Free The Sacrifice by Charlie Higson Page A

fired up the generator and showed DVDs in the pub. The kids who went out
     foraging always brought back any books they found and there were a couple of libraries
     nearby that they visited regularly to pick up cartloads of new reading material.
    Sam, The Kid and Tish were in the living
     room of their house, their hobbit hole as The Kid called it, as if it had been burrowed
     out of the flinty stones of the castle.
    Tish was sitting on the sofa with her legs
     curled up under her, drinking a cup of tea she’d brought back from the café, one
     hand absently picking at the dark scab on her forehead. She was wearing her green
     outfit: green sweatshirt, green trousers. They’d been washed since she’d
     arrived, which had made the colours fade slightly, and they’d given her some other
     clothes from the store, but this was her favourite look. Tish liked green.
    ‘What’s with the green,
     sister?’ The Kid had asked her the first night she was there, to try and distract
     her from talking about Louise.
    ‘Living here in London, in all this
     grey, it reminds me of the countryside.’
    ‘I guess so.’
    ‘You can talk anyway,’ said
     Tish. ‘You wear the weirdest clothes I’ve ever seen on anyone.’
    It was true. The Kid had a very individual
     dress sense. His favourite item was a woman’s battered old leather jacket that
     he’d cut the sleeves off – ‘Too long. I ain’t no gibbon.’ And
     since arriving here he’d taken to wearing a long dress over tartan trousers that
     he’d picked up from the Armourers. He claimed the dress kept him warm. He’d
     also picked up a seventeenth-century helmet that he liked to wearwhen
     out and about, even though it was way too big for him. He and Sam were proud of their
     weapons and armour. Sam went for more of a medieval look. He’d found a leather
     jerkin that fitted him OK – Ed said it must have belonged to a very stunted soldier –
     and he had a short sword that he wore slung from a belt over his shoulder. He also had a
     dagger and a flintlock. The flintlock was unloaded and probably didn’t work.
    The room was lit by one small candle that
     gave off a gently flickering orange light. Everybody looked better in candlelight. It
     hid a lot. Sam and The Kid had been well scrubbed when they’d first got here and
     Sam had been amazed at how The Kid’s skin was now several shades lighter. His hair
     still stuck up in a wiry tangle, though.
    Tish took a sip of her tea and smiled,
     enjoying the warmth. She stared into her mug. Stuck on a memory. Sam hoped she
     wasn’t thinking about Louise again.
    ‘Mum used to make the best cups of
     tea,’ she said. ‘Neil was useless, though. Always made it too weak. Either
     that or he left the tea bag in so long it tasted rank.’
    ‘What happened to them?’ Sam
     asked.
    ‘Neil was older than me; he died of
     the disease early on. My dad had moved away before. He was in Leicester and we lost
     contact with him when everything went wrong. I assume he’s dead along with most of
     the adults. I hope he is. I wouldn’t want to think of him as one of them, a
     Neph’, you know, a sicko.’
    ‘You call them sickos too?’ said
     Sam.
    ‘Huh?’
    ‘Just like the kids here. We just call
     them grown-ups, mothers and fathers.’
    ‘They’re sickos,’ said
     Tish. ‘And when I think of Dad, Ithink of him like he was, not
     like them. To be honest, I didn’t use to see that much of him. We spoke on the
     phone now and then, and a couple of times a year he’d come down to London and take
     me to the Rainforest Café, even when I was too old for it. Every time I saw him he
     looked at me like I was a stranger. Kept boring on about how tall I was, how I’d
     grown. And when I got boobs, he was well freaked out. Kept sneaking a look at them like
     he couldn’t believe it. Said I was growing up too fast. Well, if he’d wanted
     he could’ve visited me more, couldn’t he? He made his life. Made it in