CHERUB: The Sleepwalker - Robert Muchamore Page 0,30
three riders closed slowly with their guns drawn.
‘Kneel down and put your hands on your head,’ Dave Moss shouted, as he cruised downhill astride his quad.
Dana thought about running and she might even have tried if she’d been a hundred metres from the main building, but she was still over a kilometre away and there was no realistic chance of outrunning three riders over open ground.
As Dana knelt down with her hands raised, the rider coming up from the lake drove to within five metres and hurled a set of handcuffs into the grass in front of her.
‘You know what to do, Dana,’ she said. ‘No sudden moves or we’ll shoot the shit out of you.’
13. AMBUSH
Lauren’s journey wasn’t pleasant, but as she’d predicted, nobody wanted to follow her through the mud. The ditches were clogged with litter and debris which made it impossible to walk barefoot. When she clambered out near the western edge of the basic training compound, her first task was to remove her sodden boots and pour out the water.
She ran barefoot to a storage shed and used a standpipe on the outside to scrub away the worst of the mud and an assortment of beetles. She deliberately left the dirt on her face, because her pale skin would catch the light. After cleaning the night-vision goggles with her dry T-shirt she quickly donned it, along with her shorts.
After a glance around to make sure nobody was coming after her, Lauren kept low as she headed across the dry earth, but she was alarmed by the loud squelching of her sodden boots. She suspected someone might be stationed at the entrance of the training compound and also knew that the central part of the training area was saturated with video cameras. Luckily, Lauren’s days of clearing ditches had taught her about a rarely used side gate that led out of the training compound and into the undergrowth beneath the tall obstacle where cherubs were trained to overcome their fear of heights.
She moved swiftly, with the night vision over her eyes and Siobhan’s pack on her shoulder. But even with the red shirt’s equipment, Lauren didn’t fancy her chances of covering the open ground between the woods and the main building on foot.
The obvious answer was to grab one of the campus golf buggies. The white shirts might shoot at her, but damaging other vehicles was expensive as well as dangerous so it was banned on training exercises. If she got into a buggy she’d be able to cruise all the way back to the main building, unless she got shot up so badly that she fell out.
There were two dozen carts around campus which the staff used to move quickly between different areas. Kids were only supposed to use them under special circumstances, like if someone was injured or there was a heavy load to carry.
Lauren hoped one of the electric carts would be parked behind the gardeners’ storage building, but she faced two problems. Firstly, the staff were always bitching about who used the buggies for what and sod’s law dictated that whenever you really needed a buggy they’d all be parked on the opposite side of campus. Second, the enemy would know the value of the carts, so even if she found one there was likely to be a crew of red and white shirts waiting in ambush.
A little concrete strip was situated behind the gardeners’ store and Lauren smiled as she poked her head out of the undergrowth and eyeballed one of the larger pick-up-style carts that were used by the maintenance staff.
Before breaking into the open, Lauren turned up the sensitivity of her goggles and made a careful study of her surroundings in night-vision mode, before flipping the switch and repeating the process with infra-red. There were a few boot marks in the mud at either side of the concrete, but they were small prints and widely spaced, suggesting a pair of red shirts who’d been running after someone rather than the more cautious movements of someone setting a trap.
Lauren’s boot squelched as she stood up. She kept low as she rounded the back of the cart and pulled out the recharging plug, before swinging into the driver’s seat. Her nose caught the stench of rotten food and she felt queasy as she glanced in the back and saw thousands of flies partying on orange peel and mouldy bread. It seemed that the cart had been used for a refuse run and