The Carnival of Curiosities (Matt Drake Book 27)

by David Leadbeater

  Despite all their ideas, their brainstorming, they couldn’t think of a single way to stop this event from happening. Not from the outside at least. Lupei would have thought of everything, from paying off the local authorities to drones, enabling an overview of the area. Even stealing through the woods enfolded them in a blanket of risk.

  Drake went to his knees. The trees thinned ahead, enabling them a view of the northern end of the fairground. From here, they could study the layout. The entrance was to their west, a dirt path beyond a large parking area that curved through a gauntlet of food, beverage and game stalls designed to catch the attention and cash of every kid from the age of three to eighty.

  Further away, at the southern end of the fairground, Drake could see the frenzied light of the Madhouse beside the Wall of Death and Ferris wheel. To his right, large tents had been staked tightly to the ground, offering everything from burlesque to knife throwing events.

  The carnival grounds were filling. The parking area was hectic, the surrounding roads packed nose to tail with vehicles.

  Drake consulted his notes. “I got the Ferris wheel couple and the donut woman. Are we ready?”

  The others rattled off the people they were going to try to pull to safety before Hagi attacked. One thing Drake couldn’t spot were Lupei’s soldiers—the ones supplied by Dumitrescu, but he guessed they could be hidden away in the trailers, waiting to ambush Hagi.

  “As soon as we grab them all, we empty this fairground,” Dahl said, tapping his comms to enforce how they were keeping in touch. “By any means necessary.”

  Stowing their guns under large black raincoats, they moved out of shelter and approached the boundary of the carnival. Emerging like that from the woods, their jackets dripping, their hair wet, nine dark figures slipping across the wasteland, Drake thought they might look like figures from a horror movie, demonic fiends come to drag Lupei to hell.

  The description wasn’t far wrong.

  The team joined the flow of people and separated. Drake, jostled left and right, walked at speed to the Ferris wheel, identified its operators and walked up to them. “Cici and Corneliu?” he asked.

  Suspicion and surprise lit their faces. “Yes?”

  Drake hit them with the spiel, a speech Cam had made up that, mentioning him and better times, would best appeal to their instincts of survival. The first response he got was: “But who will work our wheel?”

  It was telling. The wheel was everything to them. Their life, their reason, their true love. The thought of walking away, even for a minute, filled them with dread and anxiety.

  “It’ll survive the battle,” Drake said. “You may not. Come with me now.”

  Conscious of Lupei’s men, of prying eyes, of a coming battle even he could not quite imagine, Drake urged them to follow, keeping one eye on the crowd.

  “I can’t leave the wheel. What about the people? Who will ensure their safety?” Corneliu asked.

  “We’re gonna save the people next,” Drake said. “But you are first. Camden wants you safe.”

  Gratitude and fond memory passed across Cici’s face, uncertainty across Corneliu’s. “He was a lovely boy,” Cici said. “A—”

  “Sorry,” Drake said. “But I have two more people to fetch. Please follow me.”

  Hoping he’d made the right impression, Drake took off toward the rows of stalls, searching for the donut and cotton candy stand. Through the throng, he spied Kenzie and Mai trying to talk more of the carnival folk into leaving, into preserving their lives. When he looked back, neither Cici nor Corneliu were following.

  “It has to be now,” he told them. “There’s no time.”

  “But the carnival is our world, our life,” the woman said. “We will live or die right here, along with the only friends we’ve ever known.”

  Drake closed his eyes but respected their decision. Keying his mic, he passed the news along, getting a similar response from Hayden and then Dahl. He understood. Would any man or woman flee their homes and abandon their lifelong friends when faced with adversity? If they had children then yes, probably, but the carnival folk’s children were largely the machines and stalls that they operated.

  Drake ran to the next person on his list, identifying an aging, gray-haired woman and delivering Cam’s heartfelt speech.

  “It has been coming a long time,” she told him as she made spun sugar, backlit by bright light and raindrops. “For good or bad, the carnival has ended.”

  Drake stared at her, struck by her acceptance and acquiescence. Standing there in the rain, surrounded by fair people and civilians, he breathed a deep breath of despair and turned away. Gazing between the crowds, seeing the carnival workers, the ones who toiled here, ate here and slept here, going nowhere else their entire lives, made him feel intensely sad for their plight.

  “All we can do is keep them as safe as possible,” he said. “It’s time to empty out this diabolical funfair.”

  As Drake swept his raincoat aside to reveal his weapons, the terrifying sounds of dozens of machine guns firing on automatic rang out.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  A frozen moment of shock and intense disbelief grabbed the crowd. Between those men, women and children that questioned the sound, those that were terrified of the sound, and those that recognized the sound, a palpable wall of fear passed, immobilizing them. Drake heard shouting and yelling from this side of the entrance, where Lupei’s own men were waiting, and from the other side where, presumably, Hagi and his allies were attacking.

  “Run!” Drake cried at the top of his voice. “Get the hell out of here!”

  Whether they understood him or not, those that looked to him saw the M4 in his hands and took action. The more attentive of them ran away from the entrance and the gunfire; the less alert straight toward it.

  Drake jumped on the comms. “Hagi’s attacking from the car park. Lupei’s men are ready. We have to clear these people out.”

  The SPEAR team fired into the air, galvanizing anyone still dithering into rapid movement. Drake tried to herd them toward the Ferris wheel, the furthest point from the entrance and close to a wide field and then a motorway where they might be able to congregate safely in large numbers. He saw both Cici and Corneliu waving people toward them.

  “Hagis are filling the entrance,” Alicia reported.

  Drake saw them too. A black wave, they flooded the eastern boundary, the result of one man’s hatred for another, one family’s blood feud with a reviled rival.

  Running among the innocents, he yelled at them to flee or get down, but not to mill like frightened sheep in the center of the fair. People were streaming out of the tents, some trying to crawl under the sides.

  A gaming stall had been knocked over, people caught among the boxes and supports, limbs stuck and entwined, struggling. The Madhouse and the Wall of Death were still running, the intensely loud music and bellowing crowd unaware that anything untoward was happening.

  Drake was torn between choices. Attack Hagi or seek out Lupei. Fight Lupei’s men or look for Hagi. Save the people or attack the soldiers.

  The choice, right or wrong, was abruptly swept away as Hagi’s men advanced into the carnival grounds. They carried guns, knives and bats; they wore jeans, T-shirts and hats. They were Roma, comprised of several clans, united in the hope that a single night of warfare would put an end to decades of killing.

  Drake might agree with them, at least with their views of Lupei, but he couldn’t let them attack the civilians. At first, they threaded through clearly innocent individuals but then a group of men lashed out at one fleeing youth and others wrestled a screaming mother to the ground.

  The situation was deteriorating.

  Drake ran at the Hagis, smashing his gun into one face, his fist into another. Men twisted and fell. Others turned toward him, seeing the slick raincoat, the hard face and the half-raised gun. They shouted, gestured and attacked.

  Drake held them off, trying not to open fire. To his left he saw Alicia
and Mai engaged in similar combat. A man struck at him with a nail-studded baseball bat. Drake caught the weapon below the nails, wrenched it free and threw it to the ground. The man launched himself then, straight into Drake’s extended elbow. There was a crack and a gout of blood. Drake turned toward the next fighter.

  All around them, the Hagis spread out through the carnival grounds. Civilians still screamed and lay on the ground, others running left and right or cowering behind stalls and rides. The carnival lights strobed and flashed; the music boomed out. The surreal madness that came with punching a man in the head and then deflecting the knife thrust of another whilst Van Halen’s Jump thundered out in the background was not lost on Drake.

  A man fell at his feet, splashing in water and mud. Another skidded close by and caught himself. Yet another collapsed across the first, face down in the puddles made by ruts in the ground. Drake hurled first one and then another man over his shoulders, spinning twice.

  “Is that the best you can do?” a familiar voice said at his side. “One man at a time? You Yorkshire puddings have no backbone.”

  And there was Torsten Dahl, an enemy under each armpit, a man in front of him falling back from a kick to the chest. Dahl grinned from three feet away.

  Drake elbowed another man in the throat. “You like three dudes at once, do you mate? Not a surprise.”

  The Swede spun to meet another assault. Drake saw Hayden and Kinimaka beyond him, and then the others. The SPEAR team seemed to have formed a ragged line before the approaching Hagis, trying to prevent them from venturing further into the carnival grounds. But they were never going to win that fight. The Hagis numbered in their hundreds.

  “Where the hell is Lupei?” Kenzie wondered. “Do you think he’s abandoned his people?”

  “No way,” Cam muttered.

  “Or he’s flanking the enemy,” Drake said. “Either way, this is gonna get worse—”

  And then he found out how much worse.

  They’d known Lupei was the master of misdirection, a purveyor of tricks and deceit. But they’d failed to imagine the depths to which his evil plumbed.

  The earth around the carnival’s entrance erupted. Multiple blasts stuck the air, and huge mounds of dirt and stones exploded upward. Hagi’s men, caught in the blast, pinwheeled to left and right, limbs flailing, tumbling until they hit the ground.

  Inevitably caught up in the blast were uncounted civilians, broken, burnt and thrown around like rag dolls.

  Drake cursed in shock. But following that blast came a second, this one inside the carnival grounds. This one seared right through Hagi’s men too, also killing more innocents than Drake could count.

  “Lupei is orchestrating this from eyes in the sky,” Hayden said suddenly. “Look up.”

  Drake did. The first thing he saw was a triangle of red lights, the sign of a low-flying drone. A brief burst shot it out of the sky. Kenzie and Mai followed his lead, grabbing three more between them. Even as they destroyed the last drone, a third explosion took out more people near the entrance.

  “Oh God, oh no...” Cam shouted.

  Drake followed his line of sight just in time to see a games stall explode, killing more of Hagi’s men and the couple who’d been running it for decades.

  “He’s killing his own people!” Cam screamed. “He’s killing his own fu—”

  Drake had seen evil before, fought and defied it, but the idea of a man deliberately killing the family who’d stood beside him for decades simply to take out a few attackers, was mind-blowing evil of the most depraved order.

  Cam sprang away from the line, racing toward the rows and rows of stalls, screaming at people to evacuate the area. As he ran, another stall exploded, the blast sending Cam flying backward through the air.

  “No!” Both Alicia and Shaw raced after him.

  Drake watched their backs. At that moment was a menacing sound, the thunder of gunfire. It came from the trees that bordered the parking area, and made Hagi’s men pause to stare in that direction and start moving that way. It felt wrong to Drake, something about that gunfire. And when some of Hagi’s men picked their way carefully between cars, when they were ten deep in the car park, four cars exploded into flames. Fire and shrapnel detonated among the men, shredding and searing them. Civilians too were caught in the blast, dying where they stood.

  Where the hell is Lupei?

  Playing his game. A mix of misdirection, trickery and heartless malevolence. Drake made his way over to Cam.

  “He okay?” he asked Alicia.

  “I’m fine,” Cam growled. “Luckily only the blast wave hit me.”

  “Where the hell is Lupei?” Drake reiterated his earlier thought.

  Cam was still on the ground, sitting upright, not moving until his head cleared. Now, his gaze fixed on the silent trucks sitting in shadow at the southern end of the carnival site. Every window was dark, every door closed, the entire area shrouded by an impenetrable shadow.

  “There are normally lights,” he said. “Between the vans and trucks. Just for convenience. But tonight... they’ve all gone dark.”

  Incredibly, there were still people hanging around the Wall of Death, which stood to the right of the trucks. The music continued to blare, and strobe lights pulsed. Most of the people were headed for the treeline, but some were staring left and right as if shellshocked. Others were trying to hide. Drake looked from them to the dark that surrounded the carnival vehicles.

  “We have to get them out of here.”

  “You think Lupei’s over there?” Mai asked.

  “He has to be,” Cam said.

  By now, the others were closing in around them, still fighting and warding off their enemies to give Cam time to recover. Drake saw Dahl hammer a man to the ground with one huge fist, Kinimaka throw an opponent into two more, and then scoop up one of their discarded guns to use on them. He saw a trio carrying baseball bats and knives come at Shaw and Kenzie, but didn’t need to watch to know how that fight would go.

  Drake turned toward the trucks. “Shall we shake the—”

  Another crazy noise split the night apart. At first, Drake felt incredible relief. And then skepticism washed over him, doubt that the wailing sirens, the incredible, compounded sound of multiple screaming police cars was real.

  “It is,” Alicia said, reading his mind. “I’ve heard that sound often enough to know when it’s being faked.”

  Drake looked at Cam. “I don’t get it.”

  “Me neither. Lupei and Dumitrescu own the cops. They should have been paid off.”

  “Could it be a trick?”

  “How?” Cam asked. “What advantage could Lupei possibly gain by—”

  Then events got exponentially worse, and it became appallingly clear that Lupei was even more inhuman than they’d imagined. Enormous explosions, bigger than anything so far, shook the night and the very ground they were standing on. At first, Drake hunched, expecting fire and earth to erupt, but nothing happened. At least, not close by.

  Alicia saw the first plume in the distance. “Fuck me sideways. What is that?”

  Drake looked to where she was pointing—at a rising cloud of smoke and earth to the east, at flames that licked a hundred-feet high, at carnage, hell and death.

  At the same time, another smoke cloud rose to the west and then another to the north. Several more explosions slammed through the ground, followed by the distant, terrible spirals and clouds of death.

  “He’s blowing up the roads,” Dahl said as if he couldn’t believe his own words. “He’s blowing up all the roads so the police can’t get here.”

  “Not just that,” Hayden said. “It’s so the Hagis can’t escape. Lupei just created a giant kill box.”

  “With us at the center,” Alicia said.

  “And hundreds of people,” Shaw pointed out.

  Drake never took his eyes of the rising vortex of death. “I think now is the time to show Lupei his biggest mistake,” he said, hefting his guns.

&
nbsp; “Which is?” Cam wondered.

  “That he trapped us motherfuckers in here with him,” Dahl growled, already walking toward the trucks.

  CHAPTER FORTY ONE

  Drake stalked toward Lupei’s trucks with the SPEAR team at his side.

  “The carnival folk are still here,” Cam said in a pained voice. “They’re not leaving their stands.”

  Drake looked back. It wasn’t quite as crazy as Cam made out. Stall owners were defending their livelihoods, crowded around a central point along the carnival’s main thoroughfare, but Hagi’s men hadn’t reached them yet and, in all fairness, didn’t appear to be targeting them.

  “We’ll come back for them,” Drake said. “But Lupei gets it first.”

  Another explosion boomed through the earth; another road destroyed. Drake could hear frustration and rage in the voices of Hagi’s men, voicing their confusion and anger at finding only cowardly deception and trickery, with no real flesh or blood enemies.

  “What’s the plan?” Hayden asked.

  “Plan?” Dahl grunted. “Plan? I’ll tell you the fucking plan. This is the fucking plan.”

  The big Swede plucked two grenades from his belt and almost pulled the pins before hurling them at the darkened trucks. It was only when Cam grabbed his arm that he hesitated.

  “No,” the young man said. “There might be innocents in there.”

  Dahl’s brow furrowed. Drake caught on. “You think Lupei’s hiding behind civilians like a gutless terrorist?”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past that man,” Hayden said. “Let’s get closer.”

  Dahl nodded, accepting. Alicia pointed out the obvious. “They’re bound to be watching.”

  “Good,” Mai said. “That’ll help rout them out.”