Truly Deadly: The Complete Series: (YA Spy Thriller Books 1-5)

by Rob Aspinall

  Oh! Come! On!

  26

  Hold On Tight

  In the midst of all the chaos, I had a plan. It was the same plan I’d had for years. When times are tough, go shopping. The sign by the side of the motorway told me I was only a short drive away from the Trafford Centre mall.

  Unfortunately, the police had a plan too.

  So did RRB.

  So did helicopter sniper.

  And so did Old Man River’s expiring body.

  But let’s start with the cops. The lead chase car, a high-powered BMW, sped by in the middle lane and cut in front of me, the brake lights flashing on and off as the driver attempted to slow us down. Nice try po-po man. The Range Rover powered us forward, slamming us into the back of the BMW.

  I clung on to the wheel and absorbed the shunt. We bumped him again. The BMW accelerated away and another cop car pulled in the space. Now there were two of them and the traffic was thickening like soup.

  We began the climb up Barton Bridge, a seriously high stretch of road with a sheer drop either side. To make things worse, it was always windy up there.

  Helicopter sniper’s plan was to paint the inside of the ambulance with my brains. Lucky for me, I wasn’t an easy target. The first shot missed when the police tried tandem braking with two cars in front. The second, when I hit the anchors and weaved left into the middle, dragging the Range Rover kicking and screaming with it. The first bullet pinged off the nose of the ambulance. The second fizzed right by me through the cabin, hitting the driver of the cop car on the inside lane. The car wriggled and flipped onto its roof and sliding away along the centre of the motorway. I glanced over at the chopper. It pulled up and overhead into the cloudy blue sky. The police changed tactics too. One stayed a safe distance in front, while another blocked off my path back into the fast lane. Another motorway sign told me my escape route was getting closer.

  One mile and counting.

  We climbed steeper and steeper up the curving incline of the bridge, a busy slip road feeding in from the left up ahead. It was at this point that I began to feel faint, a butterfly rave in my gut and sweat beads forming around my temples. My heart was aching in my chest and tiny black spots began to pop in front of my eyes, like the world was a scratchy old film.

  If I started to see stars, it was all over. Lights out. Circle of Concern, only with hit men, grab teams and guns. Or just plain old death by twisted metal fireball.

  I gulped for air as if I was drowning, wiping away the forehead sweat while attempting to blink out the spots from my eyes. Come on, Lorn. Get a grip.

  It was no good.

  The stars came out to play.

  I was rattled awake almost instantly by a hailstorm of bullets tearing through the roof, right down the centre of the ambulance. The sound was deafening and terrifying, and for a second or two I forgot who I was, where I was and what was happening.

  With my foot off the accelerator, the ambulance was moving slower. But it was still pushing seventy. I hauled myself up in the seat, regained control of the wheel and narrowly avoided a bright-green fuel tanker trundling along in the inside lane. The barrier on the left edge of the bridge rushed towards us and, with it, oblivion. I stepped on the brake pedal and turned the wheel to the right. We hit the barrier on the left side. Sparks flew and steel screeched, but we stayed on the road. More bullets ripped through the ambo as I pulled us back into the inside lane. This time, they punched sunlight holes in the left side of the cabin, turning passenger-seat guy into a human colander. There was no coming back from that one.

  I swerved left to right, the steering wheel heavier than the moon. I realised RRB was fighting me with opposite lock, riding her brake pedal to slow us down. Since the sky started raining hot terror, the police had officially shat it and got clean out of the way. Only a matter of time before that sniper scored a direct hit. As we came over the crest of the hill, he changed game plan again and took out the right rear tyre of the ambulance. The combined mass of both vehicles held us steady. I saw the chopper in the side mirror do the exact same thing to the Range Rover. It was more than enough. The wheel jerked to the left out of my hands. We spun out of control, round and round and round in a screeching mess.

  It was a crazy fairground ride back over to the motorway barrier, where a dizzying doom-plunge waited patiently on the other side. Tyre rubber burned in the air as I desperately hung on to the wheel. Not even attempting to steer. Just bracing for the big bang.

  The Range Rover took the bulk of the hit, ploughing through the concrete and metal barrier rear-end first, coming to a stop halfway over the edge, pulling the ambulance up off its front wheels.

  As the helicopter hovered out front to check on me, I slumped over the wheel, face smeared in blood … Dead.

  27

  Tipping Point

  Nah, not really.

  The blood wasn’t mine. It was for the benefit of that sniper, scooped out of a bullet wound from the guy in the passenger seat, then hastily smeared over my forehead.

  The helicopter hovered a moment. I watched out of one eye, open a crack, as it peeled off into the distance, the sniper satisfied I was toast. I sat back up in my seat and used a cloth stuffed in the driver’s door tray to wipe away the blood. I had a humdinger of a stiff neck, but otherwise I was in one Lorna-shaped piece.

  My front door was jammed from too many crunching hits. The passenger door likewise. Out the back was a hundred-foot drop. The only way out was through a gaping hole where the windscreen used to be. I caught my breath for a moment, the siren finally dying as the engine cut out. The ambulance creaked and rocked on a thirty-degree angle.

  I stood gingerly out of my seat and climbed oh so gently onto the dashboard.

  Then I heard a long, continuous beep. The patient in the back was flatlining.

  Damn you, guilt. Damn you to hell!

  I let out a resigned sigh and backed up into the cabin. I sidestepped down the incline into the rear of the ambulance.

  Meanwhile, RRB was unbuckling her seatbelt, face cut to ribbons, but alive. She brought up an automatic rifle and let rip.

  I ducked instinctively, arms shielding my face. The sound bounced around the inside of the ambulance and left me half deaf. With the windscreen in a million pieces, RRB began the precarious climb over the bonnet, the Range Rover lurching back with any sudden movement. In the meantime, I had to do something about the patient. I looked over the old man. Where to start? Inner-Philippe? Any ideas?

  Philippe’s degree was in death, not life. I don’t think they taught first aid at hitman school. One look over my shoulder and RRB was getting closer, crawling on all fours over the bonnet. I opened the old croaker’s mouth. His lips were crusty and shrivelled, with only a couple of brown teeth skewed out of a pair of yellow gums. I blew at his mouth from a foot away.

  There, I tried.

  You’re no oil painting yourself, spew-breath, my inner devil voice told me. Get back in there and suck some ancient.

  I did as my conscience told me. And it was disgusting. He tasted of gas. But it made no difference. So far, I’d kissed an orange, my best friend and a dead pensioner in the back of an ambulance. I had to get out more.

  But first I had to get out of this. RRB was close to climbing off the bonnet and into the ambulance. I’d cross that bitch when I came to her.

  I tried thumping the old man in the chest. Then I spied a defibrillator fixed to the wall behind the bed with a couple of pads attached to curly white wires. If the heart monitor was working off a battery, then surely the same went for the defibrillator. I could blast him, then fry RRB straight after with the same pads. I sped-read my way through a thin panel of instructions stuck to the wall next to the unit, but it was too late. I felt a presence behind me.

  RRB was on her feet. Tall. Sturdy. Pissed.

  She wiped away the blood dripping from a cut above her right eye and raised the machine gun. There was no time for half measures. I fly tackled her before she could get a sho
t off. It wasn’t the smartest move. We tumbled into the Range Rover cabin, the weapon bouncing away, destined for the ship canal below.

  We landed on the back seat in a thumping tangle of arms and legs.

  RRB pinned me down, stronger than Millie’s celebrity perfume. I reached for a notebook in the rear pocket of the driver’s seat, red with a hardbound spine. Perfect for jamming into her throat. With RRB coughing and holding her neck, I slid out from under her. She pulled me back by the hospital gown and butted me from a sitting position. I thought my mind was about to crack open. She tapped a knuckle against her forehead. It clanged.

  “Metal plate,” she said in Russian.

  Suddenly, the whole vehicle shunted backwards, holding, but only just.

  I panicked and scrambled my way to the front of the Range Rover. RRB pulled me back by the gown again, putting more stock in killing than living. I fell into the driving seat and she reached around the headrest, putting a hand over my nose and mouth, pressing, squeezing, suffocating me.

  I reached up behind me, desperately trying to free myself, but she had the leverage. The slender connection between Range Rover and ambulance whined and threatened to snap.

  My left hand touched on the release button for the headrest. I pushed it inwards and yanked the legs of the headrest out of their holes. I slid down further down in the seat, pulling RRB with me. Then I jammed the headrest legs back in their holes until I heard a click. RRB let go of me. I’d wedged her neck in between headrest and seat, with no way for her to free herself.

  As I tried to climb out, a section of the bridge fell away and the Range Rover swayed back, throwing me against the backseat.

  There was a snap, followed by a groan. The Range Rover rolled backwards and yawned up around seventy degrees. I pushed myself off the backseat with both feet, launching through the cabin and over the dash. I could feel my grip on the world slipping away. The Range Rover hit ninety degrees and slid off the bridge. With quick feet, I stepped off the gear lever with my left and off the bottom rim of the steering wheel with my right, jumping through the empty windscreen frame.

  All I saw was sky. Big, grey ominous sky. But as I jumped, the lump of battered black metal rushed clean beyond me, taking a shrieking, trapped RRB with it, plunging towards the murky ship canal waters below.

  I reached out mid-air, desperate, at full stretch. One hand caught hold of a twisted strand of metal barrier hanging off the bridge. Then the other.

  I desperately fought my way back onto the bridge before my grip weakened. Ha. Who would have thunk it? Saved by all those mind-numbing rehab core exercises.

  As I rolled onto my back, I tuned back into the continuous beep coming from the rear of the ambulance. The patient was still flatlining. Feeling half dead myself, I climbed in and followed the instructions for the defibrillator, rubbing sticky conductive gel on the top left of his veiny blue chest and the lower right of his ribcage. I turned on the machine and held the pads out ready in aching hands while the machine fired up. The pads charged up and I got a beep and a green light that said Stick that sucker.

  I went for it. The guy’s body convulsed, arching up off the bed and collapsing down again.

  Beeeeeeeeeep. No difference.

  I charged the pads up again.

  Come on, old man. Live.

  The pads charged. Boom!

  Nope. One more time and then I’d give up. Who the hell knows why, but I closed my eyes and imagined him alive, chatting, having a cup of tea with me. Everything had blown over. Phew, life, eh?

  I hit him with the pads.

  Beeeeeeeeep.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  Flipping beep! The old man gasped back into existence.

  I breathed a huge sigh of relief through a mouth drier than a gluten-free cracker.

  “Are you okay?” I asked the old man.

  He held my hand and removed his oxygen mask.

  “That was the most fun I’ve had in decades,” he said with a big, toothless smile. He cackled and let his oxygen mask snap back against his face. I patted him on the shoulder and left him to rest. Saving his life kind of cancelled out the lives I’d taken. Kind of like eating an apple after a chocolate bar.

  Kind of.

  As a procession of tiny blue lights sped towards us, I closed the rear doors of the ambulance, slid into the driver’s seat and turned the ignition. The ambulance was back on all fours. It started. It rolled. It drove.

  28

  'Til You Drop

  Having got the jump on the police, I ditched the ambulance in the underground carpark of the Trafford Centre mall and wheeled the old man to the bottom of a bank of escalators where he’d be easily found. I rode an escalator up to the tranquil, climate-controlled surrounds of the mall. The soothing sounds of shopping-centre music and water fountains helped to calm me down.

  I was on home turf now and I knew the place like the inside of my eyelids. The happy result of many, many days with the girls here, trying on clothes we didn’t have the money to buy and scoffing fries I wasn’t supposed to eat in the food court. The gentle bustle of human traffic echoed around the mall, natural light flooding in through the curved glass ceiling. I headed to my fave clothes store. It was a big one, always packed with sales racks I could quick-change behind.

  “Ha ha! Check out freakshow!”

  A pair of walking turds with egos bigger than their brains came the other way in their tribal tatts and wannabe gangsta getups, a couple of tangerine tramps in tow, overdone panda eyes giving me the ups and downs.

  “Look at the state of it.”

  “Where’d you escape from?”

  Ah, the familiar cocktail of social awkwardness and self-loathing. Drink it in, Lorn.

  The sensible thing would have been to ignore them, like usual. Still, I couldn’t resist a once in a lifetime opportunity. I’d brought the empty gun with me in case it came in handy. It did. I pulled it from my knickers and held it sideways in their faces.

  “What was that? I didn’t catch it,” I said, backing them up against the window of Victoria’s Secret.

  Oh, you should have seen their faces. Absolute pant-rinsing terror. I took it a step further and got all up in the first turd’s grill. I put the gun under his chin.

  “Whoa, chillax. I didn’t mean nuffin,” he said.

  Unbelievable. Even at gunpoint, he had the arrogance to tell me what to do.

  “BANG!” I shouted. The whole group jumped, but turd number one especially, a circle of urine advancing around the crotch of his low-hanging jeans.

  “Oh dear,” I said, drunk on power. “Have we had an accident?”

  I moved on, getting plenty of funny looks, feeling a little unhinged. A little devil may care, yet liking it.

  I was only a few feet from the clothes store when I saw her. Disaster! Ginger Bun, alone but alive, her left eye black and blue. She spotted me across a crowd of shoppers. This time, I made the first move, ducking into the store. I ran low between racks to the fitting room tucked away at the back, a burly security guard tailing me all the way.

  “Can I help you?” an attendant asked, putting her platinum bob between me and the fitting-room entrance.

  “Yeah, you can get out of the way,” I said.

  I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder.

  “Come on,” the security guard said. “Out.”

  One red rag and one broken arm later, the guard dropped to his knees howling in pain. The attendant bolted. I jogged along the narrow fitting-room corridor, raking open the long, black curtains, catching young women either half nude or midway through an in-depth analysis of their bum in the mirror.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s taken. Get out!”

  “Bitch.”

  “Hey!”

  “What the—”

  “Weirdo.”

  One by one, I discovered they were all busy. I tried the cubicle on the end. A glam brunette who reminded me of Becki stood
in a pencil skirt and a black bra with the tag still on, doing her best duck face in the full-length mirror while trying to angle a selfie. She jumped out of her skin in shock and embarrassment.

  Ha ha, caught in the act. Any other time, priceless and hilarious. Right that minute, entirely non-pertinent. I flashed her the piece sticking out of my waistband and put a finger to my lips. She huddled in the corner, arms across her chest. I threw the curtain back across and crouched on a circular white wooden stool. The chart music was quieter in the fitting rooms and I could hear the curtains being opened again, one by one.

  More squealing and swearing.

  Ginger Bun. It had to be. I heard her surprise the woman in the booth next door, before a pair of sexless black shoes scuffed to a halt on the other side of the curtain.

  The tips of her bitten-down fingernails curled around the top edge of the rail. She ripped the curtain open and took aim with her gun.

  I sprang off the stool like a cheetah intercepting its dinner.

  I forced Ginger Bun all the way back against the wall of the fitting-room corridor, smacking her gun-hand against the wall until it dropped to the floor.

  She was strong as a bison though, and pushed me off her into the booth. She stepped inside, closing the curtain behind her. She raised her fists like a boxer, throwing a left, a right. One I ducked. Another I blocked. She grabbed my hair and kneed me hard in the gut. Shoved me back against the mirror and dug me with a left to the ribs.

  Breathing was tough. More so when she pressed a thumb hard against my windpipe while digging me again with another punch. The girl in the corner whimpered. I reached down as far as my arm would go, fingers grasping desperately at the stool. I got hold of one of the legs and slammed Ginger Bun upside her temple. She instantly let go. I swung the stool again. She chopped it away and it broke in two on the floor. She covered up like a boxer on the ropes, getting her bearings back. I punched her hard in the left boob.