The Long Weekend

by Savita Kalhan

  Sam wiped his nose on his sleeve, and said, 'You hungry, Lloyd?'

  Lloyd shrugged, and Sam took that to mean yes. He had stuffed a muffin and a banana in his coat pocket at lunch at school. Yesterday. It had only been yesterday, but it had been the longest weekend of Sam's life – and it was only Saturday evening. The banana and the muffin would have to keep them going, as he hadn't thought of swiping any food from the kitchen in the house. All he'd thought about then was finding a sharp knife. He dug into his pocket and found the battered muffin and bruised banana, but they were edible and that's what mattered. He divided them out between them.

  'Just have to imagine they're something else,' Sam suggested.

  They ate slowly. Both of them knew there wasn't anything else to eat after this.

  'It'll keep us going until tomorrow,' Sam said. 'The police will find us by then.'

  'No, they won't,' Lloyd said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  Sam turned to face Lloyd. 'Yes, they will, Lloyd.'

  'You don't have to pretend any more, Sam.'

  'I'm not pretending,' Sam insisted. 'They're looking for us, and they're going to find us. It's just a matter of surviving until they do.'

  'We're going to die here.'

  'Don't be stupid! ''Course we're not!' Sam hissed angrily. 'We're getting out of here alive!'

  'If you say so, Sam,' Lloyd replied, his voice had dropped to a whisper. He sounded defeated.

  'I do. I do,' Sam repeated.

  They sat without speaking for a while. Outside it got darker and then night fell. The shed door still stood wide open and there was nothing Sam could do about it. He desperately wanted to get up and shut it, but he knew he couldn't do that. They moved closer together as the air turned chilly. It was going to be a clear night, which meant frost, which meant it was going to get colder and colder. Would they freeze to death? Sam wondered. Maybe that was what the man was hoping: that they were in the woods and would freeze to death, and he'd come out in the morning and find their frozen bodies. He wouldn't have to bother killing them then.

  They weren't going to die. Help was coming, but what if it came too late for them?

  Sam needed another plan.

  15

  A good plan. Easier said than done, Sam thought. What were their options? To stay in the shed, or to leave the shed. They couldn't stay in the shed forever. Why not? asked the other voice in Sam's head. The man might come back and tear the place apart and then he'd find them, or he might torch all the sheds, or there might be guard dogs in a kennel somewhere in the grounds and he might set them loose on them. The man was capable of anything. He was a monster. Sam thought he might be hallucinating now, but were they such far-fetched theories? Sam didn't think they were, although now he thought about it maybe there weren't any dogs because if there were, he would have heard them barking.

  Sam needed the loo, even though he hadn't drunk anything since the night before. Lloyd probably needed the loo, too. Well, they could always find a corner of the shed to piss in, so they didn't have to leave their hideout for that. Sam rubbed his temples with his good hand. His head had started hurting and it made it really hard to think properly.

  He just wanted to stay where he was. He didn't want to go out into the cold, dark night – not with the man somewhere out there searching for them.

  He'd ask Lloyd. 'We need a plan, Lloyd,' he said.

  Lloyd shifted his position next to him, but didn't say anything. Sam had expected that.

  'We need to get out of here. Out of the grounds. We need to find the road, or some houses, or something. No one knows we're here.'

  'He knows.'

  'Yeah, but he doesn't know we're hiding in here,' Sam replied.

  'He'll find us.'

  'No. He won't. He's already looked here once. He won't come back.'

  'How do you know?'

  'I just do.'

  'He won't give up.'

  'I know. That's why we need to get out of here,' Sam said. 'We need an escape plan.'

  Lloyd lapsed into silence again, which Sam took to mean he couldn't think of anything either.

  'I've already gone round the fence most of the way round the edge of the grounds, and there was no way through it. It's too high for us to climb, but we could dig under it, maybe. What do you think? Lloyd?'

  After a long pause when Sam thought Lloyd wasn't going to answer, Lloyd said, 'Okay.'

  'Okay,' Sam repeated. If Lloyd hadn't said okay, Sam would have happily stayed in the shed. But Lloyd had said okay, so now Sam had to sort out the rest of the plan. Digging stuff, implements, weren't going to be a problem as Sam knew where they were kept. Getting them wasn't going to be too special though as Sam would have to go alone. He didn't have to go alone, but it was the sensible thing to do. He couldn't drag Lloyd round on a tour of the sheds.

  'I think there are shovels and stuff in the other big shed. I'll go and get a couple and meet you round the back of this shed. Count to a hundred, that'll give me enough time to get the stuff, and when you get to a hundred come out. Use the back door, and just wait for me. We'll head into the woods together. If you hear him, go back and hide in the cubbyhole, or if it's too late for that, then head for the woods without me. Have you got that?'

  'Yes,' Lloyd said. 'But . . .'

  'But what?'

  'Can't we do it in the morning? When it's light?'

  'He'd see us, wouldn't he? He can't see us in the dark.'

  'But we can't see him either.'

  'We'll take it in turns to dig while the other one keeps a lookout from a hiding place in the trees,' Sam suggested. 'That way he won't be able to sneak up on us. And besides we'll be armed with a shovel. He won't know what's hit him. Okay? Lloyd?'

  Lloyd nodded.

  Sam crawled out of the cubbyhole first and Lloyd followed. He directed Lloyd towards the far corner where the back door was and headed towards the front to the open door himself. Outside it was pitch black. Sam couldn't see anything. He suddenly didn't want to go out through the open door, but he knew he had to. Lloyd was already counting to a hundred. Sam stepped out of the shed, his back hugging the wall. He half-expected a torch to be switched on in his face and someone to say, 'Gotcha!', and just the thought of that paralysed him for a minute. Fear did that to you, even just the thought of it. It stopped you from functioning. But Sam couldn't let it stop him now.

  He moved quickly towards the other shed and threw himself across the open space between the two sheds. He squatted down and crawled through the wide-open door. Propped up against the wall was a collection of gardening implements. Sam groped through them, looking for two shovels. He found one and laid it down on the floor beside him. Lloyd must have got to about sixty now in the count and Sam still couldn't find another shovel. He found a small trowel and a potting fork and laid them down next to the shovel, counting in his head from sixty. When he got to ninety, he gave up looking and picked up what he had. It was time to get going.

  He crawled out of the open door and went round the side of the shed before standing up. Then he ran, hunched over, to where Lloyd was waiting behind the other shed, except when Sam got there, Lloyd wasn't there. He dropped the stuff on the ground next to the wall and tried the door. It was locked or bolted from the inside.

  'Lloyd? Lloyd?' Sam whispered through the door.

  There was no response.

  Sam thought he heard a twig snapping underfoot somewhere behind him and swung round. There was no one there. He bent down and picked up the potting fork. Now he was armed. He kept it in his right hand while he made his way round to the front of the shed and back through the open door.

  'Lloyd? Lloyd? It's me, Sam.'

  'Sam, it's locked,' Lloyd whispered back from the darkness.

  Sam had assumed it wouldn't be locked. Why would you lock one of the shed doors and leave the other one unlocked? It didn't make sense. Sam didn't have time to make any sense out of it.

  'I'll take you out the front. Hurry up,' Sam whispered ba
ck.

  Sam kept watch while Lloyd made his way through the shed. It was too dark to see much, but if a shadow flitted through the trees then Sam would have seen it.

  'Follow me,' Sam said.

  He clutched Lloyd's arm and led him round to the back of the shed. The garden tools were lying where Sam had left them, but he had to let go of Lloyd's sleeve to pick them up. He started heading towards the trees, and a minute passed before Sam realised that Lloyd hadn't moved. He ran back for him.

  'Lloyd, you've got to follow me. I can't hold onto you. My hands are full. Do you understand, Lloyd?'

  In the darkness, Sam couldn't tell whether Lloyd had nodded or shaken his head.

  'Come on. Stick close.'

  Sam stepped away from the shed and this time Lloyd followed close on his heels. The trees were densely packed on this side of the grounds, which Sam thought was a good thing. Even if the man did see them, it would be hard for him to follow, and impossible for him to know which tree they were hiding behind.

  It was cold, and the cold bit through their coats, through their clothes, and through their skin right down to their bones. They needed fleeces, and woolly hats, and gloves, and boots. Maybe Lloyd had been right and they should have stayed in the shed. It had been much warmer in there, in their snug little cubbyhole. It was too late to go back now, Sam thought. Or was it? No, it wasn't. But . . . To go back was almost like admitting defeat, and Sam didn't know if he'd have the courage to leave the shed again, especially in daylight. He felt more vulnerable in daylight. It was true you could see everything, but everything could see you.

  Sam headed on straight through the trees. He couldn't see the fence yet, or even where the trees ended, but he knew it was only a matter of minutes before they reached the perimeter. He hefted the shovel over his shoulder and wished for the hundredth time he could swap it over into his other hand. His rucksack was weighing him down too, but he was reluctant to get rid of anything in it just in case he needed it later.

  Unlike the other side of the grounds where there was a space between the end of the trees and the fence, here the trees went right up to the fence, which was why Sam almost knocked himself out on it. He had been looking back to check on Lloyd, who had dropped too far back, and walked smack bang into it. He doubled over as the pain blinded him, and he had to let it abate before he could do anything.

  Any other time what had just happened would have been funny. Lloyd would have rolled around laughing and Sam would have felt extremely stupid for a while and then joined in with the laughter. Lloyd came up beside him and didn't seem to find it funny, and Sam wasn't laughing either. He straightened up. Nothing was broken, only a collection of bruises added to the list of injuries, but Sam didn't care any more. They were at the fence.

  'Pick a tree with a wide trunk and keep a lookout, Lloyd. I'll start digging,' Sam said. 'If you hear anything whistle, and then hide. Worse comes to the worst you can always climb up a tree and hide there. He'll never think of looking up.

  'Um, I can't whistle properly, Sam,' Lloyd mumbled.

  'Then hoot, like an owl. There are lots of them in the woods. Hoot twice, that'll be our signal.'

  'Okay.'

  Sam turned back to look at the fence. It wasn't quite as he had remembered it. He had thought every railing was anchored in the ground, but it wasn't. It was every tenth railing, with a connecting bar running along the bottom of the fence. The horizontal bar was about three inches off the ground, which meant that Sam didn't have to dig too deep. All he needed was another several inches, and they'd be through.

  Sam set the shovel to the ground with gusto. He'd never done any digging in his life, but he knew what to do. He just wasn't expecting the ground to be so hard. Solid, compacted earth. He pushed the shovel into the ground and stamped on it to get it into the ground. Then he levered the handle of the shovel backwards. He didn't get much earth out of the ground for all the effort that went into it. Several times, he made the mistake of hammering the shovel into the ground too hard and then he couldn't lever it out. He learnt slowly that moving a smaller quantity of earth with the shovel worked better even though it felt like he wasn't getting anywhere. Several inches hadn't sounded like a lot, but now it felt like it was miles away. He'd barely scraped the surface.

  Then the owl hooted twice.

  Sam kicked some leaves over the fresh soil he had exposed and ran back to where Lloyd was hiding.

  'What is it?'

  'Over there?' Lloyd pointed back to where they had come from, towards where the sheds were.

  Sam watched, but he didn't see anything. His watch said ten twenty. It was late. Didn't the man ever sleep? He waited with Lloyd until his watch said ten thirty, and said, 'I think he's gone a different way. We're okay for now. Do you want to take over the digging?'

  Lloyd shook his head. 'I-I-I'm sorry, Sam. I can't go out there. I just can't.' He moved closer to the tree, as if the tree was his protector.

  Sam wasn't sure what Lloyd meant because where Lloyd was standing was out there, but he kind of had a vague inkling and he didn't want Lloyd to get all upset.

  'It's okay. I'll do the digging, you do the looking out.' Sam looked up at the tree Lloyd had chosen to hide behind. It was an old oak with nicely spaced branches, and it hadn't lost that many of its leaves yet. 'Good choice, Lloyd. Do you think you can climb it?' he asked.

  Lloyd looked up at it. 'Don't know.'

  'Give it a go while I'm standing here. I'll give you a leg up.'

  Sam linked his fingers together and got ready, but Lloyd didn't move.

  'Come on, Lloyd. It's much safer up there than down here, unless you want to help me dig!'

  'Your hand, Sam,' Lloyd said pointing at Sam's cut.

  'Oh. Yeah. I forgot about that. Thanks.' Sam realised his cut would open up again if he helped Lloyd up that way.

  'Okay, I'll bend over and you climb on top of my back. You should be able to reach the first branch. Ready?'

  Lloyd nodded. Sam steadied himself against the tree trunk while Lloyd climbed up. It didn't take him long to get several feet up in the tree. Sam had to get back to digging. Time was passing fast. It was almost eleven o'clock.

  'Don't forget to signal if you see anything.'

  'Sam?'

  'Yeah?'

  'Be careful.'

  'I will.'

  The digging went slowly, very slowly. Sam couldn't swap hands because he couldn't use his left hand, and he couldn't use his right ankle, although he had tried, because of his earlier fall. Every now and then he would straighten up and survey his work. He was making progress, but literally inch by inch. The hole was still too small to slither through. It had gone past midnight, and Sam kept digging and scraping the earth back. He hadn't taken a break for ages and his back was screaming with pain. It was a job just to stand up straight without crying out. He was just wondering whether Lloyd had fallen asleep in the tree when the owl hooted twice.

  16

  Sam hadn't been sure whether the first two hoots had been a false alarm. It was easy to see things in the darkness that weren't really there. When he had gone over to Lloyd the first time, he hadn't seen anything where Lloyd had pointed, but that didn't mean that there wasn't anything there, and Lloyd had a better vantage point now from up in the tree.

  Sam looked around the woods. He couldn't see anything at all. He was tempted to carry on digging. The hole was nowhere near big enough for them to slither through yet. He needed more time on it.

  Stop dithering, Sam, decide and decide fast. There was a chance that Lloyd really had seen something, so it would be stupid, idiotic, to ignore his warning hoots. Sam decided. He lay the shovel flat in the hole and covered it with leaves again; it concealed the shovel, but he had to stamp down the pile of fresh soil he'd dug up as well. Then he headed over to Lloyd's tree.

  It would be safe up there. He could rest while the man went past on his search, and when it was all clear, he could get back to digging. Only then did Sam realise that
there was no way he could climb the tree, not without a boost up, or a ladder or something, and he didn't have a ladder. He didn't have anything. All he could do was hide behind a tree while the man went past, and that was too close to the ground, too close to his reach, too close to danger. And that's when his heart started thumping loudly again and his skin began to crawl. It hadn't done that for a while and it came as a shock to Sam. He thought he'd got over that stage. He hadn't realised he was still so scared inside.

  'Where is he?' Sam hissed up the tree to Lloyd.

  'There's a light, like a torch. It's swinging backwards and forwards through the trees. Somewhere over that way, towards the left.'

  Lloyd's voice was disjointed and far away. He was way up the tree, way out of reach. Sam wanted to be up there too. He jumped and managed to catch hold of the lowest branch. He dangled off it with one hand, trying to swing his legs up on to it. He couldn't do it. He had to use his other hand as well if he stood any chance of making it up. He let go and jumped again, catching the branch with both hands, eyes tearing up as the jolt of pain seared through his left hand and up his arm.

  'How far away?'

  'Can't tell, Sam. It's moving slowly, I think. I can't tell. Hurry, Sam!'

  Sam tried swinging his legs up, but it didn't work. He had to pull up more with one hand and get his other elbow onto the branch so he could lever his body over the branch and then he would be up, and out of reach, and safe. But he couldn't do it with his left hand, the pain was killing him already, and his right arm was aching from the digging. Tears were flowing freely down his cheeks, but he kept on trying, and no matter how many times he said, 'I can do it. I can do it,' he knew he really couldn't.

  Sam let go of the branch and dropped down to the ground, panting. A tree had never defeated him before, but he was running out of time. He had to find another one, away from Lloyd, but he didn't know if Lloyd would be all right without him.

  'What are you doing?' Lloyd whispered. 'Climb up, Sam. Come and hide with me.'