Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [20]
It didn’t matter.
She was dancing.
* * *
4
They were about five blocks behind him by the time he reached the municipal library on Wendacott Avenue.
They’d been chasing Bobby Prescott for half an hour now and his batteries were running low. He used the last of the power to put on a burst of speed as he came round the corner by the mall, past Smartt Software and McCray’s drugstore.
Even now Bobby Prescott felt something as he passed McCray’s. He snatched a glance back. The streets were still clear. He looked around, taking in the familiar neighbourhood terrain. He found himself unconsciously trying not to look at McCray’s. So he forced himself to stare at the place. He was passing near an outside corner of the mall facing Wendacott. McCray’s was ahead and to the left. It was just an old drugstore with some cars out front.
Bobby Prescott shot past McCray’s and the Seven Eleven, then he cut across the empty street and up on to the sidewalk, outside the library grounds. The changing texture of concrete caused his wheels to buzz. Spotlights blazed on poles in the empty tarmacked apron outside the library. Their light caused the steel bars of the library fence to strobe as he swept past. The open front gate of the library was coming up now. Bobby Prescott calculated, counting, and then he leaned outwards and grabbed at a streetlamp. He curved his leather‐gloved hand around it, gripping and pulling hard.
At the speed he was travelling the manoeuvre bruised the flat of his hand and wrenched the muscles of his shoulder. But it also sent him rocketing off on a right‐angle turn and straight into the library grounds without noticeably reducing his speed.
The plastic wheels of his roller skates made a gunshot sound as he crossed a narrow steel groove in the road surface. The heavy steel mechanism of the library gates had once run in this gutter, keeping the gates in alignment as they rumbled shut.
Bobby Prescott glanced back over his shoulder again. Still nothing. Just the quiet street and the open gates. Those gates had been jammed permanently open ever since the riots twenty years ago. Some grade 12 kids had taken steel bars out of the shop storeroom at their school and done the business with them, putting paid to the riot barrier by feeding the big metal bars into the cogged wheels. The wheels had churned and screamed and splintered.
Bobby Prescott had almost lost his hand that day. He hadn’t let go when the gate began to chew up one of those bars.
Now he cut the power to his skates and coasted the last twenty metres, angling his skates slightly to kill the last of his momentum as he reached the bottom of the wide concrete steps of the library. The first bicycle would be coming past the mall on Wendacott, coming past Smartt’s and McCray’s and the Seven Eleven about now. Bobby Prescott sat down on the bottom step and rested for a moment. He looked at the sprayed and carved graffiti around him and took comfort in it.
This was as good a place as any.
Unlacing the roller skates took maybe four seconds. In the distance Bobby Prescott could hear the skimming of bicycle rubber on the street surface, approaching fast. When he had the skates off he packed them in his rucksack, leaving the top of the sack open for quick access.
The first bicycle was coming up the school entrance now, rattling as it crossed the gate gutter, the kid on the bicycle coming through the dark places between the school spotlights. Ghost white face and T-shirt swimming across the shadows, coming straight towards Bobby Prescott. The kid was very confident. Some sort of long knife was attached with clips along the main axis of the kid’s bike. The kid was reaching down to unclip it. He was eager. Bobby Prescott recognized him. This kid had consistently led the pack for the past hour as they hunted him down.
But Bobby Prescott recognized the kid in another way, too. It was like looking at himself, twenty years ago.
The kid let his bicycle drop on to the ground