If they’d fired correctly, we’d be dead. A shell anywhere close to the tanker would have done the job.
‘OK, their sight is blocked by the dust cloud,’ Mark said. ‘Get out.’
Simon obeyed as expected. Kate wanted to follow, but her body wouldn’t let her. Mark leapt out of the driver’s seat, and took the time to stare back into the car before closing the door.
‘Kate,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry Raj is dead. He was a nice lad. And I wish we had time for you to go through your I’m-so-sad-my-life-is-over phase. But we don’t. The tank is coming now, so I’ve got this plan and I really hope you can pull yourself together quick enough to be part of it.’
Pull yourself together… that’s what the teachers back in mainstream used to say.
Mental health issues don’t just ‘ pull themselves together ’ Mark, you bloody numpty . You don’t stop grieving by ‘ pulling yourself together ’ . Even now, I don’t know how people do it.
She felt angry, an emotion she had not had the energy for all night. It squeezed itself between her fatigue and her misery, and motivated her to move herself. She huffed as loudly as she could manage, and opened the passenger door.
For a split-second, a small but important realisation entered her brain. One of her therapists had once talked about humans’ ‘fight or flight’ instincts: that when a situation got too much for them, a person would either face it head-on or get the hell out of there.
Last time someone had told Kate to ‘pull herself together’, she had not left her bed all day. It had been better to waste a whole day than approach something that scared her, especially for the sake of a person who didn’t know how anxiety worked. That morning, on the abandoned M1 in the midst of her grief, she was taking action just by getting out of the car.
The war against Nicholas Grant had changed her instincts. A year ago she chose ‘flight’ every time without fail. Nowadays she could fight, even after losing somebody she cared about.
Kate stepped out of the car into the morning light, and followed Simon to the grass bank. Mark stayed at the car for a few moments, busying himself with the petrol cap.
She followed Simon until they reached the other side of the bank. Now on foot, they could get to some proper shelter: even the best aim from a tank wouldn’t kill them if they hid behind a small hill.
Next to the car, Mark had removed his shirt. He produced his bottle of whisky from somewhere – the same whisky that had spent a year in his Oakenfold locker awaiting his return – doused the lower half of his shirt with it and stuffed the dry half into the petrol tank.
Kate had expected Mark to reach for his lighter without incident, but he leapt suddenly at the sound of a horrifying ptat-ptat-ptat, followed by what looked like miniature fireless explosions spreading across the cars around him. The muzzle flash behind the dust cloud revealed that the Challenger’s chain gun was firing blindly, and its huge bullets were ripping apart the abandoned cars.
Mark – crouched low, for all the good it would do against chain gun bullets – tore the pocket fabric out of his trousers, brought out his lighter, and turned the bottle of whisky into a Molotov cocktail which he hurled straight at the tank.
The tank got through the dust cloud not one moment before its sight was lost again, as the bottle struck not far from its visor and spread flames and smoke across their field of vision. Mark used the distraction to run from the car, out of the way of the random path of chain gun bullets, and arrived behind the peak of the grass bank alongside Kate and Simon. He even found the time to put his hoodie back on along the way.
Kate focused her eyes on the petrol tank, as if trying to force the flames to do their work by willpower alone.
A n exploding car won’t be enough to destroy a Challenger 2. Even if it goes off right next —
Their vehicle blew itself apart, spreading its burning shrapnel across the M1 and flames over its injured chassis. The tank, still fifty metres away, was unaffected. A white cloud burst from the visor, as one of the crew took care of the whisky fire with an extinguisher.
‘Do we run?’ she managed to whisper. Mark shook his head. The tank headed straight for the burning car, perhaps looking for their victim’s burned remains. Their colleagues across Hertfordshire would want to know when to stop hunting survivors.
When ten metres remained between the tank and the burning vehicle, Mark leapt to his feet.
‘You numpties cost me my whisky…’
It had been so long since they had used their firearms that Kate had forgotten about the assault rifle hanging from Mark’s shoulder. He pointed it straight towards the tanker behind the car and emptied the rest of his magazine into its side. A dozen leaks sprung from the side of the tanker, and Kate buried her face into the grass as the flurry of petrol spilled onto the carriageway and spread towards the flames.
Unlike the car explosion, miniature by comparison, the shockwave of the exploding tanker threw all three of their bodies down the side of the bank.
Mark later said that her sensory overload had lasted several minutes. All Kate remembered was coming to her senses as if waking up from some kind of empty hallucination, and staggering to the top of the bank. Once she was lucid again, she noticed that the tank lay motionless, in flames but undamaged.
‘It’s not destroyed…’ she mumbled.
‘We didn’t need to kill the tank,’ answered Mark, ‘just the clones inside. They either burned to death or lost all their oxygen. Don’t know which, don’t care either. Now let’s run home.’
Kate followed as instructed, too tired and deep in grief to appreciate the brilliance of Mark’s achievement. Maybe someday she would care that an eighteen-year-old youth offender had become the second person ever to destroy a Challenger 2, but it would not be that day. And, most likely, not for as long as she mourned Raj.
Chapter 10
As he passed the welcome sign into Lemsford, Jack checked his watch. Four in the afternoon. Their strike on Oakenfold had started thirteen hours ago, and he had barely stopped moving since.
Gracie, to her credit, was only five steps behind. She had slowed on their approach to the village, but despite her worries about this place she had never been to, she had kept up.
‘Where now?’ she whispered.
‘The Hunters’ house. Eighteen, School Lane. Follow me.’
‘You remember the way?!’
‘I was here less than a month ago. And I have the memory thing. Now come on.’
Jack was thankful that Gracie didn’t offer a response. In the old days, any discussion about his Asperger’s traits – positive or negative – usually resulted in the other person giving some kind of belittling response, such as ‘you don’t look autistic’, or ‘oh, I’m so sorry’. At that moment, the predictable response would have been ‘oh, but I can remember directions too! That’s not an autism thing!’
They would never be able to see what the memory of the house looked like inside Jack’s head: the well-mapped, in-depth and painfully specific details of each minor event. Kate’s conversation with McCormick to tell him they had arrived. Alex taking little Matthew’s room and sleeping under dinosaur bedsheets. (Everything related to dinosaurs stuck in Jack’s head like the intro to ‘The Final Countdown’, while most people wouldn’t have even remembered the little boy was called Matthew.) That joke he had made about Dawn Hunter, asking if she was some kind of vampire assassin, and nobody getting it. Charlie saying ‘the last time he kissed a woman he still called her “Mummy”’, and everyone laughing.