He gave a girlish cry and crumpled to the floor, letting go of Scarface. Ella was breathing so hard it hurt her chest. She was crying. But she’d done it. The father was down …
He rolled on to his front, leaving the club behind, pushed himself up on to his hands like someone doing exercises and stared at Ella. He didn’t look angry or in pain, he just looked as if there was something he needed to do and nothing was going to stop him. He began to move, pulling himself along on his arms, eyes fixed on Ella. She went over to the door and started to open it when she saw the huge head of a dog sticking its nose in the crack and snuffling like the mother had done earlier. She slammed the door shut as it started to bark.
Still the father was coming, hauling himself through the blood and the slime on the concrete floor, his face a mess of boils and sores. Much nearer now. Ella backed away from him. He was making a sort of brushing sound as the air came out through his blocked nose. His eyes all the while staring at Ella with that clear, serious look.
Unable to see what was behind her, Ella tripped and stumbled, went dancing back and crashed into an iron support pillar. She slid down on to her bottom, too surprised to feel any pain. And still the father came on, one hand forward, then the other, dragging himself over the dead bodies.
Ella looked around for something to defend herself with and saw Daniel’s head sitting on the floor. It was as if he was looking at her. His lips had shrunk back from his teeth so that he was smiling, laughing even. Laughing at the useless little girl who thought she could hurt a grown-up.
Ella closed her eyes. She’d finally had enough. There was nothing left in her. She gave a little laugh. There wasn’t even any fear left in her. It had all been used up. Let him come. Let him do what he was going to do and then it would all be over. Maybe she’d see Sam in heaven. That would be nice.
The bang was so loud it left Ella’s ears ringing. She wondered if the father had hit her. But she didn’t feel anything. And there had been a flash behind her eyelids. She forced them open, forced herself to look. The father was lying on his side, blood leaking out of him.
He’d been shot.
‘Scarface?’ she said, looking around.
‘No,’ said a voice, very close, almost at her side, and she saw Harry sitting propped up against the wall of the barn, holding Scarface’s shotgun. Ella crawled over to him, too weak to stand.
‘Harry?’
‘He gave me the gun.’ Harry’s face was white, spotted with blood.
‘Your friend,’ he went on. ‘There were only two shells left. I was saving the last one. It’s done now.’
‘Oh, Harry,’ said Ella. She couldn’t think what else to say.
Harry nodded over to where Scarface was lying.
‘He tried to save me,’ he said. ‘He’s all right, you know.’
‘No, he’s hurt.’
‘He’s hurt … Idiot. I mean he’s an all-right guy. All night he stood over me. Fighting them off. I couldn’t move. Some of the bastards got to me. The girls ran away. Went up the ladder. I don’t blame them. There was just too many of the bastards. And some of them, they could climb. Yeah. Couldn’t believe that. Never seen it before. They tried to get up the ladder. Your friend, he pulled them down.’
Harry grunted in pain and his eyelids flickered. Ella tried to focus on the boy, not what had happened to him. She stared into his eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at the rest of him. She had caught a glimpse, though, just enough to see that his legs were missing.
‘Are you all right, Harry?’ she asked and immediately felt stupid. Of course he wasn’t all right.
‘Are you all right, Harry?’ he replied in his slightly sneery way. He couldn’t help himself.
‘You’re bleeding a lot.’
‘You’re bleeding a lot.’ His voice was feeble.
‘I hope you don’t die, but I don’t know what to do.’
‘I don’t know what to do …’ Harry paused, looked like he was going to cry. ‘Just hold my hand,’ he said.
Ella held his hand. It felt cold and was trembling. After a while it stopped trembling and Harry smiled.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you weren’t hurt.’
‘That was a good shot, Harry. You fixed that bloody father all right.’
‘Fixed that bloody father … Didn’t I just? BOOM!’ Harry laughed.
‘I think that was the last one,’ said Ella. ‘The grown-ups have all gone.’
‘The grown-ups have all gone,’ said Harry. This time not in a sneery way, but in a happy way, like it was a good thing. Which it was.
‘They’re someone else’s problem now,’ he added, and then he closed his eyes and didn’t say anything else, and his hand went stiff and Ella knew he was dead without having to check.
Harry was all right in the end.
She made her way across the barn. Not looking. Not looking. Too many bodies. Wanting to be sick. Wondering how she was even still moving. She found Scarface sprawled on his back, arms flung wide. His bandage had come off and there was a thin trail of blood where the father had dragged him. She pressed her ear to his chest like she’d done before. And, like before, she heard a faint beating. She put her hands on either side of his damp head and shook him. His face looked worse than ever. Like an old toy the dogs had left behind. Mangled and chewed out of shape. He was a thing. But he was an alive thing.
And he was all Ella had.
‘Come on,’ she said, shaking him harder. ‘You’re not dead. You can’t just lie there. You’re too big for me to move. We have to get away from here. I need you to look after me. You’re only an ugly old grown-up, an ugly old thing, but you looked after me before and you have to do it again. I’ll look after you, I’ll help make you well, we’ll look after each other – how about that? You need to wake up, though, you need to listen to me: I won’t let you die. I can’t have anyone else die, even if you are just a freak, a sicko, one of them, even if you can’t talk and you’re no use as a friend. You’re just an ugly old hunter, a munter, a face-ache, but you’re my hunter. You’re my Face-Ache.’
A tear rolled down her face and fell on to Scarface, and she sniffed and wiped her nose. She hit his chest with her fists.
‘I don’t even know if you can hear me, but if you can hear me you can understand me, and if you could talk I don’t know what you’d say. I don’t know you, I don’t know who you are, so what would you say to me? You’d probably tell me to shut up and not be such a little girl. Well, I don’t mind what you think. I wouldn’t mind whatever you said as long as you’d just wake up and help me. Wake up, Face-Ache! Wake up!’
But he didn’t wake up.
It was no use. He was just lying there, slowly bleeding to death. Ella couldn’t help him. She couldn’t move him. All she could try to do was help herself.
She forced herself to stand up, turned her back on him and headed for the ladder. She might be able to see a way out of here without being killed by the dogs.
As she put her foot on the first rung, she heard a voice behind her.
‘I can talk,’ it said.
She turned round. Scarface had his good eye open and had raised his head enough to be able to see her.
‘What did you say?’
‘I said I can talk. And I’m not a grown-up.’
16
Ella was in the chicken shed. And she was crying. This place had always been so full of noisy life, and now it was quiet and still and dead. When she got there, she’d found the door open. The padlock hanging from the clasp with the keys still in it. The sisters had been there. And when they’d left they hadn’t even bothered to lock the door. Which meant the dogs had got in. They’d gone crazy in there. Must have just run round and round killing the chickens, eating a few, but leaving most of them lying on the floor.
Dead.
Ella felt so sorry for Scarface. He’d tried to protect all this and in the end it had been the girls who’d messed everything up. Ella picked out a few birds that w
eren’t too badly mangled and put them in her carrying bag. At least they wouldn’t all go to waste.
She went back out and rescued Scarface’s keys from the padlock. Finding them had been the easiest thing she had to do. Going into the farmhouse was going to be the hardest.
The dogs had gone. There were no more living grown-ups on the farm. It was just her now. She walked up to the front of the farmhouse, key held out ready, and waited. Trying to get brave enough to open the front door. In all the time she’d been here Scarface had never let her go inside, although he’d sneak in there at the end of every day, and in her mind she’d built it up to be a big deal. There was something in there. Something bad. It wasn’t just the fire. It was worse than that. She just knew it. Although she was finding it hard to think of anything that could be worse than what she’d been through in the last few hours. How she was still walking around and doing things she had no idea. Except that when you were busy doing things you didn’t have time to think about other stuff. The quicker she got everything done, the quicker she could get away from this place. Already the stink from the dead bodies was foul, and it would only get worse as they started to rot.
‘The dogs will eat some of them, the flies will lay their eggs and their maggots will have the rest,’ Scarface had said. ‘And they’ll spread disease. If we stay here we’ll die from it.’
Ella was still trying to get used to him speaking. Not that he’d exactly said a lot. His voice sounded croaky and cracked and the words seemed to get stuck in his throat.
He’d only really said five things so far.
He’d told Ella that they couldn’t stay here.
He’d told her that he had another hiding place, away from the farm, and together they were going to get there, whatever it took.
He’d told her that he had an emergency kit in the cellar of the farmhouse that contained all they needed to survive for a few days.
He’d told her where exactly to find the kit.
And he’d told her that she wasn’t to go anywhere else inside the house.
When Ella had asked him if it was dangerous, he hadn’t said anything.
That was it.
So now here she was. The windows of the house were dark and she wondered whether Scarface had boarded them up. All this time it had been sitting here, in the middle of the yard, with its black windows and black walls. And she was going inside it.
She slid the key into the lock. It turned easily and the door clicked open. As it did, she heard a noise. A sort of humming noise, as if from an engine, and she had the spooky feeling that the house was somehow alive.
She pushed the door open wider. Stepped over the mat. Wiped her feet out of habit. The noise was all around her now. It felt hotter in there than outside and the feeling that the house was alive was even stronger. There was a stink in here as well. A stink of damp and mould. The stair carpet was green and grey from fungus, and more climbed up the walls like ivy.
Turn left into the kitchen, Scarface had said and Ella did as she’d been told. The kitchen was neat and tidy, everything in its place, except that the walls were streaked from water leaking in and it was crawling with flies. They covered every surface and, as she passed the windows, a great swarm of them took off from the glass and swirled round her head in a black cloud. Light burst into the room. The windows hadn’t been boarded up, they’d been covered in a layer of flies, like a living curtain.
She put her hands up to protect her hair and face and waved them around to keep the flies from landing. Some battered into her and she shook her head. She carried on walking quickly to the door on the far side like she’d been told, snapped on her torch and opened it.
It’ll be dark in the cellar …
There was a short corridor leading to the cellar, with hooks along the wall for coats and a rack for shoes and boots. The door was at the end. When Ella got to it, she once again selected the right key and then started to go down.
She couldn’t stop. Couldn’t think about it.
Don’t be scared. There’s nothing down there. So long as you do exactly what I tell you, there’s no way there’ll be anything alive in there …
Yeah. Except the flies, filling the place with their noise.
You won’t be scared, will you?
No. Of course not. It was just her and the flies. But the light from the torch was jumping about all over the place and her teeth were clamped so tightly together to stop them from rattling that her jaw was aching. Halfway down Ella stopped to throw up, spattering the creaky wooden steps with watery sick.
When she got to the bottom, she found a small dry cellar. Cobwebs covered the walls – the spiders in this house must be fat as mice – and there, in the corner, just as Scarface had described it, was a large metal box with a padlock on it. Once again Ella selected the right key and tried to poke it in the lock with trembling hands. It took her several goes and she swore at herself until she got it right.
Get the kit and get out. Don’t look in any other rooms …
Inside the box was a rucksack. It was a big green army thing with a camouflage pattern and it was almost too heavy for her to lift. The first few times she got it halfway out and let it slip back. Eventually, though, she managed to haul it over the edge and it fell to the floor with a thump, sending up an explosion of dust.
She dragged it across the floor and began to bump it up the steps. The dust and dirt in the house were sticking to her sweaty skin and she had to keep spitting it out of her mouth and trying to cough her throat clear.
It took her ages to get the rucksack up the steps, but when at last it was up she found it much easier to haul down the corridor and through the kitchen to the hallway. It got caught on something in the kitchen doorway, though, and she tugged and pulled until it came away with a jerk and she staggered back, exhausted, and fell on to the main staircase, surrounded by a cloud of buzzing flies. Ella closed her eyes, let them land on her, ignoring the tickle as they explored her face, pretended she was dead and nothing could annoy her. Nothing could hurt her. She could easily fall asleep now, but another gush of sick woke her up and this time it sprayed over her shoes.
She stood up. Head throbbing. Scarface was waiting for her outside the barn. Between the two of them they’d managed to get him outside into the fresh air and sunlight – half walking, half crawling – Ella struggling to hold him up and pull him along. She wondered now how on earth they were going to get the two of them and this heavy old rucksack away from the farm and to the woods where Scarface’s hideout was.
Best not to think about that. Best to just keep going.
She looked up the staircase. The humming of the flies filled the house. Filled her head. She could just turn now and go out of the front door. Leave the house behind.
Don’t look in any other rooms …
Why not? What was in here? Why did he always come here after they’d been out hunting and never let her in? What was his secret? And he must have thousands. Like being able to speak. That was a big one. She really knew nothing about him.
Before Ella knew what she was doing she was climbing the stairs, following her torch beam like a moth as it slid up the mouldy stair carpet.
The house smelt worse upstairs, and it wasn’t just the smell of damp. There was something else. The charred, sour, smoky smell from the fire. The walls up here were black. Light came in through the broken roof and she looked up at a cold grey sky. There was a closed and charred bedroom door right in front of her. Why was she here? This was stupid. When someone tells you not to open a door, you don’t open it, do you?
All you can think about, though, is what might be on the other side. And this would probably be her only chance to find out.
She got her torch ready, pointing straight ahead, and pushed the door open. At first she couldn’t work out what she was seeing.
And then she understood.
17
The bedroom was full of heads. A great mound of them, carefully stacked. The ones at the
bottom were not much more than skulls, with the flesh dried up and the skin stretched and brown, bones and teeth showing through. But, as each layer piled up towards the ceiling, the heads got fresher and fresher. Some of the ones on the top layer Ella recognized as grown-ups they’d hunted together. Not that any dead grown-up ever really looked fresh – they were rotten and eaten away even before they died.
There was a thick covering of flies crawling over the mound, and maggots everywhere, wriggling in the eye sockets and spilling out of open mouths. They were shiny and pale. Munching away. Plus, there was something else. That wormy grey stuff she’d seen dripping from Scarface’s bag. It oozed here and there from the heads on the top row, trickling down to the skulls below.
Ella closed the door. She hadn’t seen it. That’s what she’d tell herself. It wasn’t real. She glanced in through the open door of another bedroom and saw a similar sight. The house was full of them. She swallowed. Felt sick rising up her throat again. They were only heads, only the heads of dirty grown-ups.
No … The house was empty, remember? Just an ordinary farmhouse. There was nothing in it. She hadn’t seen anything …
She went quickly down the stairs, picked up the rucksack and pulled it out of the front door, which she locked carefully behind her. The house and its secrets could stay there.
When Ella eventually got to him, Scarface looked to be asleep, but he opened one eye and peered at her when she got close.
‘Water,’ he said.
‘OK.’
She fetched a plastic bottle of water from the stash in the barn and tipped some into his mouth. His own head didn’t look much different to the dead ones in the farmhouse. There were fresh cuts to add to the scars that covered his skin. There were so many chunks missing from him it was like the maggots had been at him already. He didn’t seem able to open his bad eye any more. That was OK. She didn’t like that bloody, dead jelly.
The Hunted (The Enemy Book 6) (Enemy 6) Page 9