bucked and bounced like a startled horse, and metal ground loudly against metal.
‘Shit!’ I exploded, fighting the car back under control as the back end tried to slew off the road. My eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror. The grey van filled it, which meant it was already accelerating towards us for a second pass. There was no room on this narrow track to swerve aside, and no way we’d hold together if we left the road and tried our luck among the trees: too many rope-thick roots, too many leaf-camouflaged pits and troughs.
I did the only thing I could do, flooring the accelerator and jumping away from the van as we put on speed. But they were already closing the distance again, and there wasn’t a scratch on those black bull-bars from where they’d rammed us the first time. Mass and momentum and position were all on their side: they could run us off the road and not feel it. The van’s tinted windows didn’t allow me to see who was driving, but whoever he was I cursed his name and his Ray-bans.
Juliet was looking over her shoulder too. ‘We should stop and deal with them,’ she said, with an amazing degree of calm.
‘Great,’ I growled, weaving from side to side on the road in the hope of presenting a slightly less easy target. ‘The only problem with that idea is that if we stop now they’ll ram us into the side of a tree and we’ll fold like a concertina.’
Juliet gave me a slightly puzzled look. ‘Like a what?’ she said.
‘A concertina. Musical instrument. Makes sound by drawing air in through a bellows and then pumping it out through a – shit, can I explain later?’
‘Yes,’ said Juliet, just as the van caught up with us again. There was another shuddering impact and our back end actually left the road for a couple of moments, then smacked down again hard enough to rattle my teeth inside my skull. I rode it out, slightly better this time because I’d seen it coming, but a stench of burning rubber reached my nostrils. I had no idea what that meant: my best guess was that we’d come down with enough force to make the suspension momentarily irrelevant, and the tyres had scraped against the inside of the wheel arches at however many thousand revs per minute we were currently hitting. If I was right, another impact like that would probably make at least one of them blow.
But Juliet was winding her window down with as little haste as if she just wanted to spit out some gum. She’d already unbuckled her seat belt, and there was a barely audible sigh of cloth on metal as it reeled itself back into the holder. ‘Keep driving,’ she said laconically. Then she slid out through the window and up onto the roof of the car, out of my field of vision, for all the world as if we weren’t driving along a narrow dirt track at ninety-five miles an hour.
I caught the jump in the side mirror. It was something to see: the van was ten yards behind us at this point, but Juliet cleared the distance in a heart-stopping, balletic giant stride that landed her on top of the bull-bars, so perfectly poised that she didn’t even hit the windscreen. Instead she punched a hole right through it. Then she reached inside and hauled the driver out through the ragged circular hole in the shatter-proof glass as though she were delivering an oversized baby.
She dumped him under the wheels of the van and it jounced over him, making his arms flail and whip like a shirt on a washing line: he died without ever knowing what had hit him. The van started to veer left, losing speed now that there was no one to lean on the gas, but still with a terrific amount of momentum to burn off and nowhere to spend it.
There was a thunder-crack sound that was repeated two more times: Juliet pivoted on one arm as someone moved inside the van, gun raised to fire again. If she’d been hit, she didn’t show any sign of being hurt. The van’s side ground against the thick trunk of a mature tree and the vehicle ricocheted away again across the narrow track, slewing more violently now and starting to lean over sideways at a steeper and steeper angle. Juliet swarmed up onto the roof, rode the movement with unconscious grace and was already jumping off as the van’s side smacked down into the dirt and it bounced, end over end.
I hit my own brakes, aware that I should have been watching the road ahead of me instead of what was coming up behind. There were no other cars in sight, but I took a broad bend way too fast and skidded to a halt in the middle of the road with a handbrake turn that would have been elegant and accomplished if I hadn’t blown out both of the driver-side tyres in the process.
It had all happened so fast that the echoes of the van’s crashing fall were still dying away as I leaped out of the car. The trees hid it from my sight for a couple of seconds, though, and by the time I rounded the bend the action had moved on a little.
Juliet was down in the road, and the surviving occupants of the van were crawling out as best they could through doors and windows. One of them – judging by the gun in his hand, he must have been the guy who’d been blazing away at Juliet from inside the van – raised his arm to shoot her at point-blank range. She ducked under the bullet and pirouetted so fast she was a blur: the roundhouse kick that caught him high up in the chest must have staved in half his ribs. He folded up, fell and didn’t move again after that.
That left three: two men and a woman, who I saw now for the first time. She was a petite, washed-out little thing dressed in shades of beige, streaked with vivid red here and there because she’d just struggled through a shattered window and hauled herself to her feet in time to watch Juliet dispatching her colleague only a few feet away. Incongruously, she was barefoot: maybe that should have tipped me off, but it didn’t.
The two guys were dressed in finest mafioso chic, but the black suits and wraparound shades looked less menacing given how the situation had spun out of their control. One of them was down on hands and knees, crawling away from the van towards the undergrowth in desperate, indefatigable slo-mo. The other stood facing Juliet irresolutely, fists clenched but not knowing what to do. She took a step towards him, opening her arms as if to embrace him. He staggered back, groping belatedly at his waist for some weapon he carried there.
That was when the woman struck. She was only waiting for Juliet to be broadside on to her: now she moved in a staccato blur, slamming the heel of one hand into Juliet’s left temple and then, as Juliet turned to acknowledge her, following up with a raking slash from the other hand. Juliet’s head snapped to the side, and blood sprayed up into the still, sun-speckled air.
The woman was already changing: had already changed, more like a stiletto blade snicking out of its sheath than like the slow, camera-friendly metamorphoses of horror movies. She seemed to stand up taller as her torso narrowed and elongated: at the same time her elbows and her knees bent and locked into a new configuration that a human being wouldn’t have been able to achieve without ripping a dozen bones out of their sockets. Hairs as thick as porcupine spines bristled on her flesh, like a cat’s hairs standing up when it’s making a squalling, spitting last stand.
Juliet struck out at the
By now I was racing hell for leather towards them. There was no time to think it through. I stuck out my hand, grabbed a handful of something from the bushes to my left and tore it free as I ran. ‘Benedicite, domine meus,’ I panted under my breath, ‘hunc florem, et noli oblivisci –’ Coming from me it was bullshit, but it would have to do.
The
The surviving guy still on his feet, whose existence I’d completely forgotten, tackled me from the side and sent me sprawling, coming down on top of me. The force of the impact knocked a lot of the wind out of me, and before I could get it back I felt his fingers closing on my windpipe. His flushed, sweating face glared down into mine, his lips drawn back from clenched teeth. I couldn’t get my right hand up to prise his fingers loose: the injury to my shoulder had left the entire arm too weak and too stiff to give me any purchase. But my left hand – the one that was full of greenery – was still in full working order, and since he obligingly came in so close, I threw it around his neck, hugged him closer still and butted him in the face with nose-flattening force. He sagged and I rolled so he was under me, kneeing him in the balls en passant to make sure he didn’t get up any time soon. I scrambled free and managed to get upright again, leaving him wrapped around his pain.
Juliet was down on one knee, her face a mask of blood but her guard still up despite the terrible damage
