by Alex McCall
There was a noise, off to my left. A soft thud. I’d almost missed it but part of my mind was hyper alert and yelled at me to get down. I froze, peering through the leaves ahead of me.
There it was, a Catcher, the growing light of dawn glinting off its bronze exterior. It walked carefully, picking its way, barely making a sound. Its head swivelled left and right, scanning the road ahead.
I hadn’t seen any patrols up until now. I wondered if it was again the work of this mysterious spy, putting the chickens on high alert. It was only an idle thought, a small whispering at the back of my mind, as I stared intently at the Catcher. It didn’t seem to be in a hurry, moving slowly and carefully, making sure it missed nothing. It was between me and the farmhouse. If I tried to get past it, it would see me.
This wasn’t good. I couldn’t just wait it out. Dawn would be here soon and the chicken would easily be able to spot me. I could try and fight it but I didn’t even have a shock-stick. I did have some of the Brotherhood’s egg grenades, but it was more difficult to take out a chicken with one of those than you’d think. And even if I did somehow manage to take it down, I would alert every other Catcher in the area to my whereabouts.
Part of me was fleetingly tempted to just let the Catcher take me. The barn looked kind of nice in a basic way, and maybe my brother was inside.
Wait. I felt a grin creep across my face, like the light gradually flooding across the land. I had a plan.
I quickly slipped off my backpack and set it on the ground beside me. Then I started pulling stuff from my pockets, anything I didn’t want the chickens to get, stuffing them inside the backpack. The bag was supposed to be waterproof. The notebooks and stuff would be fine. As I worked I thought quickly over my plan, made at the last moment and probably doomed to failure. Rayna would hate it; I knew that. But it was a risk I was willing to take. After all, I thought as I stuffed the walkie-talkie into my backpack, if everything went wrong I wouldn’t be around for her to get mad at.
I crammed the bag under a bush and looked at the Catcher. It must have heard the leaves rustling because it straightened up, looking more alert than a moment ago. I crawled to the left and my hand found a large stone. The Catcher’s head swivelled abruptly and it glared right at me. It knew where I was.
Time to get started.
I stood up and hurled the rock with all my might. It whooshed through the air and hit the chicken on the beak with a faint clang.
“Hey, Beaky!” I called out. “Want to hear a joke?”
CHAPTER 10
RAYNA: ABERDEEN
I’d been planning in my head since speaking to Jesse. By the time Noah turned up at the communications room, Glen was on board. Noah was a harder sell. It had taken the better part of an hour, with Glen backing me up, before he’d agreed.
“You don’t really need my permission anyway,” he grumbled. “I don’t have any control over Glen and I certainly don’t have any control over you.”
“True,” I said, smiling at him, “but it wouldn’t feel right doing this without your OK.” I turned and walked towards the door.
“I think it’s a big risk,” Noah called after me. “Be very, very careful, Rayna.”
“I will,” I called back cheerily. Then I was out the door, on the way to put my plan into action.
I headed to the hospital and bumped into Cody on the way. He was striding towards his office. “Hey, Cody!” I called after him as he disappeared down a corridor. “Wait up.”
I thought I heard him sigh, but he did stop.
“How’s Percy doing?” I asked as I jogged up to him.
A faint blush of colour crept across his cheeks, though his expression didn’t change at all. “He’ll be fine,” he told me. “Deborah says he has to stay in hospital a while longer, just to make sure he doesn’t have a concussion or anything. But he should be out by tomorrow evening.”
“That’s great,” I said enthusiastically.
“Hmmm…” Cody said noncommittally. “You want something. Now what is it?”
I stopped being jolly, which was a bit of a relief, and looked at him seriously. “What’s the plan?” I asked him. “The long-term one? How do we beat them?”
He laughed. “The plan? We survive as long as possible. You know that.”
“No, seriously. There’s always another level with you. So what’s your plan?”
He looked around then took my arm and guided me towards his office. “Come see this,” he said.
Cody had commandeered one of the conference rooms in the hotel and turned it into his own personal office. He had maps tacked to the walls, stacks and stacks of notes from who knows where, and a computer hummed in a corner. Jesse thought all he did was play Minesweeper when no one was looking. He could have been right.
“Look at this,” Cody said, closing the door behind me. The curtains were pulled tightly shut on the windows, only the electric lights showed anything. I looked at what he was showing me: a graph drawn on a piece of squared paper. I could make out a couple of lines, the boldest going steadily down.
“This charts how fast we’re losing people,” he told me. “At the rate we’re going everyone will have been taken within the next year.”
I looked at it, shocked. “That can’t be right,” I said. “We win a lot of the major engagements. People are mostly able to wander about freely. The scavenging teams are only hit about once a week.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he told me honestly. “There aren’t that many of us – two hundred, maybe three? I mean that’s a lot when you gather us all together but there are just so many more chickens. They grab a few of us at a time, we take out a few of them. But they’ve got the numbers to spare and we frankly don’t.”
“A year.” I looked at the red line, dipping steadily down. “We only have a year before all this collapses?”
He snorted, apparently amused. “Oh no, we’ve got much less time than that. Maybe six months?”
“What? What happens in six months? Why not a year?”
He pointed at the graph. “See that line there? That’s where I think panic will set in. Once we lose half our numbers, people will start to freak out. They’ll lose faith in the system, everyone working together. They’ll start splitting off, each group leaving to look for a safer place. And Aberdeen will go back to the way it was. Only there’ll be a lot fewer of us.”
“What?” I looked at him, honestly bewildered. “But they can’t think that. I mean, look at everything we’ve got now. Why would people give up like that?”
He shrugged. “They wouldn’t be wrong. I’ve been trying to gather some information and from what people tell me, Catchers were taking fewer people when everyone was split apart and in hiding. There was a ton of food lying around so no one really went hungry. The only thing that is truly better now is that we’ve got electricity. And soon that won’t be enough.”
“Six months.” I looked blankly at the sheet of paper in front of me.
“It could be less than that. We lost Sally yesterday. That’s got people worried. If we lose any more leaders things will start to deteriorate fast.”
There was a moment’s bleak silence. “We need a game changer,” I told Cody. He smiled slightly.
“I thought that’s why we sent Jesse chasing off after his brother – to get some idea where people are taken when they’re caught. Well, that, and because it got rid of him.”
I ignored the jibe. “We need something else. Something that’ll give us an edge.”
The mocking smile became more pronounced. “And here it comes. The real reason you wanted to talk to me.”
I ignored that as well. “We need to follow up on Glen’s plan.”
It took Cody a moment to figure out what I was talking about. “You mean setting up that GPS satellite locator he’s always getting you and Noah to bring up at council meetings? That’s what you want to pursue?”
“If we could contact people in the outside world, maybe even in America, we’d have
a better idea what to do next. I mean, look around you…” I gestured at the paperwork covering every surface. “If we had more information about what things are like elsewhere, if we were able to ask questions, then we’d be better prepared for what could be coming.”
He stood and thought for a long while, pacing back and forth. “Do you have a plan? One that would protect Glen?” he asked.
I smiled to myself. I had him. “Glen says the equipment is in Robert Gordon University, up in Garthdee. I thought that Blake, Glen and I could go along with one of Jeremy’s supply runs. I know he’s planning on heading up there soon to investigate the Asda. We could blend in and then sneak away to get it. There and back in a day, no problem.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out. Shouldn’t we have a council meeting about this?”
“Glen and Noah already agree, Jeremy will be glad of the help and Blake is always up for a dangerous mission. Including you and me we’ve got a majority. There’d only be Deborah left, and as long as she’s looking after people she doesn’t really care.”
“What about Hazel?” he asked.
I cursed under my breath. I’d forgotten about her. “What about Hazel?” I asked him, one eyebrow raised.
He smiled that indecipherable smile again. “Fair enough. Then yes, you’ve got my support. Go for it as far as I’m concerned, but task Blake and his team with guarding Glen closely. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He walked over to a table and picked up a box. I tilted my head, squinting to see the lid.
“A chess set?” I asked him.
“Percy’s bored,” he said nonchalantly. “I’ve been keeping him company and trying to amuse him.”
“He plays chess?”
“I’ve been teaching him.”
I looked at Cody oddly. He didn’t usually go this far out of his way to be nice to people. More than that, there was something off about him, as if he’d been caught in a lie. I shook my head. Probably nothing.
I followed Cody out of the office and along the corridor. Just before we parted ways he turned to me, as if he’d forgotten something.
“I meant to ask. When will you be going on this mission?”
I smiled tightly at him. “Three days’ time,” I said. “Friday.”
CHAPTER 11
It was six in the morning when I woke Blake up by knocking on his door, and he was not happy. I’d just finished hammering on wood for the third time when the door was wrenched open and he stuck his head out, hair still tousled from sleep.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Rise and shine,” I said brightly. “We’ll be setting off with Jeremy and the scavenging crew in about an hour.”
“An hour?” Blake failed to stifle a yawn. “You said it would be tomorrow.”
“Change of plan. Jeremy thought the sooner we get there and back the better.”
That was a complete lie. Today was the day I’d told Jeremy we were leaving. He hadn’t been happy about the early start either. But that was the whole point. We had to leave early in the morning before the others woke up so no one would see us.
It would take a while to move all the stuff from Asda back to the centre of town. The scavengers would be traipsing back and forth for several days. But Glen would only be going once and Jeremy was the only council member I’d told we were going today. If we were attacked, I would have proof that Jeremy was the traitor. After I eliminated him as a suspect, I could do the same again, finally working out who the spy was. But as the main aim of the mission was to get Glen’s GPS satellite locator, we really didn’t want to be attacked; Jeremy seemed the least likely traitor to me, so that’s why I’d given him the correct information.
“I won’t have time for breakfast,” Blake muttered. “I hate fighting on an empty stomach.”
I passed him the bowl of porridge I’d commandeered and his face lit up. “If we’re lucky there won’t be any fighting,” I remarked.
He took the bowl and put it on a chest of drawers just inside the room. “Depends on your point of view. The more fighting the merrier for me!”
I tried not to roll my eyes. “Whatever. We’re gathering in the foyer so get your group and meet us there. Oh, and Kyle wanted me to remind you to bring the empty bowl back.”
***
We left just over an hour later. As I’d told Cody, Jeremy was taking his scavengers to check out an Asda up near Garthdee. He’d been reluctant to go before now because it was such a long way from the town centre. Blake and I were officially his extra protection. Glen was just another kid who’d volunteered to join the scavengers.
“Are you OK?” I asked Glen.
He nodded, slightly out of breath. Glen was one of the only people I knew who was still unfit in the chicken apocalypse.
“Never better. We’re finally going to get the GPS satellite locator. I couldn’t be happier.”
“And you know that if we get into any trouble you’re to run and hide, right? You don’t need to prove yourself and fight.”
He gave me a crooked smile. “You don’t have to worry about that,” he assured me.
He gamely chugged along, pushing one of the trolleys that would be used to transport our hoard back home.
Blake walked beside me, idly swinging his shock-stick. He looked perfectly happy. This was all an adventure to him.
“So how do you think this is going to go?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It’s going to be a total mess. But with any luck I’ll get a crack at the thing that got Sally.”
I looked at him sidelong. “Do you really think it’ll attack us? What would be the point?”
He returned my stare. “What would be the point? We’ve got two council members with us on this. Four if we count ourselves. We’re the most tempting target around.”
He was right: if the spy was going to report any target to the chickens it would be us. I felt uncomfortable that Blake was saying it out loud.
“Not many people know that Glen’s a council member, though. He doesn’t get out much. Most people wouldn’t even recognise him.”
“True, I guess. Well, you never know. We could get lucky.”
I turned to face him, annoyed. “This is serious.”
He took a long look at me. “You’ve got to chill down, Your Ambassadorness. Fighting chickens is fun.”
“Well, I don’t think so.”
He smirked and shook his head. “Nope, doesn’t seem you do. Shame, you should try having fun sometimes. I thought someone who’s such good friends with the famous Jesse would be up for more of a laugh.”
I’d managed to not think about Jesse at all so far today. It had been a day and a half since we’d spoken on the radio, and I hadn’t heard from him since. Hazel said if they got any information about him being captured she’d let me know, but I was still constantly worried.
“I’d laugh if Jesse ever said anything funny,” I replied to Blake.
“You don’t find him funny?”
“I find him tolerable. Just.”
Blake just shook his head. “You’re quackers.”
A suspicion formed in my mind. “Are you copying Jesse, but with ducks instead of chickens?”
Blake went bright red and started walking faster. “No. Why would I want to do that?”
I let him draw away. A wannabe Jesse. Who’d have thought it? The last thing we needed was more awful puns. Jesse had a lot to answer for.
***
It was almost midday when we decided to take a break. So far the walk had been mostly uphill. We’d actually passed very close to the chickens’ old base in Beechgrove Terrace. There wasn’t much left there now. The bomb I’d set off combined with the falling debris had pretty much flattened it. In the few weeks before the chickens came back Glen had poked around in there looking for useful stuff but he hadn’t found anything. I know the Brotherhood had taken some things from there as well, though I didn’t know what.
We sat by the side of the road and ate our sandwiches. They were
all in little packets with our names on them. Kyle had probably made them specially. He usually did. He wasn’t only good at organising rations, he was a fantastic chef. He even checked on people’s allergies and preferences, hence the names on our sandwiches. I got corned beef and sweetcorn. It was oddly delicious.
All told it was mid-afternoon before we reached the Asda.
The plan was simple: while everyone else was busy rummaging through stock, Blake, Glen and I would split off and go to the university campus, which was right up the hill. We should make it back in time to help load up trolleys and push them back. Even if we were missed it wasn’t that unusual for people to wander off. We could just say we’d gone to the B&Q across the road and no one would bat an eyelid.
The interior of the Asda was dark. We crowded around the entrance, like thieves before a cave. Jeremy stood and turned, addressing us.
“OK, guys, you know the drill. Once we’re inside it’s going to be dark so everyone put on your head torches. We need tins, chocolate and batteries. They’re the most important things. After that get bottled drinks, anything that looks interesting. I want as much stuff as you can grab in the next hour then we’re heading back.”
He looked at me, Blake and Glen and pointed towards the B&Q.
“There’s another store over there,” he told us cheerfully. “I’ll send you guys to check it out later, if you don’t mind.”
We didn’t need the huge wink he gave us, but I felt grateful nonetheless. He was giving us a good backstory for when we had to slip away.
Once inside the Asda, we switched on our torches. The playpen to the side of the entrance was spooky, abandoned when it should have been full of kids. I’d been in there a few times myself. It was a fun place to spend an afternoon while Mum did the grocery shopping. Blake turned to one of his guys.