Thanks for the encouragement guys, it keeps me writing every day.
As promised, a shorter chapter. Tell me your thoughts.
C h a p t e r S i x
The Art of Zulag Hopping
We have moved along to Zulag 27, deciding to discover what happened to Ian
that night. Here, unfortunately, there are guards still patrolling the upstairs main corridor. I feel vaguely surprised that a lot of guards haven’t yet reached Zulag 26 after seeing us murder one of them on their security cameras.
‘Could you take this for a sec?’ I ask, heaving the weighty gun up once more.
‘Oh, okay, sure. What’s the worst that could happen?’ Tom takes the gun, and smiles faintly. From what I can see in the dark, his eyes tell a different story.
‘Why’s it all oily? And so bloody heavy!’
‘Yeah… I don’t know why. It’s always been like that.’
We’re trying to get to the ladder, which happens to be directly in the heart of the bedroom-corridor. It would probably be quite easy if sligs couldn’t see in the dark.
As we creep, the sound of petrol-powered mechanical legs suddenly gets louder, and Tom throws me inside a nearby room
‘Cheers.’.
I briefly look around. Three mudokons are cowering in the corner, on the far bed that would be Tom’s, under the security camera. I take a second to muse if me, Tom and Ian would react similarly, under the same circumstances. I come up with no answer – the situation was preposterous.
I push my ear against the door. Tom does the same.
The mechanised sound gets louder … louder. As it does, my hands start to sweat and for some reason, I wish it was I who was holding the gun.
Probably thinking the same, Tom shoves the gun into my chest and whispers, ‘you better take it.’
I don’t bother to be offended that Tom thinks I’d do better with a deadly implement of horror; instead, I cling to it finding strange comfort from its oily coldness.
The nearby guard stops moving, ‘Oi!’
My heart jumps into my throat and I almost drop the gun. The mudokons in the corner whimper.
The slig isn’t referring to us, however, and we hear its legs set back into action, chasing something that must have shot into Zulag 26. Seconds later, we hear the burst of gunfire and once more I nearly drop the gun.
Throwing caution to the wind, and still ignoring the three mudokons we invaded, we discreetly push open the door and walk along the corridor. As always, the floor feels sticky, wet and grimy beneath our bare feet. Every few seconds one of us would half-trip over something – a pipe, a rat, who knows what.
We followed the procedure of occupying random rooms for brief periods every time we heard the oncoming mechanical legs, or the sharp shouts the guards would often emit, until we came to the ladder.
It wasn’t guarded by anybody. I don’t know why. In most of my experience, when there were guards in Zulag 26, they were almost certainly keeping guard over the ladder.
The ladder is long and winding. At various points throughout, rungs break beneath our feet, but we deal with okay. As I got to the bottom quarter, and another rung breaks beneath me, I begin to wonder how the workers get up and down here every day without breaking the ladder to pieces. Maybe they use a different route downwards…
I drop down to the floor, as Tom does behind me.
‘You’ve worked here before, right?’ he asks tentatively.
I shake my head. ‘Have you?’
‘Nope,’ he says, ‘where are we?’
The room is very large. On the ladder, we hadn’t passed any other rooms, we had simply climbed through this one room where hundreds of large… things… hung from the ceiling.
Being night, it was empty and darkened, and we couldn't see particularly high areas. The only light was coming from—
‘What is
that?’