Simon Green - The Man with the Golden Torc

I armoured up. The living metal flowed smoothly over and around me in a moment, sealing me off from a hostile world. Bullets hit my back and just ricocheted away. They couldn’t touch me or Molly now. The rate of gunfire increased as the black cars drew nearer, bullets spraying across my back, my shoulders, and the back of my head. I didn’t feel the impact, but I could hear it. Armouring my left arm had made it strong again, if no less painful. I slipped it carefully around Molly’s waist, and felt a little more secure.

The Vincent was really hammering along now, the passing world just a blur. Molly was laughing out loud, whooping with the joy of speed. I was more concerned about what would happen if just one of the bullets happened to hit the Vincent’s fuel tank. I mentioned this to Molly.

"Don’t worry!" she yelled back. "This isn’t really a motorbike. It just looks like one."

"Not a real bike? Not a real Vincent Black Shadow?"

"Come on," said Molly. "What did you expect from a charm bracelet?"

"Just as long as it doesn’t turn back to a pumpkin at midnight…"

Molly laughed again and pushed the bike’s speed even harder. I took my right arm away from Molly’s waist and drew the Colt Repeater from its shoulder holster. It took me a while, and hurt my shoulder like hell, but I finally wrestled the gun out. I breathed hard for a moment, controlling the pain and bracing myself for what I had to do next. I tightened my hold around Molly’s waist with my strengthened left arm, turned around on the seat, and looked back at the cars behind me. There were four of them now, with a fifth catching up, ploughing their way through any traffic that didn’t get out of their way fast enough. Men were leaning out of the car windows and firing at me with a whole assortment of weapons. One even had a rocket launcher. He fired the thing, and the rocket shot out, slammed into my armoured side, and ricocheted away to blow up a Gap store. I hoped there was nobody inside, but I had no way of knowing. Manifest Destiny didn’t care who got hurt or killed. And that was when I decided that just escaping these bastards wasn’t good enough.

They were all firing at me now, bullets bouncing off my chest and golden face mask. The bike slammed this way and that as we shot in and out of a traffic jam. The extra pain in my arm made me cry out, and tears ran down my face under the mask. But the Colt Repeater in my right hand was steady as hell when I trained it on the pursuing cars.

I tried shooting out the tyres first. That always worked in the movies. But though I hit every tyre I aimed at, not one of them blew. The armoured cars were running on solid rubber tyres. Manifest Destiny must have seen those movies too. So I aimed at the driver of the nearest car. He laughed at me, through his bulletproof glass windscreen, right up until the Colt Repeater sent a bullet through the windscreen and blew his head apart. The car swerved wildly, mounted the pavement, and rammed through three parking meters before sliding to a halt. I aimed carefully and shot dead the other four drivers, and their cars skidded and crashed and slammed into storefronts.

But more black cars were already joining the chase, screeching around corners from every side street we passed. Soon there were a dozen new cars on our trail, swerving back and forth to make my aiming harder. I kept blowing away their drivers, one at a time. Such aim would have been impossible under normal conditions, but luckily the Colt Repeater did most of the work for me. Thank you, Uncle Jack. Still more cars joined the pursuit, seeming to come from everywhere at once, ploughing through the civilian traffic like it wasn’t even there, tossing lighter cars aside or grinding them underneath. There was a chaos of crashed and burning vehicles behind us for as far back as I could see. Wide-eyed men and women huddled in shop doorways, yelling into mobile phones as we shot past.

The gunfire was constant now, slamming into me and the bike, trying to bring us down with sheer pressure of bullets. Most of them ricocheted away, chewing up storefronts and cutting down pedestrians. Manifest Destiny were using me to kill innocent people. I couldn’t let that go on.

A black car came roaring out of a side street and drew alongside us. The man in the backseat shot me in the face at point-blank range, crying out angrily as the bullet glanced off the golden mask. They were on my left side, so I couldn’t shoot them. I risked letting go of Molly’s waist with my left arm, punched through the car’s windscreen, pulled the driver out, and threw him into the road ahead. The black car ran over him, skidded away, hit a parked car, and flipped end over end before crashing to a halt. I put my aching arm back around Molly’s waist.

A police car tried to get involved. It came screaming around a corner, siren blaring, lights flashing. Two of the big black cars closed in on either side of it, and then both drivers jerked their steering wheels over at the same time. The heavily armoured cars crushed the police car between them, crunching up the standard steel chassis like so much tinfoil. The black cars roared on as the police car skidded out of control and smashed through a glass storefront, its siren still wailing forlornly. I felt bad for the cops in the car. The police aren’t supposed to get involved in our wars. They’re not equipped to deal with the likes of us.

I turned back to yell in Molly’s ear. "There’re actually more cars after us now than when we started! Are we going anywhere in particular?"

"Yes! Away!"

I had to laugh. "I’m so glad we’ve got a plan…"

"Anything else, Eddie, only I’m a bit busy at the moment…"

"Too many civilians are getting hurt! Maybe we should just stop and fight it out."

"Don’t even think that! The odds suck. You can bet the moment we stop moving, they’ll have long-range sharpshooters in place to target us. Your armour can’t protect me from that. They’d threaten to kill me, until you agreed to armour down. Then they’d shoot you full of tranks, take you back to headquarters, and dissect you alive to get at all your family secrets and the armour in particular. They’d probably do the same to me for turning traitor on them. I’d rather go down fighting. Or at least escaping."

"You’ve really thought this through," I said.

"Hell," said Molly. "It’s what I’d do. Now hang on. Our only real hope is to lose these bastards."

A black car emerged from a side alley and lurched out onto the street ahead of us. It spun around on squealing wheels and came charging straight at us. We were blocked in by cars on either side, with no room to manoeuvre. I could have jumped off. The armour would have protected me. But that would have left Molly on her own…I was still trying to figure out what to do when Molly revved the engine for all it was worth and aimed the bike right at the gleaming radiator of the approaching black car. I could hear her chanting something, but the rushing wind ripped her words away. The black car loomed up before us, close enough that I could see the driver laughing at us, and then, at the very last moment, the Vincent rose up into the air and sailed right over the top of the black car. We landed behind the car with only the faintest of bumps and kept on going. I looked back just in time to see the Manifest Destiny car smash into another black car that had been following right behind us. The two cars slammed together, head to head, and then blew apart with a satisfying large explosion.

I turned back and hugged Molly tightly so I could yell in her ear. "I didn’t know the bike could do that!"

"It can’t! But I can. Though not very often, so you’d better hope that doesn’t happen again."

I sent up some more prayers to St. Christopher.