head back up into the bike’s slipstream. Her nondescript features and lack of expression were somehow frightening. It was like she was watching me across the months. Which was of course bollocks. I still shut the footage down quickly.
The facility was in Coventry, on the edge of the Birmingham Crater. Coventry was another unwanted place. It was easy to hide things in unwanted places.
I had no option but to go after Vicar. He had been taken trying to buy Morag and me time. I cursed my stupidity for not checking before. I had assumed he was dead. Rolleston was thorough, Josephine more so, but we’d kept them jumping. I guess they had been forced to leave the system before they could tie up that particular loose end.
I wondered if this was what Big Papa Neon had meant about the dead wanting to talk to me. If it was, he could have been a bit clearer and we would have come and got Vicar. Maybe this was the price of God – messages all had to be cryptic now. But then how would Big Papa know? I suppose he could have just asked God.
Vicar’s guest spot in my dream had been my guilty subconscious telling me to check. At least I hoped that it was.
I was reasonably sure of my whereabouts, though I was still trying to keep comms use, including the GPS, to a minimum. I was riding through a small gully, a short cut, trying to save time. It was close to Pitlochry in Perthshire. There were steep rock cliffs on either side of the narrow road.
I passed a dirt lay-by and saw an ancient bus parked up. More wannabe settlers from the cities, I guessed. There was more than one family and they were all on their knees, hands laced behind their backs facing the bus. Parked in front of the bus, blue lights flashing, was a police APC. Two police covered the settlers. Another two were dragging a pregnant-looking woman out of the bus. She was struggling with them.
I drove by. Not every problem in the world was mine. I was going to go and get Vicar. I owed him. I didn’t have time for this.
I jammed on the Triumph’s brakes and looked back. They threw the woman on the ground. I kicked down the stand. They started beating her with shock sticks but they weren’t putting any current through them. I climbed off the bike. The woman was curled up trying to protect her unborn. Two of the settlers, a man and a woman, tried to get up to help the pregnant woman. They were kicked in the spine so hard their heads were battered against the side of the bus.
‘Hey!’ I shouted. The two cops beating the woman looked up. One of them pressed the sole of his boot down on the woman’s head. The other started towards me.
‘This is none of your business. Move on or you’ll get some,’ he ordered, his voice full of assumed authority. This tosser wasn’t even from Scotland. I kept walking towards him.
‘Did you fucking hear me?!’ He sent current through the shock stick. I closed with him and he swung at me. I ducked under his swing and hooked a punch into his chest, knocking him back. He tried to backhand me with the stick. I ducked again and it left him wide open to a side kick to his face. He staggered back. I walked after him and kicked him in the face again. He swung at me again. I spun under the blow and delivered a spinning kick to the head that cracked his helmet. The force knocked him sideways into another kick. He tried to stab me with the shock stick and I sidestepped, grabbed his arm and broke his elbow.
He was screaming now. I took the stick off him and stabbed him repeatedly in the face and groin with it. I took out every bit of my frustration and anger at Calum, Alasdair and pricks like these on this guy. He was a lump of bleeding pain masquerading as human when I let him fall to the ground.
I was breathing hard. It wasn’t the exertion; I had underestimated just how angry I was. I was also being covered by the other three police, two pointing shotguns and the third an assault rifle.
‘Lie down and place your hands behind your head!’ one of them shouted.
‘Given that I’ve just beaten the shit out of one of you, I can’t think that would end well for me.’
‘We will shoot.’
‘I don’t doubt it for a second.’
I squared up to them. My shoulder laser pushed its way through the break-open flap on my raincoat.
The people knelt by the bus were getting up. Two of them ran to the pregnant women. The others were slowly edging towards the police. They looked nervous, angry but nervous. The cheap replacement implants suggested that they were veterans. They must have hated being outgunned by the police.
‘Stay out of my way,’ I said to the settlers. They froze and then backed off. I turned to the police. ‘I am much better at this than y-’ I started but one of them was pulling the trigger.
The red beam of the shoulder laser stabbed through the shotgun, superheating the metal. The laser went straight through the weapon and into the policeman’s leg, blowing off a steaming chunk of flesh. The ammunition in the shotgun cooked off and exploded. The policeman was blown back onto the ground, the front of his armoured uniform a charred mess.
I was moving to the left, the heavy Mastodon revolver in my right hand, the TO-5 laser pistol in the left. The policewoman with the assault rifle was firing at me, trying to track my movement. To me the muzzle flashes of the weapon seemed to happen in slow motion. It was the same for the enormous muzzle flash of my revolver. The bullet caught her in the upper arm. The massive round penetrated her armoured uniform and any subcutaneous armour she might have. The hydrostatic shock of the large-calibre round blew her arm clean off. It went tumbling into the air. Her finger was convulsing round the trigger firing the assault rifle as the arm spun.
This was me trying hard not to kill them.
I aimed for the third and final officer’s leg with the TO-5. All I succeeded in doing was blow off smoking parts of his armour. His shotgun blast caught me in the side and spun me round.
He made a run for the APC. If he got there I was in trouble as he would be in an armoured vehicle and have access to its weapon systems. On the other hand I was pretty sure I hadn’t killed anyone yet and I wanted to keep it that way. I fired both pistols at the ground between him and the APC. He changed direction. He was now running up the road away from the lay-by. He let his shotgun drop on its sling, drew his automatic pistol and started firing it blindly behind him. A couple of the 10mm rounds flattened themselves against my armoured raincoat. There was a cry as one of the settlers took a ricochet in the leg. Right. Fun over.
I walked over to the assault rifle, removed the fingers of the severed arm from the grip and picked it up. My palm interface connected with the weapon’s smartlink. The magazine was empty but it still had grenades. I tutted when I saw what kind of grenades. I put the stock of the weapon to my shoulder, aimed and then fired the launcher. The grenade hit the running policeman on the back of his helmet with enough velocity to pick him up off his feet and sending him sprawling face down. He wasn’t moving. White gas was pouring out of the grenade.
‘Tear gas!’ I shouted at the policeman’s hopefully unconscious form. ‘Who the fuck uses tear gas?!’ Most vets had filters to survive gasses and their tear ducts were removed when their eyes were replaced. Tear gas was only really of use on children. Still I hoped I hadn’t killed him – for my sake, not his. The police could be vindictive.
I dropped the assault rifle and headed back towards my bike. The policewoman whose arm I’d blown off was alive enough to scream. The one whose shotgun I’d blown up was crawling. I kicked him in the head as I walked past.
The two families of settlers were just staring at me.
‘Next time, come mob-handed and bring media,’ I told them.
Now I was in trouble. There was some chasing, some hiding. The police were not very happy with me and God was helping them find me. I made one more contact with the net. With God’s help I downloaded the most detailed and up-to-date maps of the area I could find as well as details of police roadblocks and static surveillance lenses. Then I went comms dark.
I sat in the back of the freight container heading south. I didn’t dare drown out the clanking of the train with music because I was in working conditions.
I’d spent several days making my way to Glasgow, avoiding police patrols actively searching for me. In Glasgow I’d made my way to an old freight yard and stowed away on a cargo train. It was nothing like the Mag Lev Mudge and I had taken from America; in some ways it felt more luxurious. I was out of the rain and the wind. I’d got my stove going and had a brew. My clothes were drying and I’d bribed enough to get the bike into the container.
This was a very old-fashioned train. I think it was electric, completely automated. It ran on a network of tracks that delivered slow-moving but heavy cargo all over the UK and was much cheaper to operate than a Mag Lev. It would take me into Coventry, where I had a whole new list of problems to deal with. Chief among them was
