Free The Queen of Sinister by Mark Chadbourn Page A

men - some kind of gang, he guessed - coming out of other houses with their swag. They moved quickly and efficiently, taking only what they needed, and left the village in wagons parked at the far end of the main street.
'Well, we certainly don't want to be tangled up with those,' Crowther mused. There was a rustling beside him and before he could react, Caitlin had emerged from hiding and was sliding down a grassy bank into an overgrown field that bordered the main street. 'Wait,' he hissed, but she paid him no attention.
She skipped through the thistle and grass and clambered over a five-bar gate before checking up and down the road. Crowther waited for a long moment to see if she would be attacked, then reluctantly followed. He was weighing the advantages of tying her up for the remainder of the journey when she hailed him from a large detached house that must once have been considered desirable. The front garden was now heavily obscured by a tangle of undergrowth and it didn't look as if any repairs had been made to it since the Fall.
'You don't want to go in there,' he said, pointing to the red X painted roughly on the front door.
'I heard something inside.'
'It's a plague house.'
'This isn't the Dark Ages, Professor,' she said.
'You'd think, wouldn't you?' He turned back down the weed-clogged drive, then sighed as he heard the front door open. This time he wasn't going to follow her. There were limits.
The stench inside the house was overwhelming. Caitlin covered her mouth, fighting the urge to retch, not sure why she was in there, though she guessed it had something to do with the strange voices that occasionally surfaced at the back of her head.
She moved through the hall, with its damp, peeling wallpaper, and pushed open the door into the room where she thought she'd heard a noise. The sight that greeted her was horrific, but she felt only overwhelming pity.
Bodies marked with the unmistakable scars of the plague lay all around. At first some attempt had been made to stack them, but the last few had been thrown on the pile haphazardly.
That thought brought a succession of jarring images: the first case brought into her surgery, the sudden realisation, the mounting horror as the bodies piled up in the village hall. The faces ... her friends... acquaintances ... good people, undeserving people ... and then Grant ... and Liam ... She rammed her fists into her eye sockets to drive out the terrible pictures, the sickening smell of clay and the clammy feel of wet clothes.
The sound was barely audible, but it jolted her out of her emotional state. Something was in the room, alive. Rats? The arm of one of the corpses dropped suddenly and made her jump. Behind it she saw movement - too big for a rodent.
'Come out.' She could barely believe someone was hiding underneath those suppurating bodies.
Vibrations amongst the cadavers suggested a brief struggle was taking place, and then the corpses fell away as a boy of around nine or ten pushed his way out. He was black, his hair shorn to a bristle, and a little overweight, but he had big, expressive eyes that made him seem much younger. He blinked once, twice, his gaze filled with hope.
'Don't worry,' Caitlin said, shocked. 'I won't hurt you.'
There was a sudden rush of falling bodies and another figure emerged: a girl of about sixteen, also black, her features street-smart and hard. 'Don't come any closer,' she said menacingly. She was brandishing a switchblade.
Caitlin held up her hands. 'It's OK.'
The girl's cold eyes searched the room and the hall beyond. 'You're not with them?' she said, without lowering the knife.
'The gang with the V-shirts? No. I just got here as they left.'
The girl scanned Caitlin's clothes and came to her own conclusion. 'You'd better not try anything,' she said. Despite appearances, her voice had an educated inflection, but her attitude was unmistakably dangerous. Yet behind it Caitlin could see a hint of fear in the mirror of her eyes.
'My name's