Revenger

22

Netherton Street was nothing special: typical inner-London. It was terraced on either side in a random mix of red- and grey-brick buildings, bay-fronted and flat. Some of them were painted in faded pastel colours or dirty white, others were rendered. For a block and a half the ground floors on either side of the road were occupied by commercial premises — at least a third of them empty — with flats on the first and second floors. The Dutchman’s Head stood on the corner of a block and was painted dark green.

Paula Miklosko used the street as a short cut, the kind of rat run every Londoner knows through his or her own neighbourhood. As she first turned into it in her Suzuki Swift she wasn’t aware of anything unusual. She was too distracted by the pandemonium on the radio, the shooting at the O2 and Mark Adams’s amazing response, to pay much attention to what was going on around her. But then the first flaming bottle went arcing through the air and crashed on to the tarmac in front of her, and suddenly there was nothing else in her mind but the fire on the road — a fire that blazed despite the falling rain — and the prowling, hooded figures that had suddenly appeared out of the darkness all around her. As she slammed on the brakes, Paula caught the glint of streetlights falling on the blade of a machete. She saw a man with a length of iron piping walking towards the stationary car and realized that the teeth behind his wolfish grin were gold. She suddenly felt horribly vulnerable, knowing that the locked door of her car offered no protection, no sanctuary at all.

She had to get out of here right away.

She put the accelerator to the floor and rocketed up the road, not slowing for anyone, feeling a couple of glancing impacts as bodies bounced off the racing machine, ignoring the explosions going off on either side of the street and the brick that smashed against the windscreen and sent a spider’s web of cracks through the safety glass.

She had almost reached the far end of Netherton Street. She was so close to safety. And then a huge black shadow crossed her field of vision, blurred and indistinct through the shattered, wet windscreen. It took her a second that seemed to last an age to work out that she was looking at a massive garbage truck. And this was no insubstantial shadow, but a solid mass of metal. She was heading straight towards it. And when she braked as hard as she could her tyres just skidded against the rain-slicked tarmac and she found herself sliding helplessly towards that huge, unyielding, deadly cliff of steel.