Boy in the Tower (17 page)

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.

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.

I tell him about what I saw when I was looking out of the windows. How I thought it might be someone who needed help. That I’d run down to get myself ready to help and that there hadn’t been time to go and find him or tell Dory.

I describe how the Blucher burst all over me but how it hadn’t hurt and how one of them wrapped a vine around my leg to trap me and that I couldn’t find anyone out there in the end.

Apart from just one thing.

And I point to the cat, which is still sitting patiently at our feet, as if it is waiting for the story to turn to it.

‘What are you going to call him, Ade?’ Dory asks me as she scratches the pink skin on his tummy.

The cat is lying on his back in a little patch of sunlight on the sofa, in between us both. Dory was delighted when she heard how I’d rescued him.

‘You are made of stern stuff, Ade,’ she tells me. And she insists on feeding the cat one of our tins of tuna before Obi stops her and says that cat food will do well enough.

Obi sends me off to a couple of flats whose owners used to own cats, and soon I have filled my rucksack with tins of cat food and bags of little fish-shaped biscuits. I also find a litter tray and a sack of tiny white stones to fill it with. The litter is heavy and I have to keep stopping to rest while I am carrying it. I wonder about asking Obi to help me, but even though he didn’t shout at me, I think he is still a little bit annoyed that I left the tower and brought back a cat with me, so I don’t ask him.

‘I’m not sure. What do you think?’ I say.

‘How about Bluchy?’ says Dory. ‘Because he survived the Bluchers. He’s quite the hero, isn’t he?’

‘Hmm, how about Mystery?’ says Obi. ‘Why cats? What is it about him that stops the spores from affecting him?’ He looks at the cat suspiciously and then shouts out, ‘Oh!’ as it jumps right onto his lap.

‘Get off! Get off!’ says Obi, but the cat ignores him and settles himself down comfortably.

Obi’s right. It’s odd that the spores didn’t kill him. I wonder if there are other animals out there who have not been affected either.

I can’t think what he should be called. There are lots of names I could have easily called him, like Smoky or Misty, because he’s a soft grey colour, with darker grey stripes from his nose to his tail. But I’ve always had this funny idea that animals already have names that their mums have given them, and when humans come along and give them a new one, they don’t like it very much. I know I wouldn’t like being called anything else other than Ade. I think he needs to show me what his name is and then that’s what we’ll call him. But I feel a little silly telling this to Dory because no one else seems to think it.

‘You must name him,’ Dory says. ‘He’s yours now. It will come to you. Look how he follows you around all over the room. He knows he belongs to you.’

Dory starts humming the same tune she was singing this morning and goes into the kitchen to make some tea for us. Even Ben seems to like the cat. He came to Dory’s too to see how I was but he hasn’t left. He spent a long time tying bits of balled-up paper and corks to a piece of string which he is dragging across the floor for the cat to chase.

It’s the first time that all four of us have been together without having a meal to eat before us. There’s normally so much to do that we don’t really spend time all together, unless we’re eating.

My skin still feels a little bit scratchy from the anti-fungal powder that Obi made me put on. It turns out that the little room next to the outside door is where we get ‘decontaminated’ if we ever go outside. That basically means to get the spores off if there are any on us somehow. Obi wrote it down for me to put in my book when we got back upstairs.

Obi had set up the room just before he went to the other tower where he found Ben and Evie.

First you have to take off all your clothes and put them in a plastic bag which you then put into another plastic bag and then into another bin bag. When you are completely naked and feeling a bit cold by then, you close your mouth and eyes really, really tight and cover yourself with the anti-fungal powder.

I mean
really
cover yourself. All over. And then, when you think you are done and finished, you do it again. I looked as white as anything. By the way, Obi was telling me what to do from outside the room, by shouting through the doorway; he didn’t see me do any of this.

Then you have to wait for ten minutes. Just in case. That was the worst bit, because you just want to go home and sit on the sofa or go and have something to eat at this point, but you have to just stand and wait in the middle of the room feeling shivery for what feels like a long time. But it’s a small price to pay for not bringing spores in, I guess, and at least I had the cat with me, who also needed a good coating of powder.

He kept licking it off though, and then shaking his head afterwards as if to say,
This tastes bad but I can’t bear to have this powder on me
. After that, you take one of the towels out of the cupboard to cover yourself with and you can come out.

Obi decontaminated himself after me, and while he did that, I went through the swing doors into Obi’s room, where he’d told me to help myself to some clothes. They were all far too big of course, but it was just until I went back upstairs to get some of my own.

When Obi was dressed and he had sealed up the doors and the plastic sheet properly again, he decided it was a good idea to salt the corridor floor.

‘Just in case,’ he said. He was saying those words a lot today. We spent a bit of time pushing the salt over the floor to cover it, and then we came up to Dory’s flat, where we’ve been ever since.

Obi didn’t speak to me a lot while we were clearing up the basement.

I wanted to say, ‘Are you cross with me, Obi?’ but I couldn’t quite bring myself to say the words.

In the end, I just asked him a question. I asked about something that was on my mind, because I thought it might be on his too, and I wondered if that was why he wasn’t talking.

‘Obi?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did that Blucher hold onto me like that? They don’t eat humans. So why did it hold onto my leg?’

‘Yes, I was wondering about that too,’ Obi said. ‘I wonder if it had something to do with that little friend of yours.’

‘What? Gaia?’

‘No, Ade,’ said Obi gently. ‘The cat. You were holding him when the Blucher attacked you, right?’