Afterlight

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 dim LED bulb brightened again, revealing more of them poised in a wary semicircle in the darkness, watching them intently.
Nathan held the gun up, sweeping it slowly across them, his finger resting on the trigger. ‘Stay back!’
‘Look! We’re . . . we were just leaving, okay?’ said Jacob.
The things stared back in silence. He realised then that they were just children. He guessed they ranged in age from five to early teens. It was difficult to judge - they could have been another year or two older than they appeared, but prolonged malnutrition might have stunted their growth. Their eyes, wide, stared back at them through tangled fringes of long matted dreadlocks.
‘Look, we . . . we didn’t know this place was y-yours,’ Jacob continued. ‘So, we’ll just go, okay?’
He stepped sideways along the wall, his back sliding against the smooth curved wall of the stand. He tugged Nathan’s sleeve gently to come with him.
‘Yeah,’ said Nathan, ‘we’re leaving now.’
The children remained perfectly still, silent, watching them shuffle along. They reminded him of the orphans in Oliver, lost, smudged faces in ill-fitting clothes. Girls and boys - although amongst the younger ones he struggled to determine which were which.
The wall disappeared behind them, and they found themselves taking a backwards step up onto a courtesy stand of stools and small round metal coffee tables.
The children advanced on them cautiously.
‘Stay back, motherf*ckers! I got a gun here!’ Nathan shouted, as if it needed saying.
One of the children, a painfully thin boy - or it could well have been a girl - stepped ahead of the others and extended a slender hand.
‘Ve-weee f*ck-in hung-weee,’ it piped in a small mucus-choked voice.
Both of them looked at each other, confused.
‘Hung-wee. You foooo?’
Then they understood. ‘We don’t h-have any food on us.’ He looked at Nathan. ‘Do we?’
Nathan shook his head silently.
Another child stirred, stepped forward and extended both hands. ‘Pwee gee wee.’
Jacob shook his head, struggling to understand.
‘Pwee gee wee foo,’ it said again, taking another eager step forward.
It was like listening to a baby’s first words; toddler-talk. It would be aww-cute coming from the mouth of some chubby-faced infant in a buggy, but from these children bordering on teen years it was wrong. Tragically wrong.
His torch began to dim again. He pumped the trigger several times, quickly setting the dynamo whirring in the silence. The children all edged several steps closer encouraged by the momentary fading of light.
‘Woah! Stay f*ckin’ back!’ shouted Nathan.
More dirty palms extended - a growing sea of them. ‘Foo . . . pwee. Foo, pwee!’
‘I’m s-sorry,’ said Jacob, ‘I’m SORRY! WE DON’T HAVE ANY!!’
Then he saw a taller child pushing forward. A boy dressed in dark-stained corduroy trousers and what looked like the tattered remains of a blue secondary school blazer. Dark curls draped down across his bone-thin face. The first soft downy hairs of a moustache curled around the edge of his lips.
‘We f*ckin’ hung-wee, init,’ he barked in a wavering voice that sounded like the recently broken timbre of a pubescent boy. ‘You go’ sum f*ckin’ foo or whoh?’
‘Not with us,’ said Jacob, patting himself. ‘Really.’
The boy’s eyes rested on the assault rifle. ‘Cool gun. Gimme tha’.’
Jacob followed his gaze. ‘You want our gun?’
‘Yeh, gimme tha’.’
‘Not f*ckin’ having it!’ snapped Nathan.
‘My gun now,’ said the boy. ‘Gimme, a’ you ca’ fu’ off.’
Jacob glanced at Nathan.
‘No f*ckin’ way,’ he replied. ‘S’only one we got.’
And there was no guarantee that, on handing it over, the boy wouldn’t want to try it out on them.
The boy took another step forward. ‘Gimme a’ gun so me ca’ hun’ dogs.’
Jacob swallowed. ‘You eat . . . dogs?’
The boy was now only a yard away from them, his eyes on the glinting gun-metal grey. He suddenly made an impulsive lunge towards it, grabbing the end of the rifle’s barrel in both hands. Instinctively Nathan fired. The child’s dirty school blazer fluttered like a sail as he rocked back on his feet, pawing at the jagged wound in his stomach.
‘Oh shit man! I’m . . . s-sorry . . . I’m sor—’ said Nathan.
The other children surged forward, edging around the staggering boy; a forest of pale palms and dirty jagged nails reaching out and clawing at them. Amongst the hands and arms, Nathan thought he saw the glint of several knives.
‘Oh f*ck, run, Jay!!’ he screamed.
Jacob turned on his heels, clattering across the stools, tangling with the tables. Nathan fired a second shot into the air just above the children’s heads - they recoiled for a moment.
He turned and ran through the wake of overturned stools and tables doing his best not to tangle with the upended legs as he followed the bobbing glow of Jacob’s torch ahead. Dropping down off the far side of the stand’s courtesy platform, he sprinted twenty yards down a broad concourse, flanked on either side by dark silhouettes of gaming mascots and cardboard cut-out superheroes and supervillains.
‘Wait for me!’ he shouted after him.
Jacob stopped, turned and beckoned him on. ‘This way!’ he shouted.
Nathan quickly caught up with him. Looking back into the darkness behind him he could hear the smack of hundreds of feet on the stand’s floor, the clatter of metal tables and stools being kicked aside and a growing cacophony of shrill voices clamouring for them to stop.
‘What about Leona?’ gasped Jacob.
He shook his head. ‘Dunno, I dunno. We got to run right now!’ He looked at Jacob. ‘Jay, which way do we go?’
The drumming of feet grew louder, coming up the concourse towards them. There was only one way they could go. They resumed running up the concourse, Jacob leading the way, dodging an increasing amount of clutter across the carpet; computers pulled out and smashed; wires and circuit boards splayed across the floor like eviscerated organs. This end of the main hall, more than the other, appeared to be the children’s playground. A life-size fake potted palm tree had been kicked over and lay across their path. Jacob vaulted over the trunk. Nathan joined him a moment later, his big feet tangling with the stiff plastic fronds.
‘Hurry!’ hissed Jacob, pumping his torch trigger and turning the beam back down the concourse. Thirty yards back he could see them.
Nathan fired another shot back in their direction. The children ducked and froze for the briefest moment, like a game of grandmother’s footsteps, then resumed.
‘Go! Jay! Go! GO!!’ urged Nathan as he yanked his feet clear of the palm tree’s leaves.
Jacob swung his torch back up the concourse to pick out the way ahead. The pallid wide-eyed face of a child loomed out of the darkness in front of him.
‘Whuh—’
A blur of movement and a dull crack, like willow on leather. The torch danced into the air, spun and bounced on the ground. Jacob flopped down lifelessly beside it, blood already spilling out of his long scruffy hair and across his forehead.
Nathan fired a shot into the darkness sending the flailing child - boy or girl, he had no idea - into a spinning rack of DVD cases.
He stepped forward, dropped down to his knees and picked up the torch.
‘Jake?’
He shone the light down at his friend’s face, now almost entirely smothered with blood.
‘Oh, shit. Jake?’
He pushed a blood-soaked tress of hair out of his face to see that his eyes were open but glassy, fluttering and rolling. Nathan could hear the sound of approaching feet, shrill-pitched screams.
‘Jake!! Get up, man! GET UP!!’
He remained still.
Leaving Jacob was the—
No.
He grabbed one of Jacob’s hands and began dragging him along the carpet, away from the torch left lying on the floor, leaving a smeared trail of blood behind.
‘Come on. Come on!!’ he hissed. ‘GET UP!!’
The plastic palm tree creaked and rustled. The children were clambering over it and coming.
No. No. No . . . Too f*cking slow.
Nathan let his friend’s hand flop to the floor and grasped the assault rifle in both hands. The thundering of pounding feet suddenly ceased and the darkness around him was filled with the wheeze and rattle of their laboured breathing.
A pair of tattered trainers stepped into the pool of torch light on the floor. The light rose, spun round and flashed blindingly into his eyes.
Nathan screwed his face up, aiming down the length of the rifle at it. ‘F*ck off and leave us alone!!’ he screamed.
‘Foo . . . foo . . .’ a young child’s voice implored. ‘You give foo . . .’
He pulled the trigger and the gun clacked uselessly. A child behind him giggled mischievously.
Oh, please, no.
A whimper escaped Nathan’s throat. ‘Please . . . please . . .’

Leona saw it; a faint grey outline. She realised it had to be the doorway leading back out onto the service bay - the way they’d come in. Dark forms fluttered through it like bats into a cave; children, more of them.
She heard gunshots again, echoing across the hall’s roof.
Dozens of them flitting past her. She could hear barked voices and shrill girlish screams, excited caterwauling and boisterous jeering; like Dante’s version of a school playground. She wondered where they’d all come from. Perhaps a boarding school? Or maybe they were children from a hundred different places, drawn to each other for the safety of numbers.
Not children any more, though. Just wild animals.
Jacob. Her heart thumped in her chest. You can’t leave him in there.
The doorway was clear now, the last of the children drawn through inside and following the noise of the chase on the far side of the hall.
The boys knew where to head to, she told herself, they had the gun. Furthermore, she was going to achieve nothing cowering here. If they made it out, and then didn’t find her beside the parked bikes, they might be stupid enough to come back in for her.
Go. Now!
She got to her feet and scooted quickly in the darkness across the floor to the open bay door. Resting against the cool breeze-block wall, she heard several more shots in the distance and the playground voices rising to a crescendo.
She quickly popped her head around the door, examined the loading bay. It appeared to be empty. She hesitated a moment, listening to the distant noises, trying to read them, trying to understand if those shrill voices were screaming in frustration at their lost quarry, or were the excited celebration of a kill.
Unable to decide whether to flee or go back and find Jacob, she lingered on another moment, until she thought she heard the soft patter of feet nearby inside. No choice; she slipped through the doorway and threaded through packing crates and cardboard boxes out towards the main sliding door of the loading bay. The muted peach glow of the after-sunset sky streamed in from outside, across the concrete floor.
Once again she hesitated a moment in the shadows as she scanned the empty acre of car-park outside. There was no one to be seen. She sprinted across the weed-tufted tarmac towards the steps of the pedestrian bridge over the railway, stepping as lightly as she could, but the metal steps rang far too loudly in the still night for comfort. She sprinted across the overpass to the far side.
At the top of the steps leading down to the playground she could see the trailer and their bicycles still parked below. And there she remained, looking back across the car-park at the open delivery bay, hoping, pleading silently to see - any second now - the dark shapes of Jacob and Nathan pegging it towards her as if the devil himself were in hot pursuit.
The last vanilla light of day was gone and the sky was now a deep evening blue, stars scattered across it. No moon yet. She could only just make out the rear entrance.
‘They’ll be out any second now,’ she told herself. ‘Any second now.’