‘-in the SUV,’ James and Owen chorused.
‘Then let’s move!’ Jack ordered, clambering to his feet with Toshiko’s help.
They started back along the riverside path in the direction Jack and Owen had come from. Almost at once, they were pushing their way through the muttering files of automaton people. Hands clawed at them, catching at their clothes.
‘Just run!’ Jack barked. ‘Push through! Just shove them aside!’
They fought their way forwards. A couple of the moaning figures went sprawling. Gwen got clear enough to start running. Toshiko followed her.
There were hands all over Jack, grabbing at him, and dragging him down. Someone had hold of his left leg.
‘Dammit!’ he cried out. ‘Gwen! Go long!’
Still running, Gwen glanced back. Jack freed his right arm and pitched the object like a Rawlings ball.
‘Pass it on!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t hold onto it!’
Running backwards under the object’s arc, Gwen kept her eye on it, and caught it neatly. She started to run towards the embankment steps.
The mindless crowd forgot about Jack and started to spill after her.
She could feel the terrible warmth of the object in her hand. She blinked. On the back of her eyelids, two blue lights shone, moving.
‘Gwen!’
Toshiko was near the top of the steps, looking back at her. She held her hands out, begging. ‘Gwen!’
Gwen blinked again. She didn’t want to let the thing go. It was her turn.
A young man in a collegiate rugby jersey ran into her from the side, and began to fight her for the thing in her hand.
‘Big big big!’ he explained. ‘Tokyo drift. Wood. Trees. Leaves. Nothing behind.’
‘Get off!’ Gwen told him.
He punched her in the ribs. A small, weasel-faced woman joined him, and started to kick and scrabble at Gwen.
The three of them fell back against a secondary stretch of chain link that had been fixed along the edge of the river wall below the embankment steps. The iron poles juddered as the weight of them hit the mesh.
‘Get off me!’ Gwen cried. She got her arm free and hurled the object up towards Toshiko. It was a poor effort. The weasel-faced woman had been hanging on her elbow.
‘You throw like a girl!’ Owen declared as he raced past her, heading for the steps.
The object had sailed through the air and missed Toshiko by about six feet. It bounced into the long grass near the top of the embankment, somewhere to the left of the steps. Uttering a very clipped and precise piece of Anglo-Saxon invective, Toshiko floundered through the long, wet weeds to retrieve it.
The mindless crowd on the path turned towards the bank, tottering up the steps or scrambling up through the long grass after Toshiko.
Pressed against the chain link, Gwen tried to push the bodies off her. They’d already lost interest in her, and were trying to extricate themselves, but they’d all lost their balance into the belling net of the fence.
There was a sharp, metallic ping, then another, and another.
The section of chain-link fence was pulling away from its end pole under their combined weight. The rusting bolt-pegs sheared with a staccato squeal.
Gwen felt herself pitching back off the edge of the wall into open space. The invisible river rushed below. The young man in the rugby jersey managed to flail backwards onto the path. The weasel-faced woman was not so well braced. As the fencing tore away, she went off the wall face first, and dropped into the blackness.
Gwen was holding onto the fence, her fingers and thumbs threaded into the links. She was already too far off her centre of balance to pull back.
The fencing tore back and unspooled all the way to the second pole, where it held. Gwen yelped as she fell, and ended up hanging over the river wall, feet dangling, clinging to the swaying, straining section of torn-away fence.
The bolt-pegs on the second pole began to shear.
Toshiko rummaged in the undergrowth. A man thrashed into her, and she chopped the side of her left hand into his throat to keep him busy.
There it was. A dull glint in the rain-soaked grass. Toshiko snatched up the Amok, and started to run up the slope and back towards the steps. There were people milling around her. The moment she had it in her hand, they surged after her. Some fell over on the wet undergrowth. A woman squealed in disappointment as she slithered right back down the slope.
Toshiko kept running. Her throat ached, and she was aware of plenty of bruises elsewhere on her person, but all that seemed to matter any more was the thing in her hand. She could feel it, like a hot coal, through the leather of her stylish gloves.
Someone grabbed the tails of her long coat, and she kicked them away. Someone else seized her by the arm, and she gave them a blunt elbow smack in the philtrum as a present. She had reached flat ground, a puddled square of broken concrete between the derelict buildings and the late shop. She could see the SUV forty yards away outside the pub, sitting under the streetlights in a haze of rain.
A wrecking ball swung in and struck her in the small of the back, walloping her off her feet.
She fell on her front in the puddles. It wasn’t a wrecking ball, she realised. It was the big man in the lumberjack shirt. Twice in one night he’d poleaxed her.
He was raving, speaking in tongues, his mouth a bloody ruin and his face purple-bruised from Jack’s punches.
Toshiko rolled away as he clawed at her. Her body hurt. Her mind hurt more. Her hand was hot. It felt as if the leather of her glove was burning away. As she blinked, she saw blue lights. They were moving, moving in ways nothing could be expected to move, not even two blue lights. And they seemed very big. Big big-A gun went off.
It was so loud and so close, and the acoustic echo of the narrow yard so hard, Toshiko jumped out of her skin.
Owen came running up to her, his smoking weapon raised, shouting her name.
The big man in the lumberjack shirt turned, unfazed by the sight or sound of a high-calibre handgun, and socked Owen in the face. Owen looked as if he’d run into a clothesline. His legs kept going as his head snapped backwards. He bounced on his back as he hit the ground.
The big man turned back to regard her, ropes of clotted blood swinging from his nose. She was already up.
‘Big big big!’ he explained to her.
‘Piss off!’ she explained back.
As he ploughed on, she kicked him in the balls. He went down, but not before he’d caught her across the side of the head with his fist.
Toshiko opened her eyes. There was rain in her face. She’d blacked out for a moment. The big man had fallen across her legs. He was writhing. The thing in her hand was red hot.
She tried to pull her legs free. The big man reared up, and grabbed her throat. There was an ugly noise, like canvas tearing and raw liver being hit with a mallet, both at the same time.
The big man’s face deformed as muscle control became extinct, and any character and expression fled from the sack of meat his mind had occupied. Blood gurgled out of his mouth like an overflowing drain. His head folded over on one side and he pitched forward.
A blade of clip-frame glass two inches wide was buried in the nape of his neck.
The tramp stood over her, his hands bleeding. ‘It’s my go!’ he protested. ‘You can’t have it!’
Toshiko scrambled away, kicking the big man’s body off her legs, crawling furiously.
‘Tosh!’
