And then she remembered the torch she kept in her backpack. She quickly felt her shoulders. The straps were there. Robbie had told them all to sleep with their packs on in case they needed to make a quick getaway. She slipped the pack off her back and rummaged around inside it until she felt the familiar hard plastic. It was a wind-up torch and she always kept it wound. She pressed the button and the light shone right into Monkey-Boy’s face. He winced and shrank away from it, blinking.

He was breathing very fast. Panting like a dog. His face very white and splashed with blood. She moved the beam down his body. He was absolutely soaked and there was more blood puddling in the grass around him. How much blood was there in a human being? Her teacher had once told her it was eight pints. She wasn’t quite sure how much a pint was, let alone eight, and surely children would have less blood than adults? How much of his blood had he spilt, though? It looked like a lot.

He was holding his hands over his stomach. His forearms were all scraped and scratched, the skin raggedy and torn, and there was more blood oozing up between his hands and fingers. It was steaming in the chilly night air.

There was a smell coming off him, like the smell of a grown-up. Like bad toilets and old bins. This was worse than pins and needles. He was being very brave. If it was her she would have been just screaming and screaming.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, using the same words he’d said to her earlier. Had he been lying too?

‘I don’t want to move my hands,’ he said. And she saw that there were bubbles coming from inside the blood. Inside his body.

‘If you move them a little I can see how bad it is,’ said Ella.

‘It’s very bad,’ said Monkey-Boy and she could hear the crying in his voice. ‘He bit me. He was trying to eat me, Ella. Trying to eat me alive.’

‘Well, he didn’t!’ said Ella angrily. ‘We were saved, remember. You were saved – you’re going to be all right. Just move your hands a little and I’ll see …’

Then he did and she wished he hadn’t because she saw stuff. Awful stuff. Coming out of him. Like a nest of fat worms, grey and blue and brown and white. And then she screamed as something knocked into her hard, the torch was grabbed off her and shut down. She felt a hot hand pressing over her mouth so that her scream was strangled into silence. She was crushed to the ground, the smell of grass and mud filling her nose, and she knew that soon she would be like Monkey-Boy. She waited for it. The teeth in her skin, her bones snapping …

Eaten alive …