Page 74 of Five Survive

“How do you know so much about walkie-talkies?” Oliver asked, not giving it up.

“I just do.” Red held her hand out now, waiting for Oliver to pass it back. Her memories did not belong to him. He might be the natural leader, but he didn’t know what he was doing here. Red did.

Oliver narrowed his eyes. He unbundled the walkie-talkie and passed it over.

“Shh,” he said as he did.

Red slid into the other side of the booth, placing the walkie-talkie down. She would have to be quick at this, so the sniper didn’t know they weren’t listening again, if he tried to talk. Concentrate. Red’s fingers moved to the knob on top, beside the antenna. She flicked it into the off position and the static cut out.

Silence. A buzzing kind of silence, broken up by Maddy’s breath as she leaned over Red. It was distracting, in and out and in, a faint whistle underneath.

Red pushed down and slid off the back casing, into the battery compartment. It was empty, other than the three batteries slotted into place. Next she grabbed the screwdriver from the table, inserted it into the first screw on one of the back corners and turned it around,fast as she could. She placed the small screw on the table, spinning around itself, and turned to the next.

The others were all staring, she could feel their eyes on the back of her neck, on her fingers as she unscrewed the next one and placed it down. It almost rolled off the table but Maddy caught it.

“Thanks,” Red said, unspooling the next screw.

Oliver shushed her. And was it spiteful that Red wanted him to be wrong about this? For him to be wrong and her to be right.

She undid the final screw, dropping it with the others, and pulled the plastic casing up and to the side, carefully as red and black wires connected through to the batteries. She propped it there and looked down, bringing her eyes closer.

The green circuit board she’d been expecting to see, with small metal parts soldered on. The connection to the antenna, the amplifiers and mixers on an integrated circuit. And what were those small parts called again, oh yeah, capacitors. The tuner, transformers. She remembered the diagrams, the YouTube tutorials. Words and shapes she’d learned long ago, the kind that stayed in her head because they weren’t important. Except they were now, and there was nothing here that shouldn’t be. She recognized it all, same as the parts inside her mom’s walkie-talkie.

“Is there anythi—” Oliver began.

“Shh,” Red said this time. She was concentrating.

Slowly, Red’s fingers pried up the circuit board, just a tiny bit, so she could lower her eye to the gap and see the parts beyond, sitting at the front of the walkie-talkie. She didn’t want to pull anything out of place, she didn’t trust herself to be able to put it back together. She didn’t know if she could rebuild it if it all fell apart in her hands now. The last time she’d taken hers apart and put it back togetherhad been more than a year ago. Last February6, just for old times’ sake.

Red could see red and black wires connecting to the circular plastic part that doubled as microphone and speaker at the front, beneath the grille in the plastic.

That was it. Nothing here that shouldn’t be. No bug that didn’t belong. Red lowered the circuit board into position, even more carefully than before, and guided the plastic casing back on.

“No bug,” she said, starting on the first screw, forgetting to whisper. Oliver shot her an angry look.

“How do you know?”

“Because everything that’s there needs to be there,” Red said, tightening the screw and moving onto the next. “There’s no independent listening device in there because there’s no separate power source. And there’s nothing connected to those batteries that shouldn’t be. He’s not listening to us. Not unless we push the button,” she added, slotting in the third screw.

“And we just have to take your word on that, do we?” Oliver asked, also forgetting to whisper now.

“Oliver.” It was Maddy who said it this time.

“She could be wrong,” he replied. “Or she could be lying to us. How do we know we can trust what she’s saying?”

Red wasn’t wrong and she wasn’t lying, not about this at least. She slid the plastic that covered the battery compartment back and turned the knob to switch the walkie-talkie on. The fizz of static greeted her, welcoming her home. She’d missed the sound. Wasn’t that stupid? But it meant the walkie-talkie was working, she hadn’t broken it somehow by trying to be useful. Except now she wasn’t useful, she was a liar.

Like when she gave her statements to the police over five yearsago. Red was trying to be helpful, to be useful, even though the world was ending around them. She described her final phone call with her mom, every hateful part of it. Over and over again, every last detail she could remember. “There was a doorbell in the background. Mom rang the doorbell at someone’s house. They answered and she said ‘Hello.’ ” But that couldn’t be true, you see, they’d explained to her. Her mom wasn’t found anywhere near a residential road, near houses. She was found inside Southwark Generating Station, that old, abandoned power station on the pier. And she was dead within ten minutes of that phone call. They didn’t say Red was lying, not like Oliver just had, they said she must have been mistaken, confused, she was only thirteen, she was in shock. Sometimes Red wasn’t really sure if she’d remembered it at all. And, now that she thought about it, was she sure about the walkie-talkie?

“What are you talking about, Oliver?” Reyna’s turn to look at him, crossing the awkward silence that had followed his words.

“The sniper knew about the note, Reyna.” Oliver’s face was reddening again, heat in patches up his neck. “He knew what was written on it. He also knew exactly where we were to trap us here. So if we’re saying there isn’t a listening device somewhere in the RV, then we have an even bigger problem. Because the only alternative is that…”

He drew off, eyes circling around the group, finally coming to rest on Red.

“One of us is working with them.”

3:00a.m.

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