Storm (16 page)

I shrug under the ten tons of rubbery plastic, but really, I've got other things on my mind.

She picks up the phone, jabs one digit. I'm guessing no one picks up, because she slams the phone down. “He's such an
asshole
,” she says.

Sorry, Mom, I know I promised. I know you'd say even this “asshole” word counts. You hated swearing—no, just
me
swearing. And up until now, I've laid off it, because I wanted everything I had to tell to be…for you, really. To show you that I will never, ever forget you. But, Mom, I am about to have my heart ripped out.

Again, Mom, again.

And you, whoever you are, reading this, would you please read very carefully, and would you please…please just think what you would have done. Because I had sixty seconds to decide. I feel very precise about this, because I swear I felt every beat of my heart. But as that was already cranked up from the start and ended up totally hammer-hammer-hammering in my chest, we'll just stick to seconds, shall we?

Sixty seconds.

1–2

“Right, back in a min,” says the nurse, getting up.

3–6

She stomps—just a few steps—to the nearest door. It is labeled “Prep 1.”

7

As the nurse bats open the door labeled “Prep 1” to call for Thurley, I get to my feet.

8

In Prep 1, I glimpse the Princess, sitting on a gurney. Some kind of sign around her neck. I feel I've been slapped across the face all over again.

9–10

Too shocked to stand, I sit back down.

11

The nurse comes back out, looking flustered.

12–20

“Are they still experimenting on kids?” I ask in a dead voice.

“Yes,” she snaps. “But it WILL be stopping soon.”

21–22

“Or not,” she says as the door at the end of the corridor bursts open and a blast of cool Earth night rushes in—cool but not raining. Outside, under the canopy, there's an ambulance and a dark-windowed scary car (the kind drug-dealing gangsters in movies drive). A bunch of male versions of Ms. TVSOYMMSTTVCOMB are piling out of it, but these ones have guns. I'm guessing these must be the “Oh No, the Scientists Are Having a Fight Police” (plain-clothes division).

23

The nurse swears.

24

I swear. (Out loud.)

25

Thurley (the asshole) comes out of Prep 1, his blue gown splattered with blood.

26

Before that door swings shut behind him, I see the Princess again.

27–29

“No one leaves,” the last suit barks at the nurse as he and Thurley the bloodstained child butcher (asshole) barrel off down the corridor after the others.

30

The nurse swears again.

31

I swear.

32

The nurse sits down.

33–40

“This is not
right,” she says, taking off after them all.

41–55

I sit alone in that corridor in a state of terror.

56

I decide.

57

I get up.

58

I sit back down.

59

I get up.

60

I do it.

I speed-splop through that Prep 1 door and grab the Princess by the arm; she cowers in fear. “It's me,” I tell her. Not got time for this. “Darius said,” I shout at her, pulling her off the gurney, dragging her down the corridor.

I open the back door of the ambulance; a soldier is sitting there.

“All set?” he asks me.

My guts lurch, but I am NOT about to let this spoil our escape. I shove the Princess in.

“Yup,” I shout in the deepest voice I can manage—I have to; otherwise, I can feel for a fact that my voice would just be a frightened squeak.

I slam the door shut and go around to the front of the ambulance, the driver's door.

Unfortunately, there is already a driver—having a ciggy that he flicks out of his open window at the sight of me.

My guts lurch, but I am NOT about to let this spoil the escape either. I must stay
on mission
. I go around to the passenger side. I get in.

“All right?” says the driver, rolling up his window.

“Yup,” I shout.

“Oo! Wait up!” he says, watching his rearview mirror.

I check the one on my side; Prof Beardy is being dragged toward us by suits.

“Oh dear, oh dearie me,” says the driver, tutting.

Beardy and the suits disappear from sight.

“Had too much of the hard stuff, hasn't he?” says the driver, grinning.

The back door of the ambulance slams shut. There is a thump on this little window behind us that makes me jump—the driver shoves it open and our heads nearly bump as we both look: just the soldier, the Princess, and Beardy (who looks like he's about ready to fall off his seat) in there.

I look back around.
OK. OK. No suits. That's good.
Well, you know, not “good” good, but better than it might have been.

“This isn't a cab, you know,” the driver informs the soldier, and shuts the window.

“Might as well be,” he laughs to me.

He starts up, puts the headlights on, and we roll away from that place.

“I used to drive one,” he tells me as we head off into the night, “and let me tell you, it's true what they say—”

I don't get where we are going; we are driving away from the buildings.

“—you really do get some funny people in cabs.”

We are driving away from where I think the main gate should be. Could possibly be.

“Not
him
though,” says the driver. “Had
him
in here before.”

I do a token micro-glance at him, to act like I'm listening when really I wish he'd just shut up.

“That soldier? Sense of humor? Must've been surgically removed.”

We are driving away from everything.

“Surgically, geddit?”

We are driving into the night.

“Thought you'd like that,” he says. “You know ‘surgery'?!”

I cannot figure this thing out…but a move will have to be made, sooner or later, and I will have to make it.

“Surgery? Doctors?”

He sighs; he changes gear.
Where
are
we
going?

“So, what we got in there, then?” he asks me, jerking his head at the window.

I shrug.

“Little drama going on?” he fishes.

In the back of the ambulance, even through the glass, even through this stupid plasticky-rubbery helmet, I can hear Beardy—at the top of his voice—telling the soldier that he is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant microbiologist. “Best in the world, mate…best in the
world,” that kind of thing.

“Hush-hush, is it?” the driver asks.

I do not reply. I want to go home. I want to “And then I woke up.”

“Just trying to make conversation.” The driver sighs. “Ah! Here we go!”

We pull up at a gate. There are no crowds of the useless here. It is just a gate in the middle of nowhere. I
will
my guts not to lurch, but they ignore me.

“All right, mate?” grins the driver, rolling down his window.

“All right?!” A soldier at the gate grins back. “What you got in there, then?”

“Drunk guy and a kid.”

The gate soldier speaks into his walkie-talkie: “Exit confirmed.”

“Confirming exit,” a walkie-talkie voice says back.

“On you go,” says the gate soldier as he steps back and swings open the gate.

“Cards later?” the driver yells.

“Lamb to the slaughter!” the gate soldier yells back.

“We'll see about that,” the driver laughs to me as we bump out into the night.

It is such a starry, moonlit night—so bright I can see exactly what the sky is thinking. It is happy to light our way for now, but it is cooking up other plans; a fat slice of sky is already missing, smothered by nimbostratus, a cloud so thick with rain not a single star shines through it. That's pretty much how my brain feels: dark and deadly. Erm, and dense and dim. Obviously, the plan is to escape… It's just that the precise details of how I'm going to do that are not known to me.

“He took me to the cleaners last night,” my driver is saying. “Totally skinned me.”

I do not respond. On the track ahead of us, puddles glisten.

“You want in?” the driver asks me.

I glance at him, wishing he'd just shut up so I can think. The driver hates the puddles, swears at them a lot as he tries to weave slowly around them.

“C'mon,” he says, in between a bout of swearing, “you want in on the game? I could get you in.”

A random star in my brain twinkles feebly in the gloom:
My enemy's enemy is my friend
. (That's what my history teacher said when she was trying to explain some of the jaw-droppingly “as if!” pacts that got made in World War Two.)
My enemy's enemy is my
friend
.

“High stakes, though,” the driver is saying. “You need serious—and I do mean serious—stuff to put on the table. You got that?”

I nod. I am just looking out of the windshield, desperately trying—trying to think.

“I'm not talking cash, mind. It's gotta be jewelry—good stuff—maybe a nice piece of art. None of that modern nonsense—”

He swears, then shuts up for a moment as he maneuvers slowly around some more puddles. My enemy's enemy. I take a deep plasticky-rubbery breath and then remove my helmet. I am almost certainly going to need to shout, and it will only get in the way.

“Proper paintings, that's what people like,” he says, and glances at me—does a shocked double take when he sees that I am just a kid. “I'm a Turner man, myself…” he says, but I can see his brain has moved on to a different subject: me.

No going back now.

I fling open the door and jump out.

“
!” he shouts, braking. “What the
hell do you think you're doing?!”

What I am doing is scooping up a double handful of puddle water, and I am back at the door in a flash.