Читать книгу Underdogs - Chris Bonnello - Страница 19

Kate had gone silent, but her brain was loud with anxiety. Ewan’s orders were received by her ears but the meaning of his words washed over her.

‘Kate,’ he said, ‘you and Mark go for the staff areas. Simon and I will go from classroom to classroom.’

‘Which leaves the function rooms like soft play and the speech therapy place for me and Gracie,’ said Raj. ‘You want us in the least likely places to see action, since we’re the least effective soldiers.’

‘Shut up, Raj.’

‘It’s true though, isn’t it? I can read you like a book.’

‘Raj, you can’t even read an actual book.’

Kate took a deep breath. Her wits were returning. Maybe it was the casual insults thrown at her boyfriend that woke her up. She looked around the group, back on their feet at the brow of the hill and sheltered behind the tree line.

‘So… what about me?’ asked Jack.

‘Keep guard here.’

‘What, so I have to miss out?’

‘You get to protect us. Alert us if you see—’

‘Is this because I talked to you about—’

‘—alert us if you see anything approaching. Or any activity that’s not us.’

Kate did not understand why Ewan was so irritated with Jack, or what they had talked about that could have caused the tension between them. Jack shook his head, the hair beneath his helmet waving across his face in messy protest.

‘Just do yourself a favour, yeah?’ he asked.

‘What?’ said Ewan.

‘If this place is abandoned, they’ve probably finished the testing already. When you’re close to the entrance, throw a bullet first and see if it blows up. Don’t walk gun-first into a shield that detonates metal.’

Ewan nodded, and Kate heard him whisper something to himself under his breath. Then, with no words of encouragement for his team, without even repeating the mission criteria, he started his walk down the hill, followed by Kate and the rest of the students.

This has got to him . A lready.

The emotional impact of the night was probably compounded by the fact that there had been no changing of the guard at three o’clock. Ewan had relied on the enemies’ routine for his strategy, and the rug had been pulled from underneath his plans. More than that, it suggested that the building had not been guarded in the first place, and they had wasted three hours of their time outside an empty building.

Kate understood his frustration. When one thing bothered her, it bothered her. When several things bothered her at once, she lost her capacity to think. Both she and Ewan reaped the benefits and suffered the consequences of autistic single-mindedness, and were unable to focus on two different sources of anxiety. Ewan could have coped with the emotional strain of seeing Oakenfold, or the sudden change of circumstances, but not both.

Ewan left the bottom of the hill, and led the march across the car park towards the school entrance. As Kate followed, she noticed how neatly the abandoned cars were parked alongside each other. When the clones had come, nobody had been given a chance to escape in their own vehicles. She even recognised a couple of the cars as belonging to specific staff members.

Part way across the car park, Ewan removed a bullet from his pistol and lobbed it towards the school. The bullet glided through the air and smacked against the wall without complaint. Oakenfold was unshielded.

By the time they reached the front entrance, Kate was first in line. She lay a hand on the door to her old school, took a deep breath, then paused as Simon started frantically jumping up and down, pointing towards something inside.

‘Simon?’ she asked.

Then they all saw it. In the corner of the entrance hall, a door-shaped shadow fell on the wall opposite the toilets. And where there was shadow, there was light.

‘Well spotted,’ said Raj. ‘Someone’s left the light on in the loos.’

‘So?’ asked Gracie.

‘Well if Jack were here,’ said Raj, in an obvious protest against Ewan’s team selection, ‘he’d tell you that’s proof that the clones have been here. Because all the other lights have been switched off since… since we last saw this place.’

Since Takeover Day, Raj. You can say it.

‘You know what else I’d say?’ came a voice from the radio that made Kate jump. ‘I’d say it’s proof that this place has electricity. By the way, watch the controls on your radios. Make sure you know whether they’re transmitting or not. And only use them if it’s absolutely urgent, or you’re sure there’s nobody around to hear. While I’m at it, don’t use your torches inside until you know you’re alone. Not even lighters. You can’t afford to give yourselves away, even from a distance.’

There was annoyance in Jack’s voice, which he was trying but failing to hide. Kate understood why. He must have wanted to see the inside of the school that had saved him from suicide in his worst years. But Jack of all people knew the importance of duty and following commands, even if it hurt him.

‘Right,’ muttered Ewan, ‘thanks Jack.’

‘Oh, and if they’ve got electricity, they might have set the alarms. Be careful, and remember the code’s 1989.’

‘How the hell do you kn—’

‘Because I spent years looking at the faded one, eight and nine digits every time I walked past the alarm. And the school was founded in 1989, so it doesn’t take a genius.’

Kate looked back at Ewan’s hands. Even in the dark, she could see their tightening, determined grip.

‘I hope the alarm is set,’ he said. ‘It’d mean there’s no clones inside. Kate, open the door.’

It was harder than Kate had thought. The inside of Oakenfold would be where her ugly past met her ugly present. It had been the place where she’d tried to recover from her years of bullying – and only partially succeeded. Now, the best school on Earth would showcase the horrors of a post-Takeover Britain.

She pulled the door open, and the last free students of Oakenfold Special School crept back into the building they had escaped from together. After almost a whole year, it could perhaps have been a sentimental moment. But Nicholas Grant was days away from launching an invincible protective shield that might have been perfected in that same building, so it hardly felt magical.

The alarm didn’t sound. Ewan looked disappointed, as far as Kate could tell. It wasn’t proof that clones were in the building, but it kept the possibility open.

‘Nothing above a whisper,’ Ewan said, following his own instruction. Before splitting up, the group of six stood together for a brief moment of shared empathy. Raj said it first.

‘United by our differences, guys.’

‘United,’ whispered everyone else.

Ewan wasted no time in heading for the classroom nearest to the entrance – the one for the profoundly disabled students, who had needed rolling in and out of school in specialised wheelchairs. Simon followed him with a nervous huff.

Raj and Gracie headed straight for the sensory room, already resigned to not finding anything interesting.

‘Shall we?’ asked Mark.

‘Yeah, sure,’ replied Kate.

‘This way first. Head teacher’s office.’

The reception was right next to them, but Mark had made his decision to inspect the most important room first. Kate started to follow him as he set off, but a thought struck her.

‘Wait… isn’t this the long way round?’

‘Yeah. There’s something I need to grab from my locker. Assuming they haven’t raided it.’

I was at my locker when it started…

Kate’s brain faded into autopilot as she followed Mark, her eyes fixed on his feet as they trod before her. It was the least appropriate time to retrace the past, but perhaps Nicholas Grant had chosen the school for that exact reason.

And to be fair, it was working.

It had been between English and maths, and she had been exchanging her exercise books in her locker. Chloe and Sally had complained about not getting a signal on their phones. In the background, Charlie was shouting about his human rights being taken away because he couldn’t access social media.

The staff had looked worried, but said nothing. Rule number one in times of crisis – hide everything from the students, even news that might help them.

With Chloe and Sally equally clueless, Kate had walked down the corridor and noticed Raj talking to his friend Callum.

‘I overheard two of them,’ said the dyslexic kid who would one day become her boyfriend, ‘saying something about a fire in town. But not just one. Loads of buildings are on fire. There were gunshots too. Maybe it’s a riot.’

Kate had not believed the bit about gunshots. She had learned a lot from the false rumours people had spread about her in mainstream. Exaggerations and blatant lies were unquestioningly believed in schools, while the truth was ignored for not being entertaining enough. But something was worrying their teachers…

‘OK,’ said Mark, returning Kate to the present. ‘Here we are.’

Kate realised how lucky she was that some sneaky clone hadn’t opened fire from around a corridor corner while she had been daydreaming. She’d have been dead before noticing any attackers. Of course, Ewan would have called it lack of due care and attention on Kate’s part, rather than luck.

Mark opened his locker in near-total silence, the clicks of his combination lock the loudest noise in the corridor except for Kate’s erratic breathing.

‘Can’t even see the numbers,’ Mark muttered. ‘I just know I put them to triple-zero whenever I locked it, so I know how many… here we go.’

The pained scrape of the metal locker sounded deafening to Kate’s sensitive ears. But the faint expression on Mark’s face showed his indifference to it.

‘Single malt,’ he said. ‘Scottish, twelve years old. Well, thirteen now.’

‘Malt?’ whispered Kate. ‘Isn’t that vinegar?’

‘Whisky.’

‘You brought alcohol into school?!’

‘Kate, I spent a year away from lessons after stabbing my dad in the leg. I was already set up to fail my exams, and my adulthood was screwed before it had even begun. When Grant took over I was about a month from leaving this graveyard. Thought I’d do some celebrating on my last day, in front of as many people as possible. What were they going to do, expel me?’

Kate could barely contain her disbelief. She looked at the walls, if only to make her face less visible to Mark. She could have sworn one of the pieces of artwork on the corridor wall was Simon’s, since it was as bright and vivid as his personality had been back then.

It was odd how the little things stuck in her head. Kate had also been looking at Simon’s artwork when the rumoured gunfire had reached Oakenfold Special School. Everyone was late for maths but none of the staff cared. They were all too busy with this mystery crisis that the students must not know about.

Until Judit Ciskal, one of the reception staff, broke the news. She was wounded, bleeding from her shoulder, and running full pelt down the corridor yelling at the students to hide. There had been screams and meltdowns and panic attacks at the sight of real blood and the promise of something dangerous in the school.

Kate remembered the sight of her first clone: the tall bald model, which she had seen a hundred times since in a hundred other clone soldiers. She had believed him to be a real human at the time. He had run around the distant corner in navy blue uniform, with an actual assault rifle in his hands. It had been a sight Kate had never seen before, and would never have expected in a school.

And wow, this clone had been angry. The type of angry she would later learn was built into their neurology, as Nathaniel Pearce had built his soldiers with ‘peace’ and ‘war’ settings. She had seen angry people before, but nobody with that kind of face…

Judit had stopped to bend over and help a frozen student to his feet. When the clone had got too close, she drew out a cutlery knife and went for him. And that was when the clone had shot her to death.

‘Besides,’ said Mark, ‘I’m eighteen now, so I can legally drink this even by old world standards. This is coming back with me tonight, and I’ll still use it to celebrate leaving Oakenfold. Just leaving in a different way.’

Kate jumped at the sound of Mark closing his locker, and followed him further down the corridor. He reached for his radio.

‘Anything yet, guys?’ he asked.

A short pause, which Kate used to collect herself.

‘Nothing in the classrooms,’ came Ewan’s voice. ‘But they give a good view of the outside. Simon mentioned a bunch of metal shapes he saw around the school’s perimeter.’

‘Mentioned them?’

‘He does talk, you know. Around people he actually trusts. He saw these little shapes outside dotted around the place. They look like land mines.’

‘Better be careful on the way out then. Raj, how’s things?’

A short pause, although long enough for Kate to hear Mark’s voice echo off the walls. It had risen above a whisper, and that worried her. Mark’s complacency could spell trouble, but she didn’t dare to tell him with words.

‘I’m here too, you know,’ said Gracie. ‘Raj found the sports hall, and he’s looking through it right now. It’s packed with these huge things.’

‘What kind of things?’ asked Mark, impatiently.

‘He said something about power. He thinks they generate electricity or something. They’re big whirring things that reach halfway to the ceiling.’

‘So that’s how they’re powering the school, huh.’

Kate took out her own radio.

‘No,’ she gasped into it, ‘this is something else. We can power the whole of Spitfire’s Rise with a small petrol generator. Those things in the sports hall are for powering the AME shield.’

‘It’d make sense,’ came another voice, which she recognised as Jack’s. ‘The energy needed to maintain a shield over the school would be massive. Oh, and I’m fine out here, by the way.’

‘Have you seen anything?’ asked Ewan.

‘I’d have told you if I’d spotted movement,’ said Jack. ‘But now you mention it, I can see those little land-miney things too. But I don’t think they’re actual mines.’

‘How come?’

‘Because they’ve made no effort to hide them. They must be for something else.’

There was a momentary silence. Neither Kate nor any of the other students came up with any ideas.

‘We’ll keep searching,’ Kate said. ‘We’re almost at Paul’s office.’

Even after a year it still felt good to call the head teacher ‘Paul’ instead of ‘Mr Dale’. Special education had always been less formal in those ways, and it had been the ideal refuge for teenagers who had been traumatised in schools full of Misses and Misters in posh suits.

‘Speaking of Paul,’ said Mark, ‘I wonder if we’ve found him.’

Kate looked around, and saw nothing. Then she looked down and noticed the skeleton a metre from her toes.

She shuddered, but held herself together and kept silent.

It was the remains of an adult. Presumably a staff member. Or perhaps an adult student, since Oakenfold catered for nineteen-year-olds too. But Kate didn’t like to think of people in James’ year dying in their school.

I know your birthday ended three hours ago, she thought, but happy birthday,James. I hope it was one that you liked.

‘I don’t even know what happened to Paul,’ she whispered. ‘He might have survived. I… I know who this is.’

A cutlery knife lay next to the wall, less than a metre from the skeleton. Judit had made the mistake of threatening a clone with a weapon, so she had been executed instead of captured. But Kate hadn’t hung around to watch. She just ran.

At the other end of the school, a small group of staff members had shepherded the students through the back exit into the outdoor play area. It was normally reserved for the Block One students – those who were profoundly disabled – but that morning it was open to everyone. Kate had followed, looking for her friends in the crowd, finding only Chloe and Sally. She made it through the exit doors, and her heart leapt with relief at seeing James rocking himself next to the swings. When he saw her, his rocking and grunting had not stopped. But he had reached out towards her with a nervous stimming hand. It was love, in the kind of way only James could show, and that nervous stimming hand had been etched into Kate’s memory ever since.

Mark and Joe Horn were already attacking the fence. It was a sturdy fence, deliberately designed to keep people like them inside, but when half a dozen others joined in it didn’t take longer than a minute.

The staff members didn’t follow. Presumably they had got themselves captured trying to save more students.

When the fence came down, only some of the students fled. Some didn’t want to risk getting shot. Some were frozen in panic. Some of the Block One students simply thought they weren’t allowed to leave school, because it wasn’t home time.

Kate had watched as James had frozen himself to the swing, too deep in his routine-based comfort zone. But eventually he had relented and taken his younger sister’s hand. Maybe the fear of losing Kate had been worse than the fear of breaking his routine.

In what she remembered as Oakenfold’s proudest moment, each Block Two student chose someone with a more noticeable disability, and brought them along on their escape. Even Silent Simon had found another student with Down’s Syndrome and helped her along.

In what she remembered as Oakenfold’s most shameful moment, it had taken five minutes for them all to realise the difficulty of guiding profoundly disabled teenagers through the countryside with a literal army giving chase. Even Ewan – who had been absent that day, but met them in a field on his way to Oakenfold after something dreadful had happened at his house – had been in no position to come up with bright ideas. When a row of soldiers appeared at the end of the field, Mark had shouted ‘get bloody running, they’re not worth it!’ and everyone had obeyed.

Everyone except Kate, who had tried. But two minutes later…

She had evaded the oncoming army, and James had followed his captors as instructed. Within a few minutes, she had found the group again and joined them in their confused chaos.

So there they were: the last free students of Oakenfold. Kate, Mark, Ewan, Raj, Simon, Jack, Gracie, Sarah, Callum, Joe, Chloe, Sally, Rachael, Daniel and Charlie. (Kate raised an eyebrow when she realised she had thought of the dead students in Memorial Wall order.) They had wandered across the fields in a clueless daze, until Ewan had run ahead to find a place to shelter. He had later returned – with bloodied hands – and guided them all to the place he’d found. Inside, an ageing man with tears in his eyes had welcomed them…