I knew the back way into school from years of turning up late and sneaking through the cookhouse. I kept away from the window of the headmaster’s study, where I could see the leader of the captors, pacing. At last, I heard a familiar voice coming from the gym. It belonged to the Deputy Prime Minister, and he was complaining that he was hungry.
Keeping as low as I could, so that the guards in the playground wouldn’t spot me, I slithered up to the gym door, which was slightly ajar. I could see the slaves lying on the ground, resting. I managed to attract the Deputy Prime Minister’s attention. If I hadn’t heard his voice, I would never have recognized him. His huge bulk had melted away, leaving behind flaps of flabby skin around his face and stomach. He kept talking as he rolled towards me. The guard in the gym was obviously used to his moaning, and took no notice. When the starving man was within reach, I passed in the raw turnips. He sank his teeth in. He swigged some water from the bottle.
I couldn’t waste time. “Quick,” I said. “Tell me. Who are these people? Why have they brought you here?”
“They are some sort of terrorists,” he said. “They’ve kept us on the go for more than a year and a half now. Ever since that night at the Dome. They had it all planned. They took a chance that the Millennium Bug would turn out to be real, and had people standing by everywhere, ready to destroy power stations, army bases and broadcasting centres as soon as everything started to fall apart. And we politicians were all in one place, of course, just handy for them to swoop on.”
Suddenly I could believe the story of the explosion at the power station. I knew that my father would not be coming back.
The Minister was still talking: “Now they’re going round the country checking that there’s no prospect of getting things back together. In every town they round up the young, able-bodied people, and shoot them. You must hide. You must find a way of getting the message out about what’s happening. There are pockets of resistance. We’ve heard about them. People like you have managed to reach us with news. Some truckers in Derby even managed to get an old CB radio transmitter going. It did no good. There was no one to pick up the messages.” He took another bite out of the turnip. I was worried that the guard would notice. The Minister’s chewing was louder than his whispering. “If only we’d known. I can’t think what the intelligence services were doing. We didn’t have any warning of this at all.”
I knew I couldn’t risk staying for long, but I had a few more questions. “What do these people want?”
“Well that’s something I do know. They go on about it enough. They’re not after anything we can bargain over. They want to destroy our way of life. They despise us and everything we stand for.”
“And how did they know their plan would work? Did they plant the Millennium Bug? Was it some sort of virus?”
“No, it was real, but accidental. A weakness built into the design of early computers. We had to warn people about it. The trouble was that by raising the alarm we gave Bin Laden his big idea.”
“Bin Laden?”
“The boss man. The tall one. The one with the crazy eyes.”
“But wasn’t it a great risk, them planning all this? Weren’t they afraid of getting caught? What if the Millennium Bug had let them down?”
“They had other plans if this one didn’t work. Bin Laden would have stopped at nothing to knock us out. Apparently he even had some people training to fly planes into the World Trade Center in New York. He thought that would send us into an orgy of repression and surveillance, killing our own civilization from within.”
“No need for that now,” I whispered.
The guard snuffled. He had fallen asleep.
The Deputy Prime Minister had another nibble of the turnip, but he kept talking. “You get away and hide, son. Go while he’s not looking. I’d come too, but I haven’t the energy, and they’d only take it out on the others.”
“Shoot them?”
“If only. That would be kinder. No, they’ll make them dance together naked, or something like that. There’s no limit to the humiliations they subject us to in the name of their cause.”
I wanted to ask more questions, but he shooed me away. “Go on. Run. They’ll probably find you, but give yourself a chance – and do anything you can to pass on the word about what’s happened.”
I crept away, up the hill. Mum has been low lately, spending most of the day in bed, and she was still asleep when I got back. I knew that Bin Laden’s men would be with us soon, but there was no need to wake her just to tell her of new horrors ahead. What could she do about them? There’s no point running away. Where would we run to?
So that’s why I’m here in the attic with Gran’s typewriter. I’m trying at least to leave some record behind. Not exactly Anne Frank, I admit. I’ve only been up here a few hours, and I’m sure my neighbours will shop me to the enemy as soon as the men arrive. But I’ll put this paper in a plastic bag now, and then into a jar to keep it dry. A sort of message in a bottle, just in case any future generations are interested. Just in case anyone ever wants to know the true story of the Y2K Bug.
AT THE BALL GAME
Frank Cottrell Boyce
The Aztec civilization was decimated when the Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés invaded and colonized Mexico in the sixteenth century. One of the ancient beliefs of these doomed people was that the world will end in December 2012…
Monkey8 was the last in line. She was the only girl, the smallest and the most excited in her Ten. The others had all played the game on real courts before; she had only played on the school court and in the alleyways and covered walkways of her home. They were trotting in now, under the shadow of the great arch of the New Court. She paused, took a breath, tried to steady herself. Then she too ran into the arena. The sound: the cheers of the crowd that broke over her like a wave; the colours: the wet red of the playing surface, the gold around the spectators’ necks; the shadows: the black circle in the heart of the scoring hoop, the deep, concealing shade of the stands – everything was louder, sharper, brighter, than anything she had seen before. It was so beautiful she felt she could barely move. She wanted to stand and look at it for ever.
Then she saw the ball. It was already in play, spinning towards the ring. And then she was moving too. The ball bounced off at a crazy angle and everything about her was connected to it. Her brain was calculating its trajectory; her eye was following its flight; her feet were moving into the space without her having to think about it. Even though her eyes were on the ball, she was also aware that Jaguar3 of her own team was going for it with his left elbow, and somehow she knew that he had spotted her and would pass it to her. She stopped and turned, ready to take the ball with her right hip and pass it forward. She braced herself for the hurt and said a prayer to her guardian, the Nocturnal Monkey.
All this took less time than it took for the hard rubber ball to fall ten feet. Jaguar3 jumped, offering his chest to the rocketing ball. But instead of twisting and sending it to her, he yelped and fell, as though shot. He lay on the ground, clutching his chest in agony while the ball bounced once, twice, three… too many times. They had lost the ball. It belonged to the other Ten now.
Jaguar3’s brother went to help him up while the other players – from both teams – just stood and laughed at him. The spectators laughed too. Monkey8 tried to join in but her eye was fixed on the great bruise that was already blooming on Jaguar3’s chest. Mungo had told her that the ball they used on the New Court was harder than the school one and that the red surface was faster than the wooden floor. She had shouted at him and said he was only trying to scare her. Obviously he was right. She wondered if he was right about the other things too.