*Splat sits in a bare room alone in front of a slightly squashed birthday cake with a single candle on top*
Splat: (singing) Happy Birthday to me,
Happy Birthday to me,
Happy Birthday dear me...
(To reader) I don't know if any of you really deserve this. You're lucky I'm feeling nice and that I don't believe in revenge...
Chapter 9, Tonight’s the night!
1 day…
Bill woke up the next morning and gazed over at the sleeping body of Aaron. It was 5:30 am. Wake up was in half an hour and Aaron was snatching up the last 2 hours of the morning for sleep. As Bill watched, Aaron stirred and opened his eyes. He immediately noticed Bill watching him.
“Hey, wanna test me?”
“Huh?”
“On the map. I gotta learn all the times and places and distances and numbers and stuff.”
“Uh, yeah, whatever!” Aaron pulled and piece of paper out of his loincloth (“don’t say a word!” He muttered) and handed it to Bill. “Ok then,” Bill began, staring at the long list of numbers and words on the paper. : “Ok, what time do you leave the bunks?”
“11, then I’ve got till 2 to get around the place and escape.”
“Okaay… extra credit for that! Question 2, what’s the first place you gotta get to and how long you got?”
“Take the stairs to the 5 floor weaponry within 20 minutes. Then I’ve got another 20 minutes to grab some stuff including a grappling hook and something about a metre long before the guard comes.”
“Great. Question 4, h-”
“What happened to question 3?”
“You just answered it with your in-depth account of the weaponry. Number 4, where to next, how long you got and what route do you have to take?”
For the next 25 or so minutes Aaron continued to answer Bill’s questions to an extent that left Bill with no doubt that Aaron could pull the stunt off.
“Ok, so you got ya Orb, and you’re in the engine room again, what now?”
“Climb onto boiler… uh, number 3?”
“Go on.”
“Onto boiler number three (I think) and out through the window above into the yard. Then head to the far-left corner of the yard and head about 15 metres to the right and use the grappling hook to get over the wall at the gap in the electric barbed wi-”
“TZZZZ! You’re fried mate, it’s 12 metres!”
“$h|t! I always get that bit wrong.”
“Just think-”
Bill trailed off as the wake up bell rang. He quickly rolled up the paper and threw it back across to Aaron who stuffed it back into his loincloth.
“Cheers Bill.” Aaron whispered. “Cheers for everything.”
“Hey, shut up! I’ve lost my will to live remember!”
Aaron smiled to himself.
Aaron’s attitude changed again that day. Now he just got on with work silently. He never said a word to the guards. He was almost in a trance except that managed to pick up every word said by the guards. Literally every word.
Bill, mean while, managed once more to get into the bathroom and wash himself. He would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids… I mean the stoned slig in one of the cubicles that started shouting about the hippie slurgs dissecting his small intestine with hammers! It attracted attention to the toilets that Bill could have done without. That was the day that Bill discovered that having someone urinating on your open wounds really hurts!
Apart from that the day was pretty much uneventful. No one would have guessed that it was planned that in a matter of hours several items would be removed from the weaponry and that the power in one room off corridor AC would cut out mysteriously. Or that a mudokon was planning to sneak into that room while the power was off, remove one item from the room, and then escape out of the engine room into the backyard and over the wall towards the forest many miles to the Southwest…
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