The Fallen

by Charlie Higson

  Didn’t like hospitals. Didn’t like nurses. Didn’t like doctors.

  He’d grabbed Blue as they were getting ready to head deeper into the building. His heart had been thumping and he’d hoped he could talk without tripping over his words. He had to stay on top of things.

  ‘Don’t you think we need someone to stay here and keep a look-out?’ he’d said, pleased that his voice hadn’t let him down. Blue had shrugged.

  ‘Maybe. Dunno.’

  ‘What if more grown-ups rock up?’ Mick pressed on. ‘Try to get in behind?’

  ‘Could happen.’

  ‘I’ll stay if you want.’

  ‘Yeah? You sure?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll keep my three guys. We’ll watch your back.’

  ‘Cool. Don’t reckon we’ll be long.’

  Blue had clapped him on the shoulder then turned and joined the rest of the group. Soon they’d gone. Disappeared down a corridor next to the reception desk. It felt very still and quiet without them.

  Now Mick was sweating in a chair. If he’d had to stand up any longer his legs would have given out, they were trembling so much.

  Why was he such a loser?

  He could mash grown-ups into the ground and knock their eyes out, slit their poxy bellies open, didn’t bother him one bit. But his own blood. I mean, it wasn’t as if the cut on his arm he’d got from whacking the grown-up in the mouth was even that bad, but there was this little waggling flap of skin, and a smear of blood up his arm and …

  He closed his eyes, feeling faint again. Felt acid rising in his throat and choked it down.

  Useless loser.

  He’d got away with it, though, hadn’t he? Made it look like he was being a hero. Guarding their rear. That was good thinking. And he’d be all right in a few minutes. The tingling sensation in his head would pass. Maybe he could go out and scope the area, walk the perimeter, do something useful. They really did need someone to watch their backs …

  What if he’d got an infection, though?

  He couldn’t stop himself. Pictured germs inside him. Little tendrils spreading out from the wound, worming their way through his body. Down his arm to his fingers, then going all round his body, carried in his blood, carried to his heart, his lungs, his brain.

  Didn’t want that. Didn’t want to go nuts.

  Nobody really knew if a grown-up’s bite could infect you with their sickness, like in zombie films. Most kids died pretty quickly if they got bitten, but there was no way of knowing if they died from some random infection or from the grown-up’s disease itself.

  Funny how nobody had given it a proper name. It was just the sickness.

  The disease.

  Mick knew all about diseases. The one thing he didn’t want was to die of blood poisoning. His little brother, Ant, had got it and it had nearly killed him. Septicaemia, the doctors had called it. Sepsis. Mick would never forget those words. What happened was Ant had got the flu, and then he’d got a toothache. Silly sod never cleaned his teeth properly, drove Mum mad. He got some kind of abscess under the tooth, down in the gum. A nasty rotten hole full of pus. The doctors said the bacteria had got out of the abscess and into Ant’s blood, and he was too weak from the flu to fight it off. They only worked all this out afterwards.

  At the time they thought his symptoms were all just from the flu. He started shivering, his temperature went through the roof, he started panting like a dog, and then he went crazy. Spouting all this mixed-up babble. Mick had thought it was funny at first, before he’d got seriously freaked out by it.

  It was only when Ant started fainting that Mick’s mum thought to take him back to the doctor. Then it was all go. They rushed him to the hospital and stuffed him full of tubes and drips, pumped antibiotics into him.

  Nope. Didn’t like hospitals. Didn’t like nurses. Didn’t like doctors.

  Ant nearly died. The whole family was there, round his bed in the Whittington Hospital, watching him as he took little tiny quick breaths, his whole body shaking and shivering. Sweat pouring off him. Occasionally he’d come round and look frightened and shout some nonsense. Mum had wanted to get a priest in. In the end, though, it hadn’t come to that. Ant had fought the sepsis for three days and then it passed, the fever broke, the drugs kicked in, killed the bacteria and settled him down. Mum hugged the doctor. Mick had never really known what bacteria were before. But he’d hung around the hospital long enough to learn all about it. He’d even looked it up on Wikipedia. He wanted to know all about it so that he didn’t get septicaemia, or any of the other illnesses bacteria could give you.

  He found out that bacteria are tiny living organisms, and they’re everywhere. They live in your gut, and on your skin, and in the ground. Forty million of them in a single gram of soil. A thousand million of them in a litre of fresh water. They were so small you couldn’t see them, but they were in everything, and if you piled them all up in one place they’d weigh more than all the other plants and animals on the planet put together.

  When it came to the ones in Ant’s blood, the doctors had settled their hash, though. Wiped them out. Napalmed them with antibiotics. Saved poor Ant. Well, there were no doctors now, no one to fix you if the bad bacteria got inside you. If you got the sepsis you were dead meat.

  What if Mick had septicaemia now? What if there were tiny little creatures infecting him? His arm felt suddenly itchy and he manically scratched away at it, being careful not to scrape his bandage off. Was he hot? Feverish? Or was it just warm in here? His feet felt cold. He was shaking a bit.

  Sod it. It couldn’t happen this quickly. He was all right. Just imagining his worst nightmares. It wasn’t bacteria that had got in him – it was fear.

  How do you tell your stupid brain to shut up? It was just a scratch. Don’t be such a baby.

  He took a long, slow breath. Tried to calm down. If he was still feeling jittery in a while he’d take the other three outside. Much better to be doing something rather than just sitting on his arse worrying about shit.

  40

  Jackson was sticking close to Achilleus. It had felt like something real when they’d both attacked that father together, hadn’t it? A moment. They hadn’t said anything to each other, just moved fast. One mind. Got the sucker from both sides. Surely Achilleus had noticed? The way they’d worked together. Surely he’d seen that she was more than just some museum nerd? Surely he could tell? But he was hard to get through to, with his gnarly head all chewed up, his manner like nothing mattered. His swagger. Like he could deal with anything and was laughing at you the whole time. She’d never known how to be with boys. Always said the wrong things, did the wrong things. Tried to impress them by doing something extreme, dangerous, wild, something she thought was cool or funny but they always thought was stupid and weird. It was OK when she was just hanging out, being their mate. She’d always had lots of friends who were boys, just no boyfriends. She wished it wasn’t important to her, wished she didn’t care. Why did it matter whether she had a boyfriend, whether boys even liked her?

  Hormones probably. In the end it all came down to hormones. Those pesky little chemicals that made you act like an idiot. Turned you into a nutter or some swooning girly girl in a pink dress. Her dad had once had a long talk to her about being gay, just because she had short hair and preferred boys’ clothes to frilly skirts and lace. She knew she wasn’t gay. She was always thinking about boys. If anything she thought about them too much and wished with all her heart that she didn’t.

  She remembered when life had been easier. At primary school, when you could hang out with other kids and that’s all they were – kids. Boy, girl, black, white, brown, tall, short, clever, stupid, straight, gay – none of that meant anything, they were all the same. Kids. But as she’d got older it got harder. And now here she was, heading deeper into the darkness of this unknown building, with God knows what waiting for them inside, and instead of being alert and thinking about what she’d do if something attacked, she was thinking about Achil
leus. An ugly bully who hardly even knew she existed.

  ‘I was ahead of you,’ she blurted out, without really meaning to. Achilleus didn’t even turn. Just grunted.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Back there, when the father attacked, yeah? I got him just before you did.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Paddy?’ Achilleus booted the little Irish kid up the backside to get his attention.

  ‘Who d’you reckon was quicker? Me or the girl?’

  ‘You,’ said Paddy. ‘For sure.’

  ‘He’s biased,’ said Jackson.

  ‘Are you biased, Paddy?’ Achilleus asked.

  ‘No way. You was quicker. She was just copying you.’

  ‘I was not!’ Jackson protested as Achilleus laughed.

  They were walking down a long corridor that seemed to run the length of the building, with other corridors off to the sides and windows into open-plan offices. There were glossy framed photographs on the walls, of brightly coloured pills, and smiling, happy, healthy families, nurses and doctors in impossibly clean hospital wards. Smiling. Attractive scientists peering into microscopes. Smiling, smiling, smiling. There were also some slightly random photos of nice landscapes and sunsets. It was clear what message they’d been trying to put across – everything is all right in the world, we will look after you. You’re safe in our hands.

  Yeah. Right. Good one.

  When it had come down to it the doctors and scientists had been taken just as much by surprise as everyone else. They’d been no help at all. They’d been struck down by the disease along with all the rest of the adults. Died before they could find a cure, or even find out what the disease was, where it had come from.

  It had all happened so fast. One day it was all sunsets and smiles, the next …

  Night of the living sickos.

  At the end of the corridor was a lobby, with lifts on either side and thick glass doors at the back. A sign above the doors read UNIT B. ENTRY TO AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. To the right of the door was a flat electronic card reader and a small numeric keypad.

  Blue shone his torch at the flat black panel of the card reader.

  ‘Now what?’ Emily asked.

  ‘Simple,’ said Einstein. ‘We press our access card to the pad then punch in the secret code and – ta-dah – the door will magically swing open.’

  Blue gave Einstein a look that said he was just holding back from punching his teeth out. Achilleus went to the doors and studied them up close by the light of Paddy’s torch beam.

  Jackson had a thought and pushed past him, gave the doors a gentle nudge. They swung open.

  ‘You guys never learn, do you?’ she said, walking through.

  On the other side of the doors was a stairway that split in two and went down either side of a square central column. There was less decoration in this area. Nobody had bothered to stick up any inspiring pictures. Jackson sniffed the air. Often when you went into a building that had been empty for a long while the air was stale and nasty. Here it didn’t smell of anything. It was as if the sterile, air-conditioned atmosphere the building must have had in the old days was somehow still lingering.

  Blue pushed to the front and led them down the stairs, going noticeably more slowly now. At the bottom was another corridor leading straight ahead into darkness.

  ‘It’s gonna be a pain getting the supplies back up them stairs,’ said Blue, looking back.

  ‘There must be a way of getting the main warehouse doors open from the inside,’ said Einstein. ‘For when lorries made deliveries or picked stuff up. There must be some proper warehouse doors.’

  Blue started walking and the others fell in behind him, still keeping bunched up, the torch beams probing ahead. They didn’t have to go far before the corridor widened out into a storage area with rows of metal shelving stacked with packing materials: flat-pack cardboard boxes, empty plastic crates, rolls of bubble wrap and plastic binding material. Rolls of sticker labels.

  Blue shone his torch into every corner and under every shelf.

  Nothing.

  ‘What would a grown-up want to be hiding out down here for?’ said Achilleus. ‘They can’t get in and out, there’s nothing to eat. Unless they wanted to send some parcels to their aunties they wouldn’t have no interest in all this junk.’

  ‘They make their nests underground,’ said Blue.

  ‘I know it,’ said Achilleus. ‘This just don’t feel like the sort of place they’d choose.’

  ‘What about all those sickos outside?’ said Jackson. ‘What were they trying to get in for? What were they after?’

  ‘They only ever after but one thing,’ said Achilleus. ‘Fresh meat.’

  ‘You think there might be kids down here?’

  ‘No way. We’d have seen some signs.’

  ‘Yeah, well, let’s push on,’ said Blue.

  The door out of the storeroom through into the next part of the warehouse complex was also unlocked. It led to a short corridor that ran a little way then turned a corner. Its walls were bare concrete. Bundles of cable and bits of pipework ran along either side and there were various shelves and cabinets spaced out along its length. The further they went into the building the plainer it was and the more nervous the kids became. There was no joking now. No talking.

  Halfway to the bend they heard a noise. A shuffling, rustling sound. It went as quickly as it came.

  They all froze.

  ‘What was that?’ said Emily.

  ‘We don’t know, Emily, OK?’ said Jackson, trying not to lose her cool. ‘How could we know? It came from round the corner. We’ve never been here before. So just shut up and listen.’

  ‘Does someone want to go and take a look then?’ said Einstein.

  Jackson stepped forward. Said nothing. Just carried on walking slowly towards the corner where the corridor turned.

  Well, this was dumb. Weirdo Jackson. Showing off again. Doing something stupid and dangerous to impress the boys. Only this time she had no idea what she was getting into. For the first time today she was actually scared. She heard a scuff behind her and turned round to find Achilleus catching up with her.

  ‘Can’t let you have all the fun,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Jackson. And she meant it. She was marginally less frightened now.

  When they reached the corner they stopped and flattened themselves against the wall. Jackson wiped her face. Dried her hand on her jeans. Felt a droplet of sweat scurry down her back under her sweatshirt.

  ‘When I say so we both look round,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll keep close to the edge and shine the torch. You go wide and be ready with your spear.’

  She wasn’t sure if Achilleus would accept being told what to do by a girl, but he just nodded and said, ‘OK.’

  ‘OK.’ Jackson swallowed, her mouth painfully dry. ‘Ready … one … two … three.’

  On three they both moved, together, Achilleus going quickly to the centre of the corridor, spear up, tensed and ready for a fight, Jackson keeping tight to the wall.

  She had no idea what to expect. All she saw, though, was a rack of shelves fixed to the wall, with thin sheets of metal on them, piled high so that there was only a very narrow space between the shelves. Five, maybe ten centimetres at the most. Not big enough for a human to hide in. She took this all in fast, peering along a gap at head height, her torch beam bouncing off the metal and making strange dancing shapes. She sidestepped, keeping her eyes fixed ahead, and as she did so she caught a glimpse of something on a lower shelf. Out of the corner of her eye. A hint of a hint. She swung the torch beam back. Gone.

  But she’d definitely seen something. Something pale. Something alive. She was sure of it. It had been such a brief flash though, that she couldn’t make sense of it. She crouched down and threw more light along the shelf. There was a hurried movement. A quick whip and a wriggle.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Achilleus.

  ‘There was so
mething on the shelves.’

  ‘What something?’

  ‘Don’t know. A creature. A face. I definitely felt it was looking at me.’

  ‘You mean like a rat or something?’

  ‘No. It was hairless, naked, I don’t know. I didn’t really see it clearly.’

  ‘A creature?’

  ‘I’m sure of it. Almost white, with black eyes, set wide apart. Looking at me.’

  ‘So what was it then?’

  ‘Like I say, I don’t know, it was like a … It reminded me of something.’

  Achilleus came over and looked where she was aiming the beam.

  ‘There’s nothing there.’

  ‘There was. It went to the back of the shelves. Look, can you see? There’s an opening there, a hole of some sort.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  It was Blue. The other kids were coming round the corner to join them now, in ones and twos.

  ‘Jackson reckons she saw something,’ said Achilleus, poking the point of his spear into the hole. ‘But I reckon she’s imagining it.’

  ‘I didn’t imagine it. It was alive. It was long and flat, pale skin, dark eyes. It looked at me. I’m sure of it. Its eyes were on me. Very dark. Black, like a snake.’

  ‘You saw a snake?’ Einstein sounded dubious.

  ‘Not necessarily a snake, but that’s what it reminded me of, a snake.’

  ‘What would a snake be doing down here?’ Achilleus scoffed. ‘You’re seeing things, girl.’

  ‘It was there.’ Jackson tried to move some of the sheets of metal so that she could get to the hole. They were heavy. It would take ages to shift enough of them.

  She swore. Maybe Achilleus was right. Maybe she had imagined it. Snakes couldn’t survive in places like this. They needed sun and heat. And those eyes. Not really a snake’s eyes. Too intelligent.

  She shook her head to clear it, grabbed a water bottle from her pack and glugged half of it down. She remembered being in bed, when she was little, seeing things in the darkness, making monsters out of dressing gowns and toys, curtains.