Free A Box of Nothing by Peter Dickinson Page A

and a grey dry mess, like oatmeal before it’s cooked. James found he could eat it by mixing some water with it, but it was too nasty for more than a few mouthfuls. The sun was almost overhead by now. Except for the two who were guarding James, the rats lay around panting in the desert heat.
    At last, from far across the plain, a faint hoot came floating. Everyone jumped up and stared along the dead straight line of the tracks. James could see nothing at first, then there was a blob of smoke, then a dot below the blob, and now a louder hoot and the wuff wuff wuff of the pounding engine. The officer pulled out a huge pistol and fired it into the air. A flare soared up and burst into pink light, which drifted slowly down. The engine hooted in answer. Its wheels screeched on the track and it came to a halt close by where they were waiting. It was a great black beast of a machine, far more impressive than the gibbering rats, but its driver was a rat too.
    After a lot of furious squeaking the soldiers cleared all the passengers out of three compartments and James was made to climb into one. The officer and the two air-rats came too. The engine started with a tremendous burst of wuffing, but almost at once the officer insisted on tying a blindfold around James’s eyes, so that he couldn’t see anything at all.
    He must have slept, despite the hard seat and the rat smell, because the next thing he knew he was being prodded to his feet and pushed through the carriage door, still with the blindfold tight around his head. Rats gripped both his wrists in their teeth and hustled him through a squeaking crowd. He was yanked up onto a sort of platform, which jerked beneath him, toppling him off his feet to the sound of squeaky rat jeers all around him. He realized that he was on the back of a truck, guarded by rat soldiers.
    The truck roared through clattering streets. Traffic honked. A siren whooped ahead. The street was very bumpy, but it didn’t last. The truck roared for a short while over a smoother surface with no traffic nearby. It halted twice while rats squeaked around. When it stopped for the third time James was lifted roughly down and the bandage taken from his eyes.
    After all that darkness he blinked blindly through the glare. It wasn’t daylight. The sky overhead was murky and almost dark. He must have slept all afternoon. Now he was standing in a brilliantly lit space with a great ring of lights all around. The only shadows were cast by rows of huts. As his pupils narrowed in the brightness he began to see, rising above the ring of lights, the watchtowers that guarded one of the camps where General Weil kept his prisoners. James was inside it.

Chapter 13: General Weil
    The camp was a horrible place. The only times it stopped being horrible were when James was asleep, too unhappy to dream, but even then the guards were likely to come and wake him up and make him stand by his mattress for an hour, for no reason at all. There was only the disgusting dry oatmeal stuff to eat and only the foul soapy water to drink.
    None of the prisoners were rats. They were other creatures of the Dump—mice, voles, toads, and such—all grown large and clever in their own ways. Each sort lived in separate huts, the slow, sad toads in one block, the mice in another, and so on. James wasn’t allowed near any of them, but from what he could see the voles were the best. There was something unbeatable about them. Though they were tottery with starvation, they would never give in to the bullying guards. Even at the most terrifying moments there would be a shrill mutter somewhere in the ranks, followed by a burst of scornful vole laughter. The mice tried to please the rats, cringing and creeping. It didn’t do them any good. These were in the huts on either side of James. He didn’t see enough of the toads and the others to know how they behaved.
    He was in a tiny hut by himself. Next to it was a cage containing