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“There he is!”
Ben glanced over his shoulder, yelped, and took off running. He’d thought he was in a spot where he could watch the station without being seen, and perhaps double back past Sam and Adam when they arrived and get on board the train they were disembarking from; but the Whittlesey train station was basically a wooden shed, so his hiding place wasn’t actually very good. At least he was on the opposite side of the tracks from his opponents, which meant they’d have to go around. That would buy him a few minutes.
Unfortunately the only direction he could really go in those few minutes was directly away from the town centre, which meant it offered extremely limited options for escape. It was frustrating. The game was over in just about exactly four hours, and it was going to take Adam, the next runner, almost three to get out of Ben’s zone. If he’d just been able to evade them for a bit longer--
Could he get a rental bike somewhere, maybe? Head out of town that way? Sure, they’d be able to find bikes soon enough too, but having the game end with a bicycle chase through the English countryside would be objectively hilarious. The only problem with this plan was the part where Sam was the sort of crazy person who used phrases like “leg day” unironically, whereas Ben’s legs were telling him in no uncertain terms that they had maybe five minutes’ running left in them. So maybe this wasn’t the greatest idea he’d ever had.
He headed away from town anyway, on the off chance there was a rental stand with exactly one bike left or some other unambiguous sign, and also because it was more or less downhill. He shortly found himself in a sort of industrial park that backed onto a canal, where a few of the cute little skinny boats that seemed to be everywhere in England were pulled up nose to tail against a concrete retaining wall. In fact--
Ben skidded to a halt at the wall’s edge. One of the boats had a prominent sign: CANAL EXCURSIONS 5€. “Excuse me!” he gasped. “I want to take a canal tour! Is anyone there?”
A woman’s head poked out of a window at approximately the level of Ben’s knees. “Five euros for the tour,” she said, in a laconic tone that seemed to take no notice of his urgency. “We go up the Twenty Foot to Wisbech, and then back down the Old Nene--”
“Does it leave right away?” Ben interrupted.
The woman checked her watch. “On the hour,” she said. “Eleven minutes.”
“I will give you--” Ben fumbled in his pocket. “Fourteen euros and whatever this is if you leave right this instant.”
The woman gave him a suspicious look. “You in trouble?”
He tried for an innocent smile, a little strained because he was still catching his breath. “No, I’m playing a sort of game with my friends, they’re about to come around that corner and if they tag me I lose.”
This seemed to catch her interest. “Got a bet on?”
“Uh, no, not as such,” Ben admitted, then, seeing a flicker of disappointment on her face, added, “but my friend Adam, he’s going to brag for weeks if he wins, you have no idea. It’s the worst.”
The woman grunted. “Well, all right. Mind your step.” She deftly unlooped a rope at the back of the boat from a cleat on the wall. Ben pocketed his phone and sat down on the wall, trying not to let his backpack overbalance him, and slid down onto the boat’s roof. It wasn’t particularly graceful, but at least he managed to tip forward, landing unpleasantly hard on hands and knees, rather than backward into the slowly growing gap between the boat’s side and the wall. The pilot moved easily around him to undo another rope at the front, and used her other hand to nonchalantly shove off into the channel.
At the bend in the road Ben could see Sam and Adam’s matching Jet Lag caps appear, and quickly pulled his phone out to get the long shot. The pilot stepped around him again and climbed off the roof at the back of the boat, doing something below where he could see. An engine growled to life. Ben tried to get to his feet, failed, slipped his backpack off and tried again. This time he managed it, and cautiously made his way rearwards, trying to keep his filming phone steady.
The back of the boat was a sort of lower railed deck area with a steering thingy, which the pilot was holding on to. Just in front of her, doors led down into the inside of the boat. The pilot waved Ben down to stand beside her. “Under the circumstances, I think it’s best you pay in advance,” she said.
“Right, right.” Ben handed over the contents of his jumpsuit pocket, which turned out to be fourteen euros and thirty-four cents, a lemon-flavoured candy, a crumple of receipts, an acorn, a smashed fortune cookie, and a piece of wet string. The pilot gave the string back.
Sam and Adam had just reached the gap between the buildings and were looking this way and that, momentarily puzzled. Sam was checking his phone, probably the tracker. Ben grinned and waved. An explosive “Oh fucking hell!” carried over the sound of the engine as Adam spotted him.
“Bon voyage, boys!” Ben shouted. “Wait, no, that was backwards. Bon voyage to me.” In his mind, he was already vanishing into the sunset, his winning run secured, leaving Sam and Adam far behind.
In fact the boat was trundling northeastward, and Sam and Adam were keeping pace along the bank without trouble. They weren’t even walking all that briskly. As it turned out, a narrowboat was one of the least effective getaway vehicles ever invented.
“You realize canal boats go about four miles an hour?” Sam called. “This isn’t exactly a master escape plan.”
Ben chuckled. “You can’t tag me, though,” he pointed out. Now that he thought about it, this might actually be even better than vanishing into the sunset, because he got to enjoy the frustrated looks on their faces.
“Is this even allowed?” Adam inquired. “Because I feel like this might not be allowed, actually.”
“We’re allowed ferries,” Ben said.
“I think calling this a ferry is stretching a point,” Sam said. “It seems more like a taxi than anything, and you can’t use taxis.”
“She does tours,” Ben riposted. “Really it’s like a tour bus. A particularly moist tour bus. Taxis you pick where you want to go; this boat just goes up and down the canal and people get on and off when it stops.”
Sam’s eyebrows lifted, and Ben realized his mistake. “Sooo--we could just get on board, then?” He pitched his voice a bit louder. “Ma’am, do you think we could come aboard?”
The pilot shrugged. “Sure. I stop next at Wisbech.”
“Which is--”
“Fourteen mile.”
“Won’t that take, like, three hours?” Adam pointed out.
“Bout that.”
“Could you not just pull over--”
“No, she can’t!” Ben exclaimed. “She has a schedule to keep!”
“Ben, I am going to fucking kill you for this.”
The pilot glanced from Ben to the others and back. “These are your friends?”
“Yes, well, normally, yes,” Ben admitted, “but they’re currently also my mortal enemies, so if we could just stay in the middle of the canal--”
She nodded. “Which one’s Adam?”
“What have you been telling her about me?” Adam demanded. His voice was rising steadily in pitch. “Ben? What have you been saying?”
“Bit squeaky, isn’t he?” the pilot commented. Ben snorted.
“I do not believe this,” Adam grumbled to Sam, loudly enough for Ben to hear him. “Can we throw something at him? Would it count as tagging if I hit him with a ball of socks?”
“Sadly, no,” Sam answered. “It would also be littering.”
“Like you could hit me from there anyway,” Ben taunted.
“What about poking him with a stick,” Adam said. “What if we found, just, a really long stick--”
“You scuff my paint, I’m not letting you on at Wisbech,” the pilot warned.
Ben gave her a beatific smile as Adam spluttered. “This may be the best day of my life.”
***
It had been about fifteen minutes. Adam was growing more and more agitated as the extremely-low-speed chase continued. The road had faded out, and they were pacing the narrowboat along a dirt towpath that paralleled the canal about four feet from its edge. The boat was several feet further away, out in the centre of the channel, presumably to avoid getting snarled in the weedy plants that poked thickly out of the water at the edges.
“I do not believe this,” Adam repeated. “I do not believe this. There has to be some--You could swim out there.”
Sam’s face wrinkled delicately. “That would be extremely unsanitary. I know what’s in that water.”
“I could swim out there.”
“If you try it, I’ll tell you what’s in that water.”
Adam thought about this. “Okay, no.” He wasn’t that concerned about germs as a rule, nowhere near the way Sam was, but Sam had a way of talking about them that made his aversion, well, infectious, at least for a bit. Like the time he’d offhandedly brought up eyelash mites, which Adam could quite happily have gone his entire life without knowing about. Adam had spent the next few days wearing his glasses because putting his contacts in meant touching his eyes and possibly interacting with the tiny spiders that apparently had been living on his face the entire time. It had not been a good week at the office.
He moved on to his next idea. “What if we, okay, what if we hired another boat, and had them go alongside--”
“This sounds very close to piracy.”
“Sam, I will absolutely take up piracy at this point.”
“I’m not categorically saying I wouldn’t, but I don’t know that we’d be able to convince another pilot to go along with it.” Sam was poking at his phone. “Here’s a thought, though,” he said. “It looks like there’s a bridge about a mile or so from here.”
“Is it one of those lifting bridges?” Adam asked. “Could we, perhaps, hold it closed or something and make them stop?”
“It doesn’t look like it, no, and that would probably be illegal,” Sam said. “But it’s not all that high. I think we could just drop down onto the boat from there.”
“Huh.” Adam considered this. “Yeah, I mean, it’s going pretty slowly.” He thumbed the numbers into his calculator app. “Four miles an hour is six feet per second, so we’d still have to time it pretty close, but yes, it ought to be doable, if nothing goes wrong.”
“What could possibly go wrong?” Sam asked, deadpan.
“Okay,” Adam sighed, “just for that, I think I’d better be the one jumping into the boat.”
***
Ben was getting some interior shots of the cabin, which was adorably compact, when the pilot called down to him through the doors. “We’re coming up on Infield’s Bridge. You’ll want to see this.”
He emerged to see an alarmingly low bridge bearing down on them. “Just over a metre of air draft,” the pilot said. “There’s lower--Froghall Tunnel on the Caldon’ll knock your hat off--but it’s still quite something if you’re not used to it. You’ll want to film us going under, I expect.”
“Oh, definitely,” Ben agreed. “Do people ever get stuck?”
“Not if they’re sensible,” the pilot said, which was probably a yes. “Some people have to take their roof boxes down to go under a low bridge. What I say is, don’t store things on your roof in the first place.” She waved at her boat’s roof, which was indeed mainly clear aside from the half-dozen flowerpots that lined one edge and the painted watering can tied on beside them.
Ben squinted at the bridge, lining up his camera shot. There seemed to be some commotion going on there.
Sam and Adam, meanwhile, had set up both their filming phones on tripods to catch both sides of the bridge. Sam was hiding in the bushes beside the path, so as not to be visible from the boat. Adam had stashed his backpack in the bushes as well, and was cautiously climbing over the railing on the far side when he was startled by a loud “Here, now!” from the bridge’s other end.
He looked over and saw an old man with a walking stick and a yappy, energetic terrier dashing about at the end of a leash. “You shouldn’t be messing about up there,” the man said severely. “What are you up to? Graffiti? I can report you, you know.”
Adam offered his most conciliatory smile. “It’s fine, we’re just, uh--” He tried to come up with an ending to the sentence that wasn’t ambushing a stranger’s boat, and failed.
“Oh, American, are you? Stands to reason. Who’s we?” He peered around. “Why’s your friend skulking back there? In a gang, are you? Are those gang hats?”
Adam gaped. “What? No, we’re--”
“A likely story,” the man growled. His dog yipped excitedly. “We don’t want any of your American gangs round here. I’m going to report you both to the police. For mischief. And probably drugs.”
Adam raised a hand in what he hoped was a placating gesture. The man recoiled as though Adam had threatened him. “Wait,” Adam said. “Wait, wait.” Sam was waving frantically from his hiding place. Adam could see the boat approaching the bridge. Ben had his camera aimed at the old man, who was hopping about furiously.
“Hooligans!” the old man shouted, waving his stick.
At this point, several things happened at once.
A pair of ducks, perhaps alarmed by the stick, shot up from the edge of the water. The old man’s dog pulled loose from his grip and charged at them, barking wildly. The ducks changed course midair to veer away from the dog, zooming directly toward Adam’s face. Adam yelled and flailed instinctively and lost his grip on the railing. The prow of the narrowboat emerged from under the bridge.
Adam landed on the roof with a resounding thump and grabbed desperately for a handhold. Something crunched. “Watch my geraniums!” the pilot shouted.
Adam rolled over and found himself staring up at the underside of the bridge. In sudden terror at the possibility of getting stuck, he kicked out convulsively, and somehow managed to snag his shoelace on some protrusion in the wood. “Help!” he shouted, as the boat scraped past underneath his back.
Ben leaped forward and grabbed Adam’s ankle, and managed to yank his foot out of his shoe. The momentum carried them both sideways, and they toppled over the railing together.
There were a few seconds of confused flailing and splashing, and then they both spluttered to the surface. Ben found his footing first. The water was about four feet deep.
“Are y’all okay?” Sam called.
“Hooligans!” the old man shrieked again. “I’ll report you!” He flung his stick in their general direction, and hit the side of the boat.
“I’ll report you!” the pilot shouted back at him. “Interfering with lawful traffic!”
“Aiding and abetting gangs!” the old man countered.
“Letting dogs run about off-leash!”
“Eh? What?” The man looked around and realized his dog was out of reach and happily paddling after the boat. “Get back here!”
Glad to be ignored, Ben and Adam waded through the clinging reeds. Adam had lost his hat, and somehow, Ben noticed as they reached the shallows, his other shoe. He stumbled up the bank, dripping and mucky and looking more than a little crazed. “Cards!” he demanded. “Cards, cards, cards!”
Sam cocked his head at Ben still working his way through the plants, then silently reached into his own pocket for the spare pack of cards and handed them over, along with Adam’s tripod and filming phone. Adam shoved everything into his backpack, hoisted it onto his shoulders and staggered away down the path, in his sock feet, swearing incoherently.
Ben and Sam looked at each other. Ben shrugged, and flopped down on the path to wring water out of his shirt.
“You’re taking a shower before I sit next to you,” Sam said.
Ben nodded absently, gazing after the retreating boat, making sure Sam’s filming phone had him in dramatic profile. “I’m going to miss my seafaring days,” he said wistfully. “Still, perhaps someday I shall hear the call of the rolling tide once more--”
As if in reply, the boat angled slightly in toward the shore, and the neon lump of Ben’s backpack described a graceful arc through the air to land in the grass. “No refunds!” the pilot’s voice floated back over the water.
Ben sighed. “Honestly, that’s entirely fair.”