Escape from Camp Boring

by Tom Mitchell

  The tsunami of relief flooded all my words away. ‘Why?’ I spluttered. ‘Why didn’t you say earlier?’

  ‘Psychological torture, bro,’ said Zed.

  ‘Ellie!’ gasped Alexa.

  ‘I mean, I was going to interrupt. But you turned into a sad puppy and it felt like an important moment. And, don’t worry, you can thank me later. You dropped it when we were running through the rain. Next to some mad mushrooms. I was wondering how long it would take for you to realise. I was thinking it would teach you a lesson. We can’t be going through all this without learning important lessons about ourselves. Have you read any kids’ books? And, anyway, it’s safer with me.’

  I didn’t know whether to hug her or rugby-tackle her. All the feels.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said eventually, making sure it sounded like the most sarcastic expression of gratitude since the time I’d received a knitted jumper as a birthday present.

  And so we broke from the trail, we four and the hard drive. The houses that Ellie claimed to have seen were off at a right angle from the path. There wasn’t much undergrowth here, no bushes to catch our ankles, maybe some weak-ass ferns, no match for my powers of stomping. We kept in a straight line, one after the other:

  Me,

  Ellie,

  Zed,

  Alexa.

  (#WEZA)

  And I know it sounds weird but I don’t think I’d ever been at the head of a line before. Or the head of anything. But I led the group.

  We were like nursery kids out for the day, only we weren’t wearing tiny high-vis jackets and we had no grumpy nineteen-year-old carers guiding us. We trod over pine needles, making a polite rustle as we went. Birds sang us the morning chorus, chirping unseen. The sun broke from the horizon. The sky, seen through gaps in the canopy, was a painter’s palette of blue and gold.

  In jailbreak movies now would be the scene in which we’d be running through the shadowy trees as the sound of hungry barking dogs followed. Hard-faced men in uniform would have rifles on their backs and torches in their hands. If we’d been in one of those dystopian books that English teachers are always saying kids should like, we’d have tracker chips on us or whatever, some middle-aged writer’s warning about the lack of online privacy, I don’t know.

  Instead the most exciting thing happened when I jumped over this huge root, like a tendon breaking from the ground, and disturbed a pigeon on the other side. It rose, hooting. By this point, though, the gang couldn’t be shocked or surprised by anything and we carried on, smiling, chatting about nothing, still a bit damp from the rain, wishing the pigeon well.

  ‘I hate pigeons,’ said Ellie.

  ‘Same,’ said Zed.

  Correction: two of us wishing the pigeon well.

  It wasn’t long before we passed the final tree. There’d been no warning of the forest ending – it just did. There was a line and we crossed it (in, like, loads of ways, obviously). We stepped out on to a narrow strip of grass that ran up to a barbed-wire fence. This fence was about five metres ahead, enclosing a meadow of thinning grass that was about the width of a football field but stretched a long way left and right, the forest curving round it like a mouth.

  Past the field was a playground. It was empty, save a couple of crows sitting on the uplifted end of a see-saw. It might have been evidence of a zombie apocalypse. But it wasn’t. It was worse. It was the rec on the rough side of town where nobody dared go because of the older kids doing things older kids do.

  ‘What now?’ asked Alexa. ‘Are we close?’

  ‘This is the edge of town,’ I said.

  Zed stepped through the thick grass to inspect the fence. Five strands of wire were pulled between wooden posts. The highest came up to his neck.

  ‘We need a sack, some thick material. We put that over the barbed wire and it protects us as we climb over.’

  ‘Or,’ said Ellie, ‘we walk round the fence, round the field. Especially as we don’t have a sack or whatever.’

  She pointed the way. It was doable. I mean, it looked about ten times the distance of crossing the field but it was doable. And then I heard a sound. And the sound changed everything.

  ‘Wait!’ I pointed across the field. ‘What’s that?’

  Across the field, past the playground, there was a red dot.

  A bus. Our ticket home.

  ‘How do you know where it’s going?’ asked Ellie.

  ‘Where else would it go but the town?’ I replied, silencing Ellie with the power of logic. ‘This is the end of the road, look.’

  ‘We need to get a move on. We don’t want to miss it,’ said Zed.

  He took the two central lines of barbed wire and, straining, pulled them apart.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Ellie, stepping up to him.

  You could hear the worry in her voice. And I don’t think I’d seen them so close before. I didn’t want to consider what it meant. Theirs was a story that didn’t belong in this action-packed prison-break narrative.

  Zed’s arms shook with the effort of pulling the wires apart. His voice was a little shaky too.

  ‘Just get through,’ he said. ‘Time for chatting is over.’

  Ellie did as she was told, for possibly the first time ever. Hers was a very delicate movement. She ghosted through the space with grace. What with all the tree-climbing it made me think she probably really was a good tennis player.

  On the other side she helped Zed hold the barbed wires apart.

  ‘Who’s next?’ he asked, the words squeezed with his breath through his teeth. ‘It’s not easy.’

  With a sweep of my arm I offered the chance to Alexa. Hopefully she thought I was being polite but actually I was worried about getting caught on the barbs.

  She hesitated. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘there must be a reason why this field is fenced off. With barbed wire.’

  Ellie turned her head, looked over her shoulder.

  ‘Well, I can’t see any mad bulls if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  ‘The bus,’ I said, and that was enough for Alexa to gingerly lift legs and arms through to the other side. She was so small she could probably have managed without Zed and Alexa pulling the gap wider. Being tiny has its advantages.

  And then it was my go. I turned parallel to the fence, and stepped my left leg through without any problems. But my left shoulder got snagged against a barb. I didn’t want to force it because it would rip and Mum would go mental. Alexa told me to wait a sec and tried to ease the material off the sharp spike. I could feel her fingers spidering on my back.

  And then …

  ‘Oh my gosh,’ said Ellie.

  Alexa stepped back from trying to free me. She gasped. ‘Bongos,’ she said.

  Zed said, ‘Sick.’

  And Ellie added, ‘It’s coming towards us. It’s running. What do we do?’ And she was squeaking in panic.

  Whatever it was that had caused the squeak was further up the field behind me. I strained to turn my neck but, because I’m not an owl, I couldn’t force it as much as I needed to. My neck ached, its muscles as tight as the fence. I didn’t want to risk tearing my jacket. And, just as I thought it couldn’t have been that bad because the other three hadn’t yet run away, an arm pulled me through.

  As it did, my jacket ripped – a clean noise that broke through the morning and offered an aural contrast to the thumping of the turf, which I could not only hear but could also feel shuddering through the ground like a dope bass loop. The barbed wire twanged like a broken guitar as Zed let go and I tumbled to the ground.

  Kneeling, this is what I saw:

  A fat pony with shaggy fur who’d had its legs, neck and ears elongated and also its face crushed. It must have emerged from the dip in the meadow, right in the corner by the trees. And obviously we’d not noticed it because we weren’t looking.

  ‘Llama!’ announced Alexa.

  It stood between me and the rest of the group. Between me and freedom: a llama.

  Far fenc
e.

  Alexa, Ellie, Zed.

  Llama.

  Me.

  Fence.

  ‘Don’t make any sudden movements!’ called Zed.

  His voice made the llama flinch. It twitched its ears. Its bottom jaw moved from side to side like an outlaw cowboy chewing tobacco as it eyed me, imagining, no doubt, what it would feel like to trample me to death beneath its freaky llama toes.

  The girls shushed Zed. They began to creep backwards, away from the llama and me. This, to be honest, was the exact opposite of the direction in which I wanted them to go.

  ‘Hey!’ I hissed. ‘Don’t leave me with the llama.’

  The llama didn’t like my hissing. It made a weird kind of farting noise from its mouth. It swept its head from side to side like a hairy pendulum. It also stepped closer. And, I can tell you something, llama breath is about as disgusting a breath as you can imagine. Like it belonged to a meat-eating skeleton in Hell who never brushed its teeth.

  It eyed me with cruel black marbles. Could it kill me? I vaguely remembered a YouTube video in which a llama went mad in a field of Americans. They kick and spit, don’t they? (Llamas, not Americans.) Like toddlers having a temper tantrum, only deadlier.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Friend.’

  You didn’t need to be an expert in llama behaviour to judge that the llama disagreed. It snorted. There was white foam round its lips.

  ‘Distract it!’ I called. It bared its teeth. ‘Throw something.’

  I could hear the others arguing about there being nothing to throw. Their voices didn’t seem to bother the llama. I think it had decided that I was the enemy. It was stuck with its head low, focused on me. I felt like it was playing a game, like I’d be safe as long as I never moved.

  And then, spinning through the air, came the sporf. It bounced off the llama’s head and fell at my feet. This did not please the llama. It lurched forward, teeth snapping, hissing like a deflating balloon. I grabbed the sporf from the grass and dived to my left. The llama’s face hit the space where I’d been crouched a split-second after I’d left it. Before the animal could realise that I’d not been magicked into nothing, I scrabbled to my feet and raced away, following the other three in a mad sprint across the field.

  Panting like my dad, I watched as the others reached the fence. They stopped; they spoke. I was sure I felt the mad hot breath of the llama at my shoulder. I felt the pounding of its feet quake through the ground.

  The others didn’t climb over the fence. Instead Ellie ran towards me, hooting and waving her arms. Alexa ran along the fence to my right, windmilling her arms and screaming a constant ‘arggggh’. Zed ran the other way. He woofed and kicked out his legs.

  Tactics.

  The display was disturbing for me. Imagine the effect on the llama. I dared a look over my shoulder. It had stopped, its head cocked to one side, trying to process what the alpaca was going on.

  Alexa reached me, smiling, and grabbed my arm. I felt like one of those injured marathon runners, helped over the line by a healthier friend. We sprinted for the fence. By now Ellie was already through and on the other side. Zed had stopped his dog impression and, having chucked his backpack over, was forcing himself between the silver lines.

  Me and Alexa, we climbed the fence without snags, which is even more impressive given that I was holding the sporf between my teeth. We climbed from one tight line of wire to the other and lifted our legs over the top without, by some miracle, catching once. By this point the llama had remembered its anger and was rushing for us (me) again.

  I tottered on top of the fence as the hairy mass approached. It snapped at thin air as I fell into safety.

  ‘Wow,’ I said from the ground. ‘Thanks, guys. That’s one angry llama.’

  Zed offered me a hand to help me to my feet as the animal watched from the other side of the fence.

  ‘BLS,’ he said. ‘Berserk llama syndrome. I’ve read about it on the internet.’

  Ellie had never been on a bus before and I could well believe it. She found the prospect very exciting and told us so as we jogged past the playground, heading for the bus that sat, engine off, at the stop on the road beside the park.

  The bus of destiny.

  Now that we were free of trees, free of llamas, the air tasted different. There was a definite tang to my tongue. A metallic taste like when you lick an AAA. (I can’t be the only one to have done this.) Still, the morning sun lifted my tiredness. With heaven’s light on my face I thought maybe everything would turn out all right in the end?

  ‘Wait,’ said Alexa, and we stopped.

  We stood on a patch of tarmac past the playground. Next to us was a dog-poo bin. The smell of its sharp contents tainted the air. The bus was a pine-cone’s throw away.

  ‘Have any of you got money?’ she asked.

  ‘Zed doesn’t use money. Zed has a card. Mum says—’

  ‘Okay,’ said Alexa. ‘Do you have your card with you?’

  The penny dropped. (In one sense.)

  ‘I don’t think they take cash any more. Do they take cash?’ I asked.

  ‘Do you have any cash?’ asked Alexa.

  ‘I think what Alexa’s trying to say is that taking the bus is a great idea but we’re stuck if we’ve no way of getting tickets. And also, what is that smell?’ said Ellie.

  The bus’s engine started. It shivered to life, the red rear lights turning on like eyes opening. EVIL (TREE DEMON?) EYES. A black cloud farted from its exhaust pipe. This was the first/last stop on the route. The driver was starting for the day, about to leave because the timetable ordered it. This all meant that it was definitely morning, to say nothing of the sun being up and birds singing and it being obviously morning in all these other ways too. We would have to get a wiggle on if we were going to get to Robbie and deliver me back to camp before breakfast register. A serious wiggle.

  ‘Look,’ said Ellie, sighing as if she were volunteering to take out a machine-gun nest single-handedly. ‘I’ll talk to the driver. How hard can it be to charm him?’

  And she strode off. Classic Ellie. A valuable member of the team etc.

  First things first: the driver wasn’t a man. The driver was a woman. It’s hard to know how to describe her. Stress has wiped her face from my memory and, also, she looked like she was made of metal. I know that sounds weird and I also know there’s such a thing as driverless cars. But the driver wasn’t a robot, the driver and her leaden face were just really, really not up for dealing with kids, especially at that time of the morning.

  We joined Ellie at the bus. It’s worth taking a moment to consider what we looked like: damp, dishevelled, ripped jackets, and huddled round her as she tried her best to explain to the driver why she really, honestly, should let us on. Think back to what we’d gone through – white-water rafting, falling in rivers, sheltering in old sheds, falling out of trees, being hit in the face by bats, escaping llamas – none of which was likely to make us seem attractive or even normal. And also, we’d not been to sleep. Not really, not counting the dead squirrel shed. And it was super early. Show me someone who’s at their best in the morning and I’ll show you a liar or a freak.

  Imagine yourself as that bus driver. She didn’t even look at Ellie. She tightened the top of a coffee Thermos, secured it somewhere off to her right, and contemplated the large black steering wheel like she’d never noticed it before.

  ‘So?’ said Ellie.

  ‘Stand clear of the closing door,’ said the driver.

  She pushed a button on the dashboard and the automatic doors shuddered together, something like a double-bladed guillotine that needed greasing. But we weren’t finished and, in particular, Zed wasn’t. He jabbed out an arm, which, in the circumstances – a quickly closing pair of doors – was a stupid thing to do. Their edges met in a rubber kiss. Even though his hand was trapped, it couldn’t have hurt that much. Like, it wasn’t cut from his wrist. But you should have heard the scream that came from his mouth. Cringe.
r />   ‘Arghhhhhggghhhhhghghghh, noooooooo!’ it sounded like, and Ellie tried pulling him from the door. I had this vision of the bus driving away and Zed having to run to match its speed until it got too fast and he tripped and … wow … but it wasn’t worth thinking about.

  Anyway, this didn’t happen. Instead the driver opened the door. Zed hopped from one foot to the other like he was enacting a war dance. His undamaged hand held the wrist of the bad one and, to be honest, you could see that there was nothing wrong with it. I mean, there wasn’t blood.

  The driver closed the doors. Again. The engine revved. Ellie had her arms round Zed, guiding him away from the scene of his injury.

  What now? We’d never get to my house in time without transport. This was the problem that flashed neon in my mind until Alexa (Alexa!) banged her palms against the reinforced glass of the door and shouted, ‘Wait!’

  The bus did not move. The doors opened. A miracle and maybe there is a god etc.

  ‘What now?’ said the driver.

  ‘How about we tell your supervisor that you trapped a child’s innocent hand in your door?’

  ‘I don’t have time for this,’ said the driver, turning back to her mesmerising steering wheel.

  ‘But maybe your supervisor does,’ said Alexa, visibly growing in front of us. ‘And maybe they’ll be interested in your abandonment of four lost, cold, slightly wet, innocent children who only wanted a lift into town and promised they’d pay when they were reunited with their parents.’

  ‘You don’t know my supervisor. He couldn’t care less, to be fair. Horrible man.’

  ‘But I know the customer services email address. It’s printed on the side of the bus. And I know you’ve a responsibility to ensure our safety.’

  We looked at the side of the bus. There was an advert for orange juice. Next to this was a small square in the bus company corporate colours and the question HOW WAS YOUR TRIP? and an email address.

  Earlier I said the driver looked as if she was made of metal. She now melted.

  ‘Customers need to pay for their tickets,’ she said. ‘It’s the law.’