When the man came pelting through the door in pursuit, his face met the business end of a frying pan and his feet went out from under him. He crashed down onto the hard tiled floor with a rush of expelled breath. But still he kept a tight grip on his machete. I aimed a kick at his nuts but he rolled away. Nonetheless I connected with his thigh and he grunted. Finally a stroke of luck – I'd given him a dead leg.
He pulled himself up on a table as I swung at his head with the frying pan again. He swatted it away with the machete and it went flying from my grip, clattering to the floor. His nose was bleeding freely and one side of his face was vivid red where the pan had caught him on the cheekbone.
He snarled at me, wiped his hand in the blood from his nose, licked it, smacked his lips, and then smeared the fresh blood all over his face, mixing the new blood with the old.
"Safer now," he chuckled as he advanced, limping, towards me.
Jesus, was this guy for real?
I backed away, looking all the time for another means of defence. There was a rack of knives to my left, and I snatched a short one which I brandished menacingly. A voice in my head mocked: "Call that a knife? That's not a knife. That thing he's got, that's a knife!"
I continued backing away, trod on my discarded flying pan, and went flying like a character in a bad slapstick comedy. To add insult to injury I somehow contrived to land on my own knife, stabbing myself in the side. I yelled in pain as I pulled the blade out and felt hot blood seep down my hip. I looked up and there he was, looming over me, grinning.
"Good cattle. Bleed yourself. Save me the trouble."
"Oh, fuck off," I said wearily. And then I sat up, leaned forward and buried the knife hilt-deep into his thigh. Now it was his turn to yell. I flung myself backwards to avoid the answering swipe of his machete. I scrambled to my feet again and staggered away from him.
He resumed his advance without even pausing to remove the knife. I started grabbing things off the work surfaces and hurling them at him without taking time to see what they were. A colander, a kettle, a bottle of oil, a box of teabags; nothing slowed him down. This was futile.
I turned and scurried to the door.
It was locked. I looked left and right frantically. This wasn't the door Williams, Petts and I had entered from, that was on the other side of the room. This was – oh fuck, it was the door to a walk-in freezer.
I was trapped.
Long metal work surfaces stretched forward on either side of me, hemming me in. Behind me was a locked door, and in front of me stood some kind of Home Counties Jason Voorhees, dripping with blood, and grinning.
"Time to bleed, boy."
There was nowhere to run, nothing to hand offered any chance of defence or offence. It was just me, him and a very big knife.
Fuck it.
I put my head down, and charged the bastard. I slammed into his midriff and this time, with both legs damaged, he lost his balance and fell backwards. We tumbled to the floor and slid across the tiles and – hallelujah! – I saw his machete go sliding away underneath the tables. We wrestled, each trying to gain some purchase, but both of us were slick with blood and our hands kept slipping off each other. I tried to reach up and grab his throat but he was way too strong for me. He forced my arms down and somehow spun me, taking a firm grip on my clothes and pinioning me, face down on the floor. He folded his arm around my neck, nestling the soft inside of his elbow on my already bruised and battered windpipe, and squeezed.
For the second time in an hour I was being choked to death and I couldn't see any way of escape. I writhed and kicked, tried a reverse head butt, scratched and gasped and thrashed, but he was solid as stone, bearing down on me. I couldn't move him an inch.
Again my vision began to cloud, my ears began to roar.
And then my thrashing hands brushed against something hard. The knife – it was still in his thigh! I grasped it, twisted and pulled. He grunted and tightened his grip. I couldn't move my arm up to hit anything vital so I resorted to stabbing him in the thigh again.
And then again.
And again.
And again.
I kept the knife pumping in and out of his thigh with all the force I could muster, but as my body failed, my thrusts got weaker and weaker.
Eventually the blade fell out of my blood-slicked hands and I felt myself blacking out.
I regained consciousness what must have been a minute or two later. The dead weight of my assailant was still on top of me, but his grip on my neck had loosened. I lay there for a second as my head cleared. He wasn't breathing. I roared with the exertion of throwing him off of me, and I slipped and slid in the blood pool that surrounded us both before finally standing upright. Pausing only to pick up the machete, I staggered away, back towards the garden.
My windpipe was so badly swollen that I could only breathe in short ragged bursts. My side was on fire where the knife had speared me. I was a mass of bruises, my head felt light, my hearing was muffled and I was covered, absolutely covered from head to toe, in blood – both mine and that of the man I had killed.
No, don't think about that. Don't think about the killing, about the intimacy of it, the penetration and the spurting and the tactile slickness of his dead skin. Don't think about his breath on my neck, his hands on my throat, his knee in my back. Don't think about how awfully, sickeningly different it was to the clinical dissociation of a gunshot. Don't think about it. Save it for later. There's time for the nightmares later. Things to do.
I limped outside into the sunlight and listened. The chanting had stopped but I could still hear the noises of a large group of people. My route to freedom was still the same, so I started walking towards where Petts should have been lying unconscious. But he wasn't there. Had he regained consciousness and fled, or had he been found and captured? I peered around the corner of the hedge again and saw the machete men herding the townspeople into canvas-topped troop trucks, which had pulled up at the edge of the forecourt. They were shipping them off, presumably to their base of operations.
One man carried the dead body of the woman from the scaffold and tossed it into a truck amongst the living cattle.
Oh God, they had a use for corpses as well. Could they be cannibals too?
With a jolt I saw Petts, holding his head, clearly disorientated, being shoved into one of the trucks. There was no hope of a rescue. He'd have to take his chances.
There was nothing I could do here. I had to get back to the school and warn them about the imminent attack by all that was left of Hildenborough's militia, assuming it hadn't already taken place.
I made my way as fast as I could across the small section of exposed ground and then back into cover on the road, behind the hedgerows and up to a stile. Even the simple act of climbing over a stile felt like an achievement given what I'd been through. And then into the field and safe to the trees.
Apart from the young woman, daubed in blood, carrying a gun, barring my way and looking at me quizzically.
We stood and stared at each other for a moment, and then I smiled and said:
"Safe now."
She regarded my blood-soaked self and nodded.
"Safe now," she replied.
And I was free to go.
CHAPTER TEN
I had no idea what awaited me back at the school, but that three-mile journey felt like one of the longest of my life. I wanted to run but I just wasn't capable. A shambling half-jog was the best I could muster.
I wondered how good David's intelligence had been. Had he chosen this afternoon to attack Hildenborough because he'd known that some of their forces would be busy elsewhere? And if so, did that mean he knew about the school? Could we be his next target? All this, of course, assuming the school wasn't already occupied.
I decided my best approach was to head along the river and come at the school from the rear, through the woods. That way I could get a sense of what had happened before showing myself.
The River Medway was part of
the Ironside Line, the premier inland line of defence against the expected German invasion during the Second World War. As a result there are pillboxes all along the river, five of which mark the rear border of the school grounds. Under Mac's defence plan only two were manned at any one time, and never the same two on consecutive days.
I approached the first, but it was empty, as was the second. But the third had finally seen combat, many decades after its construction. There were four men, all of whom had been carrying shotguns, lying spread-eagled on the ground; victims of the General Purpose Machine Gun that had been housed in the pillbox. When I entered the pillbox I found one of our boys – a third-former called Guerrier, who I don't think I'd ever even spoken to – dead from a shotgun blast to the face. There was no sign of the GPMG, so I assumed the remainder of the Hildenborough attackers had commandeered it to use against further resistance. That would have evened the odds slightly.
I picked up one of the shotguns, emptied the cartridges from the pockets of the dead men, loaded the gun and moved on.
The fourth pillbox was empty but the fifth was pebble-dashed with shotgun pellets, and there was an abandoned GPMG inside, surrounded by spent casings. There were no bodies anywhere. Whoever had been manning this pillbox must have done a runner.
I moved cautiously through the woods to the edge of the playing fields and the assault course, which provided me with cover. I crawled through the netting and under the barbed wire and took up position by a wooden climbing structure.
There was no-one to be seen and no gunshots or screams to be heard; the school was silent and still. The fields offered no cover, but I had to keep going. I ran to the edge of the playing fields and made my way towards the school keeping myself close to the hedge. I made it to the outbuildings, where the walls were freshly chipped by what looked like GPMG rounds. One of the minibuses was aflame. The GPMG that had been taken from the pillbox was beside it, still resting upright on its tripod. There'd been a hell of a fight here, but it had moved on. There were two more Hildenborough attackers lying dead on the gravel path at the back of the building. All the windows on the ground floor were broken and one had a dead boy lying across it, half in and half out. I walked over and lifted his head. It was a junior called Belcher. I'd known him; nice kid, cried himself to sleep at night because he missed his mum.
Then I heard shots. But they weren't the sporadic shoot and return of a fire-fight; it was a series of measured single shots, about ten in all. I had a horrible suspicion I knew what that meant.
I made my way carefully through the corridors of Castle, passing bodies and bullet casings, splintered wood panelling and blood-soaked floorboards, until I came to the front door. I looked out across the driveway and lawn.
The guard post at the front gate was smoking and I could see the body of a boy lying across the sandbags; it was Zayn.
One less officer to worry about.
One less rapist for me to deal with.
The fight at the front didn't look like it had been as fierce as the one out back, which had obviously ended in a running battle indoors. I figured they'd sent a small force to the gate as a distraction, while the main force had attacked from the river. It's probably what I would have done. Fat lot of good it did them. Because standing in front of the school, before the assembled body of surviving pupils, stood Mac, smoking Browning still in hand. To his left lay a row of eleven men, all with their hands tied behind their backs, all with neat bullet holes in their heads. Six more men were kneeling to his right.
As I watched, Mac popped the clip out of his Browning. Empty. He nodded to Wylie, who raised his rifle and executed the next man. Then Wolf-Barry, Pugh, Speight and Patel each took a life. Green protested but he had a gun forced into his hands by Wylie. Mac barked an order and stood beside him, menacingly. Given no choice, Green closed his eyes, turned his head, and pulled the trigger. Mac patted him on the back.
One more team-building exercise.
One more crime to unite them.
I pushed open the front door and walked outside. The gasps of the boys alerted the officers, who turned, guns raised, and then stood there, amazed. Mac came running up to me, his face a mask of astonishment. He looked me up and down and said:
"What the hell happened to you?"
I told him.
"So what you're saying is that I've just executed a whole bunch of potential allies who could have helped us take on a far nastier bunch of heavily armed psychotic fuckers who like bathing in human blood and are probably cannibals?"
"That about covers it, yeah."
"Fuck."
Mac ordered the officers to hang the corpses from the lamp-posts that lined the school drive in the hope that they'd deter any attackers for a while.
After filling Mac in on my escapades I went to the San and attended to my own wounds, dosing myself with antibiotics and rubbing antiseptic and arnica on bruise after bruise. The wound in my side was excruciatingly painful, but I'd managed to miss all my vital organs and I didn't think I'd punctured my guts. I stitched it up and hoped for the best; it would make strenuous physical exercise even more awkward and painful for a while. By the time I was done a hot bath had been prepared for me, one of the privileges of rank. Lowering myself into it was sweet agony, but I lay there, boiling myself for about an hour, letting all the tension seep away, trying to work out my next move.
We had been training for a potential war with Hildenborough, but after a brief, bloody skirmish they were out of the picture, replaced by a far more menacing enemy. This new force was highly organised, armed with machine guns and machetes, driven by religious fanaticism and pre-emptively attacking communities in our area. We had no idea what, if any, strategy they were using, where they were based, or when, if at all, they planned to attack. We were vulnerable and uninformed; what we needed more than anything else was good intelligence.
When I was cleaned up I briefed all the officers on the events in Hildenborough. I was relieved to find that there was no sign of the resentment I had been expecting from them; I had been blooded once again and it seemed I had earned their respect without even having to try. Mac made it clear that all information regarding the new threat remained amongst officers only; he didn't want to scare the boys.
"Give 'em a day or so to mourn the dead and celebrate our victory," he said. "We've seen off an attacking army of adults – twenty-eight of them – with only five boys dead. We can use this to increase morale a bit, coz if what Lee is telling us is correct then this was just a warm-up. I won't leave one of my men in enemy hands so we've got to go and rescue Petts. That means picking a serious fight."
Once the briefing was over the officers went back to the grisly task of hanging out the Hildenborough dead, and burying our own. Mac and I pored over an OS map of the local area and picked out the most likely bases of operation for the group that Wylie had colourfully christened the Blood Hunters. We mainly focused on places that would have good defences, which meant stately homes and old manor houses. There were a lot of them, but we prioritised and drew up a search plan.
While Mac pondered the offence that we would adopt as our best defence, I sent a note to Matron via Mrs Atkins, warning her of the new threat and telling her to be on guard.
"I have never been so bloody scared in my entire life," said Norton. "There were bullets everywhere, the windows were exploding, the minibus blew up. I just closed my eyes and fired blind. Fat lot of use I was. Give me hand to hand and I know what I'm doing, but this was mental. Just fucking mental. And what I don't understand, right, is why they picked a fight with us in the first place? I mean, what've we done?"
"They were watching us," I said. "They saw Bates' crucifixion, thought we were a threat. You can see their point, I suppose."
"Still, couldn't they have just, y'know, knocked on the door and said 'hi, we're the neighbours, we baked you a cake?' I mean, there was no reason to come in guns blazing, no reason at all."
"Look where it got them."
&n
bsp; "Look where it got Guerrier, Belcher, Griffiths and Zayn."
I had no answer to that.
"I don't want to die like that," he said eventually.
"If it's choice of being shot or being bled and eaten, then I'll take a bullet every time, thanks. After all, been there, done that."
"Yeah, yeah, stop boasting," he teased, sarcastically. "By my reckoning you've been shot, stabbed, strangled, hanged and savaged by a mad dog since you came back to school, three of those in the last twenty-four hours."
"I also shat myself."
"All right. You win. You are both vastly harder and far more pathetic than any of us."
"And don't you forget it."
"So, oh great unkillable smelly one, do you want to know how I've been doing?"
I nodded eagerly.
"Things in the ranks are confused. Some boys are really pumped up about the fight, gung-ho, ready for more. They reckon Mac's leadership saved our bacon and they're willing to fight for him now."
"Mac's fucking leadership provoked the bloody attack in the first place."
"But they don't know that."
"Which boys are we talking about?"
"Most of the fourth and fifth formers. They're the ones who cop it least from the officers, so they've got a less highly developed sense of grievance. But I've had a quiet natter with Haycox, the horsey one, and filled him in on what happened to Matron, and he's with us. He's trying to spread the word, subtle like."
"And the juniors?"
"They're more interesting. Rowles is a sneaky little sod when he's not sniffling, and he's got pretty much all of them on side. They loved Matron and Bates, and they fucking hate Mac. Plus the officers pick on them all the time and they're feeling pretty pissed off."
"So we've got basically all the seniors led by Mac, against all the juniors, led by us," I said, morosely. "Not going to be much of a fight is it."
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