The Fear

by Charlie Higson

  DogNut was no different. On the night before he was due to leave the Tower he had his old familiar nightmare once again. Why this one? This same dream, night after night? Why would his brain not leave this memory alone? He’d survived more dangerous attacks. Lost closer friends. So why, in the darkness, did the dream come creeping like some low shadow creature into his brain? So that even he, tough and wiry and street-smart and seemingly scared of nothing, would jerk awake, tangled in his bedclothes, crying like a little baby and calling out for his mum.

  Every night the dream ran its course. He could never wake himself before that final terrible moment …

  Maybe it was the weirdness of what had happened, the fact that he’d seen nothing quite like it before or since. The slow, disgusting, unreal nature of it. It had even felt like a dream at the time.

  It had happened soon after he’d arrived at the Tower, when they were all still learning about their surroundings, before they’d turned the business district to the north and west into a forbidden zone. All the big office blocks and skyscrapers were here, even though it was the most ancient part of the city, founded by the Romans some two thousand years ago. It was an area where far-out, modern, hi-tech buildings of glass and steel rubbed up against medieval churches and solid, stone-clad eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings decorated with pillars and columns and statues.

  This part of London seemed to contain a special sickness all of its own.

  But all those months ago they hadn’t realized …

  In his dream DogNut is back there, out on patrol with his friends Ed and Kyle and a boy called Leo. Leo is a chatty kid who’s pretty tough, but also more than a little clumsy. So, although he loves fighting and is always the first to volunteer to go out hunting for food and supplies, he is as much of a danger to his own side in a fight as he is to any attacking sickos. DogNut is always nervous going on patrol with him – he doesn’t pay attention and is noisy and too sure of himself – but today a lot of the other kids are laid up with the flu and he’s the best available.

  They walk along a wide street. In his dream it’s black and white, like an old film. Bank notes are blowing in the breeze like confetti. The four of them laugh and try to catch as many of them as they can, even though they are completely worthless now. They follow the trail of money and it leads them to a fancy-looking Victorian building with an imposing front that reminds DogNut of a Greek temple. It’s the money that brings them here. There’s smoke rising from the building, but the boys are curious to look inside. To find the source of the money.

  The revolving doors at the entrance are locked. The window next to them, however, has been smashed, and, carefully avoiding the broken glass, they climb inside.

  They are in what appears to be a posh bank of some sort. There’s a wide marble floor, with a circular pattern of tiles set into it that looks something like a compass. There are pillars and carved wood, and paintings on the walls, a couple of big dead trees in pots. At the back is a staircase leading up from the lobby, to the left an empty reception desk. There are no signs of any human activity.

  Leo is keen to explore further.

  He says something about looking for gold.

  Notes aren’t much use, but gold will always be valuable …

  They walk towards the stairs. And as they get to the middle of the tiled pattern on the floor, there is a crack and the floor begins to crumble beneath their feet. DogNut instinctively grabs on to Leo and they hold each other as the floor collapses. In the dream it happens slowly, they almost float down, but at the time they must have fallen hard and fast.

  Right down to the basement.

  Miraculously they are unhurt. They’ve landed on something soft. The air is filled with dust so for a few moments DogNut can’t see anything, despite the sunlight filtering down from the floor above.

  Ed and Kyle had been walking a little way behind them and haven’t fallen through. DogNut hears Ed calling down to him, asking if he’s all right.

  DogNut shouts back that he’s fine.

  We landed on something … He tries to work out what exactly the two of them are standing on … or rather in. He’s sunk up to his waist in something warm and slimy. And it’s moving, like some giant animal.

  ‘What is it?’ says Leo.

  ‘It’s bad is what it is,’ says DogNut. ‘We got to get out of here.’

  ‘But what is it?’

  ‘I don’t want to know. I just want to get out.’

  As the air clears, DogNut notices that there’s a sort of luminous glow down here. It helps him to gradually make out his surroundings.

  Faces. Too many to count. Looking up at him. He’s sinking in a sea of faces. He realizes that the sticky mess he’s fallen into is people. They’re all squashed together, and it’s as if they’ve melted into one single, shapeless blob. They are stacked on top of each other. He can see more faces underneath. Bodies crushed and trampled and squashed beneath the feet of those people at the top.

  They’re smartly dressed in business suits, although the suits are filthy and ragged, and some of the men and women wearing them are obviously dead. Not all, though. Hands wriggle up from the gloopy mass, fingers worm towards him, heads crane over to try to get closer, but the bodies are so tightly packed that none of them can really move.

  DogNut looks around; the whole basement is crammed full of these people. How they live down here, what they eat, he has no idea. Maybe they eat whatever drops in on them. But then he sees to his horror that they are eating each other. Where they are able to they’ve clamped their mouths on to their neighbours. Over there a head has three or four other heads clustered round it, sucking and chewing. And there – two heads eating each other. He watches in appalled fascination as a mouth peels the cheek off a woman, exposing her gums. She has long since lost her teeth. The only sound is a squelching, slurping noise. There’s something cold and dead-eyed about these people, as if they didn’t care. They look like lizards.

  And now DogNut realizes that they are trying to eat him too. There are three mouths sucking at his legs. He pulls one leg away and it comes free with a plopping noise. He frantically kicks and wriggles, but as one person is knocked away another fills the gap.

  ‘This is disgusting,’ he shouts.

  ‘Go up,’ says Leo. ‘We have to go up!’

  The ceiling is nearer than DogNut had expected. God knows how deep this human pool is. He forces his way up, standing on shoulders, heads, jerking away from gaping mouths. Ed is leaning over the edge, his hand extended downwards. DogNut reaches up and his fingertips touch Ed’s. But then the panicking Leo pulls him back.

  ‘Let me go first!’ he screams, and climbs up DogNut’s body, using him as a ladder. DogNut swears but tries to help him, pushing him from below. In his panic, though, Leo slips and tumbles sideways, falling into a field of upturned baby birds’ mouths. He thrashes about and only succeeds in sinking deeper into the human bog.

  DogNut tries to get hold of him and manages to get a grip on his shirt. With his other hand he reaches out for Ed who is dangling down over the hole supported by Kyle. DogNut tries not to lose his grip on Leo. It’s impossible, though. Leo now has at least seven grown-ups hanging off him like leeches.

  DogNut knows that if he lets go of Leo he will die. It’s up to DogNut to save him, but he’s in danger of being pulled back down himself so in the end he lets go of Leo and watches helplessly as he sinks for the last time beneath the sea of faces, which curl in on him, enveloping him.

  Every night the scene is repeated, and every night the same thing happens. Leo falls and sinks out of sight into that horror.

  And that night, like every other, DogNut woke gasping for air, still watching poor Leo disappear. He sat there, soaked in sweat, shaking, his head bobbing on his long neck, telling himself that it was all right. All right. Just a dream. Just a stupid dream. He wasn’t back there. It wasn’t real.

  It was real, though. It was his fault Leo had died …

&nbs
p; DogNut had yelled so loud his throat had bled. Ed had hauled him up and he’d flopped down on to the tiles. They’d checked his body. He was covered with saliva, but none of the sucking mouths had broken his skin. Ed had tried to reassure him, told him it wasn’t his fault.

  It was, though. He had let go of Leo.

  And his guilty brain wouldn’t let go of the memory.

  No.

  He had to put it out of his mind. Push it away like all the other bad memories. Tonight, of all nights, he needed his sleep, because in the morning he was leaving.

  He’d been at the Tower of London a year. Building a new life with Jordan Hordern and Ed and Kyle and all the others who had made it here after the battle at Lambeth Bridge. Why did he never dream of that night? When half of London had gone up in flames.

  Because it wasn’t his fault.

  No.

  Come on, DogNut. Don’t be a wuss. Don’t think about it. Suck it up. Be a man. Move on. Think of Brooke. Beautiful, stroppy Brooke. Yeah. He smiled. Always look on the bright side of life, as the old song went. The nightmare wasn’t the only regular dream he had, was it?

  Some nights he dreamt of Brooke, the mouthy blonde girl he’d got split up with at Lambeth Bridge. It had been mad. Sickos, driven on by the fire, had attacked them. Half of his group had got away over the bridge, the rest of them, DogNut included, had ended up on a tourist boat floating down the Thames …

  A year since he’d last seen Brooke. And in all that time he’d never been able to forget her. In his dreams she was impossibly good-looking, her hair clean and golden, her clothes immaculate, but she was just as rude and unwelcoming. Somehow that only made him want her more. So now he was doing something about it. He and a gang of kids from the Tower were going to go upriver and search for lost friends.

  As he lay in the darkness now, though, in the bleak early hours of the morning, he wondered for the thousandth time if he wasn’t crazy. Why leave the safety of the Tower? Why leave his friends? He had it made here.

  Ha. Good one.

  He’d never be a general like Jordan Hordern. He’d never be respected like clever Ed who everyone loved. He was just daft deputy DogNut. Cooped up inside this gloomy castle. This couldn’t be it. For the rest of his life. There had to be something more. He was going to go out there. He was going to make something of himself. He was going to find Brooke, the prettiest girl in London, and return a hero.

  Hold on to that, DogNut – that’s your future.

  You’re gonna show everyone.

  You’re gonna show Jordan Hordern, and Ed … and Leo.

  You’re gonna be a hero.

  2

  It was morning and DogNut’s crew was down by the Thames packing a big rowing boat with food and water, weapons, sleeping bags and clothing. DogNut was wearing his leather American flying jacket from the Second World War. Like a couple of the others he was bringing along a steel breastplate, but that was stashed in the bottom of the boat along with everything else. It was too heavy and awkward to row in.

  The day was bright and clear. Sunlight sparkled on the dirty water of the Thames, turning it from muddy grey into a shifting carpet of silver and gold. DogNut knew it was probably just tiredness and a trick of the dancing light, but he kept seeing shapes out of the corners of his eyes and try as he might he couldn’t quite chase away the last shadows of his dream and concentrate on what he was supposed to be doing. He needed to be careful. Sure, it was a lovely day and all that, and the river might look like something out of a Disney film right now, but he knew it could be very dangerous. It was wide and deep and powerful and criss-crossed with unpredictable currents. He’d seen its dangers first hand. On the night they’d arrived here last year the boat they’d been on had hit a bridge and sank. Several kids had drowned, including Brooke’s friend Aleisha.

  And only last month a boy had been playing near Traitor’s Gate, right next to the river, showing off to his mates, and had slipped off the wall. The Thames had looked as if it was hardly moving, but the poor guy had been snatched away in an instant and never seen again.

  You had to respect the river. The kids had spent their time at the Tower organizing themselves, learning about their surroundings. Lately they’d been studying the river. Learning its ways and learning not to fear it.

  DogNut had carefully chosen this time for their departure. Although the sea was miles away the Thames was still affected by the tides. When the tide rose in the North Sea, it forced a huge volume of water up the estuary where it funnelled into the Thames and reversed its flow. The level of the river at the Tower could rise as much as seven metres. Then as the tide went out the waters would begin to drop and be sucked out to sea.

  Their route was upriver, to the west, so they’d had to wait for the tide to turn so they could go with the flow and not against it. There was a twenty-minute lull at low tide when the river didn’t flow in either direction, but now it was starting to flow strongly backwards as the incoming tide pushed it inland. This would make rowing upstream much easier.

  DogNut would have preferred to set off earlier, but it wasn’t until late morning that the tide was right. They’d found the boat at a rowing club in Rotherhithe to the east, and it was part of the small fleet of vessels the kids had collected and now kept at the Tower. It was an old-fashioned skiff, wide and deep, with space for six at the oars and one more at either end. The kids who were going on the expedition had been training hard on the water for the last two weeks, but they were hardly experts, so they were all a little nervous as they packed the boat and prepared to set off.

  They were a mixed bunch. The youngest was a ten-year-old girl called Olivia who’d got separated from her older brother during the battle at Lambeth Bridge. She was desperate to find him, though, and had been miserable at the Tower this last year. She was a skinny, nervous little thing and DogNut hoped she could hold it together. Still, she was brave enough to risk the journey, despite how frightened she obviously was – DogNut gave her some credit for that. Just so long as she didn’t slow them down …

  Olivia wasn’t the only girl coming along. There was Jessica as well. Jessica was DogNut’s age. Like Olivia she’d lost contact with the group she was travelling with in the confusion of the battle and ended up at the Tower. She said she wanted to find her friends, but DogNut reckoned the main reason she was coming along was that she’d recently split up with her boyfriend and wanted to get away from him. She was moody and hard work at the best of times, but now she was miserable as hell and not great company. They were limited to eight people so DogNut was glad of three strong fighters: Marco, Felix and Al. Marco and Felix were two of DogNut’s old mates from the Imperial War Museum who were mainly coming along for the adventure and to help him. They were very close but couldn’t seem to stop arguing and putting each other down. Marco was nice to everyone, and pretty popular; Felix, on the other hand, was always getting into fights for speaking his mind. Al was a lumpy-faced kid with a fat nose and big teeth who wanted to find his sister, Maria. DogNut referred to the three of them as the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, though never to Al’s lumpy face. He had a mean temper and was a vicious fighter.

  The best fighter of them all, though, was a giant of a boy called Finn. It was just a mighty shame that he’d cut his forearm a few days ago, and the wound had become infected. His arm was bandaged and in a sling. He couldn’t fight and he couldn’t row, but he was determined to come along anyway. He’d been travelling across south London with a group of friends from his school in Forest Hill when they’d been caught up in the fire. They’d separated, some had gone west and one or two, including Finn, had travelled north where they’d eventually come to the Tower. He was hoping to find out what had happened to the others. Finn didn’t say very much and was even quieter since his injury. DogNut was hacked off that he was out of action. He was very strong for his age and looked about eighteen. He’d always been a good guy to have at your side in a fight. DogNut could hardly stop him from coming, though, and even w
ith a dodgy arm he’d be way more use than Olivia.

  The final member of the expedition was Courtney, who would be sitting next to DogNut on the boat. Courtney and Aleisha, the girl who’d drowned when the sightseeing boat sank, had been best friends with Brooke, and DogNut knew that Courtney was desperate to be reunited with her. They’d been inseparable and Courtney missed her terribly. She was a big, heavy girl who had grown into a tough and fearless fighter, and DogNut was glad to have her along.

  Five fighters and three passengers. Not bad numbers. But eight fighters would have been better …

  DogNut supervised them as they stowed food and water, blankets and armour and weapons in the bottom of the boat. He was their boss and was pleased to see that they all did what he told them without grumbling. Here at the Tower he was captain of the Pathfinders, the name Jordan Hordern had given to the kids who went out scavenging, so he was used to giving orders. They were all taking orders from General Jordan Hordern, however. He was the big man. DogNut would only ever be second or third in line. Not this time, though. No, on this expedition he would be number one. He had to make sure the kids remembered that and did as they were told.

  He smiled to himself. Numero Uno. Admiral of the Fleet. Top Dog.

  There was a shout from the riverside and he looked over to see a small group of kids walking on to the metal pier where they were loading the boat. It was Jordan Hordern and Ed and three of the Tower guards carrying halberds. DogNut went over to meet them.

  ‘You all set?’ Ed asked.

  ‘Guess so.’

  ‘You sure about this?’ Jordan squinted at him through his thick glasses. DogNut shrugged.

  ‘You’re a useful man to have around,’ Jordan went on.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ said DogNut theatrically. ‘Bringing treasure from around the world!’

  Jordan didn’t smile. He didn’t have much of a sense of humour.