The Hunted

by Charlie Higson

Behind the father came two more fathers, then a mother, then a whole group of them, the last being prodded in by Ascot guards carrying long spears and pikes, until there were thirty-five, maybe forty of them in the arena, huddled together. Some armed with crude weapons. Most unarmed. Apart from their fingernails and teeth.

  The gate was pulled shut across the entrance. The only way these grown-ups were getting out of there was being dragged by their heels.

  The gladiators now turned to the King and raised their weapons in a salute.

  ‘They honour you, crazy Caesar,’ Arno shouted. ‘And we offer you the blood of these bastards to make us stronger, and to help us win in the weeks ahead, until the next games. Now go to it, brethren, do it for your King, the King of Chaos. This is the death of all bad things, the triumph of the cool. You who are about to die, we salute you!’

  The King tipped back his head and howled at the sky, and the howl was taken up by all the kids, like a pack of wolves, and the big hench from Sandhurst strode across the arena towards the sickos and cut one down with his sword with a great cry.

  ‘Rahhhh!’

  Ed was both horrified and fascinated. Next to him Brooke was hiding behind her hands like a little kid watching Doctor Who. Ed noticed that the crowd had thinned out a little. Some kids had gone, unable to watch the slaughter.

  ‘Do you want to leave?’ Ed asked Brooke.

  ‘This is sick,’ she said. ‘And not good sick. I mean bad sick. Real sick. I never thought I’d feel sorry for one of ’em. But this is wrong.’

  ‘If it keeps the peace …’ Ed didn’t really know what else to say. ‘If it keeps these kids from killing each other then …’

  ‘This is cool,’ said Lewis. ‘It’s well sick. And I mean sick as in a good thing.’ And then he jumped out of his seat with half the other kids as Josa cut a mother’s arm off. Ed had never seen Lewis this lively outside of a fight.

  It was a full-scale massacre now, and it was hard to keep up with the action as the arena became a riot of swarming bodies. Kids running in and chopping at the sickos, stabbing, kicking, gouging. The adults fighting back now. They’d looked like a scrawny, mangy bunch, made stupid by disease and being out in the daylight, but they fought like banshees, roaming in little packs.

  Ed had never watched a battle like this before; he’d only ever been in the middle of one. He figured that people had always liked watching violence, from the Romans throwing Christians to the lions, to the public executions of the Middle Ages, to slasher movies and awful stuff on the Internet.

  This was still shocking, though. The grass was starting to turn red.

  Those kids who had stayed to watch were loving it. This was revenge. Payback for everything that had happened in the last year.

  Ed tried to pick Kyle out in the confusion.

  Couldn’t see what had happened to him.

  He turned to Lewis.

  ‘Can you see Kyle?’

  61

  Kyle was in among a tight bunch of sickos. They’d got around him quicker than he was expecting and he was too hemmed in to swing his axe, so was having to use it to shove them away to make some space.

  He gave an almighty shunt, swore at the ugly bastards and now there was room. And then he felt the world shift sideways. He was reeling. It took a moment, but then his head exploded with pain. Something had smashed into the side of it. Must be an armed sicko. He’d seen one with an iron bar just now. He staggered in a circle, looking for him, worried that he might black out. Instead he puked and that seemed to clear his head. The next moment, however, he felt a terrible, cold, aching jolt up his right arm and he dropped his axe.

  He’d been hit again. This time on the bicep. His whole arm had gone numb. He could barely move it.

  Bastard sicko, where was he?

  And then he heard a voice.

  ‘You gonna pay for this morning, wasteman.’ It was Kenton, looming out of the melee with a grin on his ugly, tattooed face, casually swinging his club in the air. Was it Kenton who’d hit him? He picked up the axe Kyle had dropped so that he was now holding two weapons, one in each hand.

  ‘And you gonna pay for the other day an’ all.’ Josa had come up behind Kyle. ‘That car was ours.’

  ‘Well, I ain’t got my wallet on me,’ said Kyle, manoeuvring for space. ‘So I can’t pay you right now. How about I just kick your arses?’

  ‘How about you try?’ said Josa and she lifted her sword. It glinted in the afternoon sun. It was two against one and Kyle was unarmed.

  The sensible thing to do would be to run. You can’t argue with a blade. Stab wounds were bad. Hell – any wound was bad. He didn’t want to end up bleeding to death in some stinky bed like Macca, as his poo leaked out of his punctured guts.

  Trouble was, Kyle wasn’t a bolter. He had too much bloody pride. To run now would be a loss of nerve, a loss of face. Fighting was his thing. The only thing he was good at. The thing that made him who he was.

  An idiot, sure. But a fighter too.

  Well, if it meant dying with his boots on.

  Bring it on …

  Kenton certainly looked impressive with his two weapons. Like some ninja, kung fu warrior, or a badass World of Warcraft dude. But Kyle remembered him at Slough, twirling that damned shotgun. How easily Lewis had taken it off him. And two weapons at once were hard to control, especially when one was as heavy and hard to control as Brain-biter. Kenton wasn’t the worry, though. Josa was.

  Kyle badly needed something to defend himself with, give him an edge. What could he do? His arm still hurt like hell. He doubted he’d be able to use a weapon even if he could get hold of one. There wasn’t time for that anyway. If he switched his attention to look for something, Josa and Kenton would be on him like dogs on a bone.

  A thought came to him. All sorts of things can be weapons.

  He moved.

  Ran hard at Kenton, getting inside his swing, going to his left, where he was struggling to raise Brain-biter with his weaker left arm. That put Kenton between Kyle and Josa. Kenton swung the axe feebly and the shaft batted harmlessly off Kyle’s back. And Kyle was in. He grabbed hold of Kenton by the shirt with both hands, ignoring the pain that clawed at his wounded arm. Kenton hadn’t been expecting this and had no hands free to do anything, unless he wanted to drop a weapon. And Kyle was giving him no time to think. He shoved hard, piling Kenton backwards and into Josa, who couldn’t get out of the way quickly enough and was now being forced back into a knot of sickos. Kyle kept moving and, as he felt the two of them start to go down, he gave one last push and they collapsed.

  As they fell, Kyle grabbed Kenton’s club, twisting it. Kenton, falling backwards, had two options: let go or risk having his arm broken. Kyle helped him make the decision by kicking hard at his elbow. Kenton cried out in pain and the cudgel was free. Kyle jumped over the falling bodies and ran clear, tensed, ready. Kenton, who had landed on Josa, was first up, fumbling with the axe. Kyle didn’t give him a chance. He gripped the club in both hands, feeling a stab of pain that shot up his arm into his head, and swung.

  He got Kenton full in the mouth. It was like hitting a tomato with a baseball bat. Bright red blood splattered out and Kenton was down for good. The shock wave up Kyle’s arm made him scream. It was shuddering and twitching in spasm.

  He gritted his teeth and looked at Kenton, who was kneeling on the ground, moaning, Brain-biter dropped and forgotten.

  ‘Now you’re a matching pair,’ said Kyle. ‘The toothless twins.’

  Josa was up, though, and coming at Kyle in a low crouch, the blade ready in her hand. Kyle was about to lift the cudgel to a strike position with his left arm when he was grabbed by two fathers. If he hadn’t been hurting so much already he might have thrown them off, but he was powerless to do anything except curse and try to avoid their teeth.

  Josa moved in for the kill. She had Kyle just where she wanted him.

  And then Ed was there. And Josa went down again, punched in the side of the head. Stunned. E
d picked up Kyle’s axe, cut the sickos away and brought it around on Josa as she tried to get up.

  ‘This ends now,’ he snapped. He had a look of cold, hard fury on his damaged face that even Kyle found frightening. Lots of people had made the mistake of thinking that Ed was a nice, gentle guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Kyle knew him better. He knew that, if it came to it, Ed would drive that axe right through Josa’s skull. And Josa knew it too. You could see it in her face.

  ‘You shouldn’t even be in this fight,’ she said.

  ‘Show me the rule book.’ Ed hacked a mother aside as she came close and Kyle could see that Josa was scared that she’d be next.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘It’s over.’

  62

  Brooke was desperate. Couldn’t work out what had happened. Trying to see what was going on. One moment Ed had been sitting beside her, looking for Kyle in the battle, and the next he’d sworn, leapt up and gone racing down to the arena, completely unarmed.

  He was somewhere out there. She scanned the arena and then felt relief flood over her. There he was, helping Kyle to the side, holding his axe, and swiping it at any sickos who came close.

  He got to the barrier and Brooke went down to meet him. Kyle was clutching his arm and grumbling that he was all right. Ed kept telling him to shut up. Brooke helped them to climb over and she could see that Kyle was having difficulty using his right arm.

  They went back to their seats where Lewis and Ebenezer asked them what had happened.

  Brooke looked back down at the arena. The last three sickos standing, the fastest and strongest, were moving round the edge, trying to get away. Guards behind the barrier pushed them back with their weapons. Some kids in the front seats kicked out at them, laughing. The gladiators attacked in a pack and down the sickos went, one, two, three, in a flurry of flashing blades and flying blood. The Sandhurst boy even managed to finish on a high note: he swung at the last mother and took her head clean off with one blow.

  ‘He’s just showing off,’ said Kyle through clenched teeth.

  The cheering from the crowd was the loudest yet at the races. The Sandhurst boy paraded around, holding the mother’s head up by the hair, dripping blood everywhere. The guards moved in and started to drag the dead bodies clear.

  Just another afternoon’s sport, thought Brooke. But she knew it wasn’t over yet.

  Sophie had been standing at the barriers with some of her team, bows at the ready in case they needed to put down any sickos. She walked up to Ed’s group.

  ‘You ever seen anything like that?’ she asked. Brooke could see there were spots of blood on her face.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘And I never want to again.’

  ‘Then maybe you won’t want to stay for the last event,’ said Sophie. ‘They’ve saved the biggest, toughest, ugliest grown-ups for last.’

  ‘It just gets better,’ said Kyle. ‘See you around, Brooke.’

  But Brooke stayed put.

  ‘What do you do with them bodies?’ asked Lewis, as two kids pulled away a fat father, one leg each.

  ‘There’s a big bonfire tonight and a big party apparently,’ said Sophie. ‘They go on that. I guess it’s like a Guy Fawkes made of real people.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Brooke.

  It took a while for the arena to be cleared of corpses, and while it went on the gladiators took the cheers from the crowds. Lots of the kids threw things down to them, soft toys and bits of clothing, scarves that the gladiators tied round their wrists. Brooke could see that already this event was developing its own rituals as the kids celebrated their triumph over the enemy, making the nightmares go away, showing that the sickos weren’t all-powerful, weren’t all to be feared.

  As they were sitting there, Josa came over, carrying her baby. She was alone. None of her boys around. To Brooke’s surprise she offered to shake Ed’s hand.

  To her even bigger surprise Ed shook it.

  ‘Respect,’ said Josa and offered Ed a toothless smile. Then she turned to Kyle.

  ‘Clean slate, yeah? I know when I’m beat. You all could of come and joined us, you know. We need killers like you.’

  Ed shook his head, hardly believing what he was hearing. ‘If you’d been a bit more welcoming maybe we’d have considered it,’ he said.

  ‘You know what it’s like.’ Josa gave a shrug. ‘We gotta survive. We don’t trust no one. And I do like to play games.’

  ‘You’re a bastard, Josa.’ Ed said it almost politely.

  ‘Ain’t I just?’ Josa laughed. ‘Respect to you, though, yeah? From one warrior to another.’

  ‘Are you apologizing?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Ed nodded. ‘I guess maybe’s good enough for me.’

  ‘I was just doing what I had to do,’ said Josa. ‘Like I learnt it.’

  ‘You’ve kept your people alive. You’ve pulled them through some hard times. I know how tough that is. Just remember what Arno said – the grown-ups are the enemy. If we’re ever gonna make anything of this whole big mess we’re gonna have to work together to rebuild.’

  ‘You think that’ll happen?’ Josa asked. ‘You think any of us got a chance?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe’s good enough for me too,’ said Josa.

  ‘That army has to be stopped first, though.’

  ‘What army?’

  ‘The sickos that came through the other night.’

  ‘That was way heavy, man. Was all we could do to keep them out.’

  ‘They’re massing. But I’ve got a plan.’

  ‘A man with a plan.’

  ‘Yeah. Can I rely on you to help me out, Josa?’

  ‘Is like you said, funny face.’ Josa stared at Ed. ‘Maybe.’

  Her baby struggled in her arms and gave a little cry.

  ‘What’s he called?’ Lewis asked.

  ‘He’s called Tyler after his dad.’ Josa poked a dirty finger in the baby’s mouth. ‘His dad was a bit of a moron, to tell you the truth, but, you know, he was his dad. He died early. Golden Girl killed him. We ain’t never liked them Windsor kids. Hope they don’t win the cup again this year.’ She lifted her baby’s little arm and made him wave at Ed and his gang.

  ‘Say goodbye to the nice people, Tyler.’

  Brooke watched her go. She was understanding all this better now. Arno was clever. These games made sense. They were a neutral place where kids could get together and sort out their problems, and if a few sickos got mangled along the way, well then. She shouldn’t be so squeamish.

  As Ed said, they were the enemy.

  She just wondered what was going to happen to the rest of them in the final event.

  63

  Malik was sitting on the floor of his cage, just outside the arena. He was watching some kids haul a cartload of dead adults away along the road. He’d known what to expect. He’d heard the kids talking about it enough. The reality, though, seeing those carved-up bodies, made him doubt, not for the first time, whether he was doing the right thing. But his mind was set and when he decided something he stuck with it. He’d decided to stay silent and hadn’t said a word since they’d caught him in their nets.

  Right now he still wanted nothing to do with the world of children. He’d known when it was time, when it felt right to go back, and being hunted and trapped like an animal hadn’t made him like these kids any more. So let them think he was a grown-up. Let them think he was diseased and good for nothing. He knew inside he was better than them. He wasn’t going to give up. He was going to teach the kids a lesson. He was going to win.

  Yeah, right …

  When the Windsor kids had caught him, they’d beaten him unconscious and he’d woken in the back of a pick-up truck with several comatose adults, one of whom had died on the journey. That was the only time he’d wobbled, the only time he’d tried to speak. There’d been a boy sitting on the back of the truck, holding a gun. Malik had lifted his head and croaked at him. Talking to Ella for all that time down in the
ir hole in the ground had destroyed his voice. It was sore and dry and cracked. And a rope had tangled around his neck in the attack making it worse.

  He couldn’t get any words out and the boy had kicked him and he’d fallen unconscious again. That had made his mind up. It was the last time he’d tried to talk. If he was going to get out of this he was going to do it on his own terms. His own way.

  His mum always said he was stubborn, and now it was probably going to get him killed.

  Just so long as he made his mark along the way.

  At the castle he’d been locked in what had once been the dungeons with all the adults they’d captured. It had been filthy and stinking and vile. They’d fed him on rotting vegetables and bits of rancid meat, and he’d become feeble and sick. The kids weren’t that bothered. They only needed to keep him alive long enough to bring him here to be killed. For the most part the adults had left him alone. One night, however, a hungry father had got too close. He’d bothered Malik for hours and in the end Malik had strangled him. When the kids came in in the morning to check them out, they found the man half eaten. The others had been at him all night. Malik had stolen his clothes, disguising himself more fully, covering himself in their smell. Now he hoped they’d all – adults and children – leave him in peace.

  It wasn’t to be, though. He was picked out and moved into another part of the dungeon with a smaller group of adults where they were looked after better, given proper food and cleaner water. And then they were moved out of Windsor altogether. They’d been sold to Maidenhead. Seemed the kids there hadn’t caught enough adults of their own to make it to the races. So Malik had been exchanged for fresh food and petrol.

  So he was a thing. Not even a person. An ugly, broken thing. Buried deep down inside him was a dark, festering thought; it chewed away at him. Was there another reason he kept away from kids? Was it the real reason he wanted nothing to do with them? Was it shame? Dirty shame.

  He’d become a freak. Someone to be laughed at. They feared him because they knew they might end up like him, and, because they feared him, they hated him. As far as they were concerned, he was a monster. So why not behave like one? None of this would change if they found out he was a boy, would it? He could never properly be one of them. So that’s what he was going to be. A dangerous monster. He would turn their hatred back on them ten times worse. A hundred times. He would make them pay for his shame.