For a moment he thought they’d run over someone. Which would have been cool. They’d just leave a red smear on the concrete, King Jeremy thought. Then the van stopped.
Seat belts bit into Dracimus and King Jeremy’s torsos. Talia had been laid on the floor and was slowly being buried in hot shell casings, her head towards the back of the van. Now her legs bent and she almost stood upright against the back of Dracimus’ seat. Baron Albedo hit her hard as Inflictor flew into the back of King Jeremy’s seat.
There was the tinkling of spent cartridges falling to the floor. Then nothing.
Jeremy recovered first. ‘Is she all right?’ he demanded. ‘Is she fucking broken?!’ This could not be for nothing, he thought wildly.
‘She’s banged up but fine,’ a dazed Baron Albedo told him.
Du Bois had both feet on the brake as he tried to stop the Range Rover. The four-by-four left a lot of rubber on the road but stopped twenty feet short of the van.
Beth and du Bois looked in amazement at the tentacle sticking out of the road.
‘Is this normal?’ she asked in a small voice.
‘It’s really not,’ du Bois said, his eight hundred or so years of experience proving useless now.
There was the sound of more automotive carnage. On the opposite side of the road a large articulated lorry had jack-knifed in the road, blocking all four lanes of traffic. To du Bois’s eyes it looked like it had been done on purpose. A car swerved and shot up the bank into the air and then turned over. More and more cars hit the truck. One came straight through the lorry’s trailer. In front of the lorry a Portsmouth city bus was coming to a halt.
Something burst out of the side of the bus. It was moving too quickly to make out clearly, but it had a wedge-shaped head, looked armoured, moved like a predatory animal but was vaguely humanoid in shape, though with entirely too many limbs. Landing on the road, it leaped at the van.
Something hit the side of the van.
‘Hey!’ Baron Albedo said as Inflictor grabbed his Desert Eagle while drawing his own so he had one in each hand.
The side of the van was torn open.
Beth opened the passenger door of the Range Rover, climbed out and aimed the FAL carbine through the gap between the door and the vehicle. Du Bois was out of the other side, the Benelli shotgun in his hands.
Men and women poured out of the bus at a shambling run. There was something wrong with them. With horror, Beth realised that they all looked like the thing that she had fought in the greyhound stadium. Du Bois fired the shotgun again and again and again at them. The shotgun blasts were knocking them down but not killing them, but du Bois needed the nanite-tipped bullets in the .45 for the gunmen in the van. He was pretty sure they were the DAYP.
There was the sound of gunfire from the van. The six-limbed armoured creature staggered back but did not fall. There were cries of panic from inside.
The sliding door on the van’s passenger side slid open. Beth watched as the big one stumbled backwards out, firing a pistol in each hand back into the van. She started firing. Aim. Short burst. Correct. Short burst. Repeat. Round after round hit the big one with the inhuman face. She turned him red, firing so quickly that although they were controlled bursts it was almost like she’d emptied the entire magazine into him at once. He stumbled with every impact, bringing one of the Desert Eagles up to fire at her ineffectively. She ducked behind the door, reloaded quickly and then fired another thirty rounds in short bursts at him until he fell over.
Then the door on the other side of the Range Rover was ripped off.
Too many. The shotgun was the wrong weapon. He heard the rapid firing of the carbine from the other side of the Range Rover – Beth was holding up her side of things. He fired the last round from the shotgun and let it drop on its sling. By now some of them had made it to the van. He could make them out crowding around the van and dragging someone, presumably Talia, out.
The six-limbed thing turned and looked at him as if noticing him for the first time. At least du Bois assumed it was looking; he could see no eyes on the bony, ridged, fan-like head. It bounded straight at him with surprising speed. He only just got out of the way as the door where he’d been standing moments before was ripped off its hinges. Du Bois fast-drew the .45 and at point-blank range fired again, and again, and again. The entire magazine was gone in moments. It sprawled across the tarmac, leaking some kind of violet fluid. The .45 was smoking, its slide back. Du Bois stared at the thing. He’d used all the nano-tipped rounds he had.
Two more of them clambered out of the passenger side of the van’s cab. Unerringly Beth poured fire onto them as they tried to bring their weapons to bear. Driven by a cold rage, she was giving some thought to going over there and sawing their heads off with her bayonet when she had finished shooting them.
Du Bois ejected the magazine from the .45 and slammed in another. Firing from one knee, he started putting two rounds into each of the mutated people carrying Talia. They staggered and some fell, but there were too many and he had to be careful not to shoot the girl.
He stood up, ejected the magazine, reloaded and fired again, walking towards the bus, using a different approach now – shooting them until they went down. Two more hit the ground, but they were still moving. He suspected he was putting a lot of rounds into members of the Solent Sub-Aqua Exploration Club. Another magazine hit the tarmac as a new one was slammed home. He’d grabbed more magazines from the compartment in the back of the Range Rover after the gunfight in Old Portsmouth, but after this one he only had one more left.
The shot caught him in the shoulder, spinning him around. The ragged nano-fabric woven into the rags of his leather coat hardened, as did his skin. Had he been a normal man, the hydrostatic shock would have blown the limb off. One of the gunmen was firing through the rip in the side of the van. Du Bois turned on him, firing one-handed as he advanced, his left arm rapidly healing. Few of the shots were hitting but they had the desired effect of making the shooter keep his head down. When his left hand could move again, he pulled a fragmentation grenade out of his pocket and yanked the pin out with his right. He let the spoon flip off, his internal systems counting for him. Baron Albedo was firing as the grenade flew into the van.
The second was down but the third had made it to cover in front of the van and was returning fire. Beth was switching between suppressing him and putting more rounds in the two on the ground to prevent them from healing.
The van exploded. Beth prayed her sister hadn’t still been in there.
Du Bois had already turned and was sliding his last magazine home into the .45. The bus was beginning to pull away. He started running, trying to get an angle to fire on the driver. He risked two shots but they went wide. He fired the remaining six into what he was pretty sure was the engine block, but the bus kept on going.
He heard and his blood-screen told him that there was someone coming up behind him. He turned to see a man staggering across the tarmac, skin and flesh regrowing as he made his way towards him. Du Bois grabbed the punch dagger from his belt buckle and rammed it into Baron Albedo’s throat. The blade of the dagger disintegrated into nanites that surged through Albedo’s systems, quickly overcoming the young man’s own nanite defences as they sought ways to kill him.
Baron Albedo, aka Clifford Sharman, had once been a nice kid from a little town in north-western Idaho who got picked on for being clever. He died on a stretch of motorway a long way from home.
Du Bois holstered the .45, ran back to the Range Rover and jumped into the driver’s seat, throwing the shotgun in the back. A lot of the mutated people he’d shot were starting to get up. He could hear sirens and there was a helicopter in the air above them. Du Bois prayed it was police and not media.