This chapter was horrible.
I don't even know how to talk about it.
It was so much more cold-blooded, horrific, evil and inescapable than anything else in the entire series, and that's saying something. I mean, seriously, who would do something like that?
Um if you haven't read this book (or any other books in this series for that matter) just go and read them now because you're seriously missing out.
In this chapter Alex gets captured by some people who are working for McCain on his way to school. They get him with a hypodermic syringe to knock him out and then bundle him into the back of a van and take him to a strange place where they are joined by Myra Bennett who makes the situation much worse.
She cuts his hair badly and they've changed him into old baggy clothes by the time he wakes up. Bennett then sticks another needle in him, but this time she doesn't take it out: instead she attached some sort of box to it and hides them under his sleeve. She tells him that it will keep re-injecting him with this liquid at regular intervals so that he has no chance of escaping.
And then she shows him his reflection in the mirror. He's sitting in a wheelchair, and with the haircut and stained outfit and numbing fluids that are being pumped into him, he looks like he's suffering from severe brain damage. Bennett has lodged onto the fact that people don't look closely at people in wheelchairs because they don't want to look like they're staring and has taken advantage of it. Even if people were already looking for Alex, they wouldn't think to look at disabled people, and Alex is almost unrecogniseable anyway. Alex can't move, can't speak, his body has become a prison as his mind continues to work normally - when he's not unconscious, that is.
They wheel him out, and through his various bouts of consciousness he registers that they're taking him to Heathrow Airport, then boarding an aeroplane. The most painful thing about this chapter is how helpless he is. His mind could be screaming at him but he cannot do anything, and these people know exactly what they're putting him through, and they don't even care.
Onboard the aeroplane, Bennett tries to further humiliate him by getting him to eat baby food, but luckily Alex is able to keep his mouth resolutely closed to avoid any more of this torture he's being put under. What kind of person would do this to a fourteen-year-old?
They get off the plane and Alex sees a huge sign saying, "Smile, you're in Kenya" and realises that he has flown so far across the world and no one knows where he is. Jack wouldn't have known, MI6 would have been alerted but there's no way they'd expect this to happen and they can't have been prepared. His only hope is if they manage to track down McCain and therefore, by some miracle, Alex too.
And then it just ends. And we're left feeling completely gutted. How on earth can Alex get out of this? If no one knows where he is, even if he manages to escape, how on earth is he going to get back to England from Kenya??
Uuuurgh this was so horrible to read, I have no idea how he's going to escape this one, I almost don't want to read the next chapter because I can only see it getting worse!!
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