Annie shook her head frantically. ‘There’s no plan. You’ve all got weapons, what difference does it make? Two of you or three, we’re still being held at gunpoint.’
This was baffling. What the hell was she playing at? Was there any benefit of getting one of the men out of the room?
‘Where is this machine?’ one of the other men asked. Tom thought it was the one who’d been nicknamed Mo. ‘I don’t mind going.’
Larry turned towards him furious. ‘No! Let me think.’ He grabbed the butt of his automatic weapon and stroked it as though it had talismanic properties. The other man stuck his hands in the sides of his flak jacket and glared round at the class, trying to intimidate them into keeping quiet while his boss tried to decide what to do.
‘Right,’ Larry said and Curly shifted his hands to his sides expectantly. ‘I’m not sending one of my men off on a wild goose chase. Got that, missy?’ He pointed a gloved finger at Annie. ‘So, you can go with him. If you’re that worried about your boyfriend, you’ll be straight there and back. If you’re not back in five, then one of your little friends will have to face the consequences.’
Mutters of protest from the students were instantly silenced by Larry’s hand moving towards the trigger of his weapon. Tom watched Annie’s reaction, trying to work out if this was what she’d wanted, but she was giving nothing away as she nodded at the man.
‘Got it,’ she said.
Annie knelt back down next to him and grabbed the hand that wasn’t covering his wound. She looked close to tears as she smiled at him. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ she said. ‘Just hang on.’
Tom smiled back at her, trying to make the gesture look as weak and pathetic as possible – not a difficult task as he was genuinely frightened for her.
‘Come on then,’ Mo said from the door. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
Annie stood up and crossed the classroom, the eyes of each one of her classmates following every step. She looked back briefly as the armed man turned the key in the lock and opened the door. Then she was gone.
Larry glanced at the chunky watch on his wrist, emphasising his deadline to those left in the room. ‘Right, as you were,’ he said with a grin that, to Tom’s eyes, looked worryingly manic.
The silence in the room was almost suffocating. It felt like Annie had taken most of the oxygen with her when she’d left, and Tom realised that his classmates were even more terrified than they had been before. Everybody in the room seemed to jump as Larry’s phone rang, the sound oddly incongruous amid the tension. The man answered but didn’t say anything suggesting it was a call he’d been expecting, or he was deferring to the caller. He hung up and scanned the room.
‘Which one of you is Annie Bainbridge?’
The silence which greeted his question seemed to make him nervous. ‘I said–’
‘She’s the one who’s just gone out,’ Jess mumbled.
Larry looked at the door and then at his phone as though trying to decide something. Tom thought he was going to make a call but, instead, he started typing frantically on the keypad. Something was wrong and that something involved Annie. This wasn’t making sense. First his dad and now his girlfriend. What the hell was going on?
Tom shook his head. He was starting to feel drowsy. He knew it wasn’t blood loss because there wasn’t much bleeding now. Was he hungry? Had the wound got infected so quickly that it was making him ill? He couldn’t think. Then he realised – this had happened before. He’d been in shock and it was wearing off. That’s what the exhaustion was about. But he needed to stay awake and alert. He couldn’t give in to it no matter how much he wanted to. Last time he’d slept for nearly a full day. And nothing had changed when he’d woken up.
Before
The maths problem had made no sense. Tom usually ‘got’ maths. He was predicted an A grade for his GCSE and his teacher had suggested that he might want to go on to study the subject at A-level but they’d been working on quadratic equations for the past few lessons and he was struggling. It seemed like at least three out of the ten questions on each page made no sense at all.
‘You done number six?’ he asked Dan who was sitting back in his seat and surreptitiously glancing down at the phone in his lap.
‘Huh?’
‘Number six. It doesn’t make sense.’
Dan straightened up and looked over at Tom’s exercise book. ‘You’ve copied it down wrong. It’s 4x squared, you’ve put 2x squared.’
Tom made the correction and tried the problem again. He wrote down the answer and flipped to the back of the textbook to check it. Still not right. ‘Shit,’ he murmured.
Dan was looking at his phone again.
‘You’re going to get that taken off you,’ Tom warned. ‘What’s so interesting?’
‘Text from my mum. The A595’s blocked. Buses can’t get through. She says to walk down into town and she’ll pick me up near Tesco.’
‘What’s happened?’
Dan shrugged. ‘Accident probably. Pain in the arse having to walk into town.’
‘You two! Get on!’ Mr Jackson snapped from behind his computer monitor. Tom looked up but the teacher was focused on his screen. How did they do that? Tom wondered. So many teachers just seemed to sense when somebody wasn’t doing what they were supposed to. He looked back down at the textbook and wrote down the next problem – correctly this time – and managed to solve it easily.
Halfway through the lesson the door opened and a terrified-looking year-seven kid trembled on the threshold, his uniform immaculate and his expression one of total embarrassment. ‘Sir, I’ve got a note for you.’
Mr Jackson glared at him from beneath his impressive dark eyebrows. ‘Well, I can’t read it
