The Fallen

by Charlie Higson

  ‘We’ve done enough for one night, I reckon,’ said Jackson. ‘I can’t face any more dead meat. We’ll sort the bodies out in the morning. We should all get up into the minerals gallery. We’ll be safe there. But you’ll have to move some more beds in.’

  ‘Wrong,’ said Achilleus. ‘You are gonna have to move some more beds in. We just saved your sorry arses. We want to be shown a little appreciation, yeah, a little respect.’

  With that he stood up, tilted his face towards the distant ceiling and yelled, his voice echoing and unexpectedly loud in the vast, yawning space.

  ‘Check me, Hogwarts, the SAS have just rode into town. My name is Achilleus. Don’t you never forget it. Achilleus. And I expect to be treated like a king. You get me? I ain’t taking no more crap from anyone. Ever!’

  In the darkness of the balcony above, nobody had noticed Justin, the boy in charge at the museum, slip out from his rooms and come to look down at the new arrivals.

  He leant on the balustrade and tapped his teeth with a fingernail.

  He hoped this wasn’t going to mean trouble.

  7

  Ella, Monkey-Boy and Blu-Tack Bill were sitting on a bed, huddled next to each other, their puppy, Godzilla, asleep in Ella’s lap. He was warm and very still, only now and then twitching and shivering. They focused all their attention on him. As long as he was quiet, they could tell themselves that there was nothing to fear. They took turns stroking him, careful not to wake him up.

  The local kids had set up a little camp for them inside the minerals gallery. The gallery was divided by two rows of square pillars and between the pillars were long display cabinets full of rocks and crystals and weird lumps of metal. The museum kids had made some of the spaces between the cabinets private by fixing up sheets and screens and walls of plywood and cardboard. A couple of oil lamps and some scattered tea lights gave off a warm orange glow, so that the gallery had the feeling of a sleeping shanty town at night.

  Everyone else had settled down, but these three, the youngest of the new arrivals, were too disturbed to sleep and they sat in their makeshift cubicle, whispering in the dark like kids at a sleepover.

  ‘I’m not sure I like this place,’ said Monkey-Boy, who’d earned his name because of his love of climbing. ‘I preferred Buckingham Palace. I liked it there. It was where the queen lived. I liked that. This place is scary.’

  ‘It’ll be better in the morning,’ said Ella, who didn’t want any dark thoughts to creep in. Blu-Tack Bill didn’t say anything. He never spoke, just listened, his fingers working away at the lump of Blu-tack he always carried with him.

  ‘I don’t like it. It’s full of grown-ups,’ Monkey-Boy complained.

  ‘There were grown-ups at the palace,’ said Ella. ‘I saw them. Kings and queens. When we were leaving.’

  ‘We should have stayed there.’

  ‘If Maxie and Blue thought it was better to come here, then it’s better,’ said Ella. ‘They know the best thing to do. They got us across London, didn’t they?’

  ‘There was nice food at the palace,’ said Monkey-Boy.

  ‘There’ll be nice food here.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  Blu-Tack Bill thought about food. He was hungry, but found it hard to eat and was getting very skinny. Before his mum and dad had died from the disease he’d always eaten the same meals every day. Sugar Puffs and toast with no butter for breakfast. A ham sandwich made with sliced white bread for lunch, and chicken in breadcrumbs with chips and beans for dinner. His mouth watered now that he thought about it. The past seemed an amazing place full of wonderful things. Food like that was only a memory now.

  He looked to see what his hands had moulded. A dinosaur. Maybe it was meant to be a turkey dinosaur. They’d sometimes given him them to eat at school. They weren’t too bad. He liked dinosaurs. This museum had been one of his favourite places to visit before the disaster. He never got bored of looking at the dinosaur fossils. They didn’t change. They were always the same. You could see how they were made. He knew exactly how many bones were in each fossil. The stuffed animals he liked too. They never moved. You could look in their eyes and they didn’t look back. Not like in the zoo where the animals were jumping and running all over the place, and they confused him and he didn’t know what they were thinking in their weird animal brains. He wasn’t like Monkey-Boy; he was happy to be here, looking forward to the morning, when he could properly explore. In fact, if you’d asked him before if he could choose anywhere to live in the whole world, he would have said here.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Monkey-Boy looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘What?’ said Ella.

  ‘I heard a scratching noise.’

  Bill listened now, and he and Ella heard it at the same time, a rhythmical scraping sound.

  ‘I don’t like this place,’ said Ella.

  A boy wearing pyjamas stuck his head round the end of their space.

  ‘Go to sleep, will you?’ he said. ‘You’re keeping everyone awake.’

  ‘We heard a noise,’ said Monkey-Boy.

  The boy listened. For a while there was silence, then the scraping started up again. The boy made a dismissive grunt.

  ‘Could be anything,’ he said. ‘There’s always noises here. It’s a really big old building. You get used to it.’

  ‘Could it be grown-ups?’

  ‘Even if it was they can’t get in here,’ said the boy. ‘This gallery’s fortified. It was designed to keep the minerals safe. Some of them are really valuable. There’s a bit down the end that’s built like a giant safe. No grown-up could ever get to us. Tomorrow I’ll show you around. You can help us feed the chickens.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ said Ella. ‘I like chickens.’

  Bill smiled to himself. If they had chickens maybe they had chickens in breadcrumbs.

  ‘Goodnight,’ said the boy. ‘That noise doesn’t mean anything. Just go to sleep.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ Ella asked.

  ‘Everyone calls me Wiki.’

  ‘Goodnight, Wiki. We’re not scared of the noise now …’

  8

  Two floors above where the kids were sleeping, in a forgotten room inside the east tower, sat a boy. He wore a black roll-neck jumper and had very pale white skin. He was sitting cross-legged, sharpening a knife against a piece of stonework, the sound travelling through the walls of the building.

  Scrape, scrape, scrape …

  He’d taken the knife from the girl, Emma, after he’d strangled her down there on the lower level. Her last words had been, ‘Why are you doing this, Paul?’ He’d wanted to explain, but he hadn’t been able to put it into words. All he knew was that he had to let the sickos through. The kids here, they hated him; they’d killed his sister, Olivia. He was sure of it. His memory wasn’t so clear. He thought he must have been ill recently. A fever of some sort. It made you forget things. He wouldn’t forget his sister, not Olivia. Never forget what they’d done to her …

  What had they done …?

  Had they really killed her?

  He stopped sharpening the knife and stared at the wall, trying to remember. He was in some kind of abandoned storeroom, in a part of the museum that looked like it hadn’t been used in years. A warren of poky rooms had been constructed here with thin partitions. Like the cubicles the kids had made in the minerals gallery downstairs. Some were storage spaces; others were workrooms and tiny, box-like offices. There was a dusty, chaotic jumble of bits and pieces lying around the place. Old pieces of scientific apparatus, broken display cases, collapsing shelves, filing cabinets, and cupboard after cupboard stuffed full of rocks, crystals, lumps of metal, bits of meteorite, all neatly labelled. There was even a small kitchen up here, with a few cups and knives and forks sitting where they’d been left when the museum staff had deserted this part of the tower long ago.

  He was safe up here. A narrow staircase led in a long, straight line down to where the other kids were sleeping, but the door
at the bottom was firmly locked. He’d been busy shredding newspaper and pulling the stuffing out of an armchair to make a bed.

  He could stay hidden for a long time.

  He’d originally been intending to go back to see David at the palace …

  That’s right. That was how it had happened. It was coming back to him now.

  David had shown him that the only way to fix everything was to open those doors, to let the sickos through and get revenge for what the kids had done to him. Which was …

  Never mind. He’d remember that soon enough.

  Soon enough.

  He was still hoping to go back to the palace and live with David. But on his way out of the museum, after opening the doors, he’d had to hide, to avoid both the gangs of sickos who roamed the galleries and the kids who’d come out to try and stop them. Sneaking through the shadows, he’d found his way up on to the rooftops from the Darwin Centre and had enjoyed being up high, out in the open. His head had cleared and he’d stopped to stare in awe at the stars that were scattered across the night sky. For the first time it had struck him just how vast the universe was. Going on and on and on forever. He understood it now, what Buzz Lightyear meant by ‘To infinity and beyond …’

  What happened here, to him and all the other kids in the museum, meant nothing. Who would remember any of this in a billion years’ time? Nobody. Down below were dinosaurs so old they’d become rocks; above him … infinity and beyond. Inside him – atoms, molecules, particles, circling like the stars of a nano-universe.

  I am a star, he had thought. And laughed. A fallen star. And for a moment he had thought he could hear the stars calling to him, distant voices, like the voices you heard coming over the radio late at night.

  He had no idea how long he’d stayed there on the roof staring at the stars and trying to understand what the voices were saying. Time had lost all meaning. Afterwards, though, he didn’t want to go to the palace any more. He was going to stay up here on the top of the world for a while. He was a bat. He could fly out over the rooftops of London. He was God, sitting up there among the stars, looking down on Earth.

  Exploring further, he’d found a way into the east tower, which stood at the corner of the museum, opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum. At the very top of the tower was a huge empty room, its roof supported by a complicated criss-cross of iron bars and struts. There were tall, thin windows looking out from each wall and from up here he could see everything that was going on.

  It would be his own little world. He would go down into the museum when it was quiet and take his favourite exhibits, bring them up here and start his own collection, like …

  Like.

  Someone he had known. A collector.

  The kids wouldn’t miss anything, even if they did survive the night. One of them, the little know-it-all kid they called Wiki, had been very fond of telling everyone at any opportunity that the museum held seventy million specimens.

  Seventy million specimens …

  Seven billion-billion-billion atoms in the human body …

  Seven thousand stars visible to the naked human eye …

  He was better than the dozy kids below, because he was cleverer than them, stronger than them. Wiki might know useless facts and figures, but Paul understood things, how the world worked, how the universe worked, the stars, the planets.

  I am a star …

  He rubbed his forehead. It felt hot, throbbing. He pulled down the collar of his roll-neck jumper, found his neck slick with sweat. Tried to let some of the heat out. He ran his fingers over the half-healed wound where a sicko had bitten him two weeks ago. It itched horribly. He wanted to scratch it and scratch it, to tear his skin off with his fingernails, but he fought the urge. He had to let it get better. He hadn’t told any of the other kids about it. Didn’t know how they might react. They might want to do experiments on him, or maybe just throw him out to protect themselves. In case he turned into one of them. They could sense it in him, though. The sickness. That’s why they hated him. Because he was different. He was bitten.

  No. It was his secret and he had to fight it alone.

  He pressed his hand to the wound, felt the heat coming off it, and closed his eyes, waiting for the throbbing in his head to die away.

  And then he heard it.

  A dry rustling sound, like an old man rubbing his hands together, and then a rattling of twigs.

  Something was up here with him. Moving about. He opened his eyes and stared into the darkness below one of the windows, sure that that was where he’d heard the sound coming from.

  Silence and stillness. Then the sound of claws scraping on wood. There was definitely something there. A patch of darkness that was blacker than the rest. It twitched, flickered, moving jerkily.

  Paul held his breath and clutched his knife tighter, his eyes wide, trying to suck in any light.

  A rustle and a leathery creak. The black shape grew bigger, rose up. It appeared to be forming itself out of the stuff of shadows, feeding on the darkness. What was it?

  He heard a different noise now, rasping breath, almost like a laugh …

  ‘Get away,’ said Paul, his voice sounding feeble and weak. ‘Get away from here.’

  The shape continued to grow, continued to rise, up and up, until finally it showed against the deep blue of the window. A black silhouette. A nasty, bony head, with broken and skeletal wings poking up on either side, so that the head hung down in the middle, making an M shape.

  A Boney-M.

  Still Paul stared at it, willing it to come into focus, and slowly, slowly the thing emerged out of the darkness. It had a long beak, lined with vicious little teeth that clacked as it opened and closed. It looked like a fossil come to life, one of those weird part-lizard, part-bird, part-fish creatures he’d seen below, crushed and bent out of shape. Like a dead animal you might find squashed in the road. It was dark and greasy, its few feathers glinting in the moonlight. It hopped forward, one black eye fixed on Paul.

  ‘Get away from me,’ said Paul, sliding backwards on the seat of his trousers across the floor, the knife held out in front of him.

  The creature made a sound like someone retching, but didn’t stop. It hobbled on its shattered legs, using its wing tips like walking sticks. And all the while came the rustling and rattling of dry bones.

  It opened its beak, an obscene little tongue waggling inside it, wider and wider and wider …

  And then it screamed.

  Paul put his hands over his ears, trying to block out the noise. It sounded like a hundred voices all shouting at once, a thousand, a million …

  There were words in there, babbling, crazy; he tried to focus, to make sense of them, and slowly the voices merged together to become one voice.

  ‘Don’t be afraid of me,’ it said, harsh and crow-like.

  Paul was panting, his chest rising and falling. He stared at the creature.

  ‘I’m your friend, Paul,’ it said. ‘Your only friend. And I’m going to help you, you miserable piece of dog dirt.’

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. I’ve always known it, snot-for-brains. I know everything about you. We’re the same, you and me. We’re predators.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  The creature tilted its head, studying Paul. It laughed, the sound splashing inside Paul’s head.

  ‘Surely the question is What do you want?, my darling.’

  ‘I don’t know what I want. Leave me alone.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You want to clean this museum, Paul. Get rid of the filthy kids. Now that you have a proper knife it’ll be easier. Isn’t that why you took it? Isn’t it, you pussy maggot?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You have to do it, Paul.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The bony thing was right in front of him now, the size of a dog. It reminded Paul of photographs he’d seen after the BP oil spill in the G
ulf of Mexico, of rescued pelicans covered in black slime.

  ‘I’m trying,’ he said. ‘I let the sickos out.’

  ‘You have to try harder, you useless little tit. How many of the bloody kids do you think will be alive in the morning? Will the sickos get them all, or will they fight back?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t know … You don’t know anything, do you? When it’s light you need to go and take a look, finish off any of the brats who are wounded.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I will.’

  ‘You can’t go to the palace until your work here is done. You understand me? You have to make sure that all the kids are gone. Then the museum will go back to what it was meant to be – a place for dead things, like me … seventy million of them. And when you have finished there will be more. More dead things. You can lay the kids out on display. The dead kids. Your collection.’

  ‘Yes …’

  Paul swallowed. The bony thing, Boney-M, was almost upon him. He could smell it. It stank of death and decay. He fought off the urge to be sick. Closed his eyes as the obscene thing came right up to his face, probing with its tongue. He could feel its breath, on his mouth, his neck. Hear the creaking of its leathery joints. He flailed out with his free hand to push it away, but he felt only empty air.

  His eyes snapped open.

  It was gone.

  He scurried over to where he had first seen it below the window, trying to find it. But there was nothing there except the half-decayed body of a dead pigeon.

  He could hear Boney-M’s voice in his head, though. Laughing …

  9

  ‘The ones in here are for laying eggs and the ones in the pen over there are for breeding. We always need more chickens.’

  True to his word, Wiki was showing the new arrivals around. Ella, Monkey-Boy and Blu-Tack Bill were squatting down next to one of the chicken runs that had been built in a big central courtyard. The courtyard had once been used as a car park by museum staff. There were still a couple of cars parked there, and over on the far side was a big Tesco delivery lorry with flat tyres.