Chapter Eight

THE WASTELAND

WELL, IT LOOKED like sunlight when we first emerged blinking into it. In fact it was still miserable and grey, but it dazzled us after the darkness of the sewer.

We crouched down behind a pile of bricks that had once been a wall.

‘Well done, gang,’ I said. ‘Did we all make it?’

I did a quick register to make sure. I didn’t want to leave anyone behind in the sewer to be eaten alive by rats.

‘Noah?’

‘Here.’

‘Moan.’

‘Here.’

‘Jenny?’

‘Here, of course. Where else would I be?’

‘Rude Word?’

‘Woof.’

‘Jamie?’

‘GROOOUUURRRPPPPP.’

‘Please, Jamie, no burping. It might give away our position, plus it’s disgusting.’

‘Sorry.’

‘And you haven’t said if you’re here yet.’

‘What? Oh, here.’

‘Thank you. Now, gather round, everyone, and we’ll plan the next stage.’

They all squatted in a half-circle round me. Their faces were full of excitement and fear. This was definitely the scariest adventure we’d ever had.

‘Well then?’ said Jenny.

‘Well then what?’

‘Well then, what next?’

‘Oh, yes. Er, we need to reconnoitre the situation.’

‘Eh?’ said Jamie.

‘It means we have to have a look around.’

I got out my U-boat Captain’s binoculars, and peeped over the broken wall. After a few seconds trying to get the focus right, I could see all around the perimeter to the gate where the Group 9 guy was on guard with his hellhound. Ahead of us there was about five hundred metres of open ground. Beyond that the tower block loomed huge and grim. Between us there were a couple of bulldozers and a dumper truck, left idle for the weekend, plus some other piles of bricks, some wheelbarrows, some planks, and all the other cool stuff you find on building sites.

I checked back to the Group 9 hut. As I watched I saw the guard come out, with Zoltan on a lead. He began to walk away from us, around the inside of the fence.

‘A bit of good luck,’ I whispered to the others. ‘The guard is doing his rounds. Looks like he’s going to go all the way round the fence. In a couple of minutes the tower will be in between him and us, so we can make it without being seen.’

‘What about sniffing,’ said Noah.

‘Sniffing is rude,’ I replied. ‘If you’ve got a runny nose you should wipe it on a hanky or a leaf or your sleeve.’

‘No, I didn’t mean my sniffing, I meant Zoltan.’

‘Well, obviously dogs can’t use hankies . . . Oh, you mean he’ll sniff us out? Well, the tower should block off most of our smells. But we should make sure we don’t do any farts. It’s well known that a dog can smell a boy’s fart from fifty miles away.’

‘What about a girl’s?’ said Jennifer, with a funny look on her face.

‘What? Oh, I don’t think girls do them,’ I said.

The Moan laughed. ‘Course they do – she does them all the time.’

Jennifer hit him in the ribs.

‘Well, you do,’ he said very quietly, rubbing his side.

‘Maybe she does and maybe she doesn’t,’ I said, ‘but if she does, it probably smells of flowers, so Zoltan won’t recognize it. He’ll just think, Oh, what a nice smell. A lovely patch of roses must have come into bloom. Something like that. But, you know, in doggie language, so it would be more like, Woof woof, growl woof, snuffle woof, but meaning what I said.’

Jennifer gave me a little smile when I’d finished. I was being nice to her because we were on a kind of olden-days adventure, and we were sort of knights, so you have to do something called ‘being chivalrous’, which is all about looking after girls (whether or not they really need it) and saying their farts smell of flowers (whether or not they do).

All this time I was watching the guard and his dog like a hawk. A hawk with high-powered binoculars. Zoltan was the sort of dog that did a wee on every bush to show that he owned the place. So that’s how they went.

Walk.

Wee.

Walk.

Wee.

It wasn’t long before they’d gone walking and weeing behind the tower. This was our chance. We were out of sight.

‘See that dumper truck?’ I whispered. They nodded. ‘We sprint for that. Ready? Go!’

We jumped over the wall and raced like rabbits for the truck. Jenny got there first, of course. She’s so fast she’d probably have got there first if she’d done it in cartwheels.

Jamie made it next, then The Moan, then me, with Rude Word right on my heels, and Noah at the back. I was gasping when I reached the dumper truck.

‘Halfway there,’ I said, and was about to begin another encouraging speech, when Jenny interrupted:

‘Where’s Noah?’

Noah. Drat. I looked back. And there he was, halfway between the wall and the dumper truck.

‘Looks like he’s stuck,’ said The Moan.

Noah was lying on the ground, waving at us. His face was crinkled up with pain and fear.

‘I’ll go back and check on him,’ I said. ‘You guys wait here.’

I ran back to Noah as fast as I could. There was a big patch of tangled-up barbed wire. Noah was caught in it like a fly in a spider’s web. It had snagged his jeans and torn a great rip in his T-shirt.

‘Don’t move,’ I said. ‘You’ll just make it worse and probably disembowel yourself.’

Disembowelling is one of the worst ways to go – worse, I reckon, than death by jellyfish, death by parachute-not-opening, or death by scorpions. What happens is that your bowels, which are all the pipes and tubes in your belly, slither out of you like giant worms. You then have roughly ten seconds to re-embowel yourself, which is when you push the pipes back in and sew up the hole, before you die.

Of course usually that’s impossible, because the thing that caused the disembowelling in the first place, say a Samurai warrior, a sabre-toothed tiger or great white shark, will still be attacking you, and might well have eaten your bowels in the meantime. Not the Samurai warrior, of course. Japanese people don’t eat bowels, but raw fish. They may eat raw fish bowels, but I’m not sure. I’ll check on the Internet.

But I didn’t mention any of the details of disembowelling to Noah, because then he’d panic and start thrashing around, which is exactly the right way to go about getting yourself disembowelled.

I had exactly what I needed to deal with this situation. I took out my multi-tool. As well as the knife, the scissors, the thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves, the magnifying glass, the hammer, the pliers and the saw, it had some wire cutters.

‘I’m stuck fast,’ said Noah weakly. ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I replied as I got to work with the wire cutters. ‘I’ll have you free in a second.’

It was harder than I thought to cut through the thick wire, and I had to use both hands and squeeze with all my might.

But I did it.

First I snipped the wire tangling Noah’s legs, and then, more carefully, I cut through the wire caught up in his T-shirt. Each time it made a very satisfying click sound.

Click.

Click.

Click.

I thought I’d have made a very good wire-cutting man in the trenches in the First World War, even though that was one of the worst wars ever, in terms of mud, rats, gangrene, death, etc., etc.

It took more than a second, but in the end Noah was free. I snapped my multi-tool together again and put it in my pack.

‘Thanks, Ludo,’ Noah said as we jogged back to join the others. ‘You could have left me there until Zoltan found me and savaged me all to bits, but you came back and saved me.’

‘Hey,’ I said proudly, ‘we’re the Bare Bum Gang and we never leave one of ours behind. Unless it is The Moan in one of his bad moods . . .’

Noah looked at me accusingly.

‘Only kidding,’ I said, and we both giggled.