Jade shifted the gear stick into reverse and swung the wheel hard right to back round the pillar, aiming her rear bumper at the pseudo-woman. The sudden movement, then the impact, threw John round in the rear compartment, like so much loose cargo. Jade braked hard, ground the engine into first gear, spun the wheel left, and took off.
As she drove out of there like a devil bat flying out of Hell, the vicious liquid-metal animal went with them, in the back of the van, attacking savagely. John drew his .45 and emptied it into the pseudo-dog, deafeningly in the confined space. Anton managed to kick it out of the van, and Selena slammed the sliding door with a satisfying crunch. Still the alarm sounded and a group of cops burst into the car park behind them, guns at the ready. As Jade reached an exit ramp, a laser beam hit them, going through the back of the van, and missing John's head by an inch.
Anton fell back into a corner, barely conscious. Willi the wounds and injuries he'd sustained, he should have been dead long ago. Selena crawled over to tend to him. As John looked for ammunition in his backpack, to reload the 12-gauge, Jade took a hard left onto the ramp. Momentarily, a concrete wall protected them from more laser fire or anything the cops might do. They roared to the top of the ramp, Jade wrenching the van round a series of V-angles, then slamming the brakes.
The car park exit was blocked by a metal grill. John would have looked for the controls, but Jade simply plowed the van into it. Hard. She backed up quickly, then drove forward again, hitting the grill and smashing something in its mechanism. On the third try, they got partly through, as the grill started to twist and break away, tilting outward, but it scraped the van's roof and held them in place. All this was taking too long. Selena smashed out the van's back window and snatched the 12-gauge from John's hands as soon as he finished reloading. She aimed and fired. Once. John couldn't see what she was shooting at, but he had a fair idea.
Jade hammered down the accelerator, and the van pounced forward once more, its roof bending where some of the grill had jammed. They were shaken around in the back, trying to hold onto objects or parts of the cabin. The front screen shattered, and they rocked back and forth, stopped momentarily. Wheels spun on the concrete. With a tooth-grinding scrape of metal, the van broke through. Jade lost control as they hit the street, and careered onto a footpath. She steered into the spin, steered out again, got them back on the road, swiping a trashcan as she went. She worked up through the gears like a racing driver.
Selena hit the floor. "Down!" she said.
John stretched on his stomach, head toward the front. A second later, a laser burst went straight through the body of the van, burning the passenger seat up front next to Jade. It must have passed close to her, but she never slowed or reacted.
"Trouble ahead, everyone," Jade said. "Brace yourselves." She swung the van hard right, cutting across a footpath. "We had some police cars trying to stop us."
John sat up, looking out the windows, trying to make sense of what had happened. It looked as if they'd entered a T-intersection, and Jade had taken them down the pedestrian pavement instead of the road. She swung the wheel again, narrowly avoiding a guy unlocking the door of his shop, then got back on the road and crushed the accelerator to the floor. A moment later, there were more cops on their tail.
In the corner, Anton groaned, then managed a faint smile. "Mark my words," he said. This is going to be a long night."
A van like this had heavy steering. You had to bend over the wheel, pulling it towards you, but Jade controlled it with an ease that implied immense strength. As the police pursued them, she weaved through the huge city's labyrinth of streets, past its rich jumble of shops, houses, churches, squares, colonial and modern architecture, proud public art, and seedy alleyways with trash and beggars. She managed the traffic, or any other obstacle that came her way as if she had a sixth sense.
But the police wouldn't let go of them easily. A harsh thrumming followed them and a powerful spotlight focused down from overhead.
"We've got a chopper tailing us," Sarah said.
Jade didn't look back. "I realize that, Ms. Connor."
"Jade," Danny said, "we've still got the same problem. We need to get rid of this van."
"I know. It's conspicuous, and the police have its registration."
"Worse than that," Sarah said. "If the police have it, that Terminator will get it."
She glanced at John, who said, "Trust us. We've had some experience in this kind of situation." Rummaging in his backpack, he found a spare magazine for Sarah's assault rifle and passed it across to her. Quickly, he swapped the magazine over.
"That makes sense," Danny said. "See what you can do, Jade."
"You can all assume I'm working on it," Jade said. She sounded slightly sarcastic, though so controlled it was hard to be sure. She swung the van hard into another alleyway, and a police car went past. Then she picked up a one-way street, placing the van neatly into the line of flowing traffic. John's wristwatch showed it was just past 4.00 a.m. Some traffic was starting to build on the roads. For the moment, they'd lost the police cars, but the chop- , per was still overhead. As long as it could follow them, , they'd never be clear of the cops.
John took stock as Jade drove straight for a couple of miles. They still had Baxter's corpse to deal with. He didn't know what the Specialists would want to do with it, but he wasn't happy with it there in the back of the van. All the same, that was probably the least of their worries right now.
"So what's the deal?" Sarah said quietly, looking Danny's way. "Are we still trying to stop Judgment Day, or what?"
"Something like that," he said.
"All right. That's all I needed to know. Desperate times make desperate measures." Sarah crawled to the back of the van and aimed the CAR-15 in the air, through the broken window. She fired upwards at the police chopper. "It's backing off," she said. "They probably think we're mad enough to shoot them down." She fired off another burst. "In fact, if everybody's going to get killed anyway, maybe we are."
Jade found a narrow street on the left, kicked the brake down, and got them round the corner somehow, rear wheels sliding. She straightened out and headed for a big Liverpool department store car park, checking it out. The car park was closed, so she cruised on past, looking for a better opportunity. Behind them, the police chopper was getting noisier again. There'd be more cops any second now.
"Hang on, please," Jade said. She drove to the right, onto the pavement, then plowed into the shop's locked doors, shattering the glass and setting off more alarms. The van careered through the dimly lit space of a cosmetics department, smashing counters and displays.
"Great," John said. "This'll sure attract attention."
"It doesn't matter," Jade said with a strange certainty. "Everyone, get out. Now." She wrenched her door open-it was jammed where the metal had deformed while they'd been escaping from the car park. The sliding side door was also jammed and it took too long to force open. Selena smashed the last of the rear glass and they climbed from the vehicle, maneuvering Baxter's body as carefully as they could. John retrieved his 12-gauge.
They followed Jade up a flight of stationary escalators, then another. She moved like a shadow past racks of CDs and videos. Softy glowing signs pointed them to an emergency exit As they ran, Anton leaned on Danny for support. Of the Specialists, Danny was the only one who was still unscathed, though Jade now showed no ill effect from her wound. While she'd been driving, she'd somehow grown stronger. Then again, Selena's badly cut body also seemed to have healed, even the parts that were worst mangled in her fight with the pseudo-dog. She was covered in blood, but nothing like you'd expect from the way it had savaged her.