Six Days Read Online Free Page B

carried him this far, but he ain’t breathing so good now –”
    “Crew number! What zone?” Spit flies out of his gob with the shouting.
    “Please.” I sink to my knees.
    Some Russian commands come screeching out of his field radio. He swings up his gun and hoofs me out theway. He don’t even glance at Wilbur or Peyto. Then the patrol is past us.
    Scavs who stopped to watch start picking up where they left off. Way too scared to come over. I’m so fried I can’t even move for a couple of minutes. Peyto comes to help me up, and he’s all goggle-eyed and shivery.
    “They were going to kill us,” he breathes.
    “Welcome to London.”
    “Why didn’t they?”
    “Fifty-fifty, I reckon. Bigger fish to fry. I don’t know.”
    “They were looking for someone.”
    We watch the patrol head back toward the river.
    “Yeah,” I go at last. “Looks that way. Looters maybe. Man, they was pretty jumpy, though, eh?”
    “Looters?”
    “Unofficial scavving. If you’re over here, you’ve got to be under a gangmaster, numbered crew. Else you’re dead meat. Probably let us go cos we’re kids, and they figured Wilbur was on his way out anyhow, not worth the bullet.”
    Talking of Wilbur, he’s still spark out.
    “Hey, they’ve gone now, you numpty. Show’s over.”
    Wilbur scrambles to his feet.
    “What about those people?” Peyto nods toward the scavs still eyeing us over.
    “They won’t dob us in, but we’d better get a lick on. Trouble for us is trouble for them if we hang about.”
    We head on, eyes peeled for more patrols, past the edge of Parliament Square, where the main scav action’s taking place, crushers full swing and gangs swarming all over the roofs, picking the rafters clean. A quick shifty at the north end of Little Sanctuary and it’s as I thought – our crusher’s cranked up again, spewing fumes and chugging out a stream of brick slag into the road.
    We swing round and approach from the quieter south end of the street. I still ain’t sure how this is gonna pan out. We can’t just waltz in there. There’ll be soldiers stationed somewhere near the crusher, and then there’s explanations I need to find for the gangmaster, not to mention the old man.
    There’s a tunnel through the rubble to a little cobbled courtyard at this end of the street. We slip in. Inside, the old garden’s gone to jungle. Trees and vines are growing into the walls, brushing up against the second-floor windows. I start to clamber my way up the branches.
    “What you doing, Cass?” goes Wilbur. He sounds worried, like I’ve lost the plot.
    “Winging it. You two just gonna stand there like a couple of prize turkeys?”
    I boot through one of the windows, and wait on the landing till they catch up. Then it’s up to the top floor, onto Peyto’s shoulders, and through the hatch into the loft. Flashlight on. Just a load of moldy junk and boxes. But as I was hoping, up here there ain’t no partitions between anyof the loft spaces – it’s just one clear run across the rafters to the far house where the old man’ll be, slaving on his tod, cursing the day we was born, no doubt.
    One quick sprint over the beams and we’re there. Except I can’t see no hatch for all the rolls of insulation. Ain’t nothing for it. I find a soft bit between the rafters and give it a good stamp. Actually, it’s a tad softer than I figured. We go through it like a horse ‘n’ cart through a cake. The whole ceiling. Plus chandelier, by the sounds of it.
    When I look up through clouds of plaster and wads of yellow fiber, the old man is standing at the doorway.
    And he don’t look best pleased.

A SCAV’S LIFE
    F or a while, as the dust settles, it looks like the old man ain’t got the words for how furious he is. But somehow he keeps a lid on it.
    I start to say something. I ain’t sure what, except that it ain’t the truth. Cos how’s that gonna help things?
    But he holds up one hand and he’s
trembling
with anger. The scav