The Dead Read Free

there, like a flag. What did it matter now, though? In a list of all the things that sucked in the world his stupid birthmark wasn’t even in the top one hundred.
    ‘Should we try and block the door somehow?’ said Ed, making an attempt to look like he was in control again.
    ‘What with?’ said Jack. ‘Let’s just get back upstairs to the others, yeah?’
    ‘What about the teachers?’ said Ed, looking fearfully at the door.
    ‘There’s nothing we can do, Ed. Maybe the rest of them will be distracted by Mr Hewitt. I don’t know. Maybe they’ll stop to eat him. That’s all they’re looking for, isn’t it, food? You’ve seen them.’
    Ed let out a mad laugh. ‘Listen to you,’ he said. ‘Listen to what you’re saying, Jack. This is nuts. Talking about people eating each other. It’s unreal.’
    But Ed had seen them. A pack of teachers ripping a dead body to pieces and shoving the bloody parts into their mouths.
    No . He had to try not to think about these things and concentrate on the moment. On staying alive from one second to the next.
    ‘All right,’ he said, his voice more steady now. ‘Let’s get back to the others. Make sure they’re all OK. We’ve got to stick together.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    Ed took hold of Jack’s arm.
    ‘Promise me, Jack, won’t you?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘That whatever happens we’ll stick together.’
    ‘Of course.’
    Ed smiled.
    ‘Let’s go,’ said Jack, dragging his torch from his pocket and shining it up and down the corridor. There were heavy fire doors at either end that the kids kept shut to slow down any intruders. This part of the corridor was empty. They had to keep moving, though. They had no idea how long the other teachers would be delayed in the common room.
    Ed suddenly felt more tired than he’d ever felt in his life. He wasn’t sure he had the energy just to put one foot in front of the other. He knew Jack felt the same.
    Then one of the fire doors banged open and Ed was running again.
    A teacher had lurched through. Monsieur Morel, from the French department. He’d always been a big, jolly man, with dark, wavy hair and an untidy beard; now he looked like some sort of mad bear, made worse by the fact that he seemed to have found a woman’s fur coat somewhere. It was way too small for him and matted with dried blood. He advanced stiff-legged down the corridor towards the boys, arms windmilling.
    The boys didn’t wait for him; they flung themselves into the fire door at the opposite end but as they crashed through they collided with another teacher on the other side. He staggered back against the wall. Without thinking, Jack lashed out with the bat, getting him with a backhander to the side of the head that left him stunned.
    Jack and Ed came to a dead stop. This part of the corridor was thick with teachers. God knows how many of them there were, or how they’d got in. Even though they were packed in here, there was an eerie silence, broken only by a cough and a noise like someone trying to clear their throat.
    Ed flashed his torch wildly around, and almost as one the teachers turned towards him. The beam whipped across a range of twisted, diseased faces, dripping with snot, teeth bared, eyes staring, with peeling skin, open wounds and horrible grey-green blisters.
    They were unarmed and weakened by the sickness, but they were still larger and on the whole more powerful than the boys, and in a big group like this they were deadly. The boys had fortified one of the dormitories on the top floor where they were living, but there was no way Jack and Ed could make it to the stairs past this lot.
    They couldn’t go back and try another way, though, because Monsieur Morel was even now pushing through the fire door, and behind him was a small group of female teachers.
    ‘Coming through!’
    There was a loud shout and Ed was dimly aware of bodies being knocked down, then Morel was shunted aside as a group of boys charged him from behind. At their head was Harry