Arran knew how Freak had felt last night, when the madness had taken hold of him. Anger burned like rocket fuel inside him. He was drunk with it. He waded in among the panicked grown-ups, swinging his club in vicious, punishing arcs. He was no longer tired or sick. His body felt nothing. It was as if he had left it behind and was watching it from somewhere else, like a film, or a computer game. Yes. A first-person shooter. He kept pressing the X button and watching the club swing. It smashed into a skull. It shattered an arm. It snapped a spine.

He could see a long, blurry trail behind it as it moved through the air. And when a head exploded there was no blood, just multicoloured blobs of light.

They’ve turned off blood mode, he thought. They’ve made it suitable for under-fifteens. But this game was too easy. The enemy’s AI was set too low. They were too slow, too stupid, too easy to kill.

Smack!

Look at them go down.

Slam!

He laughed. The kids were going to win this battle today.

Crack!

Sure enough, the grown-ups were falling back, trying to get away. He caught sight of the big father with the swollen head. He had a group of fathers around him and seemed to be surveying the carnage. He shook his head, which rolled backwards and forwards over the gold necklace at his chest, then he turned and retreated.

Yes. Run, you cowards.

Arran couldn’t let them escape, though. Not after what they’d done. He ran after them.

Someone was shouting behind him.

‘Leave it, Arran, they’re finished.’

‘Let them go!’

‘No!’ He was a lion among wildebeest. A hunter. A killer. He ran with them, he would track down every last one of them and smash them into oblivion.

The grown-ups fell to left and right as he powered on. He funnelled them into a tree-lined side-street, past a car wash. They scrambled clumsily, frightened and careless. And they fell. Silver bolts shot from his eyes and they fell. He yelled with joy. He didn’t even need a club. He threw it away. It was only slowing him down.

He had left the other kids behind. It was just him and the grown-ups. He saw them tumble, the silver bolts sprouting from their ugly broken bodies.

And then it was like he had been punched hard in the chest. He wasn’t running any more. He looked down. There was a silver bolt sticking out of him. No, that couldn’t be. He couldn’t have shot himself. He tried to laugh, but it hurt too much. What was going on? He had fallen. He was sitting down, his legs straight out in front of him. Dead grown-ups lay all around him.

Nothing moved.

He couldn’t breathe. His lungs were full of liquid.

He looked up. The sky was flickering.

From far away he heard a shout.

‘A-r-r-a-a-a-a-an!’

20

Small Sam was cycling like a demon. There were grownups everywhere. The roads were crawling with them. Where had they all come from? There was something going on. Every time he tried to get back towards Camden he’d come up against a group of them and had to turn round and cycle furiously the other way. He had gone in such a roundabout route and taken so many side-roads and turnings that he wasn’t exactly sure where he was now. He was coming down a main road of grimy low buildings that looked like it hadn’t been up to much even before the disaster. And then he saw something he recognized. Pizza Express. This must be Kentish Town then. He remembered his mum and dad talking about which Pizza Express to go to. ‘Let’s go to the one in Kentish Town.’ It was big and had a very high ceiling. There used to be a strange wire statue of a man standing in one corner. He’d found it a bit scary when he was younger.

How silly to be scared of a statue.

As far as he knew, Kentish Town was next to Camden. So maybe he hadn’t got as lost as he’d thought. All he needed to do was keep going downhill.

There was a cloud of black smoke filling the road ahead. A shop was on fire. He held his breath and zoomed through, screwing his face up. Luckily the road was clear on the other side. Grown-ups didn’t like fire. They would keep away.

And there was the back of Sainsbury’s; a funny-looking metal building on the canal, like something out of Star Wars. This was it. He’d made it. This was Camden. But with so many grown-ups out on the streets he wondered where his friends might be. And Ella. He hoped she wasn’t too scared without him.

He remembered the feeling he’d had when he’d first seen the mob of grown-ups marching down Camden Road, like an army. He knew what his fear was now. That the grownups were massing to attack his friends. Maybe the kids had also had to take another route to be safe?

He pedalled harder and soon came to where several roads met near the tube station. He stopped at a traffic island in the middle. In the past there would have been cars and lorries and buses rushing past in all directions, and the pavements would have been filled with kids going to the market. Now it wasn’t like being in a city at all. The buildings might just as well have been rocks and cliffs. The abandoned, stationary cars were boulders. The road a dried-up riverbed.

There was even a sound, a rushing, swirling noise like water. He’d heard it before today. It wasn’t water. It was the sound of massed grown-ups. Breathing, sighing, hissing, their feet scuffing on the tarmac. But where was it coming from?

He looked around.

There. In the direction of Holloway, up the road that led past the front of Sainsbury’s. A great mob of grown-ups was moving towards him. Even from this distance he could smell them.

He would have to get shifted.

Which way to go, though? Which route would the other kids have taken?

There were so many choices here. And now there were more grown-ups coming along the other roads. Maybe they were trying to see what was going on? The only clear route was the one heading back the way he had come, towards Kentish Town and the fire, which he could see now was spreading. The whole of the sky in that direction was hazy with a purple-grey smudge.

Come on. Which way was the centre of London? The road signs were too confusing. They pointed to places whose names he didn’t know.

The most obvious route was down the high street. It was the widest road. There were a few grown-ups wandering about in it but if he went fast enough he could get round them. He shunted the bike forwards, put his full weight on one pedal, then the other, and soon his feet were a blur as the pedals spun round and the chain rattled over the cogs. He passed a knot of grown-ups who made a feeble lunge at him, but as he glanced back at them his front wheel hit a hole in the road. The whole bike jarred. He lost control and flew over the handlebars, landing in a painful heap on the tarmac. For a few seconds he was too stunned to move. His trousers were ripped and his elbows and knees were bleeding. Then he sensed someone coming near and shook himself awake. He looked up just as a skinny young mother with no hair and dribble streaming down her chin made a grab for him. He rolled away from her groping hands and kicked out. He got her in the knee and she went down face first.

Sam was up. He looked at his bike. The front wheel was bent out of shape and the tyre was burst. All that work. Wasted. He would have to walk now. He might never be able to catch up with the others.

Actually, he would have to run. There were more grown-ups closing in on him.

He stumbled forward and felt his legs wobble. He was dizzy from the fall, and limping. He forced himself to move, though, watching his dirty trainers as they slapped down on the road in front of him. He needed somewhere to hide. He passed some steps going down to a public toilet. No. He didn’t want to get trapped. He remembered the tube station. Maybe if he could get in there, in the dark, he’d be all right. Just so long as he got safely off the streets. He broke into a run and dodged past some railings. Two fathers came lolloping up behind him and smashed into the ironwork.