the pile.
Oh, Christ.
Jacob nodded silently, as if reading her mind. ‘They’re real. I . . . I touched one. I touched one of the—’
She instantly put her fingers to her lips to hush his too-loud voice.
‘Shit,’ hissed Nathan. ‘Does that mean there’s some canni—?’
Leona didn’t want to say the word out loud. Somehow that would make it more real if she did. ‘We should leave,’ she whispered, ‘leave right now.’
Both of them nodded.
‘Whoever did this could be—’ She clamped her mouth shut. She didn’t want to think about who or what had stacked these bones carefully into a pile. She stepped cautiously back the way she’d come, wildly panning the fading beam of her torch across the faux stone walls and the dangling plastic skeletons above.
They were approaching the arched doorway when they heard the sound of movement; shuffling of feet, whispering of lowered voices. She pumped the dynamo trigger several times, and the faint glow from her torch pulsed brightly, picking out a startled wall of pale faces glaring back at them.
‘Oh shit!’ she gasped. She turned to the other two. ‘Run!’
They stumbled out of the dungeon and turned right, running along a broad strip of uncluttered carpet. She turned to look over her shoulder to see only darkness. There were noises coming from back there; the slapping of feet.
Oh shit, oh shit.
‘Fuck!!’ bellowed Nathan.
She glanced forward to see more pale faces blocking the way ahead. She jabbed her hand right. ‘This way!’ They scrambled up onto a Microsoft display plinth and across a cluttered press-only marquee, weaving their way through rows of plastic chairs arranged in front of a large projector screen.
‘Come on!’ she screamed after the other two, deftly and quickly picking her way through and exiting the marquee on the far side. A moment later she was clambering over a length of velvet rope and stepping down off a plinth onto cord carpet again. Her torch faded to darkness and she decided to leave it that way, rather than attract attention.
She could hear Jacob and Nathan stumbling and cursing in the marquee. Not far behind her. They must have got tangled in the chairs. They were making too much fucking noise.
‘Come on!’ she called out.
‘Which way did you go?’ she heard Jacob’s muted voice. Further away now. The morons were heading the wrong way.
‘Over here!’ she called.
Chairs clattered. She could also hear the growing noise of footfalls, and an awful keening cry, like a host of mewling babies all teething.
‘Jacob! Nathan! Over here!’ she hissed as loud as she dared to. Those things - children, that’s what they’d looked like, children in rags, with long hair and dirty faces - they were very close . . . closer than the other two.
Don’t call out again, stupid.
In the darkness she could just make out her immediate environment and found a dark nook behind a tall placard and a rubbish bin. She hunched down between the two as quietly as she could. A moment later the darkness in front of her was full of the sound of feet and plimsolls on carpet, gasping laboured breath, mewling and crying. She even heard slurred baby-words uttered between them. And the smell: an awful smell of human faeces and stale urine.
A moment later it was quiet. Her eyes, accustomed now to the dark, picked out the last small silhouettes passing her by; shambling little forms that could have been nursery-aged children.
The last of them gone, she eased herself out of the nook. It was then that she noticed the cold of her damp trousers against her legs and realised she’d pissed herself.
The hall echoed with the sounds of the chase still going on; the clattering of things knocked over; that mewling raised in pitch to a frustrated howling that sent a shiver down her back.
Oh fuck.
She had no idea at all which way was out now. She’d completely lost her bearings in the panic. She couldn’t even tell from which direction the echoing noises of pursuit were coming. All she knew was that the pack of feral kids that had just rushed past her were to her left.
She turned right.
Chapter 39
10 years AC
Excel Centre - Docklands, London
Dozens of them, picked out in the flickering beam of his torch; children, pale and gaunt, faces smudged with ages-old dirt beneath long greasy tresses of hair.
‘Shit! They’re all around us!’ yelled Nathan.
Both of them backed up against a smooth curved wall of an Electronic Arts stand. Jacob pumped the trigger on his torch. The