In fact it was probably a time for running away, but I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of being run down from behind and trampled. As two burly men lunged for me at the same time, I ducked and crouched low to the ground, and their momentum carried one of them on past me, the other over my head in a graceless somersault.
That was it for tactics. A great many arms were clutching at me all at once, a great many fists pummelling at my shoulders and the back of my neck. I was hauled to my feet, then knocked sprawling again as the crazies got in each other’s way in their eagerness to claim a piece of me.
At that moment the shop window behind them – one of the few that was still intact – exploded outwards in a rapidly expanding flower of glass splinters which somehow, miraculously, gave birth to Juliet. She dived through the window head first, but rolled in the air and landed on her feet with a barely perceptible flexing of the knees. Then, having made her entrance and her point she strode forward with perfect poise, glass splinters pouring off her like water.
The crazies had turned at the sound, their assault on me slackening for a moment as they took in what was happening – and then for another moment, as they stared at Juliet and came to terms with her scarily perfect beauty.
Then the nearest guy swung a metal bar at her head. It wasn’t much of a bar: it looked as though it had been torn from a clothes rail of some kind, and it was probably hollow, so the chances are that it wouldn’t have done that much harm to Juliet in any case. But we never got the chance to find out: she ducked gracefully around it, took the guy’s arm at wrist and elbow and flung him backwards over her shoulder through the window she’d just smashed. Another man did manage to land a blow, with his bare fist, on the point of her jaw: she took it without comment and kicked him in the stomach, making him fold with an unpleasantly liquescent gurgle.
Without breaking stride she walked into the midst of the rioters, a cat among seriously unbalanced pigeons. They closed around her, hands and weapons raised, which only went to prove that they hadn’t really been watching when she came through the plate-glass window. It takes a lot to hurt Juliet; and then a lot more on top of that to slow her down. There were sounds of organic impact, truncated gasps and grunts, then the dull thunder of collapsing bodies as people fell like wheat around her.
There was a hypnotic fascination to it that made it hard to look away. But since the heat was off me, I reckoned I’d better put my time to some productive use. Turning my back on the scene of rapidly diminishing mayhem, I sprinted along the gallery to the section of railing that had been turned into an impromptu gallows. The man they’d been looking to hang was lying on his stomach on the floor, his hands and feet tied tightly and then an additional length of rope lashed between them so that his legs were bent back, his feet sticking up into the air. I used the loup-garou’s knife to cut this last rope, but the blade was too sharp for me to risk using it close to his wrists and ankles. I rolled him over on his back and hooked the gag away from his mouth. He was pale and sweating, his dark hair lank and his eyes exopthalmically huge. The fact that he was wearing a tie struck me as a piquant little grotesquerie: who goes to a riot wearing a tie?
‘The hostages,’ I said. ‘Where are they?’
He spat in my face. ‘You fucking piece of shit,’ he screamed. ‘Satan will ream your throat out, you degenerate bastard motherfucker! He’ll shove his fist up your—’
A little of that kind of thing goes a long way. I stuffed the gag back in his mouth and wiped away the spittle while he glared and grunted at me. ‘Not on a first date, pal,’ I murmured.
Hostage, hostage, who’s got the hostage? I looked around for inspiration. The news footage had been shot from the front of the building, out in the street, and that was where I’d caught sight of Susan Book’s face peering out through the smashed window. I tried to orientate myself, remembering which way I’d come in and which way the main concourse underneath me ran. It seemed that the front ought to be over to my left, where foot-high red capitals shouted T. K. MAXX to the world.
‘Where now?’ said Juliet, appearing silently and alarmingly at my elbow.
I got to my feet and pointed. She walked across the gallery without a sound and entered the store. I shot a single glance back to the scene of the earlier engagement: bodies littered the ground, and none of them were standing.
I ran to catch up with her. ‘Did you kill anyone?’ I demanded.
‘No. There’s one who could die from her wounds – one of her comrades slashed her neck and shoulder with a knife, trying to get through to me. The rest will live.’
‘Thank God for that,’ I said, dryly. ‘I was thinking you’d just turn up the heat under their libidos and melt their brains into slush. This was a little more . . . direct than I expected.’
‘I tried,’ Juliet snapped. ‘They should have been incapable of any aggression as soon as they saw me. They should have been incapable of anything except involuntary orgasm.’
‘Oh. So what went wrong?’
‘Perhaps I’m losing my touch.’
It wasn’t that. Even without looking at her, I could feel her sexuality washing over me like a warm, caressing tide. And I knew from terrifying experience how strong the undertow was in those waters. But I think we both knew the answer: the demonic miasma was all around us now, and it had been ever since we got up onto this top level. These poor sods were possessed.
Without having to discuss tactics we both shut up at this point. We were walking through the shop, which was eerily silent apart from the mournful echoes of police bullhorns from the street outside: our own footsteps were very effectively muffled by the clothes spilled from the racks and strewn on the ground. The rails and shelf units were none of them higher than about four feet off the ground, so we had a good view of the big open-plan area we’d moved into, but up ahead of us the store curved around in an L-shape which we couldn’t see until we got to the end of the aisle. We weren’t trying for stealth, exactly – Juliet didn’t have much use for stealth – but we didn’t want the sound of our conversation to drown out any warning we might get of a possible ambush.
Rounding the corner, we found ourselves right in the thick of the party. The wall ahead of us now was the front face of the shopping centre – windows from floor to ceiling, with the night pouring in through that ragged hole in the centre pane that I’d seen from the other side in the news broadcast. To either side of it, maybe three or four men knelt low or flattened themselves against the wall, peering out at the cordon in the street below as if they’d never heard of police snipers. Further away from us still there was a circular display area ringed with floor-level mirrors, which seemed to have been intended for trying on shoes: in this cramped amphitheatre, two more men, one armed with a baseball bat, kept watch over a small, terrified huddle of presumably innocent shoppers. That was all – and it looked like good odds except that one of the men at the window had a rifle. Long-haired and thickly bearded, he looked as he swung back the bolt and put the first bullet into the chamber like someone who’d accidentally wandered off from the set of Deliverance and found himself in an episode of EastEnders.
All heads turned towards us, and I glimpsed Susan Book in among the hostages. I also saw a man lying full-length on the ground, a bloody hole where his face ought to have been. Susan was sitting right next to this poor bastard: her eyes widened when she saw me, and she opened her mouth as if to speak.
I spoke first. ‘Hey, guys,’ I said. ‘Saw you on the nine o’clock news. Where do we sign up?’