The Dead

Matt had done some sketches for the design they were painting on to the bits of sheet. It had taken him a while to get the picture right, but he’d finally drawn one he was happy with. The image was based on his vision. When you looked at it one way, it was a picture of two different boys, one behind the other. Looked at another way it appeared to be a boy and his shadow. The main figure, the boy at the front, was fair-haired and dressed in white. The second boy, his shadow, was dark-haired and wore dark clothing. He was less detailed and looked sort of half-formed. Matt wasn’t the greatest artist in the world, but there was something about his last drawing, a strange, haunting quality.

Transferring the image to the ba

‘Red for the eyes!’ said Phil, the youngest of the acolytes. ‘The Shadow Boy should have red eyes.’

‘It’s not a poster for a horror film,’ said Matt.

‘What colour then?’

‘Just leave them dark. And he’s not called the Shadow Boy. He’s the Goat. The shining one is the Lamb; the dark one is the Goat.’

‘Should he have horns?’

‘No. They’re not a real lamb and a real goat. Just paint him as I’ve drawn him.’

‘If we put on yellow rays it’ll look like the Lamb is glowing,’ said Harry, another of the acolytes.

‘All right. But do it carefully.’

‘What’s it going to say?’ Phil asked.

‘What do you mean, “say”?’

‘It has to have words on it.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Something in Latin,’ Harry suggested. ‘Like Death to the enemy.What would that be in Latin? Did anyone here do Latin?’

‘I did,’ said Archie. ‘I think Death to the enemy would be something like nex ut hostes hostium, or mors ut hostes hostium, something like that. I’m not really sure.’

‘We can’t put something on we’re not sure of,’ said Harry.

‘We should put the name of our Lord on it,’ said Matt. ‘The name of the Lamb.’

‘That’s an easy one,’ said Archie. ‘That’s Agnus, and Agnus Dei would be Lamb of God, or Lamb of the Lord.’

‘That sounds cool,’ said Phil. ‘Agnus Dei.’

Harry had the best handwriting. He’d done a calligraphy course at school and Matt had been getting him to write down his teachings in a big notebook they’d also scrounged from the shop. They were making their first testament. They’d argued for ages over what to call it. The Book of the Lamb sounded like a recipe book, and The Book of Matt didn’t sound right either. The Book of Matthew sounded too much like the Gospel of Matthew in the Bible, and Matt had gone to great lengths to explain that their new religion had nothing to do with Christianity and any of the old religions, even though he’d nicked most of it from the book of Revelations. In the end they’d decided to just call it The Book, and Harry had carefully drawn the words on the front cover in gothic script. After that he wrote down everything Matt came up with about his new religion. It turned out that Harry’s spelling wasn’t the best in the world, but his writing looked really cool so Matt let him keep his job.

Harry had tried suggesting that maybe their new religion could have its own special new kind of spelling but the others weren’t convinced.

Once they’d filled in the two main figures Harry started on the words. But after twenty minutes he was still working on the A so they left him to it, sitting there, hunched over the ba

39

They had turned off the main road westwards towards the river and had started to weave their way through the tangle of side-streets, occasionally catching glimpses of the gasholders they were using as a landmark. These giant steel drums, painted pale green, towered above the surrounding buildings, but when the kids got in among the tightly packed houses their view of them was blocked.

There was no clear layout to the streets and the kids had to make detours round housing estates so their progress was slow. They felt really nervous now. There was much more evidence of the disaster on these side-streets, reminders of all that had happened. Fires, wreckage, dead bodies. They also spotted two different roving gangs of sickos and each time had to make another diversion to avoid them, ending up more lost and disorientated.

At last, though, by pure chance they came out on to a main road and there ahead of them was the blue-and-white Tesco logo on the front of a long, low, ugly building next to the inevitable car park. The gasholders were silhouetted against the sky behind them.

‘What did I tell you!’ DogNut cried triumphantly, and the kids cheered as they ran across the road.

Their excitement was short-lived, however.

The supermarket had been gutted.

The windows along the front were all smashed in, the shelves inside stripped clean. A few empty shopping trolleys stood forgotten and lonely among the debris of smashed tills and broken cabinets.

The kids wandered around glumly, glass crunching underfoot, hoping they might find something that had been missed.

There was nothing.

‘Well, that was a big waste of time,’ said Jack.

‘It was worth trying, though,’ said Bam.

‘Really? Was it?’

‘Come on, Jack, maybe let’s look on the bright side a little, yeah?’

‘The bright side of what?’

‘Well, at least there weren’t any sickos waiting for us in here.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that,’ said Brooke, and they turned to see her staring along one of the aisles.

They hurried over to her.

A ski

She started to move towards them, half crawling, half crouching, feeling her way along with her spindly arms out to either side.

‘Kill it, Bam,’ said Jack.

‘Shoot it,’ DogNut added.

Bam shook his head. The mother looked so pathetic. ‘Don’t know if I can.’

Ed stepped forward, rifle raised, the tip of the bayonet pointing at the mother’s face. She looked up at him, her eyes u

He gripped his rifle tighter. Told himself she wasn’t human any more. She was just a mindless thing now, eaten up by disease, probably dying.

‘Do it, Ed.’ Jack’s voice sounded hard. Ed knew he didn’t believe he could.

Could he?

The thought of sticking the bayonet into her, feeling it sink into her flesh, pushing it hard enough to kill her, into her brain …

Could he do it?

Brooke pushed past him and grunted as she swung her club at the back of the mother’s head. The stricken mother collapsed face down with a little whimper and lay still.