Scorched Earth - Robert Muchamore Page 0,55

in the dazzling light, but the sound of a revolver being cocked made them try. Getting shot would be unfortunate, but Paul reckoned he might choose a bullet over another eight weeks holed up in darkness.

‘I hear you can be tricky,’ the guard warned. ‘So I want you to climb out one at a time. Real slow.’

Paul was nearest the ladder. He knew the layout of the little cellar well enough to find anything with his eyes shut, but when he tried climbing his brain went into meltdown, as if his muscles had forgotten how to do stuff.

‘Ain’t got all day,’ the guard barked. ‘Move out!’

‘I can’t see,’ Paul shouted back, panicked by his state of mind. ‘My eyes need to adjust.’

‘What are you bringing us out for?’ Joel asked.

‘It’ll be for an arse whooping if you don’t hurry up.’

Paul eventually got it together. Hands on the side of the ladder, one clumsy step at a time. It was getting so that his eyes would stay open for a couple of seconds at a time when he got to the top. He breathed clean air and felt sun-warmed tiles on the soles of his feet.

‘Through there,’ the guard said, as he shoved Paul towards an open door.

The place sparked vague memories of the night they’d arrived. It was a boarded-up ticket office but the trains that regularly shook their cell never stopped at the platform outside.

Two thuggish railway workers leaned against the far wall and there was a bucket and some clean rags on a table. Paul and Joel were both ordered to strip and wash, which wasn’t easy because the water was cold and there was no soap.

Paul didn’t shave yet, but Joel was handed a cut-throat razor and gave himself a couple of nicks as he sheared off 3 centimetres of ragged beard. Paul could almost tolerate the light by the time he got told to put on some army boots and a tattered railway worker’s uniform.

He still needed to think about every routine movement and he was fascinated by scabs and lumps that he’d only been able to feel in the darkness. His torn shoulder muscle had healed, but he had scars where he’d scraped across tarmac through the car’s open window.

‘What’s happening?’ Joel asked, as he buttoned his shirt.

‘It’s on a need-to-know basis,’ one of the railway workers said.

‘And the likes of us don’t need to know,’ the other added, as he smiled at his colleague.

Paul felt cautiously optimistic as he was led out of the ticket office and on to a deserted platform. The nightmare had always been that the Nazis would get them, but Rouen’s communist resistance wouldn’t bother getting them washed and dressed up for that.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The Nazis banned civilians from driving in Paris soon after the invasion. The occupied city had always been quiet, but now it was eerily so. The Germans kept their own journeys to a minimum, saving fuel for battle or a retreat. The Métro opened for one hour in the morning and one in the evening, but only if the electricity was on. Mainline trains couldn’t go south or west because the Allied advance had cut the lines off.

PT got lucky and found a horse-drawn taxi-cart for a sunny half-hour ride to an industrial district on the other side of the Seine. There weren’t even food queues now. The Germans wanted to discourage any kind of public assembly and all official rations had been reserved for the army.

Parisians ate what they grew, paid extortionate prices on the black market, or trekked into the countryside to forage or steal. Cats had vanished and pigeons landing in the wrong spot were liable to end up in a cooking pot.

The address Paul had found on Commander Robert’s water bill was a small café-bar with a single apartment above. A sign in the window said Closed Due to Shortages, so PT walked down an alleyway at the side. A ground-floor window was open because of the heat, and since nobody was around he leaned against the wall behind the rubbish bins and listened to sounds coming from inside.

There were two, perhaps three, little kids running around and a baby screaming. A woman occasionally told one of them off, but if there was a man inside he was either asleep or ignoring the brats. After peeking in to make sure the downstairs room was empty, PT opened the window wide and pulled his shoulders in to get through.

He was in a narrow space