A Quantum Mythology (50 page)

‘I don’t really understand why you’re here. Nobody cared about these people before I started killing them.’

They reached the second floor, and suddenly something was falling down the stairwell towards them. Both of them tensed, but neither fired. The armed-response-officer’s corpse plummeted past them, bouncing off the guard rails and the bodies strapped to them. It hit the concrete at the base of the stairs with a wet thump and a splash of blood. Du Bois glanced down. Grace continued looking up the stairwell, watching for movement. Du Bois noticed that the pins and spoons were missing from several of the stun grenades on the police officer’s body.

‘Grenade!’

Both du Bois and Grace moved to the wall, crouched down and turned away from the stairwell. Du Bois closed his eyes, but even then the bright phosphorescent light still leaked through his lids. The noise was deafening, like thunder running up and down the stairwell, rattling doors and shaking the bodies tied to the railings. Augmented eyes and ears compensated for the light and the deafening noise almost immediately. Du Bois couldn’t quite understand the play. He ran the last few moments back in his head. Then he realised the filtering effect on his hearing had allowed him to pick up something interesting, even under all that noise: glass breaking somewhere above him.

He ran past a startled Grace and pushed his way through one of the doors into a corridor with flats on either side. He heard the throaty roar of a powerful engine starting up. The Mercedes Sprinter. He reached the window at the end of the corridor, which looked out over the same side of the building where the unusual van had been. Grace was right behind him. He smashed the window and leaned out – the van was moving beneath him now. He aimed the .45 and started firing it rapidly, expecting to be taken out by an overzealous police marksman at any moment. The bullets sparked off the top of the van as it sped across the grass. The van was armoured. The slide flew back on the .45, its magazine empty.

‘Coming through!’

Du Bois stepped back and away from the window as Grace hurtled past him and smashed through the remaining glass, dropping forty feet to the ground below. He heard her cry out in pain as she landed on the grass, but she rolled and came up firing short bursts from each of the converted, fully automatic Berettas. She was limping after the van as she fired, but the bullets were sparking off the speeding vehicle’s armour.

Du Bois steeled himself and then leaped out of the window. While he was in mid-air the police woke up and started firing at the van as well. They were pouring bullets onto the vehicle, but none of the rounds penetrated the armoured body.

Du Bois hit the ground hard, a jarring impact that rattled his teeth and momentarily knocked the air out of him. He tried to roll but felt something give in his leg. Pain shot up the right side of his body. Grace dived and rolled back to her feet, moving close to the wall as rounds fired by the police chewed up the ground where she’d been standing a moment before. Du Bois was trying to get to his feet as his systems attempted to heal whatever the fall had done to his leg. A solid impact to his right side spun him around even as his clothes hardened sufficiently to stop the bullet penetrating.

He managed to stagger over to the wall next to Grace, who was busy reloading both of her pistols. Du Bois ejected the magazine on his .45, pocketed it and replaced it with a new one, working the slide to chamber the first round.

‘I’m ready to start shooting police officers now,’ Grace muttered through gritted teeth.

‘Maybe not with so many cameras here,’ du Bois suggested, though he agreed with the sentiment. There was shouting from the police lines, more gunfire, screams from the crowd, then a crashing noise and the unmistakable sound of panic, followed by the cries of the injured.

Du Bois’ leg had repaired itself by now, and he risked running across the grass towards the Range Rover. Grace followed. She wasn’t limping anymore either. The police didn’t fire on them. They had other things to worry about – the Sprinter van had just crashed into the police cordon. The power of its obviously modified engine and the weight of the vehicle had sent a police van and a police car hurtling backwards into the assembled crowd.

Du Bois watched the Sprinter heading east along Druids Lane towards Alcester Road South.

‘Security services. Don’t fire!’ du Bois shouted as he and Grace sprinted for their respective vehicles. At the same time he was requesting a direct satellite feed to be downloaded straight to his head from Control.

By the time du Bois reached the Range Rover, hauled the door open and scrambled in, the van was already out of sight. Grace sped by him on her Triumph Speed Triple, accelerating so hard that the front wheel had come off the ground. She was pushing her weight forwards, wrestling the bike back down.

Grace was also receiving the satellite feed direct from Control, which amounted to grainy footage of the Sprinter as it cut across the roundabout at the junction with Alcester Road South. It looked like the van had collided with a number of vehicles and just kept going.

Grace rode at speed through a tangled warren of streets, trying to cut ahead of the Sprinter, leaning low into the corners.

The Mercedes van drove through the rest of the traffic on the road as if it wasn’t there, the vehicle’s weight and power easily shunting the other vehicles out of the way as it used the heavy-duty winch mounted on the front like a battering ram.

Grace wove in and out of the carnage the van was leaving in its wake as it headed north, back towards the city centre. She slewed the bike onto one of the streets that ran alongside Alcester Road South, pulled parallel with the van and glanced over the grassy bank towards it. The cab’s windscreen and windows were tinted.

Grace didn’t notice the hatch in the van’s side window drop open until she saw the muzzle flash from the three-round burst and felt the impact on her helmet, shoulder and side. Her clothes and helmet hardened, but she wobbled. Realising she was losing it, she tried to steer the bike towards the grass verge. Grace and the bike parted company. The bike slid across the grass. Grace did a half-tumble and landed high on her back, then followed her bike across the wet grass.

Du Bois mounted the pavement as he cut the wrong way across the roundabout. Both sides of the road were lined with dented or wrecked cars. He realised that unless he took a similarly blasé approach to human life, there was no way he was going to catch up with the van.

He saw Grace go down on the satellite feed. She would be fine unless the bullets being fired at her had a nanite payload.

‘Do you need picking up?’ he asked as the first flashing blue lights appeared behind him and he heard sirens.

‘Ow, and no,’ Grace finally answered. ‘The bike’s still running.’

On the satellite feed he watched her climb back on the Speed Triple, take off across the grass and drop back down onto Alcester Road South.

Du Bois’ route analysis finished. He slewed the Range Rover hard right, off Alcester Road South, and accelerated. Moments later, he turned hard right onto a residential road that ran parallel with the Alcester Road. He continued accelerating, overtaking cars and forcing oncoming vehicles to brake hard.

The bike had lost one of its mirrors, the paintwork was messed up and, most worrying, one of the handlebars was a little bent, but it was still running. Grace wove in and out of busy traffic and the multiple car accidents the Sprinter was leaving behind it. She watched it hit an oncoming car head-on not far in front of her. The car’s momentum was halted, then reversed, and it flew backwards into a shopfront. The van sideswiped a double-decker bus and made it wobble. It was still wobbling as Grace rode by. She knew the van’s body was armoured. She was wondering about the tyres.

Grace pulled the bike out into the oncoming traffic to peer around the van, looking for an opening. The van moved to block her. Grace dropped a gear and then leaned in low, slewing the bike hard left, coming around on the inside of the van and then accelerating hard. The van veered hard left and tried to force her off the road. The side of the van touched Grace’s elbow and she took the bike onto the pavement. Startled pedestrians flashed by.

Grace reached inside her jacket with her left hand and drew one of her Berettas. The van half-mounted the pavement as it tried to crush her into the shopfronts rushing by. Pedestrians were diving into the shops to get out of the way. Grace accelerated as she fired a long burst at the van’s rear wheel, and then another at the front wheel as she overtook the Sprinter. The van closed the gap. Sparks flew and glass smashed as it scraped against the shopfronts, but Grace was already past. She leaned to the right, coming off the pavement and back onto the road. Grace aimed the gun behind her and fired off the rest of the magazine, mostly in frustration, at the van’s windscreen. Sparks flew from it, but nothing much else happened. If her shots into the wheels had any effect, she couldn’t see it.

In her remaining mirror, Grace saw a hatch in the front of the windscreen pop open and a gun barrel appear through it. She slewed the bike into oncoming traffic, weaving in and out as the driver started firing, the bullets ripping indiscriminately into the vehicles on the road.

Du Bois was driving the Range Rover at ridiculous speeds through narrow roads with cars parked on both sides, trying to catch up with the van.

‘I need more gun,’ Grace told him over their link. On the satellite and
CCTV
feeds, he watched her weaving in and out of traffic, taking fire from the van.

‘Seven-six-two and a grenade launcher,’ du Bois said.

‘We’ll need the weight of the jeep to force him off the road,’ Grace told him.

It’s not a jeep
, du Bois thought automatically. ‘Okay, I’m going to—’ Du Bois slammed on the brakes. There was a car in the middle of the road. Du Bois left black marks on the Tarmac but managed to bring the Range Rover to a halt just in time to avoid a collision.

Grace sped up, trying to put enough distance between her and the Sprinter that he would stop firing at her. There was too much collateral damage in the way.

The road was mostly clear ahead as she roared through a junction with a pub on the corner. More shops and pubs lined the road, but they began to look nicer, more upmarket, the closer they got to the town centre. She glanced behind her and was appalled to see the Sprinter catching up. She twisted the throttle, coaxing more speed out of the bike as she wove between the few other vehicles on the road. Grace knew she was the one being chased now.

Du Bois stared. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. The driver of the car had stopped to have a chat with a pedestrian. He leaned on the horn. The man in the car gave him the finger and the pedestrian laughed. Du Bois thought about showing them the gun. Actually, he thought about shooting one – if not both – of them, but he managed to control his anger. He moved the Range Rover forwards until it touched the rear bumper of the car and then accelerated. The Range Rover pushed the car forwards, building speed, until du Bois saw a convenient space among the parked cars on one side of the road. He turned the wheel and put the car through the gap and into a wall. He stopped, backed the Range Rover out and resumed his course.

There was a park on his right. He braked mounted the pavement and drove up a tree-lined, steep grass bank. He picked up speed, heading for the path, scattering joggers and dog walkers as he roared through the park. The armoured Range Rover hit the locked gates at the end of the path at speed and crashed through them.

Grace leaned down so low that her shoulder nearly touched the Tarmac as she turned onto the Belgrave Middleway, part of the ring road surrounding the city centre. She knew the Sprinter wasn’t far behind her.

It had gone wrong somehow. They were supposed to be chasing the van.

Ahead of her she saw a police car parked on one of the bridges that crossed over the road. She leaned low and swerved off the Middleway, heading up the ramp towards the bridge. There were two policemen, both armed – probably the only two armed-response officers in Birmingham who hadn’t been at Druids Heath. She assumed they were waiting for the Sprinter. Grace mounted the pavement and brought the bike to a stop right next to the railing. She climbed off and left it idling, then pushed up the visor of her crash helmet.

‘Gentlemen, I need one of your carbines and I’m afraid I don’t have time to argue with you.’

‘Miss, I need you to clear this area immediately!’ one of the officers said, walking towards her, hand held up. Grace closed with him quickly. She kicked up at his Heckler & Koch G36 carbine with sufficient force to break it in half, catching him in the chin, powdering bone and causing him to spit blood and teeth. Then she brought her foot down on top of his head in an axe-kick, fracturing his skull and driving him into the ground. His partner was already turning towards her, raising his G36. Grace closed with him and grabbed the weapon before he could bring it to bear. She yanked it hard, dragging him towards her by its strap. Still wearing her crash helmet, she head-butted him, breaking his nose, then pulled the carbine’s sling over his head. Grace was aware of the Sprinter getting closer. The police officer was staggering, pawing at her. Grace glanced at him irritably. She grabbed his Taser from its pouch on his webbing, pushed him back and Tasered him in the face until he hit the floor, twitching and drooling.

Grace brought the carbine up to her shoulder, which was a little awkward as she was still wearing her crash helmet. She aimed the reticle of the holographic sight at the Sprinter’s armoured windscreen, directly over the driver’s position. She fired short burst after short burst, but again the bullets just sparked off the glass. She continued firing as the van left the Middleway, heading up the ramp towards her. The magazine on the G36 ran dry, so she tossed the weapon. The van slewed around the corner and onto the bridge. Grace leaped on the bike as the van bore down on her. She put her right foot on the bridge’s railing, screaming as she pushed with augmented leg muscles. She managed to lift the bike up and over the railings and jumped moments before the Sprinter ploughed through the spot where she’d just been standing. The vehicle ran over the two prone police officers and smashed into their car. Grace and the bike fell twenty feet to the road and hit it hard. The suspension cushioned the fall but the impact still drove the bike up into Grace. Her teeth clattered together and a few of them broke. Blood filled her mouth, which she spat out as the impact forced the wind out of her. She knew she’d torn something in her leg manoeuvring the bike over the railing. She’d also heard something crack on the bike as it hit the road, but the engine was still running as it bounced back up on its suspension. She heard the screech of tortured metal above her as the police car was rammed through the railings of the bridge and plummeted to the road.