"Oh, and Lee?"
"Yes?"
"It really is very good to see you. We could use some level heads around here."
Trying not to let my level head swell to the size of a football, I blushed and mumbled some thanks.
The staff accommodation was situated in the west wing of the main school building, an old stately home from the 1800s that was turned into a school about a hundred years ago. It was imaginatively referred to as Castle – not The Castle, or Castle House, just Castle. The two towers on either side of the main entrance made it kind of look like a castle, with mock battlements on the roof, but inside it was wood panelling, creaky floorboards and draughty casement windows.
The central heating in our dormitories was provided by huge, old metal radiators that wheezed, groaned and dripped all winter. The paint on them, layers thick, would crack and peel every summer, exposing the scalding hot metal underneath. Some prefects' favourite method of torturing junior boys was to hold their ears to an exposed bit of radiator metal. It'd hurt like hell for days afterwards. MacKillick liked this technique, although he had allegedly once used a softer and more sensitive part of one boy's anatomy, and I don't even want to think about how badly that must've hurt. The radiators were cold now, and the air was chilly and damp.
The school was eerily quiet. I paused in the main assembly hall, breathing in the smell of floor polish and dust. At one end stood the stage, curtains closed. The sixth-formers had performed A Midsummer Night's Dream there last term, God knew when it'd see use again. Halfway up the wall, around three sides of the hall, a gallery walkway joined one set of classrooms to the library and staff areas. I limped up the stairs and used it to make my way through into the wing normally reserved for teachers.
I found Bates in the staff room, giving what appeared to be a briefing to the three remaining boys, all in their school uniforms, as if attending a lesson. Bates was stood by a whiteboard, drawing a simple map with arrows showing directions of approach. The central building on the map was labelled 'Tesco'.
The door was open, so I knocked and entered, making Bates jump and reach for his rifle before he recognised me, clocked the crutch, and came over to help me to a seat.
"Kevin isn't it?"
I sighed. "No sir. It's Keegan, sir. Lee Keegan."
"Keegan, right. Well, welcome back Keegan. Been in the wars?"
I've buried my mother, cycled halfway across the county, been attacked three times on the way, eaten ripe roadkill badger for breakfast and then been savaged by the hound of the bloody Baskervilles. I'm covered in mud, blood, bruises and bandages, and I am on crutches. Of course I've been in the damn wars. You prick.
"Little bit, sir."
He had the good grace to look sympathetic for about two seconds.
"Good to have another senior boy back. RAF, weren't you?" He said RAF with a hint of distaste, as if referring to an embarrassing medical complaint.
"Yes sir. Junior Corporal."
"Oh well. You can still fire one of these though, eh?" He brandished his. 303.
"Yes sir."
"Good, good. We'll get you sorted out with at the billet later. I was just outlining the plan of attack for tomorrow. Take a seat."
Bates looked weird. His hair was slicked back with gel (or grease?) and he was dressed in full army gear. His boots shone but he hadn't shaved in days, his eyes were deep set and bloodshot. His manner was different, too. The blokey jokiness was gone and instead he was acting the brisk military man. Grief, did he really think he was a soldier now? I bet he'd even started using the 24-hour clock. He resumed his briefing.
"We assemble by the minibus at oh-six-hundred." Knew it. "The primary objective is the tinned goods aisle at Tesco, but matches, cleaning fluids, firelighters and so forth would come in handy. Yes Green?"
The sixth-former had raised his hand.
"Sir, we've already visited… sorry, raided… Sainsbury's, Asda and Waitrose. They were all empty. Morrisons wasn't even there any more. Why should Tesco be any different?"
For the briefest of instants a look of despair flickered across Bates' face. It was gone in a moment, replaced by a patronising smile. God, he really was in a bad way. It'd been hard enough for me to bury my mother but it was, after all, the natural way of things – children mourn their parents. I couldn't begin to imagine what burying his wife and children had done to him; he seemed broken.
"Got to be thorough, Green. A good commander leaves nothing to chance. Nothing!"
"Right sir!" The boy shot me a glance and rolled his eyes. I grimaced back. I knew Green reasonably well. He was in the year above me, but was in my house and had helped organise our annual drama show last term. He was a high achiever in exams, and always put himself front and centre in any play or performance, but get him near a sports field and he looked like he wanted to run and hide under a bush; smart, but a wimp. Exactly the kind of boy Bates wanted nothing to do with. He was tall and lean, with dark hair and brown eyes, and the lucky bastard had avoided acne completely. No such luck for me.
I had been in the Lower Fifth before The Cull. Rowles was a second-former and Norton, sat next to Green, was Upper Fifth.
I barely knew Rowles. He was so much younger than me I'd never had anything to do with him. Even for his age he was small, and his wide eyes and freckled cheeks made him look like one of those cutesy kids from a Disney film, the kind who contrive to get their divorced parents back together just by being awfully, grotesquely, vomit-inducingly sweet. He was looking up at Bates, eyes full of hero worship. Poor kid. Bad enough losing your parents, but to latch onto Bates as your role model, now that was really unfortunate. I realised he was young enough that the world pre-Cull would soon come to seem like a dream to him, some fantasy childhood too idealised to have really occurred.
Norton, on the other hand, was all swagger, but not in a bad way. He was confident and self assured, a posh kid who affected that sort of loping Liam Gallagher strut. Well into martial arts, he had the confidence of someone who knew he could look after himself, and spent most break times smoking in the backroom of the cafe over the road, chatting up any girls from the high school who bought his bad boy act. Although he fitted the profile, he wasn't a bully or a bastard, and I was pleased to see him; things could be fun with Norton around.
What a gang to see out the apocalypse with – an aspiring luvvie, a wideboy hardarse and an annoying mascot child, overseen by a world weary nurse and a damaged history master who thought he was Sgt Rock. Still, it could be worse – the head could be alive and MacKillick could be here.
Just as that thought flickered through my brain I heard someone behind me clear their throat. I cursed myself for tempting fate and turned around knowing exactly which particular son of a bitch would be standing behind me.
"Hi sir," said Sean MacKillick. "Need a hand?"
"Oh fuck," said Rowles.
CHAPTER TWO
Sean MacKillick was Bates' golden boy, and the highest ranking boy in the army section of the CCF. He was Deputy Head Boy and captain of the rugby team – three successive county trophies. He was also a Grade A, platinum-plated bastard.
Because of his sporting achievements the school authorities thought the sun shone out of Mac's jock-strapped arse, but when the teachers weren't around he was the worst kind of bully – sadistic, vicious and totally random. Jon always said it was because he was so short. Even now, at nineteen, he was shorter than everyone in the room, even Rowles, but he was built like a brick shitter and his head was so square it had corners. His thighs were meaty and his legs so stumpy that he kind of waddled – some of the juniors had christened him Donald Duck – but there was no mistaking the raw, squat power of the man.
His eyes were piercing blue under close-cropped blonde hair, and his face was heavily freckled, but there was cruelty in the curl of his mouth, and his eyes were all cold calculation.
Mac was a posh kid. His father was in the House of Lords until they did away with hereditary peers, but he
had adopted the persona of an East end gangster. Born into the aristocracy but he acted like Ray Winstone. Pathetic, really.
Most of his classmates worshipped him, but beyond that he'd been almost universally hated, especially in the CCF. He saw the uniform as a licence to do whatever he pleased, and although he was a bully on school grounds, that was nothing to how he behaved when the army section was away on camp or manoeuvres. Army summer camp last year had reportedly turned into an endless round of forced marches, press ups and endurance tests, all overseen by Mac and ignored by Bates, who seemed to think it was just good, clean fun.
At the last camp, an outward bound week in Wales doing orienteering and stuff, he actually threw a boy into a river and then held his head under the water until he lost consciousness. When they fished him out and revived him Mac made him finish the exercise with them, sodden and disorientated. This was winter, halfway up a mountain, so by the time they made it back to the rendezvous he was literally blue; ended up in hospital with hypothermia. Too scared to tell, he pretended he'd slipped and fallen in. The other boys in the squad kept quiet too – Mac had a little gang of hangers-on and if you didn't want to end up black and blue, you didn't mess.
He and his lackeys would strut (well, they'd strut, he'd waddle) around the school laying down the law, but whenever a teacher appeared Mac would smile and fawn. The head loved him. He was only relegated to Deputy Head Boy because the Head Boy's dad had just donated a new chemistry lab. Matron loathed him. She was always cleaning up the wounds he inflicted, but the head waved away her complaints muttering platitudes about youthful high spirits. Wanker.
There were dark rumours of a death too, a long time ago, back when Mac was a junior. But as far as I knew that's all they were – rumours.
Mac had left school the term before The Cull started, won some big prize on speech day for being king of the brown-nosers, and Jon had keyed his car during the ceremony. Jon who was now dead. We were so relieved to see the back of Mac, so sure he was gone forever.
Basically, Sean MacKillick was the last person on the earth you wanted looking after a group of vulnerable kids in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Bates gave an exclamation of joy and – God help us – hugged the bastard.
"Welcome back, Mac," he said. "Now we can really get started."
Over the next few weeks we had a steady influx of people taking up residence. There had been over a thousand boys in the school and at 7% survival rate that left about seventy alive. Of these about forty turned up in the weeks following my return. Some brought brothers or sisters, mothers, grandparents, uncles, aunts and friends. Only one boy arrived with his father, but the man died the next day of pneumonia. Bates was especially good with the boy – Thackeray, his name was – and I saw a whole other side to him. He was caring, kind and thoughtful; surprising. All in all we were forty-six by the end of the month and it felt like life was returning to the old buildings.
Everybody who returned brought their stories with them. Wolf-Barry, a skinny sixth-former who was a bit of a computer geek told of bodies littering the streets of London, rats emerging from the sewers to feast in broad daylight. Rowles had seen mass graves and power stations converted into huge furnaces to burn the dead. 'Horsey' Haycox, imaginatively nicknamed because he was obsessed with horses, had encountered a group of born again fundamentalist Christians who had declared holy war on anyone not of their faith, by which they basically meant anyone non-white. Speight, another sixth former, told a very similar story, but his local God-bothering nutters were Muslims. There were many other tales of shell-shocked survivors turning to extreme perversions of religion to try and make sense of what had happened, and charismatic leaders building power bases while beheading, hanging or even burning anyone they deemed impure or unclean.
A generator was set up and fuel was collected from a nearby petrol station. We emptied a Blockbuster and most evenings we ran the power for a couple of hours and watched a movie. Television and radio were pretty much dead by this point, although we kept scanning the airwaves for signals. Some satellite stations were still broadcasting as far-off generators slowly ran down, but mostly they all just broadcast muzak and test cards apologising for the interruption in service. An Italian channel played an old dubbed episode of Fawlty Towers on a continuous loop for three weeks. One by one all the stations faded away to dead air. The last live station broadcasting came out of Japan, where one guy ran a daily news show. He showed footage of distant explosions and gun battles, empty streets and haunted, echoing city canyons. We watched him every day for a month until one day he just wasn't there any more.
Bates and Mac took charge and organised everyone into work groups, and we started to feather our nest. A spotty little Brummie called Petts prepared a section of land to be a market garden come spring; after all, our supplies of tinned and dehydrated food were running low and soon we'd need to start growing our own.
The main kitchen was a useless modern gas range, but in one of the outbuildings we found a turn of the century kitchen with a long-forgotten wood burning stove. We cleaned it up and had hot food once a day, prepared by one of the boy's aunts, who we started to call the 'Dinner Lady', although her name was Mrs Atkins. Lots of the dorms had old, bricked-up fireplaces, so we took a sledgehammer to those, opened up the chimneys again, harvested some grates from an abandoned hardware store in Sevenoaks, and slept snug every night. The woods in the school grounds provided all the fuel we needed.
We even set up a paddock and rounded up a cow for milking, two pigs and three sheep. Being a posh private school, St Mark's had no shortage of wannabe gentleman farmers and two had survived and returned – Heathcote and Williams took to their tasks like pigs to swill.
The school came to seem like a haven. We organised football and rugby tournaments, started having assembly after breakfast; hell, we even had campfires and sing-alongs. The big stone wall that enclosed the grounds on three sides, and the River Medway which marked the school's southern border, kept the outside world distant and held it at bay. We felt safe and insulated, and Bates and Mac were fine as long as that lasted. Sure the scavenging parties were a little too soldiery to take seriously, but without his cronies Mac seemed almost normal, and Bates gradually settled down. He relied heavily on Mac to organise things, but sorting out the rota for planting spuds and milking the cow doesn't really provide much opportunity for megalomania.
It was surreal. The world had died and here was this tiny, insular community of grieving children carrying on as if everything was fine. And for a while, just for a while, I allowed myself to be lulled by it, allowed myself to think maybe things would be all right, maybe the world hadn't descended into anarchy and chaos and cults and blood and horror, maybe the rest of the world was like we were – hopeful and coping. Maybe this little society we were setting up would work.
What an idiot I was. A community is only as healthy as the people who lead it. And we had Bates and Mac. I should have realised we were fucked before we even began.
We could only keep the madness at bay for so long. We were living in denial, and Mr Hammond's arrival changed everything.
Norton and I were in the south quad working on a madcap contraption designed by some fifth-form chemistry 'A' student called Dudley, designed to harvest methane gas from animal shit, when we heard the first gunshots. They echoed off the walls and we couldn't tell where they were coming from. There were sharp repetitive sounds too, which we quickly realised were hooves on tarmac, and distant shouts. The front drive!
We ran through the buildings to the front door and looked out at the long driveway that led from the front gate up to the school. An old man was running as fast as he could up the drive towards us, holding hands with two boys. All three were shouting for help. Behind them, just inside the gate but gaining fast, were a man and a woman on horseback. Both carried shotguns. The woman took aim at the fleeing trio. She fired and one of the boys stumbled and fell forwards onto the gravel. The old man hesitated, unsu
re what to do.
"Run, you idiot, run," whispered Norton.
The old man ushered the other boy towards the school and as the child continued running the man turned back to get the wounded boy. He crouched there protectively shielding him from the approaching riders as they reigned in their steeds and loomed over them. The woman took careful aim at the running boy.
While all this was happening boys had come running up to the door one by one, drawn by the noise. Bates arrived last, carrying his rifle. He pushed to the front and went to open the door just as the woman fired and the running boy threw up his arms and tumbled head over heels onto the cold drive. He lay there for a moment and then started crawling towards us. We all gasped, horrified. The woman started her mount trotting towards him.
I glanced up at Bates but the look on his face said it all; he was frozen, unable to make a decision. We weren't going to get anything useful from him.
"Where's Mac?" he asked.
"Scavenging party, sir," I replied.
"Oh. Right. Ummm…"
Shit. I had to do something.
"Sir, give me the gun sir," I said.
"What?"
"Give me the gun, sir." I didn't shout, that wouldn't have worked. I was just quietly insistent, assuming authority I didn't really feel. He handed me the rifle just as Matron came running. She too was armed.
"Matron," I said. "Get out there and talk to them. Just give me two minutes."
Startled, she looked to Bates for confirmation, but he was just staring out the window, biting his lip. She looked back to me and nodded, then stepped out onto the front steps, rifle ready but not presented for firing.
The horsewoman had dismounted and was standing over the injured child, who continued to crawl away from her, whimpering and crying, leaving a thick red snail trail behind him. Her colleague was still mounted, covering the other two, about twenty metres behind her.
I turned away from the door, pushed through the crowd of boys, and ran up the main stairs. I needed to get to a good vantage point.
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