Unwrapping her lunch, she noted how many students were sitting alone to eat because their friends were absent. This reminded her of the dream of Billy in his human shape. It had been so wonderful to see him and to hear him talk again. She wondered what it had meant that he was older. Was it because animals aged more quickly than humans?
Rage threw her crusts under the tree for the birds before making her way back to the library. She needed to get some material about the Antarctic for a geography project. She was still photocopying when the bell rang for the end of lunch. She quickly finished, then hurried through the empty passages to the darkened auditorium and slid into a seat right at the end of a row and near the exit door, hoping there had not been a roll call. The movie turned out to be something that she had already seen, but at least it was a real movie.
The end-of-day bell sounded louder than usual, waking her from a light drowse. The small number of students quickly left school as Rage collected her coat and bag from her locker without hurrying. It took Mrs. Marren at least half an hour to get across town to the bus stop where she picked Rage and Anabel up, and Rage saw no point in catching the early bus and freezing for twenty minutes. There was no sign of Anabel when the late bus trundled up, but that was not unusual. Anabel often took the first bus so that she and her friends could stand and talk. Rage always wondered what they could find to talk about after spending lunchtime, class time, and even recess gossiping.
When Rage climbed out of the bus, she found that she was alone at the bus stop. Either Anabel had missed both buses, or she was staying in town another night. The latter was more likely, and Rage’s heart lifted. She turned to wave to the friendly bus driver, who frowned at her as if she were a stranger. Disconcerted, she dropped her hand. She stared after the bus, wondering if it was possible that he hadn’t recognized her.
She had been at the stop for a good fifteen minutes longer than usual, and the cold had begun digging its claws into her when it occurred to her that maybe Mrs. Marren had picked Anabel up right from school. Mrs. Marren might have called the school to say that she would pick them both up there because of the weather, and in retaliation for the previous morning, Anabel had neglected to tell her. Rage’s heart sank at the thought of having to call Uncle Samuel to come and get her. She waited another fifteen minutes, then, teeth chattering like castanets, began to walk back to the school. It was only about six blocks if she cut through two lanes, but the heavy snowdrifts made it hard work. The first phone booth she saw, she stopped and called the Marrens’ number. There was no answer. She tried to call home and got the answering machine, with her own voice inviting her to leave a message or call back later. She left a message telling Uncle Samuel that Mrs. Marren had not come and that she would be in the school library. The only problem was that it might be hours before he came.
Rage considered going to the office, but the staff were sure to contact Mrs. Somersby. It was beginning to snow very lightly again, and it had grown darker by the time the school came in sight. It was deserted, all the classrooms dark and the street empty, but the library lights were on.
She had gone only a few steps along the school street when she saw someone standing by the gate leading to the school’s second bike shed. Rage would have to walk right by him, and her steps slowed at the realization that there were no houses on the other side of the street: only a white wasteland that in any season but winter was a park with clumps of trees and swings and a climbing frame.
Rage felt ridiculous imagining that she might need to scream for help. “Whoever it is must be waiting for someone,” she murmured to herself.
Who would be waiting outside for someone in weather like this? Mr. Walker’s sharp little voice demanded inside her mind.
Rage was unable to bring herself to turn back or to cross the road because it would be too obvious why she had done it. She was so nervous that she thought if the person sneezed, she would probably have a heart attack. The idea made her want to laugh, and all at once the clouds let through more light. Then she did laugh because now she could see that the person was just Logan Ryder.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, too relieved that it was someone she knew to worry that it was someone who disliked her.
“Waiting for you,” Logan said.
Rage’s heart skipped a beat. Logan’s green eyes flared at her like neon lights as he straightened up.
“Why did you call me last night?” she asked. To her surprise, it was Elle’s voice that came out, light and strong and challenging.
“Call you?” Logan sounded puzzled enough that Rage wondered if she had dreamed it after all. Then he gave a snarling laugh. “Yeah, I gave you a wake-up call.”
“I don’t think I’m better than anyone else,” Rage said quietly, hitching her schoolbag onto her shoulder so that she could run if she needed to.
“You think you’re special because your mum is in hospital. A lot of kids have dead mothers and fathers,” Logan growled.
“I told you I don’t think I’m special,” Rage said. “But even if I did, why do you care?”
Confusion passed fleetingly over his face. Then Logan glowered at her. “Tough talk for a little girl out all alone in the night.”
“It’s not night and I’m not a little girl,” Rage said evenly. She forced herself to start walking toward him again. He stepped into the middle of the path, blocking her way.
“I have a message for you,” he said in a sinister voice.
Rage was surprised to hear him use exactly the same words as the firecat in her dream. She gave a startled laugh.
Anger distorted Logan’s features and he lunged, grabbing the handles of her bag and wrenching it off her shoulder. Rage clung to the bag, and to her belief that this was just a school-ground scuffle.
“Leave me alone. I don’t want to hear any message from you,” she shouted.
“So you don’t want to hear about what happened?” Logan jerked the bag lightly and Rage stumbled closer. She let the handles slide down to her fingers so that she could step back, and she glared at him.
“I don’t want to hear anything you have to say, Logan Ryder, now let go of my bag!”
“You don’t want to know what happened to Mrs. Marren?” Logan taunted, giving the bag another light tug that unbalanced her and further loosened her grip.
Rage felt a hot little dart of shock. “Mrs. Marren? What are you talking about?”
“So you do want the message?”
Rage’s fear melted into an intense weariness and she stopped struggling. “If you have a message from Mrs. Marren, Logan, then just tell it to me instead of acting like some stupid gangster in a movie.”
Logan’s expression grew uglier. “You think you can give me orders?” He wrenched the bag out of her hand, unzipped it, and emptied it onto the snow, then threw it down.
Rage gave a cry of dismay. “You rotten pig,” she yelled. She would have flown at him despite the disparity in their sizes, but suddenly there was a sound that made them both freeze.
It was a deep, savage growling.
Rage turned toward the sound. She saw with dreamy horror that three enormous wolves with pale, silver-tipped pelts and flaring green eyes were hurtling across the football oval beyond the park on the other side of the road. All at once she registered that the wolves were running toward them.
“Oh my God! Run!” she screamed. She grabbed hold of Logan’s parka, breaking his paralyzed stance as she pulled him toward the school gate. She let go then and ran for the bike shed, praying it would be open. She did not have the slightest doubt that if the nightmarish beasts caught them, they would be killed. Logan passed Rage and slammed his bulk into the shed door so hard that if it had not swung open on impact, he would surely have broken something. The door gave a great metallic clang as it rebounded off the inner wall. They hurled themselves inside and turned to slam the door shut.
“The bar,” Rage gasped, and Logan was beside her, their breaths rasping in unison as they lif
ted it into place.
A second later the wolves were at the metal door, smashing and snarling as if there were a whole pack of them instead of only three. Fortunately, the door was heavy metal, as were the shed walls and floor. The bluish security light above the door made Logan look pale and ill, and Rage supposed that she looked the same.
“The roof,” Logan hissed, jerking his chin upward.
Rage looked up to see that there was a section of transparent Perspex. She shook her head. “They couldn’t possibly climb—” She stopped because all of a sudden the animals outside had fallen silent. She made a move toward the door, and Logan grabbed convulsively at her arm. She shook him off and pressed her ear against the metal by the crack between door and jamb. The hair on her arms rose as she heard the sound of ragged breathing. A picture came into her mind of a wolf pressing its ear to the door on the other side. She drew back sharply, terror and helplessness rushing through her veins.
“What did—” Logan began, then something landed heavily on the roof. This time it was Logan who moved first, turning and literally dragging Rage after him to the bathroom in the back of the shed. He pushed her in first and shot the bolt behind himself just as the Perspex in the roof cracked with a violent report. Of one accord, they pressed themselves against the wall on either side of the malodorous toilet bowl, as far from the door as possible.
Rage listened so hard her head ached, but she couldn’t hear any movement. Time passed. It grew colder, and the silence went on and on until Rage finally pushed her fear aside and gathered her wits. She knew that wolves were stealthy, clever hunters, but they would not wait long if there was other prey out there, easier to catch. It might even be that she had imagined the cracking sound of the roof giving way. How on earth could wolves leap onto the roof, after all, even if they had been as gigantic as she had imagined? Glancing at Logan’s pale, set face, it occurred to her with a faint sense of hysteria that they were waiting for the surprise terror that always happened in the movies when you thought the characters were safe. The body you thought was dead that leapt up and grabbed the hero. The dragon that had been killed, then opened its maddened eye. The face that suddenly appeared at the window.
The wind moaned. It wasn’t as cold in the shed bathroom as it had been outside, but it was cold enough, and they must have been standing there for an hour. Rage couldn’t feel her toes. She forced herself to stand up.
“What are you doing?” Logan whispered. The white showed all around his green irises.
“We can’t stay in here forever,” Rage whispered. Her voice sounded strange and husky, as if she had screamed for hours.
“What if one of those things is waiting inside?” Logan whispered. He was sweating. Oddly, knowing that Logan was so frightened made Rage feel less so. After all, she had faced some pretty terrifying things in her life already, hadn’t she?
“I’d rather get eaten than freeze to death slowly in a smelly bathroom,” she said in Rue’s stern, no-nonsense voice.
Another silence.
“All right,” Logan said at last. “But don’t blame me if we get eaten.”
This was so completely absurd that, incredibly, Rage started to laugh. It was more than half hysteria, and she was shivering so hard that her laughter sounded like some sort of convulsion. She tried to stifle the sound, but this only made her laugh the harder. She doubled over and tears leaked from her eyes. She saw that after his first look of astonishment, Logan was laughing, too. Logan Ryder and me are laughing together, she thought incredulously, which made her laugh even more. They were both hanging on to the cistern, leaning over the pee-smelling toilet, and this seemed the funniest thing of all.
When they managed to gain some measure of control, Logan gasped, “Well, if anything was out there, that would have convinced them a couple of maniacs were in here, and they would’ve taken off.”
That broke them both up again, but after a bit, Rage’s stomach hurt so much from laughing that she had to make herself stop. And suddenly she was quite certain that they were safe. She reached for the door and then hesitated and looked at Logan. He sobered and nodded, and they left the bathroom.
Rage’s heart sped up again at the sight of drifts of snow in the shed and great, jagged pieces of shattered Perspex. The skylight had broken but there were no beasts. The Perspex must have collapsed under a load of snow. Most likely the thump they had heard hadn’t been a wolf landing on the roof but the roof buckling a little under its weight of snow. She went to the door and rested her hands on the crossbar. The feel of the chill metal under her fingers was like an icy burn, reminding her of the sheer black malevolence she had felt when she had put her face against the jamb earlier. All her fear flowed back. She might have drawn away, but Logan reached out and put his hands on the bar beside hers. “Okay, let’s do it, then,” he rasped. They lifted the bar smoothly, hooked it back in place, and heaved open the door.
A blast of icy wind clawed at their faces, snatching Rage’s breath away, but there were no growls. No giant wolves leaping at them.
“Gone,” Rage said shakily, pulling her coat around her, half convinced that she had imagined the wolves. Maybe they hadn’t even been anything more than a pack of feral dogs turned vicious by the weather. The door jerked violently and Logan caught hold of it. “We better shut it or the wind will break it right off.”
Rage nodded and they fought to close it. Then they leaned into the wind and went along the track to the outer fence. At the fence gate, Logan pointed to an enormous, smudged footprint. They stared at it in horror for a full three minutes, Rage thinking it looked more like a bear track than a wolf print.
“We better get to the school in case they come back,” she said shakily.
On the other side of the gate, her books and notes lay scattered in a pile, pages fluttering in the wind where the snow had not buried them. Several loose sheets had blown against the fence. Rage stared at them in wonder, feeling as if the tug-of-war with her bag had happened in another life. She noticed absently that Logan’s battered backpack lay beside the fence, where he must have put it to free his hands.
“Blast!” Logan muttered, his voice slurred with cold. He knelt down and began shoveling everything back into her schoolbag.
“Forget them,” Rage said, glancing around.
“You go ahead and I’ll catch up,” he said determinedly.
“You’re mad!” Rage said, falling onto her knees and helping him.
The job was done quickly. Logan zipped the bag and handed it to Rage. He threw his backpack over his shoulder and, side by side, they hurried along the footpath toward the oasis of light ahead that was the school. They did not speak until the doors had hissed shut. Rage turned to see them both reflected in the sheets of glass. Beyond was only the darkness and the flying snow.
“Those things could be through that glass in about a second,” Logan murmured, voicing her own thought.
“We ought to call someone,” Rage said.
“Look,” Logan said in a peculiar voice. She looked at him. “I’m sorry about the books,” he went on. “I’ll tell the library I did it and pay for the ones that are wrecked.”
She shrugged, and her mind stuttered sideways to the call he had made. “I don’t think I’m better than anyone else, Logan. I really don’t. If I seem different sometimes, it’s because of some things that happened to me last summer. Not just my mam being in an accident.”
He gave her a look she could not quite read, and she thought he might ask What things? but instead he said, “Maybe we better make it an anonymous call to the cops. We ought to let someone know those things are on the loose. But we’ll have to think of a story. If we say we got chased by giant feral pigs, the police’ll think it’s a hoax and take no notice.”
Rage stared at him. “Pigs? They were wolves.”
Logan frowned at her. “Are you nuts? Didn’t you see the tusks and their red eyes?” He was already headed for the phone beyond the lockers. Rage followed, bemused.
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“Logan, I didn’t see pigs, feral or otherwise. I saw wolves!”
Logan turned to her, his face grimly certain. “Look, I know what a boar looks like, all right? One chased me when I was about six. I have a scar from my belly button to my neck to prove it, and I was about three inches from its face when it tried to gut me. I still have nightmares about it sometimes.”
Rage was silenced by the vision this summoned up. Was it possible that she had only imagined seeing wolves? Logan was now dialing triple zero, and putting on a much older voice, he described having seen feral pigs in the school grounds near the lower bike shed. He hung up while the policewoman was in the middle of asking for his name and address.
“That was amazing,” Rage said. “You really sounded older and totally responsible. Like a doctor or something.”
“I can do voices,” Logan said gruffly, but she could see that he was pleased by her praise.
Rage remembered something he had said earlier, and after a slight hesitation, she asked, “Logan, what happened to Mrs. Marren?”
Logan gave a short bark of laughter. “You are a cool one, Rebecca Jane.”
“Rage,” she corrected him automatically, then flushed at what he might say.
But he smiled and made a gesture of surrender with his hands. “Rage, then. I was in the office waiting to get my ear chewed when a phone call came in for you, so I pricked up my ears. It was the Marren woman calling to say she wouldn’t be able to pick you up and bring you home because she’d had an accident.”
“Oh no!” Rage cried.
“It’s okay. It wasn’t bad. She drove into a ditch and needed a tractor to get her out. From what I heard, no one was hurt, but I guess she was freaked by what happened. There was a message for Anabel to go to her aunt’s, and you’re supposed to call that Somersby woman so that she can arrange accommodation for tonight if your uncle can’t come and get you. I offered to give you the message. I figured you’d come back to the school when no one turned up to pick you up, so I waited.”