Halfhead - Страница 53

‘Got it!’ Jo stood, a blood-soaked, tattered jumpsuit in her hands. She managed to get one leg into it before the elevator juddered to a halt and Will shoved her out into the building foyer.

‘What the hell was that for?’ She staggered against the wall as, behind them, the floor of the lift exploded upward. The unconscious body of the one-legged trooper jerked as round after round tore into it. ‘Ah, got you.’

Mr Duncan, the building’s night porter, came scuttling round from behind his brass and marblette fortress.

‘Fit’i hell’s ga’in oan?’

‘Get back behind your desk and keep your head down!’ Will ran for the front entrance, pulling Jo along behind him. ‘And call for help!’

They burst out into the street and the rain.

Jo struggled her arms into the jumpsuit. ‘Which way?’

‘There.’ He pointed across the street to the path that led away into the darkest depths of Kelvingrove Park. ‘We go anywhere else and people are going to get hurt.’

‘Trust me,’ she said, running after him through the park gates, ‘those bastards come anywhere near me, people are going to get hurt.’

Will was already soaked to the skin, his bathrobe flapping out behind him like a towelling cape. The Thrummer in his hands still had a good two-thirds charge left and he had another pair of power cells strapped to the webbing. If they could find some decent cover they might actually get out of this alive.

They hammered, barefoot, down the path, between hissing yellow orbs of light, setting off holo adverts as they passed. Will tried his throat-mike again.

‘Control, do you read me?’

The response was garbled-small spurts of words interspersed with waves of hard, white noise.

‘Anything?’ Jo was breathing hard now and so was he.

‘Jammer’s breaking up the signal. Backup might be on the way, but I don’t know how long it’s going to take.’

He looked back over his shoulder, just in time to see seven heavily armed troopers explode out of the front door of the building and screech to a stop on the pavement. For a moment it looked as though they might have got away with it…but one of the figures must have seen the chain of glowing adverts Will and Jo had left in their wake, because he pointed straight at them.

‘Bastard! We’ve got to hide.’ Jo grabbed a handful of Will’s soaking dressing gown and ran off at ninety degrees to the path, dragging him into the darkness.

Cold, slippery grass whipped at their shins, the rain and the night swiftly gobbling up the sodiums’ feeble glow. There wasn’t enough light to see his hand in front of his face, let alone where he was going. Will went down hard, twisting his ankle and slithering to a halt in the mud beneath a sharp-edged bush.

From his skewed vantage point he could see the assault team charging along the path like polished beetles, the sodium light glinting off their wet body armour.

‘Will?’

‘Shhh!’ he hissed through clenched teeth. ‘Get out of here. I’ll hold them back.’

‘Bollocks you will.’ She dropped down next to him in the mud.

‘We stand a much better chance if we split up.’

She shook her head, but Will reached out and held her face in his hands. ‘You need to go. You need to get as far away from here as possible.’

‘I’m not leaving-’

‘No you’re not. We’re just splitting up, that’s all. Making it more difficult for them to find us.’ His ankle was killing him: he was going nowhere fast and he knew it. ‘Once you’re out of the park, get on the nearest shuttle and go anywhere. Soon as you’re out of jammer range, call control and get a pickup team out here.’

‘I-’

Will pulled her down to him and placed a soft kiss on her lips.

‘Over there!’ The shout was followed by the high-pitched whine of a Whomper on full. It barked, blasting a chunk of waterlogged turf into muddy rain right in front of them.

‘Go!’

Jo didn’t need another telling; she picked herself up and charged off into the bushes.

Will pulled the Thrummer up and flicked on the light-sight. Its hard green line streaked out from under the bush, into the middle of the shouting trooper’s chest. Will pressed the trigger and the man’s torso evaporated. Four troopers watched, mesmerized, as the man’s shoulders slumped into his hips, before the whole grisly mess slapped into the path in a mist of red. When the green targeting beam leapt to the next one in line they hit the deck hard. But not before Will got off a second shot. The Thrummer growled and someone lost everything between their left elbow and their spine. The survivors scrabbled to their feet and ran for it, doing their best to get the hell out of there before Will fired again.

He picked one at random and stripped the skin off their back before the weapon chimed empty in his hands.

‘Three out of seven. Not bad for a half-naked man in a bathrobe.’ Will racked the Thrummer upright and shot the battery pack out into the mud. He could hear them crashing through the bushes on either side, trying to outflank him while he reloaded. With a grim smile he slapped the next power cell into the slot and cranked it up to speed. The telltales danced along the body of the weapon as the tines began vibrating inside.

The night lit up with a blue flash. Over to his left a bush was torn apart into its component molecules, the fragments of chlorophyll swept away in the torrential downpour. He took a guess at the source and swept the area with his Thrummer. Undergrowth leapt into the air, crackling with static electricity. The weapon’s roar filled his ears, shaking the teeth in his head as he swung it back and forth, decimating anything in its path. It was deafening.

He didn’t hear them coming up behind him until they were almost on top of him.

Will span round, the Thrummer coming with him, tearing its way through shrubs and earth, his finger still hard on the trigger. The first one into the clearing caught the weapon’s wake full in the face. His body ran on another step before it realized there was nothing giving the orders anymore and went down, fountaining arterial crimson into the rain-battered grass. The second trooper dived in beneath the Thrummer’s arc and slammed into Will’s chest, sending him sprawling into the bloody mud.

Something hard crashed into the side of his head, snapping it around. Hot yellow blobs filled his vision. The world span. And then someone clambered on top of him, straddling him, locking his arms against his sides, pushing him down into the quagmire. Pain burst across his scalp as the woman grabbed a handful of hair and forced his head back. Her fist hammered into Will’s nose, sending warm salty blood pouring down his throat. The next blow closed his left eye, smashing his head further into the mud.

He tried to heave the bastard off, but her weight was solid, pinning him, immobile.

The fist caught Will’s left cheek and he heard, with surprising clarity, a muffled ‘pop’ as the bone broke.

Will’s hands scrabbled in the mud, looking for something, anything to fight back with. His fingers brushed against a boot-the other trooper, the one with no head.

The fist hammered down again. Pain cracked through Will’s mouth as teeth snapped. He retched, blood exploding from his split lips.

A voice above him shouted, ‘Gah! You filthy fucker!’

Another punch.

Will grabbed the boot, working his hand around. Boot knife: please God let there be a…Bingo. He fumbled with the strap holding the knife inside its sheath. The handle was cool beneath his fingers as he slid the blade free. Head swimming.

Difficult to think.

Dizzy.

Darkness…

Someone was yelling at him, bellowing into his battered face, dragging him back to consciousness. He saw, through his one good eye, the woman on top of him curl her fist back again. Will rammed the boot knife into the back of her ankle and twisted till he could feel the hamstring snap.

A scream. The weight fell away. She rolled in the mud, clutching at the knife sticking out of the back of her leg.

‘You bastard! My fucking leg! You bastard! Agghh Jesus!’

Will rolled onto his side and vomited blood, bitter and salty. The roaring in his head came in waves, fading the world in and out, in and out.

‘You fucking bastard!’

He tried to move, but nothing worked. All he could do was lie there as the trooper struggled to her knees and dragged his fallen Thrummer out of the mud. Her face was pale, teeth gritted, eyes angry, dark slits, but there was no mistaking her. The first time they’d met she’d been wearing tribal scars and eclectic rags. The second time she’d been wearing casual clothing and talking to a man in a long black cloat. Big-boned rather than fat. Her ginger hair hidden beneath a combat helmet.

‘Fuck orders, you’re fucking dead!’

The telltales danced along the sides of the assault rifle, and a hard blue crackle filled the air. The lightning caught her square in the chest and Will felt the harsh roar of the Thrummer as all her muscles contracted involuntarily. Blue sparks fizzled out across her rigid body and then, with a wet splatch, she keeled over into the mud.

Will wanted to laugh, but all that came out was a rasping gurgle and one of his back teeth. Still alive. He lay there, bleeding into the rain-soaked earth. Then quietly slipped into unconsciousness.

25

‘What do you mean, you lost him?’ Ken Peitai stood in the darkness of the Hopper’s cargo hold, watching the monitor in front of him and not liking what he saw one little bit. He’d arrived with ten heavily armed troopers, to pick up one guy, and the useless bastards got their asses kicked. One dead in Hunter’s apartment, another unconscious. One in little pieces at the bottom of a lift shaft. Three dead on the path in Kelvin grove Park. One with no head in the bushes and another one out for the count. Only two left and they’d lost the God-damned target.