I shook my head. I’d have dearly loved to get my own clothes back, but I had no idea where Basquiat would have stashed them. I was just going to have to get by.
Po loomed over me, and Zucker flicked him an appraising glance. ‘You know that Olympic event where people walk really fast?’ he asked me.
‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘Well, that’s what you’ve got to do. If you run, my friend here is apt to knock you down, step on your head and rip your guts out. It’s his way. But we are in a hurry. So – as fast as you can without running.’
Zucker turned and led the way out of the room. I followed, and Po brought up the rear like a walking wall. Except that walls mostly have graffiti rather than spines, fangs and slavering jaws.
The other cop was slumped out in the corridor, the scattered pages of a pink racing paper bearing silent witness against him. Not that he’d have had a much better chance if he’d seen the loup-garous coming: I had a suspicion that you’d need something on the scale of a howitzer even to slow Po down.
The alarms were still screaming, filling the air to the exclusion of everything else. I was sort of assuming that they were a default distress signal, but I realised as we reached the short flight of steps at the end of the corridor that the building was actually on fire. At least, the level below us was full of smoke that hung heavily in the air in visible layers, and there was an acrid chemical smell that took a lot of the fun out of breathing.
We came down into an open space lined with chairs – a waiting area of some kind for one of the Whittington’s specialist units. Zucker hesitated, then pointed to the far side of the room and headed off in that direction. I followed, at a constrained jog-trot. I didn’t want Po trampling me under from behind, and I wanted still less for him to get a mental image of me as a rubber bone.
There were three sets of lift doors in a row. Zucker pressed the DOWN buttons on all three, and the middle one slid open immediately. Po pushed me forward and I staggered in. Zucker glanced off to left and right, then backed in himself and hit the ground-floor button.
‘If the power goes, we’ll fry in here,’ I told him, the thought genuinely making my stomach turn over slightly: I’ve got just a touch of claustrophobia that surfaces every now and again when I’m in enclosed spaces with semi-human monsters that smell like old, damp carpets.
‘Not a problem,’ Zucker said tersely. ‘Trust me.’
The doors slid open again and we came out fast into a wide corridor, Zucker still taking point. The ground floor was like some kind of vision of Hell. The smoke was thicker here, shutting my line of sight down to my own arm’s length, and the chemical stench was worse. There were a whole lot of other sounds now beneath the wail of the alarm: screams, shouted orders, the scrape and thud of booted feet. No footsteps from behind me, though: I looked round, and saw that Po’s feet were as bare as mine. The last vestiges of his clothes had sloughed away now, and with them whatever laughably slim chance there’d been of him passing for human. Even if he got his errant flesh under control, he’d be stark bollock naked.
I collided with a wheelchair that was just sitting in the corridor and almost went over on my face. Po snarled warningly: he clearly took my breaking stride as a provocative act. ‘How are we getting out of here?’ I called out to Zucker, who was a good few yards ahead of us on account of not having to worry about losing major limbs and organs.
‘Trust in God,’ he suggested. I looked at him curiously, but he was forging on down the broad corridor without looking behind, so that all I could see was the back of his head. There was no trace of irony in his tone.
‘Not usually an option for me.’
‘But now you’re in His hands.’
A pair of large doors were in front of us. Zucker kicked them open and went on through, into an atrium of some kind. The higher ceiling made the fumes dance in hypnotic convection currents like curdled milk in coffee. My head was spinning, my stomach heaving. Neither of the loup-garous seemed to be affected at all.
I lost sight of Zucker almost at once, but he hadn’t gone far. When I stepped through after him his hand shot out of the fug and gripped my wrist. His voice sounded close to my ear.
‘Stay close to me,’ he muttered. ‘If we have to leave you behind, we’ve been told it’s okay to kill you. Po is hoping it pans out that way, but I prefer to stick to the script as far as possible.’
It occurred to me to wonder what Zucker looked like when he made the change into his animal form. He obviously had a lot more self-control than his partner. I decided that I didn’t want to be around when that self-control snapped.
He hauled me after him into the thunder-grey semi-dark. I presumed that Po was still with us, but I couldn’t see him any more. I couldn’t see anything. It seemed like the whole place was ablaze, although I suddenly realised I hadn’t seen any flames not felt any heat.
Suddenly a face loomed out of the smoke: a security guard, in full uniform, wielding a futile torch that did nothing but reflect off the churning billows. The guard saw us as we saw him, and opened his mouth to yell.
Po leaped more or less directly over my head, landing full on the guy’s chest. He went down hard. Then Zucker was on top of Po, grappling with him. ‘Leave him!’ he snapped. ‘Leave him, brother! Let God find him out! Let God judge!’ There were grunts, and scuffling, and then a full-throated roar from Po.
For a moment I thought I could give them the slip. That would have made life a lot simpler. But stepping sideways in the stinking gloom, with the shrilling of the alarm still jangling my thoughts, I bumped straight into a wall. Then the alarm stopped, abruptly, leaving the appalling vacuum of silence to rush in and claim the space where it had been. After-echoes died away and were swallowed in the deadening fog.
Zucker’s arm clamped down on my shoulder, whatever altercation he’d had with Po presumably settled.
‘It’s this way,’ he said, with an undertone of warning.
We moved forward. There was something cold and granular underfoot: for a moment I wasn’t sure what it was, then I heard the crunch from under Zucker’s boots and realised that I was walking on broken glass. ‘Fuck!’ I protested. Zucker hissed me silent. My voice sounded indecently loud in the sudden hush.
Two eyes opened in the fog ahead of us: gleaming yellow eyes, about seven feet apart. An engine revved. Zucker waved, and the eyes flashed: headlights, on full beam. But we were still inside the building.
More indistinct figures were staggering through the gloom off to our right. Someone shouted, and I saw the flash of another torch beam. Zucker snapped his fingers and, before I even figured out that it was a signal, Po scooped me off my feet. He ran behind Zucker, around to the left, past the lights. The side of a vehicle slid by us, dull white, and two metallic clangs sounded one after the other. Then I was thrown down, not onto the glass-strewn floor of the atrium but into the back of some kind of van. The two loup-garous piled in after me and we backed at reckless speed, Zucker pulling the doors closed with a deafening crash, then swung around with a squeal of tyres.
‘Mach two,’ Zucker bellowed, pounding twice on the roof with the heel of his hand.
And we tore away so fast that I was thrown over onto my face again just as I’d finally managed to get up on my hands and knees. A siren gave a mournful, oddly truncated whoop-whoop-whoop as the driver shoved down hard on the accelerator, making the speed limit a distant memory.
I twisted my head around and took in the gurney with its wheel locks, the medical kit on the wall, the oxygen cylinder strapped down solid in its recess. We were in an ambulance. The sneaky bastards had hijacked an ambulance.
There was a third man lounging in a fold-down seat next to the gurney. He was stocky, with a pugnacious, peeled-red face and the kind of hair that – although long and even luxuriant – starts a good couple of inches below the crown of the head, leaving a shiny circular landing area for mosquitoes. He was wearing a biker’s jacket and a pair of torn jeans that looked as though the rips had all happened by accident rather than being installed at the factory, and he was holding a gun with a silencer so long it suggested desperate over-compensation. It was pointing at my head.