Revenger

36

As Mark Adams would happily have pointed out, given the opportunity, British soldiers spent hundreds of years standing and waiting for their enemy — from the thin lines of archers charged by French knights in armour at Crécy and Agincourt, to the small band of men confronting thousands of Zulu warriors at Rorke’s Drift. They stood and waited… and waited some more… waited until the absolutely final possible second before unleashing their arrows and bullets. Now Carver stood in a corner of the Lion Market, close by the storeroom door, with one of the shelves for shelter. And he waited.

From where he stood, he had no view through the shutters, but he did not need it. He could hear the garbage truck’s engine revving, and the shouts of the crowd. He sensed the noise coming closer and the vibrations of the truck’s tyres and engine through the floor. Louder and louder the noise became as he told himself to stay calm, breathe steadily and maintain control of his pounding heart and the rush of blood and adrenalin through his body.

Closer… louder… his guts and throat tightening…

And then the truck hit the shutters with a crashing, clanging scream of metal, and smashed through the flimsy perforated steel like a charging rhino through a mud hut. Carver screwed up his eyes as the truck’s headlights cut through the darkness of the shop, and the first rioters appeared on either side of the great steel beast, silhouetted against the blinding white glare as they picked their way through the debris.

There were angry shouts as the charging mass behind barged into the backs of the more slowly moving people at the front, and a couple of cries of pain as rioters cut themselves against the jagged edges of the smashed shutters.

A few more seconds passed. The red digital readout of the microwave timer kept counting down towards zero. More light, fine flour pumped out into the air around the air-conditioner.

Then the wave of people broke upon the shore of the supermarket and suddenly the rioters were coming in by the handful, then tens of them, filling up the aisles, pressing towards the corner where Carver stood concealed behind his shelf.

They thought the shop was empty. They thought it was theirs for the taking. Now they were whooping and cheering, and the only thoughts they had of fighting came from the desire to barge one another out of the way as they raced for the shelves where the alcohol was kept.

Someone fired another gun, glass shattered and an angry voice shouted, ‘Not now! Kill the shopkeepers first!’

The skirmishing around the booze racks broke up as the mood in the shop changed once more. ‘Kill them!’ the voice shouted again.

In his ears Carver could hear the sound of Schultz, breathing heavily, swearing in pain and fighting fury as he and Ajay Panu fought to hold back the human tide by the back door.

Still Carver waited.

Finally, when the rioters were almost close enough to touch, when he could not only see and hear them but smell them, too… finally Carver stepped out from behind the shelf and fired three more times. Each explosive impact of hammer on cartridge was followed by the sound of another round being pumped into the breech in a smooth, relentless sequence. His targets were all male, none more than ten feet from where he stood, and this time he shot to maim, rather than kill instantly.

A twelve-bore cartridge, fired at a distance of less than five metres, can rip an arm right off. And when that happens, the sight of a man with blood spurting from his raw, tattered stump doesn’t look half as funny as it might do on a video game, or in a scene from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. Nor does even the most hardened, psychologically damaged street kid react well to being hit in the face by a severed limb.

The screams of a man whose stomach has just been blown away and whose entrails are unravelling in slimy coils across a linoleum floor strike fear into any heart. And when there are two of them lying howling in front of their mates, and a third is running around, screaming, like the human answer to a headless chicken, and people are shouting out in alarm because there’s blood all over their face, or they’re slipping on the intestines underfoot, then even the biggest, angriest crowd can be seized by confusion, chaos and panic.

And in that chaos Samuel Carver slipped through the door behind him and into the second battle that was going on inside the storeroom.