Abu had slipped away without any of the adults noticing. This was almost immediately after they had settled upon the place. He knew they would be busy checking what resources were there, blocking the hole in the front window and attending to injuries. But he had his own plans.
All the while the others had been deliberating about what to do, Abu had been surveying the scene, working things out. He couldn’t just sit and wait for someone to rescue them. He knew that even if anyone could get into the tower, they might never find them. He also noticed fresh fires had started up. It was only a matter of time before something exploded.
And there was also the dread thought nagging at the back of his mind – something he could not even contemplate properly, an almost unimaginable horror. In a dark recess of his mind, Abu could visualise the worst-case-scenario. It had happened a little before he was born but he had seen the replays many times on TV and YouTube. He knew time might be running out.
He ran to a clothing store he had spotted with the others. It was a Gap. Inside, the place was badly smashed up – like the other shops. He was almost getting used to it now . . . which was very odd, he thought. Just inside the shop, two dead bodies lay sprawled on the floor, covered in fine powder. They were both lying face down in the mess – a man and a woman, each of them in shop-assistant uniforms. The woman had two huge pieces of jagged glass protruding from her back. A wide puddle of blood stretched away from under her. As much as he could get used to the destruction of the building, he would never get used to this, he thought, and tore away from the ghastly sight.
He passed a set of clothes racks. Only one remained upright. Towards the back of the store, he found what he was looking for – fleeces, warm jackets, thick sweaters. He grabbed a dark blue cardigan that looked about his size and pulled it on, shivering. He then plucked a thick, wool-lined jacket from a pile of tangled clothes. It turned out to be a reasonably good fit and he immediately started to feel warmer. Clasping a collection of clothes to his chest, he stumbled back to the front of the shop, deposited the pile close to the door with the intention of taking them over to the café on his return journey and walked as fast as he could along the row of stores.
He had to take it carefully. Danger, he knew, lay everywhere. All kinds of danger: the threat of falling masonry, stray electrical cables that could fry him in a millisecond, hidden holes and crevices in the floor. But he knew exactly where he was going. It was only six shops along the row and in a moment he was there. He looked up and read the shop sign: Cloud Electrics. Through the shattered window, he could see piles of electrical gadgets, computer terminals, leads, plugs and heaps of multicoloured wiring. The door had been a single glass sheet that had shattered into pellets. He stepped inside.
The shop was cast in shadow. The only light came from a halogen emergency spot in the centre of the ceiling. Turning, he saw an orange glow at the back of the store and with a sudden panic he realised it was a fire. The flames were spreading and would soon engulf the entire shop. Scanning a rack of metal shelves close by to his left, he span on his heel and saw another rack to the right. The remains of a counter stood in the middle of the floor. On top of it lay a cluster of electrical parts, a spaghetti of wires.
He strode over to the counter and pulled at the tangled mess trying to unravel it. ‘Allah!’ he exclaimed aloud and simply grabbed a handful of wires, stuffing them into his pocket. Then he plucked a small battery pack from the pile. On the closest shelf lay parts of a radio set. Next to these was a larger battery. He tossed away the smaller one and pocketed the bigger pack.
On the floor, close to his feet, he saw a collection of miscellaneous components from a TV set, and on the right-hand rack of shelves he could make out a reel of wire. He collected up the materials and ran out into the mall, setting everything down on a dry patch of marble flooring a few metres from the electrical store.
It took Abu longer than he thought it would to put to- gether the parts that made up the radio receiver/transmitter. And even when he had finished, 30 minutes after exiting the shop, he couldn’t be sure he had put it together properly. He turned to the power supply – a junction box with a pair of leads dangling from its rear and a fresh packet of a dozen E-sized batteries. He connected the power supply to the radio and depressed the ‘on’ switch. Nothing happened.
He swore. He knew he shouldn’t, but then all his friends did and over far less. This he knew could be a matter of life or death, a bit more important than losing a game of football in the playground or stubbing your toe on a desk. He switched around a couple of leads, checked the connections and found one of the circuit boards was not making contact with the power supply. Deftly, he jiggled the socket and it slipped into place. Sitting back on his haunches, Abu stared at the collection of components, the tangle of leads and the flimsy wiring. He depressed the ‘on’ button again. This time a hiss emerged from a tiny speaker at one end of the array and a red light appeared on a circuit board close to it.
‘Allah be praised!’ the boy exclaimed and clapped his hands together in excitement. ‘Now I just have to fix this.’
He stretched over to pick up the length of thick metal wire that would act as a makeshift aerial. Connecting it to the radio close to the power supply, Abu leaned in, picked up the microphone wired to the main body of the radio and cleared his throat.
‘Help us,’ he said self-consciously in Arabic and then in English. Then more stridently, ‘Please help us. We’re trapped in the Cloud Tower. Floor 199.’