‘Come on. We can at least get rid of that lot,’ he said, striding over to where the first of the grown-ups was crawling across the tracks. He went straight up to it and as it rose to its feet he swung his club like a batter, splattering its brains over the back end of the train.

Tom and Kate cheered.

‘Yeah!’ Tom shouted. ‘Now you’re talking. Let’s take them out!’

The next few minutes were merciless. The confused and feeble strangers carried on trying to get down off the platform and Shadowman’s calculations were correct. They were arriving singly, making them easy targets. His club rose and fell, smacking into bone. Tom and Kate’s swords were soon covered in blood from the tips of their blades to the pommels on the end of the grips. Alfie was throwing stones and yelling madly.

Only Jester held back, shouting instructions, but keeping clear of the bloodshed.

Soon thirteen strangers lay dead or dying, and the rest of them realized they were beaten. They retreated back along the platform towards the station.

The kids cheered again and hurled insults after the limping, defeated grown-ups. They looked at each other, covered in gore, exhausted, sweaty, but exhilarated.

‘Slice and dice,’ said Tom.

‘Mincemeat,’ said Alfie.

‘You still look very clean, Jester?’ said Kate, staring at his patchwork coat that had only a couple of spots of blood on it. ‘Didn’t see you doing much damage.’

Shadowman kept quiet. He wasn’t looking at Jester, wasn’t interested in whether or not he’d pulled his weight. He’d noticed something. While they’d been fighting, a smaller group of strangers had emerged from the tunnel down the tracks, no doubt lured by the noise and the smell of blood. There were six of them, and they looked considerably tougher and less sick than the ones from the station.

‘The party’s not over yet,’ he said wearily, and pointed to the new arrivals.

Jester erupted angrily. ‘You think I can’t do any damage? Think I don’t know how to fight? Yeah? Well, watch this!’ He grabbed Shadowman’s club from him and strode towards the oncoming strangers who slowed down, not sure if it was safe to move in for an attack.

Jester broke into a sprint, charging full pelt at the strangers, and smacked the first one, a tall father with long fair hair, hard in the neck. He didn’t go down, though, and the other strangers managed to close in on Jester so that he had no room to properly swing the club again.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ said Shadowman. ‘We need to help him.’

The four of them dashed over and started to lay into the strangers. Tom, Kate and Alfie concentrated on the ones who were hanging back. Shadowman headed for Jester, intending to pull him free of the two big fathers who had him by his left arm. But, just as Shadowman got close, Jester swung the club back with his free hand and it struck Shadowman square between the eyes.

It was like being hit by a firework. A shower of sparks exploded in front of Shadowman’s eyes and he suddenly didn’t know which way was up or down. He collapsed to his knees with a grunt, and his bladder emptied, soaking his jeans. Everything had gone a sickly yellow colour and was flipping over and over. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. His head felt as big as the moon and he was shivering, suddenly freezing cold.

The voices of the other boys boomed around him, but he could make no sense of them. The sound hurt him, though. He held his temples, wanting to scream, trying to hold his expanding head together.

He was dimly aware of the strangers being beaten down, of Tom and Kate yelling at Jester, then running off, Jester shouting after them.

Where were they going?

Come back …

I’m still here.

I need your help.

Now Jester was looking at him. His lips moving. Words buzzed in the air, but Shadowman couldn’t catch them. Jester and Alfie tried to pull him to his feet. Every time he stood, though, his legs gave way. In the end they dragged him to the side of the tracks.

‘Can you walk, Shadowman … can you walk … can you walk …?’

Shadowman couldn’t even speak, let alone walk.

‘There’s more of them coming … more of them coming … more of them …’

Where?

Shadowman tried to focus, but the image just flipped and skipped. He forced his face round towards the tunnel mouth. Another gaggle of strangers was emerging.

‘We’ll have to leave him … we’ll have to leave him … have to leave him …’

No …

‘I’m sorry … sorry … sorry …’

No …

The sky was pulsing. Shadowman threw up. Made a last effort to stand. For a moment he was up, then he was overcome with dizziness and he hit the ground with a hard, painful thump.

Everything went black.

He could taste dirt in his mouth. He opened his eyes. He was lying on his side. Staring at the tunnel.

Jester wasn’t there any more. Alfie gone too.

More strangers were coming out. No chance of counting them as they jumped about in his vision. They looked to him like a horde, an army, thousands of them.

Coming along the tracks towards him.

Where were his friends?

Oh yes. They’d run.

He had to hide.

Or something.

No. He was all right. The strangers weren’t coming towards him, after all. They were veering off, going after Jester and the others. They hadn’t seen him where he lay in a tangle of weeds. He was safe. It was going to be all right.

And then he felt a tug at his foot.

With a supreme effort he rolled his throbbing head round to look. It was one of the strangers from the battle. The father with the long fair hair. He wasn’t dead. He was slithering towards Shadowman on his belly, and he had his fingers clamped tight to his shoe.

Shadowman moaned.

It was the dead fighting the dead.

43

‘We going inside that, are we?’ said DogNut, bending his neck back to look up at the curved windowless walls of the building in front of him. It rose up eight storeys, looking like nothing so much as a giant concrete nut. The structure stood inside a modern extension to the Natural History Museum that was all glass and steel and hard surfaces.

‘Yes,’ said Justin proudly. ‘It’s where the museum laboratories are.’

‘You sure it ain’t stuffed with sickos?’

‘No. Just kids. Kids and millions of specimens.’

‘Why did the museum need labs?’ DogNut asked as they set off up the stairs. ‘Were they studying diseases, like?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Justin. ‘I think they studied plants and animals, fossils, that kind of thing. We’ve found some amazing scientific apparatus. A lot of it we’re still trying to work out how to use, but there’s loads of things we’re already using, like microscopes, computers, fridges …’

‘I think even I could figure out how to work a fridge,’ said DogNut.

‘We have to keep our specimens cold,’ said Justin.

‘Yeah, I know. You wouldn’t want your sickos to go off.’

There was an entrance to the pod on the third floor and Justin led DogNut into the dark interior, his torch shining over the walls and floor.

‘This building is called the Cocoon,’ Justin explained. ‘Before the disaster it had all sorts of displays and interactive stuff in here, projections on the walls, audio playing …’ He ran his torch beam over the walls like an archaeologist in a prehistoric cave. ‘All dead now, of course, but the museum’s collection of stuffed animals, seeds, insects, bones, weird things preserved in jars – that’s all still here, the physical things, the real things, not digital … bleeps and pixels and ones and zeros.’

There was a series of sloping ramps in the Cocoon that gave occasional glimpses of deserted labs as they climbed inside it, but as they rounded a corner near the top DogNut saw light up ahead. Electric light, burning inside a busy lab full of kids.