So many of them. It took ages for them all to pass. Shadowman held back. Waiting for his moment.
Finally the last few stragglers shuffled past and he got ready to head off in the opposite direction.
Except …
What were they doing? Where were they going? He remembered his revelation of last night, about how dangerous the strangers would be if they properly united. If they could join others like themselves, band together into larger and larger gangs, be a real army.
Until last night such a thought would never have entered his mind. Now, though, he was seeing something horribly new and dangerous. He had to follow them. He told himself that he was only making sure that he knew where they were, so that he could avoid them, but he knew it was something more than that.
Know your enemy.
And they were the enemy. A real threat. This organized rabble. This terrifying …
What?
What could he call them?
He’d always liked to name things. If you put a label on something, it was yours – you owned it. That was why he was so frustrated at not to be able to think of a proper name for the fourth stranger in St George’s little gang of lieutenants.
He’d spent his life following, observing, naming … Now he could put his skills to good use. He sneaked out into the road and set off after them. The secret survival hoard had been a sign. But it was a sign that he had misread. He’d been given what he needed, not to go back to the palace, but to survive on the streets here and keep an eye on the strangers.
There was only one thing. If he was going to spy on this army of the sick, he’d need to give them a name.
It would come to him.
54
DogNut, Courtney, Marco, Felix and Finn were in the library where Chris Marker and his assistants had set up camp. Chris was sitting at one end of a long table with a huge leather-bound volume open in front of him, writing carefully by hand on the blank creamy-white pages. Assistants sat on either side of him, all writing away in similar ledgers. There was a peaceful air of quiet study. The assistants were listening intently to DogNut, looking up now and then, before tilting their noses back to their work.
They’d been here all day, Dog Nut’s team, taking it in turns to tell their stories, and now it was his turn. He was the last to go and not enjoying it. He’d been telling them everything he could remember about what had happened since his mum and dad died and he’d had to face up to the new reality of a disease-ruined world. He had told how he’d left his council block and joined Jordan Hordern’s crew. How they’d fought their way into the Imperial War Museum, and how they’d lived there until they’d been forced to leave by the fire.
As he talked, the sun slowly went down and one of Chris’s assistants lit a row of candles that had been placed down the middle of the table. They gave a comforting, mellow glow. Courtney felt like she was in some medieval film, or the sort of programme you used to get on the BBC about monks and things.
DogNut paused, scratched his stubbly head. Not sure how to carry on. His voice was hoarse. He was tired of talking. The day had seemed to go on forever. He couldn’t believe that he had delayed going back to the Tower for this. He’d been so keen to get here and now the thought of spending just one more night was torture. He looked out of the window. Getting darker all the time.
Whatever happened he was leaving first thing in the morning.
‘Go on,’ said Chris, pen hovering over the page.
‘Look, I ain’t any good at this,’ said DogNut. ‘I don’t know what’s important. I don’t really know how to tell stories, only jokes.’
‘You’re doing fine,’ said Chris Marker. ‘Don’t stop now. Let me worry about how to make it into a story.’
‘How you gonna do that, though? It’s just, like, stuff that happened.’
‘There are stories everywhere; you just have to untangle them.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Yeah. So go on then.’
DogNut went on. He told the story of how he and his friends had found Ed fighting for his life at Lambeth Bridge. How they’d got split up from everyone else and ended up drifting down the river on the tour boat. He told about their arrival at the Tower, and then it had been left to him to tell all that happened in the last year. How Jordan Hordern had organized them into military units. How they’d made the Tower secure and protected it. How they grew food. The fights they’d had. The things they’d found. The friends they’d lost.
Courtney and the others chipped in now and then, adding their own memories, filling in the gaps for him and correcting some of his mistakes. He wasn’t very good at telling it clearly. He kept stopping and starting and going off on side stories and forgetting what he was talking about, but Chris Marker remained patient, occasionally asking him to clarify something or repeat it so that he was sure he understood correctly.
And then finally DogNut came to the story of their journey here. Of the boat trip back up the river, of meeting Nicola and her kids at the Houses of Parliament, of Bozo and the hunters. He laughed about their short stay at the palace and outwitting David. He didn’t laugh when he came to the part about the Collector. He mumbled and muttered and became very vague when he told about leaving Olivia behind. Courtney saw he was having difficulties and took over, quickly filling in the last part – arriving at the museum and going back with Paul and Robbie and the others to kill the Collector.
Once DogNut was done Chris put down his pen and looked up, rubbing his eyes, which looked feeble and watery in the candlelight.
‘Thank you,’ he said, closing the book.
‘Not sure what use any of that’s gonna be,’ said DogNut. ‘The only thing I know for sure, talking about it, is I want to be back there at the Tower right now.’
‘You never know what’s going to be important in the future,’ said Chris. ‘There are loads of stories in London. There are kids out there now going through the same things as you, and they’re all parts of one big story. The story of our survival, of fights and victories, and defeats and death, friends being killed, enemies being slain.’
‘Slain?’ said DogNut. ‘Nobody says “slain”. You even sounding like a book.’
‘Why not?’ said Chris, and he tapped the leather cover of his ledger with his fingertips. ‘We’re all in a book – this book. We’re all in the story. Tonight we’re writing down your part in it, DogNut.’
‘Yeah, great,’ said DogNut. ‘To be honest I didn’t understand any of what you just said.’
‘Everything you’ve done since you left the Tower,’ said Chris patiently, ‘all the people you’ve met, it will all have an effect, and who knows where it will all end? It’s like dropping a stone in a pond, ripples go out in all directions.’
DogNut snorted through his nose. He was beginning to think Chris Marker was half mad. He’d never really known him before. This was the most he’d ever heard him say. Somehow this weird kid had come alive here, in this world of books.
‘There you go again, Chrissy-Boy,’ he said. ‘Hitting me with your deep stuff. You ain’t making it no clearer, bruv. Let me tell you.’
‘I suppose what I’m saying, DogNut, is that you’re part of history. We don’t know yet how important a part, but you’re in there all the same.’
‘Is anyone really gonna be interested in reading about me, though?’
‘I’m interested,’ said Chris, ‘and others will be too. We’re the new generation. We’re the survivors. We’re making a whole new world here. In the future, kids are going to want to know what happened. How it was. I think your journey, crossing London, could be really important, because you’ve taken the first steps to uniting all the kids around London, drawing us all together. It’s like someone coming from the other side of the world, like Marco Polo travelling to China, or Columbus arriving in America. You’ll all be important figures to future generations. You’ll all be heroes.’
‘Future generations?’ DogNut scoffed. ‘If we’re lucky.’
<
br /> ‘We’re going to make it, DogNut,’ said Chris.
‘Who says these future generations are gonna want to remember, though?’ said DogNut. ‘I’d of thought they’d want to forget all about this.’
‘No. History is important … You know what Winston Churchill said?’ asked Chris.
‘We’ll fight them on the beaches, or something.’
‘Yeah, he said that, but he also said that history is written by the victors.’
‘What’s that mean then?’
‘It means that if you win a war you can write the books and say you were the good guys and the losers were the bad guys.’
‘Yeah, OK, I’m on it. So what?’
‘I think it works the other way round as well,’ said Chris. ‘If you write the history, you’ll become the victor.’
‘You lost me again.’
‘If we make our own history, if we tell stories that bring us together, we’ll be stronger. It’ll give us something to believe in. The sickos can’t do that – they’re no better than animals – but we can. Every battle we win we have to tell the story over and over, so that we can win more battles. People love stories. They’ve told stories since even before they could write. Myths and legends, stories of heroes and villains, gods and monsters. Real things happened, the story got told and then the stories became legends. That’s what we’ve got to do – tell our own heroic stories.’
‘I don’t feel like much of a hero,’ said DogNut, and Courtney laughed. ‘Plodding across London, letting poor little Olivia die.’
‘It depends how you tell the story,’ said Chris, and he smiled at DogNut. ‘You’re Jack the giant-killer, and the Collector was an ogre in his castle, the Cyclops in his cave, the Minotaur in his labyrinth. Olivia was the virgin who was sent off to be sacrificed, and you’re the guys who tried to save her, who slew the monster once and for all so that nobody else would be eaten by him.’
‘Yeah, maybe when you put it like that it don’t sound so bad …’
‘That’s the power of storytelling. That’s why we have to control the stories – to control history. What was the Collector’s version? It was the story of a poor lonely man, the last of his kind, just trying to survive, and being ambushed in his den by vicious killers. That would make it very different. If we told it that way, we’d feel sorry for him, and then it’d make it harder to kill other sickos in the future. That’s why we have to tell the stories, so that we’re the heroes and the sickos are the monsters. We tell it our way.’
‘What are you saying, book-boy?’ DogNut was shaking his head slowly. ‘I keep thinking I got it and then you hit me with more words and it goes out my head.’
‘I’m saying you’re going to be a hero, DogNut, whether you like it or not.’
55
Jester was sewing a patch on to his coat by the glow of a fire. It was a small piece of material he’d cut from an old T-shirt of Shadowman’s. He’d found the shirt in a pile of clothes that Shadowman had left at the palace. Jester had brought it along with him in his satchel …
Just in case.
He had no doubt that Shadow was dead. This way he’d always remember him. When he got back to the palace, he’d find out whether Kate or Tom had made it. He doubted he’d ever see Alfie again, and would have some explaining to do if he did. Probably, though, he would distribute Alfie’s belongings among the other kids, and hold one item of clothing back.
To cut a patch from.
He put down the needle and thread, and stared into the fire, watching the embers. It was the closest thing to television any of them had now. You could stare into a fire and imagine it was anything you liked. You could be staring into another world. Witnessing the eruption of a volcano. The birth of a planet. The lights of a giant city from the air …
Or just a fire.
He rubbed his face. It was very late. Apart from the guards they’d posted around their camp, the others were all asleep. He was lucky. He knew that much. He’d stumbled across a group of kids who knew how to look after themselves. Two groups of kids, if he was going to be accurate. Each group had been holed up inside a different supermarket, and he gathered that they didn’t exactly get on. That was useful information. He’d tuck it away in case he needed to use it later. After he’d been rescued he’d managed to persuade both groups that they’d all be a lot better off at the palace. He was good at that kind of thing. Talking people round. And he knew that once he got these kids to the palace, if he wanted to keep them there, doing what David told them, he was going to need to use all his powers of persuasion, his skill at bending the truth. He was going to have to convince them that they were looking at something white when it was actually black.
These were tough kids who weren’t used to being told what to do by anyone else, but if he could make them believe that the palace was the best place to live in the whole of London, then David would have the best army around. It was going to be difficult. Not everyone took to David. Not everyone wanted to live under his rule. He drove Jester himself up the wall sometimes.
Yeah. He was going to be busy, and was already planning his strategy now. The Holloway kids weren’t all fighters. They had younger kids with them who would appreciate the greater safety and security on offer at the palace, so that was a start. It was their leaders who were going to be the most trouble. Although on that front Jester had had a little luck. Arran, the leader of the Waitrose kids, had been killed in a pitched battle with some particularly nasty grown-ups. A girl called Maxie seemed to have taken temporary charge, but he wasn’t sure how much authority she had. She’d be easy to deal with. The leader of the second group of kids, however, the ones from Morrisons, the bastards who had initially chased him away, was going to be harder. His name was Blue, and he was one tough case. David was going to have to offer him something he really wanted. Failing that, Jester would have to arrange for poor old Blue to be taken out of the picture. Jester wasn’t ever going to forgive him or his crew for driving him away with stones.
He’d get his revenge. He just had to wait for the right time. There was no hurry.
For now he just had to get them safely to the palace. When they saw the good life to be had there, it should soften them up.
The downside to Arran dying was that they’d all been held up for hours waiting for him to give up the ghost. And then Maxie had insisted on burning his body. By the time they’d reached Regent’s Park it had been dark, and they’d been attacked again, this time by wild animals. In the end they’d decided not to push on any further until it was light. Now they were camped out in a railed-off public garden at the end of the park. Guards patrolled the perimeters, a couple more kept watch from the roof of a groundsman’s hut. Jester felt perfectly safe. Having seen these kids in action, he was more than a little impressed.
He was tired. He’d sleep soon. For now, though, he was trying to make plans while it was quiet. How easy it had been in the old days, with mobile phones and email and Facebook. He could have had a long chat with David and warned him in advance of their arrival. Told him to lay it on thick, prepare a feast, put on a show. They could have banged their heads together until they’d come up with a solid plan. Instead he was having to fly solo for now.
Never mind. He was sure it would all work out fine. It wasn’t far to the palace from here, certainly not more than an hour. They’d be there before lunchtime tomorrow. In the end his trip had been successful, more successful than he’d ever dared to imagine. He’d hoped to maybe find a few strays and outcasts who might want to join up with a larger group for protection and instead he’d found these tough and well-organized warriors. It was a shame he’d lost Alfie along the way. And probably Kate and Tom – God knows where they’d ended up. Good luck to them.
And then there was Shadowman. That was a real shame. He’d liked Shadow. The closest thing to a best friend he’d had in the world. In the end, though, Shadow had made a sacrifice for the greater good. Look what Jester was bringing back in exchange for his l
ife. At least thirty new recruits. If there was anybody up there in the sky keeping score, couldn’t they see that Jester had done the right thing? What use was it living in small scattered groups around London? They needed to be in one big group. That was the future.
Surely Jester had done more good than bad.
No, not bad, wrong.
He had done more right than wrong.
Hell. Had he even done wrong at all? It wasn’t his fault Shadowman had walked inside his swing. If you wanted to blame anyone, blame the strangers, blame the bloody grown-ups who’d left the world in this mess.
Don’t blame him. Not Jester. All Jester was doing was surviving. That’s what mattered now. To get through all this and rebuild the world.
Yes. Everything he had done was for the future of mankind.
When he’d finished sewing on the patch, he would sleep well tonight.
And if Shadowman himself was up in heaven looking down at him, he was sure he’d understand.
56
The strangers weren’t going to give up. They’d been besieging the house since before it had got dark. How long ago was that? A few hours, definitely. From his new hiding-place, in a burnt-out family home a safe distance away from the action, Shadowman had trouble seeing exactly what was going on in the darkness. He could hear well enough, though. Hear the strangers’ grunts and yowls, the creak of breaking wood, the occasional snap. There were kids inside that house and the strangers intended to get at them no matter how long it took.
He’d followed them all day. At first they’d meandered aimlessly about the streets with no real purpose and he’d moved from house to house behind them, keeping far enough away that there was no danger of them smelling him, but close enough that he wouldn’t lose them. It wasn’t difficult. They moved in a slow, shuffling mass, stopping every few minutes and, for no obvious reason, milling in the road, before switching direction and wandering off again. Even if the leaders got too far ahead Shadowman always kept one eye on the stragglers – he couldn’t let his guard down – and kept his other eye in the back of his head as smaller groups were constantly appearing out of nowhere, curious to see what was going on. In the past Shadowman had seen rival gangs of strangers attack each other, like packs of wild dogs, but that hadn’t happened today. These strangers, under the leadership of St George, were working together as an army, just as Shadowman had feared.
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