Free The London Pride by Charlie Fletcher Page A

back and caught her hip painfully against the steps behind her, bringing tears to her eyes.
    Scrambling to her feet, unable to think why the dog had done this – or even if he had meant to do it – she went to the door. She was about to open it when she heard the reason.
    A lion roared.
    Filax barked.
    And then there was the shrowling, growling, snarling maelstrom-sound of two big animals fighting for their lives.
    She saw a blur of stone lion and marble dog pinwheel past the small square of safety glass in the fire door. The lion was trying to get at the dog’s throat, and Filax was trying to shake it off. The lion clawed and snarled, and Filax spun and snapped, and then he hurled the lion off, trying to get at its throat instead. The lion shrowled in fury, and hooked at the dog with all four claw-tipped paws. Again the positions changed as the dog yelped and threw him off, as the attacker turned to defender and back again, with no let-up from either of them.
    The fight threw them back and forth across the corridor outside, banging and crashing into the door with such force that it screeched on its hinges and Jo knew it would burst open at the next blow.
    And so, with a final shout of ‘Will! Get out of there!’, she ran for the roof, hoping the fire door at the top would not be locked. Otherwise she was running into a dead end. And she had the nasty thought that if it was locked and things went badly with Filax, she might rather abruptly and unpleasantly find out exactly why it was they called it that.

12
False dawn
    Will did not snap awake when Jo first yelled his name. He was buried beneath a mountainous slag heap of sleep that pressed down on him like the weight of the world. Instead he clawed himself back to consciousness, tunnelling upwards with a disoriented and rising panic, his mind jumbled, unsure whether he was dreaming or drowning: had he heard Jo shout or … was it in his imagination? He could so easily let go of the thought and just sink back down into the nice welcoming fug of sleep on this very comfortable bed if he had just imagined her voice …
    The barking and roaring in the passage outside ripped him out of the blurry depths and unceremoniously dropped him hard onto the sharp edge of reality.
    The room door was open.
    Jo was gone.
    Filax was fighting something in the passage with a lot of bumping and thumping and snarling.
    Will stopped in his tracks, halfway off the bed, paralysed.
    He had to do something. His mind knew this. But his muscles didn’t seem to be getting the message. Or maybe they were waiting for more detailed instructions.
    He heard himself shouting.
    ‘JO?’
    So at least his voice was working. He tried to hear a reply through the noise outside.
    ‘JO!’ he shouted. ‘Where are you?’
    Filax and something fiercely muscled and made of stone windmilled past the open door.
    Clearly someone was issuing orders to his muscles without him knowing it. Maybe there was an autopilot that took over in moments of crisis, a sub-routine that clicked into self-preservation mode when the conscious mind jammed. Whatever the reason, he found he had jumped off the bed and slammed the door shut.
    Jo was gone. The thought had his gut churning in horror. He hoped she was hiding somewhere safe. He couldn’t think why she might have left the room, or how something could have taken her from it without waking him.
    For a brief moment he felt he should not have left the dog outside to fight alone, but the feeling didn’t last long: he knew he was no match for a lion, and would just get in the way. There was the banging noise on the walls and floor as the fight came barrelling back down the hall and past the door. He jammed his eye to the peephole and saw Filax had the lion by the scruff of its neck and was definitely holding his own. Luckily it was a Filax-sized lion, not a disturbingly huge one like the giant beasts that sat at the bottom of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.
    Filax fighting