‘This is sick,’ she said. ‘And not good sick. I mean bad sick. Real sick. I never thought I’d feel sorry for one of ’em. But this is wrong.’

‘If it keeps the peace …’ Ed didn’t really know what else to say. ‘If it keeps these kids from killing each other then …’

‘This is cool,’ said Lewis. ‘It’s well sick. And I mean sick as in a good thing.’ And then he jumped out of his seat with half the other kids as Josa cut a mother’s arm off. Ed had never seen Lewis this lively outside of a fight.

It was a full-scale massacre now, and it was hard to keep up with the action as the arena became a riot of swarming bodies. Kids running in and chopping at the sickos, stabbing, kicking, gouging. The adults fighting back now. They’d looked like a scrawny, mangy bunch, made stupid by disease and being out in the daylight, but they fought like banshees, roaming in little packs.

Ed had never watched a battle like this before; he’d only ever been in the middle of one. He figured that people had always liked watching violence, from the Romans throwing Christians to the lions, to the public executions of the Middle Ages, to slasher movies and awful stuff on the Internet.

This was still shocking, though. The grass was starting to turn red.

Those kids who had stayed to watch were loving it. This was revenge. Payback for everything that had happened in the last year.

Ed tried to pick Kyle out in the confusion.

Couldn’t see what had happened to him.

He turned to Lewis.

‘Can you see Kyle?’

Chapter 61

61

Kyle was in among a tight bunch of sickos. They’d got around him quicker than he was expecting and he was too hemmed in to swing his axe, so was having to use it to shove them away to make some space.

He gave an almighty shunt, swore at the ugly bastards and now there was room. And then he felt the world shift sideways. He was reeling. It took a moment, but then his head exploded with pain. Something had smashed into the side of it. Must be an armed sicko. He’d seen one with an iron bar just now. He staggered in a circle, looking for him, worried that he might black out. Instead he puked and that seemed to clear his head. The next moment, however, he felt a terrible, cold, aching jolt up his right arm and he dropped his axe.

He’d been hit again. This time on the bicep. His whole arm had gone numb. He could barely move it.

Bastard sicko, where was he?

And then he heard a voice.