‘This is crazy,’ said Achilleus. ‘I tell you I’m gonna merk him.’
‘You’ll do nothing,’ snapped Einstein. ‘If this father is all that Ed claims he is, he might be a big help with our research.’
‘A big help with our research.’ Achilleus impersonated Einstein, making him sound lispy and wet, and then he spat on the floor. ‘Stupid nerd.’
And then Ed walked in with Kyle, who was carrying an axe. Brooke felt a stab of longing for Ed. Her emotions had been so shredded she was a wreck; her moods had been pinging about all over the place like a kid who’d drunk too much Coke.
She heard Trinity say something that she didn’t understand. Wondered if it was aimed at her.
‘Two scarred faces. Rule of three. There’ll be a third. You’ll see.’
Behind Ed came a hunched figure, with Ed’s friends from earlier walking on either side of him. He was shrouded in a blanket. She could see his skinny legs sticking out underneath. At first Brooke thought he was wearing green trousers, and then, with a little jolt, she realized that his legs were bare and his skin was covered in green mould.
Behind them came a little girl carrying a violin case and two small boys, one with fair hair, the other with a mad shock of dark hair. He was wearing what looked like a dress with a sleeveless leather jacket over it.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Achilleus. ‘Here come the clowns. The circus is in town.’
They came through and waited on the black and white tiled floor, looking round at the massive dinosaur fossils. Brooke went over to them. Smiled at Ed.
‘We’ve got somewhere ready for him,’ she said. ‘But not everyone likes the idea. You have to promise he’s not gonna be dangerous.’
‘I can’t promise anything.’ Ed wasn’t smiling back. ‘But he’s my problem. I’ll watch him.’
The little fair-haired boy came over to her. He looked like he’d been crying. This must be Sam. Small Sam, Ella had called him, and Brooke could see why. She felt desperately sorry for him.
‘Is it true that my sister was here?’ he asked. ‘She’s called Ella.’
‘Yeah,’ said Brooke. ‘I know. She was here, darling. She’s all right. Don’t worry about her. She’s gone, though. She wanted to get out of London.’
‘I told you, Sam.’ Ed sounded tired.
Sam looked suddenly cross. He swiped at Ed’s arm.
‘We should have come last night,’ he shouted. ‘I wanted to come.’
‘We couldn’t, Sam, you know we couldn’t. It was too dangerous and we were all too shattered. If I’d known we were going to miss her, of course I’d have tried to get here, but we didn’t know. How could we have known? It’s just bad timing. Bad luck.’
Sam sat down on the floor and his head dropped. ‘What am I going to do?’
‘We’ll find her, Sam.’ Ed tried to pull the little boy up. Sam wasn’t having any of it, though. He struggled against Ed.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll find her,’ Ed went on. ‘Not today. But when we’re ready we’ll go after her. We’ve got to get ourselves sorted first. Find out where she might have gone.’
There were tears running down Sam’s face. This was too much for Brooke. She didn’t want to think about it any longer. She turned her attention to the man, who was covered by the blanket.
‘Does he have to stay under that?’ she asked.
‘He doesn’t like the light.’
Kyle lifted up the side of the blanket.
‘Oi, Wormy,’ he said. ‘You want to come out now and say hello to these nice people?’
The blanket shook. There were some muffled words from underneath it. He really could talk then.
‘He don’t want to show his face,’ said Kyle, and then Achilleus came striding over. He gave Ed and Kyle a dirty look.
‘If he’s coming in here we want to see him,’ he snarled, and snatched the blanket off.
Brooke winced and took a step back as the man was revealed. Apart from a green bowler hat he was naked and covered all over with more of the green mould, along with the familiar lumps and boils of the diseased. His long arms dangled at his sides and she saw that he had very long yellow fingernails. He looked shy, blinking, but also a little sly, peering out of the corners of his pale eyes as he took in his surroundings. Finally he looked at Brooke and licked his lips.
‘Butters,’ said Achilleus, lifting his spearhead towards the man.
Then there was a shout from across the hall and the sound of running feet. It was Fish-Face. She was tearing towards the man, her arms held out in front of her.
A look of recognition followed by great sadness came over the Green Man’s face and he held his own arms out towards her.
Fish-Face was sobbing. She ran into his arms, crying, ‘Daddy, my daddy.’
Achilleus gave a snort of laughter.
‘Now that’s something you don’t see every day,’ he said.
96
Ella was awake in the dark. The faint glow of the moon through the curtains did little more than fill the blackness with vague grey shapes. The larger blob was an armchair. The lumpy shape lying on some cushions on the floor was Robbie. The dark square against the wall must be the television.
Ella could hear breathing. She had gone to sleep sandwiched between Monkey-Boy and Maeve on a big double bed. It reassured her, knowing that Maeve was sleeping next to them. Like when Ella had bad dreams when she was little and would creep into Mum and Dad’s bed in the middle of the night. If only it wasn’t so dark. She didn’t like the dark. She hoped that her eyes would adjust to the light and show her more of the room, but she soon figured out that this was as good as it was going to get. She had to try to get back to sleep.
Something had woken her, though. Something in her head had told her to fight off sleep and open her eyes. What was it? A sound maybe? She listened. Apart from the steady breathing at her side it was absolutely quiet. She concentrated, trying to remember what had come to her in her dreams. If not a sound, then what? A movement? Had Maeve stirred?
Ella looked at the grey bulk on the mattress. She could just make out the steady rise and fall of a sleeping body, but nothing more. Go to sleep. If there was anything wrong one of the bigger kids would have woken. She curled up a little and closed her eyes. Felt sleep creeping up on her. Went over the events of the day. Leaving the museum in the morning. Saying her goodbyes to her friends. All the crying. Even her new friends had cried, Wiki and Jibber-jabber. Soppy boys. Then the car journey, watching the buildings go by, and then the trees and the fields. The countryside. Finding the hotel on the little island. Smashing a window to get in. Exploring. How happy they’d been to find that nobody had been in here for months. No sign of any grown-ups. They’d even found some boxes stuffed with food hidden in the cellar. They’d taken this as a good sign and decided to definitely camp here for the night. All in the same bedroom. A suite Maeve had called it.
As they’d settled down to sleep, Maeve had said that she couldn’t really believe it. ‘I can’t take it in,’ she’d said. ‘This morning we were stuck in the museum, and now look at us.’
‘We shouldn’t relax too much,’ Robbie had said, trying to impress Maeve by sounding all adult and sensible. Honestly, he was so obvious. ‘We should take it in turns to stand guard, just in case.’
That had made Ella feel very safe. Knowing that someone would be watching over her. She couldn’t even remember going to sleep. It had happened so fast. She must have been tireder than she’d realized.
She would have slept all night until the sun came up if something hadn’t woken her …
A smell …
A smell had woken her …
She could smell it now. Something thick and earthy and rotten. Something familiar. A smell that had haunted her nightmares for months.
Where was it coming from?
If there was any danger one of the bigger kids would have woken up …
Her stomach fluttered. They were supposed to be on guard. Robbie and Mae
ve. Keeping watch. But she’d seen Robbie asleep on the floor and Maeve was on the bed next to her.
Ella was wide awake now, her heart racing and her head buzzing.
‘Maeve?’ she whispered. ‘I’m scared.’
The body next to her didn’t stir.
‘Maeve, please,’ she said, louder this time, her fingers fiddling with her necklace. ‘I can smell something.’
She could feel panic rising in her chest. She knew that smell too well. It was the smell of grown-ups. Grown-ups who no longer washed, or changed their clothes, or used the toilet properly, grown-ups whose bodies were a mess of sores and boils, leaking pus and blood and spit and worse.
But where was the smell coming from?
It seemed close.
She put out a hand to shake Maeve. Her body felt hot, and she was wearing some sort of heavy, scratchy material that Ella didn’t remember.
And she was sticky and damp.
Now Ella knew where the smell was coming from. The body on the mattress. It stank. She shrank away from it, scuttling on her back. What had happened to Maeve? And where was Monkey-Boy? He was no longer in the bed. She flopped off the edge of the mattress and slithered across the room to Robbie and started to shake him.
‘Robbie,’ she whimpered. ‘Wake up. Wake up! There’s something in the room. Please wake up. I don’t think it’s Maeve. I don’t know where she is. Robbie, please wake up. I’m scared …’
But Robbie was cold and still. Ella groped up his body, feeling for his face. She would have to force his eyes open. Scream in his ear …
But when her searching hands reached Robbie’s neck there was no more of him.
His head was missing.
Ella screamed and, as she did so, the figure on the mattress slowly rose. It was too big, much too big to be Maeve. Too big to be a kid. It was a grown-up, a father, its eyes staring, its mouth a black hole. It put its feet over the side of the bed and stood up.
Fear snatched the voice from Ella’s throat and she darted across the room and scrabbled in silence for the door. But where was it?
She hit the wall and felt along it. Where was the door?
Where was the door?
She couldn’t get out.
The father was lumbering closer.
No. Not like this. They should have stayed with the others. Not like this …
She was pressing herself against the wall. The door must be here somewhere. There had to be a way out. And then she was falling. The door had been open all along. She landed on something soft and cold and wet.
Another body.
She heard the sound of the father behind her. His feet on the carpet, shuffling along, sshwssh, sshwssh. His heavy breathing. Wheezing and gurgling in his throat. Felt his hand on her ankle. Jerked her leg away.
Not like this …
She got up, slipping in a wet puddle. Skidded and hit the corridor wall. Carried on. It was even darker out here. All she could see was some dim light coming through a window at the far end of the corridor.
Ran towards it, the father behind her, moving faster now, moaning softly.
Not like this …
She came to the window; the corridor turned to the right. She went round the corner and there was a flash of light and now she screamed. A face seemed to hang in the darkness.
It was the worst face she had ever seen. Like it had been chewed up and spat out by something. The skin was torn and folded and shiny with scar tissue, the lips swollen, blistered. One eye a clouded, bloody mess, one ear missing.
And now she saw Monkey-Boy, his bloody, lifeless body held in the creature’s right arm.
The creature raised its free hand and Ella felt her knees giving out, the blood draining from her head, light and sick and floating, slipping away from this world.
The hand came down.
Please … Not like this …
Charlie Higson Q&A
WHERE DID YOU GET THE IDEA FOR THE ENEMY?
I had two starting points for writing The Enemy. I wanted to write a book where all the adults disappear and kids have the run of the place – that’s always been a great fantasy of mine. Wouldn’t it be great to live in London if you could go wherever you wanted? You could live in Buckingham Palace, or go to the Tower of London and try on all the suits of armour. But I also wanted to write a scary book, different from the Young Bond series. My son is really into zombies – he’s fascinated by them, but they also scare him a lot. After I’d written each chapter of the book I’d read it to him at night, in an attempt to scare him, and I kept on until I gave him nightmares!
DID YOU TAKE INSPIRATION FROM ANY OTHER BOOKS?
Yes. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, which was written in the 1950s, is really the grandfather of this kind of story – about a man trying to survive when everyone else has become infected with a disease. There are also parallels with Lord of the Flies by William Golding, but in that book it’s all about the things that would go horribly wrong if you leave kids alone by themselves. I wanted to show a world where the children had already been through that process and where they’re now trying to put the world back together and establish a society without grown-ups.
DID THE STORY CHANGE MUCH FROM YOUR ORIGINAL IDEA WHILE YOU WERE WRITING IT?
It did actually. No matter how much you plan what’s going to happen, when you start writing the book always takes on a life of its own. You might roughly know what’s going to happen at the beginning and the end, but you don’t know how you’re going to get there. For instance, when I started, I didn’t really know which of the kids were going to live or die. And I’d originally planned for there to be a lot more about the gang war between the two groups of children – the kids in Morrisons and the kids in Waitrose – but when I started writing I found that I wanted to move the book past that point and focus on their battle with the adults instead.
DO YOU FIND IT EASY TO KILL OFF CHARACTERS?
Yes and no. If you’ve decided early on that a certain character has got to go, you start to distance yourself from them. But there were other characters that I’d thought I was going to kill off, and then realized I’d become too attached and couldn’t do it. But even when you’ve decided that you’re going to get rid of someone halfway through and you manage to go through with it, you need to look back and make sure they’ve been given enough of a presence before that point to really make their death hit home. And that can sometimes be a bit painful. When I was doing events for Young Bond, kids would often say they really enjoyed the books but that they always knew that James was going to be all right, because he grows up to be James Bond. So with The Enemy, I wanted to make it clear from the start that no one was safe.
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spinebreaker (n)
story-surfer, word-lover, day-dreamer,
reader/ writer/ artist/ thinker
THE BEGINNING
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First published 2013
Text copyright © Charlie Higson, 2013
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ISBN: 978-0-141-96797-4
The Fallen Page 38