The grade lieutenant narrated from the cupola that the locomotive was stopped within sight of the Regent’s Park East fort of the Grande Enceinte. That meant they were virtually at Euston depot. Lawrence would have no chance at all of escape once inside the depot. A frantic grab at the door and run for it? Better than what awaited him inside Euston.
The gunners had faded to silence, their faces pale and grim. They swung their guns from side to side. From outside came a kind of rustling noise. The grade lieutenant muttered from the cupola:
“Christ, we can’t kill all of them.”
“The telephone is dead,” the master sergeant said. “They’ve cut the line.”
Flames belched in. A gunner danced about screaming, his front roaring up flames—the poor sod had taken a direct hit from an oil grenade, probably fired from a catapult. More grenades banged on the outside. Burning oil sprayed from a ventilator grill. Curtains of fire dropped into the centre of the stinger car, followed by two lumps thrashing about, rolling in the blazing oil as it burned off their blistering scalps. What had been the grade lieutenant’s head was bright red, with crisps of scorched skin peeling off it. Someone yelled:
“Stay at your guns!”
Lawrence grovelled back against the steel wall, knees against his mouth, fingers working the knot at the back of his ankles. In seconds the stinger would be a gas chamber for all of them, as the flames ate the oxygen. The unhurt troopers crammed the top corners, farthest from the flames, trying to burrow beneath one another. Lawrence pressed a cheek to the steel floor and took a deep breath, sitting up to reach for the wheel of the door—but it was searing hot. He pulled down the cuffs of his overalls and tried again. The wheel turned and the locking bolts withdrew. He threw his shoulder against the door.
Heavy though the armoured door was, it clanged back against the steel plates and Lawrence fell out onto a bush. Dense grey smoke belched out above him. The air cheered as a pack of hungry beasts with human faces pressed in, leering to pounce, hesitating when he swept back his sleeves to show the bleeding weals from rubbing through the leather bindings. The filthy brown overalls, body smell and pierced ear lobe confused the beasts enough to buy him seconds.
“I’m one of you—I was their prisoner…”
With deliberate slowness, he rose to his feet. Being a head taller than anyone else nearby, he could see the train was hopelessly buried within a lake of mob. It had stopped on an expanse of open ground outside the Grande Enceinte, the frontier wall of the Central Enclave. Helmeted heads looked down from its battlements—and they did nothing at all. In healthy times, bursts from brass-munchers would have scattered this mob. Ergo, these were not healthy times.
The first trooper got thrown into the crowd from the stinger. He was just a teenager, his face smeared by smoke and tears. The crowd surged into the space around Lawrence, jamming him in place solid as if he had been buried alive. Eyes around him bulged wide with panic. He heard wheezes of breath crushed from lungs, while he protected himself by locking his arms. More troopers skeeted over the top of the crowd, floating on heads and punches. A mouth stretched wide, spine arched into a bow. Someone had speared the kid through the chest with a meat cleaver. Another got his throat slashed and scattered blood in all directions to laughter and applause. Another lurch of the crowd and the pressure around Lawrence gave way, bodies dropped unconscious in heaps. Everyone close to him had been suffocated unconscious, while those farther out were all eyes on the slaughter of glory troops, laughing at the pleas of mercy. He ducked under the coupling between the wagons, getting tangled amongst traffic going both ways under the train, some eager to see the fun before it was over, others cursing the slaughter of boys. On the far side, he was just another head and shoulders in a turbulence of anonymity. His size, wild looks and dirtiness prompted those in his path to get out of the way. From the edge of the lake, he looked up the length of the train towards the Grande Enceinte. Now he understood why the great number of troops in the forward carriages had not attacked the crowd. They had managed to extricate themselves by sheer force of numbers, creating a Roman-style hedgehog of bayonet-mounted rifles to create a sanctuary with their backs to the train. With an amoeba-like ability to alter shape as required, the blob-sanctuary was growing forward off the locomotive to bridge the fifty yards or so to the gate of Regent’s Park East fort. Since the gates were currently shut, he wondered, rather idly, what would happen when the tip of the blob got there. He did not care. It was not his problem.
From this new vantage point, he could see beside the railway a typical blockhouse and raised pole marking the beginning of a turnpike. It was all locked down and, apparently, abandoned. That did not guarantee the far end of it would be locked down and abandoned with the pole raised. Mirror-Face’s tale had imprinted in Lawrence a deep fear of the ultramarines.
What he needed was this lake of slummies to drain home, wherever home was. The ultramarines would have no chance of spotting him in its midst. Once inside an asylum, he would lie low somewhere on bum alley until he got his bearings, made a little money and got some clothes to wear over these Value System overalls.
Chapter 16
Riding the thick flow down the turnpike to the local industrial asylum was easy like a leaf riding a stream. It also proved arousing. This was the first time in four and a half months that Lawrence had so much as set eyes on a
