CHERUB: The Fall

by Robert Muchamore

  Although these restrictions on telephones had been lifted years ago, the city government was desperately short of money and only a few streets near the centre of Aero City had ever been wired up for telephones. If James wanted to make a call, he’d have to get hold of a mobile.

  The eastern edge of town had once housed the tens of thousands who worked in the giant production plants. But the young and healthy had long since abandoned Aero City in search of work, while the vulnerable citizens they’d left behind had been moved into blocks nearer the city centre.

  The result was a ghost town: dozens of empty blocks, stripped of anything valuable and slowly crumbling back into the earth. James picked one at random and spent the night in a second-floor apartment. Without heat and with most of the doors and window frames stripped out for firewood, he found refuge in a bathtub, with a plastic shower curtain trapping the heat around his body and making a surprisingly effective blanket.

  He could have started a fire to keep warm, or run back into town and broken into an apartment in the hope of stealing a mobile, but CHERUB taught its agents to be patient: the cops would be on high alert and James didn’t understand his surroundings. He decided to hide in the bathtub until he had a clearer head and some daylight to nose around in.

  James suffered through the night, unable to sleep and wondering what had gone wrong at the meeting. As the wind howled through the missing doors and windows, he sipped the vodka to keep the shivers at bay and clutched his stomach, nursing a dull ache from where he’d been punched in the guts.

  *

  James was restless and began exploring his bitterly cold surroundings as soon as day broke. He checked out the apartment, stepping gingerly over missing floorboards, then along the balcony where he was relieved to see nothing but more stripped-out apartments.

  After checking his own floor, James surveyed the rest of the building and concluded that his only companions were the hundreds of pigeons roosting on the top balcony. But when he scanned the neighbourhood from up high, the clothes hanging out to dry and odd wisps of smoke indicated that he wasn’t completely alone on the eastern side of Aero City.

  James had already decided that it would be too risky to try leaving via the only road out of town: there was sure to be a police blockade. He considered escaping through the forest to a neighbouring town and either hitching a lift to Moscow or making a phone call when he got there. The trouble was, the nearest settlements were more than thirty kilometres away. James had no idea where they were and there was every chance that the Obidins would have goons on the look-out when he arrived.

  This left James with one realistic option: sneak back into the city centre, get hold of a mobile phone and call for help. But with only one set of clothes, he’d be easily identified if he went out in daylight. He’d have to stay inside until it got dark and then sneak into one of the city’s more affluent areas and either mug someone or break into an apartment.

  James didn’t have a watch, but he knew it got light at around eight in the morning and was dark when he came out of school at four, which left him with seven and a half hours to kill. It was important to stay warm, and now that he felt more confident about his surroundings, he decided to make a fire.

  Although most of the doors and many window frames had been removed from the block, there was still plenty to burn. James collected up rags and a few sheets of newspaper and used his penknife to strip splinters of wood from a floorboard. He laid them all in the bathroom sink and used a match to light the kindling.

  He kept the fire small, because he didn’t want to burn the building down or leave a trail of smoke big enough to be spotted from the ground. But the flames were enough to warm his hands and raise the temperature inside the small bathroom up to a couple of degrees above freezing.

  Once he’d warmed up, James’ thoughts turned to his stomach. The sugar in the chocolate bars and Coke he’d bought the night before would provide him with enough calories to see the day through, but he craved something hot and his mind turned towards the pigeons roosting on the top floor.

  He’d trapped and eaten pigeons during basic training. The meat was tasty and perfectly safe if you gutted the bird and cooked it properly, but he’d also need clean water for making a hot drink and cleaning up.

  More importantly, James figured that keeping himself busy by boiling water and cooking food would be better for his mental state than spending all day shivering and worrying about whether his future involved an unpleasant reunion with the Aero City police.

  There were a couple of centimetres of clean snow on the balcony, but he’d need a pot in which to boil and sterilise the water. Fortunately for James, few of Aero City’s former residents owned cars and many had been forced to leave their heaviest and least valuable possessions behind. A tour of a few apartments was all he needed to find a couple of battered pots, an enamel beaker that would serve as a makeshift cup, the wire mesh from a grill tray and even a plastic office chair to sit on.

  James built up the fire in the sink and rested the mesh over the top before stepping out on to the balcony. After checking that there was nobody down below, he began scooping fresh snow into the pot until it was almost full. Back inside, he set it down over the flames.

  His next task was to capture the birds. His mind flashed back to basic training and Mr Large telling him that pigeons are basically stupid and much easier to catch than fish or mammals. They only have two states of mind. The first is oh my god something’s coming let’s fly away and the second is everything’s fine. If you want to catch a pigeon, all you have to do is make it believe that everything’s fine and it will practically walk into the cooking pot.

  While his pot of snow melted, James raced upstairs to the pigeon-infested sixth floor, clutching his penknife and the large pot. The balcony was encrusted with bird lime and feathers. Naturally, the pigeons flew away when James came near them, but he crouched down with his back to the wall and stayed deadly still.

  Within seconds, the birds forgot that James existed and began strolling around him as if he wasn’t there. When the first one came within a few centimetres of his hand, James reached out and grabbed it, before snapping its neck and dumping it in the pot. The sudden movement caused the birds to flutter, but within another minute they were all pecking away at James’ feet and within ten he had five pigeons in his pot.

  Back downstairs, he found the bathroom smoky but warm and the snow melting over the flames. He began preparing the pigeons by slitting their throats and letting the blood drain into the bath tub.

  The first animal James had ever cleaned and cooked had been a freshly shot squirrel during basic training. Pushing his hands inside to pull out the guts and the warm blood sticking to his fingers as he stripped away the pelt had made him feel sick. He’d wondered when such a skill would be useful to an undercover agent in the twenty-first century, but he appreciated the knowledge now as he expertly skinned and gutted each bird with his penknife, before snapping its ribcage to turn each one into a flattened slice that would cook evenly on the small fire.

  James fed the fire as he worked and by the time the pigeons were prepared he had a saucepan of boiling water. Placing the pigeons on the grill, he headed out to the balcony and washed his bloody hands with snow, before coming back inside and rubbing them with vodka to sterilise them.

  After flipping the meat with a stick, James sat on the plastic chair, poured water into the beaker and took three gulps, before cupping it under his chin and enjoying the steam rising towards his face.

  This was his first moment of reasonable comfort since he’d been rudely awakened eight hours earlier. But it only served to remind James of his precarious situation: he was a long way from home and had never felt more alone in his life.

  8. DIDDLEYBOMBBOMB

  Lauren and Kerry felt weird as they faced each other across a table in the campus dining-room. Kerry had a lesson but couldn’t face it. They didn’t want to be alone, but at the same time they both felt awkward, si
tting together and wondering what to say.

  Rumours were the only things that spread around CHERUB campus faster than germs. By lunchtime, everyone seemed to know that James was missing. The two girls felt radioactive, as friends offered their sympathy in gentle voices, before sitting as far away from them as they could.

  Lauren was supposed to play basketball and Kerry was scheduled to go into town with her friends, but neither girl felt like it. They went back to Kerry’s room and somehow ended up spending their Saturday afternoon playing Scrabble with Rat and Kerry’s mate Gabrielle to pass the time.

  *

  Reasonably warmed and fed, James moved out of the apartment as soon as the sky darkened. The electricity was back on and he knew that his orange jacket and gloves made him conspicuous in the city centre.

  He’d spent much of the day wondering about the best way to get a mobile phone. He’d considered breaking into an empty apartment in one of the city’s wealthier areas, but these tended to be well policed. Besides, there were few landlines around and people generally took mobiles with them when they went out.

  He thought about simply walking up to someone and asking to borrow their phone, but it would mean showing his face in a public area and in an impoverished and crime-ridden city, the chances of anyone willingly handing their mobile to a well-built teenager who looked like he’d spent a night sleeping rough weren’t good.

  James realised that he was going to have to mug someone. It wasn’t going to be nice for his victim, but it would be a tea party compared with what might happen if Obidin’s men got hold of him.

  The grey streets of Aero City were about as far from thriving as you can get, but there were a couple of lively streets in the centre of town where the kind of people who could afford mobile phones shopped, ate and danced the night away inside the city’s only nightclub. But these businesses were mostly owned by Denis Obidin’s family and the area always crawled with cops.

  James decided to pick his victim at the city discount store instead. The large metal shed was one of the few things to have been built in Aero City within the last ten years. He’d been there a few times with Boris and Isla and found it stuffed with everything from Chinese-made tracksuits through to canned food and cheap power tools.

  There was a large car park, but few people owned cars and most shoppers walked their purchases a few kilometres through the snow in bags or trolleys. James sat on a low wall at the edge of the lot and staked out the entrance. He needed a customer who was alone and looked wealthy enough to own a mobile. At the same time, he tried not to attract the attention of a gang of tough-looking teenagers who were using a desolate area of the lot as a skate park.

  James wasn’t exactly god’s gift to skateboarding. He’d made an arse of himself on the few occasions when he’d mounted a board and was impressed by their display; especially when you considered that they were performing on snow and ice, with nothing but hoodies for protection.

  After watching endless pensioners and harassed, impoverished buggy-pushers, James noticed a young woman coming through the automatic doors holding a giant carrier bag with a set of pillows crammed inside. She looked about nineteen and wore tight jeans, black leather boots and a fur hat. But it wasn’t the kind of cheapo fur hat that all the old grannies wore and her brown leather bag had clearly come from some fancy Moscow boutique. It was definitely the kind of bag that had a mobile inside it.

  Relieved that she didn’t head towards a car, James waited until the woman was on the unlit street alongside the giant store before standing up to go after her.

  ‘Careful, arsehole,’ one of the skateboarders yelled, as James almost knocked him flying. He’d been concentrating on the woman and hadn’t noticed the board clattering towards him.

  As the first boarder struggled to keep his balance after swerving, another lad jumped off his board, pulled a flick-knife out of his jeans and flashed it under James’ nose.

  ‘You want trouble?’ the lad grinned.

  He was smaller than James, but felt confident with a knife in his hand and his mates covering his back.

  James backed away and raised his hands. ‘Sorry.’

  He stuck to a single word, because the kids might have heard that the cops were looking for an English boy and his accent was a giveaway.

  The kid who’d swerved was seventeen or eighteen and he’d circled back towards James, kicked his board up into his hands and was swaggering towards him.

  ‘This is our space, faggot,’ the big lad spat, puffing up his chest and bunching up his fists.

  ‘Sorry,’ James said again, as he backed up further and turned his head quickly to see if his target was still in sight.

  The skateboarders all laughed as he backed away.

  ‘He’s pissing his pants.’

  ‘If we see you around here again, we’ll cut you up.’

  But James didn’t give a damn about their attempts to bruise his ego. He wanted the girl, or at least the phone he hoped to find inside her expensive leather bag.

  After leaving the car park, James took a couple of quick double steps to catch up with his target. She turned left behind the discount store into a wide street with a building site on one side. A faded sign said that 55,000 square metres of shops and office space would be ready by the end of 1998, but the grand scheme had only risen half a storey.

  The young woman stuck her arm out to hail a passing taxi, but the driver was on his way to another call and didn’t pull over. After recovering from the shock of almost seeing his target escape, James realised that it was another good sign: poor people didn’t take taxis.

  But there would be another cab along in a minute and the chances were it would stop. James had to act fast. There was no one up ahead or across the street, and he checked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was behind. An elderly man was crossing the road, but he wasn’t going to be any kind of problem.

  The woman heard James run at her, but only managed two steps before he bundled her into the back wall of the store. She swung out harmlessly with the pillows and kicked him with the point of her leather boot, but James was too strong.

  He pinned her to the breezeblock wall and grabbed the bag from her shoulder as she twisted and spat. He’d hoped to be able to snatch the bag easily and run off without doing the woman any harm, but she screamed and clutched at the handle as James tried to take it.

  ‘Let go or I’ll hurt you.’

  ‘My boyfriend will kill you,’ she snarled. ‘Do you know who he is?’

  James didn’t know who he was, but the people who counted in Aero City were drug dealers, money lenders, or cronies of Denis Obidin. Whoever he was, James didn’t have time to mess about. Finally losing his patience, he grabbed the woman’s neck, slapped her in the mouth and gave her a shove. She ended up sprawled in the snow with a split lip.

  James guiltily snatched the bag and was relieved to see a purse and girly pink phone inside. It was an odd-looking device, branded with the name of the local cellular company.

  He stuffed the purse inside his jacket and couldn’t resist glancing at the phone’s status: two thirds battery, four out of five signal bars. He felt like a six-year-old looking at a big stack of presents on Christmas morning.

  He was tempted to dial straight away, but it didn’t seem like a good idea with a fair bit of traffic around and a woman bleeding on the ground in front of him. After running for a few hundred metres, James cut down to a brisk walk to avoid suspicion.

  Once in a while he checked the phone and noticed that the reception was getting weaker as he moved further from the city centre. After a kilometre and a half, he cut into an unlit alleyway that ran between two abandoned office buildings.

  The phone lit his face with an amber glow as he dialled the 0044 for the UK, but all he got was a Keypad Locked message on the display. Frustrated, he tried different combinations to unlock it: star followed by hash, like you did on a Nokia; holding down the number nine; holding down the zero; but he got the same me
ssage every time.

  After two minutes’ fumbling, James took a calming breath and studied each key in turn.

  ‘Stupid poxy phone,’ he growled.

  He considered taking the battery out and restarting the phone, but he’d be completely stuffed if the phone asked for a pin number when he switched it back on. Then he noticed that his thumb had been covering a little button on the side with a picture of a padlock on it.

  After holding it in for three seconds, the phone chimed and Keypad Active appeared on the screen. James felt triumphant as he started dialling – but then he noticed shadows at the end of the alleyway.

  They were on top of James before he had turned his head. The first thing he felt was a skateboard smashing him full in the face with enough force to knock the back of his head against the wall behind him. As he raised his arms to shield the next blow, a trainer plunged into his guts and was followed by a wall of bodies shoving him backwards on to the concrete and stomping him.

  ‘English boy,’ one of them chanted.

  James reached for his gun, but before he knew what was happening his arms were pinned to his side and a big dude straddled him and punched him repeatedly in the face. It was the guy he’d almost knocked off the skateboard.

  ‘English boy,’ he repeated, before spitting a massive grolly in James’ eye.

  James thought he’d have half a chance of getting to his gun when the dude stood up, but the skateboarder had felt it pressing into his thigh while he was pounding James. He ripped it from James’ waistband as he stood up, then aimed the gun down at him before savagely kicking him in the balls.

  The five skateboarders laughed as James doubled over in pain and spat out a mouthful of blood.

  The youngest kid there looked about twelve and he’d picked up the mobile phone. ‘Let’s call the cops,’ he grinned. ‘How much is twenty-five thousand split five ways?’