Red Eye - 02 (30 page)

Tina shoved some of Redlaw’s money onto the counter and went outside with her purchases. She checked her watch.

Twenty-five minutes since she last saw Redlaw.

Twenty-six.

She started stamping her feet to stay warm.

He was running late. What the hell was he up to? What was keeping him?

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SIX

R
EDLAW COUNTED AT
least fifty of the yellow school buses, slotted tightly together in the parking lot like pieces of some giant puzzle. All of them wore thick berets of snow.

The fence was easy enough to scale. Chainlink was an odd kind of barrier, in that it provided so many handholds and toeholds for the determined climber to use. Self-defeating, in a way.

Barbed wire was strung along the top, but it had been applied economically, a single strand wreathed round and round the crossbar. Redlaw was able to grasp it with his gloved hands, straddle over and drop down the other side, without snagging his clothes or pricking himself.

The snow cushioned his landing, sparing his knees. Small mercies.

He padded over to the guard’s hut, an aluminium-sided static trailer, and stood on tiptoe to peep through a window. No one inside. As Miguel had predicted, the guard wasn’t clocking on for duty today because nobody else was.

Dozens of sets of keys hung on a rack in the hut. Redlaw cast around for something he could force the door with, a length of rebar maybe.

That was when his gaze alighted on a kennel, nestled nearby between two rows of buses.

A large kennel. With the name Zoltan painted over the entrance.

A large,
empty
kennel.

He heard the dog coming at the last possible moment. It had sneaked round behind him. It didn’t bark, but its paws crunched heavily on the snow as it stopped stalking him and broke into a run.

Redlaw whirled round to face it. The dog was a huge beast, a bull mastiff. Its jowly mouth hung wide open, its teeth were fearsome, and its bloodshot eyes bore a cruel, murderous glint.

In a flash Redlaw recalled a training module at Hendon: what to do when confronted by a dangerous dog. It was thirty years ago, when he’d been a naïve young police cadet, but the techniques he’d been taught came back to him as though it was yesterday.

Zoltan the mastiff sprang.

Redlaw’s left arm came up horizontally.

Better your arm than your throat
. That was what the instructor, a K9 handler, had said.
You can afford to lose a hand, but not a windpipe
.

The mastiff’s jaws latched on to his forearm. The thick lining of the army-surplus parka saved him from severe injury. The pressure of the bite was intolerable, almost literally like having his arm gripped in a workbench vice, and he felt teeth break his skin, but he knew the dog was capable of much worse. He’d got off lightly so far.

A surge of adrenaline made Redlaw see everything with precision. Every move he must now make was mapped out in detail in his head, a checklist for survival. Get one step wrong and the mastiff would make him pay for it, dearly.

The mastiff dragged down on his arm, trying to bring him to its own level. Redlaw hauled up against its immense weight. The thing was far stronger than him, but if he kept it up on its hindlegs it would be off-balance and unable to utilise that strength against him.

He stuck out his right thumb, rigid, and without hesitation jabbed it into the mastiff’s left eye. He felt a strange kind of clinical detachment as he wormed his thumb deep into the eye socket and twisted it to lever out the eyeball. The jelly-like orb came free with a wet sucking
pop
, trailing nerve tissue and gristle behind it.

Zoltan the mastiff let out a piteous howl, and all at once Redlaw’s arm was released. The dog reared back, whimpering and shaking its head. The eyeball, still attached, flopped this way and that. Gore striped the snow.

By rights, that should have been that. The shock of having its eye enucleated was supposed to render the mastiff helpless, sending its nervous system into shutdown. The dog might even have a heart attack and die.

Either the bull mastiff didn’t know that, or it was made of far sterner stuff than the average hound.

Recovering its wits, it gave a baleful growl. Its remaining good eye fixed Redlaw with a look of sheer Satanic loathing.

Then the mastiff launched itself at him again.

If all else fails
, the dangerous dogs module instructor had said,
you need to choke the animal. If it’s large enough, the best way is this...
And he had demonstrated the method on a dummy dog, and when all the cadets, including Redlaw, had grimaced, he had said,
Trust me, you won’t think twice when it’s your life on the line
.

And Redlaw didn’t think twice. He met the leaping mastiff with his left arm outstretched, fingers pinched into a pyramid, and he rammed his hand straight into that slobber-strung, gaping maw.

The mastiff’s impetus knocked Redlaw flat, but also impaled it further onto Redlaw’s arm, past the wrist, halfway to the elbow. Redlaw balled his hand, deep inside the dog’s hot throat, into a fist. The mastiff was on top of him, but his arm was locked tight inside its gullet. Claws scrabbled on his chest. The dog wrenched its head from side to side, trying desperately to dislodge the blockage. Redlaw could feel its muscles straining around his forearm.

Panic lit Zoltan the mastiff’s good eye. Its efforts to free itself weakened. Its whole body began to shudder as oxygen deprivation took hold. All at once it keeled over onto its flank, Redlaw’s arm still inside. Spasms ran through its body, and its legs kicked and twitched. Finally its eye lost that sinister brilliance and seemed to fog over. The dog’s bowels let go, unleashing a torrent of meaty faeces onto the snow. One last mighty muscular heave, and the mastiff lay still.

Redlaw painstakingly extracted his arm from the creature. His parka sleeve was ripped, saliva-sodden, and bloodied, with bits of stuffing poking out all over. Pain began to spark around the bite wounds. His head went woozy. He lay back in the snow and caught his breath and waited for his heart rate to normalise.

“Lord,” he said to the skies, “I know it’s your habit to test people, to try them in the fires of providence so that they can learn what they’re made of and be tempered and become stronger. But this?” He flapped at hand at the dead dog. “On top of everything else? Seriously?”

Answer came there none from the heavens, other than the relentless cold white benediction of snowfall.

T
HE SEARCH FOR
something to jemmy the guard’s hut door with proved futile, so Redlaw resorted to breaking one of the windows with the butt of his Cindermaker. He reached through, undid the latch, and slithered inside.

The bus keys were organised according to vehicle size, each with a tag listing a licence plate number. Redlaw reasoned that he didn’t need one of the larger-capacity buses when he had only eight passengers, nine if you counted Tina. Also, a smaller bus ought to be easier to drive, and nippier.

Soon he was behind the wheel of a twelve-seater, with the engine juddering and growling and diesel fumes pluming at the rear. The interior smelled of vanilla air freshener and children’s sweat.

The depot gate was secured with padlock and chain. Both were more durable than they looked, and it wasn’t until the bus had rammed the gate for a third time that they snapped.

When Redlaw rendezvoused with Tina outside the stationery store, he thought she looked disgruntled because he was ten minutes later than promised. But in the event it was the bus itself that offended her.

“The short bus?” she exclaimed as she boarded. “You went and stole the
short bus
?”

“What of it? We don’t need one of the bigger ones.”

“You have no idea, do you? The short bus is for the special needs kids. The retards and the disabled and the challenged. Did you not notice the wheelchair lift at the back? Nobody in their right mind would be seen dead on the short bus.”

“Well, I’m not going back to steal another,” Redlaw said. “I had a hard enough time getting this one.” He indicated his left arm.

“Holy cow. What a mess. What happened?”

“Let’s just say the place had the kind of guard who doesn’t take days off.”

“Does it hurt? Looks like it does.”

“I’ve had worse.” Redlaw winced as he used his left hand to pull the lever that closed the bus doors. Then he stamped on the clutch, ground gears, and drew away from the kerb. “I see you’ve got all our supplies. Excellent.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, I made good use of the time,” Tina said.

Redlaw was driving an unfamiliar vehicle on the wrong side of a very snowy road, so he was too preoccupied to notice the small, hopeful smile that creased the corners of Tina’s mouth as she uttered these words.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SEVEN

F
ARTHINGALE BLINKED SLOWLY.

“Run that by me again.”

The very frightened Porphyrian technician on the other end of the line swallowed hard, collected himself, and said, “They’re gone, sir. And two of us are down. Down as in dead. I... I was one of the lucky ones. I got out in time and I ran and hid and they missed me. But they went crazy. I mean plain fucking bat-shit berserk. It was horrible. A slaughter.”

“Be very exact,” Farthingale said. “Team Red Eye held you all at gunpoint...”

“Yes, sir.” The technician’s name was Dale Postma and he was a 26-year-old MIT graduate. “They were kind of nice about it. Polite, almost. At the start. They were all, ‘Sorry, guys, but we’ve got to do this. Co-operate and no one’ll get hurt.’ They had their gear on, their weapons. We weren’t about to argue, not with a bunch of trained, armed killers. We’re lab geeks, for Christ’s sake. We did as we were told.”

“And what they were demanding from you was a fresh dose of PP-66.”

“Yeah, and Dr Istamboulian, he said he didn’t think that was a good idea so soon after the last dose, and one of the Red Eyes, Abbotts I think it was, he said something like, ‘That’s not your decision to make, doc,’ and threatened to put a bullet in his head. So Istamboulian backed down, because who the hell wouldn’t, and we all trooped along to the treatment chamber...”

“Yes, yes,” said Farthingale impatiently. “I get it. You dosed them up, like the meek little lambs you are. Then what?”

“We gave them their forty minutes, went back in...”

“You didn’t think to contact me during that time? It never once occurred to any of you that it might be worth informing me, your boss, about this unhappy turn of events?”

“We were instructed not to. She said they’d know if we had and we would pay for it. And anyway, we assumed there wouldn’t be much you could do about it even if you did know.”

“She? Warrant Officer Berger?”

“She was the ringleader, sir,” said Postma. “You could tell. The others were all looking to her for guidance, answering to her. Even Giacoia, though he outranks her.”