by Alan Early
While the guard’s back was turned, Arthur took his chance. He crept around the stack of boxes and edged towards the open doorway. He could hear the sound of running footsteps and barked orders coming from the lower floors as other guards searched for him. He glanced over his shoulder: the guard in the room still had his back to him, scanning the mounds. Arthur took a long stride forward and as he did–
Splech!
Arthur looked at his sock as it squelched loudly.
What a traitor, he thought.
‘Oy!’ roared a voice from behind him as the guard swivelled on the spot. ‘Stop right where you are!’
Arthur did the exact opposite, running out of the storeroom, slamming the door behind him and turning the lock on the outside. Behind him the guard pounded on the door, alerting those further down the staircase. As soon as they spotted him, they bounded up the steps. The guard in the storeroom then started to throw his weight against the door in an attempt to break it open. Arthur looked around frantically, trying to find an escape route. To his right was the door leading back to the camp itself, and pounding up the stairs to his left were a dozen of the Wolfsguard, armed with batons and crossbows. In front of him was the edge of the staircase and beyond it a narrow gap with a sheer drop to the ground floor, four storeys down. There was a low safety wall around the edge. He glanced over and could see even more guards sprinting up the stairs.
There was nothing else for it. Arthur jumped onto the wall, took a deep breath and looked down at the flood below. What he saw made him pause. This is insane, he told himself. If I jump and miss the water I’ll end up as a puddle of blood, gore and shattered bones on the concrete. But if I don’t jump the guards will catch me and probably submit me to a fate worse than death.
His thoughts were cut short as the guard burst out of the storeroom behind him. Barely realising what he was doing, Arthur leapt feet first off the edge. He held his breath as he plummeted, keeping his body as straight and rigid as possible, ready for the impact. The bag slid awkwardly around on his back, threatening to unbalance him. Regardless, he kept his mind fixed on his intended destination: the flood below.
He soared past a row of jet skis idling at the landing bay and smashed into the water. The wave from his impact sent one guard – who’d just arrived on his jet ski – flying from the vessel, and the force of it knocked the air from Arthur’s lungs. Seconds later, his feet hit the submerged ground and he pushed himself back up towards the surface. He gulped in air greedily then saw that the jet ski the guard had fallen from was just beside him. The engine was still running. He swam to it, gripped one of the handles and pulled himself up. The original driver was swimming towards it now too, roaring every expletive under the sun at him.
Arthur looked at the controls. He had never operated anything like this; he’d never even driven his dad’s car around the driveway at home. He twirled one of the handles and the jet ski revved; the front end of it soared straight into the air, almost throwing him off and sending the guard somersaulting backwards in the water. But he managed to hold on and eased his grip on the control. The jet ski settled down and, with a tweak of the second handle, started moving towards the exit.
The guards who’d been running up the stairs had turned and were now racing back down. When Arthur saw them coming he revved the engine once more. The jet ski knocked off one of the side walls but he managed to get it under control and steer it out through the door to freedom.
He didn’t know which way to go but remembered coming from the left-hand side the night he was captured. He figured that the guards probably travelled all over the city but he just didn’t feel safe retracing their exact steps, so he chose to go right. As he started to turn, he heard more engines behind him. He looked over his shoulder to see that a handful of guards had reached their jet skis and were revving them up.
Arthur twisted his own throttle and the jet ski flew away from Croke Park, slicing through the water with ease and sending waves over the rooftops of the buildings on both sides. Without looking, he knew that the guards were on his tail; he could hear the engines roaring aggressively behind him. He hunched over the controls, willing the engine to work harder, to go faster.
Just then, something appeared in the corner of his vision. Movement. He glanced back to see a person on one of the rooftops. Arthur was going so fast he couldn’t work out if it was a man, woman or child, but he managed to see what happened next.
The person pulled something out of the water in Arthur’s wake. If he hadn’t been looking for it, he’d never have spotted it. It was a metal cable and, as the person held it, it ran taut across the water. The pursuing guards crashed straight into the cable and were thrown backwards and off their jet skis. Arthur slowed and turned to get a proper look.
Before the guards could resurface and get back on their slowing skis, more people leapt and slid from where they’d been hiding on the rooftops. They swam to the skis and boarded them. Arthur hadn’t a clue who his saviours were, but he was thankful they’d been there just at the right time to save him.
Chapter Twelve
In total, there were five people in the group that rescued Arthur from the pursuing Wolfsguard: one either side of the cable, holding it taut, and three more who commandeered the driverless jet skis. As Arthur watched, one of the cable holders dropped their end while the other one coiled it in; then they both slid down the roofs and mounted their own jet skis which had been hidden behind the roofs of the houses they were on.
The guards had just broken through the surface of the water and were floundering about angrily as Arthur’s saviours sped off. Arthur wondered who they were. After all, they hadn’t looked much older than him. But, he decided, any enemies of the Wolfsguard were friends of his. So, hoping that, whoever they were, they were trustworthy, Arthur followed them. It was difficult at first to keep pace. His rescuers clearly had a lot more experience on jet skis than he did. He’d just gotten used to the quick turns they were making when they took a particularly sharp twist down a narrow alleyway between two tall office buildings.
The alleyway was just wide enough for the jet skis to go down in a single line and Arthur really had to concentrate to make sure he didn’t bounce off the side of the tall, plain walls. They emerged from the alley into a wide open space with half-submerged fences around the perimeter. Arthur peered under the water to see a few cars parked there and a white grid painted on the ground. It had been a car park before the flood had taken over, he realised.
The other jet-ski riders hid around the corner from the alley opening. Arthur did likewise. As they waited in silence, he took the chance to study his saviours properly for the first time. They were all in their teens or pre-teens and most of them looked exceptionally fit. They each wore a swimming suit of some sort – either full-body neoprene wetsuits or a simple pair of surf shorts. The sole girl among the group was wearing a one-piece swimsuit: it was pink with little yellow palm trees on it that seemed out of place in the post-apocalyptic urban landscape. She was in her mid-teens, had dreadlocks down to her waist and several beaded bangles around both wrists. Next to her was a boy who looked a little younger than Arthur. He had a crooked nose, as if it had been broken on several occasions, and was pudgy around his middle, his gut hanging over the waistband of the neon-green beach shorts he was wearing. He had a backpack slung over his shoulders into which Arthur had seen him put the wound-up cable. By the way the bag sagged against his bare back, Arthur supposed it must be very heavy, but the boy didn’t seem to mind. Despite his young age, with his nose and girth he gave off the air of someone you wouldn’t want to trifle with. The other cable-holder was a boy who looked to be around Stace’s age. His face resembled a map marked out by lines of acne and he was also in surf shorts, covered in a Hawaiian pattern. He was wearing a sleeveless blue hoodie, swinging open to reveal his skinny bare chest.
The other two were in full wetsuits. They each had diving gear pushed up to their foreheads – goggles and snorkels – and
a pair of flippers sitting in their laps. Arthur could tell from their broad-shouldered frames that they were clearly the strongest swimmers of the motley crew. As the group waited in hushed silence, they took off their snorkelling gear. The first was a boy of about fifteen with a totally shaved head and bulky upper frame. The second was a slim young man with a mop of wavy black hair, who looked to be at the older end of his teens. He clearly hadn’t shaved in a while and was sporting an impressive amount of dark facial hair all over his jaw. Arthur guessed that he was leading this gang.
‘Who are you all?’ he asked, somewhat excitedly.
‘Shh!’ said the girl with the dreads, who was next to him, clapping a hand over his mouth. It was a little too tight and he had to struggle to breathe through his nose. She put a finger over her own lips then pointed her thumb over her shoulder. He nodded to say he’d understood and she withdrew her hand. Arthur smiled at her gratefully, but she didn’t return the expression. She merely stared forward, listening intently.
Then he heard it himself: the sound of approaching engines, roaring as they slashed through the water. More guards had obviously left Croke Park in pursuit of him. Except that now, after the humiliation of losing the jet skis, they’d be even more vicious, even more unforgiving. His heart pumped faster and louder in his chest and he tightened his grip on the handle of his own jet ski, readying himself in case they had to make a quick escape.
The noise became deafening as it got nearer, bouncing off the vacated buildings and sending Arthur’s senses into overdrive. He could picture the guards in his mind’s eye, thrusting forward on their jet skis, hunched over the controls, their faces sneering and red with rage behind the black masks.
The Wolfsguard passed right by their alleyway, sending waves careening down the lane and into the parking lot. They all looked at each other with wide-eyed apprehension, waiting in silence for more engines to approach. But none did. As suddenly as the racket had begun, it dwindled into the distance.
‘All right,’ said the tubby, tough-looking boy who was holding the cable, when the noise had faded. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Wait!’ Arthur moved his jet ski closer to the stubbly-faced leader. After his time in Croke Park, he wanted some answers, needed some answers. ‘Please tell me,’ he said. ‘Who are you all? What’s been going on?’
The leader eyed him suspiciously and Arthur stared stubbornly back.
‘Who are you?’ he demanded again.
The leading boy looked from one of his companions to the next then turned back to Arthur, smiling.
‘Why would we tell our prisoner that?’
‘Prisoner?’
‘That’s right. Now you can come with us or we can leave you here for the wolves.’
‘But–’
‘What’s it going to be?’ urged the fat one.
‘Where are you taking me?’
Miss Dreadlocks pumped her engine and said gleefully, ‘To see our gracious leader!’
Rather than heading back up the alleyway and risking running into more of the Wolfsguard search party, the guy with the tightly shaved head cut a gap in the fencing around the car park and led them through it, heading back towards the city centre. He seemed to know his way around the sunken city best – a skill that Arthur assumed would be hard to come by – and he led the way. During the day that Arthur had had his little sandpit-boat, he’d only been able to find his bearings because he knew the route home so well. But Mr Egg-head confidently navigated along streets where the only visible landmarks were the top storeys of Georgian houses that all looked the same to Arthur.
Before they had set off, Fat Boy had tied one end of the cable around a hitch on the front of Arthur’s jet ski and secured the other end to a similar hook on the rear of his own. Arthur guessed that they couldn’t care less about him, but weren’t very keen on losing his jet ski. As Fat Boy sped off in front of him, Arthur had to be sure to keep up the pace otherwise he’d be thrown off the ski. He wasn’t particularly happy about being their prisoner, but figured it couldn’t be any worse than what he’d just come from.
The leader, Stubble-face, was right behind Egg-head. They were followed closely by Miss Dreadlocks and Spotty Teen, both side by side. Fat Boy and Arthur trailed at the rear of the convoy and Arthur couldn’t help but feel unprotected in this position. Every second he expected to be ambushed by some of the Wolfsguard, and he wondered pessimistically if the others would bother saving him twice in the same hour.
He wanted to ask where they were going but knew he’d get no response. He could see their eyes flitting from side to side, constantly on the lookout for more guards. Egg-head took them down any side streets and narrow laneways he could, avoiding the main roads or avenues at all costs. Then he led them into a cul-de-sac. For a split second, when he saw the dead end, Arthur was sure that they’d wandered into a trap. But Egg-head disappeared through the tiniest gap in the wall, which Arthur hadn’t even noticed. They followed through one by one, bouncing against the wall on either side, and into another street beyond.
Eventually they arrived in the shadow of a large building. They took the jet skis through an open square space – Arthur looked down through the flood to see a couple of delivery lorries parked there – and into a hidden nook between two buildings. A speedboat was already moored there and it was a tight squeeze to fit the skis but they managed it. Once the vessels were all out of sight of the main thoroughfare, they shut off the engines and clambered through a window in the taller building. They went one by one, either climbing over the jet skis or swimming across to it.
The space inside was dim – lit only by the weak green light coming through a row of windows. Cardboard boxes, shelving units and various pieces of dusty junk filled the narrow, anonymous corridor that led off into further darkness
‘Hurry up,’ Stubble-face said once they were all in. ‘She’ll be waiting for us.’
Arthur followed as quickly as he could and, if not for Fat Boy guiding him through the gloom with one hand on his shoulder, he was sure he’d have stumbled. Suddenly, a rectangle of light cut through the blackness as Stubble-face swung a door open. He went through and the rest stepped in after him.
Arthur couldn’t help but gawp at the sight that awaited him beyond the doorway. They were in a shopping centre. All the shops were shut and in darkness but the wide and open central area was ablaze with electric lights buzzing overhead. Somewhere in the distance he could hear the low rumble of a generator. The whole place was impossibly bright – especially after he had become used to the green, murky daylight – and Arthur had to squint until his eye adjusted to the glare. Sleek lines and chrome were the order of the day and generic muzak played from the overhead speakers. They were on the upper floor and, as he looked down, he could see that the ground floor was flooded as expected. Unsold products of every sort – clothes, electronics, food – all floated on the still water. But up here, the centre was vibrant with bustle and life.
People charged from one shop to another, loading bags with whatever took their fancy. There weren’t many – fifteen, twenty tops – but the way in which they ran about, elatedly taking what they wanted, made the scene seem so much livelier. The people were mostly under the age of eighteen – although there were a couple of adults here and there. Most were wearing a patchwork selection of clothing. Clearly they’d had to make do with whatever clothes they could find for a few weeks now. That wouldn’t be the case any longer, Arthur thought, watching one girl pile several pairs of jeans, hoodies and T-shirts into the bag she was carrying. With the stores themselves still in darkness, and by the way the shoppers were haphazardly grabbing stock, Arthur realised something.
‘They’re stealing,’ he uttered, before he could stop himself.
‘It’s not stealing if no one owns it any more,’ protested Spotty Teen.
‘Sorry. I do understand, you know. You’re taking what you need to survive. We’ve all had to do that.’ He thought of the supplies he’d taken from the toy s
hop.
‘Come on,’ said Stubble-face. ‘You have to meet someone. She’ll know what to do with you.’
He strode quickly away as the others joined in with the salvagers, dressing themselves with brand-new clothes. Stubble-face had a long gait and Arthur had to half-jog to keep up.
‘Where is she?’ The teenager asked a passing boy whose arms were overflowing with tinned food.
‘She’s in the café there, going over the checklist.’ He nodded past them and they walked in the direction he’d indicated.
The open-fronted café was in darkness but enough light spilled in from the centre for them to make out the figure of a girl sitting at one of the tables. Arthur could hear a boy opposite her detailing everything they’d taken as she marked the items off a list in front of her. She was wearing a heavy-looking jacket, full of pockets, and had a long stick strapped to her back. Her hair was a dusky shade of auburn, tied back in a tight ponytail. Arthur knew who it was even before Stubble-face said her name.
‘Ash, we found someone.’
The girl turned around to look at him and Arthur rushed straight forward. He embraced her in a relieved hug for a second before Stubble-face yanked him off her, sending him flying to the floor.
‘Ash, I can’t believe I found you!’ he cried, back on his feet before the older teen could react a second time. He beamed at the girl, but then his heart sank when he saw that she was looking back at him with a puzzled expression.
