‘Yeah, sorry, boss.’ Kyle backed away and returned to the gatehouse.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Ed, his voice shaking. ‘Where’s she gone?’
Brooke told him. How Maeve had taken Ella and the others and headed for the countryside. Ed became more and more agitated the more he heard, looking off down the road as if he might see them.
‘I need to go after them,’ he said, gabbling, his mind racing. ‘Sam’s not going to take this. If you knew what he’s been through. We need to get supplies. And I’ll need to go back and tell Sam. Jesus, how long ago was this? What sort of start did they get? If we hurry …’
‘Ed … Ed …’ Brooke put her hand on his arm. ‘Slow down. You can’t just go charging off. You’ll never catch them. They’ve been gone ages. You’ll need to properly plan …’
Ed sagged, deflated, like someone had just punched him in the gut. For a moment he looked like a little boy, a very tired and miserable little boy. Broken. Then he shook it off. Sighed. Straightened up. Forced all emotion out of his twisted face.
‘Story of my life,’ he said flatly. ‘I should have known this was never going to end.’
Brooke hugged him. Wanted to make it right for him. And in that instant it struck her quite forcefully that she loved him.
But she had to tell him the worst.
‘I’ve got more bad news, Ed,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’
She felt him tense.
‘DogNut,’ she said.
‘DogNut?’ Ed’s voice was flat. ‘He was here?’
‘I thought that’s who you were looking for, to be honest.’
‘He found you then?’
‘Yeah.’ Brooke wondered how to tell him. In the end she knew there was only one way. ‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry, Ed.’
Ed’s body began to shake. He sagged and buried his face in her shoulder.
‘Him and Courtney,’ said Brooke, stroking his back. ‘They were trying to get back to the Tower. I was going with them. We were ambushed. It was during the day. We never expected it. They killed DogNut and Courtney. They did this to my face. Ella and Sam’s friends rescued me. It’s a long, long story, Ed, but I guess I’m going to have to tell you all of it.’
‘Not now,’ said Ed. ‘I’ve had enough for now.’
They stood there like that, arms round each other, Ed’s friends looking on awkwardly, and the darkness of their world seemed to settle all around them.
Finally Ed spoke.
‘What am I going to tell Sam …?’
94
Maeve, Robbie, Ella and Monkey-Boy were in high spirits. They could not believe their luck. The car was running smoothly and they hadn’t seen a single grown-up all morning.
It had taken them ages to get on to the M4. First they’d had to skirt all round the museum so that nobody saw or heard the car. Then, from what Blue had told them, they knew they couldn’t actually join the motorway until after the roundabout where the bridge had collapsed. So Robbie had picked a route that kept close by. The only problem was that so many of the streets were blocked. There were buildings tumbled over by fire; there were fallen lamp posts and wrecked vehicles. Twice they’d got lost and ended up back where they started, but eventually they’d found their way on to the motorway out near Brentford.
Robbie wasn’t the best driver in the world. The car was an automatic so he didn’t have to worry about gears, but he still kept getting muddled between the brake and the accelerator, and they would jerk and lurch about in the road. The last thing he wanted was to crash their precious car so he went painfully slowly, and once they’d hit the motorway he hardly sped up at all. He was like an old man out for a Sunday drive. They crawled along, Robbie hunched over the steering wheel and squinting through the grubby windscreen. They’d cleaned it as best they could, but the washer was empty.
Ella kept leaning forward to check their speed and she’d never seen the dial show anything faster than ten miles an hour. It wasn’t a difficult calculation. They’d started with enough petrol for fifty miles. That’s what the display had said once they’d got going. Fifty miles at ten miles an hour would take them five hours, and that was without all the mucking about getting on to the motorway.
‘We’ll use less petrol if we go slow,’ Robbie had explained when Ella questioned him about it.
Ella had been very nervous at first, as they’d nosed round the backstreets, trying a road, giving up, turning back, almost getting stuck. She’d been worried that at any moment they’d be attacked by grown-ups, but as the day had gone on and they hadn’t seen any, not one, she’d relaxed. The others relaxed too. She’d watched Maeve and Robbie. How Maeve had started out with her shoulders up by her ears and her head tight on her neck, and slowly she’d loosened up. Like she was melting.
Robbie too. He’d hissed and groaned at first, his bad leg hurting him. Now, though, he seemed comfortable. And every so often he would touch Maeve’s leg and she would smile at him.
He had a thing for Maeve. It was so obvious it was funny. Ella noticed these things. She hoped they weren’t going to get all gooey and cut her and Monkey-Boy out. She didn’t like it when people got girlfriends or boyfriends. They changed.
Seeing the two of them relax made her feel a whole lot better, though. Maybe they were going to make it. Maybe they really were going to escape.
Ella looked out of the window as trees and buildings slipped past. It was over a year since she’d been in a car. She’d forgotten what it was like. She remembered long drives with her mum and dad and Sam, listening to a story CD. Harry Potter or Alex Rider … Jacqueline Wilson if she could get her way.
As they moved further along the motorway, it seemed that the whole world was empty. They passed the signs to Heathrow Airport and Maeve said how amazed she was that Blue and the others had walked this far.
Yeah, thought Ella, they were probably walking faster than Robbie was driving.
And then they passed under the M25 and Maeve cheered.
‘What’s the M25?’ Monkey-Boy asked, seeing that it was important to Maeve.
‘It’s a motorway that goes all the way round London,’ Maeve explained. ‘A huge ring road. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the boundary, where London stops and the rest of the world begins.’
Despite what Maeve said it wasn’t proper countryside yet. There were still buildings here and there, but you could go further and further now without seeing any, and there were fields and woods and lakes.
‘Are we there already?’ said Monkey-Boy, staring out of the window on his side. ‘Is this the countryside?’
‘Kind of,’ said Maeve, and she turned round to ruffle his hair.
‘I’m getting car sick.’
‘Yeah?’ Maeve laughed. ‘Well, if that’s all we’ve got to worry about we’re going to be OK.’
‘We’re gonna have to stop soon,’ said Robbie. ‘The petrol’s saying we’re nearly empty. Maybe we should find somewhere to camp down while it’s still light.’
‘It’ll be hours before it gets dark,’ said Maeve.
‘Yeah. But we’ll have run out of fuel long before then. I don’t fancy sleeping in the car. We need to find somewhere safe while we can still drive and then figure out what we do next.’
‘I guess we should turn off the next chance we get then,’ said Maeve. ‘It’s a shame. Just when we were doing so well.’
‘Yeah,’ said Robbie. ‘No sign of any settlements yet. I was hoping we’d have seen some other kids by now. There must be some out this way.’
‘We may still find something,’ said Maeve.
They came to a junction and turned off. Ella read the sign. Junction seven. The turn-off to somewhere called Slough. Ella made a face. She didn’t like the sound of Slough. It was a horrible name to call a town.
‘I really don’t want to spend the night in Slough,’ she said.
‘Me either,’ said Robbie, and he laughed. ‘We’ll avoid it. Find somewhere else. I want to steer
clear of any towns.’
They took the slip road and looped round over the motorway. Maeve checked the map she’d brought along and directed Robbie away from Slough, going in a big circle and eventually back over the motorway again. They were quickly on narrow roads among trees and hedges. There was lots of water around, small rivers and lakes. Ella felt better now. This was what she’d been expecting.
‘Here we go,’ Maeve said. ‘This looks perfect. There’s an island in the middle of the river here, with a hotel on it. It’ll be a perfect place to hole up for the night. I can tell from the name.’
‘Why?’ asked Robbie. ‘What’s it called?’
‘Monkey Island,’ she said, and turned to share the joke with Monkey-Boy and Ella. ‘What do you think of that?’
‘Sounds great,’ said Monkey-Boy. ‘Will there be real monkeys?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘I hope not,’ said Ella, remembering the attack in Regent’s Park, the diseased chimpanzees, poor little Joel …
She fingered her new gold necklace that she had picked up on her trip to the Victoria & Albert Museum. It comforted her, knowing she had this beautiful thing round her neck.
It took them a few minutes to find the hotel, Ella and Robbie both nervously checking the petrol gauge every few seconds. When they arrived Ella saw that you could only get to the island over a footbridge that led from the car park. They parked the Range Rover and sat there taking in the silence for a while, nobody wanting to be the first to leave the safe cocoon of the car. Staring at the river that was sparkling in the early afternoon light.
‘What do you reckon?’ said Maeve eventually. ‘Shall we go check it out?’
‘Let’s do it,’ said Robbie.
They all climbed out of the car. Sniffed the sharp air. There was the smell of the river and the nearby trees and grass. It smelt good. Clean. Ella knew what grown-ups smelt like, and it wasn’t like this. It all seemed very peaceful. There were birds singing, but there was no sign of any human activity. No grown-ups. No children.
Robbie and Maeve both had swords, and Robbie had a crutch that he hopped along on. Maeve led the four of them over the metal footbridge to the island.
‘I been thinking,’ said Robbie, looking down at the gurgling water. ‘There might be a boat here. We could go upriver on it. Be safe from any sickos that way. What river is this anyway?’
‘It’s the Thames, I think,’ said Maeve.
‘The Thames? You’re joking me. It don’t look nothing like what it does in town.’ He whooped up at the sky. ‘Everything’s better in the countryside!’
There was a wide lawn, completely overgrown, the grass up to their thighs, and past it there was a fancy old hotel, all white, with columns and arched windows. It was like something out of one of the BBC programmes that Ella’s mum used to watch, where the women wore bonnets and the men wore top hats. It didn’t look as if it had been vandalized at all, or broken into. There was still no sign of any human activity anywhere. They’d found a magic dream place. A summer island. They could live here as a family. With Maeve and Robbie as Mum and Dad and Ella and Monkey-Boy as their children.
‘Let’s go and check in,’ said Maeve, and she broke away, running through the grass. One by one the others joined in. As she ran, the grass whipping at her, Ella felt suddenly wild and free.
They’d done it. They’d escaped London. She could forget all about everything that had gone before. As if none of it had ever happened, as if all those dead people – family and friends – had never existed. They were just characters in a story she’d been reading. That’s all. And now she could close the book and start a new story.
No. Not just a story.
This was the beginning of a new life.
She was never going back.
95
‘We should lock this new sicko in the lorry,’ said Einstein. ‘Where we kept the other ones.’
‘No,’ said Brooke. ‘Ed says this one’s different. We can’t treat him like an animal.’
‘We’ll see.’
They’d been arguing ever since Ed had left to go and pick up the rest of his party and Brooke had announced that he was going to be bringing back some sort of grown-up with him.
There was a tense atmosphere in the central hall at the museum. Nobody knew quite what to expect. Most of the kids had been told to stay in the minerals gallery for their own safety, but waiting downstairs was a small welcome party – Brooke, Einstein, Boggle and Justin from the museum. Blue, Maxie, Achilleus and Paddy from the new arrivals, along with the three warehouse kids, Fish-Face, Skinner and Trinity. Justin had wanted to keep them out of the way as well, but they’d insisted on being there. They seemed agitated and excited. Kept mumbling among themselves. Fish-Face, in particular, was on edge, making little birdlike movements, holding her head as if listening, her long neck bent, her wide-set eyes staring into the distance.
Brooke wasn’t sure about the Twisted Kids. They scared her. Since finding out that they claimed to be able to communicate with each other without actually talking she was even more unsure of them. She wondered if they could read her mind and had to be careful to keep them out of her thoughts, in case they saw how she felt about them. She tried to think only about Ed … and the sicko he was bringing with him.
‘How’s he different?’ said Achilleus, who had missed the first part of the argument.
‘He’s clever apparently,’ said Brooke. ‘He can talk.’
‘Yeah,’ said Achilleus. ‘Just like Seamus and his dumb-arse losers out at the warehouse. Ollie had the right idea about them.’ He spun his new spear in his hands. ‘I’m keeping the Gay Bulge handy. You know what they say? The only good grown-up is a dead grown-up.’
Brooke didn’t like Achilleus. Since she’d been attacked she’d lost her confidence when it came to boys. Before she could make them do whatever she wanted. Now … She was a freak like the Twisted Kids. And Achilleus, well, he was a bit of a mystery to her. She felt that even before he would have been somehow shielded from her powers. She wasn’t going to let him get the upper hand, though.
‘This grown-up’s bare important,’ she protested. ‘He can help us.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know how. I don’t know anything about him, do I? This is all new to me. But if Ed says he’s important, and we mustn’t hurt him, then …’
‘Oh, Ed says this, Ed says that, Ed says kiss my arse,’ said Achilleus dismissively. ‘Who’s this Ed anyway?’
‘I know Ed,’ said Justin. ‘Ed’s all right. If he says this one’s important then …’
‘Yeah, well, whatever Ed says,’ Achilleus interrupted. ‘If I have any doubts about this douche then the Gay Bulge is going to finish the argument, OK?’ He lifted the spear to his face and kissed the blade.
‘What you gonna do to him, Akkie?’ said Paddy.
‘What do you think, Paddywhack? I’m gonna rip his diseased belly open and wear his arse as a hat.’
‘Yes, thank you, Sir Lancelot,’ said Einstein sarcastically. ‘I’m sure we all feel a lot safer knowing you’re watching over us.’
Achilleus sneered at him, but said nothing.
‘We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt,’ said Maxie, who seemed to be on Brooke’s side. She and Blue had helped Brooke to make a bedroom of sorts for the sicko in the insect gallery, which was reasonably small and could be safely locked. They’d hauled in a bed and found a bucket and some food and water for him.
They had no idea what to expect, though. All Brooke knew was that she trusted Ed.
Ollie was standing on the balcony near the minerals gallery, looking down at the doors. Just like everyone else he was unsure about all this. And, as ever, he was ready for anything. His sling was stuck on his belt and he was crunching three steel balls against each other in his left hand, moving them around so that they rolled over his curled fingers. The cut on his face where the mother had scratched him was itching slightly and he resisted the urge to touch it.
It was healing, thank God, and hadn’t become infected.
He became aware of a movement and felt something touch his other hand where it rested on the stone top of the balustrade. He turned. It was Lettis, her face pale, dark rings round her eyes, which were wide and glistening. Her expression was serious, unchanging, and he wondered if she would ever smile again. He wondered if she would ever speak again as well. All she did was spend hours hunched over her journal, though she would never let anyone see what she was writing. Not even Chris Marker in the library.
She looked deep into Ollie’s face and he held her hand tight. It felt small and dry and cold.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘We’ll be all right. I won’t let you down again. There’s no need to be scared any more.’
And then more kids appeared, a group of the smaller ones. He recognized them all – Blu-Tack Bill, Zohra and Froggie, Wiki, Jibber-jabber; the only ones missing were Ella and Monkey-Boy. They formed a ring round Lettis, as if they might protect her, though they were nearly all younger and smaller than her.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be waiting in the gallery?’ he said.
‘We wanted to see,’ said Wiki.
Ollie was about to say that it might not be safe when he remembered what he’d just told Lettis.
‘Well, keep still and keep quiet,’ he said. ‘I guess I’m responsible for all of you now.’
‘We can look after ourselves,’ said Jibber-jabber and Ollie smiled. Maybe they could. He felt Lettis squeeze his hand tighter and saw that she was staring intently at the doors.
They were opening and someone was coming in from outside.
‘He’s here,’ said Skinner, who was pacing about nervously.
‘Freak of the week,’ Achilleus sang, just loudly enough for the rest of them to hear, and Paddy giggled.
But it was only Jackson who appeared in the doorway.
‘They’re coming through the gates now,’ she said.
‘What’s he look like?’ said Brooke.
‘Can’t see. He’s under a blanket.’
The Fallen Page 37
