Simon Green - The Man with the Golden Torc

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 again 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.

I drove on, half dead behind the wheel myself, and for a while I had the motorway all to myself.

And then, from up ahead, came the Flying Saucerers. And I was so hurt and tired and generally pissed off that I didn’t even slow down. Let them come. Let them all come, every damned thing from above and below and in between. I was on a roll and mad enough to take on the whole bloody world. The Flying Saucerers are high-level magic users who swan around in flying saucer–shaped artefacts made up of ionised plasma energies, for reasons best known to themselves. Personally, I think they just like to show off. They’re the vultures of the paranormal world, darting down to pick up the spoils of other people’s battles and carry off whatever isn’t actually nailed down. Which is actually pretty pathetic behaviour, if you ask me, for a group who claim they’re out to rule the world.

I peered wearily through my cracked windscreen and scowled at the saucers shooting through the sky towards me. There had to be a whole fleet of the bloody things. Twenty, maybe thirty, their wide saucer shapes as insubstantial as soap bubbles, condensing into weird rainbow colours around the pilots sitting cross-legged in the centre of the craft. A whole fleet slamming towards me in broad daylight. Made bold at the prospect of a prize like the Soul of Albion. And knowing them, they’d waited for everyone else to take a crack at me, and weaken me, before they tried for the Soul themselves. I could feel my smile widening into a death’s-head grin under my golden mask. I might be down, but I wasn’t out. And I had weapons and tactics and dirty tricks I hadn’t even tried yet.

The Flying Saucerers are dangerous because, like the family, they take science and magic equally seriously. They embrace both schools of knowledge, two very different doctrines, and combine them in unnatural and unexpected ways to produce a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Like the plasma saucers: science devised, magic driven. They came howling in, one after the other, targeting computers zeroing in on my car. Energy bolts cracked and exploded in the road ahead of me, and I threw the Hirondel this way and that, ducking and dodging as best I could. Fierce energies crackled all around me, chewing up the road in long ragged runs. One whole grass verge was on fire, and I had to jump the Hirondel over a wide crevice that opened up in front of me.

Anywhen else, I would probably have been scared shitless in the face of so much superior firepower, but after everything I’d already been through, the saucers were more annoying than anything.

The road blew up, right in front of me. I punched the Hirondel through the smoke and flames, but the left front wheel dipped into a crack and snatched the steering wheel out of my hands. The car spun around and around, spiralling down the motorway at sickening speed, before finally skidding to a halt. I sat limply in my seat while my spinning head settled, feeling really grateful I’d had seat belts installed, even though it was a classic car. My armour had protected me from the sudden deceleration and probably a really nasty case of whiplash, but I was still pretty dazed. And my wounded arm felt worse than ever. God alone knew what damage the faerie arrow was doing to my system.

I checked the car over. Smoke was rising from under the bonnet, which is never a good sign, but everything seemed still to be working. I considered using the EMP generator, but I was pretty sure the Flying Saucerers would have shielded their craft against that. I would have. Which just left…taking out the trash the old-fashioned way.

I undid my seat belt, forced open the door, and half crawled, half fell out of the car. I levered myself upright by leaning most of my weight on the car door, and the heavy metal crumpled under the strain of my golden fingers. I winced. That was going to be hell to beat out later. I stood up, straight and tall, using all the armour’s support, and strode off down the motorway towards the approaching saucers. The first dropped towards me and opened up a strafing run with its energy weapons. And I drew my Colt Repeater and shot the Flying Saucerer in the head. He’d protected his craft against EMPs, energy weapons, and magic attacks, but he’d never expected to face a simple cold lead bullet. Guided by the gun’s unnatural nature, the bullet punched through all the pilot’s shields and blew his head apart before he even knew what was happening. The saucer dropped like a stone, skidded across the motorway, leaving deep scars in the road behind it, and finally exploded in a rainbow of dissipating energies. I turned slowly, and then shot every other Flying Saucerer out of the sky, one at a time. Even the ones that turned and ran.