I decided to commemorate my one year anniversary of joining this website by combining the two things that are the whole reason I'm in this mess - I mean, the whole reason I joined this wonderful website.
The reason this is a tribute to The Dead and not The Enemy is because I read The Dead first, which is a prequel. Plus, it's my favorite book out of the entire Enemy series. (Well, actually it's tied with The End - but The Dead came out first, therefore, it's my favorite)
Tribute to the Dead
Mr. Johnson was crawling through the broken window.
Sliding over the edge on his belly. Hands groping at the air, fingers clenching and unclenching, arms waving as if he were trying to swim the breaststroke. In the half-light Lincoln could just make out the look on his pale yellowing face. A stupid look. No longer human. Eyes wide and staring. Tears of blood dribbling from under his eyelids. Tongue lolling out from between cracked and swollen lips. Skin covered with boils and sores.
Lincoln stood there frozen, the baseball bat held tight in sweating hands. He knew he should step forward and whack Mr. Johnson as hard as he could in the head, but his right arm ached all the way down. He'd been swinging the bat all night, and last time he'd hit a teacher it had jarred his shoulder. Now it hurt just to hold the bat, which felt like a lead weight in his hands.
He knew that wasn't the real reason, though. When it came down to it, he couldn't bring himself to hit Mr. Johnson. He'd always liked him. He'd been Lincoln's English teacher for the last year. He was one of the youngest and most popular teachers in the school, always talking to the boys about movies and TV and video games, not in a creepy way, not to get in with the kids, simply because he was genuinely interested in the same things they were. When the disease hit, when everything started to go wrong, Mr. Johnson had done everything he could to help the boys. Trying to contact parents and make arrangements, keeping their spirits up, comforting them, reassuring them, always searching for food and water, making the buildings safe…
And when it had gotten really bad, when those adults who'd gotten sick but hadn't died had started to turn on the kids, attacking them like wild animals, Mr. Johnson had helped fight them off.
He'd been tireless, and it had looked like he might escape the sickness
He'd been a hero.
And now here he was, crawling slowly, slowly, slowly into the lower common room like some huge, clumsy lizard. He raised his head, stretching his neck, and wheezed at Lincoln, bloody saliva bubbling between his teeth. Lincoln could see two more teachers behind him, attempting in their own mindless way to get to the window.
Lincoln swallowed. It hurt his throat. He hadn't had anything to drink all day. They were running low on water and trying to ration it. His head throbbed. This was the second night the teachers had attacked in force. Lincoln's second night without sleep. The stress and the tiredness were turning him slightly crazy. His heart felt all fluttery and he was constantly on the edge of losing it, breaking down into uncontrollable sobbing, or laughter, or both. He was seeing things everywhere, out of the corner of his eye, shapes moving in the shadows. He would shout a warning and turn to look and there would be nothing there.
Mr. Johnson was real, though, something out of a waking nightmare, slithering in, inch by inch.
The last hour had been a chaotic panicked scramble of running around in the dark from room to room, checking doors, windows, battering back any teacher that got past the defenses. And then they'd heard the breaking glass in the lower common room, and he and Clyde had come charging in to see what was happening.
And there was Mr. Johnson.
Lincoln couldn't do this alone. He looked to Clyde and saw him crouched down behind an overturned table, his dark face poking over the top, eyes black-rimmed and staring behind his glasses. Clyde, his best friend. Clyde, who everyone thought was smart. Clever without being cocky or a suck-up. Fair-looking Clyde who was the favorite student of all the teachers. Clyde, who beat him a video games without really trying. Lincoln had always felt second in line to him, even though the two of them did everything together, hung out all the time, shared books and comics and music, had all the same classes together.
Last year the school had produced a glossy booklet advertising itself to new parents, and there on the front cover was Clyde – the boy most likely to succeed. The happy, smiling confident face of Royal Woods Jr. High.
Well, this was the new face of the school, hiding behind a table, scared halfway to death, while the teachers crawled in through a broken window.
Clyde was totally bricking it, and his fear was making him next to useless.
"Help me," Lincoln croaked.
"I'm keeping watch," said Clyde, a slight catch in his voice.
Yeah, right, keeping watch… keeping safe is more like it.
Lincoln sighed. His own tiredness and fear were turning him bitter.
"If you won't help," he said, "at least go and get one of the others."
Clyde shook his head. "I'm staying with you."
"Then do something," Lincoln shouted. "Johnson's nearly through. I need help here."
"What…? What do you want me to do?"
Lincoln rubbed his shoulder. He'd had enough of the school. He'd had enough of this mess, night after night, the same bloody ritual. Right now he'd rather be anywhere else than here.
Most of all he wanted to be at home, though. Back in his own house, in his own room, with his own things. Under his comforter, with the world shut out.
Home…
He tossed the bat to Clyde. It bounced off the table and ended up on the carpet.
"Hit him, Clyde," he said.
"I'm not sure I can," Clyde replied.
"Pick up the bat and hit him." Lincoln felt tears come into his eyes. He squeezed them tight and pinched the wetness away. "Please, Clyde, just hit him."
"And then what?" Clyde asked. "They just keep coming, Lincoln. We can't kill them all."
"Hit him, Clyde! For God's sake, just hit him!"
Clyde looked at the bat, lying in a strip of moonlight on the worn-out carpet. The electricity had gone off three weeks ago. Nights were blacker than he had ever known they could be.
He didn't know what to do. He knew he should help Lincoln, but he was paralyzed. If he did nothing, though, wouldn't it be worse? The teachers would get him, just as they'd gotten Chris and Kyle and Kevin. They'd come in with their horrible filthy nails and their hungry teeth. They'd grab him…
Maybe that would be better. To get it over with. All he could see ahead of him was a never-ending string of dark nights spent fighting off adults, as, one by one, his friends were all killed.
Get it over with.
Shut your eyes, lie down, and that would be that…
He saw a hand reaching out towards the bat. As if he were watching a movie. As if it were happening to someone else. The fingers closed around the handle.
His fingers.
He picked up the bat and raised himself to a standing position. The blood was pounding in his head and he felt like he was going to throw up at any moment. If he came out from behind the table and ran forward now, he could get Mr. Johnson before he was fully through the window and on his feet. He could help Lincoln. They'd be okay.
Yes.
He pushed the table out of the way and crept forward. What if Mr. Johnson sped up, though? What if all the diseased adults weren't slow and confused? It was easy to make a mistake. Every boy who'd been taken had made some stupid mistake. Had been careless.
Clyde raised the bat just as Johnson flopped onto the floor. For a moment he lay there, unmoving. Clyde wondered if he was dead. Then the teacher rolled his head from side to side and forced himself up so that he was squatting on the sticky carpet. He belched and vomited a stream of thin clear liquid down his front. It smelled awful.
"Hit him, Clyde."
Clyde glanced over at Lincoln. He was stooped over, breathing heavily, his eyes wild and shining. Exhausted. His white hair made him look older than he was. Like he was a ghost.
"Hit him now."
When Clyde turned his attention back to Mr. Johnson, the teacher had straightened up and was shuffling closer. There were three long jagged rips down the front of his white shirt. Clyde's eyes flicked to the window frame, where a row of vicious glass shards stuck up along the lower rim. Mr. Johnson must have raked his torso across them as he crawled in, too stupid to realize what was happening. Blood was oozing from behind the rips and soaking his shirt. His tie had been pulled into a tight, stringy know.
There was a noise from the outside. Already other shapes were at the window, jostling each other to get through.
Johnson suddenly jerked and lashed out with one hand. Clyde staggered back.
"Hit him, Clyde," Lincoln hissed angrily, on the verge of crying. "Smash his bloody skull in. Kill him. I hate him. I hate him."
The thing was, Clyde hadn't hit a single one of them yet, and he didn't know if he could. He didn't know if he could swing that bat and feel it smash into bone and flesh. He'd never enjoyed fighting, had always managed to avoid anything serious. The fact that most people seemed to like him and wanted to be his friend had kept him out of trouble. He'd grown up thinking it was wrong to hit someone else, to deliberately hurt another person.
And not just any person. It was Mr. Johnson, who until about two weeks ago had been friendly and normal…
Normal. How Clyde longed for things to be normal again.
Well, they weren't ever going to be normal again, were they? So swing that bloody bat. Feel the bone break under it…
He swung. His heart wasn't in it, though, and there was no force to the blow. The bat bumped feebly into Mr. Johnson's arm, knocking him to the side. Johnson snarled and lunged at Clyde, who cried out in alarm and jumped backward. One of the table legs poked him in the back, winding him and knocking him off balance. He fell awkwardly, his head bashing against the table. He lay there for a moment in stunned confusion until a shout from Lincoln brought him back to his senses.
Where was the bat? He'd dropped the bat. Where was it?
It had fallen toward Mr. Johnson, who had stepped over it. Clyde couldn't get to it now and neither could Lincoln. Not without shoving Johnson out of the way.
And Johnson was nearly upon him. There was just enough light to see the pus-filled boils that were spread across his face. He raised both his hands to chest height, ready to make a grab for Clyde, and his shirt pulled out of his trousers.
"Help me, Lincoln!"
But before Lincoln could do anything, there was a bubbling, gurgling sound, like a clogged-up sink unblocking, and an appalling stink filled the room. Mr. Johnson howled. The glass had evidently cut deeper into his belly than any of them had realized. He looked down dumbly as his skin unzipped and his guts spilled put.
Now it was Lincoln's turn to vomit.
Mr. Johnson dropped to his knees and started scooping up long coils of entrails, as if trying to stuff them back into his body. Lincoln moved at last. He kicked Johnson over, grabbed the fallen bat, then ran to Clyde.
"Come on," he said, seizing Clyde's wrist and pulling him to his feet. "We're getting out of here."
They bundled out into the corridor, and Lincoln pulled the door shut.
"I'm sorry," said Clyde. "I can't do this."
"It's all right," said Lincoln, and he hugged Clyde. "It's all right, buddy, it's all right."
Lincoln felt weird; it had always been the other way around. Clyde helping Lincoln, Clyde cool and in control, gently mocking Lincoln, who worried about everything. Lincoln never sure of himself, self-conscious about his white hair. Not that Clyde would ever say anything about it, but it was always there, like a flag. What did it matter now, though? In a list of all the things that sucked in the world, his stupid hair wasn't even in the top one hundred.
"Should we try to block the door somehow?" said Clyde, making an attempt to look like he was in control again.
"With what?" said Lincoln. "Let's just get back upstairs to the others, yeah?"
"What about the teachers?" said Clyde, glancing fearfully at the door.
"There's nothing we can do, Clyde. Maybe the rest of them will be distracted by Mr. Johnson. I don't know. Maybe they'll stop to eat him. That's all they're looking for, isn't it, food? You've seen them."
Clyde let out a crazy laugh. "Listen to you," he said. "Listen to what you're saying, Lincoln. This it nuts. Talking about people eating each other. It's unreal."
But Clyde had seen them. A pack of teachers ripping a dead body to pieces and shoving the bloody parts into their mouths.
No. He had to try not to think about these things and concentrate on the moment. On staying alive from one second to the next.
"All right," he said, his voice more steady now. "Let's get back to the others. Make sure they're all okay. We've got to stick together."
"Yeah."
Clyde took hold of Lincoln's arm. "Promise me, Lincoln, won't you?"
"What?"
"That whatever happens we'll stick together."
"Of course."
Clyde smiled.
"Let's go, said Lincoln, dragging his flashlight from his pocket and shining it up and down the corridor. There were heavy fire doors at either end that the kids kept shut to slow down any intruders. This part of the corridor was empty. They had to keep moving, though. They had no idea how long the other teachers would be delayed in the common room.
Clyde suddenly felt more tired than he'd ever felt in his life.
He wasn't sure he had the energy to just put one foot in front of the other. He knew Lincoln felt the same way.
Then one of the fire doors banged open and Clyde was running again.
A teacher had lurched through. Mr. Puga, a teacher with oriental features. He'd always been a big jolly man with dark wavy hair and an untidy beard; now he looked like some sort of mad bear, made worse by the fact that he seemed to have found a woman's fur coat somewhere. It was way too small for him and matted with dried blood. He advanced stiff-legged down the corridor towards the boys, arms wind milling.
The boys didn't wait for him; they flung themselves into the fire door at the opposite end, but as they crashed through they collided with another teacher on the other side. He staggered back against the wall. Without thinking, Lincoln lashed out with the bat, getting him with a backhander to the side of the head that left him stunned.
Lincoln and Clyde came to a dead stop. This part of the corridor was thick with teachers. God knows how many of them there were, or how they'd gotten in. Even though they were packing in here, there was an eerie silence, broken only by a cough and a noise like someone trying to clear their throat.
Clyde flashed his light wildly around, almost as one the teachers turned toward him. The beam whipped across a range of twisted, diseased faces dripping with snot, teeth bared, eyes staring, with peeling skin, open wounds, and horrible gray-green blisters.
They were unarmed and weakened by the sickness, but they were still larger and on the whole more powerful than they boys, and in a big group like this they were deadly. The boys had fortified one of the dormitories on the top floor where they were living, but there was no way Lincoln and Clyde could make it to the stairs past this crown.
They couldn't go back and try another way, though, because Mr. Puga was even now pushing through the fire door, and behind him was a small group of female teachers.
"Coming through!"
There was a loud shout, and Clyde was dimly aware of bodies being knocked down, then Puga was shunted aside as a group of boys charged him from behind. At their head was Lynn Bamford, champion wide receiver for the school, and bunched next to him in a pack were four of his friends from the football team, armed with hockey sticks.
They yelled at Lincoln and Clyde to follow them and cleared a path between the startled teachers, who dropped back to either side. The seven boys had the muscle now to power down the corridor and into the empty entrance hallway at the end. They kept moving, Clyde running up the stairs three steps at a time, all tiredness forgotten.
They soon reached the top floor and hammered on the dormitory door.
"Open up! It's us!" Lynn yelled. Below them the teachers were starting to make their way onto the stairs.
There were muffled voices from the dorm and the sounds of activity.
"Come on," Lincoln shouted. "Hurry up."
Mr. Puga was coming up more quickly then the other adults, his big feet crashing into each step as his long muscular legs worked like pistons, eating up the distance.
At last the boys could hear the barricade being removed from the other side of the door. They knew how long it took, though, to move the heavy cabinet to the side, shunting it across the bare wooden floorboards.
There had to be a better system than this.
Lincoln turned. Puga was nearly up.
"Get a move on." Clyde pounded his fists on the door, which finally opened a crack. The boy on the other side put an eye up to the gap, checking to see who was out there.
"Just open the bloody door," Lynn roared.
Puga reached the top of the staircase, and Lincoln kicked him hard in the chest with the heel of his shoe. The big man fell backward with a small high-pitched cry, toppling down the stairs and taking out a group of teachers on the lower steps.
The door swung inward. The seven boys made it through to safety.
The adults were scraping the dormitory wall with their fingers and battering at the door. Now and then there would be a break, a few seconds' silence, and the boys would hear one of them sniffling at the doorjamb like a dog. Then the mindless frenzy of banging and scratching would begin all over again.
"Do you think they'll give up and go away?" Liam, one of the football players, was standing by the heavy cabinet that the boys had used to barricade the door. He was staring at it as if trying to look through it at the adults on the other side.
"What do you think?" said Lincoln, with more than a hint of scorn in his voice.
"No."
"Exactly. So why ask such a stupid question?"
"Hey, hey, hey, no need to start getting at each other," said Lynn, stepping over to put an arm around his friend's shoulder. "Liam was just thinking out loud, weren't you, L? Just saying what we're all thinking."
"Yeah, I know, I'm sorry," said Lincoln, slumping onto a bed and running his fingers through his hair. "I'm all weird inside. Can't get my head straight."
"It's the adrenaline," came a high-pitched, squeaky voice from the other side of the room. "The fight-or-flight chemical."
"What are you on about now, Wiki?" said Lynn, with a look of amusement on his broad, flat face. Wiki's real name was Levi. He was a skinny little twelve-year-old with glasses who seemed to know everything about everything and had been nicknamed Wiki, short for Wikipedia.
"Adrenaline, although you should properly call it epinephrine," he said in his strong nasally voice. "It's a hormone that your body makes when you're in danger. It makes your heart beat faster and your blood vessels sort of open up so that you're ready to either fight off the danger or run away from it. You get a big burst of energy, but afterward you can feel quite run-down. It's made by your adrenal glands from tyrosine and phenylalanine, which are amino acids."
"Thanks, Wiki," said Lynn, trying not to laugh. "What would we do without you?"
Wiki shrugged. Before he could say anything else, there was an almighty bang from outside, and all eyes in the room turned back to the door.
Clyde looked around at the grubby faces of the boys, lit by the big candles they'd found in the school chapel. Some of these boys had been his friends before, some he'd barely known. They'd been living in this room together now for a week, and he was growing sick of the sight of them.
There was Lincoln, sitting alone chewing his lip, the fingers of one hand running back and forth through his white hair. Lynn with his four football friends, Liam, Zach, and the Spokes brothers, Rusty and Rocky, who had a reputation for being a bit thick and had done nothing to prove that they weren't. Little Wiki and his friend Darcy, who almost never stopped talking. A group of six boys from Field House, across the road, who stuck together and didn't say much. Lexx, tall, elegant and somehow, despite everything, always immaculately dressed. Lars, sitting by the window, reading a paperback (that's all he did now, read books, one after another; he never spoke) and "the three nerds," who were all in Clyde's physics class.
Nineteen faces, all wearing the same expression: dull, staring, slack, slightly sad. Clyde imagined this was what it must have been like in a trench in the First World War. Trying not to think about tomorrow, or yesterday, or anything.
Apart from the nineteen boys in this room, Clyde was alone in the world. He had no illusions that his mom and dad might still be alive. About the only thing the scientists had been able to say for sure about the disease, before they, too, had gotten sick, was that it only affected people fourteen or older. His older brother, Dan, was older than he, eighteen, so he'd probably be dead, or diseased, which was worse.
The last contact Clyde had had with his family was a phone call from his mom about four weeks ago. She'd told him to stay where he was. She hadn't sounded well.
There were probably other boys around the school, hiding in different places. He knew Lane had taken a load over to the chapel, but basically Clyde's world had shrunk down to this room.
These nineteen faces.
It scared him to think about it. How shaky his future looked. He felt like a tiny dot at the center of a vast, cold universe. He didn't want to think about what was outside. The chaos in the world. How nothing was as it should be. It had been a relief when the television had finally gone off the air. No more news. He had to concentrate on himself now. On trying to stay alive. One day at a time. Hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second.
"How many seconds in a lifetime, Wiki?" he asked.
Wiki's voice came back thin but sure. "Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day, three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, actually three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter because of leap years, so let's say the average life is about seventy-five years, that's sixty, times sixty, times twenty-four, which is er, eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds in a day. Then three hundred and sixty-five days times seventy-five makes, let me see, twenty-seven thousand three hundred and seventy-five days in seventy-five years. So we multiply those two numbers together…"
Wiki fell silent.
"That's a big sum," said his friend Darcy.
"Never mind," said Clyde. "It doesn't matter."
"It's a lot," Darcy added, trying to be helpful. "A lot of seconds."
And too many of them had been spent in this bloody room. They'd dragged the beds in here from all around the House, so that they didn't get split up, but it meant it was crowded, stuffy, and smelly. None of them could remember the last time he'd washed, except perhaps Lexx. He had had his school suits specially made by a tailor in London and used to boasts that his haircuts cost him fifty bucks a shot. He was keeping himself clean somehow. He had standards to maintain.
The room was made even more cramped by a stack of cardboard boxes at the far end. They'd once contained all their food and bottled water, but there was virtually nothing left now. They had supplies for two more days, maybe three if they were careful. Lincoln was looking through the pile, chucking empty boxes aside.
There came an even bigger bang, and the cabinet appeared to shake slightly. They'd packed it with junk to make it heavier, and it would need a pretty hefty shove from outside to knock it out of the way, but it wasn't impossible.
"We've got to get out of here," Lincoln muttered.
"What?" Clyde frowned at him.
"I said, we've got to get out of here." This time Lincoln's voice came through loud and clear and everyone listened. "It's pointless staying. Completely pointless. Even if that bunch out there backs off in the morning, even if they crawl back to wherever it is they're sleeping – which we don't know for certain they will do – we're gonna have to spend all day tomorrow going around trying to block up the doors and windows again. And then what? They'll only come back tomorrow night and get back in. We can't sleep, we can't eat. Luckily, none of us got hurt tonight, but… I mean, if the teachers don't get us, we'll basically just starve to death if we stay here."
"Yeah, I agree," said Lynn. "I think we should bog off in the morning." His voice sounded very loud in the cramped dormitory. He had always had a tendency to shout rather than speak, and before the disaster the other boys had found him quite irritating. He was large and boisterous. Blundering around like a mini tornado, accidentally breaking things, making crap jokes, playing tricks on people, laughing too much. Now the others couldn't imagine how they'd cope without him. He never seemed to get tired or moody; he was never mean, never sarcastic, and totally without fear.
"We need to find somewhere that we can defend easier than this," Lynn went on. "Somewhere near a source of food and water."
"The only source of food around here is us," said Lincoln.
"They might go away," said Wiki's friend Darcy. "They might all die in the night – lots of them are already dead. If we hold on long enough, they'll die, they'll pop like popcorn. You see when Ms. DiMartino, the science teacher, died? She was lying on the grass in the sun, lying down dead, and her skin started to pop like popcorn, the boils on her kept bursting like little flowers all over her. You know like when flowers come out in a speeded-up film? Pop, pop, pop, and after a while there wasn't anything left of her, she was just a black mess, and then a dog started to eat her and the dog died, too." Darcy stopped and blinked. "I think we should all stay here until they all go away or pop like popcorn."
"They're not going to go away," said Lincoln, going over to the window where Lars was still reading his book, his eyes fixed on the pages. There was a bright moon tonight, and it threw a little light into the room, but Lincoln doubted if it was enough to see the words properly. Not that that stopped Lars. Nothing could stop him now.
Lincoln looked down into the street. There were two teachers down there and an older teenager, maybe seventeen or eighteen. They were hobbling along, walking as if every step hurt their feet.
"Some of them die from the disease and some of don't," he said. "Who knows why?" He turned back from the window to point toward the door where on of their attackers was rattling the handle. "And who knows how long that group out there are going to take to die? Could be weeks, and in the meantime they know we're here, and they won't give up until they've got us. They're going to keep on attacking every night, soon as it's dark, every bloody night. Most of the other boys left ages. Us guys, we stayed in case anyone turned up to rescue us. Ha, good one. Nobody has turned up, and, let's face it, nobody will."
"Two billion three hundred and sixty-five million and two hundred thousand seconds…" said Wiki quietly. "Roughly. In a lifetime. If you are lucky…"
It took four of them to shift the cabinet in the morning.
Aware that they were moving it for the last time.
Once the door was clear, Lynn put his ear to it. He looked at Lincoln. Lincoln licked his lips, tense. "Well?"
Lynn shook his head. "Can't hear anything."
"Go one then."
Lynn grasped the handle, turned. It clicked and the door popped open a fraction. He checked that everyone was ready. A row of boys stood waiting. They'd pulled the metal bed frames apart to make weapons out of the struts and heavy springs, and they'd packed up whatever supplies and belongings they had left into backpacks or bundles made of sheets.
"Ready?"
The boys nodded. Lynn took a deep breath and tugged the door open.
A pale, sickly light washing in from the small windows showed that the area outside was empty.
The teachers were gone.
One by one the boys filed out onto the landing, wary and alert. They were shivering. Their combined body heat had kept them reasonably warm in the dormitory, but it was early March, and the air out here was noticeably colder.
"Look at that." Liam nodded toward the door. The outside of it looked like it had been savaged by a pack of wild animals. There were gouges and great dents, long gashes as if from claws. It was worst around the handle. The teachers had almost managed to scrape right through the wood. The walls were similarly scarred, with chunks missing and a pattern of bloody handprints.
"Looks like we only just made it out in time," said Lynn. "One more night and they'd have been on us."
It stank on the landing. There was evidence that at least one of the teachers had used the carpet for a toilet. There was torn wallpaper down the stairs and a fresh splash of blood up one wall. Maybe they'd been fighting among themselves.
"Come one." Lynn led the way down. Behind him came Liam and his other mates from the football team, carrying vicious metal lengths of bed frame, with ripped-up sheets wrapped tightly around the ends to protect their fingers. Next came Lincoln and Clyde, Lincoln with the baseball bat, Clyde with a hockey stick. Behind them were Darcy and Wiki, chatting away to each other, wobbling bedsprings up and down in their hands. Then Lars, still reading a book as he walked, a makeshift pack slung over his back crammed with yet more books. Then the three nerds, carrying wooden clubs made from chair legs. After them came Lexx, immaculate as ever in his suit and tie, lugging an expensive suitcase and suit bag, filled with his favorite outfits. Finally the six boys from Field House, watching their rear and armed with an odd assortment of garden tools.
At the bottom of the stairs the carpet was black and sticky, as if a tub of molasses had been poured into it. The boys' sneakers stuck to the floor and squelched as they lifted their feet. It smelled worse down here, a foul brew of blood and dead flesh and unwashed bodies. Sweet and sour and putrid.
The main way in and out of the building was through two big double doors. The first thing Mr. Johnson had organized when they'd decided to secure the House was nailing the doors shut with planks of wood. They'd been using an alternative exit through the back of the kitchen as a way in and out, because it was quicker to open and close and easier to lock. They had keys for the back door as well as the kitchen door, so had an extra line of defense. It had turned out to be a complete waste of time, though, as the sick teachers soon found other ways to get into the House.
Lynn put a hand over his mouth to block the stink.
"This way," he said, leading the group down the corridor that led toward the kitchen.
It was dark in the corridor and they walked quickly. All the boys wanted to get outside as quickly as possible. They soon arrived at the kitchen door, which had a small reinforced-glass window set in the center, crisscrossed with a wire mesh.
Lynn strode up to it, as eager as the others to be out of here. He took a big bunch of keys from his pocket, selected the right one, and slotted it into the lock. He was just about to turn it when Lincoln pulled him back.
"Wait a minute."
Lynn stopped. A flash of irritation. Then a little laugh.
Lincoln sighed. "Come on, Lynn, you could at least check it before you open it."
"Sorry, old mate, brain not in gear. Never did work at a hundred percent, to tell you the truth, turned to mush now. Still asleep. I think." He knocked the side of his head with his fist. "Wakey, wakey!"
Lincoln stuck his nose to the little window and peered into the kitchen. It was dark; the sun was rising on the other side of the building, and its light hadn't reached this far yet. He could see no movement in the gloom. Then he spotted that the back door was half open. Someone had definitely been in there during the night.
"What do you reckon?" Lynn asked. "Is it safe?"
"Hang on a minute. Can't tell."
Lincoln's eyes were slowly growing used to the light. He was picking out more details in the kitchen. There was a scarlet smear of blood on the window over the sinks. And there, on the table, what looked like a slab of meat. He realized there was an arm still attached to it. He swallowed, trying not to retch.
"I'm not sure we should go this way," he said.
"Are there some in there?" Lynn asked, trying to see over Lincoln's shoulder.
"It's hard to tell."
"Here, let me look." Lynn shoved Lincoln aside and took his place at the window.
"Not a pretty sight, is it? Don't think there's anyone in there, though… Whoa!" He leapt back as a female teacher hurled herself at the door, squashing her face against the glass and smearing it with pus. It looked like Ms. Shropshire, from the English department, but it was hard to tell.
The shock made Lynn burst out laughing, and soon most of the other boys had joined in. Lincoln just stared at the door, which shook on its hinges as Ms. Shropshire repeatedly rammed herself against it with a whining and slobbering noise.
Clyde crept forward and risked looking in.
"There's more than one of them in there, he said. "We'll have to go another way."
"You don't say," Lincoln murmured.
"And we need to be quick," said Clyde, ignoring Lincoln. "They could break this door down if there's enough of them. Or they might just figure out that there's another way in – however they all got in last night."
They backtracked down the corridor, increasingly nervous and anxious to be out of the building that was feeling more and more like a trap. When they got back to the hallway, they headed for the doors.
Lincoln saw what looked like a football sitting in the middle of the floor. He had an urge to race forward and kick it, an automatic response. He took several paces, then came to a dead stop, almost overbalancing, like someone suddenly finding himself at the edge of a cliff in a cartoon film.
It wasn't a football. It was a human head. All that was left of Mr. Johnson. His eyes were open, and he looked calm and at peace. He no longer resembled the deranged maniac he'd been when Lincoln last saw him.
Now Lynn spotted the head. "Bloody hell," he said with a laugh. "Better get rid of that. Bit freaky."
He gingerly picked the head up by the hair, then lobbed it across the room toward a trash can that sat in a dark corner. Amazingly, it landed clean inside. Lynn cheered and punched the air. "Shot!"
Lincoln didn't know whether to laugh or curl up in a ball and bang his forehead on the floor in despair. He stood there, drained of all energy, wishing he were a million miles away.
Lynn, Liam, and Zach, armed with bits of iron bed frame, set to work on the door, trying to lever the planks off. It was slow work, made slower by the fact that the boys had hardly slept again in the night and were strung out, awkward, and sluggish, their muscles not working as they should, as if the signals weren't getting through clearly from their brains. In the end Lincoln couldn't bear to watch them clumsily struggling to make and headway; he came back to life and went over to help.
As they worked, they could hear the teachers down the corridor, bashing and thumping against the kitchen door.
"Can't you hurry up?" said Lexx, who was standing back, watching, his luggage standing neatly at his feet, looking for all the world as if he were waiting for a train.
"We're going as fast as we can," said Lynn.
"If you're in so much of a hurry," said Lincoln irritably, "why don't you help? Or don't you want to get your clothes messed up?"
"I'm not very good with my hands," said Lexx, flattening a lapel on his suit jacket. "And yes, I don't want to ruin my clothes. This shirt is Comme des Garçons."
Lincoln shook his head and tutted. If Lexx weren't so ridiculous, the others would have lost patience with him long ago.
There was one last plank left to remove. Bigger and thicker than the others, with about ten fat nails fixing it to the door. The boys were getting in each other's way, and Liam's weapon slipped, gouging Zach's hand. Zack sucked his fingers and swore at him.
There came an almighty crash from the kitchen.
Lincoln glanced back. Had the door finally given out?
"Come on, come on," he said, as much as to the piece of wood as to the other boys. He was scrabbling at the plank with his fingers, trying to pry it loose, and he was so intent on removing it that he lost track of what was going on behind him. It was only when he heard a high-pitched scream that he turned around.
There were teachers in the hallway. Six of them, including Mr. Puga, who had his hands at the throat of one of the Field House boys and was shaking him like a doll. The boy's friends were battering the teacher with their makeshift weapons. The rest of the teachers were being held back by the Spokes brothers and the three nerds, who stayed in a tight pack, yelling and screaming abuse.
Clyde was with the rest of the boys, who were milling in a frightened circle, not sure what to do.
Liam gave his iron strut to Lincoln and snatched a fire extinguisher from a bracket on the wall.
"You get the door open," he shouted. "We'll deal with this bunch."
Clyde ran over to help Lincoln, and between them they managed to get the bit of bed frame behind the plank. They pulled down on it with all their weight and, with a horrible squealing noise, the nails began to pull loose.
Liam hit the plunger on top of the fire extinguisher, and a stream of white foam erupted from the hose. He aimed it at the circling teachers, blinding them.
Mr. Puga was still savaging the boy from Field House. The blows raining down on his back seemed to have no effect.
With a final screech, the plank popped off the door. Lincoln grabbed one end and raced back to Puga.
"Out of the way!"
He swung the piece of wood at the man's head, and it stuck fast. One of the nails must have punched through his skull. Puga stood up, the plank hanging from the back of his head like a huge ponytail. He stretched out an arm towards Lincoln; then went stiff and shuddered before falling sideways, knocking over Mr. Shropshire, who slipped and slithered about on the floor, unable to stand up in a pool of melting foam.
"Come on," Lynn yelled from the doorway. "Let's go! Let's go!"
"We don't know what's out there." Clyde looked worried.
"Can't be any worse than what's in here," Lincoln shouted as he ran over and pushed past Clyde.
Clyde closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to find some small scrap of courage hidden deep inside.
When he opened his eyes, he realized that he'd been left behind. The others had already gone outside. He hurried after them and found them in a tight pack, blinking in the early morning light. The boys from Field House looked shell-shocked. Clyde realized their friend hadn't made it. He said nothing. Too sick to speak.
There didn't appear to be anyone else out here, but a low moan from behind him caused Clyde to turn around. The teachers were emerging from the House, covered in foam. They were too sick to move fast, and the boils and sores covering their skin made them walk as if they were treading barefoot on broken glass, but the boys knew from experience that they wouldn't stop. Once they started to follow, the wouldn't give up.
"Leg it!" Lynn shouted, and the boys raced across the open ground toward the main school entrance.
Clyde stayed at the back, helping Wiki and Darcy. They were smaller than everyone else and slower. Clyde didn't know what he'd do if one of them got left behind. He urged them on, shouting encouragement, aware all the time that the teachers were steadily lumbering along behind them.
They rounded the end of the School House and headed toward the archway that led out into the School Yard. Clyde spotted Lincoln ahead. He was hanging back, staring at the administrative building by the main gates.
What now?
Clyde was too scared to stop. He sprinted through the arch, but as he ran past, Lincoln grabbed hold of his jacket and pulled him back.
Wiki and Darcy ran on.
"What's the matter?" Clyde's voice rasped in his throat.
"Can you see that?" said Lincoln, and he blinked, as if not wanting to trust his own eyes.
Clyde turned in the direction Lincoln was looking. For a moment he could see nothing.
"What?" he said, scared and angry and desperate to get away. "What am I looking for?"
"Over there. The office where the school secretaries work."
"What? What is it…? Oh, my God."
There was a girl at the window, hammering on the glass, her mouth forming a silent scream.
I hope you guys enjoyed this little tribute. I'm going to end it here because that's where the preview for this book ends on the iTunes store.
In the meantime, to those who have read any of The Enemy books, do you have a favorite book and character(s)?
Like I said, my favorite book is The Dead (and The End). And I'd say my favorite character out of the entire series was Ed Carter (and Jack).