Siege: Book 6 in the Kings Keep Series

By Graeme Butz

Has Alec been sent back in time, or was his experience at Kings Keep Academy a delirious dream?

Struggling to escape from his unfamiliar prison, Alec needs to find Rod to complete the mission set for them by Celadorto repair the time-tear and close an open time gate, as well as return the runaway convict boy to his rightful period in Australian history.

The invisible war of worlds follows Alec to his family farm for his thirteenth birthday and drives a wedge between him and Rod that may be irreparable. Has the time-tear also torn their friendship forever?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Sep 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503509658

Graeme Butz

Graeme Butz is a former high school teacher and community worker who lives in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Australia. He spends much of his time working on his bush garden, reading, listening to music, visiting Op Shops, writing the next book, and talking to his ‘visitors’ (parrots, wallabies, lizards and snakes). Occasionally, he spends time beachcombing on the New South Wales south coast and helping with reading support groups in local schools. Written while still a teacher, the Kings Keep series—its characters, events and narrative—were all extensively piloted on junior high school students (and underwent serious revision) to ensure language- and content-appropriate plot and text for the target age group.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Graeme Butz.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5035-0964-1

                 eBook         978-1-5035-0965-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/28/2015

Xlibris

1-800-455-039

www.Xlibris.com.au

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

To Jimmy and Malcolm

CHAPTER 1

‘Where are you taking me? … Why are the bandages back on my eyes? … Why are my hands tied to the bed rails? … What’s happening? …Why won’t anyone tell me what’s happening?’

Alec struggled violently and protested loudly as his hospital bed was wheeled quickly along a corridor, then into a lift. He heard the doors close and felt a harsh jolt as the lift descended. ‘Noisy,’ he noted, ‘and a rough ride. Not the school clinic. This isn’t good.’

‘Answer me!’ he screamed, his voice echoing in vain off the lift walls. A hand pushed roughly on his shoulder in response to his outburst.

‘You’ve brought this on yourself,’ an unidentified voice snapped at him. ‘Shouting and screaming, disturbing the other children. No consideration for others. That’s why you’re being moved to an isolation unit. No-one will hear your tantrums there. You can scream until you’re exhausted. Serves you right.’

The lift stopped moving and the doors opened with a loud hiss. The bed bumped out and was rolled briefly forwards, then sideways, then reversed. Alec heard the wheel locks of his bed snap tight.

‘Your own room, all to yourself,’ the voice told him in a snide tone. Enjoy it. There’s no audience to perform for.’

Alec heard the scuffing of shoes on polished floor and the lift doors open and close. He waited a few seconds before speaking.

‘Is anyone here? … Can anyone hear me? … Please answer if you’re there … Hello … Anyone?’ He was alarmed at the despair in his voice, and waited in the silence. ‘Don’t panic, stay calm. There’s probably no-one here. Where’s here? Not the clinic. Not the district hospital either. That lift is really noisy, sounds ancient. And I’m not ten, I’m twelve, nearly thirteen. Why would they tell me I’m back two years to my accident with the barbed wire? Doesn’t make sense. Have to get out.’ He heard the lift doors open, and two sets of footsteps approaching.

‘Play dead – asleep, anyway. If they think I’m asleep, maybe they’ll talk and I can get some clue about what’s going …’

‘Alec, can you hear me? … Alec? … Wake up … It’s Dr Grey.’ A hand gently shook Alec’s shoulder, and he resisted the urge to panic.

‘Go totally limp, like a rag doll, don’t tense or they’ll know.’ Alec left his head turned to one side, his arms hanging as limply as the restraints would allow. He let a dribble of saliva run out of the corner of his mouth.

‘Not conscious,’ the voice remarked very close to Alec’s cheek. ‘Breathing is slow and deep. We didn’t sedate him. Must have exhausted himself with all that nonsense upstairs’ (‘That’s not BB’s voice – and anyway, I’d smell him a mile off. Stay dead’).

‘Hmmm,’ the other voice pondered with reservation. ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps he’s playing possum. Better check his pupils – that’ll tell us.’ (‘Oh, no – I can’t fake eye reflexes. I’m a goner’).

‘No – leave the bandage on,’ the first voice whispered. ‘If he’s faking it, he’ll get a look at his surroundings.’ A hand touched his forehead, and another loosened his right wrist tie and checked his pulse. ‘Sweaty, rapid beat, feverish. He’s drooling, too. Don’t like it. May be hungry, or becoming dehydrated. We can’t compromise his functions. Get him back on a drip. If we lose him, it’s over. The other one’s already out of reach. This one’s our last chance.’

There were slight squeaks of wheels and mild bumps of the bed as Alec lay motionless. ‘The other one? Do they mean Rod? Alistair? Doesn’t matter. It proves I didn’t imagine Kings Keep. I am twelve! This has got to be BB’s team. How did they get me?’

‘Time’s wasting. I think we should wake him up and … just get it out of him. There’s no-one to interrupt us this time. Leave him to me.’ The threatening tone made Alec want to gulp, but he didn’t dare risk even a swallow. He had no way of telling how closely he was being watched.

‘I nearly had him,’ the second voice whispered. ‘Let him get his fluids back, then we’ll try sodium pentathol. He’ll tell us everything we need to know, and then we can … lose him. A couple more hours – that’s all we need. Let’s get organised, and come back at six to finish it off.’

‘Six … a.m. or p.m? Sodium what? Finish what off? Finish me off?’

The footsteps retreated to the now-familiar lift doors, and Alec decided he had to risk it all in a breakout. He began tugging at his bonds. ‘Right one’s loose!’ he realised excitedly. ‘That guy didn’t re-tie it properly when he checked my pulse. What’s that magician’s trick Minh taught me at camp? Open and close your fingers and the rope loosens on your wrist.’

It took a lot longer than Alec remembered Minh doing when he demonstrated an impressive escape from rope handcuffs tied behind his back. But the principle was sound – repeated flexing of his wrist and fingers allowed his right bandage to work a little looser. ‘Careful – don’t pull it tighter,’ he advised himself as he shook his wrist and pulled gently. By rotating his thumb, Alec worked part of the bandage up over his thumb joint. Expanding his hand as wide as possible and then contracting it, he shook it and pulled it free.

‘Gotcha!’ he smiled triumphantly and clawed at the eye bandage. Alec prepared to refocus his eyes. Slowly, carefully, he began to open one eye, only to find its eyelashes caked firmly together. His right hand came up and scraped at the gunk Then he forced his eyelid open with thumb and forefinger.

Everything was blurry, and Alec repeated his actions with his left eye, finding it, too, was hazy and out of focus. ‘I have damaged them,’ he told himself with a surge of panic. His right hand tore at the knot restraining his left wrist, and soon he had both arms free. He sat up in bed and prepared himself. ‘Don’t panic. It might just be a bit of an eye infection. Take it easy. Slowly, slowly.’ He spat on both hands and tried to wash away the crusty seal over his eyes, then blinked many times.

Gradually, objects in the room were discernible, but still not in focus. Decidedly anxious, Alec threw the bedsheet off and tried to stand. His legs folded under him, and he thudded to the floor.

‘Oooh, bad head-spin,’ he announced, groping for the bed rail and pulling himself to his feet. His legs were like jelly, his body felt hot, but his bare feet were cold on the old lino floor. It was a small room, about five metres square. Alec noticed that the pale green paint on the walls was peeling in large patches. The corners of the room and the light coverings had dusty cobwebs. ‘What a dump – this isn’t a hospital at all,’ he concluded out loud. ‘More like a basement storeroom. But where?’

Alec cautiously made his way to a small hand-basin and wall-mounted mirror with a large diagonal crack through it, all the while trying to make his legs work. He propped himself up by placing a hand on the wall each side of the mirror, and blinked repeatedly. It was definitely his face, but Alec was alarmed – yes, he looked more like twelve than ten, but his face was scorched like old sunburn, part-brown and part-pink, showing several crows-feet lines beside each eye.

‘What’s happened? Was I out in the sun?’ He reached towards the tap, then stopped himself. ‘This place is old. If I turn on the tap, I bet the pipes will vibrate like at home, and they’ll hear it upstairs.’

Alec turned to study his room again, bravely ignoring pain in his eyes. There was a metal bedside cabinet, three large metal lockers against one wall, a wooden chair beside the bed, and a flaking painted air-conditioning duct mounted onto the ceiling, running the length of the room, through the top of opposite walls.

‘No-one here – and none of those fisheyes,’ Alec sighed with relief. ‘That duct could be my tunnel out. Can’t use the lift – they’d hear it. No windows – that’d be too easy. What’s in there?’ The doors to the three metal units were unlocked, and inside Alec found folded linen, a stack of pillows and various boxes of bandages and swabs arranged on separate shelves. ‘No clothes,’ he lamented, tugging ruefully at his despised hospital gown. ‘Maybe mine are in the bedside cabinet.’ Hope turned quickly to bitter disappointment when the cabinet proved to be empty.

‘Okay, it’s the duct or nothing,’ he concluded, studying once more the long metal box on the ceiling. ‘Prise open the air vent cover and crawl out. It’ll be dusty, and noisy. But how do I get up there?’

It took only half a minute for Alec to realise how to improvise a ladder. He unlocked the wheels of his bed with his foot and rolled it under the duct at the vent site, then slid out each of the bed rails. Standing the rails vertically, he tied the end of one rail to that of the second securely with bandages to form a crude stepladder. Placing it carefully on the bed, he climbed up his ladder to the vent and began prising the cover off. One by one, the old screws were popped out until he could pull the cover off with a forceful wrench. Alec dropped it carefully onto the bed below.

‘Now the hard bit,’ he coached. ‘Crawl along that thing without making it sound like thunder and telling everyone where I am. What can muffle the sound? Maybe a few pillows under me and slide along like a sled, so my knees don’t make the tin bang like a drum.’

Alec climbed down his makeshift ladder and dragged three pillows out of a metal unit. ‘I could push this thing up against the lift door,’ he reasoned. ‘They’d have to move it to come in. That could buy me some valuable time.’ Pleased with his plan, Alec placed his shoulder hard against the heavy unit and leaned in, forcefully sliding it across the floor to the lift opening. It filled almost the entire doorway, urging him to greater feats. ‘Two would be better,’ he told himself, scraping a second unit into place. ‘Ooh, noisy. Hope they didn’t hear that. One more?’ He had barely leaned his shoulder against the final unit when the lift mechanism clunked and hummed, warning that his captors were on their way down.

‘No time to get out,’ Alec gasped. ‘I’m done for.’ The lift doors opened, and the effect was immediate.

‘What the …? He must be loose!’

Alec’s tormentors found their way blocked by two large wall presses. Angrily, they began kicking and shoulder-barging the units, which stubbornly stood their ground against repeated attacks before succumbing to the onslaught.

‘How did he get loose?’ a furious voice demanded as the two forced their way over the toppled cabinets. They stood and studied Alec’s bed-mounted stairway to the duct, incredulous. One picked up the vent cover, briefly examining it before casting it aside.

‘An ingenious little brat. Told you he was foxing. We should have sedated him.’

‘Never mind the post mortem,’ the other snarled. ‘He’s gone. Wonder how much head start? Can’t be more than a few minutes. It’s a tight squeeze in there, even for a kid. Bet he’s still up there somewhere. He won’t know his way out – it’s a labyrinth, and pitch black inside it. Come on. Let’s check the outlets. He can’t get far.’

The first man climbed onto the bed and made his way shakily up the ladder, peering into the dark duct. ‘Can’t see anything,’ his voice echoed. ‘But you’re right. It’d be a very slow trip. He couldn’t have got out yet. Let’s guard all the outlets and keep him trapped in there until he gives up.’

‘Just one thing,’ the second man paused. ‘If he’s moved two cabinets, maybe … you don’t suppose he’s found … Quick! Give me a hand.’ The two men took hold of the final cabinet and slid it away from the wall, breathing an instant sigh of relief.

‘This stairwell should’ve been bricked up when the lift went in. Cobwebs everywhere, and the dust on the steps hasn’t been disturbed. He didn’t find this. Just as well he didn’t get to move the last cabinet. That means he’s still up in the duct. Come on, let’s block off the outlets. We’ll have him soon enough.’

CHAPTER 2

Clambering back over the metal barricades, the two exited via the lift. Probably only a minute later, but seeming like a lifetime, the door of the bedside cupboard slowly opened, and Alec’s head cautiously poked out. A cramped and aching body followed, Alec resting on all fours as he marvelled at his lucky escape.

‘That was too close! I barely made it into there. Oh, my aching body! I would never have made it along that duct – it’s as tight a squeeze as this thing, but goes forever. Now where’s the stairwell they were on about?’

He stood and stretched to get the tightness out of his body, then made his way to the only standing unit. Alec smiled as he peered around it and inspected a dusty narrow stairwell, with no door, leading upwards. ‘The original steps to the basement! Your version of my fireplace. Where does it go? And who’s at the other end?’ He