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Back The Enemy Save as PDF
Chapters (69)
  1. Table of Contents
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“Don’t you want revenge?” he said. “For what he did to Freak? Don’t you want to see him dead?”

“If I’d wanted that, I could have killed him myself this morning.”

“Revenge, Maxie.”

“I don’t want revenge. And I don’t want any more fighting.”

“It’s not your decision,” said David, and he walked over toward John.

“The two of you will fight for it,” he said. “Our champion against yours.”

“All right.” John smiled, showing his small, jagged, yellow teeth, and shook hands with David. He didn’t let go. Instead he leaned closer until their faces were only about an inch apart. “The winner decides what happens between us. The loser gets buried with a nice ceremony and some flowers.”

David laughed, trying to pull his hand free. “I don’t think we have to go quite that far,” he said. “We’re not talking about a fight to the death.”

“Oh yes we are,” said John, and he grinned wider. “It’s the only way to decide it. A fight to the death. We’ve shook on it.”

A great hubbub broke out in the room. There were cries of protest, and angry accusations. John stood there, smiling his smile, clutching David’s hand in an iron grip. David looked unsure of himself. Once again he turned to Achilleus for reassurance.

Achilleus was unfazed.

“What’s the problem?” he said once the noise had died down. “That’s my kind of fight.”

He walked over to Carl and the other squatters. “Better get your shovels ready, chaps. You’re gonna have some digging to do.”

“No!” Maxie shouted. “This is horrible. We’re not animals.”

“Speak for yourself, bitch,” said John, and the room erupted into a chaotic frenzy of shouting and shoving.

John stood there in the middle of it all with his broken-toothed grin, his hard bony head nodding slowly on his long neck.

51

Sam and the Kid were sitting at the bottom of the Gherkin.

The weird skyscraper that looked like a huge vegetable. They were finishing off the last of the provisions from the Kid’s leather backpack. Some murky water in an old plastic bottle and a can of peas.

They’d been wandering, lost, through the empty canyons of the City of London for the last hour. The street plan made no sense. There were no straight lines; roads twisted and turned and came to sudden stops. The boys were trying to reach the river so that they could get their bearings, but it was proving impossible. Every direction they tried seemed wrong, or took them back to where they’d started. So time and again they made their way back to the Gherkin as the chief landmark in the area.

And now it was growing dark.

Paper fluttered in the air. Sam looked up to see that it was spilling from a broken window high up in the Gherkin.