The door at the far end of the corridor burst open and the man with the yellow teeth came running through with a submachine gun in his hands. Without noticing the woman, he turned and entered the first door. The woman heard a girl’s scream and then a burst of gunfire.
She began to run. The man stepped back out of the room, the barrel of his gun smoking. He turned to walk towards the next door and then stopped in amazement as he registered a woman in a bra running towards him with teeth bared. It took him a second to react, but he soon brought the gun to bear.
“Rush a gun, flee a knife,” the woman muttered to herself as she barrelled forwards. The sound of the shots was deafening in the enclosed corridor, and she felt hot air stream across her right shoulder as the distance closed. Then there was a sharp sting in the same shoulder but she ignored it as she crashed into the gunman, flinging him to the floor. The bayonet clattered out of her hands as they fell. She wrestled with him for a moment and then, realising the madness of this, sat up, straddling him like a lover. Again he took a moment to react to this unexpected move, a moment in which she reached down, grabbed his gun, reversed it and used the butt to send the bones from his nose shrapnelling into his frontal lobe.
She leaned across him, grabbed the bayonet again then stood, blade in one hand, gun in the other. She checked the gun once, recalling Sanders’ tuition, recognising the vital parts. She pointed it at the chest of Yellowteeth and squeezed the trigger. A stream of bullets thudded into him.
The woman nodded, satisfied.
She heard a door open behind her and she spun around, raising the weapon. A teenaged girl peered out at her, eyes wide with fear. The woman lowered the weapon.
“You speak English?” she asked.
The girl nodded. The woman handed her the bayonet, and the girl looked at it in wonder.
“Take this,” said the woman. “Stick it in any man you meet who’s not wearing a uniform. Understand?”
The girl nodded.
“Good, now get everyone in these rooms into the dungeon at the far end. Lock the door. The keys are in the pocket of the dead man you’ll find in there. Don’t come out until the shooting stops. Can you do that?”
Again the girl nodded. “You’ve been shot,” she whispered.
The woman looked at her shoulder and registered a small hole at the top of her arm. She fingered it, and found the exit wound. The bullet had gone straight through and missed both bones and arteries. She didn’t feel any pain, though she knew that would not stay the case for long.
She turned, jumped over the corpse of Yellowteeth and ran out the door. She had wasted enough time.
She emerged onto a darkened dance floor with swing doors at the far right. She ran diagonally across it. As she reached the halfway point the doors swung open and three men ran in. All were in civvies and all carried guns.
Their eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness, so by the time they realised they were not alone it was too late. The woman sprayed the doorway with bullets and the men jerked and dropped. She kept running, jumped over them and flew out the swing doors, ready to fire.
Behind her, in the corridor where she’d killed Yellowteeth, she heard shattering glass as Cooper’s men came in through the windows. So now they were ahead of her and behind her. She gritted her teeth.
She had to get to Spider first.
She ran down an empty staircase keeping the gun aimed at the bottom in case anyone else came running through. There was another soft explosion on the far side of the building as she reached the bottom and turned to find herself facing another corridor and another row of rooms.
These doors were open. One, about halfway along, had a single bloodstained hand stretched across the threshold.
The woman walked down the corridor checking each room for survivors. Despite her focus, she knew she would have to help any wounded girls she found, even if that meant letting Spider escape. But Yellowteeth had been thorough. Each room held at least one dead girl, some as many as three. No-one was to be left alive who could testify against them. No witnesses, no descriptions. The woman reached the end of the corridor with something approximating relief and pushed through into the lobby bar.
A patch of darkness on the carpet was the only evidence that someone had been stabbed in the head here not so long ago.
There was a burst of gunfire from somewhere close, beyond the opposite door, then heavy footsteps on the stairs behind her. She scanned the room in desperation. Had they already captured him? Had the bastard escaped her?
Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of something that didn’t seem right, so she turned and realised that there was another door, slightly ajar, behind the bar. It was flat and featureless, disguised as part of the wall, which was why she had not seen it earlier. She ran to it and pulled it open, squeezing through and closing it firmly behind her. Cooper and his team would probably not see the door on their first pass, especially if they were still encountering resistance. If Spider had come this way, she would be the only person in pursuit for now.
The woman smiled, but it was not like any smile Kate had ever worn.
She scampered down the dark, narrow stairs. A small landing with another discreet door marked the ground floor, then the steps continued down into the cellars. The woman saw a glimmer of light ahead and slowed. He turned the corner at the bottom and found herself in a long, low featureless brick corridor, painted black. There was no light here, but she could make out a fading glow at the far end, betraying the presence of someone fleeing with a torch. She took off in pursuit, catching only vague impressions of rooms off to her left and right, each marked by a low, round arch and some brick steps going down into a chamber. The squalid cellar entrances smelt of blood, shit and fear.
The woman barrelled on through the darkness, turning the corner at the far end to find a dead end and an old metal grille in the floor. It was still open, and the glow of the receding torch seeped out of it. She did not even look down into the sewers before jumping.
She splashed into cold, lumpy water that came up to her waist. The sewer was a round tube of Victorian brick. The current was strong, swollen by the heavy rains, and the water swirled and eddied, trying to pull her feet out from under her. The floor felt slimy beneath her feet and she knew that if she lost her footing she would be in big trouble.
She held the gun high above her head and waded forward, following the fading light around the curve of the tunnel.
She had only progressed a few metres when she stepped into space, a breach in the sewer floor, like a pothole. She unbalanced and fell backwards, disappearing into the raging torrent and being carried forward at speed. She lost her grip on the gun. Flailing around in the darkness, she broke the surface once, twice, gasping for air as she hurtled along.
For the first time it occurred to her that she might die down here.
She lost all sense of orientation. Down was up, left was right. The water roared in her ears, she saw flashes behind her closed eyes and felt the dizziness of impending unconsciousness.
Then she hit something. Something soft, which fell ahead of her, and then she and this object were tumbling together in the water. Something hard hit her on the side of the head; was that the torch or her gun? Just as she thought she was dead, the water threw her out into a void and she fell, momentarily free, drawing ragged, desperate breaths.
She splashed down into a lake of some sort and fought to the surface. There was no light down here. The torch had gone. She floated there, treading water as it swirled around her, calming herself, listening intently, trying to filter out the sound of the waterfall that had deposited her in what she assumed was some sort of junction.