Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘Oh, no,’ Kayleigh said, and she hugged me again and even tousled the pink bits she’d put in my hair. ‘Of course not. You can hide with us if you want. Alice can stay here, can’t she?’

None of the others looked wildly enthusiastic, although

Chinenye did manage to look up and sort of smile at me.

‘You’ll have to bring your own food, though,’ said one of the boys. ‘We haven’t got any.’

‘I was thinking of getting some food anyway,’ I said.

‘Oh God!’ said Kayleigh fretfully, twisting her fingers. ‘Be careful.’

‘Maybe you could come with me?’ I suggested. ‘Or someone else.’

There was an awkward silence. Chinenye dropped her head back into the Russian boy’s lap. ‘We just can’t,’ she said, without opening her eyes. ‘We can’t go out again tonight. It’s not worth it.’

‘We think lying low here until the Colonel gets back is our best bet,’ Kayleigh explained.

‘Even if you starve ?’ I said, beginning to get irritated with them all. They didn’t answer. ‘I was thinking we should start making plans for if nobody does come back.’

‘Oh, don’t say that!’ Kayleigh said, starting to cry again. ‘They will. They have to.’

I wondered if I’d somehow been imagining her as bigger than she was, because now she seemed sort of shrunken.

‘I’ll come back later,’ I told her. And then added, ‘Maybe,’ and I went back to the corridor. I’d get into the food store from outside, I decided. That would be safer, and then I’d take whatever I could find over to the wheat dome, and maybe somehow everything would look a bit better in the morning.

I went back to the airlock. There was an oxygen pump there so I refilled my canister and put the mask on before I went outside.

It was black and cloudy and I only had the glow of the dome to find my way by, but I managed to get into the food store beside the kitchens. I couldn’t find the lights at first, and a couple of larder robots whirred past my shoulder in the dark, carrying a tub of soybean oil over to a shelf, and I clapped my hand over my mouth to keep from yelling out in shock.

When I’d got my breath back, I collected some dried Smeat bars and fruit, a block of cheese, some noodles and a tub of chocolate gludge, and then a few slightly more random things that had survived the other kids’ raids, like a tub of hundreds and thousands and some tomato ketchup. I put everything in a wire crate I found in a rack, and carried it awkwardly outside and hid it behind one of the twisty pine trees near the Maggini entrance to the base. Even though I could lift such a lot in the low gravity, it was annoyingly bulky and the things inside kept sliding around, so it was too awkward to carry much further on my own.

I should have gone straight to the wheat dome and got someone to help me carry everything. Unfortunately I decided I’d make another scouting trip and try and get some wipes and toothbrushes.

I went back in through the food store and the kitchens. They were close to the Processing Chamber where we’d had our uniforms dispensed to us on the first day, and with a bit of luck I thought I might be able to make it and get something out of the machines. But this time, just as I was opening the door from the kitchen to Vogel Corridor, I heard someone coming.

All the internal doors on Beagle Base were old-fashioned ones with hinges and door handles like back at Muckling Abbot, so that no one got stuck if there was ever a power cut. It was only the doors to the airlocks and the outside that slid open and shut. I drew back into the kitchen, and the door clicked.

‘What’s that?’ said a girl’s voice.

‘Just one of the kitchen robots,’ said a boy.

‘No, it wasn’t. It’s one of those kids trying to hide. Come on.’ Their footsteps sped up.

It was Christa and Leon, wanting a snack, I supposed.

I retreated further into the kitchen in the beginnings of a panic. I was sure they were coming inside, but there wasn’t time to run back through the food store. I decided I didn’t want to be found hiding in a cupboard, so I set my shoulders, pushed the door open and walked out. ‘Hello,’ I said.

‘You don’t take a hint, do you,’ said Christa.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ I said reasonably. ‘I know we’ve never got on that well, but things are different now. We’ve got to cooperate. We don’t know if the grown-ups are even coming back.’

‘We’re the grown-ups now,’ said Leon. ‘And you’d better learn to do as you’re told.’

‘We need to at least work out how we’re going to organise the food,’ I pleaded, backing away as they came closer. Not that I meant to be pleading, but pleading seemed to be what came out. ‘We’ve got to make sure the wheat and soy and everything gets harvested. We don’t even know how long the robots will keep going or how to fix them if they break and if this goes on for weeks people could starve .’

Leon grabbed my arm and dragged me down Vogel Corridor towards the garden dome. It was horrible how easy it was for him, that I was fighting as hard as I could and it didn’t really do a thing. I’d had all that training to toughen me up. But so had he.

At this point Lilly and Gavin and all their gang came running to see what the noise was about, and they brought their chair legs and bits of robots.

‘Hey, Lilly?’ shouted Christa. ‘Isn’t this a friend of yours?’

I did manage at this point to kick Leon in the knee as hard as I could. And he let me go – by throwing me towards Gavin and Lilly, and what with the gravity I went flying a scarily long way down the passage, even if I didn’t land as hard as I would have on Earth.

This time, when they started hitting and kicking me, it was even worse than before, in that for a while I ended up on the floor with my arms over my head thinking about what Josephine had said about people are going to start killing each other . But it didn’t go on that long, I suppose, although it felt like it, and when they backed off I was not dead. They did not stop, there, though. I scrambled up and tried to break away and Lilly and Gavin laughed at me for running, but Leon grabbed me and said, ‘No, no, you wanted to get in, didn’t you?’

He grabbed me again, just as easily as before. He hauled me a way down the passage and pulled out an old scaffolding pole or something jammed into the frame of a door, and he flung me inside a dark classroom. I could hear them all laughing outside as they wedged the pole back in place to hold the door shut.

The classroom was a mess, all tumbled desks and chairs and burned gym mats someone had thrown in there. Not that I spent much time looking at any of that. I did what people trapped in rooms usually do: start banging on the door and shouting, ‘Let me out!’ even though I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere.

After a while, I stopped and considered my situation. I reflected it was just as well I’d been to the loo recently, but it wouldn’t be much fun if I was still in here by the time I needed to go again.

Also I was still very hungry, and thirsty too.

I told myself they wouldn’t actually leave me in there until I died, but I wasn’t absolutely convinced. Even if they didn’t really mean to do that they might wander off to a different part of the base and forget I was there.

At this point I was standing with my forehead against the door and my eyes shut, and just coming to the conclusion that I might as well have a little cry, when something came up behind me and boomed, ‘HEY THERE, ALICE,’ in my ear. I screamed.

It was the Goldfish. It was hovering delightedly right in front of my face.

I flopped limply against the door and swore, at length.