Zom-B City by Darren Shan

angrily.
    ‘Right, that’s enough,’ he snarls, then barks a command into his radio.
    Overhead, the airborne helicopter buzzes forward. I’ve seen enough war movies to know what’s coming next. With a yelp, I throw myself out of the fountain. My right shoe flew from my foot when I leapt in, and now my left drops away too. But the shoes are the least of my worries. Because as I scramble clear, the pilot hits a button and launches a missile.
    The fountain explodes behind me and I’m tossed clear across the square by the force of the explosion. I slam into a lamp post and slump to the ground. My ears are ringing. The hat and glasses have been blown from my head. I’m half-blind and all the way shaken.
    Sitting up in a wounded daze, I catch a blurred glimpse of the helicopter gliding in for the kill. I’ve nowhere to hide now and no strength to push myself towards safety even if I did. Spitting out thick, congealed blood, I sneer at the pilot – just a vague, ghostly figure from here – and give him the finger, the only missile in my own personal arsenal.
    There’s another explosion. I can’t shut my eyes against it, so I cover them with a scratched, bloodied hand instead. Flames lick across the sky and I feel like I’m being sunburnt in the space of a few sizzling seconds. There’s a roaring, maniacal sound, as if two huge sheets of welded-together metal are being wrenched apart. Then the dull thudding noises of an impossibly heavy rainfall.
    None of this makes sense. The second explosion should have been the end of me. B Smith blown to bits — goodbye, cruel world. But I’m still alive and there’s a gap in the sky where the helicopter should be. What the hell?
    Lowering my hand, I peer through a dust cloud which has risen in front of me like a shroud. As it starts to clear, I see the wreckage of the helicopter scattered across the ground, mixed in with the remains of the fountain. Some bones jut out of the mess, all that’s left of the pilot and any soldiers who were with him.
    I gawp at the bewildering scene, then look up at the steps. And that’s when everything clicks into sudden, sickening focus.
    A second armed force has spilled out of the National Gallery. Dozens of people, more appearing by the second, racing down the steps at the side of the pillared entrance, or leaping over the railing to land directly on the terrace. One of them has a bazooka. Smoke is spiralling from its muzzle.
    The troops spewing out of the art museum are neither human nor zombies. Most are wearing jeans and hoodies. Their skin is disfigured, purple in places, peeling away from the bone in others, full of ugly, pus-filled wounds and sores. They have straggly grey hair and pale yellow eyes. I can’t see from here, but I know that inside their mouths their few remaining teeth are black and stained, their tongues scabby and shrivelled, and if they spoke, the words would come out snarled and gurgled.
    These are the mutants I spotted in the Imperial War Museum shortly before the zombie uprising, the same monstrous creatures who stormed the underground complex. I know no more about them now than I did then, except for two things. One — they cause chaos whenever they appear. Two — they’re led by a foul being even weirder than they are.
    As if on cue, as the mutants tear into the startled soldiers, I spot him emerging behind them, colourful as a peacock set against the grey backdrop of the National Gallery. He stands between two pillars, arms spread wide, grinning insanely, the pink, v-shaped gouges carved into the flesh between his eyes and lips visible even from here, through the dust and with my poor eyes.

    I can’t see the badge that he wears on his chest, the one with his name on it. But I know that if I could, it would read, as it did when I first met him underground on that night of spiders and death, Mr Dowling .
    Send in the clown!

TWENTY-TWO
    The mutants swarm round the soldiers and helicopters. They’re soon joined