Fifty Fifty (24 page)

He dreamed of chaos. People ran shouting through dark corridors. Torches flashed, alarms howled, a door was kicked in. A curtain of plastic strips blazed in dripping flames and beyond was the
stamping of terrified feet in cages. There was something behind the big silver door of the fridge – something waiting; he could not see what it was, but it was coming for him. It was going to
snap his neck as if he were a mouse, and Mum was not there. He could hear her a long way away, banging furiously on the door, but she couldn’t get in.

He woke up sweating and terrified and with one thought in his mind.
I’ve got to tell Jude . . .

But what, exactly, was he going to tell Jude? Was he going to try and persuade him to abandon the raid on the labs?

Right this instant Gil wanted the raid to go ahead more than ever. He wanted Jude to smash the labs into rubble. It would be revenge on Dad, revenge on his smugness and rightness, revenge for
his secrets, for the lies he had told and the truth he had not told. He deserved that level of destruction.

But Dad’s mice – when Gil thought about Dad’s mice all he could see was Mum. He saw Mum sitting in the pan of a giant pair of old-fashioned scales, while mice fell one at a
time like chocolate drops into the pan on the other side. Gil let himself think about Mum. He thought about her for a long time. If she was ill, if she was going to become like Granny and slowly
slip away into a place where she could not remember who Dad was or who Gil was or even who she was herself, how many mice would he sacrifice to stop that happening? How many diseased mice would he
make if he thought it might save Mum? A hundred? A thousand? A million? How many mice was Mum worth? Was it even possible to weigh lives against each other like that?

There were no answers. If the raid went ahead, Dad’s research would be destroyed, and with it the hope of helping Mum if she was ill. If Gil tried to stop the raid he would be standing up
for Dad when he hated Dad more than he had ever hated anyone in his life. Wasn’t there anyone he could ask for help? Gil thought of Louis and all the childish messes they had survived
together. Louis might have helped him. But he’d screwed things up too badly with Louis, and in any case it would never have been fair to drag Louis into this. The mess was too big and too
frightening, and Gil had made it all by himself.

Gil lay in his room, thinking and not thinking, while the day turned into night and the room darkened. Mum came up the stairs from once or twice and asked him questions through the closed door,
but he didn’t really hear what she was asking, or what he said in reply. At some point he heard that Dad had come back, and Mum and Dad were talking softly together outside his room. He
didn’t move. It was like being an astronaut floating way above the world with only the sound of his own breathing for company. From time to time he thought about the battered old phone under
the bed and wondered about calling Jude, but he couldn’t think what he would say to him.

He would have to help himself this time. Gil didn’t know if he had the strength. If he was going to act he would have to act tonight, because tomorrow might be too late. But he was
terrified. He was terrified, it was dark, and everything he had ever believed about himself and his family lay in ruins.

Sometime after midnight when he was sure Mum and Dad were asleep, Gil made himself act. It took less than ten minutes to pack his school bag with the equipment he needed. He
left his desk barricading the bedroom door in case Mum or Dad tried to check on him in the night. Then he went to the window and pushed it open, slipping out of the gap on to the conservatory
roof.

After the warmth of the day, Gil was completely unprepared for the chilly wind that swept out of the blackness of the night sky. As he crawled across the roof, the cold cut through his clothes
and made him wish he’d put on a couple of extra layers. But he didn’t go back. He reached the edge of the wall and dropped neatly into the back garden.

His old bike was still there under the lean-to at the side of the house. Gil pushed it through the front gate, instinctively looking up to see if there were any lights on, if anyone was
watching. But the house was dark, and Gil quickly set off through the back streets with his hood up and his head bent.

It was silent and empty everywhere. Gil cycled swiftly through the pools of orange light that fell from the street lamps. His hands got colder and colder until they felt as if they were frozen
to the handlebars. The thin plastic gloves he was wearing didn’t help at all.

After a while Gil lost his sense of time. He was shaking with cold and pouring with sweat at the same time. Nothing looked familiar, even though Gil was sure he knew where he was going, and when
he turned the last corner and saw he’d arrived it was like an electric shock.

Dad’s building rose above the splashes of light from the few street lamps, looking more massive than ever. The stone that was so soft and yellow in daylight had turned grey and hard. The
smoked glass entrance doors looked like black mirrors, and the steps were in shadow. There were no protesters on the pavement, but Gil knew there would still be security guards patrolling the
building.

Gil slipped back around the corner and hid his bike in an alleyway. Then he ran to the bushes that edged the pavement opposite the labs. He crawled behind a bush and began to watch the building.
Almost immediately a uniformed guard came out of the narrow road that Dad had driven him down, the one that led to the car park. The guard was being pulled along by a big Alsatian, and Gil could
hear the man grumbling as he jerked the lead, trying to hold back the dog. He walked past the front of the labs, turned a corner and disappeared into an area that looked like a small garden. Gil
thought he remembered looking down into it from Dad’s office, and he scanned the side of the building to see if he could locate Dad’s window, but the high walls disappeared into
darkness. Moments later he heard voices and then a second guard with a much sleepier-looking dog stepped out of the garden and walked past the labs in the opposite direction, turning down the road
to the car park.

For what seemed like hours nothing moved, and Gil began to slip back into the feeling that none of this was really happening. He was asleep, dreaming, and soon he would wake up in his own
comfortable bed. He felt his eyelids begin to droop, and then suddenly the big Alsatian staggered round the corner of the building again. Gil jerked awake at once. It felt as if someone had punched
him in the stomach. He had to make a run for it now, as soon as this guard turned the corner into the garden, and before the other guard appeared, patrolling the building in the opposite
direction.

Gil began to straighten his legs. His knees creaked with the cold and the muscles in his thighs ached as if they were about to snap. As he watched the guard pace slowly across the front of the
labs Gil felt something pull sharply at his back and for an instant he thought it was a hand. Just before he yelled out loud he realised it was only one of the straps of his backpack, tangled up in
the twigs of the bush. He swore under his breath, wriggling the strap free, and when he looked up again the guard had vanished.

Gil leapt out of the bush and sprinted for his life across the road, past the grand glass entrance, round the corner and down the road towards the car park.

Everything hurt. His legs hurt, his lungs hurt, and the heavy box in his backpack bashed against his spine as he ran. Oh God, no one had seen him, had they? Gil dodged the barrier and ran on.
The walls that rose on either side of him were blank and featureless and there was nowhere that would hide him, and the guards would soon be closing in. Gil skidded to a stop and frantically
scanned the car park for a hiding place. There was a huge wheelie bin to his left, and Gil would have given anything to be able to climb inside it and collapse on to a pile of rubbish. But he
didn’t know if he had time, and in any case the guards might hear the lid slam. So instead he scuttled round the back of the bin and hugged the wall, praying the dogs didn’t sniff him
out.

The clump of boots on tarmac got louder and louder and Gil began to hear the wheezing of the guard’s Alsatian. Then he could hear the guard muttering under his breath, and eventually a few
words.

‘ . . .
stupid
bloody dog, stop
pulling
for Pete’s sake, or I’ll take you to the bloody river and drown you, you mutt. And get away from that rubbish bin! How
many times do I have to tell you!’

There was a snuffling on the opposite side of the bin and then a sharp yelp from the dog.

‘Serves you right. Now behave.’

‘Go easy on him,’ said a different voice. ‘He’s only young.’

‘You wanna swap? He’s a pain in the arse.’

‘All right. But this one’s half asleep, I warn you.’

Please, please just get on with it,
Gil howled inside his head, hunched behind the bin. He wanted a pee so badly he thought his bladder might explode. Then the voices stopped and the
footsteps started to fade. He peered over the top of the wheelie bin and saw a guard plodding away past the door to the back of the labs.

Gil ripped the bag off his back and pulled out the box that contained Dad’s keys. Stealing it from the study for a second time had felt much easier, even though it meant having to wear
those revolting plastic gloves again. Gil dropped the keys in his pocket, hung the magnetic door release pendant round his neck and shoved the box back into his bag. Then as the guard turned the
corner of the building he stood up and ran towards the door.

This is where it all goes wrong,
a voice said in Gil’s head as he ran. Here he was, breaking into a building at half past one in the morning when he should have been fast asleep.
The feeling of unreality was so overwhelming he wanted to laugh. There was the back door, almost within reach, but as Gil stretched out his hand the door was suddenly flooded with light and he
stopped, bewildered. It was as if someone had just switched on the sun. It took him a few seconds to realise there was security lighting that came on as soon as you got too near the building. Why
the hell hadn’t he expected that? Well, at least it meant he could see the keyholes.

Gil pulled Dad’s keys out of his pocket with shaking hands. There seemed to be about a million keys on the keyring and every time Gil grasped one it slid out of his fingers because of the
slimy plastic gloves. At last both locks were opened and Gil pulled the handle as hard as he could. The door opened so easily it almost knocked him flying. Gil fell through the opening and the door
swung shut behind him. Immediately he was thrown into darkness. And at once the panel on the wall started bleeping and little red warning lights flashed everywhere.

He’d triggered the burglar alarm.

He hadn’t forgotten about the burglar alarm, of course, but last time he’d been here with Dad all the lights had been on. Now it was completely and utterly dark apart from the tiny
flashes of red from the alarm panel. A towering wave of fear crashed over Gil and swept away the memory of what he was supposed to do next. He scrabbled frantically at the shut door and
couldn’t find any way to get it open again to let some light in. There was a torch in his bag, but how long would it take to find it? In about thirty seconds every siren in the place would be
shrieking like crazy.
No-no-no!
screamed a voice in his head.
Get out get out get out get out get out!

As Gil clawed uselessly at the shut door another voice spoke inside his head.
Sigma
, it said, very calmly and clearly. Of course,
Sigma
. The code for the burglar alarm was
Sigma
. He didn’t need light to disable the alarm. He could do it with his eyes shut. Gil leapt over to the panel on the wall. It went on bleeping relentlessly, like a countdown to
blast-off. The keypad glowed a mysterious white, and Gil could just make out the numbers, arranged in just the way he’d seen them on the phone when he’d told Jude what
Sigma
looked like. Quickly he punched in the pattern. Five digits, 3-1-5-7-9. If he was wrong . . .

The bleeping stopped.

Gil’s legs gave way and he dropped to the ground in a heap, overtaken by panic. It gripped his stomach and twisted it until Gil was ready to throw up. His lungs gulped for air and he was
aware of a tear trickling sideways out of the corner of his eye and dripping over his nose and into his ear while he rocked himself on the hard floor. Then just as suddenly the terror had gone, and
Gil lay there in the dark while the shaking gradually subsided. He wondered why no one was coming to find him. He’d managed to stop the burglar alarm, but the guards must have seen the
security light blazing away in the darkness outside. Or perhaps the light had gone off, and they had no idea that Gil was inside.

Before he’d left home, Gil had thought through two options and both of them now seemed crushingly stupid. It had all seemed straightforward in the safety of his bedroom. Plan A was to go
to the labs, break in, find Dad’s mice and steal them before Jude did. Plan B, if he bottled out of Plan A, was just to get the back door open, trigger the alarm and run, so that Jude’s
chances of raiding the labs would be ruined. Plan A was clearly madness, now he was actually here. He couldn’t climb all the way up to the animal rooms and save Dad’s mice. How would he
get them out of the labs? He could hide them somewhere, maybe, but the thought of the journey up to the top of the building filled Gil with a feeling of hopelessness. It was too difficult.