They’ve turned off blood mode, he thought. They’ve made it suitable for under-fifteens. But this game was too easy. The enemy’s AI was set too low. They were too slow, too stupid, too easy to kill.

Smack!

Look at them go down.

Slam!

He laughed. The kids were going to win this battle today.

Crack!

Sure enough, the grown-ups were falling back, trying to get away. He caught sight of the big father with the swollen head. He had a group of fathers around him and seemed to be surveying the carnage. He shook his head, which rolled backward and forward over the gold necklace at his chest, then he turned and retreated.

Yes. Run, you cowards.

Arran couldn’t let them escape, though. Not after what they’d done. He ran after them.

Someone was shouting behind him.

“Leave it, Arran, they’re finished.”

“Let them go!”

“No!” He was a lion among wildebeests. A hunter. A killer. He ran with them; he would track down every last one of them and smash them into oblivion.

The grown-ups fell to left and right as he powered on. He funneled them onto a tree-lined side street, past a car wash. They scrambled clumsily, frightened and careless. And they fell. Silver bolts shot from his eyes, and they fell. He yelled with joy. He didn’t even need a club. He threw it away. It was only slowing him down.

He had left the other kids behind. It was just him and the grown-ups. He saw them tumble, the silver bolts sprouting from their ugly broken bodies.

And then it was like he had been punched hard in the chest. He wasn’t running anymore. He looked down. There was a silver bolt sticking out of him. No, that couldn’t be. He couldn’t have shot himself. He tried to laugh, but it hurt too much. What was going on? He had fallen. He was sitting down, his legs straight out in front of him. Dead grown-ups lay all around him.

Nothing moved.

He couldn’t breathe. His lungs were full of liquid.

He looked up. The sky was flickering.

From far away he heard a shout.

“A-r-r-a-a-a-a-an!”

Small Sam was cycling like a demon. There were grown-ups everywhere. The roads were crawling with them. Where had they all come from? There was something going on. Every time he tried to get back toward Camden he’d come up against a group of them and had to turn around and cycle furiously the other way. He had gone in such a roundabout route and taken so many side roads and turnings that he wasn’t exactly sure where he was now. He was coming down a main road of grimy low buildings that looked like it hadn’t been much even before the disaster. And then he saw something he recognized. Pizza Express. This must be Kentish Town, then. He remembered his mom and dad talking about which Pizza Express to go to. “Let’s go to the one in Kentish Town.” It was big and had a very high ceiling. There used to be a strange wire statue of a man standing in one corner. He’d found it a bit scary when he was younger.