by Sarah Govett
Raf wandered over to the window, surveying the fleet of trucks. Mr Hicks’ eyes flickered over to him, and a frown criss-crossed his brow. Who was this young upstart ignoring his stories? He opened his mouth.
‘Look here…’
‘Such an impressive operation you have here, Mr Hicks,’ came Raf’s voice from the window. Respectful but not creepy. Just the right level of deferential. Brilliant!
The frown vanished and Mr Hicks’ chest inflated still further. Any more and he’d pop.
‘It’s all about having a winner’s mindset.’ Cue another story.
I had to endure a few more minutes of Mr Hicks reliving his glory days as a (definitely fictional) college football star before Raf broke in again.
‘So sorry to interrupt, Sir, but I promised Noa’s mother I’d have her back by now so we really should make a move. We have a bus to catch after all!’ A sly smile spread across his face and I knew he’d succeeded. He’d found the truck.
Mr Hicks looked relieved.
‘Probably best,’ he said. ‘Another very busy day here. Prisoner transport you know.’
We nodded back seriously. We appreciated the burden he bore. The responsibility he shouldered.
Mr Hicks offered to get someone to show us out but I quickly jumped in and said not to bother, not on this very busy day. That we were pretty independent and could remember the way out.
I thanked him again, for his ‘wisdom’ – puke – and we started back along the exposed walkway again, forcing our legs to remain at a normal walking speed when they wanted to run, to jig.
At the top of the spiral stairs where we were definitely out of earshot, Raf whispered, ‘It’s there. Look! No … follow my finger … right a bit.’
I saw it. At the far side of the hangar, second from the right sat our truck: RX1 3LB.
We reached the bottom of the staircase and looked left, right. None of the guards seemed to be coming in our direction; their attention was elsewhere. Here was our chance. Scuttling across the hangar like a couple of ninja crabs, we reached the truck undetected. We were on fire. We were unstoppable.
But there was no time even to take a breath, let alone celebrate. A shrill bell rang out and suddenly the tarmac was flooded with police. Police with guns. The prisoners were being brought in.
‘Quick,’ Raf hissed. ‘Here.’ He was crouched next to the access door for the storage compartment – our home for the next however many hours. I took three deep breaths to calm myself. I’ve always disliked small enclosed spaces – I think I’m probably borderline claustrophobic. This was going to be difficult. Difficult but do-able. Until it wasn’t. Until Raf reached out his hand to open the access door and found it locked.
Why had we not thought of this?
I started hyperventilating.
Raf grabbed me.
‘Get under the truck.’ We hit the ground and scrambled out of sight. Raf riffled through his bag.
‘What are you doing?’ I whispered. ‘Have you got some sort of spanner or… ’ hope bubbled up, ‘a skeleton key?’
He didn’t answer me but instead pulled out two pairs of grippy gloves.
‘Put them on,’ he instructed.
I looked at him. I knew what he was thinking and my legs were already shaking. ‘No!’ was all I could manage.
‘Yes.’ He swallowed. ‘We have no choice. Now we find somewhere to hang on.’
We’d had seconds to get into position, bodies facing the undercarriage, hands wrapped round pipes, arms extended so we could peer out at an upside-down world, when the prisoners were marched across the hangar towards the truck.
They were flanked on either side by police, well some special branch of the police or army anyway. They wore chunky boots instead of shoes and the jackets had squarer shoulders. Most of the prisoners looked pitiful, a sorry mix of men and women. Thin to the point of being shrunk and with no light in their faces, as if all hope and spark had been sucked out – like those vacuum storage bags that remove the air so suddenly your entire wardrobe fits in. Anger burned in me. These guys were clearly no violent criminals. They were minor Opposition, people who had dared to challenge the system. People who could now be disappeared without trial. But the prisoner at the back was different. He hadn’t been shrunk. He looked like the type they showed on telly to justify what they were doing. He had predator written all over his face. His face. He turned and I gagged. It was like the left side had been melted away. The skin was white with weird marks like dripping wax and the ear on that side was little more than a fleshy stump. He said something to the policeman next to him. I don’t know what, but it made the policeman mad enough to hit him to the ground with his baton. The guy just laughed though. Rolled around on the ground like it was the best joke ever and he wouldn’t stop. Till he did. Till he looked straight under the lorry and his eyes clocked mine. My heart nearly exploded. That was it. We were found already. Raf had seen it too as I felt his whole body tense up next to mine. But the guy didn’t call out. He didn’t say anything. He just kept eye contact and slowly, ever so slowly, licked his lips.
Travelling at speed clinging to the underneath of a truck that also happens to contain a psycho is about as hard and stupid as it sounds.
Even with the gloves on, my fingers kept nearly slipping off and the metal rods we hung from grew hotter and hotter as the engine ran. Raf next to me, the feeling of his body pressed next to mine, was the only thing that kept me going. Kept me holding on when my muscles were spasming and fingers burning. The thoughts that kept flooding my brain were the worst. The road surface was only a hand span away from my head. From the base of my skull. And it roared and it spat gravel up at us. And the word skull made me think of skeletons and roadkill. If I slipped I’d be roadkill like those squashed foxes you’d occasionally see by the side of the road with their guts steamrollered to the outside of their body.
This was it. This was real and there was no going back.
We knew we were approaching the Fence long before we saw it, not that that’s saying much as by now it was dusk and you don’t exactly get an excellent view out from underneath a truck. We smelt and tasted the salt in the air and felt the vibrations of the truck lessen as it slowed on the smaller roads. The roads were bumpier here and at one point Raf was nearly thrown as his left shoe was bumped out of its foothold and his left leg dragged along the floor for three seconds before he managed to pull it back up again. The air was becoming lighter. A white harsh artificial light. We were entering the floodlit zone.
I could hardly breathe. I was terrified the light would expose us. That it would momentarily disobey all the laws of Physics and curve round under the truck, announcing our presence to the hundreds of armed guards that my brain insisted would suddenly appear. Images assaulted me. The woman’s body on the Fence. Dancing. Cooking.
But the shouts of discovery didn’t come and the truck kept going, slowly bouncing along the uneven ground.
Finally it came to a complete stop and we heard this series of hollow clangs, like an enormous, out-of-tune xylophone being hit, and then harsh grinding. The gate to the Fence was being opened. The glare from the floodlights was so intense we had to squint to look out. Then we were on the move again, rumbling through the open gate. We were here. We were in the Wetlands. The truck paused again and I started getting heart palpitations. Everyone knew they scanned the trucks on their way out of the Wetlands. All over – secret compartments, the underneath included. They’d made a big deal about this on the news a while back to show how on top of security the Ministry was. No undesirables getting back in thank you very much. They sent the trucks to a special ‘heart-beat’ monitor shed to check for stowaways. There hadn’t been any mention of scans on the way into the Wetlands so we’d assumed we’d be fine. But what if they’d changed protocol? What if they were now doing it this way too? We’d be discovered in seconds. But then the truck rumbled on and I breathed again.
We bumped and jolted our way down a potholed road, de
eper into the interior before coming to a complete stop five minutes later. A shrill bell rang and we heard the sound of heavy boots on tarmac and then a metallic click and grind. The guards must have been opening the doors at the back. This was it. We had to run. Without being seen. We peeled our fingers off the pipes and lowered ourselves to the floor. I almost bit off my tongue trying not to scream as I uncurled my now bird-claw-like hands. The gloves were shredded from friction and my fingers were raw and swollen underneath. The prisoners were being taken to the right side of the truck so the left was our only chance of concealment. Crouched with our backs to the truck’s side, we scanned the surroundings, looking for a place to flee to. Looking for cover. We’d counted five pairs of heavy boots: five guards. Five guards and twelve prisoners. We had to make ourselves invisible to seventeen people.
A shout and movement. The prisoners were unshackled and on the move. Eleven heading in a row, deeper into the Wetlands. Their step was synchronised, as if still bound together, this time by a shared fear or perhaps a primal instinct that a pack has a better chance of survival. And they followed the old road. Maybe they thought it’d take them to civilisation. But where was the twelfth? Where was the psycho? I risked another glance under the truck and saw him – sat on a raised grassy patch, a smile sliced across his face. The guards clearly didn’t get it. Didn’t know what he was waiting for. Didn’t know it wasn’t a what but a who. He started singing to himself. ‘Girls and boys come out to play… ’
I prodded Raf in the ribs. We needed a plan and my mind was empty. He looked back. He had nothing too. Was this it? Was this as far as we were going to get? Was this when the guards caught us and interrogated us and then caught our family and everyone I loved became a Fish?
My spiralling thoughts were broken by a groan and then a laugh. Raf and I both hit the floor to see what was happening. The guards, all four of them, had clearly had enough of the psycho too. They’d surrounded him, and were clubbing him. And he just laughed. He kept on laughing.
This was our chance. Scanning left and right. We needed cover. Where the hell do you hide in a salt marsh? Raf tugged my sleeve. There, about a hundred metres to the back left was a raised mound topped with some sort of shrubs. We sprinted to it, ducking low, stabs of pain shooting up through my legs which were shaking and bloodied from the trip, the sound of messed-up laughter chasing at our heels.
You know when you’ve imagined a place all your life. It’s been lurking in the background of every exam you’ve ever sat, stalked your dreams and shaded every insult you’ve ever suffered – Fish, Fish, Fish. And now you’re here. It’s impossible to take in.
After what seemed like hours but was probably only twenty minutes of hiding in the middle of a painfully prickly shrub we braved it and crawled out, crouched, then stood. We were like the lame tableau of the Evolution of Man they’ve got in City Hall. From the top of our mound we got to look around properly in the last of the day’s light and we could see for miles. Guards, truck, psycho all gone. We had the place to ourselves.
I’d imagined total flatness. A flat, shallow sea of death with clouds of mosquitoes. Sea, salt, maybe a few grey-leaved plants like at Aunty Vicki’s, but not much more.
I’d been so wrong.
I know we were still pretty close to the Fence but the land here wasn’t completely pancake like. There were some weird, crater-style holes like we were on the surface of the moon or something. Then, in the distance we could make out a number of hills ranging from small mounds like the one we were on to proper hike-up hills. One where the last of the sun was setting, so west I guess, and then some more heading to the east. And it wasn’t even totally flooded where we were. More like wet in patches but mainly dry sandy earth covered in plants and stuff. Not stuff that we could necessarily eat, but grasses and reeds and patches of fleshy leaves that looked a bit like inflated rubber. And there were animals. When we threw ourselves onto the ground behind the shrub, a small brown animal, a rabbit I think, scampered out the other side and disappeared into the grass. The air even smelt nice. Patches of sea lavender scenting the surroundings like Daisy’s mum’s pot pourri.
But there was one glaring thing missing. People. In our discussions there’d always been, I don’t know, like one big settlement of people which we’d spot immediately and head to and get Jack. And we’d assumed that they’d be near the Fence, ’cos surely that would be where the best land was, right? Furthest from the sea. But there wasn’t any settlement. There weren’t even any old buildings. One area was scattered with bricks and rubble as if something had stood there years ago, but whatever it had been was now razed to the ground. My stomach should have flipped but actually did this horrific growl. It knew we hadn’t eaten for hours even if the rest of my body seemed happy running on concentrated adrenaline. Raf reached for his backpack, wincing as it touched his mangled hands and I smiled, thinking he’d read my mind, smugly thinking that we must be massively in love as we’d developed Mum and Dad’s psychic gift, but he actually pulled out a roll of bandage and a bottle of iodine so it seems his mind is both more practical and less romantic and greedy than mine. Raf would make an excellent nurse. Careful, gentle, precise. My hands looked professionally bandaged, almost like I was wearing slim-fitting white gloves whereas my handiwork on him looked ridiculous – more like an escaped mummy from an Egyptian tomb.
The feast then began – a mucor protein bar and bottled water. Mmmm Hmmm. We probably should have only had a little bit of the water, but we were exhausted and dehydrated from our death-trap journey, and figured we had water purification tablets with us anyway. You grow up thinking water doesn’t have a taste. It’s just there – the least interesting but most available option. But it does, have a taste that is – sweet, soft, clear. Water might actually be the most delicately delicious drink in the world.
Mucor, on the other hand, still tastes like mucor, however hungry you are. We didn’t talk – just sipped and chewed and I guess recovered. Eventually, Raf broke the silence and said, ‘Rather than trying to spot people, seek out dots on the horizon, we should just ask ourselves, right?’
‘Ask ourselves what?’ I don’t think I was being a denser. I don’t think he’d actually asked a question other than to himself, in his head.
‘Sorry, what I mean is – where would you go if you had to live here?’
I thought for a minute and then it seemed really obvious.
‘Up a hill.’
And then the wolf grin spread over Raf’s face and I thought this guy could take me anywhere in the world and I’d feel safe. Or not safe; but not safe in a really good way.
In what seemed like seconds all the light had gone and it was suddenly completely dark. The sliver of moon did almost nothing but then ours eyes adjusted and the stars were awesome. A proper canopy and it seemed like they were just for us. I’d done some reading up from Dad’s star book so I pointed out Orion’s belt and The Plough.
‘What about that star. The really bright one?’ asked Raf adjusting position so that his head rested on my stomach.
‘Hmmm, maybe Venus. Or the North Star?’ I tried to concentrate but kept worrying that my stomach was making weird rumbling sounds straight into Raf’s ears. ‘I think if it flickers it’s a star but if it doesn’t it’s a planet. Or maybe it’s the other way round.’
‘Thank you, Professor Blake. This is clearly a subject you know a lot about.’
I poked him in the ribs and he rolled off me, laughing.
‘Now come here,’ he instructed. ‘Put your head here,’ he said tapping his shoulder, ‘it’s my turn to ED-U-CATE you.’ He mimicked Mr Hicks so perfectly and his booming voice seemed to bounce around the stillness of the night. We both froze for a few seconds, fearful we’d announced our presence to the world. No one came.
‘Sorry about that. Now, this is what I wanted to show you. Look at that constellation … the one that looks like a tick … yes, that one. That’s the Noa’s smile constellation.’ And then he totally cracke
d up at his own hilariousness. Just because the right hand side of my mouth lifts up more than the left when I smile. No idea why. It’s like the muscles on the right are stronger. Or I had a mini stroke as a child. Raf hadn’t noticed it till I pointed it out a few weeks ago and now he claims it’s ‘adorable’ yet clearly also a bit funny.
‘Shut up!’ I hissed at him, rising onto my knees in semi-pretend outrage, totally failing to keep the laughter out of my voice.
‘Make me!’ he countered, rising too. ‘Come on, I’m still talking – blah blah blah – and you’re completely failing to make me stop.’ He was edging closer and closer until he was leaning over me, centimetres from my face. ‘Can’t think of anything?’ he said, teeth white in the near-dark. Run, little Red Riding Hood, run.
‘OK, guess I’d better take care of things myself.’ And then he leant down and kissed me and I forgot all about the stars and the Wetlands and the psycho and everything.
We decided to camp where we were for the night and then head out at first light. Although we’d obviously practised putting up mosquito nets at home during City-wide drills, it turns out it’s loads harder when you don’t have special hooks drilled into a wall at the exact right spacing, but we managed somehow to drape the nets over the branches, taking excruciating care not to rip them. Just one rip could be a restaurant door to a mosquito and then, before you know it: bite, suck suck here’s some malaria, then R.I.P. We resprayed ourselves with mosquito repellent and then snuggled down next to each other ‘to keep warm’. It wasn’t cold. I’d been wondering for a while how we’d sleep next to each other. Whether I’d rest my head on his shoulder or he’d wrap one arm round me or we’d spoon, fitting perfectly together. We ended up spooning, Raf lightly kissing the back of my neck. We didn’t totally fit perfectly. His body wasn’t quite long enough to totally cradle mine but it was still nice. Really nice. And I fell asleep dreaming of the hills. Imagining they were beacons calling us forward. Flaming beacons. The shade of Jack’s hair.