The Disappeared

by C. J. Harper

  ‘Can I have some ham?’ I say.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She carries on chewing.

  I have to swallow because my mouth is watering so much. ‘Listen, I’m starving. I think I’ve got as much right to be pilfering food as you have.’ I move towards the fridge, but she catches hold of my arm.

  ‘Not ham,’ she says. ‘I take one of all things. If we take all lots then they’ll see.’

  She’s got a point and I’m actually pretty impressed that she’s been smart enough to think of it. I help myself to a cold potato with one hand and a tomato with the other. My mouth folds around the potato. It’s delicious; the middle is so soft and salty that my jaw aches with the unexpected pleasure. I ought to be putting things in my pocket for later, but I’m just so hungry.

  ‘Who eats this stuff?’ I say. The fridge is jam-packed with all kinds of tasty food that they’d never serve to a Special.

  ‘The enforcers,’ she says.

  ‘Why don’t all the Specials come down here?’ I ask, cramming in a chunk of cheese.

  ‘Not big lots,’ she tells me, carefully repositioning the cheese dish to where it was. ‘Not all people can . . .’ She mimes punching in the code.

  ‘Not everyone knows the code?’ I say. I look at her hard. ‘If you don’t know the word “code” what happens in your head when you think about it?’

  ‘What?’ she says.

  ‘When you were telling me, did you have a word in your head for “code” or did you just think of . . .’ I copy her mime.

  ‘I have my words for it,’ she says, her face half hidden by a chunk of bread.

  ‘What are they?’ I ask.

  She lifts her chin. ‘I say “the get-food number”. But now I say “code”.’ She shakes back her silvery hair. ‘I’m not stupid.’

  I look down at the fridge door and realise that it’s got an electronic lock attached. Goodness knows how she got it open. She’s right. She’s not stupid.

  When the girl isn’t watching I put a small apple in my pocket. She turns to look at me with suspicious eyes, so I say the first thing that comes into my head.

  ‘You’re not a Red.’

  ‘I know,’ she says.

  ‘Are you an Hon Red?’ I frown. ‘That’s like a half-Red, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not an Hon. It’s like Red, but no . . .’ She tugs a strand of hair.

  She frowns at the fruit bowl and repositions a banana to cover the gap left by the apple I took. ‘I will be an Hon Red.’ Her eyes light up. ‘I’m going to be next Dom.’ She says it in a low voice as if she’s letting me in on a big secret.

  I’ve gathered that the Dom girl is important. She and Rex are like the Specials’ king and queen.

  ‘That’ll be nice,’ I say. ‘If you like hanging around with a bunch of violent bullies.’

  She sucks in her breath. ‘Dom is the best. I’m going to be the best.’

  I consider asking her if her complete lack of both ginger hair and height might be an obstacle, but she’s all starry-eyed and I don’t want to annoy her, so I butter the tiny chunk of bread she’s allowed me. That’s when we hear voices coming from the dining hall. I freeze. The girl doesn’t freeze, she whips two containers back in the fridge, screws on the lid of the massive bottle of milk, replaces it in exactly the right position, closes the door and starts reconnecting the electronic lock.

  ‘I suppose you’re expecting something to eat,’ the voice from the hall says.

  They’re getting closer.

  ‘Door,’ says the girl, without looking up from the wires she’s fiddling with.

  ‘What?’ I say. She can’t mean we’re going out through the door; we’ll run straight into them. I look about for a back door.

  The girl tuts and drops the wires. She sprints silently across the kitchen and prods the wedge of wood out from the door and eases it shut. She runs back to me, rapidly twists in a final screw on the lock, flicks off the light, grabs me by the wrist and pulls me through complete darkness into a cupboard.

  I hear the kitchen door open. A wave of fear washes over me and I feel like someone has sucked the bones out of my legs and they can no longer support me. I am too terrified to stand. I sway on my feet, but the girl grabs me by the back of the shirt and holds me up. I realise that I’ve still got the butter knife in my right hand. I concentrate on not dropping it.

  There’s the sound of a cupboard opening and the rustling of a packet. ‘Here, you can have this. Now listen, I’ll keep this short,’ says the voice on the other side of the kitchen. ‘I know you find it hard to follow lengthy instructions.’

  It’s Enforcer Tong’s voice. I’m sure of it.

  ‘Uh?’ comes the reply.

  That doesn’t sound like an enforcer. It must be one of the Specials, or maybe an impeccable.

  ‘I hear some Specials are planning trouble for the enforcers,’ says Tong. ‘I don’t like trouble. It is your job to find them for me and it is my job to punish them. You find these bad Specials and you will get more food.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ the impeccable grunts.

  There are footsteps and the sound of the door closing. I relax and the sense of relieved tension is so strong that I almost wet myself. I have cramp from standing rigid and I start to roll my shoulders, but then I notice that the girl’s hand is still on my back and I stop mid shoulder roll. I turn to look at her, even though it is too dark to see. She takes her hand away. I slowly drop my shoulders in what I hope is a casual fashion. Neither of us speaks.

  The girl pushes past me out of the cupboard. She turns on the light again and I notice that there is a back door in the corner. Maybe I should get going. The girl checks that the lock on the fridge is secure then she sweeps up the crumbs we’ve made on the counter with her hands.

  ‘What was all that about?’ I say.

  ‘Tong makes people do the things she wants. And stops them doing things she doesn’t.’

  ‘Control obsessive is she? I don’t like the way they use older kids to keep an eye on—’

  There’s a noise behind us. I spin round. The door is opening. We’re in big trouble. There’s absolutely no escape now.

  Before I can move, the girl turns off the light.

  It’s pitch black. The door clicks shut. They must know we’re in here. They must have seen the light and now we’re trapped.

  There’s a silence.

  Nobody moves.

  It can’t be Tong; she’d be bellowing by now and she would have switched the lights straight back on. It must be the impeccable – why doesn’t he turn on a light? Then I realise that maybe he doesn’t want us to see him because he’s ashamed of being in league with the enforcers. Which is fine. Dark is fine. We can escape under cover of darkness. All we’ve got to do is get to the back door.

  I stretch out my left hand and grasp the girl’s arm. I pull her firmly along in the direction of the door I saw in the far corner. I feel like a kid in a virtual haunted house booth. Any moment now I’m sure something is going to come rushing out at me.

  There’s a great clatter from the middle of the room. The impeccable has knocked a pan off the preparation block. That means he’s coming closer. I graze my shin on something and suck in my breath involuntarily. I curse myself inwardly for giving him a clue to our whereabouts. We’ve reached where the door ought to be, but when I grope in front of me there’s nothing. I take another step forward. And another. My hand hits the wall.

  I pull the girl in close behind me and feel for the door frame. I’ve got it. I fumble for the door handle and push it down as gently as I can. Thank goodness there’s no code punch on this one. I start to pull the girl through the door, but she’s yanked backwards out of my grip.

  I hear the noise of a struggle, but neither of them calls out. I lurch back, blindly sweeping my arms in front of me trying to find them. Moving towards the grunting and scuffling, I eventually scoop a handful of the girl’s long hair – it’s cool to the touch. I m
anage to get my hand under her shoulders and pull her away from the flailing arms of the impeccable. I aim a kick where I imagine his groin to be and I hear him hit the ground with a groan. But just as we reach the door, I feel the girl pulled back again.

  I’m not going without her. I owe her for the first decent feed I’ve had in ages. I swing my arms out, but find only air. I crouch down and locate a hand gripping her ankle. I keep hold of his hand to help my aim and then I plunge the butter knife I’m still holding into the back of his wrist.

  ‘Arggggghhh!’

  The hand releases her ankle and the girl falls forward. I pull her up and together we push through the door, stumbling into a corridor of more blackness. We run blind. My face is pulled back, wincing, expecting to smash into something any moment. I keep my hands raised and soon they hit another door. I try the handle, but it’s locked.

  ‘We need code,’ the girl whispers.

  I grope about for the keypad. ‘What is it?’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know this code.’

  ‘Where does this door go?’ I ask her.

  ‘To feeding pods.’

  I picture the position of the letters on the key pad outside our classroom and, using my sense of touch, I tap out DINING ROOM.

  My hands are shaking. I’m not sure how many Os I’ve typed. I try the door, but it won’t open. The door at the other end of the passageway crashes open and we hear the impeccable feeling his way towards us.

  I try again. DINING ROOM. There’s a click. The door opens. We tumble through and slam it behind us. We’re back in the faintly lit hall of feeding pods again. This time at the far end. The girl widens her eyes at me and breaks into a smile. I smile back.

  We speed back to the bathroom and then into our beds. I tell her in a whisper how the butter knife saved the day.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I ask.

  ‘Kay,’ she says.

  ‘Mine’s Blake.’

  ‘I know, you told me.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  ‘You eat big slow, Blake.’ She yawns. ‘But you stab good.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to work for Tong?’ I ask Kay the next morning while she’s lacing her boots. It’s unnerving to think that the impeccables are constantly spying on everyone.

  ‘More big food, less big hitting, all the enforcers say, “No EMDs for you, good boy”.’

  ‘Well, I’d like all those things, but I wouldn’t grass up the Specials,’ I say.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I wouldn’t talk to the enforcers and tell them what Specials were doing.’

  Kay looks sceptical.

  ‘I wouldn’t! I might not be any good at fighting, but I’m not a traitor and you should remember that I was pretty good with the butter knife when you were in trouble.’

  Kay laughs. ‘You are knife-good, yes.’

  ‘Anyway, shouldn’t your Reds be doing something about bad impeccables like that? What do they do to Specials who get Specials into trouble?’

  ‘They kick their heads in,’ she says.

  ‘That’s what they do to everyone.’

  Kay scowls. I don’t think she likes me criticising the Reds. I won’t push it because this morning she has been just a shade less aggressive with me and it seems like a good time to get some answers. I think Kay is a little more aware than Ilex and there are some things I need to know.

  ‘Can Specials send emails?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ she says.

  ‘Do you know what an email is?’ I say.

  ‘No. That’s how I know we can’t do it,’ she says.

  ‘What about letters? Can Specials send letters?’ I say.

  ‘Letters?’

  ‘Like a message,’ I say. ‘You write down what you want to say to someone then the . . . er . . . letter-man takes it to their house.’ It’s odd how weird a lot of things that you take for granted sound when you try to explain them.

  ‘No. No talking to people not in the Academy. No communicator talk, no writing talk,’ she says.

  ‘Couldn’t I bribe an enforcer to send a letter for me? Bribe is—’

  ‘I know bribe,’ she says.

  ‘You don’t know letter, but you know bribe? That’s a sad reflection on your education, Kay.’

  She can tell I’m taking the mickey and sticks out her tongue at me. ‘The enforcers are bad-and-more-bad. They like being bad to you. A bribe won’t work,’ she says.

  ‘What about someone else? Couldn’t I bribe a cleaner?’ I say.

  ‘What with?’

  I take stock of my worldly goods. One book. Unless I can find a cleaner who really likes poetry I don’t have anything to offer.

  ‘You need shrap,’ says Kay.

  ‘What’s shrap?’

  Kay sits up straight. ‘Shrap is what all Specials want.’ She goes to the locker at the end of her bed and brings something to show me.

  It’s a bolt tied to a string necklace. She puts it round her neck and looks down admiringly. She’s also got a nail on a string and a small section of copper pipe. Shrap appears to be junk metal. I remember the nut and bolt on Ilex’s belt and all the Specials making that chinking noise to show their approval of Lanc.

  ‘Apart from being able to make a rather annoying noise, what’s the point of that?’ I say. ‘Why would anyone want that rubbish?’

  Kay pulls back, cradling her shrap to her chest. ‘It’s shiny,’ she says.

  ‘But it’s not worth anything,’ I say.

  ‘What’s worth?’

  ‘Things that have worth, you can . . . get things with them,’ I say.

  ‘You can get things with shrap. You can get a mate. You can get food. You can get Specials all looking at you and saying, “Ooh shiny”.’

  In the real world I have a bank account with over two thousand credits in. I have an AEP score of 98.5. I own valuable scientific equipment. Here, I am a pauper because I haven’t broken off bits of metal from the building and strung them round my neck.

  Fantastic.

  On my thirteenth night at the Academy I decide to try to escape. The day before, I get Ilex to draw me a map of the Academy. He traces it out in the dust under his bed. There’s the long corridor with grids coming off on either side. At the north end, stairs lead down to another floor of classrooms and up to two floors of dormitories. Before the stairs, on the left, is the door that I came in by. Ilex says this door leads to the older part of the Academy which isn’t used any more. I also know that reception is down this corridor and, most importantly, an exit.

  Past the main stairs the corridor curves into the dining hall and kitchen. There’s another exit close to the dining hall and running away from there is another corridor that I’ve never been down. At the south end of the main passage and off to the left is the drum-shaped fight room. Also at that end of the corridor is a lift and the door to the enforcers’ sleeping quarters. There are several other corridors with no exits on. Ilex says they’re where the Making rooms and the LER rooms are. I still haven’t visited them, but I don’t think I need to bother about them.

  Looking at the map, I realise how few exits there are. Imagine what would happen if there was a fire. The enforcers would run off without so much as opening a door and hundreds of Specials would die in either the flames or a stampede.

  My plan is to try all possible exits. I have to get out of here. I have to get to my mother. She’ll have tried to call me on my communicator by now and when she gets no answer she’ll try the Learning Community. What will she do when they tell her that I don’t exist? I don’t want her to think that something terrible has happened to me.

  I lie awake till the breathing of everyone around me is regular, including Kay in the next bed. She’s told me she’s not going to the kitchen tonight, so there’s no chance of bumping into her. I slip out of bed and head for the bathroom, leaving the room the same way I did the night I snuck out to find Kay.

  I try my first hope – the door at the bottom of the st
airs which connects to the passage leading back to reception. I check down the corridor, there’s no sign of an impeccable patrol or anyone else, so I type RECEPTION into the keypad by the door. There’s the same high-pitched beep as on the bathroom door and I know I’ve got it right. A tiny screen on the keypad flashes: Swipe ID card. Damn. This is going to be more difficult than I imagined. I find a cancel button and press it, in the hope that no one is going to be alerted to the fact that I’ve tried to get through the door.

  Why the ID card? We don’t need one for the kitchen or the bathroom. Which I suppose is lucky really. I guess the difference is that this door isn’t internal. It leads somewhere they really don’t want the Specials to go – outside. I may as well test out my theory so I head for the door near the dining hall. This time I can’t even get the code right. I try OUTSIDE, BACK DOOR, GARDEN, then I make myself stop because even if I get the code, I can see this one also has a reader for a card that I don’t have.

  I had told myself that it might not happen tonight, that I might have to make plans and try again, but secretly I was hoping that by now I’d be on my way home. Suddenly, I’m desperate to get out of this place. I’ve got one last chance tonight.

  My final hope is the door to the enforcers’ quarters. It’s risky, but it’s just possible that they have a separate exit to the outside world, so I have to give it a try. The door probably doesn’t work without a swipe card either, but I’ve got to see for myself. I steal down the long corridor lined with classroom doors. The last door on the right leads to the enforcers’ part of the Academy and, at the end of the corridor, the entrance to a lift juts out.

  I’m about to try the door to the enforcers’ section when there’s a humming sound above me and I realise that someone is in the lift. I look up at the digital floor display. The lift is on the floor above me and it’s coming down. I’m in trouble. I look around desperately. The corridor is bare. There’s nowhere to hide. The buzz of the machinery is getting louder. If I try to get into a classroom they’ll hear the pneumatic door, but I haven’t got time to run back up the corridor. The only place to hide is in the shadow between where the lift sticks out and the corridor wall. I hope whoever it is doesn’t turn round.