I said it was a very bad idea and that we were not to open the door for anything. Jasmine said I was being stupid and babyish, so I didn’t say anything else. I kept my thoughts to myself. So the next question on everyone’s lips was who should go outside and do it.

As you can imagine, nobody put their hand up. Nobody wanted to volunteer to be the first to go outside.

‘But it’s perfectly safe,’ said Jasmine. ‘The others went off all right, didn’t they? I watched them go, there were no sickos around. If there were they would have followed them or attacked them.’

‘I still don’t want to go out there alone,’ said Reece. And there was an argument.

The argument is still going. I can hear them as I am writing this. I got bored of it, and didn’t want any more of it. Nobody would listen to me. So as an excuse I said I had to write the journal, which wasn’t really an excuse and is certainly not a lie. I do need to write the journal. And finally I had something to write about. The argument obviously and whether we will open the doors and go outside.

I don’t want to go outside. I wish nobody would have to go. What I really want is for the others to come back. They must be back soon. Hopefully the argument will go on and on for a long time and before anyone decides anything there will be a big knock on the church doors and there will be Blue and Ollie and the others and we will all cheer and be safe again.

They will know what to do about the body as well.

That’s what I want. But, as I say, I am only small and unimportant, so who cares what I want?

Chapter 52

52

Blue wouldn’t have been able to say just exactly what he was expecting on the other side of the door. But it wasn’t this. This was way outside his comfort zone. A weird day had just got a whole lot weirder.

The door opened into a large room. He’d seen from the plans that the warehouse was divided into two, with this smaller area at the rear, connected to the rest of the warehouse by a big roll-down door. There was a sort of steel cage built around the door, with wire-mesh walls and roof.

To get to the door they’d have to go through the cage.

And inside the cage were four fathers.