The Dead

‘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 ski

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 ru

‘Scientifically, the less time you spend in the rain, the less wet you’ll get,’ Wiki was explaining. ‘So you’re better off ru

‘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 begi

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.’