The Fallen

by Charlie Higson

  Ebenezer came over to Ollie.

  ‘That’s twice you nearly bought it, Ollie,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should get out of here. We’re just in the way.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The fight looked to be nearly over anyway. The grown-ups, bloated from feasting on the kids, had been surprised and quickly swamped.

  Ollie felt breathless and dizzy. He’d been more scared than he’d known, and the shock of finding all the kids slaughtered was getting to him. There was a stink of blood in here, and human waste, rotting flesh and fresh meat all mingled in a foul stew.

  Ebenezer was right – Ollie wanted nothing more than to get out into the fresh air before he was sick. First, though, he had to check there was nobody left alive. He forced himself to stand, willing his shaky knees not to buckle. He swallowed hard and walked towards the altar. Kids were strewn everywhere, too badly injured to possibly be alive. The grown-ups had pulled the small bodies to pieces, and now they lay dead among their victims.

  Ollie caught Blue’s eye. For once Blue didn’t look like he was too cool to care. There was a haunted look about him. Ollie knew how he was feeling. He must look the same. They’d let these kids down. Should have been here for them. Should have come back sooner. Even Achilleus looked cut up. He was stalking the church, sticking his new spear into every grown-up body and twisting it with a foul curse.

  ‘What we gonna do?’ said Ollie.

  ‘Bring the other bodies in from outside,’ said Blue. ‘All of them.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Then we’ll burn this stinking place down. It’s all we can do. Burn their bodies.’

  Ollie helped Blue organize a work party and they collected anything that would burn and piled it in the middle of the church: old prayer books, the little square cushions for kneeling on, the wooden pews, the cloth off the altar. They dragged the small broken bodies close to the pile and when it was ready Blue set light to it. It was slow to catch, but in a few minutes a flame had taken.

  Ollie forced himself to stay a little longer and he and Ebenezer double-checked that there weren’t any survivors. The last place they looked was the tower. There was an open door at the bottom; it had been splintered and broken in. They climbed to the top of the spiral staircase and out into the light. Ollie could see some of the children down below, the ones who hadn’t come into the church with the war party, sitting or standing in silence.

  And a big expanse of empty grey sky.

  They went back down and walked outside where Ollie found Einstein and Emily sitting on a bench with their arms round each other. Einstein looked very pale.

  ‘All of them?’ he said.

  Ollie said nothing. There was nothing to say. He left Ebenezer and walked away from Einstein into the trees. Managed a few paces before he sank to his knees, overcome with tears. He sobbed and wailed and beat his fists in the dirt till he had no strength left. And then it was over.

  He crawled to a tree and sat with his back against it, hidden from the others by the shade. There didn’t seem to be any more grown-ups around out here and he didn’t have the energy to look. Let someone else be responsible. He’d had enough. He emptied his mind and let it become a blank. An empty shell of nothingness.

  Smoke was drifting from the church. He watched it rise up and dissolve into the sky, like a cloud of angels escaping from the earth and returning to heaven. It was the souls of those poor dead children.

  He had no idea how long he’d been sitting there when he became aware of a movement nearby. Before it had even properly registered he instinctively threw himself to the side.

  A father was standing there. Tall and long-limbed. His arms were wet with blood up to the elbows. His face wasn’t too badly affected by the disease. He had a few spots and had lost most of his hair, but otherwise looked fairly normal. He was wearing a long coat and Ollie saw that he had several small animals hanging from his belt, which was tight around their necks. Cats, a rabbit and a squirrel. Some were still alive and writhing. Most were dead. One cat was bent double, its back legs up and clawing at the belt, its eyes bulging from their sockets.

  Three times. Three times in one day Ollie had been caught by surprise. It wasn’t good.

  The father smiled. He had something in his hand. He swung it at Ollie, who scrambled away on his back and then bumped into another tree. He used it to shuffle upright against. The father swung again and Ollie couldn’t get out of the way in time. The blow took him in the side of the head, stunning him temporarily. The next thing he knew the father’s arms were crushing him and he could feel his hot breath on his neck. Whatever happened he couldn’t let the bastard bite him. He swung round, thumping the man into the tree and then kicked at his legs with his heel. It was enough to make the man loosen his grip and Ollie was able to duck down and out of the circle of his arms.

  Ollie didn’t let up. He had to go on the attack. He grabbed at the man’s throat, locked his fingers into the skin and pressed hard, at the same time pushing forwards so that the man collapsed backwards with Ollie on top of him.

  Ollie made sure he didn’t let go. He could feel the animals on the man’s belt struggling, trapped between their two bodies. The father was gurgling and scratching at Ollie’s hands, but Ollie could feel him weakening. He had dropped whatever it was he’d been holding and Ollie saw it lying there. A large, leather-bound book, stained with bloody handprints.

  He made a quick decision. Let go with one hand, picked up the book and brought it crashing down on the man’s forehead. The man gulped and jerked and went still. Now Ollie was finally able to get his knife out and he stabbed it upwards at his face, ramming it through the roof of his mouth and into his brain.

  It was over.

  Gasping and shaking, Ollie stood up and kicked the body, then untangled the cat. It hopped away, one of its legs broken. It probably wouldn’t live much longer, but at least it was free.

  Ollie left his knife where it was. He didn’t want to look at the man again. Didn’t want to touch him. He could get another knife. He also couldn’t face the other kids yet. If he didn’t have to talk about what he’d just done then it hadn’t happened. He moved away and sat down again. This had been a private thing, between him and the man.

  He looked at the book. Recognized it. It was the one that the little girl, Lettis, had been writing in. This book had been precious to her. She wouldn’t have let it out of her sight unless …

  Ollie looked over at the church. He could see flames at the windows now. Her body would be among all the others in there. By the end of the day it would be ashes. This book would be all that was left of her.

  It was a journal, wasn’t it? It struck him that it might contain some clues to what had happened here. He opened it and read the first line from the final entry …

  This is the journal of Lettis Slingsbury.

  He flipped through the pages and felt a tightening in his throat every time he saw her name, the way she kept repeating it, each time smaller and scratchier than the last. He worked back, found what she’d written about being left behind at the church, and then the discussions about burying the body. As he got to the part where the kids had got attacked outside, the writing became messier and more scrawled.

  Finally he got back to where he’d started. The last entry in the book.

  77

  This is the journal of Lettis Slingsbury. I am writing my name in the hope that it sticks. That it is a mark of me and my existence. I think this might be the last thing I write, so I hope someone finds it and takes it back to Chris Marker at the museum. He will want it for the official records. And I hope it will explain everything that happened to us and why.

  Maybe if my bones are still here with the book whoever finds this could bury me and say a prayer for my soul. Even though we used to go to church I’ve never really thought much about GOD before and praying and my SOUL, but I suppose being with someone who really strongly believes in God (that is Jasmine) has made me think about that sort of
thing properly for the first time. It was Jasmine that gave me the idea of asking someone to pray for me when I’m dead. She said that prayer is very powerful and as we were in a church she was praying a lot obviously. Which is something that I have written before.

  I don’t know. Maybe there is no God, but if there is one I would like to be with him when this is over. I know I shouldn’t be writing so much about myself and my thoughts and feelings, they are not important really. But there’s no one else, to be honest. No one else to write about, that is. There is only me now. I wanted this to be a great adventure. Something to put in the history books to show how we survived after the disease. Chris says the history of our lives is important. Well, I suppose this is the history of my life. Even though it was just a short one.

  So this is what happened. I hope you will read it and remember me.

  Hold tight to the book.

  Some of it is written quickly so it might not be well written. I have looked at my last entry and it is just a scribble, not properly written at all. It was dark and I was on the top of the steeple and desperate so I didn’t properly write about what had been happening. My last proper entry was when I was writing about the banging on the door and would we open it and was it our friends or was it sickos.

  I wish now we had kept that door shut. When we opened it we let all the evil of the world into the church. But we couldn’t leave it shut because our friends were out there and they were being attacked by sickos and we could hear their shouts and their screams. So you see we had no choice. Still, though, I wish we had kept it shut. I know it is a bad thing to say and maybe I won’t get to heaven after all for thinking it and writing it. It is a selfish thing to have in your mind. I am only thinking of myself. Only it wasn’t just me, was it? There were five of us still in the church then and four outside. Those five would all still be alive. The four outside would have been killed anyway, whatever happened. They were doomed as soon as they went outside. I wish I didn’t have to write this. I have to tell the truth, though. Chris says we must always tell the truth and the truth is that I wish I wish I wish we had kept those doors closed.

  It was Aiyshah who opened them. She said she had to, she said we couldn’t leave our friends to die out there like dogs, and she opened the door and there was Jasmine and Reece on the doorstep in the porch all covered in red blood and unable to stand up. We went to pull them in and that was when there was a big thump, a loud bang as it were, and a rushing dark shape. Actually two dark shapes, the shapes of men. Two sickos came running over and barged the doors open, bashing into them as loud as anything. I screamed and someone else screamed and I was the first to run. I let go of Jasmine, who I had been holding up, and I ran back into the church towards the altar. I cannot fight. I am too scared to fight. I was almost too scared to run, my legs didn’t seem to do what I was telling them to do. I was all wobbly and feeble and shaking. There were two of us running together and we got to the altar and there was nowhere else to go.

  There were two sickos in the church, the two big fathers who had barged into the door. One of them had all animals tied to his belt. Cats and things. And it made me think, not then but after when I had time to think and there was nothing else to do except think. I thought it was interesting that sickos don’t always only just eat us children. They eat other things as well. They will eat anything. Whatever they can get their hands on. They do not eat us because they hate us, they eat us because we are food, the only fresh food they can catch. Except maybe cats and rats and small animals. In the same way that I didn’t used to hate cows and chickens and, when I was smaller, I had a book about a farm and some farm animals I used to play with. I didn’t hate them, I loved them, and I knew we ate animals, like the cows and chickens, and that’s all we are to the sickos – cows and chickens.

  The big father with animals on him came down quickly, his arms swinging to the sides, and we ran this way and that, trying to get away. More sickos had come in through the door as well. Luckily the animal man got hold of Aiyshah instead of me. I say luckily: it was lucky for me not lucky for Aiyshah. I didn’t look what he did to her and a bad part of me thought that it served her right for opening the door, although I knew I didn’t really mean it. I liked Aiyshah and I was just relieved that I hadn’t been caught. Now I feel ashamed to have thought that and wish the father had got me instead of her. I don’t deserve to be alive. I feel sorry for Aiyshah and wish she was still alive, but that was the last I saw of her. I could hear her, though, moaning and wailing for a long time as the father did awful things to her.

  While he was distracted I got away and ran to the other end of the church. I was not alone. Scott and Caspar were there and there were also three horrible sickos. They were sort of joined together as if they were one horrible creature. They only had two arms to share between them and the one in the middle had no arms at all and he just used his mouth to attack. He would tilt his head back then bring it biting down forward with his top teeth sticking out. I saw him get Caspar this way. Caspar was too weak to defend himself. He couldn’t run.

  When things were normal and life was ordinary I used to like playing a zombie game on my dad’s iPhone. It was called Plants vs. Zombies. It was good and fun and quite hard and quite funny as well. You had to put like special plants in the garden and they shot seeds or threw things at the advancing zombies and when you hit one a bit fell off, like their arms. And that’s what the three sickos reminded me of. The middle father had already lost his arms and now he was all teeth and used his head in a bobbing forwards way.

  As well as the normal zombies in the game, there was a zombie with a ladder who always had that same action when he had used up his ladder – bobbing forward and cutting down with his teeth. That was always the scariest zombie in the game cos he was quite fast as well. He looked like an old man and he bobbed down and down again with his teeth. That’s what the real sicko did to Caspar, bobbed down so that his top set of teeth jabbed into the top of Caspar’s head, while the other two held him still with one arm each, and every time he bit him, Caspar screamed. There was blood all down his face and his hair was sticking up where the man was biting it.

  All around me now were screams and shouts and the sickos were going crazy, like foxes in a chicken run that I read about when I was interested in farms. Foxes are wicked and kill chickens for fun without wanting to eat them.

  I was still running around like a mad thing and everywhere I turned there was a horror, another sicko attacking another child. I was sick with worry and fear and panic so that I didn’t know what to do. In the end I saw a doorway. It was the doorway up to the tower. The steeple where Daryl had been. I didn’t know where he was now, I hadn’t seen him since the sickos had got in, or been let in I should say.

  I ran to the door and hoped it wasn’t locked. It wasn’t and I got it open and I looked around to see if there was anyone else I could let in. There was only Scott that I could see. The others had all been taken.

  I called out to him. ‘Over here,’ I called, and he saw me and a look of hope came into his face and I smiled with happiness and he started to run and I called, ‘Come on!’ and I thought I would have a friend with me behind the door. He didn’t in the end get far because the three fathers got to him and the bad one brought his horrible teeth down, crack, on to his head, and he fell over and I didn’t see him any more so I shut the door and found a key in it and I locked it fast as anything. Which meant I had locked out any of my friends who might still be alive. There was nothing else I could do, though, I hope you understand that.

  It was dark in there, and there were winding stairs going up to the top of the steeple. I went up slowly and carefully and nearly jumped out of my skin when someone grabbed me. I gave a big scream, but it was only Daryl, though. He was panicked and crying and very relieved to see me, but disappointed that I was only one person and a girl and quite small. We both asked each other what we were going to do over and over, what are we going to do? I said the others must be ba
ck soon and they would save us, and he said yes, they would save us and we would be OK. I wish now that he had been right. The others have abandoned us, though. We don’t matter to them and we didn’t know it at the time, we still had some hope.

  We went carefully to the top of the stairs and out on to the top of the steeple and looked down. There were several sickos outside. They had killed our friends and we didn’t want to look at what they were doing. And it was getting dark now and I realized everything had taken longer than I had thought. Everything seemed very dark and bleak and there was no hope for us. That was when I wrote my last entry. On the top as the dark came on us. It was a sort of prayer for rescue. Praying that the others would come back.

  Downstairs we could hear the sickos banging on the door. I could imagine the one with no arms banging his head on it and I knew nothing would stop him. He wouldn’t ever stop until he had broken through.

  And time passed slowly. So I was up on top of the steeple with Daryl, and the sickos were banging and banging and battering at the door, thump, thump, all night long, they wouldn’t stop. And Daryl went down to see if it was all right, if the door was breaking, and I looked up at the stars in the sky and the way that they went on forever and it made me feel small and that my problems down here were small and to a starman I would hardly even exist. One moment this would make me feel not so scared and unhappy, because my problems didn’t matter, and then I would feel bad because I thought I won’t exist any more and nobody will know about me. I am still Lettis Slingsbury now, but when I am dead what will I be then? I won’t still be me, I will be nothing.

  Daryl came back and said the door was strong. He wanted to stay up on the top outside. It got cold at night, though, and we had to go inside. I didn’t like to because the noise was louder in there. There was the banging and also a scratching and snuffling like animals trying to get in. Daryl remembered he had a small candle in his pocket and we lit it and it made it not so bad on the stairs, but still we couldn’t sleep. We held on to each other for warmth and it was warm and not so bad, but we were crying. Sometimes it was me crying and sometimes it was Daryl and sometimes it was both of us.