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.

How silly to be scared of a statue.

As far as he knew, Kentish Town was next to Camden. So maybe he hadn’t got as lost as he’d thought. All he needed to do was keep going downhill.

There was a cloud of black smoke filling the road ahead. A shop was on fire. He held his breath and zoomed through, screwing his face up. Luckily the road was clear on the other side. Grown-ups didn’t like fire. They would keep away.

And there was the back of Sainsbury’s, a funny-looking metal building on the canal, like something out of Star Wars. This was it. He’d made it. This was Camden. But with so many grown-ups out on the streets, he wondered where his friends might be. And Ella. He hoped she wasn’t too scared without him.

He remembered the feeling he’d had when he’d first seen the mob of grown-ups marching down Camden Road, like an army. He knew what his fear was now. That the grown-ups were ganging up to attack his friends. Maybe the kids had also had to take another route to be safe?

He pedaled harder and soon came to where several roads met near the tube station. He stopped at a traffic island in the middle. In the past there would have been cars and trucks and buses rushing past in all directions, and the sidewalks would have been filled with kids going to the market. Now it wasn’t like being in a city at all. The buildings might just as well have been rocks and cliffs. The abandoned, stationary cars were boulders. The road a dried-up riverbed.