The Dead

by Charlie Higson

  As Ed was studying the photograph, he caught sight of a face reflected in the glass of the frame and he spun round in fright, thinking he’d seen the face of a sicko.

  Idiot. Jumpy idiot. Not a sicko.

  There was a wardrobe across the room with a mirror in the door. He went to it, hardly daring to look.

  No wonder he’d mistaken himself for a sicko.

  The boy who stood looking back at him was in a right state. Covered in blood, his face pale and plastered with soot and ash. Most of the tissue paper had fallen off his cheek, but a few crusty black scraps remained, stuck to a long gash that was mostly scabbed over, but still bled in a couple of spots. His left eye was bruised and swollen shut. His right eye was ringed with dark purple.

  The young fresh-faced boy in the photo might have been a different person.

  He went back over to Jack, who was lying on his back, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow. Already the duvet was darkening around him where his blood was soaking into it. He was shivering.

  And then Ed remembered something.

  There was a toy box in the corner. He lifted the lid and rifled through it. It was full of Lego, and old Action Men with no heads and arms. There were also bits of Bionicle and some half-painted Warhammer figures. Nearer the bottom were some plastic zoo animals. But no stuffed toys.

  He closed the lid and looked around the room. A battered cardboard box sat on top of the wardrobe. He pulled it down, his shoulders screaming.

  It was full of cuddly toys – a duck, a cow, three teddies, a snake – and there … a dog, with long floppy ears and a silly smile. One of the ears was worn away almost to nothing.

  Floppy Dog.

  He took it over to Jack and put it in his hands. Immediately Jack’s fingers found the frayed ear and started to rub at it.

  Ed lay down next to his friend and put his arm round him. Jack felt very cold and still.

  ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jack whispered, barely making a sound.

  ‘You’re home, mate,’ said Ed. ‘In your own bed.’

  ‘I know. It’s good. There’s nothing like your own bed, is there? It doesn’t hurt any more, you know. I think I’m getting better.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘When I was little … I wish I was little again …’ Jack was finding it hard to speak. ‘At primary school. Nothing seemed to matter then. Everything was easy. There was nothing to worry about. Except when I had to cram to do the entrance exams for Rowhurst, but even that … It seems, as you get older, there’s just more and more to worry about. I wish I was at home with Mum.’

  ‘You are home, Jack.’

  ‘Oh yes …’ Jack opened his eyes and looked at his old toy. ‘Yay, Floppy Dog,’ he said, then closed his eyes again. ‘Is it all over now, Ed? Is it safe?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s safe, mate. We’ll be safe now. In the morning we’ll get up and have some breakfast, then go down the shops – maybe they’ll be open again. And then …’

  ‘It’s all right, Ed. You don’t have to.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You know, Ed, I’m sorry I ever called you a coward. You’re not a coward. You’re brave. You’re really brave. You got me home. You didn’t leave me. You’re my best friend, Ed.’

  ‘And you’re my best friend, Jack, you always will be.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Neither of them said anything else. They didn’t need to. There was nothing more to say. Ed watched the square of sky at the window as it faded to pink, then grey, then dark blue, then black. There was no moon tonight but the sky was splashed with millions of bright stars, more than Ed had ever seen before. He pictured himself flying up out of the little room, up on into the night sky, and then out into the solar system, past the planets and out into the endless reaches of space. The two of them lying here, alone in the empty house, didn’t mean so much really, did they?

  55

  Brooke, Courtney and Aleisha lay squashed together on a couple of mattresses in the 1940s house. They could hear Froggie whimpering. Luckily Frédérique’s teeth hadn’t broken through the sleeve of his jumper and drawn blood, but he had a nasty purple bruise in the perfect shape of her jaws, as if he’d been bitten by a miniature shark, and he was really upset by the incident. It was the shock more than the pain that was making him cry now. For a little while they’d all felt safe. Happy. Not any more. They knew that an attack could come from anywhere at any time.

  The girls couldn’t get the image out of their minds, Frédérique, with her teeth clamped on the little boy’s arm not letting go, her long hair falling about her face. The other kids milling about shrieking and yelling, nobody knowing what to do. In the end Jordan Hordern had rescued Froggie. He’d come down from the upper floor, calmly walked over to Frédérique and chopped her in the side of the neck with his hand.

  DogNut and Jordan had then taken her limp body away.

  ‘Is that gonna happen to the rest of us?’ Aleisha asked, staring at the flickering night-light, glad of the warmth of her two friends on either side of her.

  ‘Don’t think about it,’ said Brooke. ‘Get some sleep.’

  ‘I can’t. Whenever I close my eyes, all I can, like, see is her, coming at me, like a witch, saying all this, like, French stuff, like bonjour, mercy, Moulin Rouge …’

  ‘French is a stupid language,’ said Courtney, ‘and France is a dump.’

  ‘Don’t be scared of her,’ said Brooke. ‘She’s locked up. She can’t hurt you now.’

  ‘What if she gets out, comes creeping through the museum? I don’t like it here.’

  ‘I always found her creepy,’ said Courtney. ‘I never trusted her. I had, like, a what you call it, sick sense.’

  ‘You was just jealous,’ said Brooke.

  ‘Wha-aat?’

  ‘Yeah, because she’s, like, thin, and you’re, like, fat.’

  ‘Bro-ooke!’ said Aleisha, appalled. ‘What you saying? You didn’t ought to say things like that.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Courtney. ‘I ain’t fat. I’m big.’

  ‘Yeah, big and fat.’ Brooke gave a snort of laughter. ‘I don’t know how you do it, girl, with what we get to eat. You’re like that fat guy in Lost, Hurley. Crashes a plane on a, like, desert island, where there’s no McDonald’s or nothing, and doesn’t get any thinner after, like, weeks.’

  ‘I ain’t fat, Brooke!’

  Brooke laughed and leant over Aleisha to give Courtney a little squeeze.

  ‘I don’t love you any less because you’re XL, girl. You are who you are. My mate. I don’t care what you look like. I’m just saying you didn’t like Lady Ooh-La-La because she’s skinny. Ain’t that right?’

  ‘No,’ said Courtney. ‘I don’t like Frédérique because she’s a sicko who tried to eat Froggie.’

  ‘Can we talk about something else?’ said Aleisha. ‘It’s freaking me out. I don’t feel safe no more. The sooner the boys get back the better.’

  56

  When Ed woke, there was light in the sky. For a long while he didn’t move. His whole body was stiff and chilly, gripped by a knotted web of aches and pains. At last he gently untangled his arm out from under Jack’s head and then very carefully closed his eyelids. Jack’s skin was completely cold now, except for the strip along his side where Ed’s body had been pressed against him.

  ‘Goodbye, mate,’ said Ed, but he had no more tears inside him.

  At least Jack had died happy, at home, in his own bed, among his old familiar things. He looked very peaceful, lying there with his old dog for company.

  Ed levered himself up off the mattress and stood on the carpet, trying to stretch some of the stiffness away. When he felt strong enough, he went down into the kitchen and looked out at the garden. The plants were shaking and bending in a strong wind. Shrubs and nettles and brambles and weeds were being tossed about as if some giant hand was stirring them.

  It was morning, but still gloomy. The dark smoke cloud now filled most of the sky and there
was the red glow of fire nearby. He could smell the smoke. It reminded him of when they’d broken into the church and found Mad Matt and the others passed out.

  How long ago was that? It felt like weeks. But it wasn’t, was it? It had only been three days.

  He coughed. He would have to hurry. The fire was obviously blowing closer. There was a row of books on a dresser. He scanned the titles. They were cookbooks mostly but he was searching for something that you could be pretty sure of finding in every house in London. An A to Z.

  There!

  He pulled it out. It was filled with maps of all the streets in London. He looked up Jack’s address and followed the route back to the War Museum with his finger. He checked it and rechecked it, memorizing street names. Once he was sure what he was doing he slipped the A to Z into his back pocket and then went over to one of the drawers he’d looked through last night and fished out a box of matches. Finally he grabbed a cookbook at random then went back upstairs.

  He opened Jack’s bedroom window and looked out into the road. The wind was blowing rubbish along but there was no sign of any people out and about. Before he’d finally fallen asleep last night he’d heard them, the sickos who came out after dark, wandering the streets, fighting, looking for food, but none had come near the house.

  He tore a handful of pages from the cookbook, screwed them up and put them under Jack’s bed. Then he packed in anything else he could find that would burn – more books, comics, teddies, clothes – and set light to it all with a couple of matches. In a few moments there was a blaze going and the room was filling with smoke.

  ‘See you, Jack,’ he said, tucked Floppy Dog into his friend’s arms, kissed him on the forehead and went out.

  He ran down the stairs, stuffed as much food as he could carry into his pack, shoved his pistol into its holster, grabbed the bike from the hallway, then opened the front door and went out into the street. He looked up at the house. Already Jack’s bedroom was filled with flames and smoke was pouring out of the open window.

  At least Jack wouldn’t be found by any scavengers.

  Ed turned away, got on the bike and started pedalling.

  57

  Frédérique was humming softly to herself. A familiar tune but she couldn’t remember the name of it, or the words. Papa used to sing it to her when she was a little girl. She felt calmer now, out of the light. She was wrapped in darkness and it meant she could think clearly. The light punched your brain. It hurt. The darkness was kind and gentle, like …

  She moaned and pushed her fingers through her hair. All across her scalp there were lumps and bumps. It was as if her brain was expanding, forcing these new growths out of her head. If she concentrated really hard as she ran her fingertips over them, she could read them like Braille, all the thoughts coming out of her head …

  She would think of a way to escape from where they had trapped her. She would get away and she would punish them for what they had done to her.

  The first thing she had to do was work out how to get her hands free of these things they’d clamped round them, these bracelets, these menottes.

  She’d figure it out.

  She was clever now.

  Cleverer than them …

  58

  Ed couldn’t get the reek of smoke out of his nostrils. It was everywhere, blown on a hot wind. It stung his eyes so that he wept as he cycled. He felt itchy under his skin. On edge. There was a weird, tense atmosphere to the day as if the world had been screwed up tight. Everything felt wrong. It was dark when it should have been light, so that it was somehow day and night at the same time.

  The wind tugged at him, like an annoying child, making him jumpy. He had every reason to be nervous. The events of yesterday had really shaken him up and he’d lost two good friends.

  His last friends.

  It looked like today wasn’t going to be any easier. The empty street he’d seen from Jack’s window had given him a false hope. There were more sickos out on the streets than he’d ever seen before. They were everywhere, spooked by the approaching fire just as badly as he was. He expected any minute to be attacked again.

  He had an awful feeling of hopeless doom he’d never known before. The dark sky seemed to press down on him with an awful heaviness. It was a lid, slowly closing, suffocating the world, trapping the smoke and the fire and wind. He was reminded of all those myths and legends where the sky was a solid thing that had to be held up. There was a giant, wasn’t there, who lifted it on his shoulders?

  Atlas. That was it. Atlas holding the sky up.

  Well, it felt like Atlas had fallen.

  He cycled as fast as he could, but it wasn’t easy. The roads were blocked everywhere by abandoned vehicles, so that he had to keep swerving round them. It hadn’t been so noticeable yesterday when they were walking, but riding a bike was different. You were aware of every bump and hole and obstruction. Driving a car would have been nearly impossible.

  In fact, every now and then he would come to a car that had been set on fire, and was reduced to a pile of twisted metal and plastic. There was other debris as well, strewn everywhere, rubbish and bins and dead bodies, occasionally a burnt-out run of buildings that had collapsed. He longed for an open stretch, but he had resigned himself to the fact that it wasn’t going to happen.

  He had already had to change the route he’d planned. The area around the Oval was an inferno. The flames had rapidly spread to the surrounding buildings so that there were now two big fires that threatened to link up and engulf the whole of south London. He had to stop every couple of minutes to check the A to Z and adjust his plans based on which roads he felt were safe to ride down.

  The sickos didn’t help either. There seemed to be gangs of them whichever way he went, standing in the road looking up at the sky, or just wandering aimlessly. Once he had to make a detour round a small group of them who were fighting like drunks, the sort of addled street people you used to see in the cities, arguing with each other and throwing clumsy punches.

  He kept moving, though, and in his roundabout way he was getting gradually closer to the museum and safety. He just wished his heart wasn’t beating so hard against his ribs and his breathing wasn’t so quick and painful.

  As he rode, images flashed through his mind, switching backwards and forwards. Jack and Bam, alive and laughing. Bam doing his Maori war dance. And then Bam lying in the gutter, cold and still, and Jack in his bed holding Floppy Dog. The living and the dead.

  The dead.

  All those bodies at the Oval. The red fountain of flesh rising over them when the first canister went off. He wondered how many other sites there were around London like that, stacked with corpses. He knew a lot of people had left the city when the disease had started killing people. He’d seen it on the news – traffic jams miles and miles long. Those were some of the last images they showed on television before it went off air. It had all happened so fast.

  Ed tried to picture the rest of the world like this, falling into chaos and ruin. The numberless dead bodies everywhere. And, worse, the living. Zombies. Stranded between life and death. He remembered the sensation of being pressed up against Greg. The stink of him, the heat and the damp. The craziness in his eyes. Struggling over the meat cleaver …

  And Greg was still out there somewhere.

  With poor little Liam.

  He told himself to just concentrate on the road and not dwell on anything else. But try as he might he couldn’t get those images out of his head.

  What was it about Greg?

  There was something more. Something worse.

  When Ed had looked into his eyes, seen the madness there, he’d recognized something and now he understood what it was. They were the same, the two of them; they’d both been helpless in the grip of a killing frenzy. When Ed had found his courage yesterday, he’d lost something precious in the bargain. He’d lost part of what made him human.

  He was a different person now, and not a better one. Oh, yeah, he could f
ight, he could swat sickos like flies, he was a bloody hero, wasn’t he? He was death himself. Riding a bike. But in the end all he was doing was adding to the score of the dead.

  Was that all a hero was, then? A killing machine without a heart?

  Stop it, Ed. Stop thinking. Keep pedalling, keep those wheels turning. Get back to the museum. See the others. His new friends.

  That would help fight the sadness and blow away the darkness inside him that was spreading, suffocating him like the black clouds in the sky.

  Jack lying there on the bed, cold and still with Floppy Dog in his arms.

  Pedal. Just pedal. Those tears were caused by the smoke …

  Concentrate on the living. Justin the truck-driving nerd and the little kids in his Brains Trust, mouthy Brooke and the girls, big Courtney and little Aleisha, strange Chris Marker with his face in a book, even Mad Matt and his acolytes. He missed them all.