Pack Animals (15 page)

‘Do you think he’s been on an
offensive
driving course?’ asked Rhys. His teeth rattled almost as much as the contents of the glove compartment, where he’d stashed the MonstaQuest cards on his hurried departure from the mall. The half-drunk can of Coke from their earlier journey shuddered in its cup holder, slopping blobs of cola across the dash.

They sped along a wider stretch of roadway. A serrated row of white tick marks led up to the squat yellow shape of a speed trap. Rhys found himself stamping down with his right foot. He bit back a warning to Gwen, knowing it was futile. But he couldn’t help giving a little groan when the double-flash of the camera told him they’d been snapped.

‘It’s me that’ll get the ticket when they contact the leasing company,’ he grumbled.

Gwen cackled. ‘Like Tosh hasn’t had to hack the ticketing database before!’ She gave him the briefest of amused sidelong glances. ‘There was this blowfish in a sports car, liked nothing better than racing an MX5 Eunos along the Gabalfa flyover…’

‘I don’t know what to believe any more,’ Rhys replied. ‘I used to think all them alien sightings were caused by terrorists putting psychotropic drugs in the water supply. This morning I’ve seen a dinosaur eating a house in Rhiwbina.’

The Vectra skidded left through a red light after the Mondeo. Rhys could hear the blaring horns and glass smash of the cars they left in their wake. Gwen crunched the gears down into third, and cursed as the engine over-revved. ‘Oh, these boots!’

Rhys peered into the driver’s side footwell. ‘Bloody hell, Gwen!’ he shouted. She was still wearing those long boots with the big heels that she so liked, the pair she wouldn’t tell him the price of. ‘How can you control this thing in those heels?’

‘Didn’t really have time to change before I got in.’ Gwen jerked her head at the steering wheel. ‘Want to have a go?’

‘No need to be sarky,’ replied Rhys. He clutched at the dashboard as his fiancée skidded his car through another red light. A cacophony of beeps and crunches told him all he needed to know about what they’d left behind them at the junction.

Ahead of them, the red Mondeo cut a sharp right across traffic. Oncoming vehicles screeched to an angry halt. The Mondeo clipped the rear wheel of a drop-handle racing bike and catapulted its rider onto the pavement in a tumbling dazzle of bright Lycra. Rhys winced. His instinct was to stop, get out and help. Even before he’d finished the thought, Gwen had flung the Vectra through the gap in the opposite line of traffic.

‘Here we go,’ she said with satisfaction. She pushed the stick shift into fourth and accelerated onto the dual carriageway. Rhys glanced over at the speedometer, and saw they were roaring up to 80.

They were gaining on the tatty Mondeo. Even though their target weaved an erratic path through the traffic, Rhys’s new company car and Gwen’s confident driving had the edge. ‘Gareth is having to make decisions about what to do at every turn,’ she told Rhys. ‘We just have to keep pace.’

The Mondeo screeched onto the scrap of hard shoulder and vanished behind a high-sided fourteen-wheeler. From the TIR carnet and the registration, Rhys could tell it was a French camion. The rig wobbled and the strident horn resounded with the driver’s outrage and surprise. Gwen tapped the accelerator and sped around the other side.

Gareth had ploughed on past the truck’s nearside and down a slip road. They were going to overshoot and lose him. Gwen pressed hard down on the brake and pushed the Vectra into the path of the French rig.

‘Jesus, Gwen!’

The horn brayed again, but this time there was an accompanying shriek of heavy tyres on the roadway. The French driver slammed down on his brakes and wrestled with the monster vehicle to avoid a collision.

The Vectra bounced over the white chevrons between the carriageway and the slip road, and the Mondeo was in their sights again. Gwen calmly shot out into the junction roundabout. Rhys could still remember the smell of burning rubber from the truck’s tyres, and the sight of the driver’s madly staring eyes in the cab.

The Vectra cut a corner, and jerked harshly up a high kerb. The whole car bounced, the can of Coke jolted out of its cup holder, and the contents of the boot rattled and bounced against the rear door. The door of the glove compartment dropped open and the contents barfed out over a startled Rhys.

Gwen gave an anguished cry of shock. She twisted the wheel in an effort to regain control.

‘What’s the matter?’ bellowed Rhys, panicking and looking desperately around to work out what was happening. It wasn’t only the movement of the car that shook him.

‘Sorry, love!’ Gwen gave a whooping gasp of relief as the car levelled again.

‘I really thought we were going to overturn, or something. You scared me half to death there, Gwen.’

‘That can of cola,’ explained Gwen. She casually brushed the empty container into Rhys’s footwell. ‘Dropped into my lap, and it’s soaked right through. Just look at the front of my jeans!’

‘That’s nothing,’ muttered Rhys, calming down a little.

‘You should see the back of mine.’

Traffic was thickening again as they came into the centre of town. Rhys began to recognise the roads that led into Cardiff Bay. Gareth wasn’t afraid to veer onto pavements if that meant getting past a stationary vehicle. At one point he smacked against the Perspex and metal of a bus stop, cracked the transparent shelter and scattered a yelling line of people.

Rhys watched their quarry career over a Keep Left sign. The wheels lifted clear from the pavement as it scooted over the corner of a junction. With a high-revved whine, the car raced off towards the embankment. The Millennium Stadium peered across the river as the car jigged and danced madly ahead of them. That’s where I want to be, Rhys told himself. Watching the international. Not chasing around Cardiff as a helpless passenger in my own bloody car.

Gwen roared up behind Gareth’s Mondeo until they were right on his bumper. Rhys could see why the driving was more unpredictable than ever. Gareth was tossing back his long hair and raising something with his left hand.

‘Look at him! He’s using a mobile phone! That’s…’ Rhys was going to say ‘dangerous’ until he acknowledged how stupid that would sound. ‘That’s illegal,’ he concluded lamely.

‘Oh sure, Rhys,’ laughed Gwen. ‘Three points on his licence is
exactly
what he’s worrying about.’ She veered right as the Mondeo slipped into a side road. ‘And I’m not convinced that
is
a mobile phone.’

The thing in Gareth’s hand was filling his car with bright light.

Coming down the narrow embankment carriageway towards them was a huge, growling pantechnicon. Its blank cab front stared them down, the impassive bulk defying them to continue. The square shape of its trailer loomed behind the cab, and the hiss of its air brakes made it even more like a bull about to charge.

‘Ha!’ crowed Gwen. ‘You are going nowhere now, Gareth!’

The Mondeo’s nose dipped and its brake lights flared. Gwen’s leg jerked forward as her foot sought the brake, but the Vectra screeched into a short skid and smacked the rear of the car in front. ‘Aww, no!’ yelled Rhys as the bonnet crunched up.

The light from the Mondeo increased. Gareth’s head and shoulders were a stark silhouette in the brilliance. Rhys blinked, thinking that the brightness was hurting his eyes. And shivered.

It had got very cold all of a sudden. He could see his own breath.

With impossible speed, a thick, freezing fog surged around the car. Frost patterns began to craze the front windscreen. Visibility had dropped to only a few dozen metres. Everything outside was rimed with ice – lampposts, parking meters, the road surface. A woman laden with plastic supermarket bags twisted, skidded, and fell headlong on the pavement. Her shopping spilled from the bags and over the slick surface.

Rhys heard the Mondeo’s engine revving again. Gareth swerved the car hard right, his wheels spinning furiously to get traction before he jolted up over the pavement and through a low barrier on the far side of the street.

Gwen flicked on the Vectra’s lights. And gasped at the sight through the windscreen.

The pantechnicon was slewing towards them. The driver grappled with the steering as he struggled to arrest the huge vehicle’s progress, and the cab slowly twisted from side to side like an enormous animal sadly shaking its head in resignation. It wasn’t going to stop, and the Vectra was right in its path.

Rhys grabbed for the door handle, but Gwen grasped his other arm. ‘I see where he’s gone!’ she hissed. Put the Vectra back into gear. And bumped the wheels onto the far pavement and through the gap that Gareth’s Mondeo had made in the fence.

Behind them, the pantechnicon slid on its unrelenting journey down the iced roadway, crunching against street lamps and tipping them over.

Rhys’s relief was short-lived. The nose of the Vectra dropped, and the car breached the embankment barrier. The car see-sawed briefly on the edge, then careered down a steep incline.

‘It’s the river!’ he yelled at Gwen. His voice quavered as the car bobbled and rattled its inexorable way over the uneven surface.

‘I know!’ she snapped back at him. ‘Just look at it.’

The car plunged onwards, out of control. Shreds of bushes and skeletal branches clutched and scratched at the paintwork like talons. The fog around them gave the briefest glimpses of their surroundings. The chipped, angled embankment blurred past the side windows, changing from grey to green where the river had lapped and splashed up the base of the concrete.

A bone-crunching thump rattled Rhys’s teeth in his jaw. At the bottom, instead of a splash as they hit the water, the car groaned and crunched when it struck the frozen river. The Vectra’s engine whined as the wheels spun helplessly and the vehicle described a lazy circle on the river’s icy surface. A large white shape appeared from the mist. The car slowly twisted and, with a crunch of metal on wood, its rear smacked into the side of the object.

They had struck a riverboat. Incredulous passengers stared out through the vessel’s windows, probably as surprised to see Rhys as he was to see his company car crash into them. The vessel had already come to an abrupt halt in the thick ice, and its captain was hardly going to be on lookout for stray Vauxhall Vectras mid-river.

Rhys caught his breath, and peered at Gwen. ’The insurance claim on this is gonna look pretty bloody unbelievable.’

He could hear screams of terror from the riverboat behind them. Rhys turned in his seat to see why they were yelling. The passengers were wide-eyed, pointing at something beyond the Vectra.

Rhys twisted back, just in time to see a dark mass smash down on the bonnet. The whole car shook with the impact. A slavering head splattered the windscreen with spittle as it bellowed a bestial cry at the occupants of the car. Something like a bulldog, only the size of a Shetland pony, scrabbled to get at them, tearing the wipers and trim off the windscreen. Rhys jerked back in his seat with a bellowing shout of his own, unable to get far enough away from the thing. It was gonna break the window. It was gonna reach in and devour him with those terrible, foam-flecked fangs.

Beside him, in the driver’s seat, Gwen released her seatbelt, then shuffled and squirmed. Rhys was terrified that she was going to get out of the car. ‘Don’t!’ he cried. But he didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t know what to do.

The bulldog monster slammed its head down, and the windshield cracked right across.

Gwen reached forward, double-handed, and pressed a handgun against the glass. That was why she’d removed her seatbelt – to get at her weapon.

She fired twice in rapid succession, a double-tap. The explosive noise of the gun filled the enclosed car. The windshield shattered into fragments. The alien monster’s head dissolved in a spray of gore and pus, and the body dropped off the bonnet and disappeared from view.

Gwen burst her door open, dived out, and moved as carefully as she could over the ice to the front of the car. She aimed her weapon, and fired two more bullets into the unseen creature beyond the bonnet.

Rhys sat for a moment and gasped in a desperate breath. His ears still rang with the sound of the first two gunshots. He dropped his chin down on his chest and expelled the air in a shuddering exhalation of relief.

At his feet were the MonstaQuest cards that had scattered out earlier. He scooped them up, straightening them to return them to the glove compartment.

Gwen got back into the car. She was furious, and slammed the heel of her hand against the steering wheel. ‘Damn it. Gareth got away.’ In the icy cold, her exasperated words formed angry clouds in front of her mouth. ‘He abandoned the Mondeo near the opposite bank and hoofed it while I was dealing with that Mahalta.’

Rhys nudged her elbow. ‘Did you call it a Mahalta?’ He handed her one of the MonstaQuest cards. ‘This says it’s called an Antebellum.’

‘No, the last one we saw, Jack said it was…’ Gwen’s voice trailed off as she considered the oversized playing card. ‘Wait a minute… How can this be on here?’

‘That’s not the half of it,’ continued Rhys. He passed more of the creature cards to her, one by one. A Weevil. A bat-like creature. Something that looked like an angry diplodocus. ‘And there are these things called Element Cards, too, see?’ He watched her reaction as she studied them. Lightning. Sandstorm. Fog. Ice. ‘Too much of a coincidence?’ he asked her.

Gwen tapped the cards against her chin as she thought about it.

‘Never mind,’ said Rhys. ‘Fog seems to be clearing a bit now. There’s the Stadium, see? Blimey, I’ve wanted to have a trip down the Taff for ages. Didn’t think I’d be doing it in the Vectra, mind.’ He considered the icy river. ‘D’you think Green Flag will come out this far?’

‘I doubt it,’ laughed Gwen.

‘Told you we should have gone with the RAC.’

‘Look over there.’ Gwen pointed through the shattered windscreen. She was showing him where Gareth had abandoned his Mondeo.

‘I hope that little shit has got third party, because I am gonna sue his arse off.’

‘No,’ said Gwen. ‘I mean it’s sinking.’