Scarface shook his head. He was probably as scared of the kids in Windsor as the grown-ups. Maybe more so. And everything he had was here, on the farm.

‘Sonya and Louisa, the girls, they’ve been trying to get in the buildings.’

Scarface made the grunting noise in his throat and laid his sticks down near the edge of the fire. Ella could see that he’d made another couple of bundles.

‘Are we going to die?’ she asked him.

She didn’t know why she bothered asking. She knew what he would do. Just shrug. That was all he seemed to do.

‘Well, I don’t want to die,’ said Ella. ‘So will you please get up and do something? Get ready!’

Scarface got up creakily from his chair and stretched. She could hear his joints popping and he gave another little groan, deep in his throat. Then he found Ella’s spiked club and her rubber Lego shield and gave them to her. Ella felt like throwing them on the floor.

‘I can’t do anything,’ she said. ‘I can’t fight. Look at me. I’m no use. Why did you ever rescue me if you weren’t going to look after me?’

Scarface shook his head and turned away, went over to a cabinet on the wall that was padlocked shut. When he opened it, Ella saw there was a shotgun inside it, the type that farmers used, and some boxes of shells. He bent the gun in half and slotted in two shells, then filled up his pockets with the boxes. He left the gun bent in half.

Out in the yard they were able to smell the grown-ups before they could see them. The wind was blowing towards them from the west and bringing with it the unwashed stink of a thousand diseased bodies. A countryside smell of manure and sour urine, mixed with a town smell of drains and sewers and rotting rubbish. Then they heard them, the steady tramp of their feet making a shuffling rumble, and their sighs and hisses, not a roar, just a depressing moan. Like wind rattling at a window, trying to get in.

The kids moved to the gate. There was still nothing to see in the darkness. The grown-ups wouldn’t be visible until they got to the wire.

Ella and Scarface found them there, staring into the night. The noise of the approaching grown-ups made her shiver and she wanted to be sick. The smell was suffocating. She heard Isaac calling out and looked up to see that he had moved back over the rope bridge to the platform in the nearer tree. He sounded scared and excited.

‘They’re almost here!’ he was shouting. ‘You should see it. You wouldn’t believe it. It’s insane. There’s hundreds of them. Unless they go round us we don’t stand a hope in hell.’