Free CHERUB: Shadow Wave by Robert Muchamore Page A

laughter as Kyle turned red, clutched his stomach and erupted into a rasping cough.
    ‘Good eh!’ Aizat beamed. ‘One of my uncles went blind after drinking this stuff.’
    ‘I’m not bloody surprised,’ Kyle croaked. ‘I feel like my head’s on fire.’
    Kyle took a second sip, but there was no way he could drink the rest. Aizat had downed his own glass without fuss, and now snatched Kyle’s and drank it in three quick mouthfuls.
    ‘You’ll be drunk again,’ Wati said bitterly.
    ‘Who asked you?’ Aizat shouted back, and threw the plastic beaker at his sister. ‘Sitting on your arse all day, when the place is a pig sty.’
    The girl poked her tongue at Aizat, then picked up her headphones from the floor and disappeared through a bead curtain into a side room. Kyle looked along a set of bookshelves and was surprised to find lots of very deep stuff: Marx, Freud, Kafka and other highbrow writers, mostly written in English.
    ‘These yours?’ Kyle asked.
    Aizat nodded. ‘I like to read. I have lots of pen friends too. One in China, a girl in Italy, a boy in United States. He’s really cool. We’ve been writing each other since we were seven and he burns CDs with all the latest stuff on it. You like the Foo Fighters?’
    ‘I can take ‘em or leave ‘em,’ Kyle shrugged. He glanced at his watch, and imagined Large yelling at him for coming back late with booze breath.
    ‘A British pen friend would be good too,’ Aizat said. ‘But you always say no.’
    ‘Who says no?’
    ‘Mr Large comes here, once or twice every year,’ Aizat explained. ‘Each time he brings different kids for the jungle expedition. When I ask one of them to be my pen friend, they always say no.’
    Kyle understood now. Cherubs are discouraged from speaking with any outsiders they meet during basic training and Large would go bananas if any trainee was found with a stranger’s address in their backpack during kit inspection.
    But Kyle wasn’t a trainee, and he thought Aizat was cute. ‘I’ll be your pen friend,’ he said. ‘Can’t promise I’ll write very often, but I’ll try anything once.’
    ‘Nice one!’ Aizat smiled. He hunted for a pen and a notepad to exchange addresses. ‘The post isn’t great, so I use web cafés on the mainland.’
    ‘No problem,’ Kyle said, as he jotted his e-mail address on a piece of paper. ‘Now we’d better start getting these supplies on the trailer, or Large will go ballistic.’
    *
    The tide had gone out surprisingly fast, enabling Kyle to drive the quad and trailer quickly over a plane of flat, wet sand, without diverting on to the road as he’d done on the outward journey. As he approached the Starfish Hotel, he was surprised to see Iona charging out towards him.
    ‘Get moving,’ she shouted, as Kyle pulled up in front of the hotel. ‘There’s an emergency.’
    ‘What’s Large’s problem?’ Kyle moaned, stepping off the quad. ‘I came as quick as I could.’
    ‘It’s not Large,’ Iona said. ‘The water splashing out of the pool wasn’t just a normal earth tremor. We got a call from campus on Large’s satellite phone. What we felt was an aftershock from a huge earthquake off the coast of Indonesia. A massive tsunami has already hit their coast and now the wave might be heading towards us.’
    A chill went down Kyle’s back as he looked around at the sea. He’d seen a video about tsunamis in the education block on campus and realised he’d have been defenceless if a giant wave had hit while he’d been out on the sand.
    ‘That’s why the tide went out so fast, I guess,’ Kyle said. ‘We did it in geography. The earthquake lifts up the entire sea, sucking all the water away from around the coast. Then the water comes back as a massive tidal wave, at over five hundred miles an hour.’
    ‘Are you sure?’ Iona asked thoughtfully. ‘The tide here always goes out really quickly.’
    ‘Well, I only got a C on that module,’ Kyle said, half smiling. ‘What