a science-fiction adventure called Fever Crumb, set in London hundreds of years in the future. He found that reassuring. That there would still be something here in the future, that the world wasn’t about to end.

He smiled.

He was there, inside the book, walking the streets of London, living in the future city.

And he was happy there.

10

The wintry sky was a great slab of unbroken grey. The flat light made Rowhurst look like a picture laid out below him, not a real town at all. From up here on the church tower Jack had a clear view of the high street, and the main school buildings over the road. He was leaning on the battlements, wrapped in his coat to keep out the cold. A thin biting wind was carrying drizzle that settled on his hair and face and kept trying to run down the back of his neck.

The rain was staining the grey stonework of the school with dark, blotchy patches. The place had been founded four hundred years ago, but only a couple of buildings from that time remained. Most of the rest had been built in the nineteenth century in a grand, heavy and, quite frankly, ugly style. A row of black railings ran along the front, broken by the wrought-iron gates with the school’s name in gothic letters across the top. Boys had been going in and out of those gates for nearly a hundred and fifty years. Too many boys to count. Jack wondered if any boys would ever come back here. Would this place ever be a school again? Or would the buildings slowly crumble and decay, split open by wind and rain and frost and the searching roots of trees and weeds? He’d never really enjoyed school that much. He’d struggled in lessons, his parents had hired a string of tutors to get him past the entrance exam and he’d always felt that he was never going to catch up with the other boys in his classes.

Rowhurst had been his dad’s old school. Dad had been very happy there and still kept in touch with his old school friends …

No. Not any more. Jack had to keep reminding himself that that world didn’t exist any more. The world of school reunions and dads going off on ‘boys’ weekends’, fishing and bike riding and whisky tasting.

Welcome to hell.

A cold, grey hell.

In a funny way, Jack was going to miss school, though. It had been such a big part of his life and if you didn’t count the lessons he’d probably got a lot out of it. He’d made some good friends. He’d enjoyed the sports. He’d been a good all-rounder – football, running, tennis, cricket, swimming. Plus he’d liked acting in the school plays. He could cover over his birthmark with make-up, pull on a wig and a costume, and pretend to be someone else. He’d enjoyed playing villains most. He’d been Iago in a production of Othello. Kwanele had played the main part – he was the only black boy in the school. Kwanele was a bit camp and hammy as an actor, and almost turned the play into a comedy, but audiences loved him and he had definite star quality. Everyone agreed that Jack’s scenes with him were the best thing in the play, and were the best theatre the school had ever seen.

Ed had taken a small part, for a laugh, but he couldn’t act to save his life. He just couldn’t be anything other than himself. Good old Ed Carter. He was self-conscious and couldn’t stop grinning in embarrassment.

Memories. That’s all Jack had left now. That’s all the school would become, a memory, kept alive by however many boys survived. Would Jack one day tell stories of his schooldays to his own son as they huddled in the dark in some ruined building eating rats and drinking polluted water?

Ah, yes, son, the best years of my life …

Which they probably would be, of course. He couldn’t see his life exactly improving from here on in.

Memories. You had to hang on to your memories somehow. That’s why he wanted to get home – to try to grab a corner of the past and hang on to it.

He spat over the battlements, watching the spitball fall with the rain.

He certainly wouldn’t ever forget the school. Not after all that had happened here in the last few weeks. How many teachers had he killed, he wondered.

He hadn’t been counting.

Home, though, was a small precious memory that seemed to be slowly fading. A magical lost place. A place where the old Jack lived. The one who rode a bike and argued with his mum and dad and watched TV and spent hours on the Internet.

Very different to the new Jack, the one who cracked open the skulls of teachers and buried dead kids.

He was going to go back there, no matter what it took.

He’d come up to the top of the tower to take a last look around. See what might be waiting for him out there. The view was pretty good. He could see most of the school and a fair part of the town. The high street was the main route in and out and he had a clear view along it in both directions.

The town looked quiet and peaceful from up here. If the sun had been shining, it might have been the picture on the box of a jigsaw puzzle. A typical small town in Kent with the sort of houses that children drew, redbrick, pointy roofs, chimneys. If you didn’t know, you would have no idea of the horrors that were going on all around you. If you looked closely, though, you could spot a couple of burnt-out buildings, abandoned cars all over the roads. A dead body lying in the gutter. So far he hadn’t seen another living soul since he’d climbed up here, though. The diseased grown-ups tended to stay inside when it was light. But they were there. Hundreds of them, thousands …

It couldn’t be any worse in London.

Jack looked north, in the rough direction he imagined his family home in Clapham to be. What lay between here and there? He wanted to get moving and find somewhere to sleep before it got dark.

‘Is it all clear?’

Ed had come up the stairs and out of the little turret in the corner of the roof.

‘Looks OK,’ said Jack. ‘You sure you don’t want to change your mind? Come with me? Whatever happened to the idea that we were going to stick together no matter what?’

‘There’s nothing for me in London, Jack.’

Jack felt like saying that there was me, your best friend, Jack, but kept his mouth shut. Their friendship had become difficult lately; maybe it was time they went different ways.

‘I just think there’s a better chance of survival in the countryside,’ Ed said. ‘It seems crazy to me to go into town.’

Jack shrugged. ‘Maybe in London they’re having twenty-four-hour parties with no adults telling them when to go to bed.’

Ed smiled. ‘Maybe.’

‘You’ll be all right,’ said Jack. ‘You’ve got Bam and all the rest. Bam knows how to take care of himself. You stick with him you’ll be fine.’ Jack didn’t say it, but he knew that that was what had decided it for Ed. He was going to keep close to Bam and the rugby players. Jack couldn’t blame him. Survival was everything now. Stronger than old friendships even.

He smiled and gave Ed a quick, awkward hug.

‘Take care.’

‘Yeah.’

‘How does that song go? “I will survive”?’

‘Yeah.’

Ed looked in pain, like he was struggling to say something. Whatever it was he didn’t say it. They were both keeping their secrets to themselves.

That was how to survive.

What was the point of survival, though, if you became an animal? Scrounging for food, fighting, killing to stay alive? Jack’s house, and all it contained, had become something special in his mind. Because what it contained was what made him human. He couldn’t explain that to Ed. He wasn’t sure he even understood it himself. He would never have had spacey thoughts like this before. Somehow, being close to death made you go deeper into your mind. Either that or you did what Bam did, shut your mind down, didn’t think about anything, treated it all as a big joke.

Jack moved to the stairs.

‘Please come with us,’ Ed pleaded. ‘Please, Jack.’

‘My mind’s made up.’

‘You always were a stubborn bugger.’

‘Always will be. Now I’ve got to go.’

11

Jack had put that song in his head and now he wasn’t around to suffer the awful singing. Ed had started it and now they were all belting it out, as they tramped along through the drizzle in a straggly crocodile, for all the world like an unruly bunch of primary-school kids on a trip.

Problem was, nobody really knew the words.

‘I will survive … da da da daa …’

Ed wondered if they would have been better off keeping quiet and not attracting attention to themselves, but singing seemed to keep the shadows away, it gave them courage. As long as they were singing, they were invincible.

‘I will survive … da da da daa …’

They were marching south, out of the town, leaving the school and the church behind. None of them had been out of the grounds in at least the last five weeks. For a while the town had been chaos, the streets overrun with crazies. Now the boys were goggle-eyed at how deserted everywhere was. The shops that had always been busy stood open-doored and empty, ransacked of all their stock. The houses were dark, lifeless and neglected, with rubbish piled in the gardens. Offices were silent. Cars stationary. The only sign of life was when a dog ran out and barked at them. The shock had made them all jump but after a moment’s panic they’d burst out laughing and had mocked each other for what a bunch of wimps they’d been. The dog was still tagging along behind, keeping a wary distance. It was skinny and scabby, with patches of fur missing.

But so far they’d seen no other people. Living or dead. They’d made it to the outskirts of the town. The shops had mostly given way to houses and small businesses. They passed a doctor’s surgery; a dentist; the local pub, the Hop Sack, its windows blackened by fire. There was a big Tesco up ahead and, after that, beyond the common, was ‘Futures Enterprise Zone’, known by the locals as ‘The Fez’, an ugly modern retail and industrial park, whose main occupants were a carpet warehouse and a tool-hire company.

Arthur and Wiki were walking along with a boy called Stanley, who had been part of the chapel group. They were having an intense conversation about whether you got wetter walking or running.

‘Scientifically, the less time you spend in the rain, the less wet you’ll get,’ Wiki was explaining. ‘So you’re better off running. As long as you’re running towards a shelter.’

‘We had floods last year,’ said Arthur, ‘at home. It rained really hard for two days and nights and the river burst its banks, it was like the streets had become a river, you had to use boats to get anywhere, it was really fun, and I thought it would be probably the most exciting thing that was ever going to happen in my life, you know, like a disaster movie, you see them in the cinema and you think, that looks incredible, but it’s never going to happen to me, because, mostly, living in England it used to be pretty boring, not any more, though, this is more extreme than a flood, much more, it’s maybe not as cool as a flood, and it’s more, you know, terrifying, but it is like a real disaster movie, and I never thought that was going to happen.’

When they got to Tesco, they stopped to take a look, but the place had been cleaned out and set on fire. All the food and drink had been looted from the petrol station next to it as well, but there were a few useful items still on the shelves, torches, cigarette lighters, batteries and a stack of road atlases.

Bam opened one out on the counter.

‘Look,’ he said, pointing to the map with a stubby finger. ‘This is us, here, in Rowhurst. We’re going this way, south-west, past The Fez. After that there are fewer and fewer buildings and then we’ll start to be in the countryside. Not proper countryside, though, still lots of town and villages and whatnot. We’ll need to go more west to this open area here towards Sevenoaks and Maidstone. That’s proper farmland, that is. We’ll get a pretty decent idea of what to expect once we’re there. And it’s near enough to some major towns if we decide the country life isn’t for us after all.’

‘Looks like a plan,’ said Ed.

When they got outside, they found the group of boys from Field House were throwing bricks at a glossy black Mercedes that had been left in the car park. They were trying to break the windscreen, but so far the bricks were just bouncing off.

‘Stand aside!’ said Bam, and he picked up a huge block of masonry.

He ran at the car and hefted his missile at it with a grunt.

This time the glass shattered and the boys cheered.

The bang had seemed startlingly loud, as did the wailing alarm that followed it. It shrieked for about thirty seconds then stopped.

The silence that followed was perhaps even more extreme. There were no angry shouts from adults, no sound of traffic, no aeroplanes overhead, no music …

The boys too were quiet. Thoughtful. They were in a world of silence now, something that none of them had ever really known before. The comforting hum and buzz of civilization had ceased.

‘Come on,’ Bam shouted. ‘Let’s hear some noise! What’s happened to the singing? We’re on the road, a band-of-brothers, team effort and all that! How about a group hug before we go?’

‘What?’ Ed looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.

‘Joke. OK?’ said Bam, laughing. ‘Don’t lose your sense of humour, Ed me old mate. Now ándale, ándale! Let’s get motoring.’

As they marched off singing the car alarm started up again as if cheering them on.

12

Jack was trudging along in the opposite direction out of town, wondering if he’d made the right decision. Apart from Matt and Archie Bishop and their six young acolytes nobody else had come with him and he was beginning to feel very alone.

Matt wouldn’t shut up. He seemed to be able to talk tirelessly about his new religion. Spouting a non-stop stream of babble. To make it worse, if he ever paused, one of the acolytes would ask him a question and he’d be off again.

He was droning on now about what they could expect when they got to London.

‘… it will be changed by the Lamb to become a city of pure gold, as pure as glass, like transparent glass with twelve gates made of pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. You see? And there will be food, more food than we can eat, and clean water.’

‘But won’t it be hard to get there?’ asked Phil, the smallest acolyte.

‘The Lamb will test us,’ said Matt, and he scrabbled through his scorched pages for a couple of minutes before he found the passage he was looking for. ‘The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down upon the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up. The second angel sounded his trumpet, and a third of the sea turned into blood, and a third of the ships were destroyed. You see, we’ll have to go through fire, and rivers of blood.’

‘And a shipwreck?’ asked another acolyte.

‘Maybe.’

‘That sounds a bit scary,’ said Phil. ‘This is all a bit too real. It was all right in the chapel. I don’t like it out here. It’s like a ghost town.’

‘Do not be afraid,’ said Matt, quoting again. ‘I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One. I was dead, and behold I am alive forever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades. You see? The Lamb will look after us.’

Jack sighed. He didn’t have an iPod he could plug into his ears. The battery had long ago died on him. He wasn’t sure he could put up with seven hours of this.

13

Ed was walking along with Malik and Bam. Bam as cheerful as ever. It seemed that not even the rain could spoil his good mood.

‘Don’t you ever get miserable, Bam?’ Ed asked.

‘Nope.’

‘Or scared?’

‘Nope.’

‘Why not? What’s your secret?’

‘I have no imagination,’ Bam said in a very matter-of-fact way. ‘Never have done. Never will. Works just fine for me.’

‘Do you think we’re doing the right thing?’ Ed said quietly. ‘Going to the countryside and everything?’

‘God knows,’ said Bam. ‘Just don’t think about it, mate. Onwards and upwards and outwards!’ With that Bam gave Ed a hefty slap on the back and strode off to catch up with his friend Piers.

‘You worry about things, don’t you, Ed?’ said Malik. ‘You never used to.’

‘There’s a lot to worry about.’

‘We’re going to be all right, Ed. We’ll find a barn to sleep in. A river to drink from. Maybe there’ll be cows we can milk, sheep and chickens.’

‘Pigs,’ Ed added.

‘Technically I’m not supposed to eat pork,’ said Malik. ‘But I guess God might let me off if I’m just trying to stay alive.’

‘It’ll be like going back to Victorian times,’ said Ed. ‘We can set up a sort of commune.’

‘We’ll need to find some girls,’ said Malik.

‘What, you mean to clean and cook?’

‘No.’ Malik shook his head in exasperation. ‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘All right, don’t sound so misunderstood, Malik,’ Ed protested. ‘I know what your lot are like when it comes to women – keeping them in the home doing the housework and all that.’

‘We’re not all like that, Ed. Just like you Christians aren’t all the same.’

‘I’m not sure I am a Christian,’ Ed said.

‘Whatever.’ Malik shrugged. ‘I meant we’ll need to find some girls if we want to start repopulating the world.’

‘Fair point. We’ve got Frédérique for a start. We’ll find others. Nice country wenches.’

‘Let’s hope we can persuade them to join us,’ said Malik. ‘I don’t know that much about girls.’

‘Do you ever wish you’d gone to a mixed-sex school?’ Ed asked.

‘My parents would never have allowed it,’ said Malik. ‘They’re not that strict Muslims, but there are some things they’re quite old-fashioned about.’

‘They don’t know about that girlfriend you had that time?’

‘No way.’

‘Whatever happened to her, anyway?’

‘She dumped me for an older boy,’ said Malik. ‘He had his own car and everything. Plus he didn’t have any pesky Muslim hang-ups.’

‘How very shallow,’ said Ed, putting on a nasal nerdy voice.

‘Indeed,’ said Malik, copying the voice. ‘How very shallow.’

Johnno the rugby player was walking next to Frédérique, trying to get her to come out of her shell. She plodded along, head bent forward, hair hanging down like a veil. All Johnno could see of her face was the tip of her long nose, but he could tell that she was still miserable. Her shoulders were slumped and she barely lifted her feet as she walked, as if each step was a huge effort.

He tried asking her about her cat, about France, about her school, but he could get nothing out of her, not even a grunt. In the end he told her about himself. He thought at least it might distract her. He told her how he had grown up in Dover. How his dad worked for the customs department at the ferry port. How he had two sisters, his parents were divorced and he’d got into the school on a sports scholarship. He explained how he lived for rugger. The French played rugger too, so he thought she might be interested in that, even though in his experience girls weren’t really that much into rugger.

‘I’m into music as well,’ he said. ‘It’s not just rugger. I don’t much like indie music, though, and hate R&B. I like anything LOUD.’

He couldn’t remember when he’d last heard any music. You needed electricity to hear anything. Had all the music in the world just disappeared along with the power? What a weird idea, to think that there would be no more AC/DC, no more Led Zep and Nirvana and the Rolling Stones and the Stone Roses …

Best not say anything about all that to Frédérique; he was meant to be cheering her up, wasn’t he? He’d only bring her down even further if he started to point out all the things that no longer existed because there wasn’t any electricity.

The Internet, music, TV, films …

Bloody hell.

They were coming up to the Futures Enterprise Zone – The Fez. A modern development of low brick buildings each with its own parking area in front.

Bam caught up with Johnno.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said.

‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’ Johnno asked with a grin.

‘Ha, ha, laughed the man,’ said Bam. ‘No, listen, there’s that tool-hire place in The Fez. We should check it out. We could really get tooled up, if you’ll pardon the pun. Most of us have still only got bits of broken bed and sticks. There’ll be axes in there, crowbars … chainsaws.’

He said ‘chainsaws’ with such relish that Johnno smiled.

‘Might be worth a look,’ he said.

‘Come on then.’

Bam spread the news and they veered off the road into The Fez, which looked as deserted as everywhere else in Rowhurst.

They passed the carpet warehouse and there ahead of them was the tool-hire shop. It looked untouched, though there was evidence of fire damage to the laminating factory to the right. The steel shutter over the loading bay was rolled up and inside it was blackened and sooty.

Ed and Malik were in the middle of the party, still discussing girls. Not really paying much attention to where they were.

‘We’ve got to think practically,’ Malik was saying. ‘We need to make sure the human race doesn’t die out. It’s hard to imagine – but us lot, we’re the future.’

Ed looked around at the others. ‘It’s not much of a future, is it? A bunch of public school boys and a girl with a cat in a box.’

‘We’ll find other kids,’ said Malik. ‘We can’t be the only ones who’ve survived.’

‘Well, it’s certainly looking that way so far,’ said Ed.

‘No,’ said Malik. ‘You’ll see. For the first time in weeks I’m starting to feel positive. Not too positive, mind, let’s not get carried away here, but I really think that –’

Malik was gone.

One second Ed was talking to him, and the next …

It took Ed a moment to process the information, to make sense of what he’d seen – the brief flash of a face in the darkness of the factory doorway, a white face with black eyes and yellow teeth, two hands reaching towards Malik’s neck.

He’d been pulled inside.

Before Ed had time to shout, to warn the others, bodies erupted from all around, from out of the doorway, from the gaps between buildings, from behind them, moving fast, hitting the boys hard.

There were screams coming from all around Ed now. And everywhere he turned there was a confused melee of writhing shapes.

What shall I do? What shall I do?

Malik was in the building. His friend, Malik. Ed made a half-hearted move towards the doorway, and saw in the dim interior about ten of them, three or four crouched over Malik’s body, the others coming straight for him, charging out of the gloom. Ed backed away and the figures exploded into the daylight, arms flailing, teeth bared.

Teenagers. Boys and girls. They looked to be about seventeen or eighteen.

Ed turned and ran. Shouting to the other boys.

‘Stay with me. Get away from here.’ But he had no idea if anyone could hear him, if anyone could do anything.

He saw Johnno go down, with three or four teenagers on his back, another two pulling his arms and legs. The Field House boys were in a huddle, panicked. The three nerds were backed up against a wall, sobbing.

The teenagers were faster and stronger and more brutal than the older teachers from the school. They were filthy, their clothes stained with blood and worse. Some wore hoodies, some were wearing only T-shirts, others were so ragged it was hard to tell what they were wearing – their clothes hung off them in tatters. A few were nearly naked, their bodies a mess of wounds and pus-filled boils. One or two of them were older boys from the school, wearing suits. Ed recognized a prefect. He’d lost most of his hair and one eye and looked more like an animal than a human now. He had a smaller kid, Stanley, one of the boys from the chapel that Ed remembered carrying out into the fresh air only an hour ago. The prefect was swinging him round by one arm, his face blank and emotionless.

And all the while the rain fell in a steady monotonous drizzle. It was a dull, damp, grey day. A typical English day. Boring and flat. A day for staying indoors and waiting for tomorrow. And here they were, dying on this dreary industrial estate.

Ed spotted Frédérique, still hanging on to her cat carrier. She was standing frozen, staring a hundred miles into the distance, while the fight raged around her. He grabbed her and pulled her away from where four teenagers had Johnno on the ground and were trying to bite his stomach. Then Ed saw Wiki and Arthur, cowering behind a pile of boxes. Ed grabbed Wiki and hoped that Arthur would follow.

‘We have to get away from here,’ he shouted, but there was nowhere to run. Wherever they turned there were more of the older kids.

Ed dragged his gang towards the Sullivan brothers, who had made it back to the road and were holding out, fighting back clumsily but effectively with garden spades. There were just too many of the teenagers, though, and before Ed got to the brothers he watched helplessly as a fat teenager got Anthony from behind and sank her teeth into his neck. Anthony yelled and clutched at the wound, dropping the spade. Instantly two more were on him, girls with maniac twisted faces covered in spots and blisters.

Damien tried to batter the girls off his brother, but he was overpowered by a mob of bigger boys and he went down struggling and cursing.

Ed switched direction and bumped into someone running the other way. He went sprawling, pulling Frédérique and Wiki down with him. He let go of them and rolled to his feet. Both Sullivan brothers were on the ground now and it didn’t look like they’d be getting up again. And there was one of the Field House boys, trying to run with two girls on his back and another with her arms round one leg. He fell over with a yell.

Ed made it out of the estate and into the road but was knocked over again and ended up with someone on top of him. He laid into them desperately with knees and elbows.

‘Ow, stop it!’ It was one of the nerds, his shirt torn half off his back. Ed apologized and they helped each other up. The nerd – Justin – picked up a bit of bed frame that had been dropped by a rugby player and started lashing out around him in a blind, red-faced fury, keeping the circling teenagers at bay.

Ed looked around for Frédérique and the younger boys. Wiki and Arthur had disappeared but Frédérique was standing frozen again. A slobbering, wet-faced teenager was crouched in front of her, sniffing her, his head moving up and down her body. For some reason he wasn’t attacking her, maybe because she was standing so still he couldn’t tell if she was alive.

Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do if you were attacked by a bear? Play dead?