These weren’t cars. None of them were cars. These were CARnivores.
I’d read about them, heard about them from other agents, but I had never seen one close up before, and had never wanted to. CARnivores are sentient, meat-eating cars with attitude. Some say they came originally from some other dimension, where cars evolved to replace humans, and some say they evolved right here, ancient predators who’d learned to look like cars so they could prey on humans unnoticed. They stalk the motorways, following tired souls who drive alone in the early hours of the morning. The CARnivores close in, cut them off from the pack, and then choose a secluded spot and force their prey off the road. And then they feed…
But what the hell were this many CARnivores doing travelling together in bright sunlight, in the middle of the day? I supposed even demon cars could be tempted by a prize like the Soul of Albion. My mission wasn’t a secret any longer; there was a traitor in the family, and he had sold us all out.
The CARnivores pressed in on either side, bumping me hard, first from the left and then from the right. The Hirondel absorbed the impact and just kept going. Sturdy old car. I could see dead men swaying in their driving seats, their eyeless heads lolling back and forth. Another CARnivore rammed the Hirondel from behind, jolting me forward in my seat. Two more bumps, left and right, harder now. CARnivores like to play with their food. The one on my left slowly opened its hood, the bloodred steel rising tauntingly to show me a pink glistening maw within and rows of churning steel teeth. It was hungry, and it was laughing at me.
Underneath the protection of my golden armour, I was sweating. I could feel it running down my face. I was pretty sure the living metal would be a match for the CARnivores, but it couldn’t do anything to protect the Hirondel. And I needed the car if I was to get the Soul safely to Stonehenge, still a good hour’s hard driving away. I could see the effects of the CARnivores’ proximity already manifesting in the Hirondel. Every part of the car looked older, dimmed, even shabby. CARnivores could leech the vitality right out of any car, aging it at an accelerated rate until it malfunctioned or fell apart from metal fatigue. And then the CARnivores would drive it off the road and feed on the driver and any passengers. CARnivores exist by draining other cars dry, but even more than that, they love their human prey.
They’re meat junkies.
The Hirondel had a lot of extra options built in, but at the end of the day it was still just a car and as vulnerable as any other. And the CARnivores were getting awfully close. They bumped and barged me from both sides almost constantly now, jostling me like bullies in a playground, just for the fun of it. Time to show them who was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla around here. I let my left hand drift over the Armourer’s special control panel. I doubted the EMP would work on the CARnivores, even if it had recharged itself yet; they were too different, too alien, too alive. So I used the rear-mounted flamethrowers instead. Twin streams of raging fire blasted out of the back of the Hirondel, and a thick rush of flames enveloped the CARnivore behind me. The demon car screamed shrilly, thrashing wildly from side to side as it fell back. The fires had taken hold, and the CARnivore blazed brightly, flames and smoke leaping up into the sky.
I hit my brakes hard, the Hirondel’s tyres screeching as my speed dropped by half. The two CARnivores on either side of me shot forward, caught unawares, and I opened up on them with the electric cannon mounted just above the front bumper. Pumped out at a thousand rounds a second, explosive fléchettes raked both cars, chewing up the demon metal. One CARnivore exploded, flipping end over end down the motorway before finally skidding to a halt. The other surged back and forth across the lanes, leaking long trails of blood and oil. I kept tracking it with both cannon until it too exploded, shooting off over the hard shoulder and embedding itself in the grass verge beyond.
Three down, three to go.
But the other CARnivores had had enough. They slowed right down and took the next exit, not used to prey who fought back. I swept on, checking my inventory. The flamethrowers had exhausted most of their fuel, the cannon were almost out of ammunition, but the EMP was fully recharged and ready to go again. I rummaged in my glove compartment for my maps. Now that my cover was blown I needed to get off the motorway as quickly as possible. Use the side roads and the roundabout routes that an enemy might not know. And I needed to stop and find a landline phone so I could contact my family, let them know what was happening. I couldn’t trust my mobile. My enemies might tap into the GPS. In an almighty cock-up situation like this, I wasn’t too proud to beg for reinforcements. And then the car’s alarms went off again, and I looked up to see elf lords flying towards me on their dragon mounts.
I should have expected elves. They’d sell the souls they didn’t have to get their hands on the Soul of Albion, so they could use it to destroy the humans who’d driven them from their ancient ancestral holdings. Not through war or attrition, but just by outbreeding them. The elves hate us, and they always will, because we won by cheating. I could hear their laughter on the wind, cold and cruel and capricious.
There were twenty dragons, and none of them were the graceful, romantic beasts of myth and legend. These were great worms, thirty to forty feet long, with wet, glistening, segmented bodies, and vast membranous bat wings. They forced themselves through the sky by brute effort, ugly and inglorious, their flat faces made up of a ring of dark unblinking eyes surrounding a sucking mouth like a lamprey’s. Astride their thick necks, on ancient saddles upholstered in tanned human skin, sat the elf lords and ladies. Beautiful and magnificent, vicious and vile, human in shape but not in thought, they rode to the slaughter with laughter on their colourless lips, singing ancient hunting songs on the glories of suffering and the kill.
They came straight at me, moving so fast they were over me and then behind me before I even had time to react. They swooped around, the hunting pack in full cry, and the lords and ladies threw lightning bolts at me with their bare hands. The bolts exploded in the road ahead of me, blasting out craters and cracking the surface. I put my foot down and kept going, swerving the car back and forth to avoid the larger holes. The dragons pounded through the air above and beside me, taking their time, enjoying the hunt. Seeing how close they could get to the car, without actually touching it. The continuous explosions of the lightning bolts were deafening, and the flaring lights were bright enough to dazzle me momentarily, even through the armour’s protection. I could hear the Hirondel’s engine straining. I tried to think what I had that could reach the elves and their dragons, safe up in the sky. A lightning bolt hit the bonnet of the Hirondel, blasting all the paint away in a moment, and the car slammed this way and that under the impact, swerving blindly across the lane divider and back again. Only the armoured strength in my hands kept the steering wheel under control, even as the wheel itself crumpled slowly out of shape.
A dragon and its rider came flying straight at me, only a few feet above the road. I wondered at first if he was planning to ram me, but then I saw him fitting an arrow to his bow, and I smiled. An arrow against my armour. Yeah, right. I reached for the switch to activate the electric cannon and blow him out of my way. The elf lord loosed his arrow. And while I was still reaching for the switch, the arrow punched right through my windshield and through my glorious golden armour, and buried itself in my left shoulder. I slammed back in my seat, crying out in shock and pain, and actually let go of the wheel for a moment to grab at the arrow shaft with both hands. It wouldn’t budge. The car skidded across the lanes. I tugged at the arrow again, crying out in agony, but I couldn’t move it. The extra pain cleared my head like a shock of cold water in the face, and I grabbed the steering wheel and brought the Hirondel under control again.