Free The End by Charlie Higson

hadn’tspotted them at first. A black hole was the right description. They were an awful dark stain, like an infestation of insects, packed in so tightly they must be on top of each other.
    ‘Jesus,’ said Jester again. ‘There must be a thousand of them. Five thousand. Ten. How could you even count them? It must be every stranger in London. But what are they doing? What are they eating?’
    ‘They’re not eating,’ said Shadowman. ‘Food doesn’t seem to matter so much to them at the moment. They’re getting ready for something. Something more important.’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘Next stage of the disease maybe. They’re massing. For some event. Like salmon before they spawn.’
    ‘You talk like they’re organized.’
    ‘They are,’ said Shadowman. ‘In the middle of all that, likea queen bee in her hive, is the king of the strangers. A mean, ugly, vicious killer I call St George. He has thepower to make them do whatever he wants. They’d follow him over a cliff if that’s where he was going.’
    ‘No such luck, I guess.’
    ‘He’s planning something, and walking off a cliff isn’t it.’
    ‘So he’s intelligent?’
    ‘It’s a sort of intelligence. An animal intelligence.A hive mind.’
    ‘How does he do it then?’ said Jester. ‘How’s he communicate with them? Can he, like, talk?’
    ‘It’s more of a mind-control thing. Secret signals, ultrasound. I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out.’
    ‘But we might be able to communicate with him?’
    Shadowman looked at Jester. ‘Why would you want to do that?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Jester. ‘We could negotiatewith him.’
    Shadowman let out a burst of laughter. ‘Negotiate?’ he snorted. ‘What are you talking about? You don’t negotiate with dangerous animals. You kill them. It’s simple.’
    ‘Or we could just leave them alone. Let them do their thing and die.’
    ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ Shadowman shook Jester. ‘They’re getting ready for something. And you’ve seen enough of how strangersare to know that it won’t be nice. We have to stop them.’
    ‘Stop them? Stop that lot? Are you nuts? Look at them. They’re an army.’
    ‘And how do you stop an army?’ said Shadowman.
    ‘You don’t,’ said Jester. ‘You run away.’
    ‘No,’ said Shadowman, wishing Jester wasn’t being so deliberately dumb. ‘You create your own army, and you take the battle to them. You beat them,Jester. Imagine that, if we could destroy this lot. You said it yourself –that’s every stranger in London. And we could wipe them out. They’ve made it easier for us. They’re all in one place.’
    ‘Except,’ said Jester, ‘we attack them, they’re liable to get up off their arses and fight back.’
    ‘We can do it,’ said Shadowman. ‘We can take them down.’
    ‘What?’ said Jester mockingly.‘Us two?’
    ‘It’s possible,’ said Shadowman, ignoring Jester’s joke. ‘If we got an army together.’
    ‘Don’t be stupid. Look at them.’ Jester banged the window. ‘Look at them …’
    Shadowman looked. The thought of taking on that lot was terrible. He could imagine the stink they generated. The heat. All those rotting bodies oozing pus. He pictured himself standing with a pitifullysmall army of children as the sickos came on.
    Too many to count, Jester had said. Too many to kill …
    ‘We can’t fight them,’ Jester whispered, shaking his head.
    ‘We can,’ Shadowman shouted, trying to drown out his own doubts and fears. ‘Scattered around London there are hundreds of kids. They just need to be united, persuaded to join together. If we did that we couldwin.’
    ‘Where do we start?’
    ‘Come on. Let’s go.’ Shadowman jerked his head at Jester and they made their way back down the stairs, through the cinema and out of the front.
    There were two sentinels outside, who hadn’t been there before. Shadowman ignored them. Started walking north. The rotten stink of strangers seemed heavier in the