‘I remember walking along, chatting to Ed. I wonder what happened to him. He was a good guy. A good friend. Popular. Head of everything. A hit with the girls. Yeah, that’s what we were talking about – girls – if you want to know. I can’t remember exactly what we were saying, just a typical boys’ conversation like we’d had a million times before. You know? Well, you wouldn’t know, I guess. You’re too young. And a girl. Anyway, it was silly stuff because we felt sort of safe. Being all together like that. With a plan. We were going to find somewhere like my farm. With food and animals, you know … So we were just chatting and walking, and then, out of nowhere, there were grown-ups.’
Malik paused, and when he went on his voice was even quieter so that Ella struggled to hear him.
‘They got me before I knew they were even there. Grabbed me and dragged me into a building, started ripping at me. Don’t remember much more after that. Not even sure I remember anything, to tell you the truth. I’ve sort of pieced it together from dreams and memories and what people told me afterwards. You know? Glimpses and pictures. Bits and pieces. Some other kids rescued me. I never knew what happened to Ed and the rest of the boys from my school. I hope they’re OK. That they got away. I tried to find out, but nobody knew.
‘The kids that found me weren’t from my school, you see. There was another school in Rowhurst. The local state school on the other side of town. Brockridge Park. The comprehensive. We never mixed with them. They were the rough kids. We were always told to keep away from them, but they saved me that day. The boy in charge, their leader, guy called Rav, he told me afterwards that, when they found me, I was so badly mashed up they thought I was dead. There’s been a lot of times since when I wished I had died.
‘They were looting my body apparently, when I grabbed hold of one of them by the arm, like something out of a horror film. Freaked him right out. Nearly crapped himself. They didn’t know what to do with me, but there was a doctor nearby who helped some of them. This was right at the beginning, when there were still some adults who hadn’t got the disease yet. You remember, we all thought maybe some of them would be immune or something? So, anyway, this doctor, Dr Catell – Chris Catell – he was trying to help us kids.
‘He had a medical centre near where we’d been ambushed. And they took me there. He’d barricaded it up, you see. Made it safe. He had two nurses with him and they were doing what they could. At first he didn’t want to take me in apparently. Told Rav that it was a waste of time; with wounds like I had I was a goner. But Rav’s lot didn’t want me either, so they dumped me on his doorstep and when I didn’t die straight off he kind of had to take me in.
‘I can sort of remember it from there. This and that. Lying in one of the consulting rooms, all bandaged up like a mummy. This one nurse crying all the time. One of them was called Mel and one of them was Janey. I think it was Janey who cried all the time. Doctor Catell, unshaven, pumping me full of painkillers and antibiotics and stuff, cleaning my wounds, trying to stitch me up. It felt like all the nerves in my skin had been exposed, rubbed with grit. Like I’d been deep-fried. I remember a lot of screaming. He must’ve given me the most righteous painkillers he had. All pointless, he told me, but it seemed I wasn’t ready to die yet. The Koran says everything that happens has been planned by Allah. It’s all worked out.’
‘Fate,’ said Ella. ‘Isaac was going on about it. Something called a funny word, like Kermit?’
‘Kismet,’ said Malik and he chuckled. ‘Kermit. Yeah, it’s all the same thing. Fate, kismet, Kermit, Qadar. That’s one of the main teachings of Islam – Qadar. It’s all written down somewhere, everything that happens to you. Like we’re all just characters in a book. So why do you think I wasn’t allowed to die? Why do you think that is? I sometimes thought it was because there was something Allah wanted me to do. That I had a purpose. Other times I thought maybe he was just laughing at me. And lots of times I lost any faith I might have had. Didn’t believe in anything. I’d have been happy to die back then, instead of screaming all night. Dr Chris didn’t know how I survived, said I’d lost so much blood I must’ve had only, like, half a litre left in me.
‘I don’t know exactly how long it went on like that, me lying there, him looking more tired every day, the one nurse crying, the other one going slowly nuts, the kids shouting out. Yeah, there were others. I wasn’t the only one. There were six of us in all, me and another couple of boys and three girls. Time just sort of passed. Didn’t know what was day and what was night, while Chris tried to look after me and the nurses, and his other patients.
‘Then one of the boys died and there were five of us, and then it was clear that a nurse had the disease, and Chris and the other nurse, the crying one, had to shut her outside. And she stayed out there, wailing and weeping and screaming and banging on the doors, saying she was all right, then making weird sounds and using made-up language. In the end she was just, like, grunting and swearing and sniffing at the doors and windows. And then one day Chris went out and hit her with something until she was quiet.
‘The other nurse cried even more after that. I never saw her with dry eyes. She was nice, though. Nice but scared. Janey. Yeah, she was definitely Janey. We talked a lot. She wouldn’t look at me, though. That only made her cry worse. Not that she could see much of me. I was all over bandages, to tell you the truth. She’d talk about any kind of stuff. Her family, things she’d watched on the TV – she liked soaps – holidays she’d been on, her boyfriend, who was dead. And then one of the girls died. I’d never met her. And the doctor accused Janey of doing it and they had this, like, massive row, right in my room. Janey freaked out. Started climbing the walls and then she scratched the doctor’s face, and he held her down and injected her with something. She went still and he dragged her out by her hair and I never saw her again.
‘So now it’s just me and Dr Chris, the other boy and two girls. And I didn’t want to stay in that bed forever, waiting for bad things to happen to me. Of all the parts of me that the grown-ups had bitten and chewed, my legs were probably the least damaged. They hardly touched them. So, as soon as I could, I got out of bed and started trying to walk, hobbling round my little room. That’s when I got a shock, though. My legs weren’t too bad, but my arse hurt like you wouldn’t believe where one of the grown-ups had taken a chunk out of it. I made myself keep walking, though, and Chris let me leave my room.
‘I got to know the girls a bit. One had some kind of stomach infection, a split in her gut or something. She wasn’t much older than you. The other one, Abby, had a badly broken arm. I only met the boy twice. Tommy, his name was. He didn’t seem to be injured; he just sat in a chair all day, rocking backwards and forwards, humming to himself. I don’t know if he was ill or he’d just wigged out. Chris wouldn’t talk about him. I think maybe he might have had something wrong with his brain, you know, like a tumour or something.
‘As I say, there was only the two times I saw him. After that first time the doc put him back in his room and said we weren’t to disturb him.
‘The power was off by then, but the doctor had collected a load of candles. He’d light a couple in the evenings and we’d play cards and read magazines, the same ones over and over, and I tried to walk around and get my muscles working properly. But my stitches would pull and I’d be bleeding, and the doc said he couldn’t keep giving me more blood, we were running out.
‘The girl with the stomach problem, she got sicker and sicker. Went back to her bed. She shouted a lot for painkillers and the doc was giving her all these, like, antibiotics, but she went green and died. Something burst inside her, the doc said. And we couldn’t bury her so she went outside like the others. Like putting the rubbish out.
‘I eventually grew the balls to look in a mirror for the first time. And, well, I don’t need to tell you what I look like. It was much worse then, if you can believe it. As well as the cuts and gouges, and the strips of missing skin, I was all swollen and bruised, and weeping with pus and crap.
I’d been bitten and scratched and clawed at. One eye was blind. Bits of me were healing, but bits of me were gone and wouldn’t ever be coming back. I looked like someone put together from spare parts, badly put together, stitched up like Frankenstein’s monster.
‘The doc said really I shouldn’t have been alive at all. He couldn’t work out how I wasn’t dead. Maybe something got inside me when I was bitten. Only instead of killing me, it made me stronger. Kept me going. Like the grown-ups you see walking around with bits missing, terrible wounds, arms and legs gone, guts swinging in the breeze, their brains hanging out of their heads. But they’re still walking around. How does that work? I mean, I know they’re not zombies, but they might as well be, the way they look and act, the way you can whack them and whack them and they won’t go down.’
‘Take their brains out,’ said Ella.
‘Huh?’
‘That’s what you have to do to zombies. My brother told me – smash their brains out.’
‘Zombies don’t make any sense,’ said Malik. ‘The dead can’t get up and walk. Unless I’m one, one of the walking dead. A revenant.’
‘I don’t think you are,’ said Ella.
‘I don’t think I am either. But why I’m here, how I survived, I can’t tell you. And, like I said, Dr Chris didn’t know either. I got to know him quite well. We talked a lot. Well, he talked a lot. My throat hurt too much to mumble more than a few words at a time. The grown-ups had squeezed it, strangling me. They’d squeezed it and bitten it, and tried to rip my windpipe out.
‘Chris told us something of what was going on outside, how things were just getting worse and worse. I guess I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for him. Everything he did for me. And at first it was taking it out of him. Each day he was paler and thinner and darker around the eyes. He’d managed to stockpile some food when it had all kicked off, but it was steadily running out. He was giving us most of it, not eating much himself. He started to get spots and sores. I didn’t know if it was the disease or if he was just getting run-down. He was always coughing.
‘And then one night he was acting all crazy and manic, like he was high, might have been drunk for all I knew, or raiding his drugs cabinet. After that he seemed to turn around, started getting a little stronger. He started shaving and washing, became quite, you know, optimistic. I told myself that he was going to pull through. I didn’t know then that there’s no cure. You don’t get better.
‘Me and Abby, though, it gave us hope that maybe not everyone was going to die from the sickness. That guys like the doctor would be OK. He’d tell us, when we played cards, he’d say, “Look at me. I’ve beaten it.”
‘He hadn’t beaten it. It was starting to eat away at him. You’d catch him looking at you funny. His eyes all swivelling around. And he’d say weird, random things. Made no sense. And you’d say, “What?” and he’d just laugh – “Nothing” – like it was nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. After a few days of washing and shaving, he stopped. Started getting careless, his clothes dirtier and dirtier, his hands not clean and his hair all greasy. His eyes, they got shiny. He was shaking. And one day he left Tommy’s room unlocked and I went in to see if he was all right.’
Malik stopped. His last few words had been shaky.
‘Was it bad?’ Ella asked, and at first Malik didn’t say anything. He just squeezed her hand.
And then he carried on …
20
‘Tommy was a mess. With all drips and bags of blood hanging off him. And, worse than that, he had these wounds all over him. Horrible cuts, bits stitched up. The doc had been eating him. Cutting bits off with his scalpel. From his arms and legs. Worst thing was – the boy was still alive. The doc was keeping him alive. So the meat was fresh, I reckon. But man, he was a mess. Unconscious luckily. I knew how bad that would all hurt. So I put a pillow over his face.
‘When I came out, the doctor was looking at me crazy. I laid into him for what he’d done and he broke down, weeping and sobbing and grovelling. Down on his knees, saying all, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” and stuff. I’d liked the doctor, he’d been doing his best, but this thing wasn’t him any more. I had to be careful, though. I didn’t know where Abby was. If he’d done something to her while I was in Tommy’s room. He was clinging on to my shirt. I dragged him along. “Where’s Abby? What have you done to Abby?”
‘He’d injected her like the nurse. She was lying on the floor in the waiting room as if she was asleep. Don’t know what was in the syringe. Hoped it wasn’t poison. I shrugged him off and went to her, and that was when he came at me with another syringe. But I was ready for him. I’d picked up a scalpel in Tommy’s room. Cut his hand, across the back, and then I dug it in his wrist until he dropped the syringe, blood going everywhere. He was really sorry for himself now, whimpering like a little baby. He went off to his surgery and I heard him banging around, looking for medicine and bandages to fix himself up, I guess.
‘I went back to Abby. She was still alive, though in a dead sleep. I tried to get her up, but it hurt too much. I was still pretty weak and my hands and arms were much worse than my legs. I could hear the doc moving about. Knew he’d be back soon. I did what they do in films. I slapped Abby, but it didn’t do anything.
‘So I hid. I picked up a fire extinguisher and I hid, round a corner near to where Abby was lying, and when the doc came out of his surgery and went to her I hit him over the head. That wasn’t like the films either. He just said, “Ow,” and fell over, clutching his head, not knocked out at all. He’d dropped one of his syringes, though, and I grabbed it up and stuck it in his back and pressed the plunger down. And he jumped up, with the needle sticking out of him, and he stumbled about, ranting and raving, and I hit him with the fire extinguisher again and again, and in the end he sat down on the floor and blew bubbles and his eyes rolled up and went white. I dragged him into the room with Tommy and locked it shut and, as far as I know, he’s still in there.
‘Then I waited for Abby to wake up, too weak to do anything else. Sitting in one of the plastic chairs like I was waiting to see the doctor, and I thought about how weird the world had become and how horrible and depressing. I’ll tell you, that was one of my low points, one of the very lowest, and I’ve got a lot to choose from.
‘It took a few hours, but eventually Abby woke up, or at least she choked and puked herself awake. When she was feeling OK enough, we talked about what we were going to do and we both agreed we didn’t want to stay there any longer. So twenty minutes later we were out on the street, carrying as much medical gear and drugs as we could.
‘Turned out Abby had been brought to the medical centre by Rav, same as me. She’d been hanging out with him. Part of his gang. They’d been hiding out in Brockridge Park, near his school. There was a building there called Brockridge House. Some rich family had once lived there and the park had been their land. The house was almost a sort of castle and it had a garden with high walls. Rav had made a good choice. Easy place to defend. Open space around it. It’d been a place where you could get cream teas and things, and there were two big rooms you could hire out for parties and weddings. Upstairs was a gallery, I think.
‘Now it was a fortress.
‘It was about a half-hour walk to the other side of town. The streets were quiet, but that didn’t make them any less scary. I knew what it was like to get ambushed, and so did Abby. She’d broken her arm when a load of sick teenagers had tried to kill her. Luckily we didn’t see anyone. No kids. No adults, nothing. Like in cheesy old films where somebody says, “It’s too quiet …” Only in those films the next thing that happens is some big-ass attack. None came, but we were still way tense and by the time we arrived at Brockridge House we were both done in. Abby was still throwing up from the injection and I was hurt all over and bleeding through my bandages. Anyway, Rav was there with his little army of kids from the school. They were pretty amazed to see us.
‘Rav said he’d had me down for dead. And there I was, walking around. We
ll, staggering and stumbling and bleeding all over the place. I really must’ve looked like one of the walking dead just then. They were excited to see us at first, especially Abby, as she was one of them. But I could tell they didn’t like having me around. I freaked them out. I was too weird, too much like a diseased and rotting grown-up.
‘I mean, for the first few days I was a hero, escaping from the mad doctor, bringing Abby home. Then the next few days after that I was cool, a curiosity, the boy who’d survived an attack, back from the dead. And then I was a freak. Ugly and mashed up and no use to anyone. Even Abby didn’t want anything to do with me. She was back with her old friends. Siding with them. Soon there were whispers, people giving me dirty looks, complaining – you know, “He’s not one of us. Why should we feed him? What can he do to help?”
‘You can’t blame them, I suppose. They were looking after their own. Trying to get by, to survive. I got talking to a little group of kids I’d sort of made friends with. Kids on the edge. Ignored by the others. Guy called Andy who had cerebral palsy and was in a wheelchair, his friend Susannah who had the thickest glasses I’d ever seen and a permanently runny nose, a big wiry boy with a shaved head called Henry. Henry had some kind of learning difficulties and had been in a special school. Didn’t have a mum or dad. Didn’t really know what was going on. He had fits now and then and kept swearing really quietly, muttering these rude words all the time.
‘They didn’t fit in, so I hung out with them, my new pals. We’d sit in the garden and talk. I was still recovering, trying to get strong, but hurting too much. I was really weak, slept a lot.
‘We were like a weird little gang. I’d always felt a bit of an outsider at school, at Rowhurst. There were only a couple of Muslims in the whole place. I was expected to be friends with them just because we all happened to share the same religion. But we didn’t have much else in common and I didn’t really get on with them, to tell you the truth. I mean, there wasn’t a lot of crap about me being a Muslim; for the most part the boys had been OK. Obviously there were moments whenever there was anything in the news about terrorists or troubles in the Middle East. Then there’d be comments, jokes, people taking the piss. Same as if we were playing Germany at football, the one German kid at school had to put up with a load of digs.
The Hunted Page 11
