A row of bars had been fixed across the lorry and behind them sat three half-naked sickos, two fathers and a mother, chained to the side of the lorry.

Seriously freaking nuts.

Justin’s torch played across the three adults, picking out features.

They didn’t look too badly diseased. DogNut had seen a lot worse. These three showed some signs of the blistering to the skin that was the most obvious symptom, as if something evil was bubbling up from deep inside their bodies, but there were no signs of rot or decay or the livid fungal blooms that adults showed in the more advanced stages of the illness. There were other signs. The whites of their eyes were yellow and their skin tone in general was greyish. They looked half starved as well: desperately thin, their bones showing, their bellies swollen. They were dressed in the tattered remains of clothing that had become blackened filthy rags. They were losing their hair, the mother almost completely bald.

The three of them stared at DogNut, mouths hanging open, showing their purple gums and brown, rotten teeth. One father, the older of the two, started to drool, a long rope of saliva hanging down off his dry and cracked lower lip.

Justin sniggered. ‘He wants to eat you.’

The father’s tongue started to slowly squeeze out of his mouth. Muddy-coloured, swollen and blistered, it looked horribly like a turd.

‘Oh, gross!’ said DogNut.

‘He’s getting worse,’ said Paul.

DogNut noticed that the other father was muzzled like a vicious dog, with leather straps tight round his face.

‘He’s a biter,’ Justin explained when he caught DogNut looking. ‘We have to be very careful, obviously.’

‘Obviously. You wouldn’t want your pet sicko to do you an injury.’

‘They’re not pets,’ said Justin. ‘We don’t keep them for fun.’

Fun? thought DogNut. How could anyone possibly think this was fun?

He kept his hand clamped over his nose and mouth. The stench in here was appalling. There were piles of excrement on the floor and more of it was smeared up the walls. There were a couple of overflowing buckets at the back. The smell of their waste fought with the smell of the grown-ups themselves. They gave off the distinctive sour odour of decay and what the kids thought of as the sickness smell, a sort of mix of cheap sweets, school toilets and old ladies’ perfume that stuck in your throat.

‘We keep them out here in the car park,’ said Justin, ‘so that if they did escape, which I seriously doubt they ever could, they wouldn’t be able to get at any of our kids. It makes everyone feel safer, knowing we don’t keep them in the building.’

‘Why do you keep them in the dark like this?’

‘It keeps them fresh.’

‘Fresh? Why? What are you planning? To eat them then? Yeah, I’ll have the mother. Deep fried. She might crisp up a bit.’

‘Of course we’re not planning to eat them.’

‘Then what the hell are you planning to do with them?’ said DogNut. ‘Teach them to dance? I mean why have you got three bloody sickos chained up out here? I don’t get it.’

‘Well –’

‘Oh, Justin,’ DogNut butted in. ‘I gotta get out of here. I can’t stand this smell any longer.’

‘Sure, OK. Sorry. I guess we’re used to it.’

He and Paul replaced the drapes, opened the door and climbed down off the lorry before Paul pulled the door back down and locked it.

DogNut stood bent over, drawing in great gulps of clean air, trying to clear the cloying stink from his nostrils. He was fighting not to be sick. Rocking back and forth, swearing, as slowly his head stopped spinning. Finally he sat down on a little camping stool that Paul obviously used.

‘Right,’ he said, his voice husky. ‘What are they for then?’

‘We need them for our experiments,’ said Justin.

‘Experiments?’

‘We’re trying to find out about the disease. Those three in there are guinea pigs. They’ve lived much longer than any of the others we’ve caught.’

‘You’re telling me you carry out experiments on them?’

‘We take their blood, tissue samples …’

‘Tissue samples? You mean you cut bits off them?’

‘That makes it sound worse than it is. We take skin samples, saliva, anything that oozes out of them, really, excrement …’

‘You collect their shit?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘You guys sure know how to party, don’t you?’

Justin grabbed hold of DogNut’s forearm, squeezing it tight.

‘If we’re going to find out how the disease works, we have to know everything about it.’

‘Can’t we just wait for them all to die off, and forget all about the bloody disease?’

‘How old are you, DogNut?’ asked Justin.

‘Fifteen, why?’

‘That’s good.’

‘Why?’

‘What happened when the disease hit?’

‘Everybody over the age of fourteen got sick, the rest of us …’

‘We were fine, right?’ Justin was getting excited, his voice rising in pitch. ‘But what happened when you got older?’ he went on. ‘When you turned fifteen?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Exactly. You didn’t get ill straight away.’

‘Far as I can tell, you don’t get ill full stop.’

‘As far as you can tell?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But what about in the future?’ Justin asked. ‘Can you guarantee that won’t change? Do you know for sure you’ll never get ill?’

‘I got no idea, man. I try not to think about that sort of thing.’

‘Exactly. You’ve got no idea. And do you know whether you can catch it off a grown-up?’

‘No. If you get too close to them, they usually kill you, so who knows?’

‘Who knows? That’s right. That’s exactly one hundred per cent right. Who knows? And what if you get bitten? Could it be passed on to you that way?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Right again. You don’t know. Loads of kids have been bitten and most of them have died of some infection. Not from whatever new disease it is that killed most of the grown-ups off. There are plenty of old diseases banging about inside sickos, like cholera and typhus and, I don’t know, dry rot, and if you get bitten you’re just as likely to die of blood poisoning as anything else. But can they pass on the prime infection with a bite?’

‘Stop asking me questions, Justin.’

‘It’s what scientists do. Ask questions.’

‘Well, they don’t ask me.’

‘Listen, DogNut,’ said Justin, ‘so far nobody’s lived long enough after being bitten for us to tell what might happen. What we need to do is test the blood of someone, a child, obviously, who’s been attacked.’

‘I expect you’ve got volunteers queuing round the block,’ DogNut scoffed. ‘Me! Me! Me! Bite me!’

‘DogNut. You have to take this seriously,’ said Justin. ‘If we can find the causes of the illness, how it works, then maybe we can find a cure.’

‘A cure?’

‘Yes!’ said Justin, grinning like a madman now. ‘Imagine if we could turn all those sickos out there back into real mothers and fathers. All you can think about is fighting them, killing them, wiping them out. We’re thinking about curing them.’

‘What do you want to cure them for?’ said DogNut incredulously. ‘Let them die, I say. Then the world will belong to us.’

‘What kind of world, though?’ said Justin. ‘And how will we survive in it?’

‘We ain’t doing too bad.’

‘DogNut’s right!’ said Paul. He’d been lurking by the generator and DogNut had forgotten all about him. ‘We should kill them all.’

‘How can you say that, Paul?’ asked Justin. ‘After all the work you’ve done with us on those three in there?’

‘How can I say it?’ Paul was wide-eyed and getting hysterical. ‘Because they killed my sister. And if you’re on their side then you killed my sister too.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Paul.’

‘Oh, I’m ridiculous, am I? You think it’s funny my sister died?’

‘No, I don’t. Why would I think that? It’s awful. I am really sorry for you. But this is why we need to find a cure so things like that won’t happen again.’