Authors: Gabrielle Lord
March (2 page)
There was rumbling and shaking all around, as swirling, molten shapes rushed in on me. I couldn’t move. Something, somewhere, was hurting.
The train, horribly distorted, had loomed ahead, ready to destroy me. I thought I was going to be minced on the tracks. In a matter of seconds …
Was I dreaming or was this real?
My whole body seemed immobilised, held down, but where was the train? Where was the bloody impact? Was I already dead?
I’d heard about people looking down from above, watching their dead or dying bodies below on the operating table or in a car accident. But I felt as though I’d been dragged down,
beneath
it all.
I
must
have been dreaming … even though I pulled my body with all my strength, my movements were crushingly slow, just like in a nightmare.
What was happening?
My eyes flew open. I was lying down flat on my back.
There was no train. There was no railway line!
The train that was going to crush me beneath its screaming bulk had completely vanished, along with the train tracks and the gloomy, blue-lit tunnel! How long had I been passed out here?
I was in a small, dark space, filled with looming shapes and angles. I struggled to sit up but my panic worsened when I felt that something tight was pinning me down. I tried to kick, but the movement hurt like hell.
My leg! What about the gash on my leg? Surely I’d lost too much blood?
It suddenly felt like that moment up on the tracks had been hours ago … What had happened? I shook my head, trying to regain my senses, before looking around again. A dim, caged light on the cement ceiling above where I lay revealed several shafts running away on
either side of me. Across to my right, I could see a huge metal wheel, the kind that locks and seals off gas and water pipes. Above that, there were four long pipes that ran the length of the wall and then disappeared up a dark shaft. I seemed to be in some sort of landing station in a pump room.
I was lying low, just above the floor, and my body was wrapped up tightly in an old, grey army blanket. How did I get here? I couldn’t shake the cloudiness from my head to figure out what had happened, how I’d escaped the impact of the train and why I was tucked away in this dank, dark place.
My head fell back in despair. I thought I must have been caught again, and that this was some kind of dungeon. Vulkan Sligo and his lying little spy girl, Winter, had caught up with me. I’d escaped the train somehow, but I’d been recaptured and shoved in this prison.
My mind flashed back to how my foot, trapped in the heavy gumboot I’d taken from the zoo, wouldn’t budge from the tracks. I was stuck there, facing an oncoming train … The last thing I could remember thinking was that the screeching brakes would never pull the train up in time.
I realised, as the train was bearing down on
me, that I would never see my family again. I would die, never knowing the mystery of the Ormond Singularity. There was a loud shriek … and then, just before impact, the whole world seemed to open up and I’d fallen into a gaping blackness. I felt the terrifying sensation of falling into some dark space beneath my body, as if the earth had opened up and swallowed me.
A shocking thought suddenly struck me. Maybe I
hadn’t
escaped the train. Maybe both my legs were gone and I was regaining conscious ness in some overcrowded prison hospital. Horrified, I finally ripped off the grey blanket that was holding me down.
I nearly passed out with relief. Both of my legs were still there!
I wiggled my toes and cringed at the pain of this simple movement. I sat up and looked closer and saw that the gash from the lion’s claw on my leg had been cleaned and covered with a semi-transparent dressing. Through it I could count seven neat stitches!
Someone had stitched the gash on my leg
and
tucked me up tightly in this blanket! Sligo wouldn’t have done that for me. But who had? It didn’t make sense.
The pain in my leg throbbed into my consciousness. I forced myself to breathe deeply,
inhaling hard. I was alive and that had to be a good thing. But how I’d escaped being trapped on the railway line … I had no idea.
My memory was slowly becoming clearer. The ground beneath me, the metallic mesh that my foot was jammed against, had somehow given way. I’d fallen through the hole, but then someone was there and had caught me. I was in the stranger’s arms, just below the tracks, as the hideous sound of the train passed right over both of us.
‘Who’s there?’ I tried to ask, suddenly aware of a shuffling sound nearby. But my voice came out as a hoarse croak. I struggled as I sat back up again to look around.
A movement against the wall opposite me caught my eye. ‘Who’s there?!’ I repeated, my voice tentative, afraid of who I was about to meet.
I couldn’t make out his face in the dim light, but could see that whoever the thin figure was, he seemed to be wearing an oversized
dark-green
suit and a tie.
The gangly figure slowly approached and I braced myself. He appeared to be very stooped, with fair, straggly hair and huge eyes, wide like a possum’s.
‘Did you do this?’ I asked him, pointing to my stitched leg.
‘I certainly did,’ he said, unrolling a
wrapped-up
piece of fabric to reveal a range of shiny medical instruments in a line. ‘Would you like anything else done while I have my tools out? Some minor surgery? I have everything here. You have no idea what people leave on trains. No idea. I have a whole library on microsurgery back home if you’d like anything taken off or re-attached?’
‘No,’ I said hastily, cautiously drawing my injured leg away from him. ‘Thank you for what you’ve done. For helping me.’
I ran my hands through my hair and exhaled, hoping like crazy that this unusual guy was on my side. ‘I remember,’ I said, ‘falling beneath the tracks just before the train reached me … and being caught.’
The skinny man chuckled. ‘Like falling into the fiery pits of hell?’ He softly brushed some dust and dirt away that had just fallen on his array of surgical instruments before carefully rolling them back up in the cloth. ‘I could see you were in a spot of bother,’ he said. ‘You were very lucky that your foot was jammed against one of the drain covers. A couple of metres further south or north and I don’t think I could
have helped you …’
‘Drain covers?’ I asked, thinking again of the metallic mesh on the tracks that was near my trapped foot.
He nodded vigorously and a piece of his wispy fair hair flew up like a cockatoo’s comb.
‘All the underground railways have huge drains under them,’ he explained, ‘big, big tanks—otherwise the rainfall from the city above that doesn’t get caught by the drainage systems would gush down and flood the lines. That’s why all along the tracks you’ll find drainage openings. The stormwater is stored in tanks below, and when they’re full they’re pumped out into the city drains.’
The man paused and peered up at me again, as if he were checking I was listening to him.
‘I heard you running along the line,’ he continued. ‘You stumbled, pushing that big guy off the tracks, then I saw that you’d become stuck. There wasn’t much time, but I was able to yank down the drain cover from beneath you … and then down you came after it. I caught you and here you are.’
He grinned, looking very pleased with himself. ‘Right now, we’re in one of the connecting tunnels that link up all the drainage tanks. They only inspect them every few months. The rest of the
time they’re free and open to traffic—me, that is.’
‘And no-one saw us?’ I asked anxiously. He shook his head vigorously again. This time I saw a small cloud of dust shake up in a soft shaft of light. ‘I owe my life to you,’ I said, tearing up with relief, hardly believing what had happened. ‘If you hadn’t got me down here, I’d be like my shredded boot up there—all over the tracks, only in more and messier pieces.’
‘Now, now, don’t get too carried away. I didn’t want you squashed all over the tracks just up there. Didn’t want fuss and bother and police and a rescue team with their great big generator lights, and ambulance people, and all that,’ he said. ‘Didn’t want the bluecoats coming too close to that particular drainage tank—some of the shafts that lead off it,’ he said, ‘lead straight to my home. Didn’t want that.’
‘Bluecoats?’ I asked.
‘The blue coats. The railway cops,’ he explained. ‘They wear blue like the regular cops. They were all over the place looking for you.’
OK, so he’s gotta know who I am, I thought to myself. Surely.
‘One of those tunnels leads right to my home,’ he said pointing up into the dark. ‘Two of them do, actually, if you count the one with the
rock-fall
blocking it. Normally, that’s the way I’d take
you there.’
‘Sorry, take me where?’ I wasn’t too sure I wanted to go anywhere with this guy.
He ignored my question. ‘At the moment it’s too dangerous to use the tunnels, just in case the bluecoats are still hanging around.’
I understood that.
‘It was a close call. They were crawling everywhere looking for you. They thought they were coming to scrape you off the track.’