They were limping along. Ollie and Achilleus walking ahead of Arran and Freak, who were both silent, lost in private thoughts. Ollie knew well enough not to push it. If the other two didn’t want to talk about what had gone down then he wasn’t going to try to make them. Freak had lost his best friend and Arran had been badly bitten. Ollie hadn’t expected him to take it so badly, though. Arran was tough. Hated showing any weakness in front of anyone else. Something had happened to him back at the pool. He had the look of someone who had stared at something nasty. Stared for too long.

Arran’s skin had been punctured. There would be a big danger of infection. The grown-ups were filthy and riddled with germs and disease. Luckily Arran hadn’t been in the water, but the mother who had attacked him had looked pretty skanky.

Why had Arran frozen like that? All the fight just went out of him. One minute he was cracking skulls with his club and the next he was just standing there, in a dream. Had he lost his nerve?

Arran had to know that nobody would blame him for what had happened to Deke. It had been Freak’s stupid idea to go into the pool. How could they have prepared for the ambush? It wasn’t like grown-ups – usually they were stupid and slow and confused. Little different from the pack of dogs the gang had dealt with earlier. This bunch had acted together. Sorted. A team.

How many of the adults had they killed? he wondered. He knew for sure he had hit seven of them, but it didn’t mean that each shot was a killing shot. When they’d bundled out through the reception area he’d seen two of his targets lying still on the floor. He must have loosed off thirty pellets, though, maybe more. It had been too dangerous to try to collect them afterwards. He had a stack back at the camp, but it was a lot to lose in one day. At this rate it would be sooner rather than later that he ran out altogether. He’d have to find some more, or start collecting pebbles.

Damn. He loved those heavy steel ball-bearings.

His ankle was sore; he had landed badly leaping over the turnstiles. They made a right sorry bunch. Freak had been pretty badly mauled. He was covered with filth and there was blood on him, but as far as it was possible to tell, it didn’t look like his own blood. At least Achilleus looked unharmed. He swore that boy had iron underpants.

Achilleus wasn’t particularly a friend of Ollie’s. He was always having a go at him for being too posh, too clever, too quiet. But Ollie didn’t let it get to him. The two of them had a sort of grudging respect for each other. When it came down to it, Ollie valued Achilleus’ fighting skills, and Achilleus valued Ollie’s brains. They usually kept out of each other’s way and Ollie wasn’t used to being up front. It felt weird.

He remembered driving in the family car. Him and his mum and dad and three brothers. Ollie had always sat in the back, staring out of the side window, trying to keep out of their arguments and fights. He remembered the few occasions when it had been just him and his dad and he’d got to ride up front in the passenger seat. How different it had felt, like they were equals. And how nice it had been to get his dad all to himself. His dad had been like Ollie. Quiet, distant, always thinking about something.

They were all dead now. All five of them.

His dad had been the first to go. One of the very first to die when the illness struck. He had even been on the news; the headline had said something like ‘Another Death From Mystery Illness Sweeping Europe’. Then there had been more and more deaths, and not just in Europe – all round the world. They’d stopped mentioning individuals; it had been whole streets, then whole towns. It had all happened so fast people had been stunned, and hadn’t really had time to panic. The whole world had sort of gone into shock. His mother had been frantic after Dad died. She packed the house up, ready to try to escape to the countryside and stay with Auntie Susan. But she fell ill before they could get away. Then it was just Ollie and his brothers. They tried to leave London by themselves. His oldest brother, Dan, got sick next. He’d been seventeen. Then Will, fifteen.

His younger brother, Luke, hadn’t been old enough to get sick. He’d been killed in a riot up near Finsbury Park. That must have been over a year ago. It felt more like a century. By then Ollie had had no more tears left to cry, the catastrophe had been so immense, so overwhelming, that he had just pushed it out of his mind and concentrated on trying to stay alive. He owed it to his family, as the last one left, not to die.

‘We should have never gone into there in the first place,’ said Achilleus. ‘Freak’s an idiot.’

‘Leave it,’ said Ollie. ‘We couldn’t have known.’

‘All for a bloody vending machine,’ said Achilleus. ‘Sweets and chocolates! We’re not babies.’

‘Would have been nice, though,’ said Ollie. ‘I could really do with a Mars bar right now, and a can of Coke.’

‘Yeah.’ Achilleus smiled. ‘You know what I used to really like? Jaffa Cakes. I could eat a whole pack in one go. But all we’ve got to look forward to when we get back is roast dog.’

‘Better than nothing,’ said Ollie. ‘We haven’t had meat in ages.’

‘Hold up…’

Achilleus raised a hand and they all stopped. They had come to the part of Holloway Road where they had had the fight with the dogs. A group of people was up ahead, clustered round the carcass of the dead Alsatian.

‘Can you make out who it is?’ said Achilleus.

Ollie had the keenest eyesight of all of them. He shaded his eyes and squinted.

‘They’re kids,’ he said.

‘Ours?’

‘Nah. Morrisons.’

When everything had fallen apart, one group of local kids had ended up taking shelter in Waitrose, and another group had taken up Morrisons, the cheaper supermarket in the nearby Nag’s Head shopping centre. Kids had mostly ended up in the place where their mums and dads had gone shopping. Not all, though. Ollie guessed Achilleus was more of a Morrisons kid.

In the struggle to survive, where every scrap of food was fought over, the two groups of kids led totally separate lives. There was even the occasional skirmish in the street.

Achilleus turned to Arran.

‘What do we do? There’s more of them than us. Should we go round the back way?’

Arran looked at the other gang, then at his feet, then up at the sky.

‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually.

‘I’m knackered,’ said Achilleus. ‘I can’t face another fight and I can’t face going the long way round, looking out for grown-ups every step of the way.’

Arran sighed, pushed past him and carried on walking.

‘If they want to have a go at us, let them,’ he said. ‘I don’t care any more.’

Achilleus watched him go, then shared a look with Ollie.

‘Come on.’

They made sure that Freak was still with them and hurried to catch up with Arran.

The Morrisons crew soon spotted them, and they took up a defensive stance in the middle of the road.

Arran carried on walking towards them. He wasn’t going to stop. Achilleus ran past him.

‘We don’t want no trouble,’ he called out to the other gang. ‘We’ve had enough for one day. We just want to get back. We ain’t got nothing you want.’

The Morrisons crew stood their ground, sullenly watching them as they approached. They were armed with an assortment of knives, sticks and spears. Ollie spotted their leader, Blue, a muscly black kid with close-cropped hair. Ollie smiled at him, being as open as he could, showing that they meant no harm. A couple of the Morrisons crew nodded at them as they arrived, showing no expression. Blue noticed the dog, still strung across Arran’s back.

He looked from the dead Staff down to the Alsatian.

‘You do this?’

‘Earlier.’

Arran snapped out of his weird mood. He knew he had to put on a brave face. It was important not to show any weakness. They had nothing in their camp the Morrisons crew could want, but there was always a danger that they might lose some good fighters if they thought they’d have a better life in the rival supermarket.