Mrs Murfin ill and all.”
Pete could smell peaches in her blonde hair. He didn’t want to like her. “I want to go home,” he said, and then he added, “please?”
“But there’s no-one to look after you. Your father has just been arrested.”
Pete played with the wheel of his skateboard. “I’ve been looking after myself for as long as I can remember.”
She seemed sad as she looked into his eyes. “It’s high time you had someone to take care of you. Come on, let’s go; the car’s waiting outside.”
The lady took him by the left hand and they walked towards the gate. Pete had his skateboard ready in his right hand. He became aware of Squeak moving in his pocket. When he looked down, the mouse was repeating the running charade. Pete counted under his breath.
One. They were at the gate.
Two. The gate opened.
Three. Pete pulled his hand from Sandra’s, but the next moment the policeman at the gate grabbed him by the shoulder. Pete reacted with an instinct that came from years of surviving on his own. He swung his skateboard low and hit the constable on his kneecap. The man doubled up in pain, and Pete was in the corridor that led to the street.
“Catch him!” bellowed the policeman. Constable Gripe and two other men were coming in from the outside: ready to stop Pete from getting out of the door. Pete turned and ran the other way. Two paces and he was on his skateboard. Grimsby appeared around the corner in front of him. He positioned himself in the middle of the corridor, ready to catch the fugitive. Pete went straight towards him and the moment before impact he went down on his knees and passed right between Grimsby’s legs. He felt his head hitting something as he passed through. Pete looked back. Grimsby was lying on the floor, writhing in pain.
Pete took the second corridor to the left. The third door on the right stood open at a crack. He went in. It was some kind of conference room, with a long table and chairs. Pete crawled under the table and lay on the seats of three chairs, so that the tablecloth hid him from the side.
He was just in time, for he could hear footsteps coming down the corridor. The door opened and somebody came in. Just then Pete saw his skateboard lying on the floor under the table. He slipped off the chairs, grabbed it, and scrambled back to his hiding place. The man bent down to look under the table. Pete held his breath. It seemed like ages before the man got up and left the room.
For more than an hour Pete was too scared to move. Squeak got out of his pocket and ran all over the room, looking for who knows what. Eventually Pete fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.
He woke when Squeak tickled his nose with his tail. He gave such a sneeze that the poor little mouse rolled head over heels off the chair. The room was dark and everything was quiet. Pete put Squeak in his top pocket, went to the window, and peeked through the blinds. The window opened onto the police station’s parking lot, and Pete climbed out.
The parking lot was inside a high-security fence, and there was a guard at the gate. Pete stayed in the shadows next to the building, and crept towards the gate. He couldn’t think of a way to get out without being caught, so he sat down with his back against the wall. A police van stopped at the gate to be let out. Its back door was slightly open. Pete ran to the van and jumped in just as it pulled away.
The driver of the van switched on the siren and drove like a madman. Pete had to hold on for all he was worth. Evidently they were on their way to a crime scene or some other emergency. They didn’t even slow down at the traffic lights. When they finally stopped, it was with a most impressive skid and tyres screeching on asphalt. Pete jumped from the back of the van. He found himself in front of a restaurant. There were some people standing around on the pavement.
“At last! He’s arrived,” someone called.
“It’s about time,” someone else said.
Gripe (who was the driver of the van) swaggered towards them.
Pete strolled away as casually as he could. It felt as if everybody was looking at him, and he expected an outcry at any moment. But it didn’t happen. When he turned the corner, he saw a rat disappearing into a drainpipe. He broke into a run.
Two blocks away Pete stopped and leaned against a wall, panting. He was lost. This part of town was unknown territory. Squeak climbed out of his pocket onto his shoulder, surveying their surroundings. It was evening. Nightclubs, chemists and 24-hour supermarkets flashed neon messages into the black sky. Street vendors hawked their wares: flowers, counterfeit designer clothes and smuggled cigarettes. Beggars crouching in doorways advertised their misery with blurbs scratched on pieces of cardboard.
Pete was scared and hungry. He started to look in the dustbins for empty cool drink bottles. After about an hour, and what seemed to be at least a hundred dustbins, he had collected enough bottles to get money for a meat pie. He shared the pie’s crust with Squeak (who didn’t seem to like meat), and they drank water from a tap at a petrol station.
They wandered the streets for hours. By now a dense fog had closed in; it distorted structures and landmarks and hid all kinds of terrors just beyond the sphere of Pete’s senses. The city stalked them in the mists, a monstrous giant with evil eyes blinking at the street corners.
At last they strayed into an alley behind a furniture store where a lot of cardboard boxes lay around. Pete found a nice big one and climbed inside. He positioned another box on top of the one they were in to close it off completely. He lay in the dark listening to the city’s heartbeat, until at last he fell into a troubled sleep.
Pete woke with a start. There was something just outside the box. It wasn’t so much the little scraping sounds he could hear that made his hair stand on end, it was the feeling that someone or something was close by. Something started scratching at one corner of the box. Pete felt Squeak crawling into his shirt.
He held his breath.
Soon a hole appeared in the corner, letting the faint light of the street lamps in. It grew in size, until Pete could see the silhouette of a rat’s head in the opening. The rat stuck its head through, and Pete stepped on to it with his right foot. The rat shrieked and disappeared.
Then something started nibbling at another corner of the box. And at a third. And soon it was as if there were a rat nibbling at every inch of cardboard that separated them from their prey. Pete stepped on the head of another rat that tried to enter through the first hole. Then he tipped the box over with his weight. He could feel it crushing several rats under it as it fell over.
Pete was out of the box in a flash. He ran through a seething sea of rats, kicking at some and stepping on others. They jumped up and clung to his clothes; one got on his back and bit him in the back of his neck. He grabbed the rat and threw it against a wall. Pete ran, jumped and grabbed an iron fire escape that hung with its end about two metres above the ground. He scrambled onto the steel landing at the door to the first floor, kicked away a rat that clung to his left foot and grabbed one that hung on to his right leg. It bit his hand and then fell among the others on the ground.
The rats were already starting to find ways to get up the wall. A few disappeared up a drainpipe at the corner of the building. Others found a way into the building through a cracked window. They started pouring through the window next to him on the first floor.
A wild terror gripped Pete and he ran up the fire escape. The first three floors were easy going, but by the time he reached the fifth floor his chest was burning and the
