The Last Wild

by Piers Torday

  ‘Factorium is a Selwyn Stone Enterprise’, it has engraved on the bottom. Whatever. No one’s ever seen Selwyn Stone for real. He probably doesn’t even exist. It’s hard to see people when they’re always behind a smoked-glass car window or disappearing into a skyscraper surrounded by crowds of photographers and bodyguards. The head of Facto, the man who invented formula. The head of the whole Island now, the man who made up all the new rules. Don’t touch this, don’t eat that, don’t live here – well, right now, I don’t care for his stupid rules. And to prove it, I sit right down on top of his stupid name, pick up my bowl and wait.

  You see, I’m not going to eat it myself.

  Well, maybe a bit – but it is properly foul. I’m going to give it to someone else. Someone who should be here right about … now.

  And sure enough, there on the edge of the shadows by the drain, I can just see two antennae poking out, curling and tasting the air. Two orangey-red antennae belonging to an insect about the length of my thumb. An insect with a flat head, lots of bristly legs, and – silently chewing at the front – a pair of jaws.

  Another varmint. A cockroach.

  The antennae sniff the air, and, checking that no one else is around, he carefully scuttles out into the open, revealing the two large white stripes across his back.

  I give him a smile. Not that he can smile back, he’s a cockroach. But he likes to come and nibble at spoonfuls of my formula, so I let him. And he’s OK to hang out with. He doesn’t thump your leg and say, ‘How about if I give you a dead leg instead? Will you scream then?’ (No.) He doesn’t grab both your arms behind your back, while his mate tries to tickle you to death, saying, ‘What, you can’t even laugh either?’ (Again, no.) And he certainly never, ever jeers or points when you do try, as hard as you can, to say a word.

  He just sort of listens.

  I scoop a bit of formula in my spoon, and, checking no one is watching, lay it down on the ground by my feet. He scurries over and starts to lap it up.

  No one knows why the cockroaches didn’t catch the red-eye. Dad used to say he wasn’t surprised they survived – apparently even if you dropped a nuclear bomb on everything, they would be the only ones left.

  (That’s what happens when you have a scientist for a Dad. You don’t need school or exams when his lab is in the basement and he lets you watch him work, muttering to himself as he does. Your head is full of useless facts from the get-go.)

  The red-eye wasn’t a nuclear bomb though, it was a disease. A disease worse than a nuclear bomb, if you ask me. ‘Like … animal flu,’ Dad said. A flu that turned animal bodies and brains to mush and, just before they died, made their eyes burn bright red like they were on fire inside.

  Dad thought it had started in a cattle farm, but no one really knew where it had come from. And before anyone could find out, the virus had spread everywhere. Not just to the animals we eat, but to nearly every living creature – wild animals, pets, animals in zoos – right around the world it went – till the jungles were full of bodies, birds fell out of the air and fish floated in silvery slicks on top of the sea.

  It killed all the animals in the world.

  All, that is, apart from the useless ones. The ones we couldn’t eat, the ones that didn’t pollinate crops or eat pests. Just the pests themselves – the varmints. Like this smelly cockroach slurping at my spoon of formula. Even though they can’t get the virus, you’re still not meant to touch them. Because humans can get the virus. That’s why Facto declared the whole countryside a quarantine zone and forced everyone to move to the cities, where they can keep them safe – and why we live here under an upside-down glass boat. Just in case, Selwyn Stone says.

  I don’t care. I lean over, put my hand out and let the varmint crawl into my hand.

  He’s a big guy. Perhaps the biggest I’ve ever seen. Other kids here would freak out, but not me. And I look around at the damp empty patch of shade I’m sitting in, at the gang on the other side of the Yard laughing and joking over their food, and I think perhaps freak is a good choice of word by Maze.

  Because he’s right. That’s what I am. I didn’t choose it, I didn’t ask for it, but that’s what I’ve become – a genuine freak, mute and only varmints for friends.

  There’s a blast of cold from the air-con, and I shiver, feeling all of a sudden very alone. The most alone I’ve felt for a long time. Like I’m not even really here in the Yard any more, like I’m just sort of floating about in space, cast adrift in the sky above. It’s weird, but I kind of enjoy feeling sad sometimes. I deliberately think of all the sad things that have happened – the animals going, then Mum, and being taken away from Dad, dumped and forgotten about in here. Like it’s all been done on purpose just to make my life as rubbish as it could ever be, and there’s a kind of warm feeling rising up inside my chest, filling up behind my eyes, because I hate it, I hate everything, including myself for feeling like this, and I think I’m going to cry, when –

  I hear it. A noise.

  Strong, loud and clear, the strangest noise I’ve ever heard: faint and crackly, like an old-fashioned radio in a film. A noise that slowly, definitely, turns into a word.

  *Help!*

  That’s it – nothing else. It comes again.

  *Help!*

  There’s no one else here. The wardens are inside, probably dozing. Back over by the servery, Big Brenda seems to have Tony in a headlock and is trying to steal his bowl of formula, but they’re miles away. And then the voice speaks again, with more words, so faint I can only just make them out.

  *Kester! Help!*

  Whoever is speaking has a very deep voice – it’s not a kid’s voice at all, or even a man’s – it rasps and echoes, like a rock rattling down a metal pipe.

  *Please. You must help.*

  Almost not human.

  Then slowly, with a knot in my stomach, I realize whose voice it is. The only possible answer, however impossible it seems. Looking straight at me, his little varmint antennae waving –

  The cockroach.

  No – I must be making this up. We’re not in a cartoon. The cockroach hasn’t got massive eyes, or a hat, and he isn’t singing a song. I definitely don’t think he’s going to grant me a wish. He’s just an insect sitting in my hand.

  And yet I can hear him. He’s trying to speak to me.

  The cockroach flicks his antennae impatiently – before we are both plunged into shadow. The shadow of a warden looming above us, a heavy hand on my collar, hauling me to my feet, as the varmint tumbles to the ground and scurries back to the drain. He pauses on the edge, looks at me one last time and then dives down inside the hole without another word.

  What was I thinking? Cockroaches can’t talk. I can’t talk. Nothing has changed.

  Which is when the warden says the words no kid at Spectrum Hall ever wants to hear: ‘The Doctor will see you now.’

  There are some places you aren’t ever allowed into without being asked first.

  The Doctor’s rooms are different to the rest of the Hall. They don’t have glass walls to look at the sea through. They’re underground, and you have to enter a special code in the lift to get there. The lift opens on to a long white corridor, like in a hospital. There are rooms off either side, and the whole place stinks of toilet cleaner.

  This room is clean and bare, almost empty apart from a plastic chair in front of a desk, and a sink in the corner. On the wall behind the desk there is a picture of Selwyn Stone.

  A picture I’ve found myself staring at many times before. He has such a strange face. Something weird about it that I can’t explain – like he doesn’t look quite real. Apart from his eyes, which stare straight through you, seeing everything.

  I look away.

  The thing you notice most about the rooms, once the lift has beeped shut again, and the wardens have turned the lights off behind them, is that there’s almost no noise. There are no screams and shouts from the Yard, just every now and then the squeak squeak of rubber shoes al
ong the corridor outside.

  I know it’s only me down here, sat on a plastic chair facing an empty desk, but you hear things in the quiet, you see. The sound of something shifting its weight on the ceiling above, or a gust of air that could so easily be a breath. Then, out of the corner of your eye, a shadow seems to bend and slide along the floor – a shadow with eight legs. Another varmint.

  A black spider tapping about.

  I hate spiders. How it got in here, the most sterilized part of the whole Hall, I don’t know. I just sit still, count to ten and hope it doesn’t come near me. When I get out, I’ll tell Dad about the Doctor’s rooms. How they leave you there, all on your own in the dark, for hours, just to wind you up. You can’t admit you’re afraid of the dark here because that makes you a wuss, but I am. If Dad knew, he’d never allow it, I know he wouldn’t.

  It was raining that night, raining a lot, hitting the windows in noisy splats. It wasn’t properly dark, because of the moon. I was woken up by a strange sound from downstairs. I still remember how the toys on my shelf looked cross, with the shadows of the raindrops flicking across them, as I turned on the light to make the darkness go away.

  For a moment everything in my room – the clothes in a mess on the floor, the toys on the shelf – they all looked normal and happy.

  But then I heard the door downstairs ripping open.

  I got out of bed to go and get Dad. The landing was pitch black, and I couldn’t find the light switch. The door ripped again, and I wanted to cry out for him, but I couldn’t. I knew I’d have to go into his room to wake him up by shaking his shoulder.

  Perhaps he just left the door open, I thought, and started to go down the stairs extra quietly so as not to disturb him.

  I got halfway down when I heard a whispering noise that came in with a wind, blowing across my face and making my cheeks cold.

  The door was definitely open. At the bottom of the stairs I tiptoed across to shut it.

  I turned around, and started to go back.

  There was a squeak on the floor behind me. I looked back, and the door had come open again. This time there was a man standing there in the doorway. I couldn’t see his face because of the darkness.

  I felt more frightened than I’d ever felt in my whole life.

  ‘Kester Jaynes?’ he said quietly.

  I nodded, not knowing what else to do.

  ‘You’re coming with me.’

  A noise in my head snaps me back to the present. Not the metallic rasping I heard in the Yard, more a high-pitched whistle, like a boiling kettle. A whistle that seems to contain words at the same time.

  There is no one else down here.

  I shake my head, as if the noise was a buzzing fly, but it doesn’t go away. And I force myself to look at the spider, sitting calmly on the floor, every one of its eight eyes watching me. The whistling gets louder and louder in my head, as if the kettle is about to explode, until the ear-piercing shriek begins to slowly form into a word.

  A word, floating and twisting inside my mind.

  *Listen.*

  So I do, but all I can hear is the slap slap of sandals coming down the corridor, and the door sliding open, while the spider scuttles back into the shadows and squeezes through a super-thin crack into the wall. I think I am beginning to go mad. They said this would happen if I didn’t talk to anyone, that I would start making stuff up.

  Imaginary friends.

  Doctor Fredericks turns on an overhead lamp, shining it right in my face. I squirm away from the blinding light towards the floor, trying not to look at his chipped toenails. He doesn’t say anything like ‘Hello’ or ‘How are you today?’ He’s called a doctor but he isn’t the kind of doctor who makes you stick your tongue out and puts a cold stethoscope on your chest. He does wear a white coat, it’s true, but that’s the only thing doctorish about him.

  I catch a whiff of blackcurrant. The pockets of the Doctor’s white coat are full of blackcurrant cough sweets, and there’s always one in his mouth. He turns on the tap in the corner and begins to scrub his hands.

  ‘Name?’ he says, his mouth full of lozenge.

  He knows I can’t speak. He knows.

  ‘Name?’ he says again.

  I just look blankly at him. Doctor Fredericks sighs.

  ‘Jaynes, Kester. You, ahm, were seen handling a, ah, varmint in the Yard.’

  He’s drying his hands on a sheet of paper towel. I know what’s coming, but I don’t care. The cockroach doesn’t have a virus. The cockroach is my friend. It tried to speak to me.

  I think.

  ‘Did you, or did you not, ahm, handle a restricted insect, young man?’

  I stare straight ahead. A bristly hand knocks me round the back of the neck. I continue to stare straight ahead, trying not to wince.

  The Doctor sighs and sits down behind his desk, like he’s still waiting for me to say something. After what feels like forever, he gives a long drawn-out breath and begins to pick at his nails, still not looking at me. His voice is softer this time, trying to sound casual.

  ‘Do you know why you’re here, Kester? Haven’t you ever wondered?’

  I can’t help but smile and shake my head. I’m not going to show him that I care. The less you give away in here, the better. He waves his hand crossly at the world above our heads.

  ‘Do you think all of this is a joke? The Q-q-quarantine Zone, the glass roofs? Do you think Mr Stone –’ he turns and glances at the picture of his boss on the wall behind him – ‘is having a, ah, jolly g-g-good laugh?’

  He leans forward suddenly. Now he’s looking at me. I catch a glimpse of bloodshot eyes behind the thick glasses.

  ‘Does it never, ah, occur to you, that you might be here for your own g-g-good? That we might actually be, ah, trying to, dash it to blazes, p-p-protect you?’

  I shrug and stare through him as blankly as I can. The Doctor leans back in his chair and glances up at the ceiling again.

  ‘There’s still so much we don’t know about the, ah, virus. Where it came from, how it spread so jolly quickly. All we do know is that it mutates. Without any sign, or any, ah, warning. From animal to animal.’ He fixes me with his bleary gaze. ‘To humans. To varmints one day, our best scientists are sure of it. It’s not a question of if, but w-w-when. Do you understand me, boy?’

  I shrug. I’ve heard the lecture many times before.

  ‘So, I’m going to ask you one more time. Why were you handling a, ahm, v-v-varmint in the Yard? Is there anything you would like to t-t-tell me?’

  He waits.

  I try to speak. To tell him something, just any word – not what actually happened in the Yard – just a simple word, to keep him happy.

  I do. I try so hard.

  But no word comes.

  My body sinks into the chair with the effort.

  ‘Well?’

  He waits.

  ‘Nothing? Ah well. What a shame. What a d-d-dashed pity.’

  He stands and begins to pace up and down the room.

  ‘So, young, ah, Jaynes – the son of the great Professor Jaynes.’

  Here it comes.

  ‘Do you think that makes you different? Do you think that makes you better than anyone else, eh?’ He leans into my face, and his whiskers brush my cheek. ‘Do you think it makes you s-special?’

  I look down at his big white toes in their sandals and think, You’re pretty special yourself, Doctor, but he grabs my chin and twists it back up so I have to stare at him.

  ‘Your, ah, dear f-f-father also thinks he’s better, you see, than the rest of us.’ He laughs, although it sounds more like hiccups. ‘Us, ah, less honourable scientists,’ he continues through the hiccupy laughs, ‘doomed to spend our jolly old days working with wretched specimens such as yourself.’

  I don’t know why he keeps calling Dad an ‘honourable scientist’. He was just doing his job, as a vet. A very good vet, mind, perhaps the best in the country, Mum said. He had ‘the magic touch’, that’s what they
called it – ‘No animal too small, no disease too big,’ he always said. Animals in farms, animals from the house next door, animals on the other side of the world. Until the virus came.

  ‘And all I am trying to, ah, jolly well do is keep my little d-d-delinquent, ah, charges safe and, ahm, sound.’ He gives me a big smile, and it looks like his fraggly yellow teeth are running a competition to see which one can fall out of his mouth first. ‘Which is why I have no choice, I’m afraid.’

  I look at the shut door. At the picture of scowling Selwyn Stone. None of them offers any advice or any help as the Doctor gives me my sentence.

  ‘You touched a restricted insect. You know the rules.’

  He presses a button under the desk, and the door slides open to reveal two wardens in the corridor, waiting for me.

  ‘Take him, ah, back to his room,’ says Doctor Fredericks with a wave of his hand. ‘Q-q-quarantined for seven days. Total isolation.’

  The wardens haul me back to my room and lock the door behind them as if nothing had happened.

  Seven days. Stuck in here. Because I thought an insect was talking to me.

  Sat up against the wall, clutching my pillow to my chest, I try to focus on the world beyond the window. A solid black sky, but no rain.

  I try to think of happy things – like being back at home. I’m helping Mum unpack the shopping. I’ve said something to make her laugh. Then Dad comes in holding his favourite mug, full of tea, and joins in. And we’re laughing and cooking dinner and we’re happy. Everything’s normal again.

  I don’t know how long I stay like that, curled up on my bed, clutching my pillow. At supper time they shove a bowl of Eggs’n’Ham formula through a hatch in the door, but I don’t feel hungry.

  Sleeping, staring, untouched formula bowls piling up on the floor – that is how my life is until seven grey skies have been and gone since I was taken to the Doctor’s rooms.