Preston let his eyes jump from word to word, phrase to phrase. What the hell is this? Prisoners in the movies often chalked off days or weeks using a system of tally lines. Those names could be people who had stayed here in the past … except it all looked pretty fresh. No. Whoever had done this—and there were at least seven or eight different samples of handwriting here—wasn’t just recording their experiences to kill time. They were trying to piece something together. They knew about M.I.S.T., they knew of Armstrong’s connection with the project. They had Half Moon and Manchester, so they were connecting people and places. Some people they liked—others they seemed frightened of.
Preston was so deep in thought, he didn’t hear the footsteps.
That was his first mistake. Then, something tugged at the edge of his vision—a movement, a shape—and he knew he’d made his second mistake. There was somebody there. Preston’s breath hitched and his heart fired.
There was a kid in the doorway. He was all bone and tendon under his T-shirt—shoulders and ribs and sockets. He looked lean and strong, a fair-skinned kid with two little dark eyes under glasses with scratched lenses. A dog tag swung at the base of his throat. His hair was short and red, his nose pinched and pointed. He had a knife. The sight of it made Preston’s gut tighten.
The kid stood in a loose slouch, casually, arms swinging, as if carrying a blade was as big a deal as a schoolbag. He had a broad accent, East Manchester. “Don’t move, screb,” the lad said, his voice nasal. “Or I’ll gut you.”
Preston’s knees twitched and shook. He raised his hands, using the gesture to push his bag off his hip and behind his back. It was a mistake.
“So what’s in the bag, screb?”
“Nothing.” It came out like a gasp.
“Show me the bag.” The kid raised his other hand, open palm upward. He had fingernails so badly bitten the tips were cracked and bleeding. “There’s food in there, right?”
Preston fought back nausea. If he lost the databands now, he was never getting back. And neither was Alice. “Seriously,” he tried, shaking his head. “There’s nothing you want.”
The kid had a hacking laugh, like sandpaper on sheet metal. He stepped forward and raised the knife. Preston could smell his breath.
“I’ll be taking the bag, bastard,” said the lad, spitting the last word with fierce finality.
Preston shook violently as he tried to yank the shoulder bag up over his head. He got tangled, feeling the sweat bead on his scalp as he pulled it free. He couldn’t hand it over. It wasn’t an option. He held it up. His arm was stiller now. “Listen,” he said, “maybe we can work something out.”
The red-haired kid grinned into the middle distance, shaking his head, half whispering something to himself. Then he gave a roar and leapt forward. Preston yelped and threw himself to the floor, falling away from the swing of the blade. He pedaled himself backward, dragging the bag with him, and made it back to his feet.
“Put it down!” Preston stammered. “Seriously.” It came out as a babble. “Please. Wait up a second.” He backed himself into a corner near the writing wall. The kid advanced. “This is big-time unnecessary,” Preston said, voice wavering with exhaustion. “Take the bag.”
At this, the kid lowered the knife. As he did, Preston managed to land a kick against the kid’s thigh and back off, still clutching the bag. It didn’t stop the guy for long. He came at Preston again, all spittle and fury. There was nowhere to go.
In a second, the knife was at his throat and the kid was in his face, one fist balling up his T-shirt, ramming him against the wall.
The last thought Preston had was for the bag, and for Alice.
Suddenly there were others all around him. He heard shouts and a second face appeared alongside that of his attacker—a blond-haired kid with freckles dragged the boy’s raised knife-arm backward. Preston felt himself wrestled to his knees and the lad with the knife was hauled clear, yelling and kicking.
“You try starving us you’ll regret it!” he hissed viciously. “Just you watch.”
A group of them forced the boy down on all fours and kicked him hard. Preston heard his knife skitter off across the floor, and the lad roar with anger and pain. “Get off!” he spat defiantly, and growled at the group, “Big mistake, bastards. We’re taking the food, or we’re taking you out. One by one.” There was more shouting and the lad was dragged cursing out of the chamber.
Preston collapsed against the wall, his heartbeat high and hammering. He tried to put his head in his hands, but he was shaking too hard, so he pulled his bag close instead and nursed it.
The room was quiet now. The lad with the knife was gone and the others—the ones who’d pulled him clear—were gathering around him. There were eight of them. They looked like the starving kids you see in the bleak films shown between skits and dumb-ass dance routines on charity telethons.
One lad, white, maybe fifteen, had a torn T-shirt hanging loose over an emaciated body. Another looked as if he hadn’t slept in weeks, his eyes puffy and bloodshot, his chest heaving as he got his breath back. There was the blond-haired kid who’d saved him—flexing his thin fingers, wincing at his scabbed knuckles. A kid with cracked lips and a line of sores beading his cheeks and nose was wiping his brow, and next to him a lad who looked to be South Asian with long dark hair surveyed the scene, shaking his head. Their clothes were thick with chalky dust, their cheeks hollow, their eyes flat and colorless, their little metal dog tags punched with numbers. There was a girl at the front—a black girl with heavy boots, hair bunched in clumps, and a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She had her hands in her pockets.
“Who the hell are you?” she said. She had an accent as if she’d been to a good school once.
“Preston Faulkner,” said Preston hoarsely, massaging some life back into his throat. He wiped the spit from his face. “He tried to kill me.”
The girl smiled bitterly. “Yeah, well. Fox has been making a habit of that. But, like they say—friends close, enemies closer.” She crossed her arms. “What did you do to get his attention?”
Preston shrugged. “I was just reading the wall.” He nodded at the writing. “Is this yours?”
She ignored his question. “There shouldn’t be any more coming through,” she said, her eyes half-shut and suspicious. “The last gang—McKenna’s lot—knew all about shutdown.” She jerked a thumb in the direction of McKenna, the kid with the bleeding lips, before carrying on. “We’ve no room for any more. Go back.” There were nods of agreement from the tired faces around her.
“Listen,” Preston started. “It’s just me. There’s no more, I swear.”
“Good thing too,” said the girl. “We’re all out of space. So step back into your madbox and go home.”
“I can’t do that,” he said. He had to find a reason to stay. The Alice story wasn’t going to cut it. He needed something else. “Is this your wall?” he tried again.
“Go back.”
“I can’t,” Preston said. “Not yet. There’s something I need to do before Armstrong—”
“Armstrong?” said the girl. Her eyes widened and she drew her head back. She recognized the name. In the silence, she pursed her lips, blinking. Then, suddenly, Preston saw his advantage. The wall of writing was a group of confused kids trying to join the dots, and he had more answers than they did. If he was going to talk them around, he’d need to trade.
“I can help,” he said. “I know stuff. I can solve your puzzle here.”
The girl’s forehead furrowed. “Why are you here?”
“Looking for a friend,” said Preston. “I have to find her.”
The girl ran her tongue along her teeth. “Arrested? Rioting? Looting?” she asked. “You got a dog tag?”
Preston shook his head.
“I don’t believe him,” said the tired-looking lad. He had a cold face and a filthy silver tracksuit top zipped up to his Adam’s apple. “He’s ditched his tag or something. The kid’s all wr
ong. I don’t trust this.” The boy was blinking rapidly, picking at his teeth with his thumbnail, talking into his cupped hand. Yellow fingers. Smoker, maybe. “For all we know, he could be as bad as Fox and the rest of the Longsight lads.”
Preston scanned the wall. The Longsight lads. What had it said up there? He found the message. 24-7 watch. So Fox was one they were keeping a close eye on. Friends close, enemies closer. Preston touched his bruised throat gingerly.
“I say we give him a chance.” This from a big figure, taller than the others and framed like a boxer with a flat nose and shoulders wider than railway platforms. “Just my opinion,” he said, his voice unexpectedly gentle, his accent Irish.
The lad in the tracksuit sneered. “Jesus, Gedge. Go and hug a tree, will you?”
The girl silenced him with a sharp glance, leaned against the wall, kicked her feet a couple of times. “I don’t like loners,” she said. “When they come through in groups, I know what’s happening. We can handle it cos they’re all scared and we can line them up and sort them all out. But loners? It freaks me. Don’t like it.”
“I’m guessing I’ve not been the only one, then,” Preston said. “I’m looking for a girl. She’s got brown hair. Tall. Alice, she’s called. She was following someone else.”
The girl was guarded at first, then she scowled in frustration. “Dammit,” she spat. “There’s no more room. We’re sleeping head-to-toe down here. Unless we find more space, we’re gonna end up crushing each other.” Her fists were clenched. Preston could see the line of her jaw working. She walked to the writing wall and looked up at it, hands on hips, and arched her back. The nape of her neck was dark and smooth. She had a wrist full of festival passes and dog-eared friendship bracelets, and a clip-strap watch three links too big for her.
One thing was for sure—he couldn’t press her about Alice now. She needed a reason to keep him, not turn him away. Preston made it to his feet and took a step toward the wall. “Jonathan Shade let me through,” he said, pointing to the name. “I know him.”
She turned, interested now. “What else do you know?”
“I know all about Armstrong.”
The girl’s expression went cold and stormy. She looked at her boots, the muscles in her thin arms working. In those silent reactions, she’d made her feelings about Armstrong as clear as if she’d shouted her hatred aloud. “I don’t want to talk about him,” she said eventually. Then she pushed her short hair back. “Come with us.”
They started walking. A sparse corridor led to a set of stairs. Ahead, the big Irish kid, Gedge, led the way, his broad back blocking the weak light. Above them, metal pipes were riveted to the roof. Water or electricity, Preston guessed. This place didn’t strike Preston much like a prison; where were the cells? The big iron gates, alarm systems, high-walled exercise yard fringed with razor wire—all that stuff you saw in movies? Then the corridor opened into a colossal space and Preston suddenly found himself standing among a small township of kids.
He held his breath. This was definitely no ordinary prison. As Esther Klein had said—it was a cave.
The place was the size of a sports field, another chamber blasted from the rock. The floor was concrete—clinical, polished, as if it belonged in a hospital rather than a high-security jail. And on the floor, seated in groups, sleeping, sprawling, brawling, and talking, were kids. There must have been over a hundred in all; boys mostly, but some girls. And they looked ragged, starving, desperate; the youngest maybe thirteen or so. The room smelled close—stale and hot with bodies and unwashed clothes—and there was a wall of chatter punctuated with bursts of laughter and debate. There were other sounds too: the low rumble Preston had first heard in the valve chamber, and the clanking groans of two huge fans set into either end of the wall high above the crowds, their dark blades rotating slowly.
“It isn’t much,” said the slight kid with the blond hair, “but we call it home.” He gave Preston an ironic wink. “Lewison,” he said. He jingled the tag around his neck. “17226.”
Taken aback by the clamor and stink, Preston stared at the lad for a moment, then recovered his senses. “Faulkner,” he said. They seemed to stick to surnames here. There was a good deal of coughing, and he saw one kid shivering under another’s jacket, another weak with hunger or exhaustion. Elsewhere he sensed pent-up boredom, bad tempers, bottled aggression. A gang was drawing on the walls with chipped-plaster tools next to a hoard of discarded goggles. A lad nearby was nudging his companions, pointing Preston’s way. The new boy.
Preston’s gaze leapt quickly from face to face. No Alice. She wasn’t anywhere among them. Preston swallowed his frustration and fear.
“We’re on the hunt for better premises,” said Lewison, watching Preston’s wide-eyed assessment of the place. “Rabbit’s got a group out looking at the trapdoors, due back soon.”
“Trapdoors?” There was another group. Alice could still be here.
“Sounds weird, I know. But there’s some doors in the roof out beyond that corridor”—he indicated the far wall of the hall—“and if we can reach them and get through, there’s a chance we might be able to find something to eat.”
Distracted, Preston gazed upward. Above, the same punched holes in the roof gave out a light weakening as if at the end of a day. That was natural light out there, filtering in through pipes in the rock. He’d assumed to start with that this place was buried somewhere deep underground, but this wasn’t subterranean; they were somewhere light could reach. But when he’d stepped into the valve, the sun had just been coming up over the city. Here, it seemed to be fading. “Where the hell are we?”
Lewison gave a grin. “Ain’t that the question,” he said.
Preston had become aware of the girl with the checked shirt talking with her group. She dipped her head and bit her thumb as she listened to her advisors and spoke quickly in response, her eyes bright, her gaze steady and confident. He wasn’t the only one watching her. Kids in the hall were too.
There was some sort of disagreement emerging between her and the gang. The guy with the tired face and the yellowed fingers was speaking angrily. “We’ve no guarantee, though, have we?” he was saying. “And there’s nowhere near enough food as it is. Send the bastard back.”
Gedge was placating him, big hands open and raised. “Don’t we all deserve a chance at least?”
The girl leaned forward. “I think we need him, Hoyle.”
“What, like we needed the other two? When does it stop?” Hoyle blinked rapidly. “We can’t feed the ones we have,” he said. “And starving out the Longsight lads isn’t working, is it?” The kid called Hoyle gave Preston an empty stare, his eyes like black stones. “Maybe it’d have been easier if Fox had finished him off.”
Lewison pulled Preston away, his hand on his arm. “Hoyle’s a bit uptight,” he said. “There’s been a few loners recently. You’re not going to be popular.” He motioned in the girl’s direction. “But Ellwood’ll sort it.”
When he’d talked Shade into letting him through, Preston hadn’t guessed it would be anything like this. The kids in this room had most likely been pulled out of their houses, swept up off the streets of the city, bundled into vans, taken away from their families. Back home were mothers and fathers, uncles, brothers. Did this lot have anyone looking for them?
“On the other side,” Preston said, “no one knows anything about this.”
Lewison didn’t reply. He stared at the room and wiped his eyes. “I only stole a bike,” he said suddenly, as if it was his first time confessing it. “Well, a few bikes. I’m quick with my hands that way. Can’t resist it, sometimes.” He held up his thin-fingered hands as if they were someone else’s responsibility. “They’re all insured, though, aren’t they?” he said. “Bikes. These students come up to study and they’ve got tons of cool gear. Headphones, sunglasses, tennis rackets. And it’s all insured. They get the money back, right?” Preston listened to the turning of the giant fan, trying to conjure some words
. Lewison examined his palms like a fortune-teller. “I only stole a few bikes.”
He’d gone distant, his small face closed up. He said, as if it explained everything, “I love bikes, me.”
The kids in the hall had fallen into tight circles and talk had slowed with the falling of the light. Darkness encouraged a kind of brooding sealing up of character. Maybe each kid was fighting their own slow sadness, thinking of their parents or their mistakes.
Lewison touched Preston’s arm. “You’re with us,” he said, nodding toward Ellwood’s group in the corner. The room had filled with a kind of liquid summertime darkness through which eyes and hands and faces could still be seen as blue-gray outlines.
After some time, the long-haired kid next to Preston gave him a conspiratorial nudge. “We’re all here for a reason,” said the boy, and made a fan of his fingers like a magician. “All will be revealed. I have seen it.”
Preston was taken aback. “Seen what?”
“Big mistake,” Lewison said, casting aside a pair of abandoned goggles. “Never ask Chowdhury ‘what.’ ”
Chowdhury gave a tolerant little smile. “There is a law and balance to all things,” he said. “We’ve all done bad things. We’re here for a reason and we must accept what is coming to us. I for one … ”
Lifers Page 9