‘They’re arresting them?’ Si exclaimed, grimacing in disbelief. ‘Just what are they expecting all those kids to do?’ he added, as if he’d somehow heard Jial’s earlier explanation. ‘And just because – what? The kids haven’t got their angels, like they’d expected?’
‘Your egg!’ Chrissy hissed in warning, nervously glancing around as it dawned on her that Si – forgetting to keep up the pretence that he’d received an angel – had let his hands drop. ‘You’re supposed to be carrying an egg, remember?’
Si instantly cupped his hands together before his face once more. Like Chrissy, he briefly glanced back towards the angels and police standing around on the now otherwise empty green.
‘Let’s get back to my place!’ Quickening his stride, he headed up the nearest street leading away from the green. ‘Before I end up in that van!’
*
Chapter 15
‘There isn’t any signal.’
Slipping her cellphone back into her jeans pocket, Chrissy frowned in puzzlement and frustration. She had never known a time when there hadn’t been a clear signal.
‘Call ’em from Mom and Dad’s phone when we get there.’
Now they were a few blocks from the green, Si had dropped the pretence that he was carrying an angel.
‘You know,’ he continued, ‘I reckon the whole point of the signal being down is that they don’t want any kids ringing home telling their parents that they’re being arrested.’
‘It’s deliberate?’ Chrissy’s puzzled frown deepened into one of anger. ‘You reckon the signal’s been deliberately cut off?’
She glanced Jial’s way, staring at her accusingly as she waited for a response.
‘Yeah, I reckon he’s probably right on that one,’ Jial conceded, pulling a disconcerted face. She kicked out at a polystyrene cup on the floor, so that it flew up as if caught by the wind.
‘Litter?’ Si exclaimed in surprise as he watched the cup bounce into the road. ‘Now I really know something odd’s going on around here!’ he added with an ironic grin.
‘That’s what you get, maybe, when you don’t see a place for angels in your lives?’ Jial snapped sourly at an oblivious Si.
‘Jial, what is going on here?’
Chrissy glowered sternly at Jial once again. Following her gaze, Si distrustfully scowled at the empty space.
An obviously uncomfortable Jial shrugged, holding her arms out wide as if begging for understanding, even forgiveness.
‘It doesn’t make any sense, I know. But at the moment, well, I’m sorry, but – we’ve sort of lost control. But only briefly – only briefly, honest!’
She hurriedly blurted out the last part, having noticed Chrissy’s increasingly horrified expression.
‘Not even the angels know what’s going on?’ Chrissy breathed worriedly.
Si’s eyes opened wide in surprise.
‘Damn! Now that really does mean trouble!’
‘No no! I didn’t really say that!’ Jial insisted. ‘What I mean is, that presently, for the moment, we’re having a little, er, difficulty.’
‘Difficulty?’ Chrissy snapped. ‘You make it sound like there’s a difficulty delivering the latest movie I’ve ordered! Why are those kids back there really being arrested? Why are we being stopped from phoning our moms and dads? What’s happening to the angels?’
Now Jial was waving her hands, a sign that she couldn’t handle all these difficult questions being thrown at her all at once.
‘I…I can’t explain – I mean, I’m not allowed to explain. Not just yet, anyway!’ There was a hint of doubt in her voice, like she wasn’t really sure that she would ever be allowed to explain everything. ‘Trust me, please. We are trying to sort everything out. And I’m not really supposed to be telling you what I am telling you!’
‘And the kids? The one’s being arrested?’ Chrissy demanded determinedly.
Si stared curiously at the same empty spot that Chrissy was glaring at, wondering how Jial was reacting to this onslaught of questions.
‘It is for their own good, honest Chrissy!’ Jial replied defensively, her face screwing up into an affronted pout. ‘It’s for their own protection.’
Chrissy recognised what Jial’s disgruntled pout meant; Jial was upset that Chrissy didn’t believe her. But she wasn’t going to let up on trying to get some proper answers out of Jial.
‘Their own protection?’
‘What? That’s what she’s saying? That kids are being locked up for their own protection?’
Si sounded even more incredulous than Chrissy.
Jial stamped her foot in frustration.
‘Didn’t I just say I’m not allowed to explain everything? You know, Chrissy, there really is something wrong with our relationship here, don’t you think? I’m the one having to explain myself all the ti–’
‘Simon Menchester!’ a megaphone enhanced voice cred out from somewhere behind them all. ‘Stop right where you are! Or we shoot!’
*
Chapter 16
Even before Chrissy had had time to turn around and get a good look at the police car slowly heading towards them, Si had grabbed her hand. Pulling her along with him, he darted across a lawn towards the nearest house.
‘Run Chrissy, run!’
‘Don’t run, don’t run!’ Jial wailed anxiously, yet following after them anyway. ‘They’re not really going to shoot!’
They sprinted towards one of two paths running between the side of the house and its neighbour. They ducked into the passageway. Almost directly behind them, the police car bounced up onto the kerb, slewing to a halt on the lawn. With the heavy clunk of doors hurriedly flung open, the policemen leapt out onto the now heavily churned up lawn.
Neither Chrissy nor Si recognised or had ever heard anything like the ear-splitting bang that immediately followed.
A bullet zipped through Jial’s thankfully insubstantial body. It completely shredded a small bush they were all running past.
Jial instantly started to urge them on with frenziedly waved arms.
‘They will shoot, they will! Run, run!’
*
Their hearts fell as they ran into the house’s small rear garden.
Even though the cluttered mass of small trees, shrubs, bushes and rose arches, they could see that the garden was completely surrounded by a mix of high hedges, walls, and wooden fencing.
They had no choice but to keep on running, however, hurtling down a winding gravel path. They leapt over a flowerbed, thinking it would help them gain a few extra yards.
But a few extra yards to where? they wondered anxiously.
Cutting behind a garden shed, they came to the end of the garden: an almost bare lawn, dominated by a gnarled apple tree.
‘Wait, wait!’ Chrissy cried excitedly, jerking Si off to one side.
With her free hand, Chrissy forced Si to duck down beneath the low spreading branches. In an instant, they were scrabbling across the hard earth towards the bases of the thick, seemingly impenetrable hedge.
‘Where are we going Chrissy?’ Si hissed irritably.
‘I’m not sure; just hoping – hoping it’s still here!’ Chrissy quietly mumbled as she frantically tore at a covering of nettles.
Forcing and squashing the nettles aside, she began to hurriedly snap the thin twigs blocking the gap between the trunks of two of the bushes making up the hedge.
‘Yes, yes!’ she yelled excitedly, clearing enough of a gap for her to quickly if painfully clamber through, and making the hole bigger as she did so.
Si didn’t need any urging to follow her through the gap. He almost groaned in disappointment, however, when he found himself in the dark, narrow space running between two long lines of bushes that made up the hedge. With great difficulty, he turned around in the confined space to reach back through the hole and swiftly pull as many of the flattened nettles and twigs back into place. He urgently withdrew his hands as the police officers charged into the bottom
of the garden.
Through incredibly small gaps in the hedge, Chrissy and Si silently watched the officers quickly take in their situation. Both officers were holding what seemed to be huge shotguns at chest height, as if ready and prepared to fire them at any moment.
‘There’s no way out of here,’ one of the officers grumbled breathlessly.
‘They must be lying somewhere amongst all those bushes back there, like I said,’ the other agreed irritably.
Without another word, they spun on their heels and sprinted back up the garden.
Even so, Chrissy waited a moment before she dared move. She lightly tapped Si on his shoulder, indicating with a pointing thumb that they should start moving.
Seeing the way she was pointing, Si grimaced in disbelief.
Where they were crouching was already low and cramped. To either side of them, however, the intertwined branches and twigs of the bushes formed a seemingly impenetrable barrier. It was only when Chrissy began to crawl along the ground that Si realised there was a few inches of clearance between that dark tangled mass of twigs and the solidly packed earth.
Si bent into a crawl. Following on behind Chrissy, all he could see of her was the soles of her scrabbling feet. The way wasn’t completely free of sharp twigs and branches, and straight away he felt he was being painfully cut to pieces by both these and the stones scraping along his body. He uncomfortably squirmed his way along the confined passageway.
He should have gone first, he told himself. It must be even worse for Chrissy, with her being up front.
Perhaps if he still had an angel, Zorbielle would have pointed that out to him before they’d set off along here.
Then again, if he’d still had Zorbielle with him, the police wouldn’t be trying to kill him, would they?
*
Chapter 17
‘How did you know about this place?’
Si whispered, even though he hoped they’d left the officers far enough behind for them to talk once again. With any luck, he thought, they officers will still be edgily searching the bushes in the garden.
Chrissy was still scrambling along the floor directly ahead of him. The low tunnel formed by the overarching hedge seemed endless, particularly as he couldn’t see even the slightest glimpse of any light ahead of him.
‘The garden back there; it was the Edington’s house,’ Chrissy whispered back. Her voice broke every now and again into heavy pants and moans as she struggled to move as quickly as she could through the tightly confining space. ‘Sometimes, I used to help myself to an apple from their tree. You know, just for fun?’
‘Fun?’ Si said in disbelief.
‘I was smaller then, obviously! I wasn’t doing this just last week, Si!’
‘And Jial used to let you do this?’ Si sounded more disbelieving than ever.
‘I told you I was being too lenient!’ Jial snapped at Chrissy.
If Si could have seen Jial, he would have realised she was blushing with embarrassment. He would also have envied the way she was casually ambling along by their sides as if the hedge didn’t exist.
‘You laughed as much as I did!’ Chrissy retorted.
Si knew enough about how angel relationships worked to realise that Chrissy was now talking to Jial.
‘Well I knew you weren’t going to listen to me!’ Jial said. ‘So I thought I might as well get some enjoyment out of it all!’
‘Oh yeah, and then a few hours later, you’d be all sanctimonious, like you were a completely different person.’
‘Oh, so not only are we not allowed to laugh, we can’t be temperamental either. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘It may not be obvious to you, Jial, traipsing along up there like it’s a day in the park, but I’m not in the best of moods to have an argument, right?’
‘Suit yourself. No need to bite my head off!’ Jial huffily replied.
‘You know Jial, sometimes even I wonder just what type of angel you are!’
*
When they finally clambered out of the end of the hedge, they were filthy and covered in scratches.
‘Wow, look at your hand!’
Helping Si get to his feet by grasping his hand, Chrissy stared with shocked eyes at the deep cut running along the back.
‘Ahhhaaarrgh!’ Si winced in agony. ‘No, no, sorry; it’s not that you’re not being careful! It hurts like mad. One of the splinters from that tree shredded by the bullet struck it really hard!’
He tried to wiggle his fingers a little, yet even this made him grimace in pain.
‘So much for my lucky fairy ring, yeah?’ he said wryly, mockingly kissing the ring of Welsh gold he wore on the same hand.
‘Well, didn’t you say you have to actually believe in fairies for it to work?’
‘Yeah, I suppose–’ Si looked at Chrissy. ‘But look at you,’ he said light heartedly. ‘You look like someone’s dragged you through a hedge backwards!’
He reached for a twig stuck in her hair, gently pulling it free. As the twig came away from her tangled hair, they found they were staring directly into each other’s eyes.
They grinned sheepishly at each other.
Dropping the twig, Si tenderly caressed Chrissy’s hair. Slightly cupping his hand around the side of her head, he brought her face nearer as he moved closer towards her.
Their lips came within touching, touched, melded.
‘Oh jeez, could I just remind you guys I’m here?’ Jial shuffled embarrassedly on her feet. ‘I’m feeling a teensy-weeny bit of a gooseberry again, you know?’
Chrissy wasn’t in a hurry to reply. It was only as she and Si slowly pulled apart that she turned towards Jial, a mischievous grin on her face.
‘You can always look away if it upsets you, couldn’t you?’
‘Hmn, well could I at least remind you guys that you’re sort of on the run, right? You know: policemen with big nasty guns, that sort of thing?’
Chrissy chuckled nervously as she grabbed Si’s uninjured hand.
‘We’re running, remember?’ she said, suddenly pulling him into a sprint with her.
They ran down the edge of the road, Chrissy looking directly ahead, her focus on where they were heading. Si glanced about him as if expecting someone to jump out at them at any moment.
‘Get ready to cut across the lawn and into someone’s garden again!’ he warned.
‘You know, if it’s anything like last time,’ Chrissy panted back, ‘I might just prefer to see if it’s any less painful getting shot!’
*
Wherever they could, Chrissy and Si cut down the small pathways winding between the houses, keeping away from the roads as much as possible.
Running down one of these meandering paths, they finally came out onto the road that Si’s house was on. Like most of the other houses on the street, it was set slightly back from the road behind a neat lawn and well-tended flower borders. It was now only about a hundred yards away from them.
For a brief moment, the only sound they could hear was the echoing of their own feet on the slabs of paving, mixed with the steady drone of a distant lawnmower in action.
Suddenly, there was an angry growl of engines, a squeal of tyres. Just beyond Si’s house, first one and then another police car swerved into the road from out of an adjoining street, their backs momentarily fishtailing before their drivers regained control.
‘Run, run!’
Both Chrissy and Si yelled it out at exactly the same time.
They put on an extra burst of speed. Still holding hands, they dashed across the lawns, leapt over box hedging, uncaringly crashed through flowers beds. They made the door to Si’s house just as both cars squealed to a sudden halt directly outside, the tyres leaving a complicated pattern of hot rubber smears across the tarmac.
Flinging open the doors, the officers leapt out of their cars.
Flinging open the door to his house, Si desperately pushed Chrissy through. As he followed on behind, the first g
unshot took away the timber support of the small porch.
‘Dad! Mom! The police are after me!’
Si slammed the door behind him. His voice was almost drowned out by the sound of the second shot and the snap of the wooden doorframe splintering around him.
His mother abruptly appeared alongside him. Grabbing both his and Chrissy’s arms, she brusquely pulled them away from the door.
Si’s father was suddenly nearby too, stretching up to unlatch a few plastic clasps on the ceiling above the door. A concertina of heavy metal plates immediately dropped into place across the entrance.
In what seemed to be rehearsed moves, he slammed thick bolts at the base into the floor, revealing slots beneath the carpet and plaster that they firmly locked into.
Obviously satisfied that Si and Chrissy were now safely inside the house, Si’s mother rushed over to the nearest window. With moves as equally well-practised as her husband’s, she dropped and locked into place thick plating that covered and fortified the entire frame.
Chrissy looked to Si for an explanation of this strange behaviour. He appeared as mystified and surprised as she was. Even Jial frowned in bewilderment as she watched Si’s parents going through their highly organised motions.
‘We heard the cars: thought it sounded a bit odd.’ Si’s father dashed towards another window, where he began to swiftly slide another sheet of plating into place.
‘Si, Chrissy: come with me!’ Pulling back from the window, Si’s mother urgently indicated that she wanted them to follow her towards the back of the house.
‘While your dad takes care of the other windows, you can help me fetch the guns!’
*
Chapter 18
‘Guns?’
Si and Chrissy swapped bewildered stares
Despite this, they dazedly followed Si’s mom as she ran farther into the back of the house. Looking Jial’s way once again, however, Chrissy was surprised to see that she seemed to take this new revelation quite casually. She didn’t seem to find it in anyway unusual that Si’s somewhat boring parents – his father was heavily into gardening and do-it-yourself (that, of course, could explain the steel plates), his mother into crocheting and reading women’s magazines – had a hidden stash of guns.