The Sacrifice (5 page)

‘It might be cool to be a god,’
said Sam. ‘But I wouldn’t know where to start. I’ve always wanted
magic powers … I don’t have any, though.’

‘I do,’ said The Kid.

‘No, you don’t.’

‘I do.’

‘Oh yeah, like what?’

‘I can talk to animals.’

‘Prove it.’

‘All right.’ The Kid shouted at
a raven. ‘Oi, bird, get lost!’

The raven flapped noisily away, unable to
fly on its clipped wings.

‘See!’

‘See what?’

‘I talked to it, didn’t I? Never
said it would understand me.’

‘Idiot.’

‘Fool.’

‘Moron.’

‘Twitmonger.’

‘What’s a twitmonger?’

‘OK,’ said Ed. ‘I’m
glad you’re not taking it too seriously.’

‘So what happened to Matt?’
asked Sam. ‘Is he here?’

‘No. We got split up on the way. Last
I saw of him he was floating down the Thames on the wreckage of a boat. God knows what
happened to him. I really hope he drowned. He was nuts and he was dangerous.’

‘I’m allergic to dangerous
nuts,’ said The Kid.

‘I’m not sure about you,
Kid,’ Ed laughed. ‘Half of what you say seems pretty switched on; the rest
of it just sounds like gibberish.’

‘That’s cos I’m a
gibbernaut from the Planet Gibber.’

‘That’s cool with me.’ Ed
pointed out the kitchens and café where all the kids ate, the Waterloo Barracks, the
Jewel House, which had once housed the Crown jewels, although he explained that he had
no idea if they were still in there as it was impossible to get inside.

‘So what do you reckon then, guys?’
he said, sitting on a cannon outside the Jewel House. ‘You gonna like it here,
d’you think?’

‘It’s great,’ said Sam.
‘I always dreamt of living somewhere like this, to be a knight and wear armour and
carry a sword like you. Will I be allowed a sword?’

‘If you want a sword we’ll find
you a sword.’

‘I love it here,’ said Sam.
‘It’s all amazing. But I can’t stay.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I told you I was looking for my
sister.’

‘Yeah, but … ’

‘So I have to keep looking.’

‘But, Sam … ’

‘And I’m sticking with
him,’ added The Kid. ‘Like chewing gum.’

‘As soon as we’re ready,
we’re going to go to Buckingham Palace,’ said Sam.

‘You can’t.’ Ed looked
appalled. ‘Don’t be crazy. I mean, you can’t just go wandering off out
there.’

‘We did before.’

‘Yes and with a mixture of stupidity
and dumb luck, and accidently finding your way here, you’re still alive, but you
can’t risk it again.’

‘Come with us then. You could look
after us.’

‘What? No. I’m needed
here.’

‘It wouldn’t take long. You
could bring some guards or something.’

‘I can’t put other kids in
danger, Sam. Not even for you. We need to plan and … Don’t you get it,
boys? To get to Buckingham Palace you’d have to go right through the no-go
zone … Unless … ’

‘Unless what?’

‘Unless you went on the river, I
suppose, took a boat.’

‘Hold your tongue,’ The Kid
shouted, slightly too loudly, surprising Sam and Ed. ‘That just won’t wash.
Sorry to get on my high horse, Mister Ed, but Charlie don’t surf. No boats for me.
Not gonna play Pugwash. Water and me don’t mix. In a nutshell – The Kid
don’t swim.’

‘Well, if you won’t go on the
river I don’t see how you’re gonna get through the zone.’

‘Did it once before, we can do it
again,’ said The Kid.

‘All right, listen,’ said Ed.
‘I’ll do a deal with you. But you’ve got to stick to it.’

‘Depends.’

‘No, it doesn’t. You have to
agree now. Up front. I’ll help you get to the palace, I promise.’

‘Sure, OK,’ said Sam. ‘So
what’s the deal?’

‘Until we know what’s out there,
you’re not leaving the castle.’

‘Well, how long’s that going to
be? That’s not fair.’

Ed looked at Sam. ‘Some guys set out
from here the other day,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. It was a sort of exploration
party. They were going west. Upriver. A mate of mine called DogNut and seven others.
They took a boat. They’ve been gone a while now, so they should be back soon. The
deal is, when they turn up and we know what’s out there, and I think it’ll
be safe enough, I’ll take you to Buckingham Palace. Myself. OK?’

Sam thought about this for a while.
Certainly the idea of setting off alone was something he didn’t want to think
about. A huge part of him wanted to forget all about Ella
and stay here
forever with Ed and The Kid. But just as Ed had made a promise to him, he’d made a
promise to Ella. He was her big brother. He’d told her that he’d always look
after her.

‘OK,’ he said at last.
‘It’s a deal.’

They shook on it and slapped palms.

Ed gave him a hard stare.
‘You’re not to even think about it until DogNut comes back, OK? You can rest
up, eat properly, learn how to use your weapons, do some basic training, and when he
comes back … ’

‘What if he never comes
back?’

‘He’ll come back. He knows what
he’s doing.’

‘The Fear’ were on the move
again.

That was the name that Shadowman had given
to St George’s army of strangers.

The Fear.

During the night they’d flushed out a
small group of kids from a big house next to Hampstead Heath and sent them running.
They’d caught and killed one on the spot; the others they’d tracked through
the local streets and finally across the Heath. A few got clean away, but The Fear
managed to catch several of the younger ones, the ones who were slower and weaker than
the rest. The strangers had cornered them in a steep-sided hollow. The kids had been
disorientated in the dark, exhausted and frightened, but the adults, using their sense
of smell, had followed them easily. They’d fallen on them as a pack, killing them
quickly. But what came next was not some mindless feeding frenzy. Having ripped the
small bodies apart, The Fear had divided them up, St George taking the lion’s
share. There was a pecking order among the strangers, with St George and his gang at the
top. The oldest, feeblest and most diseased of the strangers got nothing.

Shadowman wondered how long the weaklings
could
survive like this and how soon the stronger ones would turn on
them and eat them.

The sun was coming up now and The Fear were
moving off the Heath. If they followed their usual pattern they would find a house and
settle down to sleep until it got dark again.

From his hiding place, high up in a tree,
Shadowman watched them closely. The way they congregated around St George. The way they
seemed to move together, with a sense of purpose. How did they do that? How did they
know what St George wanted them to do, beyond brute, slavish copying? They were
organized the way an ant colony is organized or the bees in a hive. There was a sense of
purpose in everything that they did. Somehow they managed to arrange themselves into
distinct groups, with set tasks. Nothing was said. Strangers’ brains were so eaten
away by disease they’d lost the power of speech.

Until now Shadowman had thought that all
adults had lost the capability of rational thought. They hadn’t. Their brains had
changed
, that was all. The higher level, the conscious reasoning level,
might have been destroyed, but the animal part of their brains was still going strong.
The brainstem it was called. Shadowman had learnt about it in science. It was the
oldest, simplest part of the brain that humans shared with all other creatures.

And even the smallest creatures, worms,
insects, microbes … even
they
had some kind of functioning brain.
Maybe flies didn’t actually
think
. It didn’t stop them from taking
over the world, though.

Did the malaria parasite know what it was
doing when it infected someone? Did it wonder what it was going to have for supper? What
the other parasites were talking about? No.
It just did what it did.
Plasmodium falciparum
, that’s what it was called. He’d studied
the parasite at school. A very successful creature. Spreading itself worldwide. It
wasn’t evil. It had no plan. It had no idea what it was doing. Like all animals,
it simply had an in-built programme that allowed it to survive. You couldn’t blame
the parasite for killing people, any more than you could blame a shark for having big
teeth. Sharks were no more evil than hedgehogs or fluffy bunny rabbits.

So were these strangers evil? Or were they
just doing what they needed to do to survive? And were they any more conscious of what
they were doing than
Plasmodium falciparum
?

It made no difference. Scientists
hadn’t worried about morality when they’d set about trying to rid the world
of malaria. Now the healthy, undiseased kids had to not question it when they killed
strangers. And it was down to Shadowman to somehow try to stop The Fear from
spreading.

The strangers had to be wiped out, because,
like malaria, it was a case of
us
or
them
.

When Shadowman thought about the disease, he
couldn’t help but picture adults shuffling about like zombies. They had become the
model of their own sickness. They acted like the disease itself. Spreading, destroying,
growing, showing outward signs of purpose and intelligence, but with each individual
member, each human cell, being essentially mindless.

They reminded him of something. A flock of
birds. The way they seemed to anticipate each other, to move as a single unit, a single
coordinated creature.

A flock of birds, a shoal of fish, a pack of
hunting wolves … 

A disease.

‘There’s something going
down.’

Ed looked up from his breakfast of lumpy
porridge and blinked at Kyle. He’d been up late on guard duty and wasn’t
properly awake yet. As Captain of the Tower Guard, he was meant to be ready for anything
at all times, but the one thing he struggled with was early starts.

‘How serious is it, Kyle?’

‘Well, you know, like,
pretty
serious.’

‘What? A red alert? Orange?
Purple?’

‘Oh, come on, Ed. You know I
can’t get my head around those stupid colours.’

‘OK, on a scale of one to ten then.
I’ve only just started breakfast and I don’t want to come back to cold
porridge. It was never very warm to begin with.’

‘I’d say a ten.’

Ed swore and threw his spoon into his bowl.
He slid the porridge across the table to one of his team, a quiet, curly-haired girl
called Ali.

‘Look after this for me, will
you?’ he said, standing up from the table. ‘Don’t eat it.’

Ali peered at the grey porridge and wrinkled
her nose.

‘It’s safe.’

Ed buckled on his sword and looked around
the
guardroom, which was situated at the bottom of the Bloody Tower. He
picked out three girls and a boy who had finished eating and were playing cards at
another table.

‘You lot, come with us.’

They hustled out of the tower after Kyle who
explained what was going on as they went.

‘The look-outs on Middle Tower heard
shouting outside the castle about an hour ago. It was quite far away and they
couldn’t tell what was going on.’

‘Kids shouting?’

‘You ever hear a zombie
shout?’

‘Guess not.’

‘It was definitely kids,’ Kyle
went on. ‘I was on early watch so they sent for me.’

‘They stayed put?’

‘Yeah.’

Nobody was allowed out of the castle unless
authorized by Jordan or one of his captains.

‘So have you seen anything?’ Ed
asked. They had come to Byward Tower. The gatekeeper hauled the gates open to let them
through and they ran across the causeway to Middle Tower. In the last few days the
Sappers had made good progress in the moat; there were only a couple of centimetres of
standing water left and in some places patches of muddy ground showed through.

‘We searched the whole area with our
bins,’ said Kyle, struggling to keep up with Ed. ‘At first we couldn’t
see nothing then Macca spotted someone.’

‘A kid?’

‘Far as we could tell.’

‘Just one?’

‘Just one
kid
. A whole mess of
sickos, though. The kid was running from a gang of them.’

They had arrived at Middle Tower where they
clattered up the spiral stairs to the roof. Four kids were waiting for them. Ed took a
pair of binoculars off one of them.

‘What direction?’ he asked,
putting the glasses to his face. ‘Where did they come from?’

‘No-go zone,’ said the boy,
Macca, who had given Ed the binoculars.

Ed swore.

‘Since then they’ve moved
northwards, up by Trinity House.’ Macca had a screwed-up face and was always
mucking about, but he had good eyes.

Ed switched direction, swinging the glasses
round to the right, up past the ticket offices to the main road that ran along the north
side of the Tower. They weren’t in the best position to see what was going on up
that way and, despite scouring the area for a couple of minutes, he could see nothing.
He could
hear
something, though. A voice calling out, thin and high-pitched. A
girl by the sound of it or a very young boy.

‘They shouting for help?’ he
asked. The look-outs looked blank, apart from a tall, athletic girl called Hayden.

‘Could be,’ she said.
‘It’s what I’d be shouting.’

‘OK,’ said Ed.
‘We’re going to have to find out.’

There were groans from the other, all except
for Kyle, who smiled and nodded his head, running his fingers along the blade of his new
battleaxe. He was always up for a fight.

Ed stared the complaining kids down.
‘Macca, you come with us,’ he said. ‘And you, Hayden. Kate, you stay
up here.
Use these.’ He slapped the binoculars into her hands
then turned to the last of the look-outs. ‘Carly, you go round to Devereux Tower.
There’s a better view from there. Scare up some help on the way. Keep watch from
there, OK?’