Fifty Fifty

by S. L. Powell

  For what seemed like hours nothing moved, and Gil began to slip back into the feeling that none of this was really happening. He was asleep, dreaming, and soon he would wake up in his own comfortable bed. He felt his eyelids begin to droop, and then suddenly the big Alsatian staggered round the corner of the building again. Gil jerked awake at once. It felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach. He had to make a run for it now, as soon as this guard turned the corner into the garden, and before the other guard appeared, patrolling the building in the opposite direction.

  Gil began to straighten his legs. His knees creaked with the cold and the muscles in his thighs ached as if they were about to snap. As he watched the guard pace slowly across the front of the labs Gil felt something pull sharply at his back and for an instant he thought it was a hand. Just before he yelled out loud he realised it was only one of the straps of his backpack, tangled up in the twigs of the bush. He swore under his breath, wriggling the strap free, and when he looked up again the guard had vanished.

  Gil leapt out of the bush and sprinted for his life across the road, past the grand glass entrance, round the corner and down the road towards the car park.

  Everything hurt. His legs hurt, his lungs hurt, and the heavy box in his backpack bashed against his spine as he ran. Oh God, no one had seen him, had they? Gil dodged the barrier and ran on. The walls that rose on either side of him were blank and featureless and there was nowhere that would hide him, and the guards would soon be closing in. Gil skidded to a stop and frantically scanned the car park for a hiding place. There was a huge wheelie bin to his left, and Gil would have given anything to be able to climb inside it and collapse on to a pile of rubbish. But he didn’t know if he had time, and in any case the guards might hear the lid slam. So instead he scuttled round the back of the bin and hugged the wall, praying the dogs didn’t sniff him out.

  The clump of boots on tarmac got louder and louder and Gil began to hear the wheezing of the guard’s Alsatian. Then he could hear the guard muttering under his breath, and eventually a few words.

  ‘ . . . stupid bloody dog, stop pulling for Pete’s sake, or I’ll take you to the bloody river and drown you, you mutt. And get away from that rubbish bin! How many times do I have to tell you!’

  There was a snuffling on the opposite side of the bin and then a sharp yelp from the dog.

  ‘Serves you right. Now behave.’

  ‘Go easy on him,’ said a different voice. ‘He’s only young.’

  ‘You wanna swap? He’s a pain in the arse.’

  ‘All right. But this one’s half asleep, I warn you.’

  Please, please just get on with it, Gil howled inside his head, hunched behind the bin. He wanted a pee so badly he thought his bladder might explode. Then the voices stopped and the footsteps started to fade. He peered over the top of the wheelie bin and saw a guard plodding away past the door to the back of the labs.

  Gil ripped the bag off his back and pulled out the box that contained Dad’s keys. Stealing it from the study for a second time had felt much easier, even though it meant having to wear those revolting plastic gloves again. Gil dropped the keys in his pocket, hung the magnetic door release pendant round his neck and shoved the box back into his bag. Then as the guard turned the corner of the building he stood up and ran towards the door.

  This is where it all goes wrong, a voice said in Gil’s head as he ran. Here he was, breaking into a building at half past one in the morning when he should have been fast asleep. The feeling of unreality was so overwhelming he wanted to laugh. There was the back door, almost within reach, but as Gil stretched out his hand the door was suddenly flooded with light and he stopped, bewildered. It was as if someone had just switched on the sun. It took him a few seconds to realise there was security lighting that came on as soon as you got too near the building. Why the hell hadn’t he expected that? Well, at least it meant he could see the keyholes.

  Gil pulled Dad’s keys out of his pocket with shaking hands. There seemed to be about a million keys on the keyring and every time Gil grasped one it slid out of his fingers because of the slimy plastic gloves. At last both locks were opened and Gil pulled the handle as hard as he could. The door opened so easily it almost knocked him flying. Gil fell through the opening and the door swung shut behind him. Immediately he was thrown into darkness. And at once the panel on the wall started bleeping and little red warning lights flashed everywhere.

  He’d triggered the burglar alarm.

  He hadn’t forgotten about the burglar alarm, of course, but last time he’d been here with Dad all the lights had been on. Now it was completely and utterly dark apart from the tiny flashes of red from the alarm panel. A towering wave of fear crashed over Gil and swept away the memory of what he was supposed to do next. He scrabbled frantically at the shut door and couldn’t find any way to get it open again to let some light in. There was a torch in his bag, but how long would it take to find it? In about thirty seconds every siren in the place would be shrieking like crazy. No-no-no! screamed a voice in his head. Get out get out get out get out get out!

  As Gil clawed uselessly at the shut door another voice spoke inside his head. Sigma, it said, very calmly and clearly. Of course, Sigma. The code for the burglar alarm was Sigma. He didn’t need light to disable the alarm. He could do it with his eyes shut. Gil leapt over to the panel on the wall. It went on bleeping relentlessly, like a countdown to blast-off. The keypad glowed a mysterious white, and Gil could just make out the numbers, arranged in just the way he’d seen them on the phone when he’d told Jude what Sigma looked like. Quickly he punched in the pattern. Five digits, 3-1-5-7-9. If he was wrong . . .

  The bleeping stopped.

  Gil’s legs gave way and he dropped to the ground in a heap, overtaken by panic. It gripped his stomach and twisted it until Gil was ready to throw up. His lungs gulped for air and he was aware of a tear trickling sideways out of the corner of his eye and dripping over his nose and into his ear while he rocked himself on the hard floor. Then just as suddenly the terror had gone, and Gil lay there in the dark while the shaking gradually subsided. He wondered why no one was coming to find him. He’d managed to stop the burglar alarm, but the guards must have seen the security light blazing away in the darkness outside. Or perhaps the light had gone off, and they had no idea that Gil was inside.

  Before he’d left home, Gil had thought through two options and both of them now seemed crushingly stupid. It had all seemed straightforward in the safety of his bedroom. Plan A was to go to the labs, break in, find Dad’s mice and steal them before Jude did. Plan B, if he bottled out of Plan A, was just to get the back door open, trigger the alarm and run, so that Jude’s chances of raiding the labs would be ruined. Plan A was clearly madness, now he was actually here. He couldn’t climb all the way up to the animal rooms and save Dad’s mice. How would he get them out of the labs? He could hide them somewhere, maybe, but the thought of the journey up to the top of the building filled Gil with a feeling of hopelessness. It was too difficult.

  But now he’d seriously messed up Plan B. He’d deactivated the alarms so they wouldn’t go off. The back door would only stay open if he held it open, and there didn’t seem to be a way of drawing attention to the break-in without getting himself into serious trouble. Gil didn’t even know how to open the door from the inside – he hadn’t paid any attention at all when he’d left the building with Dad. He rolled over on to his knees and got to his feet to examine the door, and at once he heard voices coming from the other side.

  Panic blazed under Gil’s ribs again. It was the guards, coming to find out what was going on. Angrily he squashed the fear down into his guts. He had to find somewhere to hide and that could only mean going deeper into the labs. Gil ran towards the door just up the corridor and fumbled again with Dad’s keys until he found the one that worked. Outside he could hear the voices muttering, and there was a little thump on the back door behind him. Then Gil was through the door, and rushing to
the next one. He touched the pad on the wall with the silver disc on Dad’s pendant and the door slowly hummed open. Then he dived into the small space under the stairs beyond and waited.

  Through the glass windows in the inner doors Gil could see a wedge of torchlight that grew wider as the back door opened. The beam shone straight down the corridor and made it impossible to see who was behind it. It moved past the first door and then, as the next door opened, the voices spilled out, sounding much too loud in the darkness. The torch beam swung wildly and Gil shrank as far back as he could and listened to what the voices were saying.

  ‘Can you believe they didn’t set the bloody alarm?’

  ‘Those dogs were a total pushover.’

  ‘I told you, didn’t I? Piece of cake.’

  ‘You don’t think there’s somebody in here, do you? Waiting for us?’

  ‘They’ve got a bit of a shock coming if they are. There’s some rope left over, isn’t there, and gaffer tape?’

  ‘Yeah, sorted.’

  ‘So let’s get on with it, eh? Just keep your eyes open.’

  A familiar chuckle came out of the darkness and Gil held his breath to stop himself gasping out loud.

  It wasn’t the guards at all. It was Jude.

  Jude took the stairs two at a time and was gone. Gil tried to count the people who followed him but quickly lost track. Six, was it, or seven? They merged into one long blur, like a giant maggot lolloping up the steps, and then Gil was alone in the silence.

  He lay back under the stairs, utterly defeated. His plans had failed. All he could do now was raise the alarm and get Jude arrested, or walk away and leave him to liberate the mice that might be Mum’s only hope.

  Or perhaps, thought Gil, sitting up again, perhaps there was an alternative. Maybe he could stop Jude taking the mice. If Gil got there first he could move Dad’s mice to a safe place. And if there wasn’t time for that – well, Jude was still his friend, after all. Gil could argue with him, explain everything, beg him to take all the animals except the ones that Dad needed. It was a very long shot. But Jude would listen, wouldn’t he, when he saw how desperate Gil was?

  Gil began to creep up the steps after Jude and his gang.

  He didn’t dare to use the torch in his backpack. Instead he replayed the memory of the video he’d taken for Jude. You went up and up the stairs until they reached the landing where the toilets were. Then it was straight on, through the automatic doors and past the room where Dad made his mouse embryos. Gil found that every single automatic door he came to had been propped open, so there was no need to use the pendant. He carried on down the corridor, through more open doors, and left to another set of stairs. When you got to the top you went right . . . or was it left? Gil stopped uncertainly at the bottom of the staircase. It wasn’t quite pitch dark. Faint streaks of light came from panels set into the ceiling, and ghostly fire exit signs pointed back the way he had come.

  As Gil stood trying to make up his mind, feet pounded on the floor directly above and he managed to jump backwards out of the way as someone clattered down the stairs and charged past him. They were gone in a moment, breathing hard with effort, but Gil thought he’d seen a big box in their arms. There was a torch strapped to the person’s head, and the beam of light bounced and wobbled ahead of them as they raced away from Gil down the corridor.

  Without allowing himself time to think, Gil ran up the stairs and turned right, immediately diving into a side corridor as a second person hurtled past with a full box. This time he caught a glimpse of a rabbit’s head with scared eyes gleaming red in the light from the headtorch. He kept going, along the corridor and up another flight of steps, watching out for the headtorches that gave him advance warning that someone was coming.

  Then Gil heard footsteps behind him as well as in front of him, and guessed that the first person must be coming back for another cargo of animals. He slumped back into an alcove that was hardly a hiding place at all, but somehow nobody saw him. The two people shot past each other in the corridor, mumbling something under their breaths, and were gone in opposite directions.

  By the time Gil reached the curtain of plastic strips that led to the animal rooms he was exhausted. He hid under a workbench in the washroom as yet another person burst into the room and puffed away with a box full of animals. It felt as if Jude’s helpers had multiplied into thousands of shapes in the gloom. They were all dressed in black, they all wore balaclavas and gloves and torches on their foreheads, they all had the same big plastic storage boxes. Gil slipped through the air shower and the plastic curtain and into the room where the rabbits were kept, wary of bumping into someone. But there was no one there. All the hutch doors swung open. The sandpit was empty. The rabbits were gone, and he knew the mice would be next.

  Gil stood hesitating at the entrance to the room where Dad kept his mice, listening and hearing nothing, and then he went in.

  Empty mouse boxes lay in heaps everywhere. There was a smell of mouse pee and sawdust. Between the rows of cabinets where the mice lived knelt a figure who was pulling out drawer after drawer, scooping out the mice and dropping them into a big box next to him. The headtorch dipped and swayed as he moved. There was nothing to distinguish him from the other shadowy figures that Gil had seen flashing past him in the corridors, but Gil knew at once that this would be Jude.

  Gil stepped behind the stacks of mice while he tried to think what to do. He heard someone come into the room, panting loudly, and there was a clatter that he guessed was their empty storage box dropping on the floor.

  ‘Here you go,’ said Jude’s voice. ‘Tellthe others we’re nearly done. Only two more after this, I reckon.’

  There was a grunt and then the noise of the plastic curtain strips slapping together. Quietly Gil moved up behind the rows of drawers. On the other side of them Jude was steadily getting closer and closer to Dad’s mice. It was too late to rescue the mice without confronting Jude. And when he sees it’s me, thought Gil, what will he do?

  He stood there for a moment, sick with a fear that was not like the fear he’d had of the guards and the Alsatians. He wasn’t afraid that Jude would hurt him. He was afraid that Jude would laugh at him, ignore him, push him aside, tell him he was just a kid. He was afraid that Jude would have too many answers. The fear made his head swirl. Gil swallowed a few times, pushed back his hood and stepped out in front of Jude.

  Jude glanced up for a fraction of a second and then went on lifting mice out of drawers. The big box in front of him was heaving with mice – squeaking, nipping, clambering over each other, falling on their backs and getting up again.

  ‘Not quite finished with this lot yet,’ he said, and then he looked up at Gil properly. The beam of light from the headtorch shone right in Gil’s eyes and he had to close them. He heard Jude swear softly, several times.

  ‘Gil,’ he said, ‘what the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ Gil said very fast, without opening his eyes. The insides of his eyelids glowed blood-red in the torchlight.

  ‘You what? Bloody hell, you pick your moment, don’t you. Can’t it wait till I’m a little less busy?’

  ‘No,’ said Gil. ‘Can you move your torch a bit? I can’t see.’

  The light dropped away and Gil blinked his eyes open.

  ‘Well, crack on with it, then, I haven’t got all day,’ said Jude.

  Gil tried to judge whether Jude was being friendly, but it was impossible to tell from his voice alone, and the expression on his face was hidden under the same black balaclava that Gil had seen in the photo above his desk. Even Jude’s eyes were invisible. As Gil struggled to put some words together one of Jude’s gang whipped through the curtain into the room. He stopped dead when he saw Gil, but without even turning round Jude put up a hand.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ he said calmly . ‘Everything’s under control here. Just give us some space for a minute, will you?’

  The figure vanished again, lik
e a black ghost.

  ‘You followed us in, did you?’ said Jude in the same calm voice. ‘I guess you worked out we’d be here tonight?’

  ‘I didn’t follow you. I was here first,’ Gil said.

  Jude’s head jerked in surprise. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said sharply.

  ‘I was the one who turned off the burglar alarm,’ Gil said. ‘It was off when you came in, remember? I heard you talking about it.’

  ‘Oh my God. Never work with children or animals, isn’t that what they say?’ Jude laughed, and the torchlight moved from side to side across the box of squirming mice. ‘You thought you’d be a hero, did you, and do your own raid? You could have screwed the whole bloody thing up for us, do you realise that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gil. ‘That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to stop you.’

  The mice squeaked and rustled in the silence.

  ‘Oh, come on, Gil,’ said Jude, in a voice that sounded dangerously quiet. ‘Don’t let me down, mate. We planned this together, you and me. Why do you want to ruin it now? You don’t want these animals to suffer any more, do you?’

  ‘You can have all of them,’ Gil said. ‘I really don’t care. I just want you to leave the ones in these boxes, that’s all.’ He put his hand on the stacks that held Dad’s mice.

  ‘Oh,’ said Jude. The torchlight flicked to the tiny clipboards on the front of the drawers. ‘So these are your dad’s little victims, are they? I thought you couldn’t stand your dad. So why would you want to stop me taking his mice?’

  ‘Because – because I’ve just found out my mum might have a really horrible disease and my dad’s trying to find a cure. He’s using the mice to find a cure. Please, Jude. Leave them.’

  ‘Oh, I get it.’ Jude laughed again. It was not a good sound. ‘You’ve decided you’re against torturing animals in experiments unless your mum’s life happens to be at stake. All animals are equal but some are more equal than others, is that it?’