Young Bond: The Dead - Young Bond: The Dead Part 40
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Young Bond: The Dead Part 40

And then he got it. Too late. Frederique was up out of her chair and coming at him, arms outstretched. The handcuffs dangling from one wrist, the other hand, the free hand, missing its thumb. There was blood all over her arms and down her front.

She came fast, and before Ed could react she got hold of his shirtfront and shoved him hard up against the wall with more force than he'd imagined she was capable of, winding him. He tried to pull away from her but she held him tight. His head was spinning. He was worn out from carrying Jack yesterday, and all his muscles ached. He didn't think he had the strength to fight her off. She bared her teeth. There was saliva bubbling between them. She put her face closer. The whites of her eyes were almost solid red. Thin trickles of blood came out of her tear ducts and ran down either side of her nose. Her jaws opened wide and she forced her mouth towards Ed. Her strength was appalling. Her breath stank like an animal house at the zoo. Ed was on the verge of fainting.

She stuck out her tongue and licked the length of Ed's scabby wound.

'No!' he yelled. 'Get off me!'

Somehow he managed to twist away and jab an elbow into Frederique's side, knocking her over. She howled and came straight back at him on all fours. This time Ed knew she was going to bite him. He kicked her in the jaw and she fell back.

Ed just had time to get to the rifle and hold it out in front of him before Frederique recovered. She squatted there, writhing and spitting.

'Frederique, stop it!'

Then the poor girl doubled over in pain and started to retch, bringing up a sticky silvery stream of liquid that spattered on to the fake cobblestones.

With that, the fight went out of her. She slumped down, pressed her face against the floor and started to weep.

'Kill me, Ed,' she pleaded. 'Please kill me. I cannot go on like this.'

'No, Fred, no ... It's all right. You'll be all right ...'

How many lies was he going to tell her today?

Just one more.

'Wait here,' he said. 'I'm going to get something that will help.'

'OK ...'

Ed backed away from her and knocked on the door for DogNut to let him out.

62.

Ed walked quickly into the centre of the atrium where the two rival gangs of boys were eyeing each other suspiciously.

'Right!' he shouted. 'Listen to me. I need you all to get your weapons and make two rows, leading from the stairs at the back to the front doors. Make a sort of passage, like, you know, running-the-gauntlet type of thing. I'm bringing someone through. She's sick, OK? But she's one of us, so I don't want anyone to hurt her. I just want to get her out of the building and away from here.'

'You sure you know what you doing, man?' DogNut had followed Ed up from the lower level, his small head bobbing on his skinny neck, agitated.

Ed took him into the front entrance area.

'We can't keep her locked up in there like an animal,' he said quietly and urgently. 'She'll only get worse. If I let her out, she can at least try and look after herself.'

'So you don't have to deal with her?'

'No. Maybe. Yeah.'

'But if you let her out, Ed ...'

'She's a friend.'

'She's a sicko now,' said DogNut. 'That's the word you lot like to use, innit? Sicko. And sickos ain't our friends.'

'But she was ...' said Ed. 'She was my friend. She'll just die in there.'

'True that.' DogNut pointed through the doors at the gardens. 'And out there she's free to attack any kid she wants.'

'So?' Ed shouted angrily. 'What do you want me to do? Shoot her? Stick my bayonet into her guts?'

'I dunno ...'

'Well, neither do I. So I'm going to let her out. Open the doors. And be careful she got out of the handcuffs.'

'How the hell she do that?'

'She bit her thumb off.'

'Holy Jesus ...'

DogNut didn't argue any more. He opened the front doors and then formed the kids into a gauntlet as Ed went back for Frederique.

The boys stood there in two long lines, each bristling with sticks and bayonets, swords and clubs. They waited, some laughing and making sharp remarks, others quiet and thoughtful, like kids organized into a game whose rules they didn't really know.

After a while Frederique emerged, blinking and confused, covering her eyes with her good hand, the cuffs rattling.

She flinched from the weapons as she shuffled between the lines. A group of Jordan's boys sniggered at her, and a couple made crude comments. Then she brought up her injured hand and they shut up.

Ed followed, his rifle ready in case Frederique tried to turn and run back.

She didn't. She just kept slowly walking towards the main entrance. When she got there she halted. Cringing away from the sunlight, hunched over. Ed came up behind her.

'You have to go,' he said.

She turned and gulped at him. She looked so sad suddenly, so normal, just a frightened little girl. She shook her head.

Ed turned his rifle round and prodded her with the butt.

'Please, Frederique. Just go.'

There were blood-stained tears running down her cheeks. Her lower lip was trembling.

'Ed,' she said.

'Just go!' Ed snapped, and shoved her so that she went sprawling on to the front steps.

DogNut swung the doors shut.

Frederique got up, came over to the glass and pawed at it. DogNut winced when he saw the ragged tear where her thumb had been. She was pleading in French and sobbing.

'I'm sorry,' said Ed, and Frederique threw herself at the window, slobbering against it, smearing it with filth. An animal again.

Ed didn't want to see. He turned away and left her there, thumping and mewling and clawing at the glass. He couldn't believe how quickly she'd got sick, how fast she'd changed, fallen apart.

Would it be worse now that she was outside in the light? Quicker? He didn't know how the disease worked, but he'd seen enough to know that sunlight accelerated it.

He tried to shut her out of his mind. Walked away between the lines of silent boys.

DogNut stayed where he was. Not looking at the girl, but up, at the sky.

He felt a cold hard lump in his guts.

63.

Jordan Hordern was sitting at his desk. He had taken over the director-general's office in the corner of the museum on the first floor. He had a bed against one wall and spent a lot of time in here reading and planning. The rest of his boys slept in the boardroom next door, which they'd turned into a dormitory. Both rooms looked out over the park and had good lines of sight.

David King was sitting opposite Jordan at the desk, his legs neatly crossed, listening as Jordan explained the rules. They were no different for David than they were for the coach party. If he and his boys could feed themselves, they were welcome to stay.

'We might not want to stay.'

'That's your decision.'

'You said yourself we can't have two people in charge,' David went on. 'I think I know best, and I don't want to be told what to do by anyone else.'

'Fair enough, soldier. Where were you heading anyway, before you found Ed?'

'Somewhere central. Somewhere with a good supply of food and water. Somewhere safe. Somewhere like this, really.'

'Yeah, well, I'm afraid we got here first.'

'Yes.'

'Why London, though?' Jordan asked. 'Wouldn't you have been better off in the countryside?'

'For the next few years we are going to be a scavenger society,' said David. 'Living off what the adults have left behind. This place, for instance, is full of weapons that we couldn't hope to make ourselves. Not until we learn the skills.'

'True.'

'So London is the obvious place to come. The countryside will be fine when it's safer, when the Strangers have all died off, when we can learn how to grow our own food. But at the moment it's pretty terrible out there. Funnily enough it's quieter here in town.'

'You'll find somewhere else to hole up,' said Jordan.

'I doubt we'll find somewhere else with as good a supply of weapons, though.'

'OK,' said Jordan. 'That's what this is all about, then? Weapons?'

'You've surely got more than you can use.'

'Not necessarily. Who knows how things are going to go? Who knows what we might need in the future?'

'Twenty rifles,' said David. 'That's all I'm asking for. Give me twenty rifles. You must have hundreds here.'

'What about bullets?' said Jordan.

'I hadn't thought of that.'

'Most of these guns are useless. There's no ammo for them. We did find some others in the armoury, and some bullets, but I ain't Father Christmas.'

'Well, then, if some of the guns aren't any use to you,' said David, 'why not give them to us and let us worry about ammunition?'

'If I give you guns, will you move on?' Jordan asked, but David wasn't listening. He had his head cocked to one side.

'Can you hear that?' he said.

'What?'

'Sounds like shouting.'

64.

A huge argument was raging in the atrium. David's boys against Jordan's. It seemed that with their leaders not around both crews had lost all their discipline. There was a lot of childish name-calling going on. David's boys were from a privileged public school; Jordan's boys were mostly from the local estates. No one was quite sure what had started it, but there was now a fierce slanging match going on with both sides insulting the other in the crudest possible way.

David and Jordan came down the stairs shouting and trying to restore some sense of order. But the argument had been allowed to get out of hand and there was no easy way of stopping it. The two sides were acting like rival football teams who had got into a fight on the pitch and were using Jordan and David like referees. And the coach-party kids were acting as spectators, nudging each other and pointing, enjoying the spectacle.

It looked like there were going to be a few red cards today. The big rugby player, Pod, was particularly angry.