Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

A high-pitched, repetitive rising tone started up, cutting across the aftershock of the gunfire. The rear door alarm.

Purkiss moved back around the fronts of the aisles to where Nina was hovering. He put his hand on her head and pushed her down, feeling her flinch, just as the door into the back passage opened and a man emerged. He’d come in through the fire door.

Interstate 95, between Washington D.C and New York

The man held a gun in a two-handed grip.

‘Give me the girl.’

‘Drop the gun,’ said Purkiss, the Glock levelled.

‘Send the girl over here.’

Purkiss shot him in the chest, a double tap, sending him back hard against the wall. He gripped Ramirez by the collar and hauled her up. He’d been intending to send her out through the fire door on her own while he dealt with Pope. Now that wasn’t an option.

Keeping himself slightly ahead of her he shouldered open the door into the passage. Halfway down was the restroom he’d come through, and at the end was the open fire door. Behind them he could hear the gunfire continuing.

Purkiss ran to the door and looked out. Nobody there. He pulled the woman stumbling after him and made her follow him hugging the wall to the corner and around the side. They encountered nobody.

Further shots came from the front of the building, and it took Purkiss a moment to realise that he’d let himself be misled, that the shooting at the moment didn’t involve Pope, because Pope had followed them through the fire door. His shape loomed at the corner they’d just passed and he had his gun raised, but wasn’t shooting because Ramirez was between him and Purkiss. Purkiss fired past her and Pope flinched back.

Purkiss dragged Ramirez to the corner ahead and round to the front of the building. The forecourt was littered with spent shell casings. A body lay near the front door of the shop. Purkiss and Ramirez moved further out and he saw movement through the shop’s wrecked front window. Berg and Kendrick, stalking between the aisles, Berg recoiling as a shot came by her.

Purkiss backed away from the building, shielding Ramirez, his gun aimed at the corner where he expected Pope to emerge. He heard a voice behind him near the pumps — Purkiss — and glanced round.

Nakamura sat beside one of the pumps, his lips drawn back in a grimace. His hands clutched his lower leg, soaked black in the shadows.

‘Bastards shot me.’

‘You dying?’

‘Fuck that.’

Keeping his gaze on the corner of the building, Purkiss said, ‘Ms Ramirez. Nina. Stay with this man. He’s an FBI agent. He’ll protect you.’

He risked a glance at her to make sure she understood. Then he began moving back towards the side of the building. Through the window, the cat and mouse appeared to be continuing.

Pope wasn’t round the side. Purkiss advanced to the back, darted a look round. He wasn’t there, either.

Purkiss thought it likely that Pope had run out of ammunition, which was why he hadn’t come after them immediately when they’d made it round the front. He also assumed Pope was going back for the gun belonging to the man Purkiss had shot inside the shop.

Purkiss made his way to the fire door, peered through. No sign of anybody in the passage.

Two shots came, close together, from the front of the building. Not from within.

From far away Purkiss heard his name being called, as a grinding rumble started up.

Purkiss ran, sprinting round the other side of the building to complete a circuit. As he came round the corner he saw three things at once:

Nakamura had crawled on his belly away from the pumps and was lying prone, his gun extended awkwardly in shaking hands.

Ramirez had stepped off to the side and was huddled with her instrument case, frozen in headlights.

The gargantuan truck, the only vehicle in the forecourt, had turned in a wide arc and was doubling back, heading straight towards the pumps. At the wheel, high in the cab, was Pope.

Purkiss was running even as he raised the gun and fired at the windscreen, but the first shot glanced off the frame above it and after that the Glock’s hammer clicked down emptily, once, twice.

He continued running, aiming in a direct line for the truck, blotting out the horror of what was about to happen, of what was now happening as the front wheels reached Nakamura’s prone and haplessly scrambling body and rocked over it, whipping him underneath, the cab rising and dropping almost imperceptibly as he disappeared and his scream was cut off.

Purkiss drew level with the driver’s door of the cab and dropped the useless gun and leaped up and got a grip on the handle, pulling it open and hanging for a moment in the air, swinging off the door, before hauling himself into the seat — Pope wasn’t there, he’d bailed out through the passenger door — and seeing the pumps looming as he scrabbled for whatever served as a handbrake in a behemoth like this. He found the handle and pulled on it with all his strength, at the same time spinning the steering wheel into the direction of the slide that was already beginning.

The truck roared as it fishtailed sideways, the dozen-and-a-half wheels setting up a banshee howl as their rubber clawed and grappled at the tarmac. Through the window now Purkiss saw the pumps rushing at him: it was too late, he was too close…

Purkiss yelled as he wrenched at the wheel with both hands, trying to drive it beyond its limits. He felt the world tilt, the tarmac tipping crazily up at him, and in a split-second he understood what was happening and let go of the wheel and braced himself for the impact.

The truck slammed on to its side in an explosion of metal and glass, the window erupting beside Purkiss’s head and showering him with granular fragments. He managed to keep his torso far enough from the door that his body avoided absorbing the full force of the collision with the tarmac, but the impact jarred him all the same, sending a bolt of agony through his shoulder and chest. He closed his eyes, waiting for the tell-tale smell of fuel followed by the sudden burst of fire which would bring the end.

*

The sudden silence made Purkiss wonder if he had, in fact, passed over into unbeing, without having realised it; but of course that made no sense. He opened his eyes.

He was cramped at an angle in the cab, his feet at the door, the rest of him diagonally across the front seat. Above him was the passenger door. He reached up, feeling the pain lance through his shoulder again, pushed the door open like a trapdoor and hauled himself out.

The truck lay on its side like a massive, slain beast, its rear doors open and its innards — children’s toys, Purkiss noticed distantly — spilled out across the forecourt. The roof of the cab had slammed against the pillar to one side of the nearest pump.

Through the shattered shop window, Berg and Kendrick stared out. Two men stood beside them, close together, their postures truculent. Cuffed, Purkiss thought.

Behind the truck, the terrible thing that had been Nakamura was difficult to discern as anything in particular.

Ramirez and Pope were gone.

Manhattan, New York City

Tuesday 21 May, 4.15 am

The door opened and a white-faced kid peered in. Giordano thought he looked scared enough to be an intern.

‘Mr Giordano. I’m real sorry to wake you, sir — ’

‘Your job. Don’t worry about it.’ He hadn’t been asleep.

‘Mr Krugmann would like to see you, sir.’

‘Krugmann’s here?’ He blinked at his watch.

‘Sir.’

The kid led him down the corridor to another small office. Krugmann sat pouchily behind a desk. He’d sacrificed his own office for Giordano and was having to make do.