The Man with the Golden Torc sh-1 Page 10

  Bullets raked along one side of the Hirondel, punching through the thick metal, slamming me back and forth in the driving seat, and forcing the car right across into the other lane. I had to fight the wheel for control, all the time screaming obscenities at the helicopter pilots. Didn’t they realise the Hirondel was a classic car, a genuine antique and a work of art in its own right? You don’t put bullet holes in a work of art! Bloody philistines. Right. Enough was enough. I was angry now. Who the hell did they think they were messing with? I hit one of the Armourer’s concealed switches, and a panel flipped open, revealing a big red button. I pressed my thumb down firmly, and an electromagnetic pulse radiated out from the car, swatting all six black helicopters from the sky like the hand of God.

  They plummeted clumsily to the ground as all their electrical systems crashed and fried, and it was a credit to their pilots that only two of them exploded on impact. Thick black smoke curled up into the pale blue sky as I hammered on down the motorway, punching the air with one golden fist. I don’t normally celebrate my kills, but they had got me seriously angry. Killing me was one thing, stealing the Soul of Albion another; but vandalising a classic like the Hirondel…Hell was too good for them.

  (Do I really need to explain that the car was shielded from its own EMP pulse? The Armourer’s not an idiot, you know.)

  Half a dozen cars came shooting onto the motorway from a side entrance, and I actually relaxed a little, assuming their presence meant the attack was over, and normal traffic was resuming. I should have known better. I noticed almost immediately that each of the cars was a sharp scarlet in colour, glistening like lipstick, and none of them were any make or model I was familiar with. There was something odd, something off, about the six scarlet cars as they crept up behind me. I was still driving the Hirondel flat out, but they had no trouble catching up. They were all long limousines with old-fashioned high tail fins, and they moved smoothly up and alongside me, pacing me effortlessly like hunting cats. For the first time I got a good look at them, close up, and my skin crawled. The hackles stood up on the back of my neck. I could see the driver of the car on my right, and the car was being driven by a dead man. He’d been dead for some time, his gray face shrunken and desiccated, almost that of a mummy. His shrivelled hands had been nailed to the steering wheel, which moved by itself.

  These weren’t cars. None of them were cars. These were CARnivores.

  I’d read about them, heard about them from other agents, but I had never seen one close up before, and had never wanted to. CARnivores are sentient, meat-eating cars with attitude. Some say they came originally from some other dimension, where cars evolved to replace humans, and some say they evolved right here, ancient predators who’d learned to look like cars so they could prey on humans unnoticed. They stalk the motorways, following tired souls who drive alone in the early hours of the morning. The CARnivores close in, cut them off from the pack, and then choose a secluded spot and force their prey off the road. And then they feed…

  But what the hell were this many CARnivores doing travelling together in bright sunlight, in the middle of the day? I supposed even demon cars could be tempted by a prize like the Soul of Albion. My mission wasn’t a secret any longer; there was a traitor in the family, and he had sold us all out.

  The CARnivores pressed in on either side, bumping me hard, first from the left and then from the right. The Hirondel absorbed the impact and just kept going. Sturdy old car. I could see dead men swaying in their driving seats, their eyeless heads lolling back and forth. Another CARnivore rammed the Hirondel from behind, jolting me forward in my seat. Two more bumps, left and right, harder now. CARnivores like to play with their food. The one on my left slowly opened its hood, the bloodred steel rising tauntingly to show me a pink glistening maw within and rows of churning steel teeth. It was hungry, and it was laughing at me.

  Underneath the protection of my golden armour, I was sweating. I could feel it running down my face. I was pretty sure the living metal would be a match for the CARnivores, but it couldn’t do anything to protect the Hirondel. And I needed the car if I was to get the Soul safely to Stonehenge, still a good hour’s hard driving away. I could see the effects of the CARnivores’ proximity already manifesting in the Hirondel. Every part of the car looked older, dimmed, even shabby. CARnivores could leech the vitality right out of any car, aging it at an accelerated rate until it malfunctioned or fell apart from metal fatigue. And then the CARnivores would drive it off the road and feed on the driver and any passengers. CARnivores exist by draining other cars dry, but even more than that, they love their human prey.

  They’re meat junkies.

  The Hirondel had a lot of extra options built in, but at the end of the day it was still just a car and as vulnerable as any other. And the CARnivores were getting awfully close. They bumped and barged me from both sides almost constantly now, jostling me like bullies in a playground, just for the fun of it. Time to show them who was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla around here. I let my left hand drift over the Armourer’s special control panel. I doubted the EMP would work on the CARnivores, even if it had recharged itself yet; they were too different, too alien, too alive. So I used the rear-mounted flamethrowers instead. Twin streams of raging fire blasted out of the back of the Hirondel, and a thick rush of flames enveloped the CARnivore behind me. The demon car screamed shrilly, thrashing wildly from side to side as it fell back. The fires had taken hold, and the CARnivore blazed brightly, flames and smoke leaping up into the sky.

  I hit my brakes hard, the Hirondel’s tyres screeching as my speed dropped by half. The two CARnivores on either side of me shot forward, caught unawares, and I opened up on them with the electric cannon mounted just above the front bumper. Pumped out at a thousand rounds a second, explosive fléchettes raked both cars, chewing up the demon metal. One CARnivore exploded, flipping end over end down the motorway before finally skidding to a halt. The other surged back and forth across the lanes, leaking long trails of blood and oil. I kept tracking it with both cannon until it too exploded, shooting off over the hard shoulder and embedding itself in the grass verge beyond.

  Three down, three to go.

  But the other CARnivores had had enough. They slowed right down and took the next exit, not used to prey who fought back. I swept on, checking my inventory. The flamethrowers had exhausted most of their fuel, the cannon were almost out of ammunition, but the EMP was fully recharged and ready to go again. I rummaged in my glove compartment for my maps. Now that my cover was blown I needed to get off the motorway as quickly as possible. Use the side roads and the roundabout routes that an enemy might not know. And I needed to stop and find a landline phone so I could contact my family, let them know what was happening. I couldn’t trust my mobile. My enemies might tap into the GPS. In an almighty cock-up situation like this, I wasn’t too proud to beg for reinforcements. And then the car’s alarms went off again, and I looked up to see elf lords flying towards me on their dragon mounts.

  I should have expected elves. They’d sell the souls they didn’t have to get their hands on the Soul of Albion, so they could use it to destroy the humans who’d driven them from their ancient ancestral holdings. Not through war or attrition, but just by outbreeding them. The elves hate us, and they always will, because we won by cheating. I could hear their laughter on the wind, cold and cruel and capricious.

  There were twenty dragons, and none of them were the graceful, romantic beasts of myth and legend. These were great worms, thirty to forty feet long, with wet, glistening, segmented bodies, and vast membranous bat wings. They forced themselves through the sky by brute effort, ugly and inglorious, their flat faces made up of a ring of dark unblinking eyes surrounding a sucking mouth like a lamprey’s. Astride their thick necks, on ancient saddles upholstered in tanned human skin, sat the elf lords and ladies. Beautiful and magnificent, vicious and vile, human in shape but not in thought, they rode to the slaughter with laughter on their colourless lips, singing anc
ient hunting songs on the glories of suffering and the kill.

  They came straight at me, moving so fast they were over me and then behind me before I even had time to react. They swooped around, the hunting pack in full cry, and the lords and ladies threw lightning bolts at me with their bare hands. The bolts exploded in the road ahead of me, blasting out craters and cracking the surface. I put my foot down and kept going, swerving the car back and forth to avoid the larger holes. The dragons pounded through the air above and beside me, taking their time, enjoying the hunt. Seeing how close they could get to the car, without actually touching it. The continuous explosions of the lightning bolts were deafening, and the flaring lights were bright enough to dazzle me momentarily, even through the armour’s protection. I could hear the Hirondel’s engine straining. I tried to think what I had that could reach the elves and their dragons, safe up in the sky. A lightning bolt hit the bonnet of the Hirondel, blasting all the paint away in a moment, and the car slammed this way and that under the impact, swerving blindly across the lane divider and back again. Only the armoured strength in my hands kept the steering wheel under control, even as the wheel itself crumpled slowly out of shape.

  A dragon and its rider came flying straight at me, only a few feet above the road. I wondered at first if he was planning to ram me, but then I saw him fitting an arrow to his bow, and I smiled. An arrow against my armour. Yeah, right. I reached for the switch to activate the electric cannon and blow him out of my way. The elf lord loosed his arrow. And while I was still reaching for the switch, the arrow punched right through my windshield and through my glorious golden armour, and buried itself in my left shoulder. I slammed back in my seat, crying out in shock and pain, and actually let go of the wheel for a moment to grab at the arrow shaft with both hands. It wouldn’t budge. The car skidded across the lanes. I tugged at the arrow again, crying out in agony, but I couldn’t move it. The extra pain cleared my head like a shock of cold water in the face, and I grabbed the steering wheel and brought the Hirondel under control again.

  I was panting harshly, and sweat poured down my face under my golden mask. I could feel blood coursing down my arm and chest, under my armour. Every movement, every breath, brought me a new pulse of pain. I gritted my teeth until my jaws ached. I was still in shock, and not just from the pain. My armour was invulnerable. Impregnable. Everyone knew that. The strength of the living armour was the strength of the family. It made our work possible, because none of our enemies could touch us while we wore the living metal. Only, the silver shaft sticking out of my shoulder was a pretty convincing argument to the contrary. Trust the elves to find a way to hurt us. The pain beat in my head, interfering with my thoughts, and it took all my self-control to push it aside and concentrate. There had to be a way out of this. I couldn’t surrender the Soul of Albion. And anyway, I was damned if I’d be beaten by a bunch of snotty, arrogant elves.

  I kept driving, foot hard down, blinking sweat out of my eyes. I’d lost all feeling in my left arm, and it hung limply at my side. I studied the arrow shaft protruding from my armoured shoulder. It was a strange silvery metal, glowing faintly. God alone knew from what far dimension the elves had plundered it, desperate to find the one thing that would pierce Drood armour. I looked up and around. The dragons were still keeping up with me, flailing their vast wings into a blur, even though the Hirondel was pushing its top speed. I couldn’t outrun them, couldn’t shake them off. So I stamped both feet down on brake and clutch and brought the car to a screeching halt, leaving long smoking trails of burned rubber behind me. The dragons and their riders swept on, caught off guard, but quickly circled around to come back at me again. Some of them were already stringing arrows to their bows.

  I forced the bullet-holed door open and stumbled out of the car, crying out despite myself as every new jolt of movement brought me fresh pain. I strode out into the middle of the road, facing the oncoming dragons, my left arm useless at my side. I could see the elves’ faces now, their cold, cruel smiles. They were laughing at me. I reached through my golden armour with my golden hand and drew the Colt Repeater from its holster. There was blood on it from my shoulder wound, and I shook a few drops off. I aimed the Colt at the nearest dragon rider, and the gun took care of the rest.

  The cold lead bullet hit the elf lord right between the eyes and blew the back of his head off. For good measure I shot the dragon in its ugly head too, and it crashed to the motorway in an ungainly sprawl of flapping wings. I shot all the elves and all the dragons, all the vicious lords and vile ladies and their ugly mounts, and they didn’t have the time to fire off a single arrow at me. I just fired the Colt Repeater again and again and again, and the bullets just kept coming, and the gun never missed. A triumph of the Armourer’s art. The dead dragons piled up before me, twitching and shuddering as the last of their unnatural life leaked out of them, and not a single elf escaped my cold anger. God bless you, Uncle Jack.

  I sat down carefully on the Hirondel’s bonnet and got my breath back. The arrow in my shoulder still hurt like hell. I had to contact the family. Get them to send a clean-up crew to remove the dragons and elves before Joe Public turned up to see them. And then the Matriarch would have to send a stiff and very formal complaint to the Fae Court, telling them to keep their arrogant noses out of Drood business, or else. It slowly occurred to me that I’d been driving for some time while fighting for my life, and I still hadn’t seen any traffic. Someone had to have arranged for this whole section of the motorway to be sealed off. To close all the exits and shut down all the CCTV coverage would take serious clout. How high up was this traitor in the family, that they could arrange something like this? Yes, I had to get to a safe phone. Tell the family. About the traitor…

  My head was actually nodding, my thoughts fading in and out, when the car’s alarms went off again. My head jerked up and I slid off the bonnet and looked around me. A thick fog covered all the motorway behind me, a dirty gray mist that churned and boiled, with nothing natural about it. I climbed back into the driving seat, gritting my teeth against the pain, and then pounded my left arm with my right fist until some sensation returned, so I could slam the car into first gear. I took off again, and out of the mists behind me came the phantom fleet.

  My first thought was This isn’t fair. Not after everything I’ve already been through… But I was too tired even to maintain a good sulk, so I just concentrated on building up some speed. My injured arm shrieked at me as I raced through the gears, but that was better than the scary numbness. The pain cleared my head and kept me angry. I was going to have to be sharp, in top form, to take out the phantom fleet.

  They swept down the deserted motorway after me, ghosts of crashed vehicles driven and possessed by spirits from the vasty deep. Half-transparent cars and trucks and articulateds, and everything else that ever came to a nasty end on a motorway. Some looked real as real could be, while others were just misty shapes, all of them still bearing the damage and burn marks of their previous ends. Too many to count, they came howling after me in a vicious pack, their ghostly engines supernaturally loud. Black brimstone smoke issued from their exhausts, and hellfire burned around their squealing tires. The phantom fleet, the wild hunt of modern times; hungry for souls.

  The lead car drew up alongside me, matching my speed effortlessly. It was a Hillman Minx from the sixties, the front smashed in, the long bonnet concertinaed. Through the cracked side windows, I could see the car was packed to bursting with grinning ghouls and demons and mutant creatures. They writhed together like maggots infesting a wound, churning and shifting and pressing their awful faces against the windows to laugh at me. None of the Hirondel’s weapons would touch these things, because they weren’t really there. Just memories of vehicles that once were, and the things from beyond that had repossessed them.

  Another car came forward, filling my rearview mirror. Some big boxy foreign job, driven by a hunched-over demon with huge bulging eyes and a mouth full of needle teeth. It hit the horn ag
ain and again, and the dead car howled like something in pain. The demon pounded on the steering wheel with its thorny hands, caught up in the excitement of the chase. And then the ghost car surged forward, passing through the back of the Hirondel, penetrating my space with its dead shape. A wave of supernatural cold preceded its progress, freezing the blood in my veins. The dead car drew level, its ghostly outline superimposed on mine, and then the demon driver dropped a thorny hand on my shoulder, ghosted right through my armour, and grabbed hold of my soul. I screamed, just at the touch of it. The demon pulled, trying to haul my soul out of my body, to be prey for the pack, for the phantom fleet. Another stolen soul, to drive the engines of the damned cars.

  But my soul was linked to my armour, from the moment I was born. You couldn’t have one without the other. And together they were stronger than any damned dead thing. The gripping ghostly fingers slipped slowly away, unable to maintain their hold. I goosed the accelerator, and the Hirondel jumped forward. The ghost car fell back, the demon howling in outrage at being cheated out of its rightful prey. Pain surged up in my left arm again, and I embraced it. It meant I was alive. I forced my left hand forward and hit the emergency default button on the CD player. The system immediately began broadcasting a recording of the ritual of exorcism, read by the last pope in the original Latin. The sonorous words boomed out of the car’s speakers, and the ghost car was driven right out of the Hirondel. Around and behind me, the phantom fleet shrieked horribly and fell back. Some were already breaking up under the impact of the holy words, drifting away in long ghostly streamers. The thick curling mists reappeared in my rearview mirror, and the phantom fleet vanished back into them.