The anxiety was unpleasant, and he tried to stop thinking about big issues and focus on here and now. He’d been lucky to run into decent people. He felt safe as he enjoyed mouthfuls of crusty garlic bread dunked in Karma’s pasta sauce.
‘This is really tasty,’ Robin told her.
‘You’re very welcome,’ Karma said, then to the other kids, ‘Isn’t it nice to get a compliment occasionally?’
‘I prefer your jerk chicken,’ Matt answered cheekily.
Marion’s youngest brother, Finn, was only two and a half. Robin thought it was cute how the toddler’s spaghetti kept sliding off his spoon, until he gave up and dug in with both hands.
But Marion’s family was never far from chaos. Matt and Otto started bickering because Otto was picking out his mushrooms and Matt took one off the table and dropped it down the back of Otto’s shirt.
Robin jumped out of his skin when Indio stood and roared, ‘Can we have one meal where you two behave?’
Otto moaned and started pulling off his T-shirt to get the mushroom out. Karma ran around the table and yanked him.
‘You sit up this end, next to me.’
‘Why have I got to move?’ Otto protested. ‘Matt put stuff down my shirt. He should be moving.’
‘Because you’re a stupid ginger squirt and I’m the greatest!’ Matt teased.
This made Otto tug himself free of Karma’s grasp and give Matt a two-handed shove out of his seat.
‘No, no, no, no, no!’ Indio shouted, pounding the table so hard she made the glasses rattle and Finn look scared.
‘So, this is my wonderful family,’ Marion told Robin, as she buried her face in her hands. ‘I assume you’ll be taking up my idea of staying upstairs in my auntie’s den …’
Robin smiled. ‘Could be good.’
He found the whole scene hilarious and it helped take his mind off his worries, but he also understood Marion’s frustration. You wouldn’t want this drama every time you ate.
Things calmed down once Otto had been manhandled into a new spot between his two mums. Marion gave Finn a cuddle because Indio losing her temper had spooked him, and she chopped his spaghetti, so it didn’t keep sliding off his spoon.
Will stuck his head through the blue tarp, said knock knock, then apologised for arriving during dinner.
‘Grab a bowl, I made heaps,’ Karma urged.
‘Thank you, but Sam is cooking for my family later,’ Will said, as he stepped up behind Robin and asked, ‘Are Karma and Indio looking after you?’
‘Sure,’ Robin said, with a full mouth and still smirking because of the chaos. ‘Good pasta, too.’
‘The mall is guarded, and we count visitors in and out,’ Will said. ‘You should be safe, but we have a huge area to protect. So don’t go wandering into obscure hallways, or exploring empty shops, OK?’
Robin nodded. ‘That makes sense.’
‘I made some calls to contacts in Locksley,’ Will said. ‘We tracked down your father. He’s under police guard at Locksley General.’
Robin let Bolognese drop off his spoon. ‘Hospital?’ he asked, as his anxiety came back. ‘Gisborne did ask the cops to rough him up …’
Will nodded. ‘They did a good job of it. Ardagh has broken fingers, a dislocated shoulder and a complex leg fracture. The nurse I spoke to said nothing is life-threatening, but he’s obviously in pain and it could be two months before he can walk again.’
Robin didn’t know what to say, but he imagined his dad scared and hurt, as Karma put her hand on his shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze.
‘I also spoke to a lawyer named Tybalt Bull,’ Will continued. ‘He’s an old friend and one of the few people brave enough to take a stand against Gisborne in a Locksley courtroom. He’s interested in your dad’s case and he’d like to meet you.’
Robin didn’t know anything about courts and lawyers, and looked baffled.
‘I don’t know your family’s financial situation,’ Will continued. ‘Tybalt says legal defence for your father would cost at least ten thousand pounds.’
Robin mouthed ten thousand, then lifted one leg to show a split in the sole of his sneaker. ‘Do I look like my dad has ten thousand going spare?’
‘Maybe we can raise money,’ Indio suggested. ‘People will donate to help the kid who shot Gisborne in the …’
‘Balls!’ Otto yelled loudly.
Robin hated the fact that his family never had any money and changed the subject.
‘Any news of my brother?’
‘Not a lot,’ Will admitted. ‘A pal at the police records department confirmed that nobody called John Hood has been arrested. He must be out there somewhere. I just hope we can get hold of him before Gisborne does.’
27. HOLY MOLEY, THAT’S A LOTTA BULLETS
The purple smoke burned Little John’s eyes and cut visibility to less than a metre. Someone was screaming outside. Bullets zoomed in every direction around the shack, but nobody seemed to be shooting directly at it.
Not being shot was a good thing, but Little John suspected it was only because the Castle Guards had orders to deliver him to Gisborne alive.
There were weapons in the lounge, but the smoke was thickest there, while Agnes and T had donned gas masks and were shooting out of the window.
During twenty hours staring at the kids’ party room, John had noticed that the metal roof over his head was only constructed for summer use, with no insulation and lots of gaps like the one that had rusted the beam.
Little John’s eyes seared and his throat felt like it was being crushed. He stumbled to the far side of the room and, after clattering into a trash can, felt his way along the wall to the Whack-a-Mole machine up back.
Its melamine top flexed as he climbed onto it. From a squatting position, he put both hands flat against the metal roof and pushed with his legs. The purple smoke was thicker than ever as a stray bullet clanked into the roof, branches crashed from a shattered tree and T yelled for more ammo in the lounge.
The Whack-a-Mole creaked under Little John’s weight and the force he was putting on the roof. But the machine was built for abuse and he began feeling movement in the screws securing the corrugated metal to rotting roof beams.
There was a clank of metal, three screws popped, then a blast of fresh air that was like nectar.
Little John bashed the metal several times to enlarge the gap, then bent the sheet aside. Rusted screws jutting from the aluminium scraped his bare back as he pulled himself through the hole and out onto a gently sloping roof coated with dark moss and clumps of fungus.
Little John’s eyes and lungs felt better, but he didn’t share Robin’s head for heights and felt jittery looking down the single storey to the ground.
A burly Castle Guard came charging around the side of the shack in his bottle-green uniform. Fortunately, his focus was on taking out the shooters around the front and he didn’t see Little John, squatting on the roof less than two metres above.
Little John slid down the tin roof on his bum, and held on to a rain gutter as he dropped onto a picnic patio area at the rear of the shack. Rusty metal tables had been toppled and there was sharp debris underfoot.
The shooting had dropped off momentarily, and seeing a Castle Guard so close to the hut gave John a sense the guards were winning. But as he ran across the patio to take cover in the trees, a sniper shot cracked from one of Treetop Buzz’s dilapidated rope bridges.
His bulky frame could easily be mistaken for a Castle Guard through all the smoke, and the idea that an invisible sniper might be lining her next shot on him dialled Little John’s fear to a new peak.
He sprinted barefoot over jagged glass and sizzled his heel on a red-hot bullet fragment, but the pain barely registered.
Little John jumped from the end of the patio and rolled into a drainage channel filled with thorny bushes and trash bags that fizzed with blowflies. One of the women who’d been singing showtunes in the lounge the previous night was unconscious on the ground le
ss than two metres away.
There was no obvious bullet wound, but both her legs were dramatically broken. There was a rope ladder up the nearest large trunk and Little John guessed she’d fallen as she tried to escape over the rope bridges.
Her clothes and boots were far too small for him, but he tugged a small pack off the woman’s back and snatched the folding knife and water canteen attached to her belt.
A ten-metre sprint took Little John to the forest canopy. He was shocked to look down and see both feet oozing blood. The rush of adrenaline quashed his pain, but he realised he couldn’t get far without boots.
The forest is dense. I have water. If I can stumble a few hundred metres and play dead, they might not find me.
But then what?
Back by the shack the fighting had intensified. Three ground-shaking thuds suggested someone had unleashed a heavier weapon, and a streak of fire from a flamethrower shot into the canopy, attempting to incinerate a sniper.
From up ahead Little John heard a hollow booming sound, like the one before the smoke grenade crashed into the lounge. He sensed the motion of the object clattering through leaves, but had no time to react.
It was the size of a baseball and hit his chest with a thud powerful enough to lift him off the ground and send him crashing back through branches. His back jarred on a tree root and he was winded as the non-lethal projectile disintegrated into a grey paste that stuck to everything.
Barely able to breathe, Little John doubled up when a second projectile socked him in the gut. He tried to stand, but was immediately sent sprawling by a tactical boot in the back.
‘Stay still!’ a powerfully built man in a Kevlar helmet and body armour demanded.
‘Give me your hands!’ the woman who’d kicked him roared from behind.
She dug her knee in Little John’s back and locked disposable plastic cuffs around his wrists. Little John opened stinging eyes as the male guard lifted his face out of decaying leaves and studied him closely.
‘This is him, right?’ the man asked.
The woman came around for a proper look. ‘Hundred per cent,’ she agreed.
The man grabbed a radio clipped to his body armour and sounded pleased with himself.
‘This is unit eleven. I have our target secured, with ID confirmed. He has no serious injuries and can confirm he is clear of enemy base. I repeat, target safe and clear. Over.’
The voice that came back through the radio shared the triumph.
‘Nice one, unit eleven! Sheriff Marjorie might give you a goodnight kiss! All other units, target is extracted. Let’s show this forest scum what happens when you take on Castle Guards!’
The female guard tutted. ‘We’re gonna miss the fun part!’
Then she pulled a black hood out of her pocket and tugged it over Little John’s head.
‘John Hood in a hood,’ she joked, then jumped with fright when a huge explosion ripped into the shack he’d just escaped from.
Even flat on the ground beneath a canopy of trees, John felt the heat from the fireball. His new captors shielded their eyes from a blinding flash, as metal roof sheets flew thirty metres into the air.
28. WHITE BALL, PINK BALL, YELLOW BALL
After stuffing himself with pasta and home-made chocolate trifle, Robin followed Marion up the escalator to the mezzanine floor.
‘Your aunt won’t mind me using her den?’ he asked, as they stepped through a sliding door, into a space built from grooved shelving panels stripped out of a neighbouring store.
‘Aunt Lucy’s chilled,’ Marion said. ‘Her boyfriend works in Nottingham. She only bounces back here when they get in a fight.’
The LED lantern on the ceiling didn’t work until Marion fiddled with the socket. With the light on, Robin saw a comfortable space with lots of rugs, a big mattress on the floor and a cooking area centred around a two-ring gas burner with more than a hundred varieties of chilli sauce along the wall.
‘Someone likes spicy food,’ he said, picking up a skull-shaped bottle labelled Jalapeno Fire Blast – Turbo Strength.
‘Aunt Lucy brings a bottle down and smears it on everything when she eats with us,’ Marion said fondly, as she opened a repurposed file cabinet and took out a lightweight blanket. ‘That duvet on the bed is for winter, so this is better.’
Marion showed Robin a pair of electrical sockets by the bed. ‘You’ll get enough juice to charge a phone or run a laptop, but you’ll fuse the system if you plug in anything powerful, like a heater or kettle.’
She flicked on a fan, because it felt stuffy, and started rolling up the thick duvet.
‘I can do it,’ Robin said.
Marion shrugged. ‘I don’t mind. There’s nothing else to do. I often sneak up here and read, or watch a show on my laptop. If you think dinner was mad, you should see the terrible trio’s nightly bedtime performance …’
As Marion spoke, Robin laid his bow on a dining table close to the light and began inspecting it. He was gutted that his most prized possession had got scuffed when he tumbled down the ravine. But he slotted an arrow, and all felt fine when he tensioned the cable.
‘You any good with that?’ Marion asked.
‘Not bad,’ Robin said, acting modest but thrilled that Marion had taken an interest in his skills. ‘I might fire a few shots in the space outside, to check it’s OK.’
The sport store’s mezzanine was only half the size of the floor below, but Aunt Lucy’s den took up less than a fifth of the space and Robin had seen a potential shooting gallery the second he walked off the escalator.
‘I need targets,’ he said, as he stepped out with his bow and quiver and eyed nothing but dusty shelf units and a scattering of toys that Marion’s brothers wouldn’t appreciate him filling with arrow holes.
‘Are ping-pong balls too small?’ Marion asked. ‘We have a trillion …’
‘Anything big enough to see,’ Robin said, before following Marion to a musty stock room at the back of the open space. Its barren wire shelves went back more than twenty metres.
‘All the good stuff like shoes and tracksuits got taken away when the stores closed,’ Marion explained, as she grabbed a huge wheeled plastic container. ‘But they left these behind.’
There was a rattling sound as she tilted the container. Inside were several hundred trios of ping-pong balls in clear plastic sleeves. Each sleeve had one white ball, one pink and one glow-in-the-dark yellow.
‘These are ace,’ Robin said, reaching into the container and grabbing a few packets.
‘We found so many, my brothers got sick of squashing them,’ Marion explained. ‘Shall I line them up or something?’
Robin shook his head as he backed up to the escalators. ‘Throw one up in the air, as high as you can get it.’
‘Seriously?’ Marion said.
She tore open a pack of three balls and tucked two in her hoodie pocket. Then she served a ball and batted it high in the air with the back of her free hand.
Robin waited until the ball neared the top of its trajectory where it would be moving slowest, releasing his arrow an instant before it started back to the ground. Marion scrambled backwards, then gasped as the arrow thudded into the store’s back wall, with the squashed pink ball skewered on the tip.
‘What the heck!’ Marion said, then shook her head and mocked Robin’s tone from minutes earlier. ‘Sure, yeah, I’m not baaaaad …’
Robin tried to be cool, but couldn’t help cracking an enormous grin.
‘If you put the other two in the air at the same time, I’ll try and shoot both.’
Marion followed orders and Robin hit the first ball easily. But by the time he’d reloaded the second ball was low and his arrow missed by a centimetre before scraping the concrete floor all the way to the back wall.
Robin jogged after the arrow, worried the hard floor had damaged the tip. But there was no major harm and he wiped it on his trouser leg before slotting it back in his quiver.
‘OK, new best
buddy!’ Marion said, smirking cheekily and giving Robin a friendly shoulder punch. ‘Gimme the bow. You have to show me how to do this!’
29. CASTLE GUARDS ARE BIG MEANIES
The air was smoky. The shack was reduced to rubble and smouldering rope bridges dangled from charred trees. The Castle Guards were cocky and brutal as they looted anything of value and smashed up the remains of the Sherwood Women’s Union.
Most Union fighters evaporated into the forest once it was clear they were outmatched. One pair staged a daring return, darting from cover to rescue their comrade with the broken legs. But two adults and two younger girls were caught, cuffed and hooded.
One green-uniformed guard tensed his enormous biceps, resting his boot on a young prisoner’s back, while his colleague snapped trophy pictures.
‘Gonna have grey hair when that pretty face gets outta jail,’ the photographer taunted.
Little John’s ears still rang loudly from the explosion. He only caught flickers of sunlight through his hood as they marched him blind and barefoot, along with the four Women’s Union captives.
The thick mask made it hard to breathe and his pains got worse as shock turned to exhaustion. Especially the burnt left heel, where he’d stepped on a hot bullet casing.
‘Get in the front,’ the woman who’d kicked him in the back growled, then cryptically added, ‘Unit one says special treatment for golden boy.’
A big hunting knife slashed Little John’s mask and his neck snapped back as the guard ripped it off. His eyes still burned from the purple smoke, but after a couple of seconds adjusting to open sunlight, he realised they’d walked to a rest stop at the edge of Route 24.
Six lanes of traffic grumbled in each direction, with the forest canopy towering on either side.
‘Move, deaf-o!’ the woman taunted, giving Little John a shove. It was hard to hear with thundering traffic and ears ringing from the explosions.
Little John saw two small tourist buses with Sherwood Castle painted down the side and A King Corporation Resort in smaller letters beneath. As he got into a seat next to a driver, the two women and two kids were ordered into the back, still wearing their hoods.
Robin Hood Page 8
