Free Hello Darkness by Anthony McGowan Page B

thinks things through. I have opinions on stuff. Opinions. Ideas. Theories. But all I had time to think now was
    BAM!

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I NTERZONE
    I opened my eyes to see a ring of gawping faces arranged above me.
    “John, are you OK?”
    It was Miss Budbe’s voice, sweet as angel cake.
    I tried to say, “No, actually, I’m not OK. Big Donna just tried to kill me with a medicine ball that weighs as much as a baby elephant, and now my face hurts from where the damn thing slapped into me and the back of my head hurts from where I hit the wooden floor of the gym, and I’m caught up in some kind of massive conspiracy involving the Shank, the Lardies and the Queens, and I’m just the tiniest bit concerned that none of this is really happening and that none of you really exist,” but that’s the sort of wacky idea that can pass through your head when you’ve just been knocked out by antique pieces of gym equipment.
    What I actually said was more like “Ungth.”
    There was blood in my mouth. I turned my head and spat it out. That scattered the gawpers.
    “You’d better get to the sick bay,” said Miss Budbe. “Would you like someone to take you?”
    I shook my head.
    “I’m fine,” I managed to say. “I’ll go on my own.”
    I changed out of my gym gear and went out into the rain. It slapped my fat, injured face like it hated me. If it had had any manners, it would have waited in line for its turn.
    I wasn’t going to go anywhere near the sick bay. There was a chance that Donna’s hit was meant to be just serious enough to get me sent there, and that meant a reception committee would be waiting. Paranoid? You wouldn’t think that if you’d had the couple of days I’d had.
    It was bad news to get caught wandering around inside the school out of lesson time, but then I wasn’t planning on wandering around inside the school.
    The Rat had been right about the hit. That meant he knew things. Things I needed to find out. The rodent and I were going to have words. But first I had to do a little prep.
    Outside the gym, I headed across the six metres of scruffy grass to the spot where the wire peeled up from the school fence. I scraped myself under and then it was a two-minute stroll to the 7/11.
    I grabbed three bags of smoky-bacon-flavoured corn puffs from a rack, and then asked the girl at the checkout for a soft pack of Lucky Strikes. She had yellow hair pulled back from her face and tied into a sort of dense stump on top of her head. She looked tough and bored, but she might have been pretty, once.
    “How old are you?” she asked without interest.
    “Thirty-nine, tomorrow.”
    “Happy birthday. You got ID?”
    She was flicking through a magazine as she spoke. She had small hands and tiny red nails.
    “Sure,” I said, and showed her the name tag inside the collar of my school blazer.
    I went back into school the way I’d come out. The PE lesson hadn’t finished yet, and I tracked along the gym wall, with the bare mud of the playing fields away to my left. Then I looped back around behind the kitchens, hit the next corner, and there, waiting for me, was the black opening of the Interzone. At breaktime the gateway to that Underworld would be busy, but there was no Cerberus on guard now.
    I hesitated – you always hesitate before you enter the Interzone, unless you’re crazed or depraved, jabbering for a fix. It was strange: the pull and the push of the place almost exactly cancelled each other out.
    Almost, but not quite.
    As I passed through I could have stretched out my arms and touched the damp walls on either side. It always felt like you were slipping into a different dimension when you entered the Interzone. No, it was something more
organic
than that. It felt like you were being swallowed. You had been on the outside of the beast, and now you were on the inside.
    It was quiet, but not dead. I sensed movement, heard muffled groans, saw the orange and blue of a Zippo flame flick on and off, on and