‘And that was how I became Tyler Keene’s bitch.’

Chapter 23

23

‘Tyler Keene, I’ll never forget him. I hated him from the start. I’d seen him before, figured out he was the guy in charge there. He was a fat kid with short curly hair and a face that looked like it was smiling but wasn’t. He was a vicious psychopath, to tell you the truth. I’m not sure anyone there liked him, but they were all scared of him so they’d made him their leader.

‘“You’re my dog now,” he said as he put the collar on me, and he laughed. From that day until I escaped from him he made my life hell.

‘He had a girlfriend called Josa, nasty, pinch-faced girl with no teeth, cruel as him. I don’t know which one was worse really. When the two of them got together, they could be really evil, like they were showing off to each other. See who could think up the worst things.

‘They didn’t take me inside just then; they were heading out on a hunting party, looking for food. They made me walk at the front, out on the lead like a dog, prodding me forward with their weapons, laughing at me, calling me names. I couldn’t say anything. Sitting out in the open hadn’t helped my throat. But they had taken me on, and I thought at least they might feed me.

‘It was a miserable day. They spent the time breaking into houses, picking up anything useful, trashing everything else. I lost count of how many houses we went into, and always I was forced to go in first as they shouted things like, “Sniff ’em out, dingo-boy,” and “Take ’em down, bitch.”

‘That’s what they mostly called me, if they called me anything – “bitch”.

‘We didn’t find a lot: a few cans and packets of food. Some crisps that Tyler scoffed straight away. And then in one house there were grown-ups. They attacked me as soon as we went in, but I managed to duck out of the way and keep out of it, though I was still on the lead. The kids were too distracted to make me do anything else, as they hacked at the mothers and fathers who were hiding in there. Not laughing now, deadly serious. And I could see that Tyler was a mean fighter, lethal. It was pretty gross, fighting in there, close up, all packed in, the noise and the smell, the grunting and shouting and yelling.