Toys

Chapter 70

A few minutes later, thoroughly chastened, I was in a speeding car with Lucy at the wheel. London continued to be a revelation to me, especially the tasteful blending of old and new architectural styles. This was such a refreshing change from monolithic New Lake City with its streamlined, very modern everything.

There was one disturbing similarity with the Elite world that I had known though: toys were all over the place. Both for children and adults.

“Plenty of those creepy little dolls around here. I guess a fad is a fad,” I muttered as Lucy drove us through the outskirts of London. Little Jessicas and Jacobs seemed to be everywhere. One of their tricks was to wave at cars and their passengers. I didn’t wave back.

“Look who’s down on toys all of a sudden,” Lucy said, giving me a sidelong glance and a chuckle. “You were having a pretty good time with one just a few minutes ago.”

“Let’s just look at the scenery, please… Now who, or what, are they?”

A gang of street punks, dressed all in black and carrying long iron crowbars, were hanging out on the corner ahead. When they spotted our official-looking car, they thrust their crowbars into the air, then tapped them menacingly against their palms. Very, very West Side Story.

“Smashers,” Lucy said. “They’re like Betas, except they specialize in destroying anything civilized: monuments, art, books, schools, museums, churches-of course-even cemeteries. The Elites pay them to do it, supply them with addictive drugs like wyre. That’s another fad sweeping the world.”

I nodded grimly. What she was saying would fit with the overall Elite plan-to degrade and demoralize humans in any way possible.

It was clear that they were succeeding too. While downtown London was well policed, parts of these outskirts looked shockingly like the human slums in New Lake City. We were the only moving vehicle in sight. The neighborhood people watched us with dull, wary faces.

The difference was that, back home, the ugliness stemmed from neglect and poverty. Here, as Lucy said, things of beauty were specifically targeted. The stained-glass windows of graceful old churches were bashed to splinters, stone walls were ruined by painted scrawls, park greens were ripped up by car tires, statues lay toppled, fountains and ponds were open sewers for waste and poisons.

The Smashers were always busy, earning their pay, having their fun.

The punks on the corner were starting to yell at us now, a monotone, three-syllable chant. “Sticks and stones! Break your bones! Sticks and stones! Break your bones! Sticks and stones!” Let me guess-“Break your bones”?

“They like to work people over with those crowbars-then hang them on hooks to die,” Lucy said. “Their idea of a good time.”

Suddenly, a bottle came flying toward the car provided to us.

My impulse was to jump out and feed it back to the scum who’d thrown it. I was armed now-the MI7 had given me a couple of compact pistols. But I reminded myself that Sir Nigel was waiting and we had to keep moving.

In the next instant, a second bottle exploded into a fireball, rocking the car from its wheelbase. A sheet of flame shot up beside my face. I could feel the heat through the closed window.

Another crude petrol bomb blew up ahead of us-then another. I swiveled around to look behind and make sure we were safe. We weren’t. The gang of Smashers was racing toward us, howling like werewolves and waving their trusty crowbars. More of them were pouring out of nearby buildings.

We’d fallen into an ambush, hadn’t we? There was no way we could make it through the alley ahead without the car being disabled-which would leave us on foot and at the mercy of this raging, hot-blooded mob.

“One eighty!” Lucy yelled in warning.

She stomped hard on the brakes and yanked the wheel around to bring us into a screeching spin. I clawed one of my pistols free of its shoulder holster and lowered the window. I aimed into the teeth of the nearest charging punk. “Get back, get away!” I yelled. He didn’t. He swung his crowbar at me instead.

I fired and his face dissolved, fragments of flesh and bone exploding like one of their petrol bombs.

I kept shooting as our wildly fishtailing car slammed into more of the screeching attackers.

“Watch out!” Lucy gasped, dodging as an iron bar bashed through the windshield. One of the Smashers had somehow gotten on the roof.

I threw open the car door, leaned out, and touched off a point-blank round that blew away the hitchhiker.

There must have been fifty more Smashers though, the nearest ones using their crowbars like grappling hooks to smash through windows and pull themselves up onto the car.

“Sticks and stones! Break your bones!” they screamed. As they swarmed onto the car like ants on a cricket corpse, rocking it to turn it over, Lucy pulled us out of the screeching U-turn and rammed the accelerator to the floor. The car lunged forward, with me still hanging out the door and snapping kicks at several snarling Smasher faces.

A second later, the car lurched free of the howling mob and streaked away from their fiery trap, reaching one hundred miles per hour by the end of the block.

I jerked loose a crowbar that was jammed in a window and raised it in front of the two Smashers who were still hanging on like leeches.

“You have one thing right,” I yelled. “Breaking bones is fun!”

They let go and tumbled away into the London fog.