Will felt the cold barrel of a Whomper pressed against the side of his head. He glowered at Peitai. ‘I will kill you. This world or the next: I’ll find you and I’ll kill you.’
Ken smiled sadly. ‘Guess it’s gonna have to be the next, buddy, cos your time in this one is up. Do him.’
The man on the end of the Whomper said ‘Aye, s-’ and then exploded.
29
Lumps of red meat spattered against the floor, an arm thudding off the side of the interrogation chair, then twitching where it fell. Blood dripped from the low ceiling tiles. The front of Lincoln’s Whomper hit the deck in pieces, like a bag of spanners, clattering and clanging against the tiles. Ken backed away, dropped his empty Screamer and dived through the mirrored door, slamming it shut behind him.
Will craned his head round to see Brian, cheeks freckled with dark red dots, teeth bared, snarling. The Whomper in his hands jumped and the mirrored door exploded in a whirlwind of shattered glass.
‘GET ME OUT OF THIS!’ Will had to shout over the deafening noise.
Brian looked through the gaping hole to the passageway beyond, then back to Will.
‘Cut me free! The bastard’s getting away!’
‘Arse.’ Brian yanked his boot knife out and sliced through the straps.
Will staggered to his feet as Constable Cat MacDonald burst into the room, her eyes sparkling like cold, feral diamonds.
‘Through there!’ Will pointed at the section of wall Ken had asked for instructions-where the observation suite had to be. ‘Kikan’s in there: Peitai’s boss. Bring the bastard down!’
‘Yes, sir!’ She grinned and the Bull Thrummer roared, turning the mirror into a fog of ionized particles. With a whoop she dived into the cloud.
Will knelt next to Jo. Her eyes were glazed, sweat dripped off her battered face. She was unconscious and Ken was getting away.
‘Look after her, Brian.’
He grabbed the Thrummer from Henderson’s headless corpse, and dived through the shattered doorway, sprinting after Ken Peitai. The weapon buzzing in his hands.
Left alone in the interrogation room, Brian crossed to where Jo was slumped in her seat and brushed the hair from her face with a gentle hand. Poor cow looked like shite, all battered and broken. The sweet, meaty smell of roast pork rising from her blistered arm.
Brian’s stomach rumbled…then lurched.
The whole thing was cooked from fingertips to elbow. No way that was healthy.
He whipped off his belt and wrapped it around her bicep, hauling it as tight as he could. It might not help, but it couldn’t hurt.
‘Don’t you worry, hen,’ he told her. ‘We’ll kill the fuckin’ lot of them.’
The passageway ran straight for about a hundred yards and so did Will, the Thrummer held out in front of him like a battering ram. He smashed through a security door at the end of the corridor and burst back out into the shuttle station, twenty yards down from the main doors.
The platform was still shrouded in heavy clouds of ionized dust from when Cat had decimated the power lines. The dirty white outline of a parked shuttle was just visible in the gloom, it’s tail lights blurry red balls in the fog.
‘Ken!’ Will made sure his new Thrummer was powered up and ready. ‘Where are you, you little bastard?’
Something moved in the murk and Will pushed the Thrummer’s trigger, whipping the dust into a frenzy. It blasted a hole straight through the cloud to the main entrance, tearing the double doors apart, making the fog there even thicker.
‘It’s OK, Ken, you can come out now. I’m not going to hurt you!’
The shuttle doors hissed open. The lights inside the car flickered on, and Will could just make out the a blurry shape frantically punching something into the destinator. As the car began to lurch forward Will pulled the Thrummer into his shoulder and stepped to the edge of the platform.
‘Oh no you bloody don’t!’
The assault rifle shivered in his hands, then let out a deafening howl-ripping into the shuttle’s rear end, turning a big chunk of machinery into crackling powder. But the shuttle was already on its way, building up speed as it powered away from the platform. It listed hard to one side and slipped off the maglev track, still accelerating. The nose dug a groove out of the tunnel wall and ricocheted back, twisting as it bounced over the guide rail and ploughed into the concrete on the other side. It scraped along in a shower of hot-metal sparks, shrieking against the wall.
The tunnel turned right, but the dying shuttle didn’t; momentum spent, it ground to a halt. The safeties finally kicked in and shut the whole thing down, leaving the car’s lights clicking on and off in emergency-warning orange. Darkness. Orange. Darkness. Orange.
Will walked to the edge of the platform and dropped down to the tracks, the Thrummer’s lightsight a solid bar of green in the dust.
Behind him he could hear Brian staggering through onto the platform. ‘Holy mother of shite…Will?’ He had Jo slung over his shoulder, her face covered with a thin film of dust and sweat.
‘He’s mine, Brian, understand?’
‘You don’t have to do this.’ Brian climbed carefully down to the tunnel floor. ‘I’ll slit the wee bastard like an envelope if you want me to. No one’ll ever know.’
‘I will.’
They marched towards the crashed shuttle, bathed in the on-again, off-again light of the warning beacons. Ken was inside, struggling with the door catch. A long gash snaked down one side of his face, spilling dark red onto his collar, saturating his shirt. With a final heave he hauled the doors open and fell out onto the tunnel floor.
They watched him struggle to his knees and then his feet.
Will powered down the Thrummer and handed it to Brian.
Brian frowned. ‘You sure this is a good idea?’
‘You don’t shoot him, you got that? You don’t shoot him unless he kills me and tries to get away. Then you blow his fucking head off.’
They could hear Ken talking to himself as he lurched away from the wrecked shuttle car. ‘No, no, no…’ One hand was clutched to his chest, the other held out against the wall, trying to hold himself upright. ‘Aw Jesus no.’ He slipped and fell sideways, bouncing off the wall as he slithered to the tunnel floor. ‘Why’d the old bastard have to do that? Aw Jesus!’
‘PEITAI!’ Will picked his way through the wreckage. ‘Told you I’d track you down.’
‘Why?’ Ken looked up as Will closed the gap. ‘Why’d he have to do it?’
‘Stand up, you piece of shit. Stand up or I swear I’ll kick you to death where you sit.’
Ken held his hand out for Will to see. Shards of glass glittered in his palm and through the breast pocket of his torn jacket.
He let out a weird, high-pitched laugh. ‘I’m already dead…’
It’s darker in the observation room: the light that bleeds in from the interrogation suite does little to banish the gloom, nor do the flickering monitors. There are no heartbeats or brainwaves for them to register; instead they twitch away to themselves, displaying nothing but static.
Pretty.
She steps into the centre of the room and sniffs: old leather, and bitter-almond aftershave, she can smell it even over the stink of ionized glass. The old man has been here.
She lets the Bull Thrummer drift around the room, looking for a target.
The place is empty, but it hasn’t been that way for long: the door at the end is still drifting shut. She sidles over and nudges it open with her foot.
Outside a corridor runs left to right with a pair of lab-coated women crouching at the furthest end, looking nervous and flustered, picking up printouts strewn across the floor-as if someone has run past and knocked them flying.
She’s so glad she decided not to kill Hunter when she saw him outside the hospital. If she had, she wouldn’t be here right now. And this is much, much more fun. William Hunter will kill Ken Peitai for her and then, after she’s caught up with her old friend Tokumu Kikan and given him his present, she’ll pay Mr Hunter a house call and say thank you in person.