The Fallen

by Charlie Higson

  ‘Because you might have some answers. You think about stuff.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Ollie winced as he discovered another bruise, this time on his leg. ‘You’ve seen what the others are like,’ he said. ‘Achilleus isn’t exactly a deep thinker. And Blue … I don’t know him well enough, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘I thought you were all friends,’ said Einstein. ‘A gang.’

  ‘No. I’ve only really known him for a couple of weeks. Before that we kept to ourselves. They had one camp. We had another. Didn’t mix. We were all fighting over the same things, with food running out everywhere. Didn’t trust each other.’

  ‘No time to think,’ said Einstein.

  ‘No. So we had this guy in charge called Arran and he thought about things. I could talk to him. He was clever. That’s why he was our leader.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He died.’

  ‘Stupid question really.’

  ‘Yeah. Only, listening to Caspar shouting his head off, it made me think about Arran, about when he got injured. You see, he was bitten by a grown-up, got really sick and then got hit by an arrow in a fight. That’s what finished him.’

  ‘So what’s the problem exactly? What do you want to know?’

  ‘This weird thing happened when he got bitten. At the time I didn’t think too much about it. There was too much other stuff going down.’

  ‘And what happened then?’

  ‘We were out on a scav hunt, looking for food, and we decided, well, some of us decided, I never thought it was a great idea … So the others wanted to look in this swimming pool. See if there was anything in the vending machines still.’

  ‘And was there?’

  ‘Yeah, there was; only it was a trap. All these grown-ups were, like, waiting for us, under the water. They ambushed us.’

  ‘Great story and all that.’ Einstein sounded bored and impatient. ‘But what’s the question?’

  Ollie hesitated before going on. Was it all going to sound stupid when he came out with it?

  ‘It’s just that – an ambush. Like they’d worked it out. Like they were waiting for us.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s not like grown-ups to do that. I’ve never seen them that organized before. That clever.’

  ‘You sure it wasn’t just random?’

  ‘No. And then there was the fact that they were underwater.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Somehow they were under the surface of the water, waiting. How did they do that? How did they breathe under there?’

  ‘They didn’t,’ said Einstein with a slightly snotty tone to his voice. ‘Human beings can’t breathe underwater. We’re not fish.’

  ‘I know. It was like they were a new breed of grown-up.’

  ‘Not possible,’ said Einstein.

  Ollie wasn’t going to give up, despite Einstein’s negative vibe.

  ‘You’ve studied grown-ups,’ he said. ‘You’ve studied the disease. Could it change people somehow?’

  ‘No. A disease can’t give people new skills. We can’t suddenly grow gills or something. Illness doesn’t add anything, it just takes things away.’

  ‘So how did they do it then?’ said Ollie. ‘How did they survive underwater? How did they plan it all?’

  ‘As I say.’ Einstein sounded more dismissive than ever. ‘They didn’t. You must have imagined it.’

  ‘I’ll admit it was all a bit confused and way intense. I suppose they could of maybe, I don’t know, had their noses sticking out or something.’

  Einstein laughed. Ollie would have laughed himself if someone else had told him this story. Whichever way you looked at it, it didn’t make a lot of sense.

  ‘It was messed up,’ he went on. ‘It freaked us out, took us all by surprise. One boy, Deke, got killed there, and Arran was wounded, as I said. Died later. Because we weren’t ready for it. We never expected grown-ups to behave like that. I mean, they can’t get organized, can they? Not really. They can’t get clever.’

  ‘I’ve never seen any evidence of it,’ said Einstein. ‘The way I see it, you worry too much, Ollie.’

  ‘I think too much.’

  ‘Same thing.’ Einstein stood up, signalling that the conversation was over.

  ‘You think, though,’ said Ollie. ‘Does that mean you worry? You don’t seem too cut up about what happened today.’

  ‘I think I’m a bit like your Achilleus.’

  Ollie snorted. He couldn’t think of anyone less like Achilleus.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think I really care about people.’

  ‘That’s nuts,’ said Ollie.

  ‘Oh, I long ago came to the conclusion that I’m nuts,’ said Einstein and he chuckled and walked off.

  Ollie shook his head. Einstein was one of those kids who couldn’t help making snotty comments and had probably been badly bullied at school. Now he’d found a place for himself at the museum. He had some useful survival skills after all and he was making the most of it. It wasn’t enough just to have good fighters; without clever kids there was no hope of getting through this.

  He was aware of a movement and he turned round to find that Lettis had scooted along the pew and was sitting looking up at him.

  ‘OK?’ he said and she nodded, keeping her lips tightly pressed together. Looked like she’d been crying.

  There was a shout from the other side of the church. Achilleus was giving little Paddy a hard time about something. Ollie could see Paddy rubbing his shoulder where the strap of the golf-bag had dug into him.

  ‘That poor kid,’ he said. ‘He lugged that heavy bag full of weapons all this way without making a fuss. That’s real hero worship.’

  Lettis didn’t say anything. Just sat there staring at him.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s find you somewhere to sleep.’

  31

  A stripe of bright early-morning sunlight lay across the laboratory floor illuminating a small crimson spatter.

  ‘It looks like blood.’ Maxie was squatting down inspecting the tiles.

  ‘Could be anything,’ said Justin. ‘Food, blood, something from an experiment.’

  ‘Don’t suppose you can do DNA testing?’ said Maxie.

  ‘Not really, no. It’s a very complicated process and it’s not like it is in films basically …’

  ‘Justin.’ Maxie straightened up. ‘I was joking. I know you can’t do DNA testing.’

  ‘Oh, right. Yeah, OK.’

  They’d waited ages for Samira to return last night. In the end Maxie, Maeve and Boggle had led a party over to the Darwin Centre laboratories. They took along some of Lewis’s fighters and Gordy, the last person to have seen Samira. He talked all the way, trying to shift any blame.

  ‘She didn’t want me to stay … She was just picking something up … I thought things were safe now.’

  In the end Maxie had snapped at him. ‘Yeah, but even so, Gordy, with everything that’s been going down here, you might have thought to wait.’

  The lab doors were still unlocked and they could find no sign of Samira in the darkness. So they abandoned the search and went back to the minerals gallery, left someone on guard at the entrance just in case she did show up.

  She never did, and in the morning they’d organized a proper search. All that they’d found was this small patch – not much bigger than a 1p piece – and even then they couldn’t be sure it had anything to do with Samira.

  Maxie watched as Gordy went down on his hands and knees and started scraping whatever it was into a small plastic envelope. He was still feeling very guilty from last night and Justin had taken over from Maxie giving him a hard time about it.

  ‘If you want to be in charge of the labs while Einstein’s away,’ he said, ‘you’ve got to be more responsible.’

  ‘It’s not my bloody fault,’ Gordy muttered. ‘Anything could have happened to her.’<
br />
  Now Gordy turned on Maxie.

  ‘What do you think happened then?’ he snapped. ‘I thought you’d cleared all the sickos out of the museum. Or maybe you’re not as great as you make out.’

  For a brief moment Maxie considered laying into Gordy, really letting rip. But she held back. He was scared and turning his guilt on someone else. It took an effort, but she was going to be bigger than him and let it go. Instead she nodded to Justin to follow her and walked through to the lab next door, which was unoccupied.

  She looked back through the glass wall at the lab they’d left. There were a few kids there, too distracted to work, standing in small groups, talking excitedly. She closed the door.

  ‘What we talked about the other day. About one of your lot having a problem. A saboteur, a traitor – I don’t know what you want to call it … What have you done about it?’ she asked Justin.

  Justin looked a little shifty and unsure of himself. ‘I don’t want to start a panic,’ he murmured.

  ‘You don’t think Samira disappearing is going to maybe do that for you?’

  Justin walked Maxie over to the windows, where they could look down to the main floor of the Darwin Centre eight storeys below. The great curving white wall of the Cocoon that filled the huge space was shining in the sunlight.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have done something. I was just hoping, I don’t know, that you’d find something in your clean-up. I don’t want it to be one of us. I want it to be safe here again.’

  ‘We can sort it,’ said Maxie. ‘But you have to tell people that someone can’t be trusted. No one should be going anywhere alone at the moment.’

  ‘Will you help me set up a committee?’ he asked.

  Maxie tried not to laugh. She wasn’t quite used to Justin’s adult way of speaking. ‘A committee?’

  ‘Yes, to investigate what happened. We’ll have to interrogate everyone here, try to build up a picture of who was doing what and where on the night of the attack.’

  Maxie had to admit that out on the street life had a certain simplicity to it. All you had to do was stay alive. To kill grown-ups. This was different. This was complicated. This was old school.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But we have to go about it the right way. You’ve got a killer among you, remember.’

  ‘We don’t know Samira’s dead. Is she dead?’

  Gordy came in, wiping his hands on his white lab coat. It was several sizes too big for him and he’d had to roll the sleeves up.

  ‘I took a look at that sample under the microscope,’ he said. ‘As far as I can tell, it’s blood.’

  ‘Even if it is blood,’ said Justin, ‘we don’t know it’s hers. And if it is … She must still be somewhere. She can’t have just disappeared.’

  32

  So much blood. He’d never expected so much blood, especially as when he’d killed her she’d hardly bled at all. Once her heart stopped beating it couldn’t pump anything out of the wound. But when he’d opened her up it was like sticking a knife into a ripe peach. He’d had to quickly find some sheets of newspaper and had then rolled her on to them. Even so the blood had spread and spread and spread, a great dark pool of it, dripping down through the floorboards.

  He had to hurry. He quickly hacked off a piece of fatty flesh from her side. It was somehow soft and chewy at the same time, and the raw skin was too tough to get his teeth through.

  Suddenly he had an image of himself, crouching over Samira’s body, and he spat the grey, mashed-up gobbet out on to the floor.

  What was he doing?

  He retched. Held his mouth, trembling. And mercifully his mind flipped again. One second he was a boy, alone, sick, appalled at what he’d done, and the next Boney-M was screaming in his ears and he was a stone-cold killer, a sicko, hungry and ruthless, and then it flipped once more and threw him into a strange place. He was a half-naked, brown-skinned tribesman living in the jungle, butchering a monkey to feed his family.

  He knelt there, slipping in and out of madness, and then he fell so deep into the pit, he imagined he was an insect, a flea or a tick, sucking the blood from Samira’s veins. The smell of her blood excited him and nauseated him and soothed him all at the same time. He tipped forward and stuck his face into the cavity he’d opened up in her body, and sucked.

  And with a flip, reality came back to him, slapped him round the face. He rolled on the floor, clutching his stomach, trying not to throw up, while Boney-M danced about him, screeching with laughter, his bones rattling.

  ‘Oh, that’s a good one, that’s rich, that’s juicy, look at the boy, wants to be Count Dracula, but hasn’t the guts for it … Oh, that’s a picture. That’s priceless. I’ll post this one on YouTube. Oh, look at him! ROFL … Or should I say ROFP? Rolling on the floor puking, puking like the little baby bunting he is … Oh, what a day!’

  It was hunger that pulled Paul back up, drove him on, took him back over to the body on the newspaper and put the knife back in his hand. His need to eat. He’d known Samira. He’d even liked her. She’d given him some medicine one time when he’d had terrible headaches. She’d been kind and thoughtful and …

  ‘No!’ Boney-M yelled at him, setting his teeth on edge. ‘Not kind. Not thoughtful. She was a pig. They all hated you, remember? They killed Olivia. They killed your sister. They ate her. And laughed about it.’

  ‘Did they?’ Paul stopped what he was doing and closed his eyes. ‘Did they really? Are you sure I didn’t imagine it? I don’t know any more.’

  ‘Oh, look at him. One light snack and he’s sitting back on his fat arse, all bloated and thankful and full of the milk of human kindness. Hello, birds; hello, flowers; hello, sky; oh, isn’t it a lovely day? No more cares in the world, little pissypants. One small meal and you feel good about things, do you? Think all the bad stuff’s going to go away? What makes you think you can just pretend that things aren’t how you know they are? Nothing’s changed. You’re still going to have to kill them all. To eat them all, and shit them out and add their bones to your collection.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Ooh, listen to him, getting all uppity. I SAY! You hear me? I DO! We all do. All of us.’

  ‘And who are you? You don’t even exist!’

  ‘You’ve hurt me now,’ Boney whined. ‘You’ve hurt your old friend, the only one who cares about you. You’ll make me cry.’

  ‘Go on then, cry. You’re not real.’

  ‘Oh, aren’t I? Then who’s this pecking your hand?’

  Paul yelped as Boney-M jabbed his hard beak into the back of his hand. He looked down. There was a gash in it, his own blood spilling out, bright red. His knife was clutched in his other hand, the one he’d been using to cut Samira up with. There was no sign of the evil bird thing. But he’d pecked him, hadn’t he? Made him bleed.

  Hadn’t he?

  What if he’d done it himself? Stabbed his own hand with the knife.

  He looked down at the awful mess he’d made of the girl. Started to cry. Threw the knife down and ran out of the room. Up the stairs, out through the window and on to the roof outside. Leant out over the wall, looking down at the road far below.

  ‘Now look what you’ve made me do,’ he sobbed, but who was he accusing? Boney-M? The kid downstairs? God? Those other voices that drifted in on the wind like fog?

  For a moment he thought of climbing over, throwing himself off. Ending it all. It would be so easy. He wouldn’t have to deal with all of this any more.

  He belched, felt acid rise in his throat. He wished he hadn’t eaten now; the girl’s flesh had stopped the aches in his belly, but it had woken him up, brought awful clarity. He turned his face up to the sky and howled.

  He knew he wouldn’t jump, though.

  Not this time.

  Not yet.

  33

  ‘Shut up and listen. I’m changing up the way we’re doing this. Here on in, only the best fighters and any other kids who definitely need to be there are going on.
’

  Ollie had been up on the church steeple and had walked in on Blue making his announcement. He’d hoped it would all have been sorted, but it obviously hadn’t. For a few minutes he’d almost been able to forget about their problems. Forget about all the frightened kids down below. The body on the altar …

  He’d climbed up to get away from them and to get a proper idea of where they were and what they could expect when they left the church. It had been dark when they’d arrived last night and, in the confusion, strung out and desperate for shelter, nobody had had much time to take in the view.

  The church was ancient, built from red brick sometime in the Middle Ages probably. The motorway must have only been about a hundred metres to the north, but it was screened by trees, so that now, without the noise of traffic, you wouldn’t know it was there. The church was almost completely surrounded by trees. Past them to the south he could see parkland and to the west there was a narrow road going over an old stone bridge. They might have been deep in the heart of the countryside. Somewhere out there, though, was Heathrow Airport, which had once been the fourth busiest airport in the world. What a crowded, bustling place England had been before all this.

  It was sunny outside. The world looked green and fresh. Ollie had taken a moment to soak it all up and enjoy the solitude. Pretend it was the old days, before the fear set in. He had plenty of time. They’d been held up for ages trying to sort out Caspar, the kid whose foot had been half bitten off by dogs. He’d made it through the night and was now finally asleep. Asleep or in a coma. Who knew? Drenched in sweat, his eyes flicking about under his lids. His breathing was very shallow and fluttery and he was pretty weak. It was obvious they couldn’t move him just yet, which was why the arguments had started downstairs.

  So Ollie had left them to it, climbed the stone steps to the top of the steeple and leant on the parapet, watching the birds flapping about in the trees. So many of them. This was their world now. Not exactly quiet – they were making a right old racket – but peaceful.

  Once he went back downstairs, however, he was right back in it, the arguing and the fighting and the tension, the wailing and the panic. It was business as usual. The day-to-day grind of making battle plans and hoping to survive till the next meal.