Authors: John Marsden
I took a few steps down the corridor, taking my gun out as I did so, then waiting for him to join me. He was there in a moment, but he still looked and felt insubstantial, like he was only a quarter of the person he had been before. I felt very disturbed by this, not only for the obvious reason, but also because if we had to fight our way out of the building I wanted to have someone solid and strong beside me.
Anyway, there was nothing I could do about that. I moved down to the intersection of the corridors, with Gavin following, and turned right, back the way I’d come. We tiptoed along. ‘’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature did stir, not even a mouse.’
We weren’t too close to Christmas, but the rest seemed to fit.
I blame myself totally for what happened next. I hadn’t paid nearly enough attention to Gavin’s condition. Knowing his toughness and stamina, I hadn’t realised how weak he had become, how desperate, how disorientated and even dizzy he was, how much help he needed. We got to the head of the stairs. I paused, peeping down the stairwell, trying to suss out the situation. Gavin had lagged a few metres back. Now he came up behind me, but caught his toe in a loose edge of carpet. I’d actually caught my own toe in it and stumbled slightly, but hadn’t bothered to guide him around it. He fell forwards, crashing into my back and bum. I fell forwards too, my finger jerking on the trigger of the gun. The world lit up and crashed in all at the same moment. The explosion from the gun made me as deaf as Gavin, but before I could think about that I hit the steps and started sliding down, desperately trying to keep my arms free so that the gun wouldn’t go off again, and at the same time trying to protect myself from getting a fractured skull.
I went down five or six steps, until I hit the landing, still waving my right arm, which held the gun. Although I felt shocked and bruised, and wanted to check to see how many broken bones I had, I knew there wasn’t time for that. I rolled over and staggered up. Above me, Gavin had stopped about halfway down the flight of steps. For a moment I hoped that the people of the house were still heavily asleep, dreaming fond dreams of serial murders, kidnappings and assassinations. But no hope of that. Lights came on above me, below me, and then on the staircase itself, so that we were suddenly as exposed as a spotlit rabbit on a bare hillside. I heard doors slamming, footsteps pounding, men yelling. I waved urgently at Gavin, to get him to follow me. Although he was now standing, he only responded tentatively, putting one foot down to the next step. I started up towards him. As I did two men appeared at the top of the staircase, looking pretty dazed themselves but both holding guns. I glanced down and saw more people at the bottom of the staircase. I wanted to gamble that the guns had been poisoned by Coke, but it was too big a gamble. Carefully I placed my gun on the carpet of the step I was on, and then gave all my energy to holding Gavin, trying to transmit some strength to him.
At first they seemed completely incredulous. Looking at me like I resembled a Tasmanian Tiger or the Tooth Fairy. Then one of them yelled my name, and I knew I was truly busted. In a moment they were all laughing and shouting and my name was getting worn out from being repeated so often. I guess they were just fantastically amused by the fact that I’d walked straight into their head office, so that they no longer had the bother of going all the way to Wirrawee to find me. Obviously it didn’t take much to amuse them. Show them a DVD of Austin Powers and they would have needed hospitalisation.
The laughter soon turned nasty though. One guy walked up, yelled something and slapped me. By then we were at the top of the staircase once more, a place I had hoped never to see again. Once this guy broke the ice, so to speak, by smacking me in the face, the others realised that it was swimming season. Someone kicked me from behind, not a killer kick, but hard enough, to the back of the knees. Then someone else hit me on the top of the head and the first guy got me again, on the other side of the face. I decided I had to make sure that I stayed on my feet; I had a horrible image of myself on the floor, curled up foetally with these guys putting the boots in big-time. I had the feeling that if I went down I mightn’t get up again.
Gavin stirred to life now and tried to stop them, but there wasn’t much fight in him and they had no problem holding him off. Still, his doing that did change the dynamic somehow, and although they kept kicking and smacking at me, they also started moving me along the corridor. One guy held my wrists behind me in a handcufftype grip. I relaxed my arms as much as I could, hoping he would relax too and I’d get a chance to throw him off. He didn’t lighten off for a moment though.
Now I was like a moving target, with three of them driving me along and the others getting in random hits at every chance. Coldly I decided that if I had the chance to kill them I wouldn’t hesitate. It was only the power of that thought which kept me going. I stumbled half-a-dozen times but managed to avoid going down.
It was pretty obvious where we were heading. Back to Gavin’s attic. I realised they were probably not going to kill me straightaway. The most likely scenario was that they’d lock me up for a while at least, in the same little room. I felt despair for myself but even more for Gavin. The time he had spent there already seemed to have affected him so badly. I didn’t like the prospects for either of us though. It wasn’t easy to think while I was being driven along the corridor, getting punched and kicked. But in some small, clear part of my brain I did wonder if we were very close to death. The only reason they had now to keep us alive was as hostages for capturing the Scarlet Pimple. But I thought it was more likely they would get rid of Gavin and me, and then go after the Scarlet Pimple with some new strategy. At least now I could help Gavin a little maybe, give him some strength for whatever lay ahead.
Nevertheless there was no point in staying at the bottom of the ladder getting beaten half to death. Gavin went up it first, followed by one of them, then me. The soldier pushed me into the room, and slammed the door behind me. I heard the key turn in the lock. I switched the light on and gazed glumly at Gavin. He was dry-eyed, but he looked even more frail and trembly. It was like he was fading away in front of my eyes.
I checked out my bruises. At this stage I had mostly red marks and grazes, but I knew I’d soon be an art gallery of red and purple and blue and brown. Lucky the room had no mirror. My body was sore, I was tired and frightened and depressed. I was starting to reach the bottom of my internal reservoir, down among the puddles and weeds, not much left to dredge up.
Somehow, though, I had to find enough to keep us both going.
I figured that Gavin would have searched this room a thousand times looking for ways to escape, but I still had to do it for myself as well, just in case. I ran my hands around the walls, feeling for weak spots. Gavin just shook his head, as if to say, ‘You’re wasting your time.’ I felt the door, jiggling it to see if it could be broken down. Pretty strong, I thought, but not impossible. Gavin on his own would have had no chance, but the two of us might be able to do it some damage.
The only furniture was a folding bed, a small table on wonky legs, and a green stool, quite a tall one. I got up on the stool and pushed at the ceiling, then moved to another spot and tried again. Knowing that Gavin was too short to have done this gave me hope that I might find something he hadn’t. I moved the stool a dozen times, probing different parts of the ceiling. Again, it seemed a long shot, but I thought it was at least possible that we might find a way to break through it.
I got down and said to Gavin, ‘What do they do each day? How often do they come up here?’ I knew the pattern they had followed with him mightn’t be the same as the pattern they would follow now, but knowledge is power and I was coming from a low knowledge base.
I felt sickened by his answers though. If I’d hated and feared these people before, these kidnappers and terrorists, I loathed them now. It seemed that most days Gavin was lucky to get two meals, and the meal deliveries were often the only visits he got. Four times he’d been taken out to the back yard to get some fresh air, but since he’d been delivered to this house that was all the exercise he’d had.
I can understand people killing each other in hot blood, like in a war, when you grab a gun and shoot someone because they’re the enemy or because they’re a threat to you or whatever. I can even understand how in peacetime people kill each other out of jealousy or rage. But I can’t understand how anyone can torture a kid in such a slow-running, day-by-day, drip-by-drip, coldbloodedly cruel way. I remember in a book, I forget its name, this girl who was about my age saying that some of her friends were killing their mothers by slow degrees. These people were killing Gavin, but it was death by a thousand cuts. Putting Gavin in these conditions was like putting a bear in a pen or a rabbit in a box or a cockatoo in a cage. Even Gavin’s cruelty to the cat at Mark’s place was easier for me to understand than the way these guys had abandoned him in the attic.
There was another question that I didn’t want to ask but I had to, and the answer was what I expected. Gavin pointed to a bucket in the corner. I’d already noticed the roll of toilet paper next to it. Apparently they emptied it when they felt like it, but usually when they brought the evening meal. At least at this stage it was empty, but it didn’t stay that way for long, as I was busting. Seemed like Gavin was too, as he followed straight after. To be honest it was embarrassing, even though Gavin and I had been together for so long. But it’s funny, you adjust so quickly to whatever circumstances you’re in. Out in the bush in the middle of a war, when you’re cold and starving, you think nothing of licking up the crumbs in the bottom of your carrier bag. But if you’re in an expensive restaurant I guess you complain if the chips aren’t hot enough. I guess. I’ve never been in an expensive restaurant, like, a really posh one.
So, I got over the toilet thing pretty quickly, although it did help explain why the room was so stinky. Poor Gavin, I couldn’t blame him for that.
But there were more important things to think about. I had to decide whether to launch an all-out assault on the room or to hold off for a while. If I thought they were likely to kill us in the near future, like, that night, I’d be smart to go ahead and do the allout assault thing. There’d be nothing to lose. But if I thought they were likely to keep us alive for a while then it’d be better to wait a bit, spend time on reconnaissance, get energy back, let them start to relax, try to come up with a better plan than just bashing down the door.
I was in a situation where I had to make a guess that could mean life or death for both of us, yet I had way too little evidence to go on. I had to put myself in the minds of people I didn’t know, whose brain functioning was pretty much a mystery to me, and who had knowledge which I didn’t. It was like being given a 600 piece jigsaw with no picture on the box and 590 pieces missing. I sat on the bed in an agony, with Gavin beside me, leaning his head into my shoulder. I had my arm around him but I worried that his trust in me was going to blow up in his face if I made the wrong call. The world was going to blow up in both our faces if I made the wrong call. But perhaps I was making this harder than it needed to be. After all, what were these people going to do with us if not kill us? They couldn’t keep us forever. They couldn’t let us go. Although the ‘I’ll live forever’ part of me, the ‘I’m strong and fit and healthy and young so I couldn’t possibly be about to die’ part of my mind couldn’t face the idea that my life might be about to end, I had to recognise the Uluru of reality in front of me.
A grimness of spirit came over me. I slipped out of Gavin’s arm and got up again. If we were going to take action, I had to start right now and at least try to find a way to break out of this room. I grabbed the green stool and took it to the lowest part of the ceiling. With both arms above my head I hit at the ceiling as hard as I could. But I couldn’t get enough strength. The only power I had was from my arms, as I couldn’t use the weight of my body. Being tired, drained by all the physical and emotional energy I’d spent so recklessly over the previous few hours and days, didn’t help either.
I only had half-a-dozen goes before giving up in frustration. I eyed off the door, but thought I should save that for a last resort, as trying to break that down would make more noise than anything else. I had the horrible feeling it would echo all through the house.
Then Gavin surprised me by reaching under the bed and pulling out a broom. He handed it to me with a look that said, ‘I’m not giving you this so you can do a bit of housework.’ Although it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had. But he glanced from the broom to the ceiling and back to me, and I realised at once what he meant.
I took a big gulp, knowing that this was going to make some serious noise, and then, holding the broom with both hands, near its base, smashed the handle into the ceiling as hard as I could. It did make some serious noise. It echoed around the little room, but I couldn’t tell how far the sound would travel. One thing was obvious though. The ceiling was made from some pretty lightweight stuff. Just cheap masonite or something. I decided to block out any thoughts about noise and attack with all the strength I had.
Boom, boom, boom.
Then, on about the fifth shot, I was through. I pulled the handle out, leaving a nice round hole, big dents around it. Jumping down, I moved the stool less than a metre, then got up and started again. Four hits and I’d made another hole.
Now I was getting excited. A gleam was in Gavin’s eyes and some life had come into his face. I moved the stool again and started my next onslaught. Sweat was running down my face now and stinging my eyes. I was trying to do this and think ahead at the same time. If I could make a decent hole, then we had to be able to get up through it. And the ceiling had to support our weight. And then we had to get somewhere, to actually find an escape route. My hair was damp with the sweat, and my arms were dropping off. I’d made four holes, in a rough square, and now I could attack the space between two of them, hoping to start punching out the whole piece.