‘Gisborne loves that truck,’ John said.
‘One advantage of shooting him in the nads and knocking him out is that it’s impossible to make Gisborne any angrier,’ Robin pointed out, almost managing a smirk. ‘And Dad’s car takes five minutes to warm up.’
‘If it starts at all,’ Little John agreed. ‘But I only had three driving lessons with Dad during the Easter holidays.’
‘The forest isn’t far,’ Robin said. ‘And there’s never any traffic out that way.’
Clare was pounding on the door under the stairs and Gisborne had started coming around.
‘Go pack,’ Robin ordered. ‘Keep it light. Once we get to Sherwood we’ll be moving on foot.’
After quickly double-checking the knots he’d used on Gisborne, Robin followed his brother upstairs.
The bottom half of Robin’s trousers was covered in flaking mud, so he switched to a pair of trackies. He dug his life savings of forty-three pounds from under a loose floorboard, and decided it was worth carrying the weight of his laptop because all his hacker and archery contacts were saved on there, and apart from his bow it was the only thing he owned that might be worth a few pounds.
Robin topped off his bag with a waterproof jacket, a fleece, dry socks, a water bottle, chocolate ginger biscuits and underwear.
The pack was heavier than he’d have liked, and he’d have to carry his crossbow and quiver as well.
After stopping in a first-floor bathroom to grab a toothbrush, sunscreen and a few other bits, Robin crossed to Little John’s room.
The sixteen-year-old had found a large backpack and pulled piles of stuff out of his drawers, but was paralysed deciding what to put inside.
‘Gisborne’s people will kill us for sure,’ Little John blurted, almost tearful. ‘And they’ve got Dad.’
Part of Robin wanted to yell at his brother to focus, but anger only made Little John worse when he got into a state. So Robin took over and started stuffing the bag. As he headed out of Little John’s room, Robin remembered he hadn’t packed a torch and raced back to the attic.
Downstairs, Gisborne was conscious and moaning into the dishcloth Robin had used as a gag. More alarmingly, Clare had taken the heavy porcelain lid off the toilet cistern and was smashing it against the under-stair door.
Robin handed Gisborne’s keys to Little John as they scrambled out of the front door.
‘What if I crash?’ John asked.
‘Try not to,’ Robin suggested, as they reached Gisborne’s wheels.
16. IF YOU GO DOWN TO THE WOODS TODAY
Black Bess’s interior had hand-stitched Italian leather seats with GG embroidered on the headrests and more loudspeakers than a heavy metal concert.
Little John pushed the big red start button and the huge engine set the whole cab shaking.
‘What do I do?’ he shouted over the clatter.
It was frustrating dealing with John when he got in a panic. Robin wondered if it might have been better to run. But they were five kilometres from the forest, they were carrying a lot of stuff, and Little John didn’t exactly have a distance-runner’s build.
‘The controls are the same as Dad’s car,’ Robin soothed, as the race-tuned engine revved and choking sooty plumes engulfed the truck.
He pointed at the transmission. ‘Try putting it in drive,’ he suggested. Robin was pinned to his seat as Black Bess shot across the front lawn on an alarming trajectory, straight towards the house.
‘Steer!’ he yelled.
The black Mercedes clattered through their dead grandmother’s rose bushes and flattened the headstones of Barry the tortoise and two beloved Hood family dogs.
‘It’s got more grunt than Dad’s wagon,’ John observed.
They bounced on towards the double garage of the neighbouring house and John slowed down to turn, just as Clare ran out onto the lawn. She hadn’t looked, assuming her dad’s car would be escaping rather than doing a bumpy circle around the front lawn.
Only Little John’s foot on the brake and a frantic dive into prickly rose bushes stopped Clare from becoming a gooey splat on Black Bess’s formidable front bull bars. Robin feared his nose would start bleeding again as he thumped the dashboard.
‘The road!’ he demanded. ‘Aim for the road!
John sped up and the front wheels finally hit the street.
Robin realised he’d made a mistake as he looked backwards through the rear window. ‘Clare’s going back inside. We took their phones, but I should have ripped the landline out of the wall.’
‘Gisborne’s got flunkeys all over town,’ John said warily, as he took a left at the end of the road. ‘And this car doesn’t exactly blend into its surroundings.’
‘We’ll bail as soon as we get into the forest,’ Robin said, as they drove a straight road with farmland on either side. ‘It’s ten minutes unless we hit traffic.’
There was one lane in each direction, so John had to pull out to overtake a tractor dragging a trailer stacked with hay bales. As he came back into his lane, they heard a siren, but the oncoming vehicle was hidden by the crest of a hill.
‘That’s not good,’ John said.
‘It’s no use turning away from the forest,’ Robin said nervously. ‘Keep your head. Speed up if you’re comfortable.’
The engine belched as John took the truck up to 80 kmh, and the tractor receded in his mirror.
An empty yellow school bus, heading to its first morning pick-up, came the other way and Robin felt monster relief as a wailing ambulance – not a cop car – emerged through the haze of low sun.
‘Going to our house, for Gisborne?’ John wondered.
‘If it is, Locksley P.D. won’t be far behind.’
Sherwood Forest’s vast canopy stretched out below as they crested a hill. It was the largest forest in the land, a hilly green mass extending north for seventy kilometres, and stretching four hundred and fifty from east to west, in a great belt from the waterfalls at Lake Elizabeth to the swampy Eastern Delta.
Black Bess drove downhill fast and noisy, coming to a rusted blue sign before a fork in the road. To the left was Route 24, a twelve-lane asphalt scar that cut Sherwood Forest in two. John went right, forced to slow by gaping potholes and reddish silt deposited by spring floods.
There were huge signs on each side of the road. The first was green, with two smiling cartoon trees and King Corp’s golden crown logo, which angry folks had shot through with bullet holes.
WELCOME TO SHERWOOD FOREST
PART OF THE LOCKSLEY SPECIAL ENTERPRISE ZONE
A CARING PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP MANAGED BY THE KING CORPORATION
On the other side a mangled yellow warning sign had been left at a strange angle after an encounter with a drunk driver:
NO REFUELLING STOP FOR 104KM
DANGER OF FLASH FLOOD
DANGER OF WILD ANIMALS
DANGER OF BANDITS
HAVE A NICE DAY
John didn’t fancy any of that as he rounded a sharp corner, then had to slam on the brakes.
Neon-orange Forest Ranger trucks were parked one on either side of the road. Between them ran a metal stinger strip, whose jagged metal barbs would shred the tyres of any vehicle that went over it.
‘Might be a routine check,’ Robin said. ‘Rangers do search vehicles for criminals and stuff.’
But there was nothing routine about the brown-uniformed Ranger who ran out, waving her arms and making halt gestures towards the black truck.
‘Turn off your engine,’ her lieutenant ordered through a bullhorn, as John squealed to a stop thirty metres shy of the roadblock. ‘Place your hands on the dashboard.’
So far, Little John’s entire driving experience had been forward. As he looked at the transmission, trying to find reverse, more Rangers jogged out of the trees and trapped them by springing a second stinger strip in the road behind.
‘We’re screwed!’ John said, pounding on the steering wheel.
‘We’ve got massive b
ull bars on the front and a lot of power,’ Robin said, pointing at the left-side Ranger truck, which had open scrubland behind it. ‘Smash it.’
John gawped. ‘Seriously?’
‘What choice have we got?’ Robin said. ‘We’re as good as dead if they catch us.’
Robin buried his head, fearing Rangers’ bullets as John practically stamped the accelerator pedal through the floor.
17. A LOVELY MORNING STROLL
Black Bess spewed black exhaust and black rubber smoke from huge black tyres.
She was the same type of Mercedes truck that Forest Rangers used, but with Gisborne’s modifications this was like comparing a regular person with a pro bodybuilder.
Beige-uniformed Rangers scattered, terrified by Black Bess’s roar. Her huge front wheels swerved off-road and reared into the parked Rangers’ truck. Glass smashed as the front bull bars ripped the doors and rear fender off the Rangers’ Mercedes, before flipping it on its side.
Three of Black Bess’s wheels were off the ground and Robin thought they were wedged. But one wheel dug in, flinging up huge clods of dirt. After a sudden jerk and a sharp bang, they were clear.
One forward-thinking Ranger had sprinted down the road with a third stinger strip, but she could only deploy it a fraction after Black Bess drove past.
Leafy darkness enveloped the Mercedes as it blasted under the forest canopy.
‘That was no fun,’ Robin gasped, as he looked back and saw a bullet hole in the rear screen. It couldn’t have missed his head by more than twenty centimetres, but with all the noise and chaos, he hadn’t noticed when it hit.
The stinger strips were spring-loaded, so they could rapidly eject in front of an oncoming vehicle. But they had to be dragged out of the road by hand, and the tyre-shredding barbs tended to catch in cracks, or slice the hands of officers who weren’t careful.
While the Rangers’ surviving truck got held up behind their own stinger strips, John accelerated to seventy. But as he got into a groove, slinging Black Bess into winding forest curves, the dashboard screens turned to blank grey and John felt power drain from the engine.
‘What did you do?’ Robin asked, as the engine cut, leaving sounds of gravel pelting the car’s undertray.
‘Don’t blame me,’ John said, baffled as he glanced at the transmission stick and jiggled the key to restart the engine.
Robin wondered if an unseen Ranger’s bullet had damaged something, but the mystery was solved when he looked at the navigation screen:
Satellite Immobiliser – Activated
‘It’s a tracking system,’ Robin announced. ‘I’ve seen the TV ad. If you report your car stolen, the system broadcasts a kill code.’
As they rolled to a halt on the narrow forest road, the boys could hear the Ranger truck closing on them. But the full horror dawned when Robin tried his door.
‘It’s locked us in,’ he yelled.
As John furiously pulled at the door handle, Robin clicked off his belt and scrambled behind his seat. The bullet through the back windscreen had partially torn the glass from its frame. It was laminated safety glass and Robin realised the shattered screen would peel off, like the ring-pull on tinned soup.
John had a job squeezing between the front seats, as Robin threw out two backpacks and his bow. The Rangers’ truck squealed to a halt as the brothers jumped from the flatbed behind the cab and charged for the trees.
After half a minute forging through dense branches, Robin stopped and shushed John.
‘I can’t hear them,’ he whispered.
The forest canopy was sixty metres up, and little light reached the ground.
‘I’ve heard King Corp pays Forest Rangers minimum wage and that outlaws hunt them for sport,’ John said quietly. ‘I guess they don’t like venturing off the main road.’
Robin smiled and took a moment to enjoy the forest’s fresh, earthy air.
‘Finally, some luck,’ he told Little John, then tripped on a tree stump hidden in shadows and stumbled forward.
Robin felt terror, realising there was nothing below his feet.
He felt pain as he got lashed by bushes growing from the ravine’s near-vertical wall.
Finally, he felt nothing at all, as he stopped tumbling twenty metres below where he’d started and thumped head first into a rock.
18. LADIES IN BALACLAVAS
‘Robin?’ Little John shouted, holding on to a tree trunk and peering down the steep embankment.
Except he didn’t fully shout because he was afraid the Rangers would hear.
It sounded like water ran at the bottom of the ravine, but it was gloomy, and beyond branches flattened by the start of Robin’s tumble, all John saw were dense green tangles.
He imagined Robin crawling up with a wry smile, saying, Phew, that was close.
Or, failing that, a shout that would confirm Robin was conscious and give some clue where he was. But there was just the eerie music of bugs and birds in the canopy, then a chattering sound as a yellow-striped lizard shot across a branch in front of his face.
Little John jumped back, feeling trapped and gulping air. A bird shrieked noisily, and he grasped the branches tighter, panicked and imagining himself falling.
‘Robin?’ he half shouted again. ‘You’d better not be pranking me.’
I wish you were pranking me …
As hope of Robin reappearing faded, John backed away and looked skywards. Decisions always did his brain in. This one was huge, and his brother might die if he got it wrong.
He considered clambering down, but the slope was close to vertical. He felt an itch in his back and glanced around. There was a fanged beetle as big as his thumb stuck to his shirt. Its front claws were moving but the rear had been squished when his backpack shifted, and snot-coloured goo oozed through its cracked shell.
‘Gross,’ John said, flicking it away then setting off back to the road.
‘Rangers!’ John yelled, fearfully and at full blast. ‘Can anyone hear me?’
He couldn’t exactly retrace his steps through dense undergrowth, but the sun gave some sense of direction. He scrambled out onto the dirt road, sixty metres behind Black Bess. He held his hands in the air as he stumbled towards three shadowy figures around the car.
‘Don’t shoot!’ he shouted. ‘I surrender. My brother needs help!’
As Little John got closer he sensed something wrong. There was no sign of the bright orange Ranger trucks and the three female figures wore jeans and knitted balaclavas, not tan-coloured Ranger uniform …
As the women turned away from Black Bess towards John’s shout, someone stepped out from the bushes alongside him.
‘Stop right there,’ she demanded.
She was short and stocky, dressed in mud-caked jeans, beat-up body armour and a knitted balaclava the colour of English mustard. There was a ratcheting sound as she released the safety on an old-fashioned Thompson machine gun with a huge drum-shaped magazine.
‘On your knees, hands on head.’
Little John pointed into the trees as his knees hit the dirt.
‘My little brother fell down a ravine. He could be hurt.’
Two more women in boots and body armour strode across from Black Bess.
‘Do you have the key to that car?’ the one in the lead asked.
‘It’s immobilised,’ John said, as he pointed again. ‘My brother –’
‘Hands on head!’ the one with the machine gun repeated. ‘Are you deaf?’
‘You took that car for a joyride?’ a tall woman with a purple balaclava said, before snorting. ‘Do you know who it belongs to?’
Little John nodded.
The women swapped glances and laughed warily.
‘You stole Guy Gisborne’s wheels?’ the one pointing the machine gun said. ‘And now you’re stuck way out here …’
‘Up the creek without a paddle,’ the tall purple balaclava teased, as she stepped closer.
An older woman, who’d stayed back trying to ge
t Black Bess running, arrived on the scene and took charge. She had a bright yellow stun gun on her belt and straggly grey hair spilled from the back of her balaclava.
‘Car’s proper dead,’ she announced. ‘The alloys are worth money, but no scrap dealer will touch parts stripped from Gisborne’s rig.’
‘Please, my brother,’ Little John pleaded. ‘He could be badly hurt.’
The one with the machine gun laughed. ‘Better dead out here than what’ll happen when Gisborne finds you.’
Little John felt tears welling. ‘Robin’s only twelve.’
He hoped he’d stirred some motherly instinct as the tall one and the old one glanced at each other.
‘Rangers will be back with a tow truck, and this is Brigands’ territory,’ the tall one said coldly. ‘We need to ship out.’
‘What about this big lump?’ the one with the gun asked.
‘He comes with,’ the older woman said decisively. ‘I’ll bet Gisborne’s put a fat bounty on his head already.’
19. THE BEAUTIFUL QUALITIES OF MARION MAID
Robin’s lids felt gluey, so he assumed he’d been sleeping for some time. One nostril was wedged with clotted blood. He felt like there was an axe embedded in the back of his skull and his arms and chest had dozens of grazes and a deeper wound with four stitches below his nipple.
He remembered crashing through branches into the ravine, but nothing after. Now he breathed dead indoor air, tinged with pee and disinfectant.
Robin jerked up, fearing Rangers had hauled him out of the ravine and locked him in one of the Sheriff’s cells. He could almost feel Gisborne’s whip on his back, but then realised there was nothing institutional about his hand-sewn patchwork blanket. Plus, there was a large fire door wedged open to let in a breeze and a Get Well Soon graffiti mural on the far wall.
‘So, you lived,’ a girl said sarcastically, as she approached.
Robin wondered if he was dreaming, because his vision was blurred and there was something unnervingly beautiful about her.
Robin Hood Page 5
