CHERUB: The Sleepwalker Read Online Free PDF Page A

Perry shirt shouted. ‘Stewardess!’
    Angus looked down the aisle and saw the man standing up from his window seat a dozen rows behind. Several others jumped out of seats in the rows around him. There was too much commotion to understand any individual but the news rippled through the plane.
    ‘What did he say?’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Back there. Something about a crack.’
    ‘Huge crack in the wing?’
    ‘ Jesus , you’ve got to be kidding.’
    ‘There’s a crack over the wing.’
    ‘Is that what’s going on down there?’
    The news hit Angus like an anvil dropped on a cartoon bunny. His mum’s wedding ring dug into his wrist, but he didn’t complain. The stewardess sprinted up to the cockpit as Angus noticed that they were losing height again.
    ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is Maxine your co-pilot,’ came across the intercom, but this time she’d lost her cool. ‘I’m sorry to say we’ve received reports of a serious flaw in the airframe. Although we have some degree of control, we are currently finding it impossible to maintain height. We are in touch with engineers at our base in London and we’re doing all we can, but I must now ask you to listen carefully to the cabin crew who will instruct you on the safe use of your life jackets.’
    ‘We’re going to die,’ Megan blurted. It was a phrase the nine-year-old used when she dropped milk on a new carpet or scratched one of her dad’s CDs, but for once it didn’t seem over the top.
    Angus watched the numbers on his seatback screen drop below two thousand metres as a male steward began a tannoy announcement.
    ‘At this time we would like to ask all passengers to remove their life vest from the pouches beneath their seats and place them over their heads, in anticipation of a landing on water. Do not, I repeat do not , inflate the life vest until you have left the aircraft. Keep your laps clear and listen for an announcement from the cockpit. You must be ready to adopt the brace position as soon as you are told to do so. The cabin crew will now be taking to their seats and will not be able to provide passengers with further assistance.’
    ‘You can’t land on the sea,’ Angus said frantically. ‘I saw it on the Discovery Channel. They put life vests on aeroplanes, but nobody in history has ever used one successfully.’
    While the rest of his family pulled on their life vests, Angus went down the seatback pocket and grabbed the kiddies’ pack he’d been handed when he boarded the plane. He unzipped the plastic case and took out a tiny spiral-bound notepad and a cheap Biro.
    ‘Angus, put your vest on,’ his mother ordered.
    He didn’t think there was any point, but he didn’t want to argue with his mum so he snatched the yellow vest from beneath his seat and pulled it over his head. It had a horrible plastic smell.
    When Angus’ head popped through, he saw that the height displayed on the LCD was rapidly closing on a thousand metres. Through the gap in the seats he saw that the couple sitting in front had decided to go out in a bout of snogging and the adult nature of this made Angus feel young. He was never going to have a girlfriend, or get all hairy like his dad, or have a wife, or own a car. All that was left was a few minutes sitting in this seat, sweating and busting for a pee.
    He rested the pad on his knee and gripped the Biro in his shaking fist. He thought about writing how scared he was, but he knew his dad would be sad when he read it and didn’t want to make him feel worse. So he wrote about what was going on and finished by telling his dad that he loved him.
    ‘What are you doing?’ Megan asked, as she watched her brother tear the small sheet from the notepad and slide it inside a plastic bag.
    ‘I’ve written a message for Dad,’ Angus explained. ‘I’m knotting it in plastic so the paper doesn’t get soggy and make the ink run when we hit that water.’
    Angus watched as his sister started looking around for her kiddies’