Free The Hunted by Charlie Higson Page A

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 adepressing 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.’
    ‘They have to go past us, don’t they?’ said Louisa. ‘Why wouldn’t they?’
    ‘
They have to go past us, don’t they?
’ Harry mimicked her.
    ‘Well, they do!’ snapped Louisa angrily. ‘Some of them. They wouldn’t all want to push in here.’
    ‘Unless they’re hungry,’ said Harry and he licked his lips. ‘Mmmm, a nice fresh Louisa.’
    Daniel didn’t laugh. He looked scared. ‘Why don’t we all just climb up there with Isaac?’ he said. ‘They’re not going to get to us up there. We could wait for them to move on.’
    ‘Yeah, and what if they don’t move on?’ said Sonya. ‘What then? If we go up top we’ll be stuck there. Like a cat chased up a tree by a pack of dogs.’
    ‘Just like the hobbits in
The Hobbit
,’ said Ella. ‘And we don’t have any kind of magic talking eagle to save us.’
    Harry spotted Scarface’s gun.
    ‘You got any more of them?’ he asked. ‘That’d be well useful.’
    Scarface didn’t respond in any way. Didn’t even look at Harry.
    ‘It’s the only one he’s got,’ said Ella.
    ‘He’s a miserable bastard, isn’t he?’ said Sonya.
    ‘I’d be miserable with a face like that,’ said Harry.
    ‘I’d be miserable with a face like yours,’ said Sonya.
    Scarface put a finger to his lips to get them all to shut up. They stopped talking, and they could hear the grown-ups, closer still, a whispering noise like wind in the trees, or a wave coming closer and closer, just one wave that sounded like it was never going to break. A tsunami.
    Ella stayed close to Scarface, looking at the faces of the other kids, just white streaks in the night.
    ‘I can see them,’ said Louisa quietly and they all turned towards the gate. There, across the open ground, was a moving black mass, the pale light from the moon outlining the tops of heads, picking out steam rising into the night air. They filled the space that was framed