Free The Real Thing by Brian Falkner Page A

them some electricity,’ Tupai rumbled. ‘But if they’re not going to kill us straight away, then
when?
’
    ‘I don’t know that either. I suppose they could always lock us in a cellar with a few weeks’ supply of food and water, and when that was gone …’
    He didn’t have to say the rest, Tupai thought, and it didn’t sound like a nice way to die. He looked around the dim room. The walls were made of large stones. It did look a bit like a cellar, he decided. And over in the corner were a few cardboard boxes.
    A few weeks’ supply of food.
    A light but strong-looking chain wound through his handcuffs, through Fizzer’s and around a stout wooden post in the centre of the room.
    ‘We need to confront the board,’ Fizzer said. ‘If I can look in their eyes and ask them if they’re involved, I think I’ll know if someone’s lying.’
    Tupai held up his manacled hands. ‘That’s not going to be quite as easy as it sounds, or have you forgotten where we are?’
    Fizzer shook his head. ‘We know where we want to be; we know where we are now. All we have to do is work out how to get from here to there. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’
    ‘Some days,’ Tupai said, ‘I wish you’d give up this airy-fairy crap and just come back down to reality.’
    But there was a smile on his face as he said it.
    The light in the room had grown measurably over the last twenty minutes or so, most of it coming from a high ventilation grille, only a few centimetres across. The light enabled them to get a better view of their surroundings. The floor was scattered here and there with mutterings of straw. At the far end of the room a short wooden flight of stairs led to a pair of heavy doors, not upright, as you would expect, and not horizontal, like trapdoors. They were on a steep slant, confirming the view that this was some kind of cellar.
    Galloping horse hooves sounded distantly, the sound trickling down through the slots of the ventilation grille. The sound approached, then faded away again. A few moments later it repeated.
    ‘We’re on a farm somewhere,’ Tupai said.
    ‘A ranch, I think,’ Fizzer said. ‘A racing stable. I think that horse is galloping around a track.’
    As if to prove him right, the sound approached again, then faded as before.
    ‘Do they do much racing in Atlanta?’ Tupai asked.
    ‘Maybe we’re not in Atlanta any more. I think we’re still in Georgia though.’
    ‘Your intuition again, right?’
    ‘Maybe.’ Fizzer pulled at his handcuffs absent-mindedly. ‘And I seem to remember that if you cross a state line, the crime becomes a federal offence. I think that’s worse somehow.’
    ‘OK, so what do we know? We’re handcuffed to a pillar, in a cellar …’
    ‘A tornado shelter,’ interrupted Fizzer suddenly, his eyes on the heavy wooden doors on the other side of the room. ‘That’s what this is, it’s a tornado shelter.’
    ‘OK, a tornado shelter, out in the countryside somewhere, a hundred miles from civilisation for all we know, but probably still in Georgia. How’s that going to help us when the food runs out?’
    Fizzer didn’t know. He pulled his harmonica out of his pocket instead of answering and started playing the traditional song of the southern states: Dixie. The mood lifted immediately.
    Tupai laughed and sang along for a few bars.
    ‘Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton.
    Old times there are not forgotten.
    Look away, look away,
    Look away Dixie Land.’
    They ate cold beans out of a pull tag can that night and slept as well as they could by piling up some of the loose straw to make crude mattresses.
    In the morning, with the effects of whatever had been in the water now fully worn off, and with the benefit of a little sleep, Fizzer finally had an idea.
    Tupai had moved over to the heavy storm doors at the entrance to see if they looked as if they could be opened. He came back shaking his head.
    ‘Built to withstand a tornado all