Free Running Wild by J. G. Ballard Page A

signal, “Snowball,” and goes into the bathroom, leaning with her palms (E 98) against the mirror as she is sick into the basin (E 99). There is no time even to wash or brush her teeth. After dressing in her blue tracksuit she begins to unscrew the aluminum baffle of the ventilator shaft above the computer. Already she can see the slide and barrel of the two Remington pistols which she and Gail will use to kill their parents.
    6:15 a.m. By now all the children have risen, alerted by their own alarms and the paging signals on their computer screens. Graham Lymington has slept fully dressed, and is already waiting by his terminal as the awake signal appears on the screen. Next door, his fourteen-year-old sister, Amanda, has a shower, using her nightdress to block the drainage grille between her feet (E 63), so that her parents will not hear the pipes drumming.
    Only Jeremy Maxted has been unable to sleep—he has spent the night in his bedroom armchair, watching an all-night TV channel with the sound turned down. He disturbs the bed, but its dry and uncreased sheets confirm that it has not been slept in.
    Emma Zest has risen at 4:00 a.m., and spends the next two hours sitting in her brother’s bedroom, watching him as he sleeps, his crossbow in her arms. One of its steel bolts slips below the cushion (E 29), but there are nine others, more than enough for both their parents and the perimeter security guard Burnett.
    Marion Miller is also up and dressed before her brother, and sits on the edge of Robin’s bath, eating a chocolate bar as he uncoils the electric cable which she has hidden inside her doll’s house and which he will plug into the steel frame of their mother’s Exercycle.
    Roger Sterling, Graham and Amanda Lymington are in visual contact with Jeremy Maxted across The Avenue, and duck to avoid the security camera on the weather vane as it pans across the houses. Roger is late—in his excitement the previous day he dropped his alarm clock, and he wakes at 6:05 to see the paging signal pulsing fiercely on his computer screen. He breaks a shoelace of his jogging shoes and stumbles noisily across the bedroom, but he knows his parents cannot hear him. In their nearby bedroom they are in a deep, drugged sleep from which they will never wake.
    6:21 a.m. The security day shift has arrived! Fortunately there is no time for tea. The wait has been exhausting for Mark Sanger—the sheets in the linen room are sodden with his sweat—but the moment Baines and Edwards drive off, taking the two loathsome Dobermans with them, he feels an immense relief. He has always feared the dogs, which are only allowed onto the estate at night (all pets are discouraged at Pangbourne Village; they foul the lawns and are a distracting focus of affection). He watches Turner and Burnett settle into the gatehouse, and then signals to Jasper Ogilvy. The first of the parents will begin to rise between 7:00 and 7:15, and this gives the children barely forty minutes to move around the estate.
    6:23 a.m. Jasper leaves his bedroom, closing the door behind him. There is no sound from his father’s bedroom, but he waits outside his mother’s door, listening to her deep, uneven breathing, which occasionally breaks into a snore. She is often awake for a few hours in the middle of the night, but then sleeps deeply until well after dawn. Jasper walks across the landing and opens the cabinet of the burglar alarm system. He disconnects the electrical circuit that links the windows and doors together during the night. As he eases the toggle his sweaty hands leave ample fingerprints (E 110) on the plastic handle.
    Jasper is now free to leave the house. He enters the silent kitchen, unlocks the outer door and lets himself onto the patio behind the garages. Screened by the roof of the swimming pool from his parents’ bedrooms, he sets off across the lawn. Behind the rose pergola he retrieves the buried shotgun, which he