In the end it didn’t really matter that the grown-ups saw Scarface coming. They tried to be ready, some even hurried up and stumbled towards him in a sort of charge, but he was too fast for them, and he had his knives, and he stabbed them as he ran past, then he turned and went back and stabbed them again. Ella didn’t want to watch, but she was running so she couldn’t shut her eyes. She hoped that was the end of it. The walking grown-ups were all knocked to the ground and bleeding. Scarface carried on, though, up to the top of the hill, and chopped down the two scarecrows and then stood against the skyline at the base of the statue, which was sitting on what looked like a pile of rocks and stones. As she got nearer, Ella saw that the statue seemed to be of some sort of Roman emperor.

She ran the last few steps up the hill and over to Scarface.

‘Face-Ache,’ she said, sounding hot and bothered and grumpy, ‘can we please go home now?’

She tugged at his sleeve. He ignored her. He was staring through his binoculars again.

Then he made the humphing noise in his throat again. What was he looking at now? Bloody old grown-up.

‘What can you see?’ She turned and looked for herself. It was like all three of them were looking now, she and Scarface and the Roman emperor on his green metal horse.

There was a long sweep of grass down the hillside, then woods and fields dotted about, roads and hedges and the odd building. And there, about as far away as Ella could see, was a dark, moving mass. It looked like a shadow on the land, slowly turning it black, eating it up, like when a cloud passes over the sun.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What is that?’

Scarface passed her the binoculars and Ella put them to her eyes, fiddling with the wheel that adjusted the focus until she could see sharply.

Even then it took her a few seconds to make sense of it. This big, blurry, moving thing.

No. Not a thing. Not one thing. Lots of things. People … men and women, mothers and fathers, grown-ups. An army of them, tramping slowly and steadily towards her. They filled the ground they walked on. There must be hundreds of them. She wrinkled her nose. It was as if she could already smell them.

How awful must that be? The stink. So many of them like that.

And then Ella realized something.

‘The farm,’ she said. ‘They’re heading towards the farm.’

Chapter 10

10