The Dead

This was a place of death.

They climbed the stairs, trying the doors on every level, until they reached the top and at last found a way out into the stands. Bam was first through. He took a couple of steps and stopped.

Ed heard him say two words.

‘Holy cow …’

46

Jack and Ed followed Bam out into the sunlight. He was standing there, frozen to the spot, too stu

They were way up in a high-tech modern stand, a gleaming white construction of steel and concrete and glass. And below them was the vast expanse of the cricket pitch, every part of it filled with dead bodies. They were stacked in great mounds like a giant rubbish tip. The ones at the bottom were the most decomposed. If it wasn’t for their bright clothing and the bones sticking out here and there, they wouldn’t have been recognizable as human at all. The ones at the top were the freshest, though even they had been eaten away by disease and decay.

There were several earth-moving vehicles standing idle. Diggers and bulldozers, JCBs, even a couple of cranes with scoops dangling from their gantries. One scoop still held a few bodies.

And there were more bodies in the stands, dumped in the rows of green plastic seats, sitting there, like dead spectators at the ultimate gladiator fight. How many dead? Five thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand? Looking out over the mounds of corpses it was impossible to tell.

The noise Ed had heard was flies, millions of them, swarming over the dead. They were not alone. Crows hopped about, rats crawled, seagulls flapped and screeched and squabbled with each other. Two dogs were digging into one of the piles of flesh to get at the bones.

‘Treasure beyond our wildest dreams,’ said Ed bitterly.

Jack and Bam said nothing.

Ed noticed several towers made out of logs and planks and scrap wood, like giant bonfires. They had large blue plastic canisters strapped to them. There were more canisters fixed around the stands.

‘This place is one giant funeral pyre,’ he said. ‘Looks like they were pla

‘They had the right idea,’ said Jack.

Ed leant over, pulled his mask down and threw up on to a seat. His head was spi

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ he groaned. ‘This is hell.’

But as they turned to leave they heard the sound of heavy footsteps climbing the stairs.

Ed felt a wave of fear and panic. He didn’t need to look to know what was happening.

The sickos were coming.

They were trapped now. They were going to die here. They were going to join this heap of human compost, forgotten, like bags of rubbish tossed out for the bin men.

Ed’s mind was racing faster than his heart. He couldn’t think straight. A tangle of images were tumbling in his mind like the wheeling knot of seagulls over the corpse pile. Images of death and decay. But one thought kept poking through, beating all the others back, and he clung on to it.

He didn’t want to die. It was as simple as that. He would do anything to stay alive.

The thought was terribly strong and clear.

He wanted to see the summer.

‘We need to find another way out,’ he said. ‘There are sickos coming up the stairs.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘Then who is it, Jack? The undead police come to help us?’

Before Jack could say anything in reply the first of the sickos appeared at the entrance to the stairs. Three fathers. Sniffing the air. Searching for their prey.

Jack raised his machine gun. Ed saw that it was trembling in his hands. ‘We could shoot them?’

‘You don’t know how to work that bloody thing,’ Ed snapped. ‘We can outrun them, though.’

He looked around for an escape. There was an external staircase here leading to the lower seating levels. They charged down it, crashing into the metal sides as they rounded the corners, until they reached the bottom. They quickly took in their situation. The nearest exit was blocked by one of the ominous stacks of blue canisters. The boys realized that the best means of escape would be to get down on to the pitch where a narrow strip of open grass had been left around the side of the corpse piles. They started to climb over the seats, pushing past the bodies that had been dumped there.

As Ed was clambering over a middle-aged mother in a weird floral sun hat, however, she reached out a hand and tried to take hold of his jacket. He jumped back. The mother hauled herself up out of the seat and puckered her lips and dribbled at Ed, as if she was getting ready to kiss him. Ed shoved her away and she fell into the next seat, waking a hairless father who flailed at Ed with long dirty fingernails.

‘They’re not dead,’ Ed yelled. ‘They’re not all dead!’

All around them sickos were rising from the seats and shuffling towards them, and now Ed saw that there were more live ones down on the pitch, moving along the narrow pathways that divided the mounds.

The boys vaulted over seats, knocking sickos out of their way, stepping on dead bodies, slipping in filth, doing whatever it took to get down. As they reached the bottom, two young mothers on the edge of the pitch made a lunge for them and Bam fired off both barrels of his shotgun, not taking any chances.

The mothers went down and Bam fumbled to reload his gun.

One barrel at a time, he told himself, jiggling the shells into the holes. Just fire one barrel at a time. Keep something back.

‘There’s a way out over there,’ Ed shouted, pointing to an exit from the pitch over near the old stand. They sprinted towards it past a wall of decomposing flesh on one side and the live sickos in the stands on the other, who were all coming down towards the pitch, some walking, some crawling, the younger ones moving faster, others stumbling, barely able to move, and as they came they dislodged the ones that had given up, who fell out of their seats.

It was impossible to tell which were dead and which alive. They were all covered in sores and boils and soft rotten patches.

The boys thought they were home free, the exit was just metres away, but then something moved ahead of them, and a cascade of dead bodies tumbled down from one of the piles directly into their path.

They had no choice. They would have to climb over them.

They tried, but it was like wading through deep mud. The bodies were so soft they gave way beneath their feet and the boys found themselves treading in shredded skin and i

‘Look out!’ Ed shouted.

A large group of sickos had got on to the pitch and was approaching from behind.

Jack raised his machine gun, fiddled with it, tried the trigger.

Nothing.

The sickos moved nearer.

He thumbed off the safety catch.

Tried the trigger again.

Nothing.

He swore and shook the gun. Tried another catch.

He yelled as the gun suddenly jumped and jerked in his hands, seeming to fire itself, spraying bullets everywhere except at the advancing sickos. Jack let go of the trigger in fright, but one of the bullets must have struck a canister, for the next moment there was an almighty bang and flames leapt into the air along with an ugly mess of body parts and a horrible reddish-brown spray.

The boys, along with most of the sickos, were knocked off their feet. They went sprawling against the hoarding around the edge of the stands and smashed painfully into the wood and plastic. They landed in a pile of sticky wetness and Ed was insanely grateful for the mask that was still clamped to his face.