something. I’m stuck here ’til I’m eighteen.’
‘Doesn’t your dad care what’s happening to you?’
‘He’s eighty-two years old, he needs an oxygen cylinder to breathe, he’s got thirty-three kids and I remind him of the nutty wife who topped herself.’
‘Bummer,’ James said.
‘It was cool back when my mum was alive. We’d visit other communes all over the world with my dad. I was like five or six, and everywhere we went, we were treated like royalty. Cameras flashed when we arrived at airports. I remember one commune in Japan, I wanted to be normal and play, but none of the other kids would go near me because they were scared of who I was. They’d hand me toys, do a little bow and then scarper.’
‘Quite a fall from grace,’ James said.
‘More like a plummet. Now I’m just in the way. I’m not a Survivor and I’m too smart to buy their brain games, but there’s nowhere else I can go.’
27. SUSIE
The metal shed got more unbearable as the sun rose. James tried all sorts of positions to get comfortable: sideways, on his belly, crouching, standing up, clothes on, clothes off. The only relief came from pouring water on his shirt and slapping it over his face.
Mercifully, the bucket got refilled every hour by a round-faced girl who’d perfected all the standard Survivor nods, head tilts and smiles. Each water delivery came with a syrupy blessing:
‘Sweat out the devils. The Lord shall forgive you both.’
Neither boy had a watch, but Rat had spent enough of his life in the sweatbox to gauge time by the position of the sun. When he sensed it was close to 1 p.m., he told James to clean himself as well as he could using the limited water available, then put on his trainers and clothes and get ready to run.
‘This heat has done me in,’ James gasped. ‘I’m not sure I’ll even be able to walk.’
‘You’d better get it together if you want that cushy work assignment,’ Rat said. ‘I nicked some papers out of the office for my stepmum and she owes me a favour, but we’re talking about Joel Regan’s wife. She’s a bit of a psycho. You can’t just knock on her office door and say hi anytime you want. We’ll have to catch her while she’s at lunch in the restaurant around the back of the Holy Church.’
James nodded. ‘I’ll try, but I’m dying here.’
Rat practically barged the girl out of his way when she released the bolts to let them out. James was impressed by how tough Rat was, disregarding dehydration and the pain from the savage paddling as he sprinted towards a single-storey building fifty metres away. The dazzling sunlight made James’ eyelids scrunch up as he struggled to keep pace.
Rat cut around the side of the building and clanked down a metal staircase cut into the ground. He grabbed a rubber handle and levered open a metal door with a yellow and black radiation symbol on it: Emergency Decontamination Area. The door was fifteen centimetres thick and Rat had to drive with both legs to shift it.
‘I know every tunnel in this joint,’ Rat said, as James followed him into a gloomy, low-ceilinged room. There was a line of radiological protection suits hanging from a rail and shower heads jutting out of the wall.
A second thick door took the boys into a corridor, with lines of strip lighting glaring off the shiny floor. The air was chilly, which gave James a boost as he ran past rooms filled with dated looking electronics, provisions and ventilation equipment.
‘What is this?’ James shouted, as their running and breathing echoed.
Rat looked back over his shoulder. ‘There’s more to the Ark than meets the eye. It goes four levels below ground in places. There’s enough canned food to keep us underground for years.’
The Ark was starting to freak James out. The Survivors in Brisbane were manipulative and eccentric, but they didn’t have underground bunkers, radiological protection suits or guns, and they didn’t beat kids into a bloody mess before baking them in metal sheds.
A four-minute run wouldn’t normally have taken much out of James, but by the time he reached the line of elevator doors at the end of the corridor he was shattered. The sweatbox had sapped his strength, leaving his muscles tight and his head thumping.
‘OK,’ Rat said, as they stepped into a giant cargo elevator with a paint-spattered floor. ‘When we step out, you’d better be on your best behaviour. This