London Wild (74 page)

Again she eyed the window. It seemed somehow lower in the daylight, somehow more accessible. She would try another run up
. Thoughts of her previous night’s attempt came to her, but she was a little rested since then, though she doubted she had been asleep for more than two or three hours.

She considered the gravel path, the bane of her previous attempt. Her bare feet hitting that rough, unstable surface had been agony. She needed to do something about that too. Maybe a plank laid across the runway would help. The thought almost made her laugh
; if she had a plank long enough to cover the gravel path, she could lean it against the building and climb it instead.

The idea of covering the path appealed to her, but she could count the plank idea out, unless she fancied a walk back across the field to the forest where she might find a tree trunk that she might be able to drag back. No, the idea was silly, but maybe something else would do.

Prison rags were not the thickest or the most durable of garments. When issued to the inmates of the Cattery, though, there were no under things. The rags themselves were all that prevented the Herbaht from being totally naked.  Lara hated the rags she was wearing; firstly, they marked her, and secondly, they stank with the collected filth of two dozen or more Herbaht stuck in the same cell.

Being naked was not something Lara relished
; at least the rags covered her. Though the rags marked her as Herbaht and did nothing to hide many of her stripes or even her tail, removing them made her feel she was somehow more obviously Herbaht to any possible watchers than she had been before. Not that there was anyone watching; it was broad daylight, and the farm hadn’t stirred. No one was up. Perhaps they felt it wasn’t worth the effort with the rain ruining all their crops, or maybe it was simpler. Maybe the farm was deserted.

She placed one of the rags carefully on the gravel path and then tested it with her foot
. Her foot still screamed in pain at her, but there was no new pain caused by the rough, sharp, and even pointed pieces of gravel. It would be a bit of a jump to the second rag, which she would place halfway between the first and the wall, and then she’d run up the wall and get into the house.

She limbered her legs before attempting the run up
. Her muscles ached with the exertion they had given her the previous day, and she needed to loosen them as much as she could if she was going to make the speed she felt she needed.

Then she ran. She jumped to the first pile of rags and landed on them squarely with her right foot
, her left foot then landing relatively comfortably on the second pile. Then her right foot again hit the wall first—her claws, oh no! Her claws found purchase in the stucco; she had forgotten to curb her instincts. Her claws held the wall, and her foot screamed in protest. Momentum was still with her. Her left foot went higher, and again her instincts tried to use claws to hold her. This time there were no claws. She threw her hands up more in desperation than anything and somehow caught the bottom of the window’s ledge. She hung there for a moment, almost unbelieving that she had actually gotten this high. It wasn’t exactly what she had had in mind, but from here she could pull herself up and drag herself in through the window.

Climbing into the room seemed to take more of an effort than she would have imagined, but the result once she was inside was well worth it. She was in a small bedroom with a nice soft carpet under her feet that felt so unbelievably comfortable after a night out in the rough. A single bed dominated the room, with the headboard up against one of the walls and the right side of the bed up against another. The bed itself was unmade, the mattress left bare and no pillows in sight. Beside the bed on the left side was a small cabinet,
home to a clock and a lamp. According to the clock, it had just gone eight-thirty that morning.

By the look of it, this was obviously the spare room
, she thought to herself. There would be no clothing here; there didn’t even seem to be a closet or a wardrobe where she might hope to find such.

Her feet seemed to stick a little to the carpet as she walked to the door to get out. Her feet had pretty much scabbed over, but the dried blood itself seemed a little sticky and had a tendency to catch the carpet a bit. She also noticed that her feet were bleeding again in a few places where the scabs had broken off
, and she was leaving small bloody footprints across the carpet.

She was sniffing the air constantly as she moved now, trying to tell if there was anyone else in the house,
but her nose, all clogged up with what she feared must be a cold, refused to tell her anything conclusive. She could smell herd. They seemed to have been gone for at least two days, but she really couldn’t be sure. For all she knew, they had heard her enter the house and were hiding in another room in the house.

The corridor stretched the length of the house,
and on the opposite side of the corridor from where she now stood was another door. A label on the door written in clumsy stick-on plastic lettering read, ‘
Mandy’s Room, Keep Out!
’ To the left the corridor went beyond the stairwell to a pair of doors beyond. To the right, at the very other end of the corridor, was a closed door with the word ‘bathroom’ on a plastic plaque hanging from a small hook. This was the room Lara sought more than anything in the world. It was true that she was hungry, but food could wait until she was clean again. So anxious was she to take a bath that, for the moment at least, the thought that she might not be alone in the house was forgotten. Instead she headed towards the bathroom with a purpose.

In the bathroom she turned the taps on with a relish she could hardly have imagined more than a week earlier. But it really had been
too long since she had even seen a bathtub, let alone had the chance to soak in the warm, luxuriating waters of such. Finally she could cleanse herself of the filth of the cell.

She sighed with happiness
. It was so easy to please her after all she had been through, but before she got into the bath she felt she needed something to put on once she got out. Walking about the house naked was all very well, but she wasn’t going to stay here indefinitely; she would need clothing if she was going out again.

First she entered ‘Mandy’s Room.’ This was the bedroom of a young girl
, the walls covered in posters of movie and music stars, while soft toys of various descriptions covered the bed. There was a chest of drawers and a wardrobe that held clothing, but it was too small for Lara to wear. 

The next door took only a minute to check
; it was a linen closet that was totally bare. Whoever owned the house must’ve emptied the closet when they left. This reinforced Lara’s belief that she was indeed alone in the house.

The last door led into the master bedroom. Here she found some clothes that might fit her. They had been left in a closet when the house had been deserted. There wasn’t much, just a few items of ugly and gaudy clothing that the original owner hadn’t considered worth taking with her. She could look for makeup to try and cover her stripes with later
; for now she just wanted the clothes.

Lara took everything; she would decide what to try on after her bath. If anything
, the clothes looked a little on the big side for her, but she could cope with too big easier than too small.

Also in the master bedroom she also found a refrigerated mini-bar that still contained a few beers. Lara despised the taste of beer and tended to avoid it, but at the moment she was thirsty enough to drink anything. She opened a bottle and drank it straight down. She then grabbed a second bottle to take with her.

Lara spent over an hour in the bath slowly soaking, thinking about food and sleep. She was yawning more and more often now as the feeling of security in this old farmhouse swelled. Twice she had almost nodded off in the bath and forced herself awake, taking a swig from the second bottle of beer.

Before she would take a nap
, though, she wanted to eat. Perhaps the herd had left some food behind; it was unusual for people to desert their home and take all the food with them.

Though the clothing she wore after the bath hung
rather loosely on her body, at least she felt dressed as she ventured slowly down the stairs. After a quick look, Lara knew roughly the layout of the floor. She didn’t hang around to examine what each room contained as she passed them. She was looking for the kitchen, which she found at the opposite end of the hall from the bottom of the stairs, under where the master bedroom would be.

Here she found
that the kitchen was well stocked. She supposed that with the house being in the middle of nowhere, several miles from the nearest shops, the owners wouldn’t want to go shopping too often, so when they did they bought plenty. Lara made herself a large sandwich and then, deciding she was very hungry, made a second, all the time drinking milk straight from the bottle in an attempt to get rid of the taste of the beer she had had.

Instead of heading back up the stairs to the bedrooms as she had originally planned, she decided that she would have her snack in the living room. It was a standard layout for a living room. It had a nice comfortable couch and two reclining chairs, a newspaper
, and a holoviewa. There was even a table on which sat a three-dimensional computer monitor.

The thing that caught Lara’s eye
, though, the thing she almost had to kick herself because she hadn’t thought of it, was the large computer screen on the far wall as she walked in, located just above the fake log fire.

She sighed at her own stupidity and took a large mouthful of a sandwich as all the worries of what she should do once she left the farmhouse left her.

‘Computer,’ she said. Her voice seemed to be little more than a whisper. There was a small chance that the computer wouldn’t react; it might be password or voice coded.

The computer’s screen sprang immediately into life. Its voice was soft and gentle and seemed very, very friendly. ‘Your request?’

Her heart elated, Lara told it, ‘I need to make a call.’ She gave the computer the number to call. It was her parents’ home number.

It seemed to take forever for the call to be answered
, but eventually a voice said, ‘Hello,’ and then in shock the voice added, ‘Lara!’ The computer must’ve automatically decided to send her image. The image of the person she was talking to also became evident on the screen. It was Hamdrill, one of her parents’ bodyguards, who also doubled as the butcher and cook.

‘I’m stuck,’ Lara cried; she could hear the emotion in her own voice
. ‘I’m on a farm on the edge of London. Can you send help? Can you send someone to pick me up?’

‘Sure
, sure,’ replied Hamdrill with feeling. ‘Which farm?’

Lara’s hope
s fell for a moment. She had no idea which farm, and since there must be thousands surrounding the city and she could be on any one of them, suddenly she felt lost again. Then an idea struck her. ‘Computer, can you send them a map of our location?’

The computer replied simply, ‘
Done!’

‘Okay, that’ll do nicely,’ Hamdrill stated on the other side of the screen almost immediately. ‘I’ll let your parents know you’re all right
, and then I’ll come and get you myself.’

‘Great,’ Lara replied happily. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

‘Good to see you too,’ replied Hamdrill. ‘Glad to see that you got out of that prison. I guess Myajes completed his mission!’

Lara shook her head sadly
. ‘Something else happened that got me free. I’ll tell you about it once I get home. I’m afraid Myajes was captured when he tried to rescue me. I have no idea where he is now.’

As the screen went dead, Lara began to wonder if the call had been a good move. She was feeling very tired and really needed to get some sleep, and the call really could have waited until she was rested. Hamdrill was a good friend, but she was also well trained as one of her parents
’ bodyguards and would be naturally suspicious of Lara’s call. After all, as far as anyone knew, Lara was still a prisoner of the Elite Guard,
and if they had discovered who she was, they might easily set up a trap using her as bait. Lara decided she would have to stay awake until Hamdrill arrived, fearing that if Hamdrill had to actually come into the house to find Lara asleep on one of the upstairs beds, she might instead decide that the danger of an ambush was too high and leave without her.

Lara uttered another prayer of thanks to the Goddess and then took a seat on one of the less comfortable chairs in the room. She then started to check through the newspaper. She might have a long wait before Hamdrill did arrive. Lara didn’t know where she was, but she knew she was somewhere on the far side of London in comparison to where her parents
lived, and she also knew that even when it wasn’t rush hour, the streets of the city were very slow going. Of course, at this point, she didn’t know about the great exodus from the city.

Mars

The first thing that caught February’s attention as she awoke was the strong smell of herd somewhere close by in the house. Almost immediately this triggered a number of natural responses to the perceived threat. Before she was fully aware of her surroundings, she was off the couch that she had spent the night on
, crouching behind it, ready to pounce with her claws fully extended. This was the third morning she had woken up on that couch, and still she wasn’t used to the scent that greeted her. It was with her as she went to sleep. It was with her all through the night as she slept and was no doubt partially responsible for some of the nightmares she had been having lately about being cornered by the herd.