The Hunted (8 page)

‘Are you cross with me?’ she asked.

He shrugged.

‘I
had
to let them in,’ she went on. ‘You know that. We couldn’t leave them out there to get killed, could we? And anyway, if the grown-ups
do
attack, it’ll be helpful to have some more people to fight them off, won’t it?’

Scarface just shrugged again.

‘So what do you think?’ Ella asked. ‘That I should have just let them get splatted by your trap? Would you have liked that?’

Scarface gave Ella one of his sort-of-smiles. That made her feel better.

‘I didn’t tell them about the food and the chickens,’ she said. ‘And I scared them. I told them how fierce you are. How you’re the biggest killer on the planet. How they don’t want to mess with you. Is that right? Did I do the right thing?’

Again all she got was a shrug. She hated it when Scarface was grumpy like this. She wanted to make him laugh.

‘I didn’t tell them about your books, and how you’re
secretly a wimp and into baking and ballet and Justin Bieber. How your name is really Face-Ache the Belieber.’

Scarface gave two quick snorts through his nose. It might have been a laugh. Ella told herself it was.

‘I’d better go and see what they’re doing,’ she said, trying to keep busy, trying not to think about the grown-ups getting closer. She looked to see if he had anything to add and, just as she had expected, he shrugged again.

Bloody grumpy old Face-Ache.

Daniel and Harry were sitting on some old logs that Scarface had set up like seats in the middle of the yard. They were checking their weapons and chatting nervously. There was no sign of the two girls.

‘Where’s Sonya and Louisa?’ asked Ella, trying to sound casual.

‘Dunno,’ said Harry.

Ella strolled off, trying not to hurry. Where were they? What were they doing? She looked everywhere, as the shadows of night deepened, and eventually found them by the chicken barn, fiddling with the locks.

‘You need to be careful,’ she said, going over to them. ‘He’s got traps everywhere.’

‘What’s in here?’ said Sonya.

‘Farm stuff, I think,’ said Ella. ‘Tools and that.’

‘There’s a funny smell.’

‘That’s a farm smell.’

‘Like animals.’

‘There were animals here before, I think.’

‘If we’re gonna be safe, we need to get inside a building,’ said Louisa.

‘We live in the big barn,’ said Ella. ‘That’ll be the best place – we’ll all go in there.’

‘Why not the farmhouse?’

‘Oh, I never go in there.’

‘Why not?’

‘You know …’ Ella had no idea what to say next. Why couldn’t Scarface deal with all this? ‘Shall I take something up to Isaac?’ was all she could think of.

‘Sure.’ Sonya dug about in her backpack and took out a bottle of water and a plastic box filled with what looked like trail mix, dried fruit and nuts and stuff. When Ella went to take it from her, Sonya held on to it tightly and put her face very close to Ella’s.

‘Are you holding out on us?’ she said.

‘What?’ Ella was trying not to get scared.

‘You’re all nervous and jittery. Like you’re hiding something. Like there’s more here than you’re letting on.’

‘I’m just scared of the grown-ups coming. That’s what we should be thinking about. Not … you know …’

‘Yeah, you’re right.’ Sonya let go of the box. ‘I keep forgetting about the grown-ups, like everything’s OK, and then I suddenly remember, and I’m like, Oh-My-God. This is not happening. Isaac is gonna think we’ve forgotten about him. You take this up.’

‘OK.’ Ella walked slowly away, carrying the box and the bottle of water.

When she climbed back up to Isaac, she found him sitting on the platform, reading a book.

‘Can you see anything?’ she asked.

Isaac looked up from the book and scanned the surrounding countryside.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘No sign of them.’

‘No.’ Ella got the water and the food out of her backpack. ‘I meant, can you see your book? It’s getting very dark.’

Isaac laughed. ‘Not really. But I was bored. There’s nothing to see, nothing happening. Maybe they’ve all gone another way. Maybe we’ll be OK. That’s what I’m praying for anyway. What’s going on down there?’

‘Getting ready.’ Ella handed Isaac the stuff and he started to tuck in.

‘What are you reading?’ she asked and he flapped the cover at her.

‘It’s the first Alex Rider book,’ he said.

‘Is it good? I think Sam read it. My brother.’

‘Yeah. I’ve read it before. Loads of times. We need to get some new books. I’d go into Windsor, but … you know.’

‘What’s Windsor?’

‘Where the big castle is,’ said Isaac. ‘It’s the biggest town around here. There’s a load of kids live there, but they don’t like anyone else coming close. Don’t like strangers.’

‘Where are you from then?’ Ella asked.

‘Bracknell. It’s quite far from here. On the other side of the grown-ups. We were stuck. Windsor kids one way, who’d probably have beaten on us, grown-ups the other. It felt like we had no options. No choice. It’s kismet.’

‘What?’

‘Fate. Do you believe in fate?’

‘I don’t really know what that is.’

‘It’s like there’s a big book somewhere with your whole life written in it. Everything that’s going to happen to you.’

‘I’ve never really thought about it like that,’ said Ella.

‘I have,’ said Isaac. ‘I have this feeling. That if they’re
going to get you then that’s what’ll happen – they’ll get you.’

‘Is that fate then?’

‘I think it’s my fate. That it’s written down. They’ll get me in the end. If I dodge it today, they’ll get me tomorrow.’

‘It’s better not to think about things too much,’ said Ella.

‘Maybe you’re right.’

‘What’s the matter with the moon?’ Ella asked, looking up at where it was appearing out of the darkening sky. It was turning red.

‘Dunno,’ said Isaac. ‘It’s not a good sign, though, is it?’ He gave a bitter little laugh.

‘What would make it red?’ Ella said.

‘Maybe smoke from a fire or something,’ said Isaac. ‘Or maybe dust or, I don’t know, particles in the atmosphere, you know, like, refracting the light.’

‘I think it’s pretty,’ said Ella. ‘So let’s not worry about it, yeah?’

‘Good plan. No worries. It’s just … They’re out there somewhere. I know they are.’

Ella got Scarface’s binoculars out and scanned the fields. It was getting too dark to see much. She passed them to Isaac.

‘What else you got on you?’ he asked. ‘Anything useful like radar, or an RPG launcher?’

‘Nothing really.’

Isaac adjusted the focus as he scanned the horizon.

‘So were you out looking for food and stuff today then?’ Ella asked, remembering the scav parties back in Holloway.

‘Yeah. There’s still quite a lot of stuff if you know where to look. Got a bit lost, though. Went further than we meant to, strayed into Windsor territory.’

‘Are the Windsor children really that bad?’

‘They’re all bastards. Them and Slough and Maidenhead. We only have any dealings with them at the races, at Ascot. Then we all get together and …’ His voice dropped. ‘Oh shit.’

‘What?’

‘They’re coming …’

Ella found the other kids sitting on the logs, not really talking to each other. She was glad to see that Sonya and Louisa were there. She explained what she’d seen from the look-out and saw them get all hunched up and scared-looking, though they were trying hard not to show it. Ella had seen enough kids like this before to recognize the signs. Daniel swore. Harry laughed. Ella had no idea what at. Maybe nothing. Louisa looked towards the gate and shook her head.

There was no sign of Scarface. He was still keeping to himself. Ella hurried off and tracked him down to the barn where he was sitting in his favourite garden chair, poking the fire with a bundle of sticks that he’d tied together.

‘They’re nearly here,’ she said. ‘We saw them from the tree with the binoculars. We’ve still got time to run. We could try to get to Windsor. We’ll be faster than them, I think.’

Scarface shook his head. He was probably as scared of the kids in Windsor as the grown-ups. Maybe more so. And everything he had was here, on the farm.

‘Sonya and Louisa, the girls, they’ve been trying to get in the buildings.’

Scarface made the grunting noise in his throat and laid his sticks down near the edge of the fire. Ella could see that he’d made another couple of bundles.

‘Are we going to die?’ she asked him.

She didn’t know why she bothered asking. She knew what he would do. Just shrug. That was all he seemed to do.

‘Well, I don’t want to die,’ said Ella. ‘So will you please get up and do something? Get ready!’

Scarface got up creakily from his chair and stretched. She could hear his joints popping and he gave another little groan, deep in his throat. Then he found Ella’s spiked club and her rubber Lego shield and gave them to her. Ella felt like throwing them on the floor.

‘I can’t do anything,’ she said. ‘I can’t fight. Look at me. I’m no use. Why did you ever rescue me if you weren’t going to look after me?’

Scarface shook his head and turned away, went over to a cabinet on the wall that was padlocked shut. When he opened it, Ella saw there was a shotgun inside it, the type that farmers used, and some boxes of shells. He bent the gun in half and slotted in two shells, then filled up his pockets with the boxes. He left the gun bent in half.

Out in the yard they were able to smell the grown-ups before they could see them. The wind was blowing towards them from the west and bringing with it the unwashed stink of a thousand diseased bodies. A countryside smell of manure and sour urine, mixed with a town smell of drains and sewers and rotting rubbish. Then they heard them, the steady tramp of their feet making a shuffling rumble, and their sighs and hisses, not a roar, just a
depressing moan. Like wind rattling at a window, trying to get in.

The kids moved to the gate. There was still nothing to see in the darkness. The grown-ups wouldn’t be visible until they got to the wire.

Ella and Scarface found them there, staring into the night. The noise of the approaching grown-ups made her shiver and she wanted to be sick. The smell was suffocating. She heard Isaac calling out and looked up to see that he had moved back over the rope bridge to the platform in the nearer tree. He sounded scared and excited.

‘They’re almost here!’ he was shouting. ‘You should see it. You wouldn’t believe it. It’s insane. There’s hundreds of them. Unless they go round us we don’t stand a hope in hell.’

‘They have to go past us, don’t they?’ said Louisa. ‘Why wouldn’t they?’

‘
They have to go past us, don’t they?
’ Harry mimicked her.

‘Well, they do!’ snapped Louisa angrily. ‘Some of them. They wouldn’t all want to push in here.’

‘Unless they’re hungry,’ said Harry and he licked his lips. ‘Mmmm, a nice fresh Louisa.’

Daniel didn’t laugh. He looked scared. ‘Why don’t we all just climb up there with Isaac?’ he said. ‘They’re not going to get to us up there. We could wait for them to move on.’

‘Yeah, and what if they don’t move on?’ said Sonya. ‘What then? If we go up top we’ll be stuck there. Like a cat chased up a tree by a pack of dogs.’

‘Just like the hobbits in
The Hobbit
,’ said Ella. ‘And we don’t have any kind of magic talking eagle to save us.’

Harry spotted Scarface’s gun.

‘You got any more of them?’ he asked. ‘That’d be well useful.’

Scarface didn’t respond in any way. Didn’t even look at Harry.

‘It’s the only one he’s got,’ said Ella.

‘He’s a miserable bastard, isn’t he?’ said Sonya.

‘I’d be miserable with a face like that,’ said Harry.

‘I’d be miserable with a face like yours,’ said Sonya.

Scarface put a finger to his lips to get them all to shut up. They stopped talking, and they could hear the grown-ups, closer still, a whispering noise like wind in the trees, or a wave coming closer and closer, just one wave that sounded like it was never going to break. A tsunami.

Ella stayed close to Scarface, looking at the faces of the other kids, just white streaks in the night.

‘I can see them,’ said Louisa quietly and they all turned towards the gate. There, across the open ground, was a moving black mass, the pale light from the moon outlining the tops of heads, picking out steam rising into the night air. They filled the space that was framed between the trees that grew on either aside of the road leading up to the gate, taking up the whole field from side to side.

One by one the children moved to the gate to get a better look. The stink of the grown-ups was growing stronger; it made Ella feel sick. She wanted to hide, to dig a hole and bury herself in the ground, let the wave wash over her. But she had to look. She had to know what was coming. She went over to the gate with Scarface and forced herself to look.

They were coming slowly, bunched together, shuffling through the long grass, trampling everything in their way.
A shapeless wodge of people. Ella couldn’t see their faces yet, but one thing was very clear to her.

They weren’t going to stop. They weren’t going to go round. They would come straight through the farm …

‘We need to get in the barn,’ she said, surprised that her voice didn’t sound more shaky.

Scarface put a hand on her shoulder, holding her still. She looked up at him. He was staring at the grown-ups, unblinking. He wanted to defend his farm, but what could he do?

‘Army ants,’ said Daniel. ‘They’re just like army ants. They’ll eat everything in their way. We should of run. Instead we’re trapped here with a freak and a useless little girl.’

He started shouting, swearing at the top of his voice, calling the faceless grown-ups all sorts of bad names, his voice getting hoarser and hoarser. And then he stopped shouting, shook his head and dropped to his knees, pressing his face into the ground. He was crying. Harry sniggered, and Sonya punched him in the arm. Scarface ignored them, just watched the approaching army, his gun hanging from his elbow.

A thin cloud moved across the sky, exposing the moon so that its full blood-red light fell on the fields.

And now Ella saw their faces.

Stupid faces, diseased, rotten, lumpy and grey. They were all sorts – mothers, fathers, a few teenagers, their clothes greasy and black, some naked. Mostly so skinny they were just walking skeletons, but one or two were swollen and puffy, like fat grubs ready to burst. And there were bits of them missing, noses, ears, eyes, lips, fingers, hands, whole arms.

One of them was slightly in front, a mother who seemed to be laughing, with wide, crazy eyes and two rows of gleaming white teeth. She wasn’t laughing, though: she’d lost the skin and flesh from the lower half of her face, and there were two thick ropes of snot coming out of her nose and dribbling down across her teeth to where they hung off her chin, swaying from side to side as she walked.

Ella put a hand over her mouth as she retched, her throat gulping. Still Scarface would not move. Daniel had got up and he and the other kids were backing away.

Still Scarface wouldn’t move and still the grown-ups kept on advancing. They were hissing. They’d seen the children waiting on the other side of the gate, heard Daniel shrieking, and they fixed their dead eyes on them, blank but staring, black holes in their horrible, stupid faces. The first of them were coming up the road towards the gate now, funnelling into the narrower gap, so that they were even more tightly pressed together. Any moment now they would be at the wires.

‘We have to hide,’ said Ella. ‘We can’t fight them.’

Scarface calmly snapped his shotgun straight. Waiting.

And then the lead grown-ups tangled in the wires, tripping and stumbling. Nothing happened. They kept trying to walk on. What was wrong? Why hadn’t they triggered the trap? More and more of them filled the gap, ploughing through the wires. Hadn’t Scarface reset the pole? Had it broken? Ella was just about to say something when there was a creaking sound, a crack and a rushing noise, and then, with a great thud, the pole swung out. It chopped down a line of grown-ups and thwacked into the backs of the leaders, skewering them on the spikes. They wriggled and writhed there, trapped, five or six of them. Still the
others behind them kept on pressing forward, so that the next rank was slowly pushed into the pole and on to the rear-facing spikes belly first.

It made no difference. It didn’t stop the rest of them. They came trudging on, driving the trapped grown-ups further on to the spikes and bending the pole. There were so many of them pushing that there was soon a splintering sound and a crack, and the pole broke and the front ranks went tumbling down.

It made no difference. The ones behind came trundling on, walking right over them, treading on them, crushing them beneath their feet. They were at the gate now, only a couple of metres from where Ella stood with Scarface. All around she could hear the sound of other traps being sprung among the trees and bushes. Bangs and thuds and grunts. Hissing.

It made no difference. The grown-ups were pushing at the gate now, their bodies crushed by the weight of other people shoving from behind, their flesh squeezing between the metal bars. She could hear the breath being forced out of them, ribs breaking. She remembered the Play-Doh set she used to have, the brightly coloured plastic machines for squashing the dough so that it came out in long, wormy shapes. That’s what was happening to these grown-ups as the ones behind kept pushing forward.

The gate couldn’t hold. There was another crash as the gateposts broke and the gate came slamming down, spilling grown-ups into the yard and setting off more traps from the sides. Long spikes flew out, spearing more mothers and fathers.

It made no difference. It made no difference. Nothing made a difference. Nothing could stop them. Ella saw the
laughing mother; she’d almost made it to the yard. And behind her was another mother, impossibly thin and impossibly tall, with a long, pale face that looked almost sad, her dark eyes sunk beneath jutting brows. She had long hair that hung down to her waist. Black and straight. Ella had never seen a woman so tall and thin. She swayed slightly from side to side as she walked, arms stiff at her sides, fingers pointing at the ground.

There was something about the woman. Maybe it was just how tall she was, towering over the other grown-ups. Ella wasn’t sure. There was a power around her. The grown-ups around her looked like they were copying her, mimicking her movements. As if she was some sort of general, and this was her army. As if she could somehow silently command them.

Her eyes fixed on Ella and seemed to look right inside her. Ella felt almost hypnotized. She couldn’t look away. The mother raised an arm and beckoned to her with a bony hand, as if calling her over. Everything seemed to fall away and go quiet and still. Before she knew what she was doing Ella took a step forward and another, and then Scarface grabbed her and the spell was broken.

She was back in the noise and chaos.

The first one of the army was through, stepping over the bodies of those who had fallen at the gate. It was a wiry father with a twisted mouth, his lower jaw broken. He held a club in his hand and he raised it, hissing at Scarface.

Scarface raised his shotgun to his shoulder and fired a blast directly at him, flattening him and several others around him. Scarface fired a second shot, taking out a few more of them, and now, at last, he decided it was time to retreat.

He took hold of Ella’s hand and they were running.