Authors: John Marsden
But my arms couldn’t take any more. I dropped them for a minute, and dropped my head, trying to get the strength to continue. If only Gavin were a bit taller and we could take it in turns. Then I heard a kind of scrabbling noise at the door. Gavin turned to it with a kind of wild look and a moment later it burst open. Two of the men came lumbering in, with at least one more behind them, and I realised with fear that our escape attempt was over already.
I got another bashing, and it seemed almost from the start that it was too much. I felt the will to fight flow out of me with every blow. I curled up on the floor in the foetal position I’d imagined earlier, covered my face, and tried to absorb the impacts. I don’t even know what they were hitting me with. I’m not sure where Gavin was but I think one of them was holding him out of the way.
At some stage they left again. It was a long time before I stirred or moved or tried to stand. Gavin was lying on top of me crying, so eventually I got up for his sake. I tried to think back to how this evening had started, with me so optimistic and positive and being the big hero, moving through the house and wrecking their guns and all that stuff. It hadn’t taken long to bring me down to this state. I thought about how the boys wanted me to join Liberation and I thought, ‘Well that’s not going to happen.’ If I survived this, which was looking pretty unlikely, I figured it was time to give up on all this fighting. If only other people would let me.
T
IME PASSED
. D
URING
the bashing at the top of the stairs I’d lost my watch. I could see how quickly Gavin must have gone into a limbo where time had no meaning. If there are no clues as to what time it is, does your body tell you anyway? I think I read somewhere that humans drift into a twenty-six hour cycle if they’re in a world without clocks.
We did have some clues, because when anyone opened the door we got a sense of whether it was daylight or dark. But I was too sore and bruised to take much notice. From time to time I thought briefly about trying to crash the door down, but I figured they might beat me to death if I did, so either for that logical reason, or out of sheer cowardice, I decided to save whatever energy I had for a better opportunity, if one ever came along.
We got a number of meals, but I’m not sure how many. I’d say seven or eight. They were as you’d expect, pretty crappy. Mostly rice, and mostly it was cold and old and evil. Some of it tasted like birdseed. I imagined that when there were some leftovers in the fridge for a few days and no-one was showing any interest in them, one of the men eventually got the bright idea of bringing them upstairs and chucking them into our room. It was hard to believe they took any more trouble than that.
I ate as much as I could. Sometimes it was hard to force my stomach to accept it, but I knew I needed energy from somewhere, and that was one of the few ways it was available. I hurt all over with the bruises, and there were no ice packs. The day after I got bashed for making holes in the roof I saw blood in my urine a couple of times, which scared the piss out of me, so to speak, but it seemed to clear up again.
There wasn’t much left in the room, with both the stool and the broom gone. They even took the legs off the bed so that the base and mattress now rested on the floor. I tried twice to lift Gavin onto my shoulders and get him up there but he was too heavy and the pain was agonising.
When I could make my mind work again we played some stupid games, like I Spy, or animal, vegetable, mineral, but neither of us was too interested. Other games, like hide-and-seek or musical chairs, weren’t really an option. Then I hit on the brilliant idea of making a chess set. I used whatever bits and pieces were still in my pockets, along with other odds and ends from around the room, and torn-up pieces of sheet for the pawns. So the kings were two halves of a hairclip, the queens were rubber bands, and the knights were bits of toilet paper I twisted into the best shape I could. I did have a pen, and I used that to colour the black pieces, the ones that needed colouring. We just drew a board on the floor in the dust. Of course the lines didn’t last long but we could always redraw them.
I’d tried a few times before to get Gavin interested in chess, but without much success. Now, however, he took to it avidly. He beat me a few times while I was sore and tired and distracted, but as I started feeling better I began beating him regularly again, until gradually, after we had played about fifty games, the tide slowly turned. I had to fight really hard to save a couple of games, and then he won a couple again, and then I won a couple back, and then he started beating me eight times out of ten. I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or pleased.
How strange, I thought, to spend our last few days playing chess. But I suppose there were worse ways to finish your life.
When time stopped passing and suddenly became important again, I was to find out that we were in the middle of another night. Two things happened. The first was a moment of realisation. I couldn’t believe I had been too stupid to see it before. We were both on the bed, Gavin asleep, and me wishing I could go to sleep. Without talking about it we had somehow found our own spaces on the mattress, so that we could both be comfortable and yet still be comforted by each other’s warmth. But Gavin was having a bad dream, calling out and twisting around. Suddenly he threw out his right arm and hit me on the cheek, yelled ‘Look out for him!’, and did a kind of sideways somersault, landing on top of me.
As far as I could tell he was still asleep. I managed to extricate myself, then put an arm around him to try to calm him, to help him sleep with at least a slight sense of security. I lay there, drifting in and out of something that had a vague resemblance to sleep. I had a series of thoughts, of images, a kind of dream where the bed had fallen apart when Gavin landed on top of me. It was like an old silent movie playing in my head, where he and I and the bed were all in a heap on the floor. Then an electric shock ran through my brain. I sat upright, or at least as upright as Gavin’s head would let me. The bed! Of course! The bed!
I wriggled out from under Gavin and started pulling him and the mattress off. I wasn’t too worried about disturbing his slumbers now. Anyway, there was always plenty of time to sleep in our little prison cell. He mumbled and whinged and grunted as I slid him onto the floor, so I turned the light on to let him see what I was doing. Inside two minutes I had disassembled the frame of the bed base. Lying flat on the floor were the two ends, which were not much use to me. Then there was a big heavy panel of chipboard, which wasn’t much use either. But the bed irons, they were what I wanted. I had suddenly realised they were the best weapons we had. Apart from fingernails they were also the only weapons we had. They had real potential though. About two metres long, and probably a bit less than fifteen centimetres wide, solid heavy metal, with a ball at each end which fitted into the crosspiece. They would punch holes in the ceiling, no trouble at all. They would probably knock down the door. If these guys came in with guns to shoot us, we might even do a bit of damage to them before we died. That would be nice.
Gavin watched, sulkily at first, then with more interest, and finally with a bit of excitement when I picked up one of the irons and showed him how much force I could get behind it. Apart from beating me at chess, he hadn’t shown much excitement about anything since I’d been caught using the broomstick on the ceiling. I was relieved to see a bit of light back in his eyes.
‘When are we going to use it?’ he said. ‘You don’t want to get caught again.’
‘You got that right,’ I said. ‘I don’t know when the best time is. And I don’t know whether we should try to go through the ceiling or the door.’
I gazed at the ceiling, considering the options. I thought I could now smash a big hole in it in no time at all, say, thirty seconds. But we’d still have to get up there and through the hole. If we put the base on its end and used it as a ladder we could probably do it, even with one of its irons missing. Assuming we did it in the middle of the night, and assuming the noise woke them, we’d still have a couple of minutes before they came after us. When we got to another room we’d have to find a manhole cover or whatever they’re called, open it, and drop down into what could be a hive of armed terrorists. It could be a long drop too, if it was a high-ceilinged room. The whole thing wasn’t a great proposition. For example, it’s hard to run away when you’ve got four broken ankles between the two of you.
The only other option was to go through the door. I figured I could smash it down with half-a-dozen blows, especially if I backed up to the far side of the room and took a run at it. There would be noise, sure, but again the whole thing would be over pretty quickly. Then we’d have to tumble down the ladder and take our chances, making a run for it. The risk was bloodcurdling, but I’d feel more confident running along a corridor than scuttling through a roof.
I explained all this to Gavin, using a combination of language and acting. He watched silently. He didn’t seem very happy. I didn’t blame him for that. At his age he was probably hoping for a bit more out of life than this. Hell, at my age I was hoping for a lot more out of life than this.
‘I guess the door,’ he said finally, looking like a guy who has to choose between the gas chamber and electric chair.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘The door it is then.’
‘Right now?’ he said, starting to look scared.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ll wait until we find out the time. We have to try to do it in the middle of the night.’
Just in case we did have to switch to the ceiling though, I gouged some rough holes into the chipboard, so we could use them as toeholds if we needed a ladder. Then I put the bed together, as quickly as I could.
Somehow the discovery of the irons had given us both a great surge of energy. It was a small thing, much too small to pin a lot of hope on, but it gave us the feeling that we were, however slightly, in charge of our own destinies again, or at least able to influence them. I turned the light off and we both got back on the bed, but I could feel Gavin quivering with life.
The funny thing was that the second thing happened only about forty minutes later. The timing was good. Mostly my timing is like, ‘Ready . . . set . . . go . . . oh hi Ellie, you wanna take your tracksuit off then try to catch the others?’ But this night I was on the button. Maybe by finding the bed irons I’d triggered some cosmic force.
No sooner had we both calmed down a bit than I just about lifted off the bed in shock. A wild concert of gunfire suddenly broke out all around us. First came only one shot, but right away a whole lot more started, as though the first one had been the signal, the spark. The time lapse between the first shot and the mad chaos of the rest was about two seconds. After the first one I flew off the bed and ran a complete demented circle. When the full shooting match started, the noise was so loud that even Gavin heard it. He leapt up after me and we threw the bed apart. I had the horrible thought that it might just be a fireworks display for the World Cup or Chinese New Year or something, but I had to take a gamble on that. And anyway, if it was fireworks, at least the people in the house might be distracted by them.
Like always when you’re rushing, you stuff it up. I don’t think I’ll ever learn that lesson properly. I dropped the end of the chipboard on my toe, then couldn’t get the iron out because I was pulling at it too hard. I tried to calm down, to settle, to concentrate. Then at last I had it. It felt heavier than before but I lifted it like it was a javelin and, holding it semi-balanced in one hand, charged straight at the door.
At the last moment I thought, ‘If this door is as hard as old ironbark I’m in big trouble.’ I’d already checked it earlier and it hadn’t seemed too solid. I aimed at the handle and lock area and missed it massively, smacking into a spot to the left that was half on the door frame and half on the wall. ‘Ow,’ I yelled, dropping the bed iron and shaking my hands. But Gavin was there in a moment, picking it up and trying to force it back into my grip. He was right and I was wrong. I didn’t have time to be worried about jarred arms. For us, time was the greatest luxury in the world.
I went to the other side of the room and lined it up again. More like a pole vaulter than a javelin thrower, I ran forward. I tried to focus on the lock area with total intensity. Dear God, I prayed, please don’t let anyone come. Please God, don’t let anyone hear the noise. This time I hit almost perfectly, about a centimetre to the right. The iron went right through, splintering the wood and warping the lock, turning it almost sideways. Gavin rushed in and tried to force the door open but it still wouldn’t go. I figured it needed one more hit. I dragged the bed iron out of the hole and backed up for what I hoped would be the last time. With all the strength I could find I charged at it. It would have been one of those great comedy moments if someone had opened the door just then. They’d have been bored through the stomach. But that didn’t happen. The ball at the end of the iron smashed into the wood, and the door burst open, so hard that it bounced against the wall and nearly slammed shut again. But lucky for us the lock was too wrecked to allow it to close properly. We had our chance. Our last chance.
Now the firing was louder. It was not as intense as that first storm, more sporadic, but quite a few shots flying around. I hardly had time to take that in, though, as I slid down the ladder, Gavin following fast. For two people who’d been starved and beaten and neglected we suddenly seemed to have a lot of energy.
I didn’t know what we were going to find at the bottom of the ladder. What we did find was nothing. For a moment anyway. I’d been expecting all kinds of surprises, so in a way nothing was the biggest surprise of all. But then a guy ran across the intersection of the corridors in front of us. He was carrying a rifle and reloading it as he ran. He didn’t see us. I wondered how many of the rifles in the house still worked. Seemed like some of them still did. What a shame. But I did know that having a gun that worked would be a big bonus for us. I formed the grim determination to get a rifle. The only rifle I’d seen was in the hands of the man who’d just run past, and I assumed it was working, so I decided I’d try to get that one.