CHERUB: Maximum Security by Robert Muchamore

Author:Robert Muchamore [Muchamore, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: CHERUB
ISBN: 9781444910469
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2011-12-15T06:00:00+00:00

18. BEASTS

James loved animals when he was tiny: the furry toys on his bed, the singing characters in animated movies and the overweight cat that wandered into his nan’s garden, knowing it would get a saucer of milk just for bothering to turn up.

Aged seven, James did his first school project on lions. His mum taped a show off the Discovery channel that was on after bedtime. He watched the female lions licking their cubs and lazing under a tree in the sun. Then the animals went hunting.

The lionesses chased into a herd of antelope. They dragged down a straggler and began tearing it apart. Ripping off its legs, clawing open the stomach and then dipping their snouts inside the twitching carcass; tearing out hunks of flesh and running their long tongues through the blood on their faces. Until that moment, James had no idea nature could be so brutal.

He got as far as the living-room door, intending to find his mum and start bawling, but something changed his mind. He went back to the couch, tentatively rewound the video and watched it again. He watched it over and over, appalled, but utterly fascinated by what the lions were doing.

The in-your-face nastiness of the young skinheads in the Arizona Max exercise yard reminded James of the video for the first time in years. They brought out the same mixture of feelings: power and viciousness, combining into a perverse kind of glamour.

James showed off, working up a sweat on the chin-up bar, before lying back in the dirt next to Elwood and listening to him talk about things the gang of skinheads had done. Elwood pointed out scared kids who handed their commissary form to him each week, in return for not getting beaten up too badly. He revelled in stories about people he’d tortured, stabbed, poured boiling water over and bullied to the point where they’d tried to kill themselves.

The history of violence wasn’t all one way. Elwood proudly showed off scars on his leg, chest and back from three different knife attacks. He said you could never judge who would snap and come at you with a knife. It was as likely to be the puny little bookworm as the brooding psychopath with arms like joists.

James was appalled, but he listened intently and laughed when he was expected to. It was mostly out of relief. The last forty-eight hours had been amongst the most traumatic of his life, but with the skinheads offering some protection, the tight ball in his stomach had eased off. He finally felt he was getting to grips with the mission. The next step was to chum up with Curtis.

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