‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he replied in a stern yet friendly tone. Any hint that Sult had ever been bothered by the event that had taken place here that morning was long since gone. He walked to the nearest of the prisoners, the one who had been added to take the place of Amba and by which name she was insistent on being called, and he examined the manacles holding her arms to the side of the chair. There was nowhere to insert a key, no series of buttons for a combination lock, and no pressure pad for a thumbprint or D.N.A. check.
‘I think these are inertia manacles,’ he said as he opened this fake Amba’s for her. Then he looked across to where Joseph was kneeling by the real Amba’s side. ‘Did you not try to just open them?’
‘Inertia?’ Judith asked questioningly. She seemed more than a little surprised at how easily Sult had released the prisoner.
‘It’s a simple idea. Anyone can open these things, but the pressure has to be applied from the outside. If the manacles feel pressure from the inside they lock all the tighter, making it virtually impossible to escape from them unless you have at least one free hand. They’re considered ideal for this sort of transportation.’
Sult then looked around at the empty seat that was positioned directly opposite where the fake Amba was.
Judith saw what he was looking at. The manacles that had sat on the arms of that chair had been torn out of their housings, and though the torso brace appeared to be in one piece, the manacles that had held this prisoner’s legs in place had suffered the same fate as those that had held the arms. This prisoner had somehow snapped the manacles from the inside.
‘But not totally impossible,’ said a voice, echoing her thoughts at the sight of the damage. Up until now the prisoners had been sitting quietly. Now it was one of these that had spoken.
‘Not totally,’ Sult agreed. He looked towards the voice, and again Judith found herself following his eyes to the speaker. She was sitting next to Joseph’s wife Amba.
‘She needs a doctor,’ Joseph said insistently.
‘Yes,’ Judith agreed, still feeling a little helpless. She wanted to take Amba and get away as quickly as she could. They had what they had come for; why were they still hanging around? Sounding calmer than she felt, she said, ‘But I can’t see that happening. As soon as we take her to a hospital they’ll either just kill her or hand her back over to the authorities.’
‘We could kidnap a doctor,’ Joseph suggested. There was only a little bit of hope in his voice.
‘Not a chance,’ Judith replied emphatically. ‘I’ll help you with this, but I won’t be a party to anything like that.’
Joseph, having freed his wife of her chains, now lifted her free of the chair and headed towards the back of the truck with her. ‘I think she’s broken a couple of ribs, maybe three. I don’t think it’s as bad as I originally feared,’ he said to Judith as he passed her. Then he hovered at the edge of the truck. It was clear from his expression that he was scared to jump down whilst carrying his wife in case he did even more damage to her.
Judith, realizing that there was finally something she could do, hopped off the back of the truck and turned so that Joseph could pass Amba to her. She did her best to ignore the three guards who lay together now. Sult’s jacket had been stretched as much as possible to cover the faces of two of them, but it didn’t quite reach the third.
Joseph then jumped down and took Amba back, carrying her carefully in his arms over to the car. As he walked, he looked similar to a husband carrying his wife across the threshold, but the car was parked a fair walk away.
Joseph’s demeanor did nothing to lighten the spirit of the day as they made the short trip to the car. He had acted all day as if there was some sort of a cloud hanging over his head, but now that his worst fears seemed to be on the edge of coming to fruition, all his attention was centered about his wife. He may not even have noticed that Judith walked in step alongside him as they made their way to the car. It was certain that not a word passed between the two of them.
Again, with his wife in his arms, Joseph would have had a hard time opening the car’s rear door if Judith hadn’t been present to help. He laid her lovingly along the back seat and tucked her legs in gently so they could close the door again. Once they were ready to leave they would have to ease her into a sitting position so that all four of them could fit in, but for now there was no reason not to let her relax as much as possible.
Judith turned to head back to the truck. Though she’d prefer for them to be leaving now, she wanted to see what had happened to Sult. She also had the idea that Joseph had also intended to go back there, perhaps to try and convince her and Sult to release the others. However, Joseph had instead opened one of the front doors of the car and had climbed in. He was now kneeling backwards on the passenger seat in the front of the car, his arms resting lightly on the headrest as he kept his eyes fixed on his wife.
He must’ve realized that Judith was looking at him, because without looking up at her he said, ‘Sult might need your help. I can stay here and watch her. I want to be with her in case…in case something happens.’
Judith felt helpless. She wanted to protest and stay with him, to comfort him and maybe to help make Amba more comfortable. Amba might be Joseph’s wife, but she was also Judith’s friend, and she too wanted to be there for Amba should she regain consciousness, or should the worst happen.
All in all, it hasn’t been much of a successful day, she thought to herself as she started to head back to the truck. It was true that they had obtained their key objective and rescued Joseph’s wife, but at what a cost! Three dead soldiers and Amba looking so ill she might not survive the night. Two or three cracked ribs, Joseph had said. That didn’t sound too bad for how bad she looked. But then Judith would have been the first to admit that she had no knowledge of medicine.
She had made maybe half the distance back to the truck when Sult appeared. He seemed to reach up and aid the descent of another cat. It wasn’t easy to tell in the rain, but Judith had the feeling that it was the same cat who had spoken to them earlier.
Sult took fairly large strides, forcing the cat he was with to almost have to run to keep up. At first he made a few hand gestures towards Judith, trying to get her to turn around and head back to the car, but Judith stood there and waited for him to reach her.
Before he reached her she noticed even more activity at the rear of the truck. A number of other prisoners were emerging from the vehicle’s rear and hopping down to the ground. Then they turned to assist still others out of the vehicle. Most of them upon leaving the truck appeared to be looking about, lost. Being of domesticated stock, chances were that they hadn’t seen anywhere outside of London in their lives, assuming they had even been out of their homes. The plethora of trees and a road that seemed to lead nowhere could have seemed very daunting.
‘Who’s this?’ she asked insistently, indicating the cat with Sult and then waving at those near the rear of the truck, ‘and what’s this?’
Sult’s eyes fell on her accusingly. ‘When I finished checking damage to the empty chairs, I turned to help Joseph and Amba. I have a little bit of training in field medicine, you know, and I thought I might’ve been able to see if we could maybe move her without exacerbating her injuries. But when I turned around you and Joe had gone and taken Amba with you.’
‘We were going to have to move her anyway,’ Judith snapped back. ‘Did you think if she was too ill to move, Joseph would accept leaving her behind? Especially after everything we’ve done to rescue her in the first place?’
‘There are ways to move people without making their injuries worse,’ Sult snarled. ‘I might have been able to suggest the best way to move her. As it is, she could die because of the way she was moved.’
Judith didn’t reply. She felt Sult probably deserved an apology. He was right; they ought to have waited for him. It wasn’t she who had carried Amba out of the truck, and Sult had been taking so long with his examination of the broken manacle
s. She turned and started to head back to the car, for a moment forgetting that Sult hadn’t answered her questions.
The cat also fell into step, finding it easier to keep up at this pace than she had at the pace Sult had originally struck out from the truck at. She kept to the side of Sult and away from Judith, perhaps just a little bit wary of her.
‘So who’s this?’ Judith asked again as they walked. She kept her voice calm this time.
‘This is Starlight,’ Sult replied simply.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Starlight offered with a big, friendly beaming smile, poking her head around the bulk of Sult to see Judith.
‘Starlight used to be the pet of the man known as Charles Dorris, better known as Slim,’ Sult informed her calmly.
‘The Cat killer?’ Judith blurted out.
‘The same,’ Starlight offered. ‘Once there were three of us, but I’m the only one left. The other two were killed in that, that Cattery.’
‘What has happened to your people these last few days is evil,’ Judith told her, then turning to Sult, ‘but I agreed only that we would release Amba. So what is she doing with us? And why are there large numbers of cats milling around the rear of the truck like a lot of lost ducklings?’
‘Well, in Starlight’s case, we have the room,’ Sult explained, as if that alone should be reason enough. Then he continued, ‘And if I’m to help Amba at all, I’ll need a nurse. Starlight here has a little bit of medical experience. You see, it would appear that Slim Dorris isn’t quite the spontaneous hero that we’ve been led to believe. His entire life is a lie, it seems. He’s a soldier in the Elite Guard much like I was, and like me, he has an elementary understanding of medicine, only he passed on some of this knowledge to his pets.’
Judith considered the situation for a moment. She was also amazed about what she had just heard concerning Slim Dorris. Assuming she had been told the truth, of course. And that was the problem. Starlight could be lying. She looked Sult straight in the eyes and said, ‘Well, if you’re really sure you need her.’
‘Well,’ Sult commented, ‘her knowledge is mostly of human anatomy, but the anatomy of the cat is so similar that I think we’ll do fine. That’s always been one of my favorite conundrums of life. The way their race seemed to spring up spontaneously, and yet they are so similar to us that they must almost certainly be some off-shoot of our own race, and yet human D.N.A. and cat D.N.A. just aren’t compatible. There are no half-breeds!’
‘You wouldn’t be the first to wonder about that,’ Judith replied. She had seen scientists on the newspaper come up with all sorts of theories for the origin of cat kind, and yet every one of them seemed to have at least one hole of some description. ‘So what are your plans for all the others? We don’t have room for them too. And I remember saying I was here to rescue Amba. Now I may let Starlight go, as you need her to help Amba, but releasing all of them…’
‘I’m sorry, Judith,’ Sult said, ‘but when the soldiers come to find out where their truck has gotten to, any cat left in the area will either be taken back to the Cattery, where they’ll be destroyed, or they’ll be taken on to their original destination, where again they’ll be destroyed. I was fully behind you originally because my friend Fredrick Hughes was one of the guards on the truck and I didn’t want him to get into trouble over the loss of all the cats. Now that he’s dead, though, it seems wrong to leave the others here to await such a terrible fate. There’s a reason I left the Cattery Guard in the first place, you know.’
‘And when those cats join up with the…’ Judith started.
‘They won’t,’ Sult interjected. ‘They’re of domesticated stock. Most of them abhor violence in any form. Besides, once the army finds the truck empty, they’ll probably search the nearby forests, and I expect most of them will be recaptured before nightfall.’ Perhaps he added this last bit for Judith’s sake: ‘Releasing them might well help buy us some time. They won’t know to stop searching once they’ve found everyone, because we’ll have two of those they are seeking. Not to mention the two that escaped before you got here.’
Judith still didn’t like it, but she supposed it made a sort of sense. With the guards dead, there was no real reason they shouldn’t help the other inmates. Except she didn’t want to overtly help those she had been brought up to consider the enemy. She’d help Joseph, sure, but he was a friend and was only interested in rescuing his wife and not in destroying mankind. Helping him didn’t make her a traitor to her own race. Did it?
As soon as they reached the car, Sult told Joseph, ‘I think Starlight and I will sit in the back with Amba.’ Joseph tried to protest, but Sult continued, ‘I know you’d like to be next to her when we leave here, but both Starlight and I have a little bit of experience with medicinal matters, and that might be enough to keep her alive.’ He turned to Judith. ‘I think you should drive.’
Joseph looked at Starlight as if waiting to be introduced. He then turned his head back to where his wife was lying and stayed as he was, kneeling over the back of the seat.
‘Me?’ Judith said, more than a little surprised and perhaps disappointed. If she was driving, she wouldn’t be able to catch up on any more sleep. ‘But this is Joseph’s car, why me?’
‘Joseph isn’t going to be much good at concentrating on the roads while there’s a small chance that his wife might suddenly die behind him. You’re the only one left,’ Sult told her. ‘Amba is going to need a lot of rest. We need to find a hotel room. We can stay there for a few nights.’
‘Once we get to Byfleet?’ Judith suggested hopefully.
‘No, I think if there’s a hotel in the next town, we should stop there. The less we travel, the better it will be for Amba.’ Sult said. He started to say, ‘And we’ll…’
Judith interrupted him, ‘And what about my car? All my stuff is in the back of it. I’m not going to be able to spend the night in a hotel without my stuff. I’ll have nothing to wear, for one thing.’
‘That’s easy,’ Sult replied. ‘Once we’ve settled into the hotel, you can take Joseph’s car and go to fetch yours.’
‘I suppose,’ agreed Judith reluctantly.
‘And don’t worry about money. We still have a fair number of these counterfeit notes left over from the transaction we didn’t make,’ Sult added, perhaps as a private jab to Joseph.
‘You knew?’ Joseph looked up, surprised, and then added cagily, ‘And you’re still willing to help?’
‘I had a close look at the money while I was waiting for you to turn up; there wasn’t a lot else to do. Most of these notes are useless for anything except a bonfire, but I think there’s about twenty thousand here that we might be able to get away with. Hopefully the concierge at the hotel doesn’t look too closely.’
‘I was rushed, mate,’ Joseph agreed.
‘I should be angry that you surrendered three quarters of a million in real notes for this garbage. But I guess if everything had gone according to plan, we wouldn’t have any of it left. Besides, I understand why you felt you had to do it.’
‘I’m not sure I do,’ Judith protested. She didn’t wait for it to be explained to her, though, so maybe she wasn’t really as angry as she thought. Instead she walked around the car and climbed into the driver’s seat.
‘We’ll also need to get some of that makeup stuff you people put on, on both Amba and Starlight so we can get them into the hotel. We could try to sneak them in, but I think you probably brought enough for quite a few weeks,’ Sult said.
‘I brought plenty, mate,’ Joseph agreed. He opened the small storage area on his side of the dashboard. There wasn’t really a lot in view, but then Joseph added, ‘And there’s a whole box of the stuff in the back.’
‘Good,’ Sult said, his voice seeming a little strained.
‘It’ll have to be slap dash, though,’ Joseph commented. ‘We won’t have time or enough room to do it properly. Let’s hope that no one looks too closely.’
‘Okay, let’s get going,’
Sult insisted. ‘We need to get away from here as quickly as we can. We can apply the makeup to Amba and Starlight once we’ve found somewhere safer to do it. We don’t want to hang around here.’
Judith looked around at him, surprised, and asked, ‘What’s the sudden hurry?’
Sult pointed up at the sky. There was something that looked very like a shuttlecraft heading towards them. It was still a long way off, but it was eating the distance between them at a very fast pace. ‘I think the search party for this truck is about to arrive.’
Starlight and Sult climbed into the rear of the car from opposite sides, easing Amba gently around into a seated position as they did so. She groaned once as they moved her, and an anxious-looking Joseph moved his head from Sult to Starlight and back to Sult.
‘If anything, that’s a good sign,’ Sult looked round to tell him quickly, trying to comfort Joseph. But time was of the essence. They had to get away before the shuttle arrived, or they might have a hard time trying to explain to the soldiers what had happened here and what they were doing with two, no, three cats in the car.
As soon as Sult was in enough to close the door and Starlight was similarly positioned on her side, Sult said, ‘Okay, let’s go, let’s get out of here quickly.’
Joseph turned away from his vigil over Amba just long enough to apply his thumb to the small pressure pad and spring the car into life. And then they were away.
26
The Fate Of The Others
Lara couldn’t really guess how long she had stood there in shock. She would have said no more than a minute, but she couldn’t be sure. She could see the road clearly from where Khosi had decided it was time for a nap, and things had moved on a bit there. There were now three figures moving about near the truck—reinforcements, or maybe just civilians who happened to have been passing by? They were climbing into the back of the truck and then out again. One of them seemed to be trying to resuscitate the soldiers and apparently failing. All three were talking and sometimes even shouting to each other. The occasional words reached her, but she couldn’t make them out with the noise of the rain.
London Wild Page 49
