The Dead

‘We need to practise that a bit,’ he said.

The acolytes started up and soon all of them were chirruping away, laughing and spouting gibberish.

Great, thought Jack. I’m on marathon walk to London, likely to be ambushed by diseased nutters at any moment and I’m stuck with a load of idiots who sound like they’ve escaped from the set of In the Night Garden.

15

When he was eight, Ed had gone on a family holiday to the west coast of France. There had been signs everywhere reading CÔTE SAUVAGE, wild coast, and the waves had been huge. One day his dad had taken him out to brave them. It had been amazing, rising up on the swell, diving through the breakers, body surfing, but then one had taken him by surprise and knocked him off his feet.

It had been terrifying, being rolled over and over, not knowing which way was up or down, a hideous churning confusion of water and sand. Whenever his feet had found the bottom, they’d been whipped away and he’d been spun again, like being inside a giant washing machine.

At last his dad had grabbed him and pulled him up.

That’s how it felt being in this fight. And his dad wasn’t here to rescue him today. His dad would never be able to help him again. Winded once more against the hard concrete, he didn’t have the strength to get up. He drew in a painful rasping breath, rolled on to his back, and the next thing he knew one of the teenagers was on him. A sharp-faced boy who looked to be about eighteen. It was hard to tell, though, because his eyes were bulging out of his head and his face resembled a margherita pizza, livid red with crusty yellow patches, like the worst case of teenage acne Ed had ever seen.

With a mad, terrified burst of energy Ed just managed to get his hands round the boy’s neck and hold him off at arm’s length.

The boy was snarling and snorting, which made green snot bubble from his nose. Pinkish-looking saliva foamed from between his rotten teeth, flecked with blood. It mingled with the snot and formed into a dribble that hung down like a rope, dangling over Ed’s mouth. A drop fell from the end and spattered on to Ed’s lips. He jerked his head to the side and spat. More warm dribble pooled in his ear.

Ed shook his head.

The teenager looked horribly diseased. Ed didn’t understand how the sickness worked, nobody did, but the thought of catching it off this drooling, pizza-faced git was horrifying.

He lay there on his back, arms straight out, squeezing the boy’s neck and trying to keep him away at the same time. He had a horrible image of one of those rubber toy heads that when you squashed them the eyes and tongue popped out. The teenager had shorter arms. He couldn’t quite reach Ed, but he scrabbled wildly at him, scratching his skin with dirty, black fingernails. Ed could do little to stop the crazed attack and he felt his arms shaking with the strain. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold out.

And then the boy would fall on him and press that gaping mouth into Ed’s face.

There was a shout – ‘Look out, Ed!’

Out of the corner of his eye Ed saw Bam pounding over.

Bam shouted ‘PUNT!’ and Ed let go of the boy just as Bam swung his leg in a mighty drop-kick. His boot co

Ed felt faint and turned away to be sick. Bam caught him and held him up.

‘No time for that, mate. Gotta keep moving.’

‘I can’t,’ Ed sobbed. ‘I can’t. I can’t do this.’

‘Yes you can.’

Before Ed could say anything else a fresh group of teenagers jumped Bam and he was at the centre of a thrashing brawl, arms and legs working furiously to keep his attackers off him. He seemed to have lost his weapon and was fighting bare-handed.

Ed had nothing left. He was alone. Exhausted. Terrified. He was sick of the sight of blood. His ears were filled with the sound of screaming. He fell to his knees, looked up at the sky and opened his mouth wide, but his throat had closed, his vocal cords had gone tight and all that came out was a long hopeless, silent shout of despair.

And then the screams of the other boys were drowned out by a rumble and a roar. Something huge was approaching down the road, looming out of the misty rain like a breaching whale. There was the blast of a horn.

Two of the teenagers let go of Bam and turned to stare, dumbly. They were flattened with a bone-breaking crunch.

Ed’s lungs had stopped working altogether. His chest was gripped by bars of iron. It felt like his heart had stopped as well. He couldn’t move or make sense of what was happening as the hulking leviathan headed straight for him where he knelt in the middle of the road.

16

With a final mighty hiss and a screech of metal scraping against metal the thing stopped, centimetres from Ed.

It was a bus. A bloody coach. A monster of a thing, two and a half metres wide and twice as high. White, with smoked windows. Ed could feel the heat coming off it.

It seemed so out of place here. A thing from the past. Ed wouldn’t have been more surprised if a dragon had just landed snorting fire and smoke. He scrambled round to the side, half crawling, half ru

Ed froze.

There was a man in the driver’s seat. Stocky and round-faced with a big head and close-cropped fair hair. Thirty-five, maybe forty – Ed was never very good at judging. The thing was, though – he was a man. An adult. The enemy.

‘Get in!’ he barked at Ed.

Was this a rescue or a trap? The man didn’t look diseased, but that didn’t mean anything. You couldn’t trust any adults at all. And yet he was driving a coach. None of the other adults, whose brains had been rotted by the disease, could drive a coach. Most of them could hardly even walk.

‘Get in, or I’m going.’

Before Ed could do or say anything Wiki and Arthur pushed past him and scurried up the steps, Chris Marker and Kwanele, still lugging his designer suitcase, followed hard on their heels.

Ed turned back to where the last survivors were still fighting.

‘Get on the coach!’ he screamed. ‘Come on, quickly!’

He saw Frédérique and grabbed her again, almost throwing her up the steps. Then he got hold of Justin, the nerd who had fallen on him earlier, and dragged him away from three vicious-looking teenage girls. Four boys from the chapel pushed past, then Bam came barrelling over with his arm round one of his rugby players. It was Piers, his red hair soaked with blood. Ed helped them on to the coach, but as he climbed on board himself he felt a hand close round his left ankle and tug him backwards. He fell painfully on the steps.

‘Stay down!’ the coach driver shouted, and Ed did as he was told.

There was a flash and a bang. Ed felt something skim over his head, brushing his hair, and whoever had hold of him let go. He looked up to see the driver pointing a shotgun out of the door, smoke rising from the end of its double barrels. Ed crawled up the rest of the way, the doors closing behind him, and the coach started to move.