The Sacrifice (37 page)

‘Do you think the pointers are
signalling or something?’ he asked.

‘Could be,’ said Will.
‘Something’s attracting sickos from all over London. Could be the same thing
that’s scaring the dogs. A noise. Like a radio signal. Something that only sickos
and dogs can hear.’

‘And girls,’ Kyle added.

‘Only up close,’ said Will.
‘They’re not getting the whole signal. I reckon it’s like a network.
And these pointers, they’re like mobile-phone masts, boosting the signal, guiding
the sickos in over the bridges.’

‘Sickos don’t roll like
that,’ said Kyle. ‘They’re too dumb.’

‘Things are different in the
zone,’ said Ed. ‘And we’ve seen something new today. Things are
shifting. The sickos are getting organized.’

It was carnage. Saif’s war party
didn’t stand a chance. They were being engulfed by a greasy black tide of
flailing, writhing flesh. From his look-out Shadowman couldn’t hear anything, but
he could see it all clearly enough through his binoculars. Once again he was watching a
disaster play itself out in front of him, powerless to do anything to help.

When he’d first heard the cars in the
distance, he’d gone out into the street and listened hard, not wanting to believe
it. He’d clung on to the hope that he was wrong. He’d imagined it. It was
something else. Not cars but distant thunder. This was too soon. Saif wasn’t
ready.
He
wasn’t ready.

There was no doubt about it, though. What he
was hearing was car engines. A sound that, until yesterday, he hadn’t heard for
over a year. How far away, though? They could have been miles away and the sound would
have carried. They were the only thing making any noise in these silent, empty
streets.

So Saif had stuck to his plan. Had put
together a hastily organized revenge party, a posse, a lynch mob. Thinking they could
charge in and sweep St George’s army off the streets.

He hoped that Saif had put more soldiers
into the attack
than he’d first suggested. No way were
twenty-five going to be enough, even with cars and weapons. How many troops did Saif
have at IKEA anyway? Shadowman had found it hard to get an accurate picture of the
numbers as the place was so big, and the kids were spread out inside or had been working
in the vegetable plots in the car park. He’d never seen them all together. Maybe
twenty-five was all Saif had.

As he’d listened, the engine noise
hadn’t grown any louder. They weren’t coming closer. Saif was probably
searching the streets for The Fear. Shadowman could wait for the cars to find their way
here or he could follow St George. One way or the other, he had to try one last time to
warn Saif of the danger he was in.

In the end he’d decided to stick with
The Fear. Saif had to find them eventually and he might never make it to the tyre centre
at all.

Shadowman set off at a steady jog. He knew
the way to find the strangers quickly.

Follow the sentinels.

He passed one. Another. A third one took him
to the main road. And then he spotted Stumpy. He’d taken up a new spot at the
junction where two roads met. Arms out, flies crawling all over him.

Shadowman had run on. It hadn’t taken
him long to catch up with the stragglers, still being herded along by Bluetooth and his
little gang. They’d got separated from the main group, going too slow to keep up.
St George was in a hurry today. Shadowman hadn’t wanted to get into a fight so
he’d skirted round them and it had taken him a few minutes to get his bearings.
Again it was the sentinels who’d helped him. He found another row of them strung
out along a different side-street, feeding into the main road.
Shadowman sped up and finally got a glimpse of The Fear. A solid mass, completely
blocking the way ahead.

From street level it was hard to get any
real sense of their numbers and Shadowman looked around for some kind of vantage point
from where he could get a better idea of what they were up to and keep a look-out for
Saif.

And then he’d spotted it: a tall crane
standing over a long-deserted building site. That would be perfect. As long as there
weren’t any strangers nearby.

He gave the main group a wide berth – easier
said than done as there were outliers all the way round and a network of sentinels. It
had taken him twenty minutes of hard running, but he’d eventually made it to the
building site without getting into any trouble.

There was a solid wooden fence all the way
round, plastered with sunny, computer-generated pictures of the flats, shops and offices
that had been planned for the site, plus the inevitable graffiti.

It was easy enough to climb over the fence
and jump down into the muddy patch of ground on the other side. It had started to rain,
and there were already soupy puddles forming.

Shadowman scooted over to the crane and
looked up. It was a good thirty metres high, but there was a ladder at the back, built
into the steel girder structure.

Hand over hand he’d climbed, thanking
God that he’d never been scared of heights, because otherwise it would have been
well scary up there. In no time at all the ground seemed a very long way away, and when
he’d got to the top it felt like he was thirty miles high rather than thirty
metres. He was God, up in the clouds. The rain fell down past him in long silver
rods.

He easily broke into the crane’s cab and
was grateful to be out of the rain. He slipped off his backpack, pulled out his
binoculars and quickly took stock of the situation.

There were views right out across London
from up here. To the north he could see the blue box of IKEA, to the left of it the high
arching span of Wembley Stadium. Closer to hand he could see the tyre centre and the
train tracks running behind it. Over to the north-east was the dark green expanse of
Hampstead Heath. Then, turning south, he could see the labyrinth of roads and buildings
that crowded their way right into the centre of town. From here it looked so close. He
could walk to Buckingham Palace in a couple of hours, maybe less.

Then he’d looked down and smiled.

He’d managed to get ahead of St George
without realizing it and saw that they were advancing towards the building site along a
main road that ran roughly north to south. They would go right past him. He
couldn’t have chosen a better spot if he’d tried. Except that it struck him
now that he was not in any position to warn Saif.

Sod it
.

Saif wouldn’t listen to him
anyway.

Shadowman had done his best. He’d
tried. Maybe Saif would see The Fear and realize his mistake. Back off. Shadowman looked
at them; they filled the road like a vast herd of cattle. Even a jerk like Saif must see
that you couldn’t take that lot on with only twenty-five kids.

Watching The Fear from up there in the sky
was like studying some complex organism under a microscope. When you concentrated, you
could see a rigid order. There, at the front, was the central core of grown-ups, moving
steadily along, huddled together in a dense knot, St George
at the
heart of it. In a looser bunch around them were other strangers and there, spreading out
like tendrils along the side-streets behind, and to the sides, were the sentinels. The
whole thing was like a great dark star or a comet going past, trailing lines of dust. He
could see that the sentinels were constantly shifting now that The Fear were on the
move. Those at the ends of the tendrils would break away and walk along to the next
sentinel in line, take their position and bump them on, with a constant ripple effect.
They were a zombie relay team. None of them were left behind.

Just as an octopus uses its sensitive
tentacles to find out about its surroundings, St George was doing the same. It made him
ten times deadlier.

And then Shadowman had noticed that there
were still newcomers arriving, being drawn in down the long arms and making their way
doggedly towards the central mass, so that The Fear were constantly growing. St George
was sucking in every stranger in London.

The dark star had a satellite. There was
Bluetooth’s group, dropping further and further behind the others. There were
maybe thirty of them, including Bluetooth and his sidekicks, and they shambled in the
middle of the road. St George’s group were packed tighter, so it was still hard to
judge how many of them there might be. Could be as many as 200 of them, Shadowman
thought, and growing all the time.

Finally, in the far distance, he’d
spotted the cars. Five of them, criss-crossing the streets, going too fast to be
methodical, too fast to be careful. Which was why they hadn’t caught up yet.
He’d watched them stop to attack a sentinel. Then after a while they’d
appeared to get the idea and had advanced down one of the tendrils directly
towards Bluetooth’s group. Shadowman had trained his binoculars
on them and watched as they’d raced nearer.

Two pick-up trucks, two big 4x4s like the
Lexus, and there was Saif, standing up in the back of a yellow, open-topped sports car
of some sort. He had a spear in his hand and a grin on his face, a barbarian chieftain
in his chariot, a harpoonist on the high seas.

They’d smashed into Bluetooth’s
group, except Bluetooth and his gang had quickly dispersed, leaving the sick and old
unguarded. Saif made short work of them. The cars ran them down, the kids in the back of
the pick-ups firing crossbows, jabbing with spears and swinging clubs. Saif himself had
speared two sick old fathers as his car passed them.

Then the motorcade stopped and the kids
jumped out, laid into the surviving strangers with a wild, out-of-control frenzy.

It took them less than five minutes to kill
all the strangers and Shadowman had watched as they’d danced in the street,
hugging and high-fiving. He could see them shouting in triumph, could imagine what they
were saying – that Shadowman had been a twat, a coward, a noob. That these zombies were
just like all the rest.

Only they hadn’t killed a single one
of Bluetooth’s party, hadn’t even noticed them slipping away. All
they’d done was kill the weakest and feeblest of The Fear. Saved St George the
trouble of doing it himself.

This wasn’t good. It would give Saif a
new and totally unfounded confidence. Shadowman’s only hope was that Saif would
think that he’d killed all the strangers and return to IKEA.

It soon became clear, however, that that
wasn’t going to
happen. Saif’s gang mounted up and set off
south again, following the line of sentinels, cutting down a couple as they passed.

Shadowman had been distracted. He’d
taken his attention off the main group and, as he swung his binoculars round, there was
no sign of them. Impossible. How could two hundred adults simply disappear? But it was
true. The incoming lines of sentinels all now met at a large roundabout where only about
twenty strangers remained. Standing waiting in the centre, among some shrubs and low
trees.

What the hell had happened to the rest
of them?

‘Dammit, where are you, George?’
he said, scouring the streets near the roundabout, but apart from the network of
sentinels which clearly spread out from this point, and the handful in the centre, there
was absolutely no sign of The Fear.

And now Saif’s cars were hammering
down the main road.

Shadowman realized that St George had picked
his spot well. There were crash barriers circling the roundabout and as the cars
arrived, they found that they couldn’t run the strangers down. One of the 4x4s
tried and got stuck on a barrier. The other cars uselessly circled the roundabout taking
potshots at the strangers sheltering among the trees, like Apaches round a wagon train
in an old cowboy film. The kids from the crashed car got out and called to their mates,
and the other cars parked alongside.

‘No, you morons,’ said
Shadowman, grinding his teeth. ‘Can’t you see it’s a trap? Stay in
your cars. Drive away. Leave them.’

The rest of the kids got out. Shadowman
could see that they were laughing, jeering at the strangers in the centre
of the roundabout, who were cowering away from them. Saif took a
crossbow from another boy and fired it, still laughing, still thinking it was all a big
game.

And then Shadowman swallowed hard.

‘Oh shit.’

A great dark mass was suddenly rushing in
from all sides, from every road that led to the roundabout, totally swamping
Saif’s gang.

It was as unstoppable as a tsunami.

St George’s army was going in for the
kill.

Soon all was confusion. Shadowman
couldn’t tell what was going on; the strangers completely covered the roundabout
and the area around it. The kids had disappeared under a seething mass of bodies.

He could picture it down there, the heat of
the grown-up bodies, the raw sewer stench of them, the bowel-emptying fear as the kids
realized what was happening. Realized they were hemmed in, with no room to manoeuvre or
swing their weapons. The agony as hands reached for them, teeth latched on to
them … 

‘Get in the cars,’ Shadowman
urged them. ‘It’s your only hope. Get in the bloody cars and get out of
there.’

And then he saw one car moving, a silver 4x4
with blacked-out windows crawling hideously slowly through the forest of bodies. The
sheer press of flesh was making it difficult to get up any speed. Shadowman could see
strangers battering it with captured weapons.

‘Come on, there must be more of
you,’ said Shadowman, desperately raking his binoculars over the battleground.
‘Come on.’

And then one of the pick-ups was moving.
Again like a car driving slowly through floodwater.

‘Go, go, go … Get out of
there! You can do it! Go on!’

The 4x4 was at the edge of the mob. The
pick-up suddenly accelerated and got in behind it. They were going to do it. They were
going to get away.

The 4x4 broke free, went tearing up the
road. Impossible to know who was in it or how many.