TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (15 page)

Then she saw her face. Becks. Only of course
it wasn’t Becks.

‘Jesus! You guys took your goddamn
time!’ the mall guard called out, relieved at the sight of five cops jogging along
the narrow service passage towards him.

‘These the two perps you called
in?’ said one of them. A police sergeant. He and one of the others were carrying
shotguns.

‘Yeah. These are them.’

‘They don’t match the
description our boys called in,’ he said, pumping shells into the weapon’s
breech. ‘Armed male and female. Both adults, both Caucasian.’ He looked at
Rashim and Sal. ‘These clearly aren’t them.’

‘But –’

‘Jason, take these two out!’

‘Yessir,’ said one of the
cops.

‘You give your details to him,’
he said to Sal and Rashim. ‘We’ll need witness statements off you
later.’

‘Right,’ said Sal.
‘Thanks.’

The sergeant stroked his chin thoughtfully,
his radio crackled with traffic. More cops on their way in. An armed response unit among
them.

‘We got several officers down in
there, sir.’

‘I know that!’ the police
sergeant barked. ‘I know that. Lemme think. Lemme think.’

Just then they heard the echo of a door bang
open, the slap of heavy footsteps on linoleum. Nothing Sal could see. It came
from around the corner, from where she and Rashim had just emerged
via the toystore’s stockroom some minutes ago.

‘Who’s that?’ whispered
one of the cops.

The footsteps echoed. Heavy. Even.
Measured.

‘It’s one of them!’ said
Sal.

‘Them? Who?’ The sergeant cocked
his weapon. ‘One of the shooters?’

She nodded.

‘POLICE!’ he called out quickly.
‘WE ARE ARMED POLICE.’ His voice rolled down the passageway and eventually
faded to silence.

The sound of approaching footsteps suddenly
ceased.

‘POLICE!’ he called again.
‘YOU BEST COME ROUND WITH YOUR HANDS UP!’

There was no reply. Just the sound of an
ammo clip being ejected and rattling on the floor. The
clack-snick
of a new one
being rammed home.

‘That don’t sound so
good,’ said the mall guard.

‘Just get these two civilians the hell
out of here before this turns nasty,’ whispered the sergeant.

The mall guard nodded. Grabbed Sal’s
arm. ‘Let’s go, folks.’

‘OK … OK,’ she
whispered eagerly.

The guard led the way. ‘Delivery bay
six is right up here. Just ahead,’ he said quietly. ‘We can exit that
way.’

He picked up the pace. Sal stole one last
glance over her shoulder at the huddle of police officers in the anaemic, turquoise glow
of the passage’s wall lights, checking their weapons and holding them up and
steady in the trained and engrained two-hand legs-apart stance.

‘Here, this way,’ said the
guard. He pushed open double doors that led on to an underground delivery bay.

As they stepped out, the mall guard holding
the swing doors
open for them, Sal thought she heard the police
sergeant call out one last challenge. Then, as the echo of his shaky voice tailed away,
the passage behind them suddenly sounded like a war zone.

7.37 a.m., 12 September 2001, North Haven
Plaza, outside Branford

Liam, Bob and Becks approached the RV
cautiously. It sat in the motel’s small forecourt on its own. Overhead the sky was
noisy with the
thwup-thwup
of a police helicopter, hovering above the pale slab
of the mall several hundred yards away.

Liam could also hear the sound of several
approaching police cars and ambulances coming from further up Interstate 95, brake
lights winking on down the congested road like a Mexican wave as drivers slowed to pull
aside and let them through.

Ahead of them, the RV.

‘Maddy said we should meet at the
diner,’ said Bob.

‘I want to check on
SpongeBubba,’ said Liam. ‘You think it’s safe?’ he added.
‘Maybe there’s another of them inside.’

‘I detect no idents,’ said
Becks.

‘Just a moment,’ said Bob. He
closed his eyes.

‘Why? What’re you
doing?’

A few seconds later the rear door of the RV
swung open and a yellow cube appeared on the top step.

‘Communicating with the lab
unit,’ replied Bob. He smiled down at Liam. ‘SpongeBubba says it’s all
clear inside.’

They crossed the last fifty yards, Liam
gesturing at SpongeBubba to get back inside. They didn’t need the lab robot
attracting attention. Liam climbed up and slumped down on the rear
seat, damp with perspiration.

‘Gee!’ said SpongeBubba with a
fixed plastic grin. ‘Fun and games!’

Becks looked down at the small robot.
‘No. Not fun and games. Danger.’

Bob clambered inside. The RV rocked.
‘Your warning saved us, lab unit. We are grateful.’

‘You’re welcome. Where’s
my skippa?’

Liam looked out through the scuffed perspex,
hoping to catch sight of the others weaving through the cars in the mall’s car
park towards the motel. Nothing yet.

‘They’re coming,’ he said.
‘They were just behind us. I think.’ He looked at Bob and Becks.
‘Right?’

Bob shook his head. ‘I don’t
know.’

‘Foster will have slowed them
down,’ said Becks. ‘He moved very slowly.’

She was right. Liam decided he should have
stayed behind, with Maddy, to help her with the old man. A dreadful thought occurred to
him. That those killer meatbots had trapped and finished both of them off. Perhaps
Rashim and Sal as well. He felt a growing surge of panic inside him. The idea of
spending the rest of his life alone on the run with two support units and something that
looked like a yellow bar of soap on stumpy legs terrified him.

Please … please … somebody else turn up.

Faith recognized the young woman instantly.
The oval jawline, the glasses, the curly strawberry-blonde hair, all a perfect match.
But even without the visual match the look of sudden recognition and sheer horror – as
their eyes locked – gave the girl away. Faith reached round behind her and whipped out
the handgun from her waistband.

‘Please move out of the way!’ she
commanded the evacuating people all around her as she levelled the gun at her
target.

‘
OH-MY-GOD-SHE’S-GOT-A-GUN!
’ someone screamed.

That worked better. The crowd, jostling to
get down the frozen escalator, dropped to the floor as one, and Faith had a perfect
line-of-sight on Maddy. The only person still on her feet.

Maddy pushed the large woman crouching in
front, desperately trying to get past. But the woman was too big to make a space on the
escalator. Maddy found herself clambering over her back.

‘Ow! Jesus help me! I’m being
assaulted!’ screamed the woman.

‘I need to get past!’ Maddy
replied. ‘I need to freakin’ well get –’

A shot rang out. The glass of the
escalator’s side exploded. The woman ducked down as shards scattered over her
rounded shoulders and Maddy rolled over the top of her, on to someone else in front.
Another shot thudded into the thick rubber handrest.

She found her feet and decided she was far
enough down the escalator to jump over the side. She landed on the top of a display of
plastic tropical bushes embedded in a bed of pebbles. Not the softest landing, but
perhaps far better than the mall’s faux marble floor. She scrambled on to her feet
yet again, people all around her shrieking in alarm as several more shots rang out
across the entrance foyer.

‘Get out, get out!’ Maddy
screamed at the bottleneck of people fighting with each other to exit through the
revolving door, and the fire exits either side of it.

Faith strode towards the safety rail of the
concourse above,
overlooking the escalator. She saw her target below
on the ground floor, grappling with people, tugging at them to make way for her. She
took aim again and fired two shots, emptying the clip. Downstairs, more glass exploded,
and the screaming all around her took on a new shrill, intense pitch.

Faith clambered over the rail and let
herself drop down. She landed twenty feet below on the hard floor, like a cat landing on
its feet, legs flexed to absorb the impact like the over-pimped shock absorbers of a
monster truck.

She reached into her waistband to pull out
her last clip. The target – Madelaine Carter – was directly in front of her, trapped
because the only way out was clogged with people tangled with each other and too
petrified to sort themselves out. She would have smiled if she’d had that
particular face gesture on file. Instead, her face remained impassive, as calm and
expressionless as a person fast asleep as she rammed the last clip home into the grip of
her handgun.

Sal and Rashim gave the mall guard – Kent –
a thoroughly unconvincing pair of aliases and random contact numbers. The guard, though,
seemed more than happy to take down what they said, no questions asked. Quite probably
he was preoccupied with thanking God he was alive still. He offered a nod – Sal guessed
that was his version of a ‘sorry for earlier’ – and told them to go
home.

They now picked their way through the crowd
at the front of the mall. A slew of police cars had parked up in a semi-circle just
outside the entrance and officers were setting up a cordon around it, urging the
rubbernecking curious back away from the rotating glass doors at the front.

‘Good grief … that
was …’ Rashim wiped sweat from his forehead.

‘Close?’

He nodded. ‘Incredibly.’

‘They’re the same ones that were
chasing me and Maddy before we came back in time to get you.’

‘Almost identical to your support
units. They were definitely a similar batch number. Quite possibly from the exact same
batch.’

A possibility occurred to Sal as they backed
away from the crowd outside and studied the front of the mall from a comfortable
distance. There were still people spilling out of the revolving doors, being hustled out
of harm’s way as quickly as possible by paramedics, cops and mall guards. Maybe
they were a batch of support units that had malfunctioned? Perhaps whoever was running
their little agency from the future had decided to send them some replacement support
units and something had gone wrong in the process?

She shot that idea down just as quickly as
it had popped into her head.

No. There was the San Francisco drop point.
That’s where they’d get back-up copies of Bob and Becks – frozen foetuses
ready to grow. These were ones already fully grown and given a very specific mission. To
come after the whole team and not rest until the last of them were dead. Apparently.
So … no mistakes there. No malfunctions. Just deadly intent.

‘You think we should make our way back
to that diner?’ said Rashim.

Sal was about to answer when two gunshots
came from just inside the mall’s entrance foyer.

A moment later a large plate-glass window
exploded and screams ripped through the air. The police who’d set up a cordon to
hold the crowd back now drew their sidearms. All of them spinning round to face the
glass frontage of the shopping mall.
People spilled out of the slowly
turning revolving door, the side doors, even through the jagged-tooth remains of the
freshly shattered glass frontage.

‘There’s Maddy!’ hissed
Sal.

She emerged with the others, arms up and
wrapped round her head to protect it, hunkered over like someone getting out of a
helicopter. Sal pushed through the crowd now all turning and scattering from the
entrance at the sound of another shot fired inside the foyer.

‘MADDY!’ she called out.
‘OVER HERE!’

The girls all but crashed into each
other.

‘Maddy? I thought you were
–’

‘Just GO!
Gogogogogo!
’

Faith picked her zigzagging target out of
the retreating, stampeding crowd. She levelled the .40 Smith & Wesson. Now the thing
had a fresh clip, she resolved to empty all twelve rounds in several controlled
double-taps. To be absolutely certain of killing the target. As she aimed down the short
barrel, she caught sight of one of the other targets:
Saleena Vikram
. Both
girls tangled with each other for a moment, then, turning their backs to her, ran away
hand in hand.

Two for the price of one
. Faith
nodded. Pleased with herself for producing an appropriate saying for the occasion. She
was about to pull the trigger when the world went completely dark.

7.42 a.m., 12 September 2001, Interstate
95, outside Branford

Five minutes later they were all back
aboard the RV, on the road and running on the last quarter-tank of petrol, Bob driving
north-east as instructed and Maddy rocking back and forth beside him in the passenger
seat trying to get a handle on things, get a handle on her jangling nerves, a handle on
the growing knot of grief in her chest, as Sal, Liam and Rashim threw questions at her
over the seat.

‘He’s gone,’ she said,
finally answering them as to where the hell Foster was.

‘What? Do you mean …?’ Liam
struggled to say any more. So Rashim finished his question for him.

‘They … they got
Foster?’

She nodded. ‘Shot him.’

‘He’s dead?’

Here it comes.
Maddy felt her
composure slipping. The blissful comfort of numbness was ebbing away, like the downslope
of a novocaine buzz after root-canal treatment. The first hot tears trickled down her
cheeks. She tasted salt on her lips and licked them away.

She nodded. ‘Yes, Foster’s
dead.’ Her voice was a lifeless whisper. The flutter and tap of moth wings against
a windowpane. She took her glasses off and buried her damp face in her hands
and realized that
now
she’d finally become that
typical movie girl-in-distress: all quivering, dimpled chin and smudged mascara.

Albeit minus the mascara.