One day, when I’m my better self, I’ll confront you about it. Not today, but one day , Mark .
They had stumbled for about a hundred metres before Mark had realised the hopelessness of escaping on foot. Before Kate knew what was going on, he had ordered them back to Oakenfold where he had picked out Stuart Lincoln’s car: the one which just happened to be the newest in the car park, and perhaps the most reliable.
Mark reached somewhere behind the steering wheel. A crunch sounded, and a couple of wires appeared. Kate didn’t understand what happened next, nor how Mark knew the science of hot-wiring a car, but it didn’t surprise her. A few moments later, she heard the rev of a car engine for the first time in a year.
‘You getting in?’
Kate started to move. Simon, rather tellingly, headed straight for the back seats as if he weren’t allowed to sit in the front. Once Kate was in the passenger seat with the door half-closed, Mark pulled away. Her door flung open again and bashed against the first car they passed, and the resulting bang sent some much-needed adrenalin through Kate’s veins. She closed the door properly on the second attempt, and glanced through the window as something moved in the early morning light.
They were clones. Angry clones, and they were running.
‘Mark!’ she shouted, her first and only word since her boyfriend had blown himself to pieces.
‘Heads down!’ he yelled back as the car accelerated. Kate obeyed, and squeezed her eyes shut too. It would not shield her from bullets, but would help with the sensory overload that would surely come. Mark must have ducked his own head, as the car’s path became wonkier and more chaotic. A short spray of bullets attacked the car, hitting nothing but its metal back. Mercifully, the tyres were unaffected. Simon did not follow Mark’s command, showing unexpected independence by sticking his head out of the window and firing back at the distant clones. Kate did not look back to see whether he hit any.
Mark turned a corner, and the clones’ gunfire fell into silence. But it did nothing to help Kate calm down. The engine was still roaring, the floor still shook beneath her, and Raj was still dead. Two more corners later she opened her eyes, if only to keep an eye out for more hunters.
The urban drive felt like a ride on a post-apocalyptic ghost train. Some buildings were burned-out shells. Some shops had been looted by bands of survivors following Takeover Day. The blood on the tarmac had long faded, but the occasional skeleton in faded clothes still occupied a space on the pavement. The meat had long been picked clean from their bones: perhaps the crows above Harpenden had developed a taste for human flesh.
That’s what lies in wait for Raj…
‘My house was down the M1,’ Mark shouted, ‘I used to take this route every day to Oakenfold.’
You barely came to Oakenfold. You vanished for a year after you got sentenced, and after that you only turned up when you felt like it.
‘Of course, if we hit the Takeover Day traffic jams on the M1, we’ll be waiting a bloody long time for the traffic to clear. But it’s better than getting shot to death here.’
Kate felt something warm on the back of her neck. Simon was panting behind her, the whole of his body frozen except his lungs, which took rapid, erratic breaths. His panic and Kate’s overload left Mark as the only truly active member of the team.
When they arrived at Britain’s oldest motorway – the birthplace of their country’s worst traffic jams – they discovered the M1 had ended its life with the worst blockage of all. Vehicles were strewn across the road as if a toddler had thrown their toy cars across a fabric floor map, forming a metal hedge maze of vans and people carriers and articulated lorries. Regardless, Mark found a way to manoeuvre through the vehicles whose owners had tried in vain to escape the clones almost a year ago. Kate’s seat rocked beneath her whenever he moved onto the grass, and her fingers twitched in discomfort each time her door scraped along a neighbouring car.
They must have travelled nearly a mile before the explosion.
Every window in their car – and the cars surrounding them – shattered with piercing shrieks. The rusted Astra three cars ahead flew out from the flames, knocked aside like a golf ball from its tee by the raging fireball at its side. The ground trembled so much that Kate was sure their own wheels left the tarmac. She watched the Astra smack the line of trees at the side of the motorway; it had landed behind their car, suggesting the explosion had happened in front of them. The smoke mirage faded from the crater ahead, and she saw what had fired the shell. It was half a mile beyond the overhead bridge in front of them, crunching its way over the dead vehicles in its path.
‘Bloody hell,’ yelled Mark, ‘that’s an actual bloody tank!’
It’s a Challenger 2 . Ewan was in my English class, and did tanks for his Speaking and Listening presentation .
It had been the only presentation delivered with any enthusiasm, so it was the only one that stuck in Kate’s memory. She mainly remembered the worst parts: that it could kill from up to five miles away, and that the only thing ever to destroy a Challenger 2 had been friendly fire from another Challenger 2.
‘How the hell did Marshall get his hands on one of them?’ asked Mark.
‘I don’t think anyone tried to stop him,’ she whispered.
Mark seemed to not hear her answer – or more likely did not care – as he found a way around the crater and continued their path along the M1, straight towards the tank.
Simon made a yelling noise in the back seat.
‘Yes, we’re going towards it,’ Mark muttered. ‘If we retreat it’ll get us for sure, or chase us back to Harpenden. If we go towards it, there might be a one per cent chance we’ll get inside its range.’
Kate didn’t mind the odds being against her survival. Not at that moment. Her intellect told her she could still contribute to this war, but the rest of her brain told her she had nothing left to offer.
‘And yes,’ Mark muttered, ‘I know about its secondary weapon. But I’d take my chances with the chain gun over those shells.’
Ahead, the tank surged over another row of cars. Kate watched as the first car – a large black people-carrier – crumbled and flattened in submission. Her parents’ lawnmower had never cut grass as efficiently as the Challenger 2 mowed its way over a carriageway of vehicles.
The tank fired a second shot, which smashed into the brow of the bridge above before it could reach its intended target. Half a tonne of concrete left the bridge, flew through the sky and tumbled its way into the nearest caravan, which exploded over all four lanes like a wood and metal supernova.
The remainder of the damaged bridge collapsed into the road, leaving just one gap underneath the part blown away by the tank. Mark bit his lip as he found a way through the dust, squeezing through a gap between two cars, a gamble which cost them both wing mirrors. There was an even tighter gap ten metres ahead, between a painter’s van and a petroleum tanker.
The gap between them and the Challenger was closing. Kate gasped as she finally realised the flaw in Mark’s plan: that even if they got close enough to escape its long-range weaponry, and even if the chain gun operator were a useless shot, the tank could just crush them underneath its tracks. In fact, the clones inside might find the experience more satisfying.
The third blast roared from the barrel, but the humans’ lives were saved by bad timing. The tank reached the end of the set of cars underneath it, and dipped forwards. The barrel sank by about ten degrees, sending the third shell several hundred metres too short.