Boy in the Tower Page 13

  I look again and again but I can’t see anything more after that. I could convince myself that there is nothing out there but I don’t. I keep looking, running my eyes over and over the same patch of bushes, trying to find out what moved there.

  I feel sure there is someone there, looking up at the tower right now. Perhaps they have got a mask on like Obi had but are running low on air.

  I think: Maybe they need to come into the tower, just like Ben and his wife did.

  I think: Maybe they need rescuing too.

  I know I am not a hero. Nothing like a superhero in a shiny red cape who knows they will save the day. I’m scared and worried and I don’t want to die.

  And I know I might do if I go out of the tower.

  But there is something bigger inside me that makes me turn round and run to the door. There’s the feeling I had when I sat next to Ben when he thanked me for giving him and Evie their last chance, and something else as well. It’s not a feeling I’ve ever had before, really. It’s just like a certainty that I know the right thing to do, and that is to try and save the person who is outside the tower.

  I know I can’t waste any time; I need to go to them straight away. Ben said that Evie had died in just moments in the open air.

  Suppose the person in the bushes doesn’t have very much air left? Or perhaps they are injured and can’t walk the very last bit of the way to our block?

  Suppose this is their last chance?

  There is no time to go and find Obi or Dory or Ben. I run downstairs to the basement as quickly as I can. My legs are taking me down the steps so fast that I think they might crumple beneath me at any minute, but I don’t fall.

  I make it all the way downstairs to Obi’s room.

  I pick up the tattered rucksack with one of the silver canisters we found all those days ago inside it. The mask is still attached to it. I fiddle with the top of it just like I saw Obi do, and I hear a small hissing sound come from the mask. I put it over my mouth and breathe in. It’s working fine. I struggle to put the rucksack on my back. It is too big for me, really, but I can manage it.

  Then I start taping up the mask, just like I did when Obi put it on. It’s harder now I’ve got it on myself, and I keep getting the tape tangled so it sticks to itself, and then I have to start again.

  Finally I am putting on the old swimming goggles and tying scarves around my face as best I can.

  I am ready.

  Chapter Forty-two

  To get to the outside door, I need to pull down one corner of the sheet that Obi put up and take some of the tape off the swing doors so I can open one.

  I feel guilty as I pull apart Obi’s protection for us and I try to put it back up behind me. The worst thing I could do is let spores into the tower. It wouldn’t matter if I rescued someone, if I managed to kill everyone else while I did it.

  I only realize how scared I am when my hands don’t seem to be obeying me properly. They seem too big suddenly, and numb, as though I am cut off from them. I swallow and concentrate hard on unpeeling the first of the thick silver lines of tape. I have to tug it hard to pull it off and it makes a ripping sound as it comes off that pierces through me and then settles in a heavy feeling of sickness in my stomach.

  I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing or not.

  I’m not Obi; I don’t know what I am doing, I’m just the kid from seventeen.

  But I guess there is one way in which I am like Obi. When I told him about the lights in the tower, he said that we must try to rescue the people, and that is what I am doing.

  I am trying to rescue the person I saw. It’s the only thing I can do.

  The floor through the swing doors is covered in a thick carpet of grit salt. My feet sink into it so that it reminds me of walking through icy snow, but it looks browny-orange instead of white. Funny how you notice things like that, as though your brain is trying to fool you into forgetting what you are about to do. To lure you into a sense of safety and dismiss the fear that is pulsing through your veins and filling every corner of your mind.

  There’s more tape on the outside door and most of that needs to come off too. It makes one final screech, a deafening sound that seems to echo down the corridor, but finally I have done it and I pull down the handle and push.

  How can I describe what outside looks like when it is so different from anything I have ever seen?

  When I open the door and feel the first rush of air on my face, it feels so cold and startling that it makes me want to step back into the safety of the tower. But after the shock of it, it feels fresh and cool and wonderful.

  I’d forgotten about that.

  There is a crunching sound as I tread on the salt surrounding the bottom of the tower. It is scattered all about me. I can hear my breath going in and out, in and out. It sounds loud because of the mask I am wearing.

  It makes me feel worried how easily one of those tiny little spores might just slip under my mask so I would breathe it in. I must be surrounded by the spores that are floating and swirling all around me but I can’t see them at all. It just looks like empty air to me.

  Then I come to the Bluchers. In some places they have grown higher than my knees, but in others, they have grown much, much taller and they tower above me. Close up, they look beautiful. And weird as well. As if they are filled with some kind of liquid that is always moving. Swirling around, making circular patterns that are never still.

  You can see the inside of them because they have a sort of clear skin which you can see right through. The liquid reminds me of when you see a little puddle of petrol on the road and it has swirls of colours in it. Or when you blow a bubble and it doesn’t pop straight away and there’s a tiny moment when it is full of moving colours. Pink and green and yellow.

  Except it doesn’t look like any of those things, not really. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever seen before.

  Not like a plant, not like a tree.

  When they are fully grown, their stems are as thick as the ropes we used to hang from on the apparatus in our school hall. The rope would feel bulky in our hands when we used to climb up it and most of us could make it to the very top. I don’t think you would have been able to climb up a Blucher, though. They look so smooth and shiny that you might slip right down one if you tried.

  I have the urge to reach out to touch one of them. They look like they would feel wet and slimy, a bit like jelly. Or like when we used to let snails slide across our fingers if we found one in the playground.

  At the top of the stem is a large, roundish shape that comes up to a little tip. Depending on how tall they are, some of these heads are as small as my finger, but when the stem is really high, they are much, much bigger than my head.

  The large ones are swollen and bloated like blown-up balloons, and look like they might pop if you poked them sharply, so I tread carefully, anxious that I will burst one if I hurry past.

  Among the Bluchers, all kinds of things are growing.

  There are tall, stalky plants that have large, long leaves, and green, bushy shrubs that have little blue flowers on top. Grasses have grown so much that they stand tall and thick, quite unlike the patchy lawns that I knew from before.

  These blades of grass look silky and dense, as if they would be difficult to walk through.

  I can’t understand how everything has sprouted over the buildings that once stood here. There isn’t a trace of the homes and shops and roads, not one trace, and when I look down to the ground, I can see that my path is covered in tiny little yellow-green leaves that coat the earth like a carpet.

  I dig the heel of my shoe in to lift some away and I see that the soil beneath looks almost black now. It isn’t the brown, sandy stuff which would fly from our trowels like dust. It is much, much darker and looks moist and crumbly, like the rich chocolate cake we ate for Gaia’s birthday. Only darker still.

  I stand among the Bluchers, so shocked by everything I see that I almost forget the reason I am outside in the
first place.

  The movement in the bushes.

  The person who is lying there, waiting to be saved, needing to get to the tower.

  I look around at the trees to try and work out which direction I need to go. It all looks so different from what I could see from the window, I can’t figure out which bit of green I saw move, at first. It takes me a while, and I have to circle the tower a couple of times before I recognize a craggy branch of a tree which looks a bit like someone’s arm bent right over, which was close by to where the person was hiding.

  I am not far away from there now and I think I see another rustle in the undergrowth. I freeze, but once again I have the eerie feeling that I might have seen something or I might not have seen anything at all, and now that the moment has passed, I have no way of telling.

  My voice is muffled through the mask.

  I call out, ‘Is there anyone there?’ but my voice can’t pierce through the plastic of the mask and all the scarves I am wearing. It is trapped beneath the layers.

  I can’t take anything off, so I creep towards the bushes and keep my eyes fixed on the spot that I think just moved. It’s difficult to walk through all the Bluchers as well as all the bristly, wild leaves and grasses that are in my way. I have to move slowly and it takes a long time.

  I have just reached the place when I hear someone call out my name from far away. It’s a voice I know well: Obi’s voice.

  I look up to the tower and can just see two tiny little specks on the roof of the block. Obi and Ben. They have seen me. I can’t make out their faces but I can hear what they are shouting down to me.

  They keep saying the same thing over and over. Louder and louder, each time.

  ‘Get back inside.’

  ‘Get back inside.’

  Chapter Forty-three

  It’s funny when time slows down or speeds up again.

  I’ve heard people talk about time like that. They say, ‘This week is going so slowly,’ or, ‘Today’s rushed by.’

  I hadn’t really taken any notice of that before.

  Sometimes night felt like a long time because I would wake up and think it must be morning and time to get up and have breakfast, and then realize that it was still dark outside and the middle of the night. But I’d never really known time to seem like it had stopped. Not until now, when I am standing outside the tower, with Obi and Ben calling down to me, wearing my air mask, in front of the leafy green bushes.

  With the Bluchers all around me.

  All of a sudden, Obi and Ben’s voices sound very far away. They get quieter in my head.

  I notice that to one side of me is a tall Blucher which is growing next to a patch of the bushes, and then I can’t tell what happens first, it all happens so quickly. Or so slowly, depending on which way you look at it.

  One moment I am thinking about whether I should try calling back to Ben and Obi that I am all right, and the next, there is just that tiny sliver of time right before something big happens.

  It is like the world has just taken a breath.

  Do I know it at the time? Maybe I don’t.

  Maybe I only remember that moment of stillness because of what happens next.

  I turn back to look in front of me, and there is a movement in the bushes, and at what seems like exactly the same time, the top of the Blucher right next to me explodes.

  Pop. Just like that.

  This is the moment that time stops. The little piece of time as I realize that it has burst and the liquid that was in it is now spraying out of it.

  Right towards me.

  The droplets look like they are frozen, like long thin teardrops hanging in the air. A fountain that I am standing right underneath. And then time restarts again and I feel the wetness of the liquid seeping through my clothes, drenching the scarves that are wrapped around my face.

  I can’t move. I don’t know if I am able to at first.

  I stand there, as still as I can, and I can feel the liquid running down my back now and the coolness of it upon my cheeks. I know I am covered, that if this is something that can hurt humans, then there is no chance for me now. But still I am waiting. Waiting for the pain to start, waiting for me to begin to die.

  My skin feels a little bit itchy and sticky but I can’t decide if I am hurting or not. I start thinking that my skin feels like it is warming up. I worry that it will get hotter and hotter and that soon it will feel like I am on fire. But it doesn’t warm up like that. I just stand there, paralysed, waiting for something to happen.

  My goggles are coated with the stuff. Everything starts looking a bit blurry through the lenses, although I can still see through them.

  What is really strange though is that I can see the colours of the Bluchers through the goggles and that changes how everything looks. It is like I am looking through a funny magnifying glass which makes everything look hazy and changes their colour. The bush in front of me is no longer green. It seems like it is pale blue now. The little blue flowers are pink, and I can see out of the corner of my eye that the tower now looks almost completely black. It is like a huge, dark shadow looming over me.

  I stand there for a long time before I realize that I am all right. I am not hurt.

  I can hear Ben still calling to me to get inside. The shouts haven’t stopped the whole time. It is just that I have been able to block out the sound in my head.

  I know that I need to go back now, but I have come outside to help somebody and I haven’t even found them yet.

  The bush that moved when the Blucher burst is directly in front of me.

  I slowly walk round it and kneel down as best I can with the rucksack on my back, to look underneath it.

  There is nothing there.

  There are little marks in the dark, black soil that show where something has been, but whatever it is or whoever they are, they have gone. I look down the only path it could have taken. It’s surrounded by swollen Bluchers and thick undergrowth. Trees are growing here, but they are so much taller than I remember and they block out the light.

  I suddenly get the eerie feeling that if I go down that path, I won’t return.

  As I stand in front of the track and decide that I have to go back, I start to feel a little bit silly. I rushed out of the tower to rescue someone and there’s no one here. I could have died when the Blucher juice covered me and I risked coming out with spores all over the place and I might have even infected the block with them.

  All for something I thought I’d seen.

  I turn back to the tower, feeling my shoulders slump. I can hear Ben’s voice die down as I turn round and start walking back to the tower. I wonder if Obi will be cross with me for going outside. Will he understand why I had to do it?

  And then I start hearing a different noise.

  It’s coming from down the path. Pop, pop, pop. It’s the sound the Bluchers make when they explode.

  And something else as well. A little mewing noise calling out.

  I turn back and I can see the Bluchers are bursting, one after another in a line, right along the path and coming towards me. Something is setting them off.

  And then I see it.

  It is running away from the sound as fast as it can.

  A small, thin cat.

  It leaps into my arms as soon as it reaches me and starts purring. It’s like it knows I have come to get it.

  I turn back to the tower, but as I do so, I feel something stopping me. I look down. It’s on my leg. A thin, silvery arm of a Blucher wrapped around my ankle.

  And it’s beginning to tighten its grip.

  Chapter Forty-four

  I desperately try to pull my leg away from the Blucher but its grip is crushing. It anchors me to the spot.

  I look around frantically, still clutching the cat to me, trying to find any way to escape the Blucher’s deadly hold. The Blucher’s squeezing me now, so tightly that I wonder if my leg will simply break from the pressure.

  I cry out and bury my head in the
cat’s silken fur. I think: This might be the end.

  The popping of the Bluchers is so loud that it sounds like the whole world is exploding. Just like when you hear thunder and it seems to make the walls of the room vibrate a little bit. Except I think I can feel the sound in my chest and in my ribs and deep inside my body, in my lungs.

  Suddenly I hear a sort of fizz and hiss, and the pressure on my leg is lessening and lessening. In front of me stands Obi, his face obscured by scarves and goggles, and behind me, I see the shrivelled dead body of the Blucher.

  Obi gestures with his arm to follow him and I imagine that if he was able to, he would be shouting with all his might, ‘Get inside, Ade, get inside!’

  I run to him as fast as I can, although my leg is throbbing and sore. Obi flings open the door of the tower, I run in and he slams it behind me. It closes with a loud bang. I stand with my back to the door until I hear the last of the explosions. And then there is silence.

  Obi throws the empty bucket in his hand to the ground and it clangs noisily and rolls and rolls until it comes to a stop. I try hard to slow down my breathing, which is coming in ragged bursts, and I try to take in what just happened outside. It was all down to Obi. He threw a bucket of salt on the Blucher that was attacking me. He saved my life.

  Obi pulls off my scarves, pulls off the mask and the goggles. I manage to say, ‘I’m OK, Obi, I’m OK,’ but I don’t think he can hear me because he is pulling off my rucksack and rushing into the little room off the corridor to grab a towel to dry my face with.

  The cat jumps down from my arms and now sits by the rucksack looking up at us. I have an awful feeling that Obi is cross with me. It starts in my stomach and it goes all the way up to make a lump in my throat and an ache in my head.

  I wait to hear what his first words will be. I am scared he is going to shout. He looks angry and his face is twisted up so much that I can’t see his eyes properly.

  ‘What happened?’ he says. It’s hard to hear him because he’s speaking through a scarf which is covering his mouth.

  ‘What happened?’ he says again. And I feel the awful feeling leak out of me. He isn’t going to shout; he is going to listen.