‘Probably alongside Jake,’ Bethany grinned. ‘My brother’s almost as bad as yours.’
‘You want to use the bucket before I sling this lot outside?’ Lauren asked, as she adjusted her underwear and pulled up the zip on her fleece suit.
‘Yeah. Hand it over, I’m busting,’ Bethany said. ‘I hope that bear’s gone.’
Lauren smiled. ‘If not, he’s about to get woken up by having a bucket of pee chucked over his head.’
After Bethany had peed, Lauren cautiously pushed the metal door open with her shoulder. It was hard to shift because half a metre of snow had blown against it during the night. The cold air stung her uncovered hands and face. She slung out the contents of the steaming bucket and glanced through the sleet.
‘Dammit,’ Lauren said anxiously. ‘It’s still out there.’
The sleeping bear was now blanketed in the overnight snowfall, except for a patch around its snout that had been melted by the breath rising out of its nose.
‘Look at the size of him,’ Lauren said. ‘I bet he could kill us both in one swipe. It’s going to be too dangerous dragging the snowmobile out before he’s gone. We’ll have to shoo him off.’
‘We should do it now,’ Bethany said, as she crept up to the crack in the container door beside Lauren. ‘That way he’ll be long gone by the time we have to leave.’
Lauren nodded in agreement. ‘Those TV shows always say that even big animals are easily scared, so it shouldn’t be that hard.’
She pushed the metal bucket through the doors and whacked it as hard as she could against the container door. The girls had to bury their ears in their hands to dull the eardrum-shattering clang. The bear, on the other hand, didn’t move a millimetre.
‘Stupid creature,’ Lauren snapped.
‘Maybe we should lob something at it,’ Bethany suggested.
The open door was letting out the heat and the girls were underdressed. They retreated inside to put on gloves and balaclavas. Bethany rummaged around for a good throwing object, while Lauren poured porridge oats, powdered milk and water into a tin and set it over the camping stove so that their breakfast was warming while they dealt with the wildlife problem.
Bethany approached the doors holding two saucepans, the only items amongst their lightweight camping equipment that seemed sufficiently hefty to rouse a polar bear.
‘I’ll have to get close to make sure I don’t miss,’ Bethany said. ‘But it might charge at me, so you hold the door and be ready to pull it shut the second I come back through.’
Bethany’s heart drummed as she crept to within three metres of the bear, holding a saucepan in each hand. She hurled both saucepans, before spinning around and charging back to the container in a flurry of white powder.
Lauren slammed the doors of their metal cage. Bethany’s momentum carried her forward over Lauren’s sled and she ended up sprawled out on the floor beyond it.
‘Are you OK?’ Lauren asked.
‘I’ll live,’ Bethany gasped, as she rolled on to her back. ‘Did it work?’
Lauren’s main concern had been Bethany’s safety. She hadn’t seen the bear’s reaction through the clouds of snow. She pushed the door back open a couple of centimetres and took a peek.
‘I do not believe it,’ Lauren gasped.
Bethany poked her head through the gap between the doors and didn’t believe it either. The bear still hadn’t moved. All that had changed was that there was now a saucepan on the ground in front of its snout and another buried in the snow over its midsection, swelling up and down with each breath.
‘It had to happen this morning, didn’t it?’ Lauren said, sounding stressed out. ‘We should have eaten breakfast, packed up and dragged the snowmobile outside by now.’
‘Think, girl!’ Bethany said, pounding her gloved hand against her thigh. ‘There must be a way to make it move.’
‘Maybe it’s deaf or something,’ Lauren said.
‘Think, think, think …’ Bethany repeated. ‘What if we loaded everything on the snowmobile and pushed it outside quietly? It wouldn’t catch up with us once we’re moving.’
‘Too risky,’ Lauren said. ‘What if we disturbed it at the wrong moment and it went after one of us? We wouldn’t stand a chance.’
‘True,’ Bethany said. ‘But looking at that dozy lump, I’d say you’d have to shove a firework up its butt for it to budge.’
‘That’s it,’ Lauren gasped. ‘Bethany, you’re a genius.’
‘What?’ Bethany asked. ‘We don’t have a firework. We do have our distress flare, but if we set that off the rescue helicopter will come for us and we’ll fail training.’
‘Not a firework,’ Lauren explained. ‘But we can make fire. Animals are scared of fire.’
Feeling that she couldn’t spare time to explain, Lauren plunged into the wreckage of the snowmobile packaging at the back of the container. She grabbed one of the long pieces of cardboard and tore off a ragged section, thirty centimetres wide and three metres long. Then she rolled it into a tube.
‘Tie this off with some of that tape,’ Lauren ordered.
Bethany picked up the strong plastic binding strip they’d cut off the outside of the snowmobile box before opening it. She wound it around the tube, tying knots as she went.
‘Are we gonna poke it with this?’ Bethany asked.
‘Uh-huh,’ Lauren nodded, as she gathered up the bits of oily rag they’d used when they were working on the snowmobile and stuffed them into one end of the tube.
‘The oil on these rags will burn easily,’ Lauren explained. ‘It won’t stick around long enough to feel any more than a quick lick of flame.’
‘Good thinking,’ Bethany said admiringly.
Bethany found some waterproof matches in her sled, as Lauren moved up to the door with the long cardboard tube.
‘Be ready to pull up the door after me,’ Lauren said. ‘He’s not going to like this one bit.’
Bethany went up on tiptoes with a match in her hand. The oiled rags instantly erupted in blue flames. Lauren pushed the burning tube through the doorway, hoping that the freezing wind wouldn’t snuff out the flame.
The fire turned orange as Lauren tilted the tube forward and the cardboard caught light. Her second crunching step through the snow took the flaming end to within half a metre of the bear’s head. When the flame was almost touching its nose, Lauren lowered the tube on to the snow and rolled it towards the bear’s face. Certain that the bear would rear up the instant the flame touched it, she scrambled desperately back towards the container and Bethany clanged the door shut behind her.
The girls caught their breath for a moment, before cracking the door back open. They were expecting to find a four-hundred-kilogram bear with a burned snout on the rampage, but what they saw was more shocking: the bear’s head was in flames and its eye socket had sunk down through its skull into its head.
‘We killed it,’ Bethany shrieked. ‘The poor thing must have been old, or sick.’
But Lauren wasn’t buying it. She’d noticed the grey wisps of smoke venting out the back of the mound in the snow. Lauren didn’t know much about the anatomy of polar bears, but she was certain their insides weren’t hollow.
‘It’s fake,’ Lauren announced.
Lauren plunged into the snow towards the smouldering bear and leaned over it. Although it was smoky, she got a reasonable view inside the cavity where the head had melted. The bear was made of nylon fur, stretched over a frame shaped out of chicken wire. Inside, she could see the plastic bellows, rubber tubing, car battery and electric pump that had made it breathe.
‘We should have known,’ Bethany stormed, angrily kicking up a flurry of snow. ‘After all the tricks the instructors have played on us.’
Lauren looked at her watch. ‘I reckon we’ve lost fifteen minutes of daylight. Let’s get breakfast down our necks and get out of here.’
The porridge was bubbling over the side of its tin when they got back inside the container. Laure
n laced the porridge with a heavy dose of glucose powder and a slow-release energy supplement designed for long-distance runners. The girls’ bodies would need every calorie of this high-energy food to keep warm on their thirty-five-kilometre snowmobile journey. When it was all mixed in, the porridge had a gritty texture and the grey pallor of cement, but the girls barely considered this as they half spooned and half drank the soggy mixture.
‘I hope there’s no more tricks,’ Lauren said, as she wiped a dribble of porridge from the corner of her mouth.
Bethany spoke with her mouth full. ‘If we can just keep our heads together for four more hours …’
4. SUNDAY
Kids who live on CHERUB campus miss a lot of school when they’re away on missions. One of the ways they catch up is by having lessons on Saturday mornings. James thought this was cruel, because it left Sunday as the only time when he got a chance to lie in.
It was nearly eleven when he decided to untangle himself from his duvet. Dressed only in boxers and a grubby CHERUB T-shirt, he glanced through the slats in his blind and saw that it was a typical April morning, with a light frost on the grass and a drizzle of rain. A football match was being played on the pitches beyond the tennis courts. The players were a bunch of muddy eight- and nine-year-olds, mostly boys.
James wandered across to his laptop, flipped up the screen and tapped on the navigation pad to check his e-mail. He was hoping for a message from Kerry, but all he had was spam from a company offering him a Free online personality test that could change your WHOLE life!!! and a schedule notification from the mission controller Zara Asker:
James,
Please ensure you attend the mission preparation building, room 31, at 1530 this afternoon, where you will be briefed on your upcoming recruitment mission. Zara Asker (Mission Controller)
James thought about sending an e-mail to Kerry, but he’d sent her three since she’d last replied and the only news he had was about the fight at the bowling alley, which he didn’t feel like going into.
He felt too lazy to go down to the canteen, so James flicked on Sky Sports News, poured himself a bowl of cereal and got milk and orange juice from his miniature fridge. There was a knock on the door while he ate.
‘Not locked,’ James munched.
Kyle and Bruce came in, both dressed in shorts and trainers and holding carrier bags with a towel and a change of clothes in them.
‘Aren’t you ready?’ Kyle asked.
James looked at the clock on his bedside table. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I never realised it was time.’
James went to the fitness training session with Kyle and Bruce every Sunday morning. Most boys preferred playing football or rugby, but after thirteen years of missing open goals, tripping in the mud and getting smacked in the face by balls that came out of nowhere, he’d reluctantly accepted that ball games were not his forte.
‘I’ll get some clothes on,’ James said, as he sat on the edge of his bed and grabbed one of the crusty sports socks scattered over his floor.
‘Way to go at the bowling alley last night, James,’ Bruce sneered.
‘You would have been involved if you hadn’t already been on punishment detail in the kitchens,’ James sneered back.
‘Yeah well,’ Bruce smiled, ‘better spending a couple of hours down on my knees cleaning out the ovens, than a month stuck in some god-awful children’s home. Mind you, it’s always a shame to miss a punch-up, whatever the consequences.’
‘You know what?’ James said, as he pulled on a white sock that didn’t match the first one. ‘I don’t see what all this fuss is about recruitment missions. It can’t be that bad being sent off to some children’s home to try and get another kid to join CHERUB.’
Kyle, who’d been on five recruitment missions for his many sins, nodded. ‘They’re not awful. They’re just really boring and a lot of the kids you meet in those places are complete scumbags; nicking your stuff and that. One time I got sent to this place in Newcastle. I had guys starting on me every five minutes. I was there for three weeks and I must have been in a row every day.’
‘Did you recruit anyone?’
Kyle nodded. ‘Those two blonde twins with the Geordie accents. Remember I pointed them out to you? They were only seven at the time, but they had more brains than all the other kids in that dump combined.’
*
There were three gymnasiums on CHERUB campus. Fitness training was taught in the oldest of them, which was still known as the Boys’ Gym, from the days when physical education was a single-sex affair. James had a soft spot for this dilapidated building, with its mahogany wall clock permanently stuck at a quarter to five, dim light bulbs suspended from long wires and shrunken floorboards that creaked underfoot. His favourite feature was the hand-painted sign hanging over the entrance:
Any boy bringing in mud or dirt on
his plimsolls will be thrashed.
P.T. Bivott (Sports Master)
Today’s teacher was Meryl Spencer, a retired Olympic sprinter, who could think of a couple of kids she wouldn’t have minded thrashing if corporal punishment at CHERUB hadn’t been banned more than twenty years earlier.
The gym had been laid out with forty stations. Some were as simple as a foam mat with a laminated card on it saying Push Ups. Others were more complex: traffic cones set out for shuttle runs, a chest-press machine, a chin-up bar.
The thirty kids in the class picked a station to start at. They worked it for two minutes, after which Meryl would blast her whistle and the kids would run to the next. The whole circuit took eighty minutes and the only relief from exhaustion came at the two rest stops along the way. Anyone who looked slack found Meryl or her assistant yelling in their face, calling them soft and threatening them with a good boot up the backside.
Eight boys piled into the showers when the session ended. James towelled off and put on clean jeans, then flexed his chest muscles and biceps in front of the steamed-up mirror.
He’d sprouted eight centimetres in the last three months and packed on muscle since starting regular strength training.
Bruce flicked James’ back with his towel. ‘You little poser,’ Bruce grinned. ‘Stop poncing about.’
James turned away and grinned as he rolled deodorant under his arms. ‘You’re just jealous because I’m looking so beefy these days,’ he said. ‘It’s hardly surprising that half the girls on campus are chasing after me.’
‘You reckon, do you?’ Bruce huffed.
Kyle spotted a golden opportunity for one of his trademark wind-ups. ‘I think you’re right, actually,’ he said, stepping forward and putting his hand on James’ bum. ‘I think you’re hot stuff.’
James leapt half a metre in the air and screamed. ‘Cut that gay shit out, Kyle.’
After a great deal of persuasion from Kerry and a few others, James had eventually decided that there was nothing wrong with his friend Kyle being gay. Sometimes it still gave him the creeps though. He spun around and furiously shoved Kyle away, his face burning with rage as Bruce and the other boys started laughing. James realised the only way to save face was to outdo Kyle at his own game. He quickly balled up all the saliva he could muster, grabbed Kyle around the back of the neck and planted a massive soggy kiss on his cheek. Kyle recoiled in horror, with a glistening trail of James’ spit rolling down his face.
‘You filthy little …’ Kyle shouted, as he scoured his wet face on his towel.
‘What’s the matter?’ James asked sweetly. ‘Come on, baby. Won’t you give us a snog?’
Bruce and the others were killing themselves laughing, as Kyle bundled up his clothes and scrambled to the opposite end of the changing room.
*
Sunday lunch was an occasion on campus. It was the only meal of the week when the individual tables in the dining-room were pushed together. Table cloths were laid and places set with the good cutlery. The traditional Sunday roast with all the trimmings was James’ favourite meal of the week, but the atmosphere at his t
able was miserable, because everyone except Bruce was being briefed for their recruitment missions later that afternoon. Even the banter riding back and forth about James and Kyle fancying each other didn’t do much to lighten the mood.
Kyle, James and Gabrielle shared the first appointment with Zara. They strolled through the drizzle without speaking, their bloated stomachs deadening their progress.
The brand new mission preparation building was a kilometre away from the main building, where they’d eaten lunch. The banana-shaped construction looked impressive as you approached: a hundred metres of reflective glass, bristling with satellite dishes and aerials. Impressions took a turn for the worse when you got close and realised that the paths up to the building comprised wooden boards laid over mud. There were still wheelbarrows, cement mixers and building materials everywhere and the high-tech entry system that was supposed to identify you by scanning the lattice of blood vessels in the back of your eye had a soggy Out Of Order notice drooped over it.
The three kids passed along a corridor that smelled of new carpet tiles. The offices all had the names of CHERUB mission controllers printed on the locked doors.
Zara Asker was one of the most senior mission controllers. She had a big office at the end of the corridor, with a semicircle of floor-to-ceiling windows and some rather swish-looking furniture with lots of curving wood and flashy chrome trim. She struggled out of her seat as the kids walked through her open door, revealing a set of baggy dungarees stretched over an almost nine-month-pregnant belly.
‘Well, well, well,’ Zara grinned, nodding at James and Kyle. ‘Dr McAfferty told me it wouldn’t take long to find a few bodies to send on recruitment missions. I can’t say I’m surprised to see you two hooligans here … And you must be Gabrielle, I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure.’
As Gabrielle and Zara shook hands, James couldn’t help smiling guiltily. Zara had been one of the controllers on his last mission and he’d got on well with her.