The Fear

by Charlie Higson

  ‘You’re a good bloke, DogNut,’ Finn said. ‘You did enough. You got us out of there. We’re not heroes. We’re just kids.’

  ‘But I won’t be able to live with it,’ said DogNut miserably.

  ‘Yes, you will.’

  ‘Yeah? And how would you know that?’

  ‘After my mum and dad died,’ said Finn, ‘I tried to look after my three younger brothers. And I couldn’t do it. I messed up. They all got killed. I try not to think about it. That was my old life. This is my new life.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said DogNut. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘I don’t talk about it. Now shut up and stop wriggling.’

  ‘But, Finn –’

  ‘I said shut up. How do you think I’ve felt all day, being like this? My arm out of action? Not being able to do anything to help? I’ve felt useless. But there was nothing I could do about it. Just as there’s nothing you can do about Olivia now. What happened to her, we’ll all share it. OK? It’s all our fault.’

  ‘OK,’ said DogNut. ‘You can put me down now.’

  ‘You won’t do anything stupid?’

  ‘No.’

  Finn dropped DogNut back on to his feet and the five of them walked on in silence for a while.

  They were slightly disorientated and weren’t a hundred per cent sure where they were, but Marco had a pretty good sense of direction and managed to lead them back on to the Brompton Road without any major detours. The main road was busier than the side-roads, however. Small clumps of sickos skulked in the doorways of buildings.

  The safest way to get past them was to run, so the kids sped up, first jogging then hammering full pelt as they started to attract the attention of the grown-ups who wandered after them.

  The kids were sprinting now, as fast as they could go, trying to ignore the burning in their lungs and the tiredness in their legs.

  Running helped clear DogNut’s mind and he was able to close himself off from his thoughts. All he had to do was put one foot in front of the other and keep pushing himself. There was nothing more to his existence. He had to build a little box and put Olivia in it, and leave it back there in the sicko’s house. He had to forget about her, just as he’d had to forget about so many other friends since the disease had changed everything forever.

  It was working. He was running from her.

  ‘Look out!’

  Marco’s shout alerted him to the fact that a big knot of sickos had spread out across the road in front of them.

  ‘Keep going!’ DogNut yelled, and they smashed into the grown-ups. Apart from Finn, they were all still armed. Felix had lost his spear, but had a big hunting knife. Courtney had her golf club, and she used it to crack the skulls of two slow-moving mothers. DogNut’s sword slashed right and left. Marco was busy with his spear. And Finn used the heel of his good hand to shove anyone aside who got in his way. They hit the sickos so hard and so fast and so unexpectedly that they rammed their way through and out the other side before the grown-ups even really knew what was happening.

  Their small victory gave the kids fresh hope and energy, and they sprinted on, feeling like they could run forever. They were aware, though, that they were picking up more and more sickos behind them as they went. True, the sickos were slow and lumbering and couldn’t keep up – very few of them had anything like the speed and fitness of the gym bunnies they’d met earlier – but, nevertheless, once they had your scent they’d doggedly follow. You couldn’t afford to slow down or stop until you were well away. The kids felt like they were dragging every sicko in London along behind them in a big net, drawing in more and more of them as they went.

  They were all too aware that there was a shambling, shuffling, mindless army of the half dead following them. They couldn’t keep running all night. If they didn’t get to somewhere safe, they were going to be in trouble.

  It was all DogNut’s world consisted of now, running, running, running … About three months ago one of the search parties at the Tower had discovered a small warehouse crammed with Nike trainers. They’d carted boxes and boxes of them back to the Tower. So now the kids might not have clean clothes and fresh food, but they were never short of fresh trainers. DogNut was glad he was wearing a new pair now as he pounded down the centre of the road, his heavy sword clutched in his hand.

  ‘How far is it?’ Felix gasped. ‘I can’t keep this up much longer.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said DogNut. ‘Just keep going.’

  ‘You idiots!’ Marco called out, half laughing, half wheezing. ‘We’re there! That’s the museum!’

  22

  DogNut couldn’t believe it. They’d been barely a ten-minute walk away when they’d been ambushed. If only they’d known they were so close, maybe they wouldn’t have made the detour at Harrods, maybe they wouldn’t have ended up in the sicko’s house, maybe Olivia wouldn’t have died, maybe, maybe, maybe …

  In their panic, in the dark, eyes focused on the ground directly in front of them, they hadn’t noticed the vast gothic building to their right, with two great lines of arched windows along the front, and a pair of tall towers spiking up into the starlit sky on either side of the entrance. With more towers on either end, the building looked more like a cathedral than a museum.

  The museum ran down the whole of one side of the road, almost as far as they could see, opposite a row of grand houses. It stood behind a strip of open ground edged by the type of black iron railings you saw everywhere in London. A group of well-armed boys was watching them suspiciously from a small pointy-roofed gatehouse beside the main gates. They bristled when DogNut and his gang ran over, and stayed put on their side of the gates.

  DogNut and his friends were suddenly hit by a wave of exhaustion and for a moment none of them could speak. They stood there, hearts hammering, panting and gasping, doubled over, fighting for the breath they needed to talk.

  Finally one of the boys from the museum walked over to the gates and looked at the new arrivals, chin raised, giving nothing away.

  ‘Where you from?’ he asked.

  DogNut managed to blurt out the words ‘Tower of London’ and the boy nodded. He was short but beefy-looking, about fifteen years old, with spiky, gelled hair and wearing a battered leather jacket. His nose was flattened, broken. It must have happened after the sickness or a doctor would have fixed it.

  ‘You the kids Ryan the hunter took to the palace?’

  DogNut straightened up. Stared at the boy, a look of pained amazement on his face.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Is one of you called DogNut?’

  ‘Yeah. I am. But I don’t get it.’

  ‘Ryan was here before on business. Told us about you.’

  ‘You gonna let us in then?’ DogNut gasped.

  The boy looked away, in the direction the kids had come from.

  ‘They with you?’ he asked, and DogNut turned to see what he was looking at.

  The sickos were arriving.

  ‘Open the gate, man,’ DogNut pleaded.

  ‘First you tell us who exactly you’re looking for. See that it all checks out.’

  Courtney had her breath back now. ‘We’re mainly looking for Brooke,’ she said. ‘She here?’

  ‘You’re friends of Brooke’s, yeah?

  ‘Course we are!’ Courtney shouted. ‘Now open this bloody gate, will you?’

  ‘Brooke recognized your names when we told her,’ said the boy.

  ‘Just open the gate!’ Marco shouted.

  The boy unlocked the gates and casually swung them open.

  ‘Nice to see you got a sense of urgency,’ said Felix as he pushed past him.

  The boy made a dismissive gesture and nodded to where the group of sickos had stopped and were holding back on the far side of the road.

  ‘They know better than to come over here,’ he said and waited for the last of the new arrivals to come through before slamming the gates closed and locking them.

  ‘My name’s Robbie,’ he said. ‘
I’m in charge of security here. You cause any stink and you got to deal with me, OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Good to meet you, Robbie,’ said DogNut, and they slapped palms.

  ‘Let me ask you one question,’ said Robbie. ‘How come you never asked the hunters about Brooke?’

  ‘We did ask them,’ Courtney protested. ‘I’m sure we did.’

  ‘We told them we was looking for David,’ said Marco, taking off his helmet and wiping sweat from his forehead. ‘I’m not sure we ever mentioned Brooke or Justin to them.’

  ‘That was stupid,’ said Felix.

  ‘You calling me stupid?’ said Marco.

  ‘We’re all stupid. We was so thinking about David we never mentioned the others.’

  ‘How long ago was Ryan here?’ DogNut asked.

  ‘Couple of hours, maybe.’

  ‘I can’t believe we’ve been so dumb,’ said DogNut. He wanted to punch something. If he’d only thought to ask the hunters about Brooke then Olivia wouldn’t be dead now.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Courtney. ‘We didn’t know. All that matters is we’re here now.’

  ‘I’ll take you inside,’ said Robbie, and he led them past some trees on to a long ramp that curved up towards the museum doors. DogNut got a glimpse of crops planted in what had once been lawns along the front of the building.

  The main doors were set into a vast carved stone archway, and another guard was waiting here. He exchanged a couple of words with Robbie then opened the doors to let them in.

  DogNut was impressed with the set-up. It reminded him of being back at the Imperial War Museum, where their leader, Jordan Hordern, had insisted on strict discipline and round-the-clock security. There had always been guards posted at the entrance. And since they’d moved from the Imperial War Museum to the Tower of London the routine had been even more military. DogNut wasn’t sure exactly what he’d been expecting when he got here, but not this. It struck him, though, that if anyone was going to survive in London these days they’d have to be well organized and well prepared. He was thinking all this as he wandered into the massive, candlelit hall inside and was further distracted by the fossilized skeleton of a dinosaur standing in the centre, with a huge long neck and tail. So it was that he didn’t really register that someone was asking him something. A brown-haired girl wearing an old-fashioned dress and carrying a lamp.

  ‘I’m sorry, what?’ he said finally. ‘Did you say something, babes?’

  The girl tilted her head to one side and gave him a dirty look, and it was then that he realized.

  It was Brooke.

  23

  DogNut shouted with joy and threw his arms round Brooke, before she pushed him off.

  ‘You dozy sod,’ she said. ‘You didn’t recognize me, did you?’

  ‘Course I didn’t,’ he said. ‘Look at you! You ain’t blonde no more. You ain’t wearing no make-up, plus you got on some kind of weird dress out of a boring history film.’

  ‘So you’re saying I ain’t pretty no more?’

  DogNut held her at arm’s length and studied her face. ‘You’re more beautiful than ever,’ he said, and he meant it. ‘Though I do prefer you blonde. You telling me it was fake all along? You bleached your hair?’

  ‘Duh,’ said Brooke. ‘Of course. There ain’t half as many blondes in this world as you think, Donut.’

  ‘It’s DogNut.’

  ‘No it ain’t,’ said Brooke. ‘To me you’ll always be Donut.’

  There was a shout from across the hall. ‘Hey, what about me?’ And Brooke spotted Courtney. She screamed and ran over to her, and the two of them held on to each other, dancing around, shrieking.

  ‘I don’t believe it! It’s you! My God! This is so cool …’

  ‘And what about Aleisha?’ Brooke said at last, breaking away from Courtney and looking around. ‘Did you bring her with you?’

  Courtney was instantly subdued; the life went out of her. Brooke knew what had happened without needing to ask and all she said was, ‘Where? When?’

  ‘That night,’ said Courtney sadly. ‘When we came across the river. After we got split up we found a boat, but we hit a bridge and it sank. Aleisha had already been wounded. She didn’t stand a chance.’

  Brooke hugged her friend and the two of them started crying, leaning against each other for support. DogNut didn’t know what to do. Whether he should go over and try to comfort them, or leave them to it. In the end he decided this was between the girls. Not his business. He had hardly known Aleisha, but he knew that the three of them had been inseparable.

  Courtney was sobbing into Brooke’s shoulder. She was aware that she was soaking her friend’s dress. But she couldn’t stop. Didn’t want to ever let go. Brooke felt warm and soft. Why had she ever thought that she didn’t want to find her? They belonged together. All the tension of the day was flowing out of her, and Brooke was absorbing it. Everything was going to be all right now.

  The spell was broken by DogNut who strolled up, rolling his head to loosen the tension in his neck.

  ‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘You gonna show us round or are you gonna just stand there snotting over each other?’

  The two girls separated, sniffed, and that was that. It was finished. They couldn’t mourn the loss of their friend any more. It would hurt too much. Aleisha was gone, but they still had each other. The words Courtney had said to DogNut earlier came back to her.

  They had to move on.

  ‘Yeah,’ Courtney said, looking around at their bizarre surroundings and wiping her face dry. ‘I wanna see how you’ve pimped this place up and then you are gonna have to, like, tell us everything that’s happened since we seen you last. Everything …’

  ‘I will, girl, don’t worry. Is a long story, though. Don’t you want to wash and eat and rest up first? You look worse than crap.’

  ‘Oh, thanks.’

  Brooke laughed. ‘Still the same grumpy old Courtney I know so well.’

  ‘I ain’t old, I ain’t grumpy …’

  ‘But you’re still my Courtney.’

  They burst into tears and hugged once more.

  ‘Oh, not again,’ said DogNut, and he made a big show of being appalled by this display of affection. Secretly, though, he was fighting back tears of his own and had a painful lump in his throat.

  ‘Enough of that,’ he said at last, pulling them apart. ‘I want to introduce you to the rest of our crew.’

  He called Marco, Felix and Finn over. Brooke vaguely remembered Marco and Felix, but had never met Finn before. He asked after his friends from Forest Hill School, and Brooke sadly shook her head.

  ‘I don’t recognize the names,’ she said.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Finn. ‘They could be anywhere.’

  He displayed no emotion. DogNut knew he must be gutted, though.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘We want the tour.’

  ‘Follow me.’

  They walked with Brooke past the dinosaur skeleton.

  ‘This is Dippy,’ she said. ‘He’s a diplodocus.’

  ‘And who’s that up there?’ DogNut asked as they climbed the wide stone steps at the back of the hall. ‘He looks like God.’

  Sitting halfway up the stairs in an armchair, as if waiting for them, was the larger-than-life-size white marble statue of a bald, bearded man.

  ‘That’s Charlie Darwin,’ said Brooke, patting him affectionately on the head. ‘I love his shoes. They look so real!’

  DogNut studied the shoes. Brooke was right. It was hard to believe they were carved out of stone. They carried on to the top of the steps and walked through a gallery that ran along the side of the exhibition hall back in the direction they had come. There were monkey skulls here, alongside skulls from Stone Age man. Other cabinets contained stuffed apes and figures of people. There was something spooky about them in the half-light.

  ‘What’s all this?’ asked DogNut. ‘I didn’t know they kept humans in museums.’

&
nbsp; ‘It’s something to do with evolution,’ said Brooke. ‘Showing us where we come from. I’ve given all the monkeys names. That one’s Brian.’ She pointed to a hairy orang-utan with its arms in the air.

  ‘You need to get a stuffed sicko in there,’ said DogNut. ‘The latest stage in our evolution. Homo zombiens.’

  Brooke laughed and then stopped, leaning on the wall overlooking the great hall below. From here they could see just how massive the place was. Even the diplodocus looked small.

  ‘It’s like Hogwarts,’ said Courtney.

  ‘I often think that,’ said Brooke.

  ‘It’s bare big,’ said DogNut. ‘How many kids you got here?’

  ‘Seventy-three,’ said Brooke. ‘But we don’t use most of the place. Is way too big. Eight hundred people used to work here. There’s other buildings, office blocks, labs, everything. It goes on forever. We just use this bit round the main hall, couple of galleries off the sides, like the dinosaur one and the mammal galleries over there.’ She pointed to the opposite side of the hall. ‘We close most of it down at night. It’s too big to patrol and make safe. In the daytime we go all over. Except down to the lower level.’

  ‘Why not?’ Courtney asked.

  ‘There’s sickos down there.’

  ‘For real?’ said Courtney, eyes widening in fear.

  ‘For real.’ Brooke laughed and punched her playfully in the arm.

  ‘Ain’t nothing to get scared about, girl. Is just, when we got here, there was some sickos still in the museum. Staff, I guess. We chased them off, killed a load. Some went down into the basement. Is like a maze down there. All these rooms and corridors and secret hiding-places. This place is just too big to be able to control the whole thing. Goes on forever. We’ve locked all the doors we can to keep the sickos out, but you can hear them down there sometimes, in the sealed-off bits, moving around. Others get in from outside and they nest in the dark. They can’t never get up here, though, not any more. We fixed all that. Come on. I’ll show you where we all sleep.’

  At the end of the primates gallery there was a doorway leading to a long room off to the side.