The Enemy

He waited, unmoving, as his eyes got used to the light, and gradually bits and pieces of the room came into view.

He could see six grown-ups nearby. The mother and the others who had captured him as well as two others – a fat old father with a bald head and a younger one with a straggly beard. They were all fast asleep and snoring and snuffling.

The room was filthy, there were broken bones and bits of meat and skin on the floor. There were a few greasy chairs, a pile of old rags in the middle and in one corner was the grown-ups’ toilet. They had done their business on the carpet and there were flies buzzing around it.

He retched. He wanted to use a swear-word. He thought of the worst thing he knew and said it loudly in his head.

Bastards.

They didn’t know better than to poo on the floor.

The dirty bastards.

Back at Waitrose they had a system. They used buckets as toilets and every day they took it in turns to empty them into the drains outside.

Not this lot.

He hated them.

The nearest one, a father, let off a long slow fart and rolled over in its sleep. A shaft of moonlight fell across his face. Sam looked at him. He had never really seen a diseased grown-up close to before. He had only seen them lumbering past in the street from a safe distance.

This father was dirty and very ugly. His hair was all stuck together and didn’t really look like hair. His skin was orangey-yellow and hanging loose in flaps, covered in sores and blisters and boils. It had cracked open in places, showing a gooey blackness underneath. He yawned and Sam saw that there was a big hole in his cheek. Through it he could see broken rotten teeth.

Sam got into a crouch and backed away from him.

His heels dug into something soft. He hadn’t noticed a seventh grown-up curled against the wall. It shuddered in its sleep and shifted restlessly. Sam held his breath. It was a mother. She wrapped her arms around one of his legs, nuzzled against him and relaxed.

This one reminded him a bit of Jea

Dirty bastards.

Bastards, bastards, bastards…

It felt good to swear. Even if it was only in his mind.

He tried to pull his leg free, but the mother had too strong a grip on it. If he tugged too hard she might wake up.

He studied her. She looked quite nice, quite pretty. Then she turned her head and he saw the other side of her face: it was a nest of boils. Great round lumps covered the whole of her cheek, her neck, her ear, even her eyelids. The skin was stretched tight and it looked like the lumps might burst at any moment.

Sam had a terrible urge to pop one with the butterfly pin. Instead he leant over and used the tip of it to tickle her skin. Soon she started to twitch and then let go of his leg to scratch the spot. With a sigh of relief he managed to step clear.

He would have to be much more careful. The more he took in of his surroundings, the more he realized that there were grown-ups everywhere. The floor was covered in them. If he put one foot wrong he would tread on one. He remembered when his dad had taken him to the zoo in Regent’s Park. In the reptile house, trying to spot lizards or snakes in their glass cages. When you first looked you couldn’t see any, but if you were patient, you spotted them. Lying in clumps, on top of each other, under rocks, half-buried, lazy and bloated.

He had to get out of here.

He moved cautiously to the window. To try to get some idea of where he was.

To begin with he could make no sense of what he saw. It was a huge alien space. Not inside but not outside. It reminded him of something.

Yes. The amphitheatre in a gladiator film.

Of course.

It was the Arsenal football stadium. He was in a hospitality box, looking across the rows and rows of red seats towards the pitch. There were grown-ups out there, some sleeping in the seats, some lying on the floor, some wandering aimlessly about.

Maybe they’d come back here because it was familiar, it meant something to them. There was certainly not going to be any more football played here for a long time. Far below, the grass on the pitch had grown high. A father was standing there, very still, like a statue. Grass up to his knees. He was fat and, like a lot of grown-ups, looked completely bald. He wore a white vest with a red cross of St George on it. Sam had the u

Sam felt sad. Dad had brought him here once. He remembered how full of life and sound and colour it had been. He’d been scared at first, all those people shouting and singing and swearing and jumping up and down. But he’d got into it and had ended up shouting along with them, even though he wasn’t really a football fan.

Now look at it…

There were sliding glass doors here that opened on to the terraces, but even if they weren’t locked the noise of trying to open them would most likely wake the sleeping grownups. Besides, there were more grown-ups out there. If they spotted him it would be impossible to get away from them in such a wide-open space. No. There had to be another way out, a back way. There must be some stairs down behind the stands.

He crept across the carpet. The room was very big; it opened up at the back into a sort of dining area with broken tables and chairs in it. There were still more grown-ups sleeping here and Sam had to look away as he glimpsed a small half-eaten body, with the head still attached, lying under one of the tables.

Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.

He tried to pretend that he was in a film. He’d always had a good imagination; he could lose himself in a game for hours and hours. The film was The Lord of the Rings and he was a hobbit in an orc castle. His dad had been reading him the book at night before he got sick, but it had been a bit old for him, he preferred the films.

He wasn’t just any old hobbit. He was Sam. Samwise Gamgee, the bravest of them all, and the butterfly pin in his hand was an elf sword.

That’s right, keep thinking about something else.

It was darker back here away from the windows and the smell was even worse. He remembered the time he lost his lunch-box. He thought he’d left it at school. It turned up weeks later under a seat in the car. When Sam opened it, it was full of stale air and rotting food and horrible green fungus that sent up a cloud of spores when it was disturbed. He actually had been sick then, the smell had been so bad.

This was worse. His eyes were stinging.

Dirty bastards…

He edged his way forward, sca

He spotted what looked like a door, on the far side of the room, past a bar. He headed for it, speeding up slightly. Halfway there a figure loomed up in front of him and his heart caught in his ribs.

One of the grown-ups had woken.

Sam dropped to the floor and flattened himself against the sticky carpet, pressing his face down so that he would be hard to spot. Sometimes it was good to be only small.

The grown-up shuffled past a few centimetres from where Sam was lying. As soon as he had gone Sam scuttled over to the bar and crouched down behind it.

He could sense that the grown-up had heard something, though. It made a strangled sound and began to move about in the dark.