The Dead

by Charlie Higson

  ‘I’ll take the soldiers,’ Bam whispered, checking his shotgun. ‘You two go for the policeman.’

  ‘I can’t do it,’ said Ed. ‘I can’t just kill them.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Bam. ‘Look at them. We’ll be doing them a favour, putting them out of their misery.’

  ‘No.’ Ed squatted down behind a police van, covering his face with his hands.

  ‘You do it. I can’t.’

  Jack tutted and drew his sword from its scabbard.

  ‘Wait here.’

  ‘All right.’

  Ed couldn’t watch. He crouched there, hands over his face. He heard his friends’ footsteps. There was a moment’s silence then there came two loud blasts, followed by the sounds of a scuffle and a body hitting the ground.

  ‘You can come out now,’ Jack called to Ed in a slightly sing-song way, as if talking to a toddler. ‘It’s all safe.’

  Ed stood up, still not wanting to look. He walked round the van and over to where Bam and Jack were waiting for him. He was aware of the dark shapes of bodies on the ground.

  He told himself that it didn’t make any difference. That these were just three more bodies to add to the piles of corpses that were already here. He forced his eyes round. He had to accept the way things were now. Somehow he had to become as hardened as Jack and Bam.

  Jack was wiping his sword clean on the dead policeman’s jacket. Bam was pulling the machine gun off the soldier.

  ‘You want this?’ he said, offering it to Jack. ‘I’m sticking with my shottie.’

  ‘I sure do.’

  ‘Do you know how to use that?’ Ed asked as Jack started turning the gun in his hands.

  ‘No – but I can find out.’

  Parked on the other side of the outer wall that surrounded the grounds were four open-backed lorries. The sort builders used to remove rubble from building sites. They were piled high with corpses. Next to them was a fleet of ambulances, their back doors hanging open, paramedics lying by the wheels.

  Whenever he’d watched the news he’d never imagined that one day he’d be part of a story. But now the news had come to town in a big way and there was no one left to record it. The corpses by the TV cameras were blind and deaf. There were no zombified news reporters standing there giving the viewers the statistics.

  ‘The whole population of London has been wiped out …’

  Ed went over to a military Jeep, where two squaddies with blackened faces and hands sat in the front seats as if waiting to drive off. They were wearing white facemasks, presumably to stop them breathing in anything noxious. Above the masks their eyes were clouded. Flies crawled all over them.

  They both had side arms in holsters.

  Ed carefully unbuckled the belt from the soldier in the passenger seat and strapped it round his waist. The pistol hung heavy and solid at his side. The driver had a pair of binoculars round his neck. Ed fished them off and chucked them over to Bam who thanked him with a big cheesy grin.

  Ed did a quick check of the bodies of the other soldiers and policemen. They were all wearing facemasks.

  He walked through the open gates and over to the line of ambulances where he jumped up into the back of one. There was a green-clothed paramedic lying on the floor, his face lumpy with yellow spots. His facemask hadn’t prevented him from getting sick, but Ed figured that if he could find one it would at least keep some of the smell out.

  With any luck there would be other useful stuff in here as well.

  He took off his backpack and went through the ambulance, grabbing anything that looked like it might come in handy and stuffing it in the bag. Painkillers, antiseptic, bandages, antibiotics, scalpels, syringes, rubber gloves, it was all good stuff. And there, finally, in a taped-up cardboard box, a supply of spare masks. He dumped a handful in the top of the bag, but kept three out.

  He hopped down off the ambulance. Jack and Bam were walking over discussing how the machine gun worked. Neither of them really had a clue.

  ‘You ready?’ said Jack when he saw Ed.

  ‘Here.’ Ed handed out the masks. ‘Put these on. They’ll protect you from the smell at least.’

  All the doors in the main stand were securely locked so the boys circled the building looking for another way in. Finally they came to a more modern part where the big glass doors stood open. There were more dead soldiers here, splayed out on the polished floor of a large entrance area. The boys peered cautiously into the gloom.

  ‘You first,’ said Bam, mock politely.

  ‘After you,’ said Jack. ‘I insist.’

  Ed pushed past them, shaking his head, determined to prove that he wasn’t a coward. The other two followed, laughing and jostling each other. The air inside felt trapped and stale. The boys tried not to gag. Their masks helped a little but there was still a stench of rotting meat mixed with a mouldy, mildewy smell. There was also a humming noise, as if there might be some machinery working somewhere nearby.

  They stepped over the bodies of two soldiers, who looked like they were holding each other in their arms, and went up some stairs.

  Ed was beginning to feel horribly faint and wobbly. He wanted to check the stadium out and then get the hell away from here as quickly as possible. He knew that dead bodies carried all sorts of diseases, like cholera and dysentery. Whenever there had been a natural disaster – and there seemed to have been loads before the big one, the sickness – earthquakes or hurricanes or terrible flooding, the news bulletins always went on about it – the risk of disease from unburied bodies. Well, there must have been thirty or forty of them outside, not counting the ones in the trucks. The thought of all those germs …

  This was a place of death.

  They climbed the stairs, trying the doors on every level, until they reached the top and at last found a way out into the stands. Bam was first through. He took a couple of steps and stopped.

  Ed heard him say two words.

  ‘Holy cow …’

  46

  Jack and Ed followed Bam out into the sunlight. He was standing there, frozen to the spot, too stunned to say anything.

  They were way up in a high-tech modern stand, a gleaming white construction of steel and concrete and glass. And below them was the vast expanse of the cricket pitch, every part of it filled with dead bodies. They were stacked in great mounds like a giant rubbish tip. The ones at the bottom were the most decomposed. If it wasn’t for their bright clothing and the bones sticking out here and there, they wouldn’t have been recognizable as human at all. The ones at the top were the freshest, though even they had been eaten away by disease and decay.

  There were several earth-moving vehicles standing idle. Diggers and bulldozers, JCBs, even a couple of cranes with scoops dangling from their gantries. One scoop still held a few bodies.

  And there were more bodies in the stands, dumped in the rows of green plastic seats, sitting there, like dead spectators at the ultimate gladiator fight. How many dead? Five thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand? Looking out over the mounds of corpses it was impossible to tell.

  The noise Ed had heard was flies, millions of them, swarming over the dead. They were not alone. Crows hopped about, rats crawled, seagulls flapped and screeched and squabbled with each other. Two dogs were digging into one of the piles of flesh to get at the bones.

  ‘Treasure beyond our wildest dreams,’ said Ed bitterly.

  Jack and Bam said nothing.

  Ed noticed several towers made out of logs and planks and scrap wood, like giant bonfires. They had large blue plastic canisters strapped to them. There were more canisters fixed around the stands.

  ‘This place is one giant funeral pyre,’ he said. ‘Looks like they were planning to burn the whole bloody lot. Or blow it sky high.’

  ‘They had the right idea,’ said Jack.

  Ed leant over, pulled his mask down and threw up on to a seat. His head was spinning and throbbed with an intense cold ache.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here
,’ he groaned. ‘This is hell.’

  But as they turned to leave they heard the sound of heavy footsteps climbing the stairs.

  Ed felt a wave of fear and panic. He didn’t need to look to know what was happening.

  The sickos were coming.

  They were trapped now. They were going to die here. They were going to join this heap of human compost, forgotten, like bags of rubbish tossed out for the bin men.

  Ed’s mind was racing faster than his heart. He couldn’t think straight. A tangle of images were tumbling in his mind like the wheeling knot of seagulls over the corpse pile. Images of death and decay. But one thought kept poking through, beating all the others back, and he clung on to it.

  He didn’t want to die. It was as simple as that. He would do anything to stay alive.

  The thought was terribly strong and clear.

  He wanted to see the summer.

  ‘We need to find another way out,’ he said. ‘There are sickos coming up the stairs.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘Then who is it, Jack? The undead police come to help us?’

  Before Jack could say anything in reply the first of the sickos appeared at the entrance to the stairs. Three fathers. Sniffing the air. Searching for their prey.

  Jack raised his machine gun. Ed saw that it was trembling in his hands. ‘We could shoot them?’

  ‘You don’t know how to work that bloody thing,’ Ed snapped. ‘We can outrun them, though.’

  He looked around for an escape. There was an external staircase here leading to the lower seating levels. They charged down it, crashing into the metal sides as they rounded the corners, until they reached the bottom. They quickly took in their situation. The nearest exit was blocked by one of the ominous stacks of blue canisters. The boys realized that the best means of escape would be to get down on to the pitch where a narrow strip of open grass had been left around the side of the corpse piles. They started to climb over the seats, pushing past the bodies that had been dumped there.

  As Ed was clambering over a middle-aged mother in a weird floral sun hat, however, she reached out a hand and tried to take hold of his jacket. He jumped back. The mother hauled herself up out of the seat and puckered her lips and dribbled at Ed, as if she was getting ready to kiss him. Ed shoved her away and she fell into the next seat, waking a hairless father who flailed at Ed with long dirty fingernails.

  ‘They’re not dead,’ Ed yelled. ‘They’re not all dead!’

  All around them sickos were rising from the seats and shuffling towards them, and now Ed saw that there were more live ones down on the pitch, moving along the narrow pathways that divided the mounds.

  The boys vaulted over seats, knocking sickos out of their way, stepping on dead bodies, slipping in filth, doing whatever it took to get down. As they reached the bottom, two young mothers on the edge of the pitch made a lunge for them and Bam fired off both barrels of his shotgun, not taking any chances.

  The mothers went down and Bam fumbled to reload his gun.

  One barrel at a time, he told himself, jiggling the shells into the holes. Just fire one barrel at a time. Keep something back.

  ‘There’s a way out over there,’ Ed shouted, pointing to an exit from the pitch over near the old stand. They sprinted towards it past a wall of decomposing flesh on one side and the live sickos in the stands on the other, who were all coming down towards the pitch, some walking, some crawling, the younger ones moving faster, others stumbling, barely able to move, and as they came they dislodged the ones that had given up, who fell out of their seats.

  It was impossible to tell which were dead and which alive. They were all covered in sores and boils and soft rotten patches.

  The boys thought they were home free, the exit was just metres away, but then something moved ahead of them, and a cascade of dead bodies tumbled down from one of the piles directly into their path.

  They had no choice. They would have to climb over them.

  They tried, but it was like wading through deep mud. The bodies were so soft they gave way beneath their feet and the boys found themselves treading in shredded skin and innards.

  ‘Look out!’ Ed shouted.

  A large group of sickos had got on to the pitch and was approaching from behind.

  Jack raised his machine gun, fiddled with it, tried the trigger.

  Nothing.

  The sickos moved nearer.

  He thumbed off the safety catch.

  Tried the trigger again.

  Nothing.

  He swore and shook the gun. Tried another catch.

  He yelled as the gun suddenly jumped and jerked in his hands, seeming to fire itself, spraying bullets everywhere except at the advancing sickos. Jack let go of the trigger in fright, but one of the bullets must have struck a canister, for the next moment there was an almighty bang and flames leapt into the air along with an ugly mess of body parts and a horrible reddish-brown spray.

  The boys, along with most of the sickos, were knocked off their feet. They went sprawling against the hoarding around the edge of the stands and smashed painfully into the wood and plastic. They landed in a pile of sticky wetness and Ed was insanely grateful for the mask that was still clamped to his face.

  This really was hell.

  It was raining rotten flesh. A fire had started. A clutch of sickos ran past them, clothed in flames. They crashed into another stack of canisters and there was a second explosion.

  The whole stadium seemed to be alight now.

  The boys seized their opportunity and stumbled, dazed and disorientated, towards the exit. The open gate was tantalizingly close. But they had to wade through body parts and unmentionable filth to get there.

  ‘Come on!’ Ed yelled, breaking away from the others. ‘We can do it –’

  The next thing he knew he was running in silence in mid-air. The ground beneath his feet seemed suddenly to rise up and then just disappear. At the same time the air contracted around him, squeezing the breath out of him, crushing his chest, popping his eardrums. He didn’t hear a bang so much as feel it. There was a blinding brightness and a bottomless darkness at the same time. Up became down and inside became out. Slowly, slowly, slowly an avalanche of dead bodies collapsed on top of him and smoke billowed towards him in a grey mushroom cloud that grew and grew until he was embraced by sweet, soft, silent oblivion.

  47

  Frédérique was alone in the women’s toilet at the museum. Only her hands showed any signs of life as they fiddled in her lap, twining and intertwining, her fingernails picking at the skin. A drip of moisture fell from her nose and she shivered. Inside, though, she felt hot, like she was cooking. Her insides were writhing and churning. Her stomach cramping. Her heart beating too fast. Every few minutes she gave a little dry cough that sent a spasm of pain through her lungs.

  She was in one of the stalls, sitting on a toilet with the lid down. The kids in the museum didn’t use the toilets any more. They had buckets for that, which they emptied outside. The water they had was too precious to waste flushing down the loo.

  She had come here to be alone, away from the noise of the other kids. Their constant chatter was starting to hurt her ears. She knew she should be happy. The day had gone well. Justin had eventually managed to get the lorry back to the museum, and they’d stopped round the back near to some loading-bay doors. The boys at the museum had been ridiculously over-excited when they’d seen what Justin and DogNut and the girls had brought back for them. It had lifted the younger ones out of their state of hungry, depressed boredom, and they’d celebrated by having a proper lunch. Or as proper as you could get out of cold tins.

  It was while they’d been eating lunch that Frédérique had started to feel unwell. The food tasted weird and smelt of rotting plants and cows and fields and compost and toilets. Even now, thinking about it, it was making her mouth fill with vinegary saliva, and bile was rising up her throat. She thought she might be sick. She could picture what she�
�d eaten, sitting in her belly, sending out roots and tendrils and spores, living inside her …

  Sitting there in the café, trying to eat, a headache had lodged behind her eyes that she couldn’t shift, despite digging into the precious supply of painkillers she kept in her purse. The noise in the café, with all the kids talking at once, had slowly driven her mad.

  She needed quiet. Only she couldn’t find any quiet. Not even alone here in the toilets. There seemed to be a constant babble of voices inside her head, all shouting and arguing at the same time. Screaming sometimes. The pressure was awful. Just awful. Every now and then she put her head down between her knees and moaned softly, then the pressure would press down hard on her eyes and she got scared that they were going to fall out on to the toilet floor or simply explode.

  She rubbed the back of her head, at the base of her skull, trying to massage the tension away. It didn’t make any difference but she carried on anyway, rubbing and rubbing until her hand came away bloody.

  If only Jack hadn’t gone. She could talk to him. Jack would know what to do. She’d been frightened of him at first with that strange birthmark on his face. But not any more. He was the nicest of them all, the kindest.

  So why had he gone? The bastard.

  The sudden flare of rage burned itself out as quickly as it had come on.

  Her stomach was gurgling. A boiling mess of acid bubbled up her throat, scalding it. She had eaten something bad. That was it. The food had been on the lorry for a long time, after all. The stuff in cans had sell-by dates months away, but even so …

  The voices in her head erupted, yelling at her.

  It’s not the food – not the food – you know what it is – why won’t you admit it – you coward – it’s not the food – the kids – they’re all bastards – Jack left you – nobody gives a shit …