“Oh no,” said Freak.

“I’m all right,” said Deke. “It’s nothing.” But then he coughed again and there was blood in his spit.

“It’s in your lung, man,” said Achilleus. “The glass.”

Deke’s eyes were rolling up in his head.

“Hold on, bro,” said Freak.

“I think I’m going to . . .”

“Don’t faint, bro,” Freak shouted, and shook his friend as he fell into unconsciousness. “Arran! We got to get him out of here.”

Almost as Freak spoke, the grown-ups attacked again. At least ten of them blundered up from the pool.

Arran was filled with a blind rage. He couldn’t stand it that another kid was wounded. They didn’t have the drugs to deal with it, and the water in the pool must have been swarming with filth and germs. With a great roar he lashed out to right and left, smashing his club into the grown-ups, shattering bones, breaking noses, loosening teeth, closing eyes. He was hardly aware of what was going on around him, only that Achilleus was at his back, cold-bloodedly dealing with the grown-ups in his own way.

When a mother came at Arran, long hair flying, he gripped her by the throat and squeezed. Her head thrashed from side to side, her scabby hands flapped at him. Her hair whipped out of her face so that for a moment he saw her clearly.

Her nose was half rotted away by disease. There were boils and sores covering every inch of skin. Her lips were pulled back from broken teeth, showing black shrunken gums.

Everything about her was disgusting, inhuman, degraded —apart from her eyes. Her eyes were beautiful.

Arran looked into them, and for a moment he saw a flash of intelligence.

He froze. Time seemed to stop. He had the sudden vivid notion that this was all a stupid dream. He had imagined the whole thing: the collapse of society, the fear and confusion, the months spent hiding out in Waitrose. It wasn’t possible, after all. It wasn’t possible that the world had changed so much. So quickly. It wasn’t possible that he had become a savage. A killer.

The mother tried to speak, her lips formed in a ghastly pucker, and a single syllable came out.

“Mwuhh . . .”

Tears came to Arran’s eyes. He couldn’t do it anymore.

He loosened his grip.

The mother wriggled free and sunk her teeth into his neck. Then Achilleus must have stabbed her, because a bright spray of blood hosed out from a wound in her chest. The next moment she was gone and Ollie was pulling him toward the turnstiles.

“Move it, Arran!” he shouted, and Arran slithered over the turnstiles in a daze.

“Where’s Freak?”

Freak had been fending off the grown-ups with his bare fists, punching, kicking, butting, trying to protect Deke. But he was losing the fight. The grown-ups had sensed that Deke was wounded. They had given up trying to block the exit and were concentrating their efforts on getting at him. Two of them had taken hold of his legs, and Freak was engaged in a ghastly tug-of-war.