“Tough if he ain’t,” Lee said aloud. “Cos we is outta here.”
Rising to his feet, he tried to get the guards to calm down.
“Hey, Sporty!” he said, calling them by their Spice Girl nicknames. “Enough with the whinin’, and Scary, if you nudge me with that rifle butt one more time, I is gonna leave you here, I swear to God.”
The guards waved their arms and continued to shout.
“Yeah – yeah,” Lee said. “It’s mad, it’s off the hook, but stressin’ out and boohoos won’t do no good, ladies.”
Suddenly, close by, there was a furtive rustling. The guards leaped around in alarm and ‘Baby Spice’ opened fire. The autumnal peace erupted with a blizzard of bullets that went ripping through the undergrowth and a tree trunk splintered as lead hammered into it. A red squirrel fell from a branch and another half-dozen shots made it jump and twitch before the nervous guard realised what it was and ceased firing.
The others stared across at the thoroughly dead animal, then began to snigger in embarrassment. Their shared tension had been released and they gave Baby teasing punches on his arm.
Lee shook his head at them. “You all got that outta your systems now, yeah?” he asked warily. “That weren’t cool, you assholes. That furry bullet bag coulda had somethin’ to say – you have no idea what the zoo life is like round here. That coulda been anythin’. That was dumb, guys – real baseline dumb! Trigger-happy ain’t the word; trigger-hysterical is what you is. You need to frost up, right now, ’fore one of us gets capped the same way.”
The guards had no idea what he was saying. They pointed at the squirrel and laughed. It was the only time Lee had ever seen them display any jubilant emotion. Their relieved, joking chatter sounded weird in this place. One of them, the thinnest, and usually the surliest, was the first to become grave once more and lifted the chain that tethered him to Lee’s wrist. Then, with urgent gestures, he mimed the boy taking them away from here.
“You got it, Posh,” Lee agreed. “That’s what I is ’bout to do – take us back over that rainbow. This messed-up Oz has got enough crazy muthas in it already; it don’t need four more with guns, what don’t speak local.”
After several frustrating minutes in which he tried to indicate what he was going to do, he finally had them lined up on either side of him. They were on an overgrown forest path and, by scissoring his forefingers, managed to demonstrate that they were going to run along it a little way and wake up back in the medical room.
“In North Korea,” he said, nodding his head slowly. “DPRK – yeah? That crap heap, ass end of nowhere. We go back there, mkay?”
“Kay!” affirmed Scary and Posh Spice on his right.
“Kay!” chimed in Sporty and Baby on his left.
Lee took a moment to compose himself and crunched his neck muscles a few times. Glancing along the forest path, he reckoned they’d be back in the mountain base before they made it past three trees. What they’d find waiting for them back there, however, was an entirely different matter.
“You’d best be long gone when we get back, old man,” he muttered. “These ladies is burnin’ to shoot something bigger than squirrels.”
Closing his eyes, he tensed and then ran forward. The chains rattled and the four guards ran with him.
After passing at least ten trees, Lee slowed to a stop and took deep breaths as he gazed about, frowning. Why were they still here? What had he done wrong? He didn’t understand it.
The guards looked at one another uncertainly and voiced their confusion.
“I know, I know,” the boy said. “I got me no idea neither. We go again, yeah?”
“Kay!” they said in military unison.
Lee closed his eyes again and concentrated harder than before. He thought of the familiar room, with its monitors, wall mirror and hospital bed. That’s where he was going to find himself this time. No doubt about it.
With a grunt, he ran along the path, leading the eager guards.
When that attempt also failed, followed by a third, fourth and then a fifth, during which they’d held hands, the guards’ keen anticipation had gone and they had reverted to shouting at him angrily.
“We should be gone by now!” Lee declared, holding his hands up. “We should be back in that dump you call home. This is not my fault.”
Posh Spice had run out of patience and he turned his rifle on the boy, prodding him in the stomach to get this most basic threat across in no uncertain terms.
“Hey!” Lee yelled. “You do somethin’ crazy an’ there’s no way you’re gonna get back, stupid.”
The others seemed to agree with him and they shouted at Posh in Korean, pushing the barrel of the Kalashnikov away.
Posh railed back at them and Lee let them bawl at each other. He tried to work out what he was doing differently. There’d never been any trouble getting back to the real world. He had flitted in and out of this twisted place at will. Mind you, he’d never had to take four adults with him, but there hadn’t been a problem bringing them here in the first place.
“Yeah, but that weren’t down to me,” he told himself. “I was dragged here, like when I brought Spencer and Maggie back in the camp. Maybe I got me a two-person max limit?”
“Hey, ladies,” he called, interrupting their argument. “Let’s try this again, but different this time. Just two of you come with me. I’ll bounce straight back for the others, yeah?”
He tried to show them this new idea by pretending to remove one of the cuffs from his wrists and leaving with just two guards. The four men scowled at him, perplexed, as he repeated the actions again and again. It was Scary who grasped his meaning first and he rapidly explained it to the other three. The proposal was not met with joyous approval and they shouted at Lee louder than before. None of them wanted to be left here, even for a short while.
“Then we is stuck!” he told them fiercely. “I can’t think of no other way.”
Lee kicked the top off a toadstool that was growing at the side of the path. Perhaps he was just too damn tired. Maybe, if he gave it a bit more time, his mojo, or whatever it was that made him the Castle Creeper, would be back to full strength and there’d be no problem. He hoped that’s all it was.
“Listen up,” he announced. “We need a time out. I gotta park and recharge.”
But the guards wouldn’t let him sit down. They had got it into their heads that the only way to get home was to keep moving and he couldn’t make them understand that wasn’t how it worked. They were determined to march down the track and see where it led to. Chained to them the way he was, there was nothing Lee could do except be pulled along.
“This won’t get you no place,” he objected, trudging along unwillingly, “’cept mebbe dead. This neighbourhood is full of monsters you never dreamed of. We’re gonna end up toasted if you don’t stop – right now!”
They refused to listen. He had had his chance and failed. Seeking refuge in the familiar, they started singing ‘No Motherland Without You’, the signature song of Kim Jong-il, at the top of their voices in Korean.
“You pushed away the severe storm.
You made us believe, General Kim Jong-il.
We cannot live without you.
Our country cannot exist without you!”
They marched as if they were on parade and Lee groaned. He hadn’t realised just how accurate he had been, referring to this place as