The Hunted

by Charlie Higson

  ‘Kill them, Dan,’ Sonya yelled. ‘Their dead bodies will block the entrance.’ Ella watched as Daniel picked up a spear and started to stab them, crying out with every thrust.

  Scarface and the three other kids managed to clear most of the barn, working their way over to a side door that had been forced open. The clasp that held the padlocked bolt in place had been bent right off the wall. Scarface pushed his way to the front and fired two shots into the open doorway, and for a blessed moment there were no grown-ups there, just empty space.

  ‘Give me a hand!’ Sonya ran to the door and tried to close it, but already there were more grown-ups trying to get in. Harry battered them, knocking back any hands or arms that came through.

  What’s the point? thought Ella. There were too many. They would just keep on coming. Somehow, though, Sonya got the door closed and then Scarface jammed an iron bar under the broken handle, wedging it against the concrete floor. Harry stayed there, leaning all his weight on the bar. He looked very tired. His jacket with the painted slogans was ripped.

  But they hadn’t completely cleared the barn. A laughing mother, who now had blood pouring out of her mouth and nose, rushed at Ella, fingers spread wide, like she was drying her nails. Before Ella could do anything Louisa charged at the mother and shoved her into the fire, sending up a firework spray of sparks. The mother shrieked and jerked about before she managed to roll out and Sonya stepped forward to stab her with her spear.

  ‘Where have you been?’ gasped Louisa, exhausted from the fight.

  ‘Trying to see what’s going on,’ Sonya replied.

  ‘How bad is it?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘The whole yard’s filling up with them,’ said Sonya. ‘Some are moving on, but most are trying to get in here.’

  ‘It’s stupid,’ said Daniel. ‘We’re trapped. It’s just stupid.’

  Harry copied him. ‘It’s just stupid.’

  ‘I hope they get you, Harry,’ said Daniel. ‘I hope they rip you to pieces and use your stupid bloody head as a football. I hope you die painfully.’

  ‘I hope you die painfully,’ said Harry.

  ‘Please, both of you, stop it,’ said Louisa.

  ‘Stop it,’ said Harry, and then he shouted as Sonya pushed past him, nearly knocking him over. He didn’t have a go at her, though, because he could see that she had gone over to the hole where the dead bodies had been pulled away and more grown-ups were coming through.

  And all the while the hammering went on, all around, on every wall, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang.

  Scarface seemed to be completely ignoring what was happening. He’d gone over to where there was an old bit of machinery with pumps and pipes sticking out of it. He was fiddling with something, turning a wheel. Ella didn’t know how long it went on like that, the kids trying to stop the adults from getting in, the adults beating on the walls, the kids bickering with each other whenever there was a moment’s quiet, Scarface fiddling. And no matter how often they blocked up a hole, or a gap in the walls where they’d been bent, another one would open up, and another.

  The kids were moving like grown-ups themselves now, slow and automatic and stiff. Zombies. There were dead bodies on the floor from when the grown-ups had got in before and Ella tried not to look at them. Every now and then her eyes would play tricks on her, caused by the dim light and her own tiredness, and she’d think one of the bodies was moving. And she’d scream and run from it, and the others would curse her when there was nothing there. Nothing had moved. No corpse was going to rise from the dead.

  When Ella did it for the fifth time, Harry completely lost it and started yelling at her, shoving her around, calling her all sorts of names. He only stopped when Scarface slapped him round the face. For a second Harry was so surprised and upset he looked like he might burst into tears. And then he turned all his anger and frustration on Scarface.

  ‘That’s right, go on, hit me, attack me, why don’t you? You know you want to, because you’re a bloody grown-up like them, aren’t you? Why are we even in here with you? It’s crazy. You should be out there with your own kind. You bloody grown-up scum. You scum, you bloody scum.’

  Harry spat at Scarface, who didn’t respond in any way other than to wipe his face. And then a new gap opened up and they were all smashing at it with clubs and spears, and the banging noise was louder than ever, and this time they had to move a big cupboard over the gap. As they were sliding it up against the wall, Daniel got his hand caught behind it and he yelled.

  ‘You’ve broken my bloody fingers.’

  And Harry copied him.

  ‘You’ve broken my bloody fingers.’

  And Louisa laughed at him until Daniel hit her and then Sonya hit Daniel and Daniel flipped.

  ‘I’m not staying here,’ he croaked, his voice almost gone. ‘I’m not staying here to die. We’re like sardines in a can. We should never have come here.’

  And then, before anyone could stop him, he pushed Harry aside and sprinted across the barn to the side door.

  ‘No, Daniel …’ Sonya screamed after him, but it was no good.

  Daniel pulled the bar free, then wrenched the door open and stumbled out into the night.

  ‘Stop him,’ said Louisa. ‘We have to stop him.’

  ‘It’s too late,’ said Sonya. ‘He’s gone.’

  Grown-ups were coming through the door. Scarface fired off two shots at them. He looked to Harry to help him and Ella saw Harry still lying where he’d been pushed over.

  ‘That bloody idiot has done it now,’ Harry moaned. Ella could see that he was hurt. He’d fallen against some concrete blocks and his trousers were torn. His leg was glistening with blood. He started swearing and calling Daniel worse names than he’d called Ella. She put her hand over her ears. Grown-ups were streaming through the open door, and more were coming in the other side under the bent wall. The kids were being forced into the centre of the barn. Scarface was blasting away with his shotgun, two shots at a time, each one sending a wide spray of pellets into the advancing grown-ups, and then he had to break it to reload. Sonya and Louisa were jabbing with their spears and using them to hold the grown-ups at bay. Harry had managed to get to his feet and, limping and clutching his side with one hand, he was swinging a spear with the other.

  ‘We can’t hold them back,’ said Louisa.

  ‘We can’t hold them back,’ said Harry automatically, not even bothering to sound nasty.

  The whole barn seemed to be filled with a grunting, hissing, shuffling crowd of them. Everywhere Ella looked there they were. A father got close to Scarface before he could reload and he had to use the butt of his gun as a club. He rammed it into the father’s face and he went down, spitting out teeth.

  And then Harry went down. Three of them had got in close and he hadn’t been strong enough to hold them back.

  ‘Harry,’ Sonya yelled.

  ‘Harry,’ he replied, still copying her.

  Scarface battered the grown-ups off Harry and then pulled all the kids into a tight circle around him. He snatched a bundle of tied-up sticks from the fire. Ella saw that he’d made them into a flaming torch. He hurled the burning brand towards the open doorway. It turned in the air, end over end, and landed just outside. Instantly there was a WHUMP and a bright flare of flame. The sudden burst of light lit the barn as bright as day. Ella could clearly see the blood everywhere, the pale, filthy faces of the kids, the rotten, lumpy faces of the grown-ups. Through the gaps in the walls she could see flames circling the barn. Smoke was pouring in and the stink of rotting grown-ups was replaced by the worse stink of burning clothes and skin and hair. A burning mother stumbled into the barn and collapsed. The grown-ups who had got into the barn had frozen, startled and confused by this new threat.

  But as quickly as it had flared up the fire outside died down. Although Ella was upset that their ring of fire was no more, she was happy that she couldn’t clearly see the horror in the barn any more.

  The open door was still clear of
people. Now might be their chance to run like Daniel had done. She’d seen a look of doubt on the girls’ faces. They were all thinking about it.

  ‘I can’t move,’ said Harry. Ella looked at him. The grown-ups had made an awful mess of his legs. One of them looked like it had been chewed half off. Blood covered one side of his face from the wound in his scalp.

  ‘It’s gone quiet,’ said Sonya. Was she prepared to leave Harry behind?

  ‘Should we …?’ said Louisa, but her words were cut off as something was thrown into the barn. It hit the concrete floor and bounced, then rolled towards the fire.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Sonya. ‘No.’

  It was a head. A boy’s head. Daniel’s head. One ear bitten off. An expression of surprise on his face.

  This seemed to act like a signal to the grown-ups in the barn. They snapped back to life. They weren’t alone. Scarface went into action. He grabbed Ella, dragged her over to the chemical toilet, opened the door and shoved her inside. She clumsily fiddled and fumbled with the lock until she at last got it shut and then flopped down on to the seat. The stink of chemicals in there made her nose burn. Maybe, though, it would mask her own smell. Maybe that was why Scarface had put her in here. For her protection. And that meant one thing. That he was scared. That the battle was nearly lost.

  Ella sat there on the toilet, shivering. She could hear the sounds of the fight, shouting, hissing, scraping, thudding, and now and then an explosion from Scarface’s gun.

  She wanted to know what was happening. It was almost scarier being shut in here, blind and helpless. Almost. She had hated it out there. Hated the grown-ups. Hated the blood and the fear and the stink. She had to look, though. She went over to the door, trying to find a spyhole of some sort. There was a tiny spot of light coming through part of the handle. There was a gap there. She put her eye to it, but then almost immediately jumped back as the point of a spear suddenly punched through the heavy plastic of the door, missing her face by centimetres. The spear was pulled free. She waited a moment, and then put her eye to the new hole, praying that another spear thrust wouldn’t blind her.

  She could hear the cries of the children, but all she could see was the glow of the fire, dark bodies going past it. She sat back on the toilet. Put the beads of her necklace into her mouth and closed her eyes. She clamped her hands over her ears again, rocking backwards and forwards. Rocking and rocking until she was too tired to carry on and she leant against the wall. In the end her tiredness was stronger than her fear and she drifted off into a sleep where her nightmares were no more frightening, strange or confused than her waking life had been.

  15

  ‘No, Mum, no, it’s me, it’s Ella …!’

  But her mother wasn’t listening. She was chasing Ella, fingernails like claws, trying to scratch her eyes out.

  ‘Mum, no, please …!’

  Ella woke with a start to the smell of smoke and blood. Feeling stiff. Sitting scrunched up, her head against a wall. For a moment not sure where she was, trying to throw off the last of the dream, still jittery, trying to convince herself it hadn’t happened. But what had happened? Where was she?

  And then it came back to her in a sudden, painful rush that jolted her fully awake.

  The toilet. The barn. The battle.

  She leant forward and peered out through the hole in the door.

  It was morning. The sun was up. Just. There was a haze of smoke drifting in the air. Otherwise the barn was still. The concrete floor was covered in bodies, like a thick, dark carpet. Whether there were any children’s bodies among them Ella couldn’t tell.

  She listened hard. It was quiet. The sound of the grown-ups, that breaking wave, that humming, hissing, swarming noise, had gone. The army must have moved on.

  Did that mean …?

  Was she alone?

  She waited and waited, too scared to open the door. She didn’t know what she’d find. She couldn’t bear the thought of being the only one still alive. She’d rather have died.

  And then she saw a movement. Something was rising from the pile of corpses, a body. She held her breath. It seemed to uncurl, like the speeded-up film of a plant growing, pushing up like a shoot from this mound of dead flesh. Whoever it was was covered in blood, black and sticky with it. It was twisted and misshapen, broken, but somehow still moving around.

  It was Scarface.

  Ella let out her breath and was just about to shout out to him when she saw another movement. Two people were coming down the ladder from the roof.

  They got to the bottom and came slowly across the barn towards Scarface, said something to him. Ella couldn’t hear through the door. He shook his head slowly. Ella could see that he held his two knives in his hands. They were dark red. Louisa said something else and Scarface shook his head again. And then Ella gasped as Louisa hit him round the back of the head with her club. He fell face first to the ground. Sonya and Louisa went to his body and started searching it. Then Sonya gave a shout of triumph, straightened up. She was holding Scarface’s big bunch of keys.

  They hurried over to the main doors and went out into the early morning sunlight.

  Ella carefully lifted the lock of the door and slowly eased it open. She stuck her head out and checked that it was OK. Worried that she’d see the girls. Worried that she’d see grown-ups. Living ones. There were more dead ones in here than she could have imagined. They were lying on top of each other everywhere she looked. In some places three deep. She was glad of the smoke, because it did something to hide the worst smells. Of bodies ripped open.

  She went over to Scarface. He was lying where he’d fallen, on top of a pile of grown-ups. She felt him, shook him, put her ear to his mouth, listening for any breathing. Then she put her hand to his chest and she felt the tiniest flutter of a heartbeat, and worried that she was only feeling her own pulse. No. His chest was moving. He was just about alive. The back of his head was badly cut and his own blood was mixing with the blood he’d been splashed with.

  Ella ran over to the cabinet where he kept his medicine supplies, tugged the door open, nearly pulling the cabinet off the wall. She found a roll of bandage, unrolled it and cut off a long strip. She tied it loosely round his head, hoping to stop the bleeding. Didn’t know what else to do.

  Then she remembered Sonya and Louisa. They’d taken his keys. What were they doing? She went over to the door and peeped out, scared that they would see her and come back to hit her over the head as well.

  There was a scorched black patch all round the edge of the barn and the smell of petrol hung in the air, mixed with a barbecue smell of roasted meat. There were more dead bodies out there, close to the building, most of them burned. There was another pile over by the fallen gate, but otherwise the farm looked deserted.

  So where were the girls?

  The chicken shed. Obviously.

  That’s where they’d been sniffing around earlier. Trying to get in.

  It had to be that.

  Ella was just about to go after them when she saw a group of grown-ups come round the side of the farmhouse. So they hadn’t all left. She pulled the barn doors together, leaving a small crack to peep out through. Her whole body was trembling. She was cold and tired and hungry and terrified.

  And alone.

  A big mother broke away from the group and limped towards the barn. She had bare arms, huge breasts and a fat neck, fatter than her head. As she got close, she belched and a stream of thin brown liquid washed down her chin and spattered on to the ground. When she reached the doors, she began to snuffle at them.

  Ella shrank back from her, and as she did so she became aware of a howling and a whining and a snarling. Something moved fast across the yard and knocked into the mother. It was the dogs. Scarface’s dogs had come back. There were no traps to stop them any more. They tore into the grown-ups, pulling them down and mauling them. Their growls and yelps sounded unreal, something from a horror film about aliens. Three fathers were trying to get away, dogs snappin
g at their legs, hanging on with bared teeth.

  Ella closed the barn doors fully and slid the main bolt across. She listened to the sounds of the attack, closing her eyes and resting her forehead on the doors. Glad she wasn’t out there. Her throat was painful and dry. She tried to swallow. She needed water.

  And then she heard a noise behind her.

  There was somebody moving about inside the barn. For a tiny moment she hoped it might be Scarface, that he wasn’t as badly wounded as she’d feared. But she knew in her heart it wasn’t him.

  She opened her eyes and turned round.

  It was a father. He had his back to Ella and was reversing towards her, dragging something across the floor. His back was wide and the remains of his shirt were stretched tight across it. Where his lumpy skin showed through the gaps it was black with dirt and grease.

  Ella realized that the thing he was dragging was Scarface. The father had him by the ankles. Ella didn’t know what to do. Even though she had her club, she couldn’t fight this man. He was huge – to Ella he seemed to be a giant – and she was feeble. A little girl, Daniel had called her. A useless little girl. And he was right. Ella couldn’t hit hard enough to hurt a fly.

  There were flies in here. They swarmed round the father and over the dead bodies. Their buzzing set her on edge.

  She looked down at her club. It was shaking so much in her sweaty hands it looked like it was attached to a motor. She put a finger to one of the bits of metal that were stuck in it. It was sharp. If she hit the father in a soft place she might hurt him. She couldn’t kill him with it, but she might slow him down, maybe make him let go of Scarface, give him a chance to escape.

  It was that or watch him drag Scarface off somewhere to be eaten in private and then wait for him to come back and start on her. Where could she hit him, though, that would do enough damage?

  The father was getting closer and closer. She could hear him grunting with the effort. His long legs stiff and awkward as he shuffled backwards, kicking arms and legs out of his way with his heels. And then Ella had an idea and, before she could talk herself out of it, she ran at the father and swung the club with all her strength at the backs of his knees. Ella let go of it and it stuck there, the spikes digging into him.