Free The Hunted by Charlie Higson Page B

between the trees that grew on either aside of the road leading up to the gate, taking up the whole field from side to side.
    One by one the children moved to the gate to get a better look. The stink of the grown-ups was growing stronger; it made Ella feel sick. She wanted to hide, to dig a hole and bury herself in the ground, let the wave wash over her. But she had to look. She had to know what was coming. She went over to the gate with Scarface and forced herself to look.
    They were coming slowly, bunched together, shuffling through the long grass, trampling everything in their way.A shapeless wodge of people. Ella couldn’t see their faces yet, but one thing was very clear to her.
    They weren’t going to stop. They weren’t going to go round. They would come straight through the farm …
    ‘We need to get in the barn,’ she said, surprised that her voice didn’t sound more shaky.
    Scarface put a hand on her shoulder, holding her still. She looked up at him. He was staring at the grown-ups, unblinking. He wanted to defend his farm, but what could he do?
    ‘Army ants,’ said Daniel. ‘They’re just like army ants. They’ll eat everything in their way. We should of run. Instead we’re trapped here with a freak and a useless little girl.’
    He started shouting, swearing at the top of his voice, calling the faceless grown-ups all sorts of bad names, his voice getting hoarser and hoarser. And then he stopped shouting, shook his head and dropped to his knees, pressing his face into the ground. He was crying. Harry sniggered, and Sonya punched him in the arm. Scarface ignored them, just watched the approaching army, his gun hanging from his elbow.
    A thin cloud moved across the sky, exposing the moon so that its full blood-red light fell on the fields.
    And now Ella saw their faces.
    Stupid faces, diseased, rotten, lumpy and grey. They were all sorts – mothers, fathers, a few teenagers, their clothes greasy and black, some naked. Mostly so skinny they were just walking skeletons, but one or two were swollen and puffy, like fat grubs ready to burst. And there were bits of them missing, noses, ears, eyes, lips, fingers, hands, whole arms.
    One of them was slightly in front, a mother who seemed to be laughing, with wide, crazy eyes and two rows of gleaming white teeth. She wasn’t laughing, though: she’d lost the skin and flesh from the lower half of her face, and there were two thick ropes of snot coming out of her nose and dribbling down across her teeth to where they hung off her chin, swaying from side to side as she walked.
    Ella put a hand over her mouth as she retched, her throat gulping. Still Scarface would not move. Daniel had got up and he and the other kids were backing away.
    Still Scarface wouldn’t move and still the grown-ups kept on advancing. They were hissing. They’d seen the children waiting on the other side of the gate, heard Daniel shrieking, and they fixed their dead eyes on them, blank but staring, black holes in their horrible, stupid faces. The first of them were coming up the road towards the gate now, funnelling into the narrower gap, so that they were even more tightly pressed together. Any moment now they would be at the wires.
    ‘We have to hide,’ said Ella. ‘We can’t fight them.’
    Scarface calmly snapped his shotgun straight. Waiting.
    And then the lead grown-ups tangled in the wires, tripping and stumbling. Nothing happened. They kept trying to walk on. What was wrong? Why hadn’t they triggered the trap? More and more of them filled the gap, ploughing through the wires. Hadn’t Scarface reset the pole? Had it broken? Ella was just about to say something when there was a creaking sound, a crack and a rushing noise, and then, with a great thud, the pole swung out. It chopped down a line of grown-ups and thwacked into the backs of the leaders, skewering them on the spikes. They wriggled and writhed there, trapped, five or six of them. Still theothers behind them kept on