300 Minutes of Danger Page 5

  The police passed by without incident and disappeared into the crowd behind them.

  ‘Good boy,’ the gunman said after a pause. ‘Left again.’

  Wondering if he had just signed his own death warrant, Kim obeyed and turned left into the underground car park.

  20:45‘Wait,’ the gorilla said. He jogged back out onto the street. A curved mirror hung high on the wall, designed to show drivers hazards around the corner. Kim watched the gorilla’s reflection crouch next to the police car for a second. Then he turned and walked back to the car park.

  20:05‘Good thinking,’ the gunman said. ‘How many tyres?’

  ‘One’s enough.’

  Kim felt a sinking feeling in his chest. The police wouldn’t be able to follow with slashed tyres. And if gorilla had a knife, that was bad news.

  The underground car park was cavernous and nearly deserted. A white van stood alone in the shadows between the fluorescent overhead lights. The perfect vehicle for two killers, Kim thought.

  18:55But no. They walked past the van to a grey sedan hidden behind it. The gunman opened the passenger-side door, which was unlocked. Kim had the sudden feeling that they didn’t have the key. The car was probably stolen.

  The gunman pulled a roll of duct tape off the seat and tossed it to the gorilla. Then he pulled the gun out of his coat and took aim at Kim.

  ‘Hold your hands behind your back,’ he said.

  Kim did.

  18:20The gorilla wound the tape around his wrists, so tight that Kim’s hands swelled up. Then he crouched and bound Kim’s ankles too.

  The gorilla opened the boot, tossed in the briefcase and gestured to Kim. ‘Get in.’

  Kim peered into the cramped darkness of the boot. ‘Are you serious?’

  The gorilla grabbed him by the hair with a mighty fist. Kim yelped as follicles were torn out of his scalp.

  ‘Get in,’ the gorilla repeated.

  Unable to use his hands or feet, Kim sat on the edge of the boot and rolled in. The gorilla didn’t let go of his hair until he was inside. The thin carpet offered no protection from the hub cap of the spare tyre beneath. Everything smelled like oil and old, dry mud.

  17:00The gorilla peeled one last length of tape off the roll and plastered it over Kim’s mouth. Panicked breaths whistled through his nostrils.

  With a tremendous whooshing sound, the gorilla slammed the lid shut. Kim found himself sealed in the blackness, claustrophobia rushing in.

  16:40He had been warned never to get into the boot of a car, not even as a joke. His parents had told him he could suffocate or die of heatstroke, and if the car was in motion, a sharp turn or sudden stop could throw him against the walls.

  The car rocked as the doors closed. The engine coughed and rumbled. Kim rolled sideways as the car lurched forwards.

  16:00What could he use? He fumbled around in the dark. He could feel a magazine, or perhaps a street directory. There was also a scrunched up ball of wax paper, probably from a burger. Not helpful.

  The only other thing was the briefcase.

  The clips were the same as those on his trumpet case. It was tricky to unlatch them with his hands behind his back, but Kim managed it. The case popped open and he rummaged around inside.

  Papers. More papers. A leather-bound book, perhaps a diary.

  Kim gasped as his hand closed around something sharp. Not like a knife—more like a piece of broken glass. But he didn’t think it had broken the skin.

  14:50He gripped the object by the blunt end, which was hard and lumpy, and started hacking away at the tape around his wrists. The first stab didn’t pierce the tape. The second missed it altogether and pricked the inside of his wrist. He suppressed a squeak, took aim a third time and pushed the sharp edge through the tape. It started to tear.

  14:20He could hear the gunman’s muffled voice over the engine. ‘Yes, sir, we got it. They opened the safe deposit box pretty quick once they saw the fake gun.’

  Fake gun? Kim felt so stupid. But that didn’t mean he was safe—the gorilla had a knife.

  ‘We got to the tellers before they could trigger the silent alarm,’ the gunman continued. ‘The staff and customers are tied up and the doors are locked. But there was a witness outside the bank. A Middle Eastern-looking kid, blue shirt, grey shoes. We have him in the boot.’

  14:00A pause.

  ‘Are you sure? That seems harsh.’

  Kim’s heart beat faster.

  ‘Yes, sir. Understood.’

  ‘What did he say?’ the gorilla asked.

  ‘He—wait. Where’s the package?’

  ‘In the boot.’

  The car stopped.

  ‘You left it with him?’

  ‘He’s not going anywhere.’

  Kim held the briefcase shut with his elbow as he tried to lock it behind his back.

  The car door opened. ‘What were you thinking?’ the gunman demanded.

  Kim didn’t hear the gorilla’s response. He kept fumbling with the clips.

  He just got them closed in time. The gunman opened the boot. Kim squinted against the light.

  13:00The briefcase was closed, but he hadn’t had time to put the sharp object back inside. It was tucked under him.

  12:55Don’t look in the case, he thought. Don’t look in the case.

  A wailing siren echoed on the breeze. The gunman didn’t say anything. Nor did he open the case. He simply slammed the boot shut again. Kim heard his footsteps crunch around to the door again. It closed, and the car started moving.

  ‘Cops are coming,’ the gunman said. ‘We have to get out of here.’

  12:00Kim kept digging at the tape holding his wrists together. Soon he’d punched enough holes in it that he could tear through the plastic like perforated paper.

  As soon as his wrists were separated he realised how much his shoulders hurt. He flexed his sore arms and got to work on the tape binding his ankles. He left the other strip over his mouth. It was unpleasant, but if the two thugs opened the boot unexpectedly, he wanted to be able to pretend that he was still trussed up.

  11:40Soon Kim’s legs were free—but he wasn’t. He was still trapped in the boot of a car, and it sounded like it was going quite fast. The wheels were thrumming against smooth blacktop and the engine growled at an even pace.

  Where were they taking him? And what would they do with him once they arrived? The gunman’s voiced echoed through his head: Are you sure? That seems harsh.

  11:00Now that his hands were more mobile, Kim searched the boot again. He had heard there was some kind of legal requirement that all modern cars had an open button inside the boot in case someone became trapped. If he found it, he could jump out and run as soon as the car stopped at an intersection.

  But if the button was there, he couldn’t find it in the pitch blackness. The carpet was smooth and featureless.

  Maybe he could force the boot open. He lay on his back, braced his feet against the inside of the lid and pushed with all his might.

  There was a creaking sound, but that was it. The metal didn’t move at all. He would be stuck in here until the two thugs opened the boot. And the sharp object, whatever it was, wasn’t much of a weapon.

  10:20The spare tyre was digging into Kim’s back. It gave him an idea. He peeled back the carpet—with great difficulty, since he was lying on top of it—and ran his hands over the spare tyre. It was smooth around the sides and the tread was still ridged on the circumference. Never used. It was also thinner than a proper tyre. It had probably been designed just to get the car to the nearest service station in the event of a blowout.

  10:00Kim lifted it up. As he was hoping, a tyre iron lay underneath.

  There was no room to give it a practice swing, but it felt heavy enough to do some damage. The guy with the knife wouldn’t get too close to him if he had this.

  The car turned a corner and slowed down. Then it turned another corner, went up a slight incline and rocked over several speed bumps. A while after that
it stopped.

  09:05The doors opened on both sides. Kim braced himself. This was it. He would escape or die trying.

  He clenched his sweaty fist around the tyre iron. If only it were like a video game, where he could make as many attempts as he wished. The two thugs were much bigger than him, and they knew where they were. Did he stand a chance?

  His chest hurt. He blinked quickly, trying to preemptively adjust his eyes to the brightness which would flood in when the boot was opened. Hot air rushed into his nose with every breath.

  What were they waiting for? Did they somehow know he was free?

  08:30Kim’s mind raced as he tried to work out how that would change things. They might unlock the boot from a distance and then instruct him to get out. He wouldn’t be close enough to use the tyre iron. No, wait—they didn’t have the keys. Or did they?

  He listened for conversation. There was silence outside the vehicle. No voices, no traffic, no footsteps.

  08:00Feeling absurd, he thumped the floor twice as though knocking on a door. He had been hoping to provoke a reaction of some kind, but there was nothing.

  The heat in the boot was starting to become stifling. Suddenly it dawned on Kim that they didn’t need to open the boot to dispose of him. They could simply leave him locked in the boot of a stolen car in the summer heat. In just a matter of hours he would be dead!

  He ripped the tape off his mouth. His lips stung as the dry, cracked skin was pulled off. He ignored the pain. ‘Help!’ he screamed. ‘Somebody help me!’

  07:35No response. The car might be parked in the middle of the desert for all he knew.

  He braced his feet against the lid again. When he couldn’t push it open, he tried kicking it. He pounded the lock until his feet were sore, then he tried slamming the tyre iron into it. No luck. In fact, he feared he might have mangled the lock so badly that even someone with the key couldn’t open the boot.

  He tried to steady his breathing. If the boot was airtight, he might suffocate. He couldn’t afford to use up too much oxygen too quickly.

  06:30Think, he told himself. You can’t open the lid, but you can’t stay here. So what do you do?

  He gasped. How could he have been so foolish? In his mum’s car, there was a hatch which connected the boot to the back seat. They had used it only recently when they’d bought a new ladder. Perhaps this car had something similar.

  He shoved the backs of the seats, and immediately felt a little give. A crack of light sliced through the gloom. He pushed again, and the hatch popped open, revealing a square tunnel into the rear passenger seat of the car. The gap looked just wide enough.

  05:50Kim squeezed his shoulders through. The light was blinding after so long in the blackness of the boot. It was louder out here too. He could hear the distant rumble of traffic, the blaring of a horn, the clatter of a shopping trolley.

  At least he was close to a populated area. He thought about shouting for help again, but for all he knew the two thugs hadn’t gone far.

  He pulled his hips through the hole and tumbled into the rear footwell. He sucked in a lungful of air—not exactly fresh but better than it had been in the boot.

  The horn blasted again. Closer now.

  05:20Kim sat up so he could look out the window—

  Then he immediately realised why the two thugs had parked here.

  They had abandoned the car on the railroad tracks.

  And a train was coming.

  04:30At the moment it was just a speck on the horizon. But the car was already humming as the tracks picked up the vibrations. The train’s brakes were screaming, but Kim doubted that it would be able to stop in time.

  He fumbled with the door. It wouldn’t open. Panicking, he tried the other side. It was stuck too. Child-safe locks, Kim guessed.

  He clambered into the front passenger seat and clawed at the door. This one popped open and he fell out onto the tracks. The coarse gravel in the rail bed crunched underneath him.

  04:00He rolled sideways and scrambled to his feet. The train was still a way off, but that wouldn’t save him. The walls on either side of the tracks were sheer concrete, three metres high and topped by chain link fencing. Kim whirled around with growing dismay. The walls seemed to go on forever. There was no way out. He couldn’t go back to the level crossing where the car had driven onto the tracks, because that would mean running towards the speeding train. He was going to have to flee in the opposite direction and hope that the train stopped before it hit him.

  The horn blared again. The train would be here in a moment. He had to go, now.

  03:30But even if it didn’t hit him, it was definitely going to collide with the car. The force would turn it into a thousand pieces of debris, rocketing through the air with deadly force. How was Kim supposed to get far enough away to survive that?

  He wondered if it was possible to drive the car further up the tracks. But the engine had stopped. He had no idea how to start a car without a key.

  The clatter of approaching wheels was deafening now.

  03:00What would a superhero do?

  No time to think it through. He just had to hope it would work. Kim ran over to the boot and wrenched it open. The tyre iron lay inside. He snatched it up and tried to close the boot again, but he had damaged it too badly from inside. It kept popping open. So instead he ran around to the bonnet, stepped up onto it and ran onto the roof. It buckled slightly beneath his weight as the car rocked on its suspension. If he fell, he wouldn’t have time for a second try.

  02:30Kim hefted the tyre iron, crouched, and jumped.

  He flew through the air towards the concrete wall, arms outstretched. For a frightening second he thought he was going to fall back onto the tracks and be pulverised by the speeding train. But the height of the car and the length of the tyre iron was just enough. The end of the iron hooked into the chain link fence and Kim found himself hanging a metre and a half above the tracks.

  02:20He hauled himself up, face sweaty, shoulders screaming, and grabbed the fence with his other hand. Leaving the tyre iron hanging from the mesh he clambered upwards, deafened by the shrieking of the approaching train’s brakes.

  He was about to climb over the fence when he saw the two thugs running up the hill towards him.

  He couldn’t drop back down. The train was almost upon him. But he couldn’t climb over—they would grab him. He hung there, paralysed.

  01:45‘How could you not check that it was still in the case?’ the gorilla was shouting.

  ‘The cops were coming!’ the gunman yelled back. ‘You’re the one who put it in there with him in the first place. Hey!’ He spotted Kim clinging to the fence. ‘The bloodstone! Do you have it?’

  01:30‘The what?’ Kim demanded.

  The gorilla drew his knife. ‘The bloodstone!’ he roared. ‘Give it to me!’

  ‘Drop the knife!’ someone else bellowed.

  Kim turned his head to see four police officers charging up the other side of the hill, all wearing body armour. Two of them had tasers pointed at the gunman and the gorilla.

  The two thugs groaned and dropped to their knees. The gunman lobbed the knife away.

  00:45Kim scrambled over the chain link fence and collapsed onto the ground, safe at last. He was just in time. As he turned to look back down at the tracks, he saw the train rocket towards the sedan. The boot was still open. He just had time to observe the object he had cut through the duct tape with—a ruby as big as a tennis ball—before the train smashed into the car. Wheels exploded outward, metal crumpled, glass turned to dust and the ruby burst like a firework, dissolving into a thousand glittering chunks.

  00:00

  CHILLING

  30:00 ‘It’s simple,’ Hope said. ‘You give them the form. You check that they haven’t ticked any of these highlighted boxes. Then you send them over to me, and I’ll give them the injection.’

  Audrey looked at the stacks of syringes in the walk-in fridge. The fly virus—or ‘flyrus’, as the newspape
rs had started calling it after ‘fly flu’ failed to catch on—was almost always fatal. What if she missed something on the paperwork? Someone could die.

  Her friends had earned work experience positions in bookshops and cafes. How had Audrey wound up in such a serious role? Yes, she did want to be a doctor someday, but this was too much too quickly.

  ‘After I’ve done my bit,’ Hope continued, ‘give them an ice pack from the fridge and sit them down in one of those chairs. Note the time. We have to observe them for fifteen minutes before we let them go.’

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  29:00‘If anyone goes pale or you notice a rash, let me know. Also if they complain of itching or nausea. By the way, you should wash your hands before we arrive.’

  Audrey turned to the sink. The Mobile Treatment Facility, or MTF, was no more than a powered shipping crate on the back of a semitrailer, but it was kitted out better than some hospitals. In addition to the sink, it had a kettle, a microwave, a defibrillator, a filing cabinet, a cupboard full of bandages and an enormous walk-in fridge. A small, round window—the kind you might find in a submarine or a spaceship—revealed the gloomy city streets as they rolled past.

  28:30Today was day one of the immunisation program. Right now hundreds of vehicles like this one were zooming towards infection hotspots all over the country. The goal was to get the whole population vaccinated within two weeks.

  Audrey scrubbed her hands in the sink, dried them on a paper towel and threw the towel into a medical waste canister. Then she sat down on the stool next to Hope.

  28:00‘Should I be wearing a face mask?’ she asked. ‘Since all these sick people will be coming in here?’

  ‘The vaccine is designed to prevent the disease, not to cure it. Anyone who’s already infected will go to the hospital, not here.’

  ‘What about people who don’t know they’re infected?’

  ‘The infected start coughing up blood within thirty minutes of exposure,’ Hope said, ‘so that’s unlikely. They also go pale, get sweaty and show bruising around the eyes. And anyway, the disease isn’t airborne. You don’t need a face mask.’