The Wilderness Read online

  Also by C.J. Harper

  The Disappeared

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Simon and Schuster UK Ltd

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2014 Candida Harper

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Candida Harper to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon and Schuster UK Ltd,

  1st Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road,

  London WC1X 8HB

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  PB ISBN: 978-0-85707-700-4

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85707-701-1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Special thanks to everyone who submitted a photo for the cover image of this book.

  Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of images and to obtain their permission.

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  www.simonandschuster.com.au

  Rainbird, this one is for you

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  I wake up. Tyres crunch the gravel outside the warehouse. The next thing I know, there’s an almighty crash and a shard of glass cuts through the air and shatters against the wall, a few centimetres above my head.

  They’ve found us.

  ‘Get up!’ Kay says, pulling at my arm. ‘Come on!’

  I throw off our makeshift blanket and stumble to my feet. There’s a second crash and I watch as one of the windows turns into a wall of splinters, then smashes to the ground. Kay yanks me into a back room.

  ‘It’s The Leader’s guards,’ she says, flinging open the door of a store cupboard, pushing me in, and closing the door behind us.

  We’ve had it. We’re trapped. I hear shouts and the slap of boots against the concrete floor. I can hardly see; there’s just the dawn light illuminating the edges of the cupboard door. Any moment now it will be flung open.

  Kay is scrabbling around by my feet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I hiss.

  ‘Look.’

  I squint into the darkness; Kay has pulled up one of the floor tiles and beneath it is a hole.

  ‘Get in,’ she says.

  I don’t wait for further explanation. I clamber down into the gap. Kay follows right behind me. She moves so fast that she kicks me in the back. As soon as she’s in, she pulls the tile back over the hole and we’re plunged into thicker darkness. I can still hear the guards crashing about.

  ‘Move,’ Kay whispers.

  She’s right up behind me. I stick out a hand and feel my way forwards. Above us, there’s a bang as someone slams open the store cupboard door. I freeze. Footsteps pace right over our heads. More banging, then a clatter as something falls to the floor. He’s throwing around the contents of the room looking for us. The noise stops. I hold my breath. I imagine the uneven tile catching his eye. I cringe, waiting for it to be plucked away, revealing us cowering. I close my eyes. The footsteps move over us again and back towards the door. Further away, thumps and shouts continue.

  ‘Go,’ Kay says.

  Go? How much further can I go? But reaching out I find that there’s plenty more space to move forwards again.

  And that’s when I realise that we’re not in a hole.

  We’re in a tunnel.

  We crawl forwards in silence. The tunnel turns a corner and the banging and yelling from the warehouse die away.

  ‘How the hell did you know there was a tunnel here?’ I ask Kay.

  ‘Ty telled me.’

  ‘What? When?’

  I’ve been with Kay almost every minute since we escaped from the Academy two days ago.

  ‘He was here tonight, when you were asleep.’

  I stop crawling. ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ Ty and Janna told us they would come and see us during the day, but they never showed. ‘You know how worried I was when they didn’t turn up.’

  ‘You were very asleep. Ty said you were big tired and you needed to be resting.’

  For efwurd’s sake. ‘I do apologise if I was snoozing; all that leading a rebellion must have tired me out.’

  ‘Don’t start big-wording me. Be thinking about not getting got.’

  I swallow my sarcasm and start crawling again. We spent months planning how to escape from the Academy and the day before yesterday it finally happened. I used to believe that Academies were training schools for kids who had failed their Potential Test, but then I wound up in one and I discovered they’re also a dumping ground for anyone the Leadership think is trouble.

  I told Janna, a journalist, what really goes on in an Academy and she helped me to gatecrash a press conference where I explained to the nation how their Leader allows children to be beaten and abused in his precious Academies. At least, I thought I was telling the world, but then I found out the broadcast wasn’t live. Even so, the Leadership weren’t happy that I’d told a hall full of journalists that Academy kids are half starved and punished with electric shocks. A pack of guards appeared and started trying to take people away for ‘debriefing’. There was a massive fight and the Academy students, the Specials, joined in. When a fire broke out we took our chance to escape.

  Except, not everyone escaped.

  I shut that thought down. I can’t think about that now. I’ve got to focus because fewer than forty-eight hours after we escaped, the guards are after us again. I don’t want to go back to the Academy. Please don’t let them find us down here.

  ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘just t—’ I bite my tongue as I bump my head against something hard and smooth. We’ve been crawling through the foundations of the warehouse, but now I think we’re clear of the building. ‘Is this the end?’ I ask.

  ‘Ty said we can get into a pie.’

  ‘A pie?’

  ‘You know, that thing, like the water is in. In the bathroom.’

  They don’t teach Academy Specials to read and they’re not big on expanding their vocabulary either. Kay has picked up a lot of new words since I met her, but sometimes her speech is still a bit crazy. ‘You mean a pipe.’ I shudder. I feel in front of me again. The hard smoo
thness is curved. ‘Do you mean this pipe?’

  Kay squeezes past me.

  ‘This one is not a water one. This one is for wires.’

  ‘You want me to crawl through a cable duct? How are we even supposed to get in there?’

  She’s patting the pipe. ‘Ty says we have to move it.’

  ‘Ty should have spoken to me, too.’

  ‘Don’t talk now. Help me. Slide it down.’

  I touch the pipe; it’s covered in a layer of dirt. I can feel it shifting. Kay is twisting it. Whoever built this tunnel must have cut right through either end of a section of pipe, so that it’s free to rotate. I use the flats of my hands to push it downwards. There’s the sound of earth trickling and when I lift my hands to reposition them further up I find the edge of a hole. It’s easier to pull the pipe down now that there is something to grip. It’s pretty clever really that you can hide this entrance by turning this section of pipe so that the hole is facing away into the dirt.

  ‘See?’ Kay says.

  I can’t see anything in the darkness, but I can feel. I poke my top half into the pipe and stick my arms out. Reinforced plastic, or something similar, curves around me. Under my knees are cables in protective sleeves. There are a lot of them, but there’s still enough room in the tube to crawl. Just.

  Kay has stuck an arm in behind me. ‘This is what Ty said. Let’s go.’

  My throat constricts. ‘Do we really need to get in the pipe? We’re already hidden,’ I say.

  ‘Blake—’

  ‘Do you even know where this tube leads?’

  ‘Ty said—’

  ‘Forget Ty, how do we know it’s safe?’

  ‘It’s safe.’ She pauses. ‘It is.’

  I wriggle backwards out of the narrow pipe into the wider space. ‘But Janna told us to wait for her here at the warehouse while she found someone for us to stay with.’ Even as I say it, I know that I sound like a whining little boy.

  ‘Janna didn’t come back. We waited and she didn’t come. Ty comed back.’

  ‘And he didn’t even bother to wake me up!’

  ‘Blake, I will tell you all the things he said, but now we have to go. Ty telled me this pipe because he wants to help us.’ She speaks quickly; she wants to get away and she wants to do it now. But I don’t want to go.

  ‘Jana wants to help us, too,’ I insist.

  ‘Janna is a journalist. She doesn’t know about being an Academy Special. She doesn’t care about the bad things The Leader was making happen in the Academy.’

  ‘She was going to find someone to tell my story. She knows people, newspaper editors and TV people.’

  ‘Yes, and if they believe you, or if they say you’re a crazy boy who helped all the bad Specials in the Academy escape, she doesn’t care because she still gets her money.’

  ‘But Janna said—’

  Kay makes a strangled noise of frustration. ‘Janna’s not here. The guards are here.’

  ‘Maybe we can wait here for the guards to leave.’

  ‘If we go back I think they’ll be waiting.’

  ‘How do you even know they’re The Leader’s guards? Maybe it was—’

  ‘I saw their van.’

  ‘You saw the van?’ King hell. What else was Kay up to while I slept?

  ‘The vans waked me up. I looked out to see if it was Janna, but it was the guards. I ran to get you and all the smashing started.’

  ‘What are they doing here? What do a vanload of armed guards want in an old warehouse anyway?’

  ‘Maybe they’re wanting The Leader’s son.’

  It’s alarming to hear her say that out loud. Even though it’s days since my mother told me the truth, it still seems impossible that the ruler of the country is the father I always believed was dead. The thought of my mother makes me suck in my breath. She died trying to get me out of the Academy. It’s all my father’s fault.

  I bite my lip. ‘How would they even know that I’m here?’ I ask.

  Kay doesn’t answer, but I know what she’s thinking.

  ‘Janna wouldn’t have bothered to help us escape and then turned us in,’ I say.

  She still doesn’t answer.

  I think back over the events of the day before yesterday. Back to the moment when I exposed The Leader for the monster that he is. It’s true that Janna did take a lot of persuading to help me to get The Leader to incriminate himself at the press conference by admitting to the way that Academy Specials are treated. And when it all ended in chaos, Janna ran off without a backwards glance for anyone. She only ended up helping Kay and me to escape through chance.

  ‘We should go in the pipe now, Blake.’

  I stare into the impenetrable blackness and a tentacle of fear unfurls in my stomach. The truth is that I don’t entirely trust Janna either, but I’m clutching at straws because I’m terrified of getting into this narrow pipe. I am desperate for a reason to get back above ground where I can breathe properly. ‘We don’t know that the guards are definitely after us,’ I say. ‘I think we should go back and see if—’

  A muffled voice is coming from the other end of the tunnel.

  They’ve found the entrance under the tile.

  ‘Get in,’ Kay whispers.

  More voices join the first one. Kay grabs my arm and pulls me into the pipe. The cables creak beneath my knees. I turn back and see a faint light coming around the corner of the tunnel.

  ‘Move the pipe!’ Kay says.

  It’s much harder to turn the section of pipe from the inside. We can’t be sat on that part or it won’t move. Kay shifts to the left and I squeeze up to the right then we have to lean over and try to twist the pipe.

  The voices are getting louder.

  I grip the top edge of the hole and push the pipe back round towards the solid earth. It moves.

  Just as a bright light comes round the corner the pipe lurches under my touch so that the hole is now twisted right round and is facing into the dirt. From the outside you would see nothing but smooth plastic.

  ‘What the hell is this?’ The voice sounds strange through the plastic. I’m frozen on my knees.

  ‘It’s a torch,’ says another, deeper, voice.

  A torch? That wasn’t us.

  ‘It’s covered in dust. Must’ve been there a while.’

  Did they see us go into the cupboard? If they did, they’re not going to stop until they find us.

  I can only hope that they don’t shine their light too close. If they notice the lines on the pipe where it’s been cut, they might get suspicious.

  ‘Ain’t nobody down here,’ the deep voice goes on. ‘Reckon this is where they hid the good stuff from customs. It hasn’t been used for years. Stinks and all.’

  There’s a heavy sigh. ‘We’re going to be here all efwurding day. Tremaine said we can’t leave till we’ve got bodies.’

  The sound of their shuffling fades to nothing as they move back towards the hole in the cupboard.

  The quiet wraps itself around me. The sides of the pipe seem to be contracting. ‘Kay,’ I whisper, ‘if we come out, they’re going to kill us.’

  ‘We won’t go out there,’ she says. ‘We can go in this tunnel.’

  My skin tightens. I’ve never liked enclosed spaces and, having just been trapped in the lift at the Academy, I don’t know if I can bear to stay in this pipe. ‘It’s just so . . . small in here,’ I say.

  ‘We have to do it.’

  I take a gulp of air and draw myself into a point of resolution.

  ‘Tell me everything that Ty said to you first.’ If I’m going to do this I need to know what’s going on.

  ‘You move and I’ll tell it to you.’

  I can hear her crawling away and I don’t have much choice but to follow.

  Kay takes a breath. ‘I really true did say we have to wake you up, but Ty said he has to tell me a thing. He says five minutes and then we wake Blake up.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  She ignores the
interruption. ‘He asked me things about you. I’m thinking Ty wants to know if you really are a Leader-hater.’

  ‘Of course I—’

  ‘He wants to know you’re safe because he can get us to be with other Leader-haters.’

  ‘Really? Ty knows people who are anti-Leadership?’

  ‘Yes, he told me this is the Leader-haters’ tunnel.’

  I try to digest the idea of an anti-Leadership group. Who make tunnels. ‘Then what did he say?’

  ‘You know the thing where you talk to the person that is in another place?’

  ‘A communicator?’

  ‘On his communicator there was a person talking to him. Shouting. I could hear it. And it’s like a bad thing happened, but Ty wouldn’t tell it to me. He said he has to go and he’s going to talk to the Leader-haters and we have to stay in the warehouse and wait for him to tell us it’s time to go in the tunnel.’

  ‘If he said to wait, why are we down here?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want us to be shot.’

  I snort. This whole situation is ridiculous. ‘Then Ty went and then I was cold and I lied down with you and I must have gone to sleep. When the guards came, it waked me up.’

  ‘You should have woken me straight away.’

  ‘What thing would you have done if I waked you? You didn’t want to leave; you wanted to wait for Janna. If I had telled you about this pipe I don’t think you would be wanting to get in it. You only got in it now because there were guards with guns.’

  Which is true. Men with guns is the only good reason I can think of to bury myself underground like this. The weight of the tons of earth that must be packed around this pipe seems to be pressing down on my head. What if the pipe breaks? What if we suffocate in an avalanche of dirt? I want to get out. I want to claw my way out. The intensity of the darkness makes me shut my eyes to block it out. My breath is coming too fast.

  ‘Blake?’ Kay asks.

  I struggle to focus on getting a sentence out.

  ‘We don’t even know where this tunnel leads,’ I say, eventually.

  ‘It goes to the people who will help us.’

  I’m not so sure about that. I don’t know if I really want to meet these ‘Leader-haters’. Back in my old life at the Learning Community, before I entered the Academy, whenever anyone whispered about people who were anti-Leadership they called them terrorists. They said that they blew up hospitals and killed children. I know that so much of what I was taught has turned out to be lies, but I’m still a little afraid of Kay’s Leader-haters.