Sheep on the Fourth Floor

by Leonie Thorpe

  ‘He seems to be walking better now,’ said Kurt. It was as if the sheep’s legs had been seized up and the grass that Anna had brought along was lubricating his joints. ‘Have you got much of that left?’

  ‘Enough to get us to the lift anyway,’ said Anna, glancing inside the plastic bag. ‘At least then Duggie can help out if Rom refuses to walk again.’

  Anna felt lightheaded with fear. It was almost as if she was in a dream. She tried not to think about what would happen if they got caught.

  She led the small procession slowly down the corridor, holding out the grass to Rom who followed eagerly. Kurt walked a short distance behind them, anxiously covering up their tracks. He collected several minute strands of grass, a tuft of cotton wool and, to his chagrin, a small pile of sheep dung, which he put in a small plastic bag.

  ‘What do you think they’ll do when they find out he’s gone?’ Kurt wondered. ‘Do you think they’ll mount a full-on police search?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ said Anna. ‘But I’m counting on them keeping it hushed. Can you imagine the uproar if the public knew the sheep was here in the first place?’

  Kurt hoped she was right. He stooped down to pick up a stray clover leaf and noticed something lying on the floor further down the corridor.

  ‘Anna!’ he hissed, recognizing the pen he had thrown earlier.

  The light was still shining from the open doorway, and as they stopped and strained their ears, they heard the unmistakable sound of Jeff’s loud snoring.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Kurt, and he tiptoed ahead and tentatively glanced inside the room. As nervous as he felt, he couldn’t stop himself grinning. Jeff was still fast asleep. A trickle of drool was running down the side of his mouth and pooling on top of the biochemistry book. He waved Anna on.

  ‘All we have to do now is get down the lift,’ said Anna. ‘You know what, Kurt? I’m beginning to think we’re actually going to pull this off.’

  Kurt flinched. He wasn’t overly superstitious but he prayed Anna’s confident prediction didn’t jinx them.

  ‘See, we’ve made it to the lift already,’ said Anna, a short while later.

  She smiled at Kurt and pushed the down button.

  Mrs Simpson lay on her hard hospital bed on Ward 24, the National Radio programme buzzing quietly near her ear. She was wide awake. She no longer felt an urge for gingernuts, but there was something else nagging her. Blackballs! That was it. The white and black peppermint sweets she had eaten when she was a little girl. She swung her legs out of bed, and put on her blue coat. She threw her red handbag over her shoulder, strode confidently past the nurses’ station, down the corridor and out of the ward. There was a grocer’s shop in High Street which sold blackballs, ten for a penny. Mr Hardwicke used to give her a free blackball sometimes, when her mother sent her down to the shop for milk. Yes, she would pay him a visit now. Mrs Simpson pressed the down arrow outside the elevator.

  DING!

  The elevator doors opened, but Mrs Simpson didn’t step into it. She hesitated. Inside the elevator was an animal. Standing on either side of it, their eyes wide, was the same pair of pale-faced youths she had seen earlier in the night. Mrs Simpson tutted and shook her head; these children didn’t look very well at all.

  ‘Mmmmmaaahhhh.’ The animal made a noise and shifted its feet.

  ‘Good evening,’ said Mrs Simpson. ‘That’s a funny little doggie you’ve got there. I’m going out for some blackballs. Do you know the way to—’

  ‘Mrs Simpson!’ a female voice called. ‘Get away from the elevator and get back to your room!’

  Mrs Simpson sighed unhappily. It was the ward nurse again. She waved at the children then turned away from the elevator and the door closed.

  ‘I was just going out for blackballs,’ said Mrs Simpson to the exasperated nurse, who led her by the arm back to Ward 24.

  ‘You must stay in bed,’ said the nurse firmly.

  ‘There were two sick children in the lift,’ said Mrs Simpson.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure there were,’ said the nurse. She started to hang the blue coat up in Mrs Simpson’s cupboard, then hesitated—maybe it would be safer if she kept the coat and handbag in the nurses’ station for the remainder of the night.

  ‘And a little doggie,’ Mrs Simpson continued. ‘Actually, it was quite a big doggie come to think of it. And it had grass in its mouth.’

  ‘That’s very nice,’ said the nurse, helping Mrs Simpson back into her bed. She tucked in the blankets and said, ‘Now, be a dear and don’t leave the ward again. I’ll bring you a nice cup of tea in the morning. Good night, Mrs Simpson.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Duggie remained blissfully ignorant of how close he had come to being discovered. He was lying way back in the driver’s seat, unaware that all that had stood between him and an awkward interrogation by an eccentric security guard was a few leftover custard squares. Duggie hadn’t really taken much notice of the seats before, and he had been delighted to discover that they reclined almost all the way to horizontal.

  ‘Could be an overnighter, like a metal tent,’ he muttered with approval. ‘Yeah, me and you are going to go places,’ he said, patting the inside of the car door fondly.

  Duggie dozed happily with his eyes closed and his hands folded on his stomach. He dreamed of the adventures his car was going to take him on: skiing holidays in the Southern Alps, surfing safaris in Northland and fishing adventures at Lake Taupo. Perhaps even some mountain biking on Mount Ruapehu and a road trip all the way from Cape Reinga to Bluff. Yeah, this car was his true ticket to freedom.

  DING!

  Duggie’s eyes flicked open. With effort he hauled the seat back upright and cautiously glanced towards the lift. His mouth fell open in amazement as Kurt and Anna emerged, their heads darting left and right nervously. They both looked tense; almost sick, he thought. Even the large, scraggly sheep that was limping between them looked healthier, despite the crude bandaging around its stomach.

  Duggie jumped out of the car.

  ‘Hey, man! Hey…it’s a sheep. You got the sheep. Look at that!’ His eyes bulged and he kept muttering about the ‘sheep’, as though the very hillside on which he lived was not teeming with them.

  ‘You guys are just wicked!’ he said, a big grin on his face.

  Duggie pulled the front passenger’s seat forwards and, with help from a day-old apple core pulled from the ashtray, they coaxed Rom into the back of the car. Anna squashed in beside Rom while Kurt sat in the front.

  Duggie noticed that they were both silent. He still couldn’t believe they’d actually done it. Of course he always knew it was a sheep they were taking, but to have it now sitting in the back of his car was just outrageous.

  ‘No probs then?’ said Duggie, turning to look at them.

  Anna and Kurt exchanged glances.

  ‘Too easy,’ Kurt said, dryly.

  ‘Get us out of here,’ said Anna, holding out the last morsel of apple to Rom.

  ‘Homeward!’ Duggie declared and he turned the key in the ignition. An audible clicking sound came from the motor, but the engine didn’t start. Duggie frowned and turned the key again. Once more, there was only a clicking.

  ‘We can go now,’ said Anna, anxious to set Rom free.

  Duggie ran his hand through his hair, took a deep breath and turned the key again. The engine still didn’t fire. He cursed loudly.

  ‘Pretty sure that’s a flat battery,’ he announced. Before Anna could respond, Duggie had jumped out of the car and was fishing around under the bonnet.

  ‘We’re going to have to push-start it,’ he said, a short while later.

  Anna looked mortified. She turned to Kurt. ‘I thought you said the car was going okay?’ she spluttered.

  ‘The car goes fine,’ said Kurt, a little offended. He had grown quite attached to the orange roughy since he had been helping Duggie on it. ‘It’s just a flat battery.’

  ‘But we have to get out of here now!’ she cried
. ‘The security guards could come at any minute!’

  ‘Then you’d better start pushing!’ Duggie said as he jumped back into the driver’s seat. ‘Go on, out you get. You too, Kurt. You’ll have to push the car out backwards and then we can get a good run-up down that aisle.’ He looked at Anna’s distraught face and shrugged. ‘It’s either that or call the AA.’

  ‘This is supposed to be sheep liberation, not a course in car maintenance,’ Anna muttered as she helped Kurt push Duggie’s car away from the parking bay.

  Kurt thought it best not to answer.

  ‘Right, get around the back and push for all you’re worth,’ Duggie instructed.

  Anna heard the faint sound of Rom bleating from the back seat as she and Kurt pushed the car. It felt heavy at first but got easier as the car started moving faster. Soon they were jogging along behind it.

  ‘Okay!’ Duggie yelled, and suddenly the car lurched and bucked and, with a puff of black smoke, the engine roared into life.

  Anna and Kurt jumped back in, both breathing heavily from the exertion.

  ‘At least there’s a bit of colour in your faces now,’ Duggie remarked. ‘Now, let’s get the hell out of here.’

  As they drove further and further away from the hospital, the mood in the car became quietly jubilant.

  ‘We did it!’ Anna cried, turning to watch the last lights of the hospital disappear behind them. ‘Rom, you’re free!’

  ‘I can’t believe we actually got away with it,’ said Kurt.

  ‘Pretty easy, huh?’ said Duggie.

  ‘Except for several near heart attacks,’ said Kurt. He told Duggie the whole story, including seeing Jeff asleep on his textbook and the old lady on the second floor.

  ‘Ah, that would account for you both looking like death when you came out of the lift,’ said Duggie. ‘Do you think the old crone will rat on you?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Kurt. ‘She was pretty senile. She kept going on about gingernuts. And she thought Rom was a dog.’

  ‘A funny little dog,’ Anna added. She felt elated to have Rom in the car, away from the danger of the lab.

  ‘But I suppose of all the things that could have gone wrong, it turned out to be pretty straightforward,’ said Kurt.

  Anna agreed. ‘But I don’t think we’ll ever be able to do it again. When they find out Rom’s gone, there’ll be a complete clamp-down on security.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s true,’ said Kurt, ‘but I’d love to be there to see their faces when they find out he’s gone.’

  Anna grimaced. From the little she knew of the hospital system, she predicted either there would be a full-scale inquiry involving the police, or it would be such an embarrassment that nobody would say anything. She prayed it was the latter.

  ‘I suppose it doesn’t rule out other labs though,’ she muttered to herself.

  ‘Uh-oh, a rebel is born,’ said Duggie, shaking his head.

  Kurt blanched. He didn’t know if Anna was serious or not about rescuing animals from other labs. Whatever her plan, Kurt was unsure whether he wanted to be involved.

  ‘Let’s just concentrate on setting Rom free,’ he said, attempting to change the conversation.

  ‘He is free,’ said Anna, frowning slightly. ‘What could possibly go wrong now?’

  Thirty seconds later, as the car cruised along the motorway towards the Peraki turn-off, Duggie’s forehead creased into a frown.

  ‘What are those lights up ahead?’ he muttered.

  Kurt squinted into the distance. ‘It’s in the middle of the road. Hey, the light is moving,’ he said with surprise.

  Anna leaned over. ‘It looks like a torch or something,’ she said. She was about to say that she must be wrong when Duggie swore loudly.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he howled. Then Duggie swore again and banged his hand on the steering wheel.

  Rom bleated softly and Anna stared intently through the windscreen to see what had upset Duggie. Her face fell.

  ‘No way!’ she cried in anguish.

  Duggie put his foot on the brake.

  Constable Porter didn’t mind the night shift. Sundays were pretty quiet anyway, and he enjoyed seeing the world in its slumber. He was lucky enough to be able to sleep at any time of the day or night and he was looking forward to falling into a blissful slumber in his warm bed shortly after his 3 a.m. finish. He glanced at his watch; only an hour to go. A set of car lights approached in the distance, and Constable Porter stepped into the middle of the road. He shone his torch at the oncoming car, signalling the driver to pull over. It was a small, white Japanese car. A dark-haired woman sat at the wheel.

  ‘Good evening, madam,’ said Constable Porter. ‘We are conducting random breath alcohol testing tonight. Have you had anything alcoholic to drink today?’

  ‘No, officer,’ said the woman. Her voice sounded tired. ‘I’m just on my way home from work.’

  Constable Porter detected the smell of cooking oil on the woman’s clothing and guessed she was probably a worker in a restaurant or café.

  ‘Ah, well, I won’t keep you,’ he told the woman.

  He held out the breath alcohol detector and instructed the woman to speak her name into it. The display indicated no alcohol on her breath.

  ‘Have a safe trip home,’ said Constable Porter cheerily, and he waved the white car on its way.

  Constable Porter was glad the message about drinking and driving seemed to be getting through. In the last two hours not one person had been taken away for a blood test. The traffic had thinned significantly in the last hour, so Constable Porter wandered across to the roadside to the parked police van and chatted with his colleague.

  ‘Give me a yell if you need a hand,’ said Constable De Vries, who was sitting inside the van. He was taking turns sipping coffee and biting on the end of his biro. ‘I’ve made a mistake somewhere in this Sudoku, but I think I know where. I’m determined to nail it this time.’

  It was five minutes before another car came into view, its headlights becoming brighter as it neared.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Constable Porter, and he stepped into the middle of the road and flashed his torch at the driver. The car pulled over. It was a bright orange sedan, driven by a youth.

  ‘Good evening, sir.’ Constable Porter leaned down to the driver’s window. ‘We are conducting random breath alcohol…’

  His words trailed off into a stunned silence as he glanced inside the car. Four pairs of terrified eyes stared back at him. He recognized all of them except one. The front-seat passenger was well known to him—Kurt Osmond, the young man who had just recently stolen his mountain bike. The driver was Duggie, his brother. The girl in the back was also in his son’s class—Anna Pascoe, the daughter of well-known scientist Dr Penelope Pascoe. The fourth pair of eyes, Constable Porter noted with surprise, seemed to belong to a sheep. Its stomach and part of its back leg were shaved, he noticed, and some kind of medical tape was wound several times around its back.

  He glanced once more at the occupants of the car. Each of them wore a look of horror mixed with dismay. Kurt looked as though he might choke, and as Constable Porter watched on, Anna Pascoe leaned forwards and put her head in her hands.

  ‘Ah…?’ As Constable Porter struggled to find his voice, something twinged in his memory. Somebody just recently had been talking with him about sheep. It had been his son Lloyd, he remembered, while they were fishing. Something about a sheep locked away in a laboratory that was having experiments done on it. They had both agreed it was cruel. Constable Porter looked again at the sheep and the taped-up wounds by its stomach and drew in his breath. Suddenly, he knew exactly what was going on.

  ‘Is this…?’ Constable Porter pointed to Rom, but couldn’t find the words to finish his sentence.

  ‘Mmmmmmmmaaaaaaahhhh,’ Rom bleated quietly. There was a muffled clattering as a small pile of ball bearing-like pellets dropped from Rom’s rear end onto the floor of Duggie’s car.

  Constable Port
er realized he had stumbled into the middle of an abduction. This nervous-looking bunch of youths had, for some insane reason, taken it upon themselves to rescue the sheep; to break into the hospital and steal property that didn’t belong to them. They were criminals. He knew, as an officer of the law, he should arrest the lot of them and have the sheep returned to the research laboratory. The youths would be dealt with through the courts and the sheep would continue to be subjected to whatever experiments were required. Constable Porter looked at the sheep squashed into the back of the car. He pictured it living in a small, windowless room, in a sterile, sunless cage on the fourth floor of a concrete city building; stuck there until it succumbed to some appalling infection or medical procedure.

  Constable Porter stood for a short while in silence, his conscience fighting a battle with his moral duty. Constable Porter had always prided himself on his quick decision making. He glanced over his shoulder at the police van then took a deep breath.

  ‘We are conducting random breath alcohol testing tonight,’ he said to Duggie. ‘Have you consumed any alcohol today?’

  ‘No, officer,’ Duggie replied in a small voice. His eyes were still fixed straight ahead at a distant point through the front windscreen.

  ‘Good. Now, please say your full name into the instrument.’ Constable Porter held the breath alcohol device up to Duggie’s mouth.

  ‘Uh…Douglas Harold Osmond,’ said Duggie, struggling to keep his voice steady.

  Constable Porter glanced at the reading on the machine.

  ‘Thank you, the reading is negative.’ Constable Porter paused and stared fixedly at the car’s occupants. ‘Have a safe trip home, Douglas.’ He slapped his hand gently on the roof of Duggie’s car, smiled a tight smile, then turned and walked away.

  There was a slight hesitation as Duggie found first gear, then the orange car pulled away from the side of the road and headed towards Peraki.

  ‘Woo hoo!’ cried Constable De Vries a short while later. ‘I cracked it!’ He waved the Sudoku puzzle happily in Constable Porter’s direction. ‘I thought I was beaten for a while but I stuck with it and voila! Things just suddenly clicked into place.’