The Enemy

26

Small Sam woke with a start. At first he had no idea where he was. Suspended in a world of total, sightless night, he couldn’t feel his body at all. For one crazy moment he thought he might be dead. He felt a small sense of relief. Nothing to worry about any more. And then he was filled with the burning unfairness of it all. He was only a little kid, he didn’t deserve to die, what had he ever done wrong? OK, so there was the time he’d broken his mum’s favourite mug and hidden it in the back of the cupboard without saying anything. And that other time when Ella had been to a party and got a fantastic face-painting of a jaguar. It had been beautiful. She’d come in with it and he’d been so jealous. He hadn’t said anything, but when he was alone with her he’d thrown a cup of water in her face and ruined it.

All right. If he thought about it, there were lots of things he’d done wrong. But they were only little things. He’d been sorry enough about them at the time and still felt guilty when he pictured Ella with the paint ru

Surely it didn’t mean that he deserved to die, did it?

Then he felt awful pins and needles in his legs and it came back to him. He wasn’t dead. He was stuck up the shaft in the underground tu

He held his breath and listened.

Nothing. The grown-ups had gone at last.

What time was it? He had no idea. He had no watch. He had no way of knowing if it was even day or night. He moved his stiff and painful shoulders, trying to get the blood circulating again, and then squeezed his legs with his tingling fingers. They were still numb. He couldn’t move until he had some feeling back in them. He waited as the fizzing spread through his nerve endings. One moment it was a faint tickle, quite nice, then it was agony and he was kicking the walls and whimpering. After what felt like ages he had enough feeling to risk undoing the belt, but, as soon as he tried to climb down, his legs gave way and he tumbled to the bottom of the shaft, landing in a painful heap in a puddle of water.

All his cuts and scrapes from the day before had woken up. His body was a mess of stings and aches and painful throbbing.

It was time to stop feeling sorry for himself, though. He needed to get up, get out of here, and get back into the daylight. He switched on his torch and carefully emerged from the hole. He leant over and flashed the torch beam up and down beneath the train. There was nothing moving in either direction. As he listened, though, he could hear distant sounds back the way he had come. Probably grownups at Camden station. That meant he would have to go the other way.

No matter. He could get out at the next station.

He crawled along under the train, powering the dynamo in his torch as he went. Stopping every now and then in the dark to listen. There were odd underground sounds. Small animals moving about. The drip of water. Deep creaks and groans. But no human sounds.

He at last reached the end of the train and could stand up and move more quickly. He trotted along. Sometimes the water became quite deep, coming up past his knees. It was black and smelt bad, but he tried not to think about it. At least nothing could be living in it.

On and on he pushed, down the curving tu

As far as he knew grown-ups didn’t light fires. Maybe it was a camp of kids then? Maybe kids lived down here? Or maybe it was just an accidental fire?

He walked slowly towards it. He could smell smoke in the air, like a barbecue. He remembered how whenever the sun had come out in the summer you could smell barbecues for miles around.

That had been the old days.

As he walked he gradually saw more of the way ahead. He made out wires and junction boxes on the walls, a stop sign for train drivers and a sort of traffic light thing, then the edge of the tu

He realized that the fire was pretty small. It had seemed bigger at first because it was the only light around. There were dancing lights and shifting shadows but he could tell that they weren’t being caused by a big blaze.

He reached the end of the tu

And there was the fire. Just by the entrance where the passengers came on to the platform. A pile of rubbish was smouldering, and a man’s legs were sticking out of it. Sitting on the platform nearby were five or six grown-ups. They were thin and dirty and feeble looking, little more than stick-people. They stared at the fire and the man’s burning legs but seemed too tired to move.

Sam swore to himself. If there were grown-ups on the platform they had probably infested the whole of Euston. He would have to somehow get past them and carry on to the next station.

He figured that if he stayed down on the tracks and kept close to the wall nearest the platform, the grown-ups wouldn’t be able to see him. He was short of breath and tried to fill his lungs with clean air. There wasn’t a lot of oxygen down here. Smoke was drifting from the fire through the passenger entrance but it was also hanging in the air above the platform. No wonder the grown-ups looked half dead. If they stayed there long enough the fumes would kill them.

Good riddance.

Sam ducked down and crawled out of the tu

His stomach rumbled and he froze. Had they heard it? It had sounded like a bear growling. He was so hungry. When had he last eaten? How long ago had it been? No idea. He had a bottle of water in his backpack, but he’d finished off the stale biscuits and ti

Now wasn’t the time to be thinking about food. If he wasn’t careful he’d wind up as somebody else’s breakfast.

On he went. It must have taken him fifteen minutes of patient crawling to get to the end of the platform but he made it safely and scurried into the comforting darkness of the next tu

He turned and pressed on towards the next station.

As he walked the water lying on the tracks grew deeper and deeper. At one point it was up to his waist. It wasn’t warm and it wasn’t cold, but it was still unpleasant. Black as oil with scum floating on the surface. He held his hands and arms up above it, keeping his precious torch well clear. Without light he would be lost and might end up wandering around down here forever.

No. Not forever. Only until he starved to death. His stomach gurgled even more loudly. There were sharp pains in his guts. He had to keep moving, and somehow he had to find something to eat.