'Could be worse. He's sleeping now. I got some water inside him and a bit of food. Crisps, mainly, but it's better than nothing I suppose. The cut's not too deep, as far as I can tell, but he's lost quite a lot of blood. It's going to be hard to get his strength back up.'
'Have you put anything on the wound? Some antiseptic or anything?'
'Yeah. Greg has a box of stuff. I squirted some Savlon on, that's what my mum always used to do if I had a cut. Savlon and soup.'
'Yuck.'
'Not together. Savlon on the cut and then a hot bowl of soup. Cream of chicken. That's if I was badly mashed-up in a match. Which was nearly every week. I'd kill for some chicken soup right now.'
'Me too.'
'Piers really needs some proper food, though. He can't live on crisps. If we could get hold of some of that smoked meat Greg has stashed away in his cool box, that'd sort him out.'
'You can try,' said Jack. 'He doesn't like me. I doubt it'll do much good, though. Despite what he says he's only really looking after himself and Liam.'
'That his mini-me?'
'Yeah.'
Jack's seat jolted forward as someone bashed into the back of it. There was a girlish laugh and he was aware of bodies crowding behind him.
'Is she your girlfriend?'
It was Brooke and her two mates. Leaning over him, laughing and eyeing Frederique up and down. Jack wondered why he had ever seen them as a set. They actually looked very different, Courtney big and awkward, Brooke thin and blonde, Aleisha tiny and dark.
'Is she?' Brooke repeated.
'No.'
'What's her name?'
'Frederique. She's French.'
'We had enough of the French when we was in Calais,' said Courtney. 'France is a dump.'
Jack felt hot anger erupt from his guts. He twisted up out of his seat and confronted the girls, who dropped back in surprise.
'Why don't you lot knock it off? Huh? Why don't you give it a rest? She's been through a lot. Her dad died this morning. She's a human being like you. OK?'
Brooke was the first to get her front back in place. She gave a long drawn-out Oooooh, eyebrows raised, mouth in a perfect little circle.
'Definitely your girlfriend then.'
Aleisha put a hand on her friend's arm, making a concerned face.
'He's right, Brooke,' she said. 'Leave it. You don't have to be a bitch all the time. We all need to be friends.'
Brooke looked taken aback. She wasn't sure quite where she stood now.
'I was only joking.'
'Yeah, me too,' said Courtney. 'She looks all right. Are you OK, darling?'
Frederique nodded without looking round.
Courtney passed her a half-eaten Mars bar.
'D'you want this? I was saving it, but you can have it if you want.'
Frederique shook her head.
'She'll be OK,' said Aleisha kindly, and she smiled at Frederique.
'Look,' said Brooke. 'Touching moment and all that, but just so's we know where we all stand is she your girlfriend, or not?'
'Broo-ooke!' said Aleisha, jutting her head forward.
'What?' said Brooke. 'We need to know.'
'Why would you care?' said Jack. 'Apparently I don't count in your world because of my birthmark. I'm just some kind of freak.'
'So, she is your girlfriend then.'
'Oh, forget it.' Jack slumped back into his seat and the girls returned to their camp at the back of the bus arguing loudly with each other.
Frederique was shaking worse than ever and Jack was about to put his arm round her to reassure her when he realized she was laughing. He couldn't help but join in. This whole situation was so ridiculous. The world was falling apart and people couldn't see outside the little boxes they'd lived in all their lives.
An image of Frederique's father trying to stand up with a plank of wood nailed to his head came to him and he laughed even harder.
The world didn't make much sense any more.
He leant across Frederique and drew a smiley face on the window.
24.
Chris Marker reached up to the luggage rack to get his bag of books down. He'd finished Fever Crumb and needed to start something new. He always felt a bit deflated finishing a book. He'd race to get to the end and then wonder why he hadn't taken it more slowly to make the enjoyment last longer. Of course he could always just turn back to page one and start all over again at the beginning, as he sometimes did. But right now he wanted something new. He searched through the books and chose one he'd grabbed at random in the library because it looked long. It was a heavy fat paperback called The Gormenghast Trilogy. Three books in one: Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone. That should keep him busy for a while.
He sat back down and Kwanele looked over to see what he'd chosen.
'I've not read that,' he said.
Chris grunted. As far as he could tell Kwanele had never read any book, unless perhaps it was a history of fashion. Magazines were a different story. Kwanele must have read every fashion magazine ever published in the history of the world. And watched every programme about fashion on the TV. He'd already summed up everyone on board based on their clothing.
The three noisy girls at the back were 'an unholy mix of TopShop, Juicy Couture, JD Sports, Accessorize and Willesden market'.
Zohra and Froggie were 'classic Boden', whatever that was.
Greg and Liam were Next, plus 'inevitably more JD Sports'.
Frederique, though, apparently 'had style'.
'That coat's an Agnes B,' Kwanele had said approvingly.
He'd been quiet since lunch, drifting in and out of sleep, and Chris had taken the opportunity to tune in to the conversation that Matt and Archie Bishop were having about their new religion in the seats in front. His book was a prop a lot of the time, so that Chris could spy on people without them realizing.
Matt and Archie seemed to be making it up as they went along, but they were still deadly serious about their religion, discussing each point at great length.
Matt was reading something out from one of his rescued scraps of Bible.
'And he carried me away ... and showed me the Holy City ... It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. What's a jasper?'
'A type of jewel I suppose,' said Archie.
'I think it's significant,' said Matt. 'Why choose a jasper, and not, say, a ruby or an emerald or one of the better-known jewels? It's a code of some sort, I reckon. Maybe we need to look out for a boy called Jasper.'
'Maybe,' said Archie, though he didn't sound convinced.
Matt carried on reading aloud. 'It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates ... There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west ... And look, here ... The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper! Jasper again. I told you it was significant.'
'What else does it say?' Archie asked.
'Erm ... the second sapphire, the third chalcedony, the fourth emerald.'
'There you are, then,' said Archie. 'He says emerald.'
'Yeah, but listen to these others I've never heard of them the fifth sardonyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst.'
'I've heard of amethyst.'
'What colour is it?'
'Dunno. Red, maybe?'
'The twelve gates are important,' said Matt. 'Doesn't London have twelve gates? The old city of London.'
'Don't know. Does it?'
'Yes. I used to know them all. There's Ludgate ... erm, Old Gate, Newgate, Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Moorgate ... I don't remember the rest, but there's definitely twelve.'
Chris shook his head. There were seven gates in London, not twelve. Matt was a fool.
'It's all in here, Archie,' Matt was saying, his voice growing louder as he got more excited. 'London, the Lamb, the plague, my vision.'
'I wish I'd had a vision,' said one of the acolytes. 'I'd like to see what the Lamb looks like.'
'He's beautiful and frightening at the same time,' said Matt, and he stood up. 'He's going to save us all!' he cried out.
'Sit down, Matt,' said Ed, who was sitting across the way from Chris.
'I won't sit down. You all need to accept the Lamb if you want to be saved. The golden child, who is more than a child. I've seen him, walking out of the darkness, and all around him is light, and in his shadow walks a demon.'
'Sit down, Matt.'
Matt left his seat and went over to Ed.
'You'll see,' he said. 'You'll see that I'm right. It's all in the pages, and if you can't see that then you're blind. We're being tested. That's what all this is about, the disease, the dead, don't you see? God has sent a plague to wipe out the sinners, to kill the evil-doers. We have to found a new Jerusalem, in London, and welcome the Lamb who will come to save us.'
'And just how do we welcome him?' Ed asked.
'We have to make a sacrifice.'
'A sacrifice?' Ed looked amazed.
'Yes,' said Matt. 'The Lamb is ready for sacrifice, but we don't sacrifice the Lamb, you see, we sacrifice the demon, the beast who walks at his side in the darkness, and then once he's been cast out, the Lamb will be free and we can all rise into God's kingdom here on earth.'
This was all too much for Ed, he started to laugh. Matt stood there for a moment, his bony shoulders rising and falling heavily, then he turned away and stalked back to his friends.
Chris was secretly smiling. He didn't think Matt's new religion would catch on. After all, he was just a kid.
What did kids know about anything?
He focused his attention back on to his book. He knew the others thought he was weird. Always reading. But the thing was, books were the future now. They held what was left of the world's knowledge. All the adults were either dead or sick. All those teachers with their knowledge, all those parents, scientists, historians, gone.
There were no more computers now, and wouldn't be again until the electricity came back on. And how long would that take? What did kids know about generating electricity? Well, if they wanted to find out they were going to have to read books.
First read the books, then build the generators, then switch the computers back on. Probably wouldn't work after all that time. So they'd have to build new computers, which would mean reading more books ...
And in the meantime, all the gigabytes, zigabytes, mega-ziga-gigabytes of information that had once been stored in all the computers of the world would have vanished.
All that knowledge lost forever. They were back to square one. Well, perhaps not square one. More like the Middle Ages. Before electricity, before the Industrial Revolution, before cars and machines.
When there was just books.
If Chris knew one thing, it was that knowledge is power. And where was all the knowledge in the world right now? In books. So that meant that books were the most powerful objects in the world.
And he was going to use that power. He was going to keep on reading. He had to start collecting encyclopaedias, science books, history, geography, books of facts and figures. He had to start planning for the future.
The scenery rolled past as the afternoon wore on, growing greyer and greyer. The drizzle never let up and their progress was painfully slow. Roads were blocked everywhere and whenever the rain picked up Greg had to slow down to a crawl because of the missing wipers.
Several times they had to stop altogether and the bigger boys would have to get down and physically move cars out of the way while Greg watched out for sickos with his shotgun. Some of the cars still had keys in the ignition, but most didn't. The boys smashed the side windows and then it was Greg who showed them how to disable the steering lock by jamming a screwdriver in behind the steering column. They didn't bother trying to hotwire them, but simply put the cars in neutral and pushed them out of the way.