Free The Enemy by Charlie Higson Page A

Islands. He told himself that they’d just gone away on a long holiday to somewhere where the disease hadn’t happened. They were on a beach in their swimsuits and sunglasses, drinking cocktails with umbrel as in them. That always cheered him up, imagining they were safe somewhere and that they were maybe thinking about him and El a. They were probably planning to come back and rescue them.
    Deep down, though, he knew that real y they would never be coming back. They must have died just like al the other grown-ups. Because if they hadn’t died . . .
    They’d be like the others.
    These grown-ups, the ones who had captured him, weren’t people anymore. They couldn’t speak, only grunt and hiss at each other. They were mad things. Al they thought about was food.
    Oh, Mom, I wish you were here now. . . .
    He wasn’t real y scared anymore. At first it had been almost too much to bear. He had gone stiff with terror. But it was tiring being scared, and it had slowly worn off, so that now he felt numb. And he was bored.
    How long had he been lying here? A tiny bit of light could get in through holes in the sack, and he could see enough to know that it was dark now.
    Grown-ups were too stupid to light fires or use solar lamps or even flashlights. They had forgotten everything.
    He hoped that they were asleep, because then maybe he could try to get away. He wasn’t tied up or anything. Al he had to do was slip the sack off and make a run for it.
    Once he had gone on a school trip to a farm. He had seen sheep and cows and pigs and chickens and he had wondered why they didn’t try to escape. It looked easy. But the thing was, back then the animals were stupid and the humans were clever.
    This was different. These grown-ups were stupid and he was clever. Yes, he was only smal , but he was cleverer than they were.
    He smiled.
    He was going to escape.
    He would wait a bit longer, though, until he was real y sure it was safe.
    He started to count, not too fast and not too slow. He reckoned that when he got to a thousand, if he hadn’t heard any movement, he would take the sack off and have a look.
    One, two, three, four, five . . .
    Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty . . .
    Counting to a thousand was taking much longer than he had thought; it seemed to go on forever. He got fed up at 420 and stopped.
    It had been ages since the grown-ups had made any noise. They must be asleep. Or maybe they had gone out hunting again and left him alone?
    Slowly, ever so slowly, he started to wriggle out of the sack, trying to make tiny movements. Every few seconds he would stop and listen, and once he was sure it was okay, he would go on.
    Little by little the sack came off, until it cleared his head. Now he was lying on his side on a sticky, stinking carpet.
    He looked around without moving his head. At first it was too dark to see anything properly. He could just make out that he was in a long room with windows al down one side. There was a pale stripe of bluish gray against the black.
    He waited, unmoving, as his eyes got used to the light, and gradual y bits and pieces of the room came into view.
    He could see six grown-ups nearby. The mother and the others who had captured him, as wel as two others—a fat old father with a bald head, and a younger one with a straggly beard. They were al fast asleep and snoring and snuffling.
    The room was filthy. There were broken bones on the floor. There were a few greasy chairs, a pile of old rags in the middle, and in one corner was the grown-ups’ toilet. They had done their business on the carpet and there were flies buzzing around it.
    He retched. He wanted to use a swearword. He thought of the worst thing he knew and said it loudly in his head.

    Bastards .
    They didn’t know better than to poop on the floor.
    The dirty bastards.
    Back at Waitrose they had a system. They used buckets as toilets, and every day they took turns to empty them into the drains outside.
    Not this lot.
    He hated