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“Well, you could try.” Amit looked at Baz, his dark eyes narrowed, challenging. “But then I’d just have to start calling you “Gayboy,” wouldn’t I?”

“What?” It took a moment for Baz to grasp what was being said. Then he understood. He glanced quickly at Ray – too off-guard to avoid doing so – and felt the color flooding into his cheeks, a burning embarrassment that all could see. He began to scramble to his feet, fists clenched, and saw that Amit was already out of his chair, equally prepared for violence.

“Hey, knock it off, Baz! Don’t be stupid.” Gene grabbed hold of Amit and held him back. “For Chrissake... Amit...”

“I’m not taking any of that “Paki” crap from him!” Amit threw a punch over Gene’s shoulder, missed, and overbalanced.

“I didn’t say that! I said how would you 
like
 it...” Baz lashed out, trying to get to Amit, but now Robbie was in the way.

“Whoa, whoa...” Robbie was doing his peacemaker bit as usual, and after another brief bout of scuffling the momentum was lost. Baz and Amit were kept apart long enough for them both to calm down.

“What’s the matter with you two?” Gene hustled Amit back towards his chair. “We got enough to worry about without trying to kick each other’s heads in.”

Baz waited until Amit was seated before lowering himself to the floor once more. He knew that his face was still red, and that nothing had been resolved.

“Now let’s get back to what’s important’ – Gene was talking – ‘and try and figure out what they’re up to, and what we’re gonna do about it. After today... I just don’t know...”

Baz dragged himself from his own angry thoughts. “What do you mean – “after today”?” he said. “What’s been going on?”

“Yeah, I forgot,” said Gene. “You weren’t there. We’ve been working down on the jetty. You know that big cross Preacher John told me to make? Well, we had to carry it down to the jetty today, and put it up.”

“Put it up where?”

“It fits into that bit of drainpipe at the back of the platform. Might have been made to measure. Isaac’s obviously had it planned all along.”

“Preacher John has, you mean,” said Robbie. “It’ll be his orders, not Isaac’s.”

Baz pictured the tall wooden cross, standing upright at the edge of the platform – immediately behind the concrete box-thing, with its huge lid...

“But what’s it supposed to be?” He still didn’t get it. “What’s the box for?”

“Box?” Gene looked at him. “It’s not a bleedin’ box, mate. It’s an altar.”

CHAPTER
 
SIXTEEN

Baz spent another day in the kitchen, helping Cookie out. He found that he didn’t mind it. The hours were long, but the work was more interesting than labelling cans in the sort room, and a lot less strenuous than barrowing stone and concrete. Cookie was easy enough to get along with, and was obviously proud of his domain. He was also proud of his ability to conjure something out of nothing, to be inventive with whatever ingredients came his way, and happy to share the knowledge that he had. This was clearly his world, and in the kitchen at least, he was king.

But even Cookie looked a bit panicky when Moko entered the kitchen on Wednesday evening carrying a cat box. The big Japanese man opened the swing door, put the cat box on the floor and gave it a shove with his foot. The plastic box slid across the tiles, turning in a half-circle so that the entrance flap ended up facing away from Cookie and Baz. Moko said nothing – or at least nothing audible. He simply grunted and left.

“Strewth,” said Cookie. “What now?” He went over to take a look at the cat box, and Baz followed – images of cats and cooking pots already beginning to flash through his head.

Cookie lifted the box and placed it on a work surface. He and Baz peered through the grille of the entrance flap, cautious lest the occupant of the box should hurl itself at them in a spitting ball of fury. But it wasn’t a cat in there. It was rabbits – two of them.

They were white, the domesticated sort, and unusually big. Fresh meat was scarce, and it was rare for rabbits to be allowed to reach this size nowadays. Hunger and impatience normally got the better of their breeders.

“Oh God,” said Baz. “Are we supposed to cook ’em?”

“Probably not tonight,” said Cookie. “But yeah, that’s why they’re here.” He opened the door of the cat box in order to get a better view. The rabbits looked calm enough, nibbling away at a few handfuls of dandelion leaves that someone had thought to provide. They made no attempt to escape.

“So... we’ve got to kill them?” Here was a thought that Baz didn’t relish.

“ ’Fraid so. It’s OK. I’ve done it before.”

“Yeah? How?”

“Well, you 
can
 do it with a chop of your hand. You hang ’em upside down by the hind legs, and whack ’em across the back of the neck. I’ve never tried it that way, though – not sure I could hit ’em hard enough – so I use a meat hammer.”

Cookie went over to a drawer, pulled it open and took out a metal hammer. It was shiny, with a black rubber handle, and one face of the hammer-head was cast into sharp little pyramids. He handed it to Baz.

“Jesus.” Baz hefted the hammer, tapped it experimentally against his palm. “You hit them with this?” He tried to imagine himself doing such a thing, and knew for certain that he wouldn’t be able to.

“Yeah. Hang ’em upside down and knock ’em over the head. The thing is, if you’re gonna do it, you really have to do it. You can’t bottle it, or have two or three goes at it, ’cos that’d be cruel. You have to do it in one, and that means making a proper job of it – one really good thump. It’s not easy.”

Cookie’s voice was matter of fact.

“But you know what’s really daft? We’ve got rabbits already – here on the island. The copse is full of ’em. I dunno why the divers trade for them when they could catch their own. Same with vegetables – why not just grow some? There’s plenty of room. They don’t think that way, though. Easier to trade a few tins, I guess. But see’ – Cookie continued his lesson in butchery – ‘the tricky bit is paunching and skinning, ’cos if you mess that up it’s a hell of a stink. You have to get all the guts out in one. Look...” He reached inside the cat box and got hold of one of the rabbits, swinging it out of the box so that it hung upside down by its back legs. The rabbit was big and amazingly long. It didn’t struggle.

“You lie it on its back, and press the guts down with your thumbs—”

“Oi!” The kitchen door was open, and Isaac was standing there. “What’re you doing? You’re supposed to be cooking in here, not yakking.”

“Sorry,” said Cookie. He cradled the rabbit.

“Put that thing back in its cage and get some food on the table. Ten minutes.”

“OK. Um... when do you want the rabbits, then?”

“What? Just feed ’em and leave ’em alone. We’re saving them for Sunday. Now get moving.”

The swing door closed behind Isaac, and Cookie put the rabbit back in the cat box. Baz wasn’t sorry to see it go, or for Cookie’s lecture to be brought to a close. When the time came, he thought, he would have to leave the butchering to the expert.

“Better get the rice on,” said Cookie. “The water’s already hot, and basmati only takes ten minutes, so we’re OK.”

As they served the divers their supper – chicken curry and rice, with hot chapatis – Isaac looked up and said to Cookie, “If you’ve got time to be playing around with rabbits, then there’s nothing much the matter with you. Tomorrow you’re on your own again. This one can go back to the sort room, where he belongs. All right?”

“Yes.” Cookie sounded miserable and Baz threw him a sympathetic look. The two boys took up their positions by the swing door, hands behind their backs, feet slightly apart.

Returning to sort-room duties at least gave Baz the chance to catch up with the outside world.

“What’s happening?” he said to Gene. “Is that the motor you’ve been working on?”

“Yeah. Just about done.” Gene stepped back from the workbench, wiping his hands on an oily rag. There was an outboard motor clamped to the bench, a complicated-looking thing with a brass flywheel on top, and a small black fuel tank with the word 
SEAGULL
 on it. A long alloy tube led to a propeller down below.

“Does it work?” said Baz.

“That’s what we’re gonna find out. We’ll just give the carburettor a quick tickle...” Gene pressed a little button up and down, and moved a couple of levers. He took a length of nylon cord and wound it around the flywheel on top of the motor.

“OK. Stand back.” Gene yanked on the rope and the flywheel spun round. There was a kind of hollow sucking sound, but the motor didn’t fire. Gene pumped a little more petrol into the carburettor and readjusted one of the levers. Then he wound the rope around the flywheel again and gave it another pull.

This time the engine caught. It fired a couple of times, stuttered almost to a halt, picked up momentum again, and then burst into sudden roaring life. The sort room rang with the high-pitched yammering of the motor, and clouds of blue exhaust fumes spread from the workbench. Gene turned back the throttle lever and slowed the motor to a tickover.

“Just going to check the drive!” he shouted above the din. He pushed at a longer metal bar, and the engine engaged the propeller. This began to spin, and after revving it up and down a few times Gene shut off the motor altogether.

“Nothing wrong with that.” His voice cut through the ringing silence.

The rest of the sort-room crew had gathered round, and Robbie put out a hand, tracing his grubby fingers over the embossed word on the petrol tank. “Wow. It’s great, isn’t it?”

There was something hypnotic, exhilarating, about the smell of exhaust fumes that hung in the air. To Baz it was an instant reminder of the world that had gone, the very street where he’d lived before the floods. There had been a group of lads that used to whizz up and down on their scooters in the evening, parking up on the corner, laughing and talking late into the night. The neighbors all complained about the noise, but Baz had envied the bigger boys and secretly hoped that someday he would be able to join them, have a scooter of his own and plan weekend trips to faraway seaside towns. And this had been the same smell that drifted in through his open bedroom window. Exhaust fumes. Freedom...

“I didn’t have to do that much.” Gene was talking. “Stripped it all down, gave the head a de-coke, unblocked the carburettor jets. Had to put in a new spark plug and new HT lead – Hutchinson found me a big roll of that, which was lucky. And the petrol was ancient, all gummy, so I put some fresh in. That was it.”

“Hey,” said Dyson. “You mean you got 
petrol?”

“A cupful, that’s all. Just enough to get it going. Hutchinson brought it – don’t even know where it came from. Storeroom, I s’pose. No chance of anymore, though.”

This reminded Baz of Cookie, and his key to the generator shed. “Hey, Gene,” he said. “If we could get hold of diesel, would that be any good? For a bomb, I mean?”

Gene shook his head. “Nah. Not really. Doesn’t explode in the same way as petrol does. Methane’s way better...”

But then Hutchinson reappeared, brought hurrying back by the noise no doubt, and the boys dispersed. Baz stepped sideways and pretended to study the list of codes on the wall. 
FB.
French beans...

The methane production was going well. Four litres – two big Coke bottles – were now stashed up at the sports center, both full of gas, and a third bottle was well under way. It hung upside-down in one of the water butts, anchored by string to a concrete block, a plastic funnel fitted into its neck. The water duty crew added to it whenever they could, taking a small bottle with them and releasing the contents underwater into the larger container.

Fart Club was observed religiously, evening and morning, so Gene had no cause for complaint. And yet he worried.

“We got nothing to actually put the gas in yet,” he said. “We gotta find a big heavy casing of some sort. And I still don’t know what the mixture should be.”

Gene’s attitude had shifted since Enoch’s death. His thinking had gone beyond just accumulating a store of explosive. He was definitely planning to build something now, a working weapon. A bomb.

But to Baz it all seemed less real than it had been. A wild pipe-dream. He thought about his queasiness over the rabbits, and suspected that if he was incapable of killing an animal, he’d find it a whole lot harder when it came to killing men.

Baz sat on his bed and watched the other boys going about their business, finishing their suppers, hanging bits of washing on the lines that criss-crossed the slob room. He could hear voices echoing from the jakes, Jubo and Robbie laughing – Fart Club in full swing by the sound of it. Ray was down at the other end of the room in deep discussion with Gene, both their faces frowning and serious. Probably working on some new aspect of the big plan. Amit and Dyson were having an arm-wrestling match, kneeling at the low table in the seating area. Here were his companions, his fellow captives, his brothers. His family. A pang of guilt accompanied that thought. He missed his dad, missed him every day, but his family was here now. And he cared about them all.

But he cared about Ray the most, and he wasn’t sure why. He knew that it wasn’t in the way that Amit had hinted at. He liked girls – had always liked girls...

The door opened at the far end of the room, and Steiner came in. He looked around briefly, located Baz and pointed a finger.

“You!” he shouted. “Kitchen. Now!”

Kitchen? What had happened? There was no point in asking questions, so Baz scrambled to his feet. He hurried out of the slob room, past Steiner, and down the corridor towards the divers’ quarters.

Isaac and crew were sitting at the table in the dining area, arms folded, and judging by the sour expressions on their faces they were none too happy. As Baz approached, Isaac leaned back in his chair. He nodded towards the kitchen door.

“Get in there and help that fat slob out. He’s ruddy useless.”

Baz pushed at the swing door and entered the kitchen.

Cookie was in a state. Beneath the dim flicker of a single bulb he was rushing around, clouded in steam, a long strip of bandage trailing from his injured hand. There were two saucepans on the stove, a frying pan to one side, an onion on a chopping board. An onion! Baz wanted to stop and stare at this marvel, but there was no time.