Shredder

by Niall Leonard

  Kemal grabbed one attacker’s arm, twisted and snapped it like a twig. The injured guy screamed and fell to his knees, but two more rioters took his place, one grasping a broken bottle, the other a chain, and Kemal flinched as the first guy’s crowbar bit into his scalp, and in that instant the broken bottle was stabbed into his neck. In another instant the crowd was all over him like jackals crowding on a lion, ripping, tearing, yowling—was it them screaming, or Kemal?—and as he slowly sank to his knees they rained down kicks and punches and broken bricks. Vomit rose in my throat—the mob attacking Kemal seemed something less than human, as if I’d conjured up serpents from the hottest depths of hell. But it was too late to stop them, even if I’d wanted to.

  The doorway to the flat was now empty and dark, and the smoke pouring out of it was lit from within by fire—Blue Shoes and Popeye had vanished. Up the street furious rioters were racing, pursuing someone, yelling threats and curses—was that where the two men had gone? The Merc’s engine roared and it jolted into gear, ready to reverse, but the crowd behind the car was still thrashing and stamping on Kemal’s slumped body, and the door Kemal had left open was still gaping wide. Someone in the rear seat reached out to pull the door shut, only to be grabbed by the arm by a rioter who tried to drag the passenger out into the street.

  Leaping onto the Merc’s hood, I scuttled across and jumped down on the driver’s side. Whoever was in the back could wait—I didn’t want this car going anywhere. I rammed the end of the scaffolding pole against the driver’s window, near the frame, where it was weakest. The glass crazed into a mosaic, and the next swing of my pole punched a hole clean through it and connected with the driver’s head. He recoiled, but he couldn’t escape—he was strapped in—and when I followed through with a fist into the side of his face he sagged and fell forwards over the wheel like a crash-test dummy.

  A sudden deafening bang, and my face was sprayed with fragments, scorching my eyes and sending me reeling backwards. I ducked, my ears ringing, and tried to blink away the pain, vaguely aware that the passenger in the back had shot at me. I stumbled round the front of the car, staying low to keep the engine between me and the shooter while I tried to clear my eyes. His shot must have hit the headrest—it had stopped the bullet but blasted burning crumbs of leather and padding into my face. I heard another shot, and high-pitched screeches of pain, and the yells of the crowd redoubled, and rocks and bottles started slamming into the Merc’s bodywork. Forcing my eyes open, I found I could see OK, though my head was ringing and my eyelids were on fire. I peered round the hood.

  The shooter had emerged from the backseat. It was the Turk, and he held a massive chrome-plated pistol in his right hand. The guy who had tried to drag him out of the back of the car lay balled up in fetal position on the wet tarmac, whimpering in agony—he’d been shot in the belly.

  For the first time ever I saw that the Turk’s catlike calm had deserted him—he had lost control and he’d lost his crew, and now he clearly feared he faced the same fate as Kemal. In his free hand he clutched a slim briefcase, the same one I’d seen earlier that day, and as rocks bounced off the roof of the Merc and past his head he held it up as a shield, looking around for the best direction to run in. Part of me wanted him to run, so I could focus on going in after Zoe, but another part of me wanted to grab that briefcase—if he was so keen to keep it, it had to be worth taking from him.

  He decided to head towards the blazing Dumpster truck, now just an empty metal shell consumed by flame. Raising his gun, he fired two more shots into the mob, almost at random, and now the crowd yelled in panic and anger, ducked and scattered in all directions. The Turk wasn’t looking in my direction, but in the two seconds it took me to reach him he could turn that gun on me.

  I stood up and hurled the stump of scaffolding pole at him, using all my strength. It caught him at an angle, right between the shoulder blades, glancing off the back of his head. He staggered and fell, and the briefcase went flying—not far, but far enough for one foolhardy kid in a greasy tracksuit top with a smoke-stained bandanna round his face to dash over, grab it and run off whooping. The Turk scrambled to his feet, waving his gun, but more bottles exploded on the tarmac around him, and a massive lump of concrete missed his head by a couple of centimeters. He stood up and ran. I let him go and doubled back.

  The kid in the bandanna hadn’t gone far—he’d taken shelter in a shop doorway and was fumbling with the straps of the briefcase to see what was inside. Just as I reached him he’d pulled out a folder full of papers and a slim laptop computer. The folder he threw away, its pages fluttering wildly to join the rest of the garbage scattered across the street, and he was just about to check out the laptop when I yanked it out of his grasp. He spat and swore at me, unleashing a flurry of punches that sort of connected with my face and head, so badly thrown it was like being attacked by a flock of moths. I smacked him in the face with the laptop—not hard enough to damage it, but hard enough to knock him backwards through the broken window. As he went down he cracked his head on the corner of a stripped display shelf and knocked himself out cold.

  The crowd had closed in on the stranded Merc, and they were piling into it the same way they had gone for the four-by-four—dancing on the roof, wrenching off the wing mirrors, ripping away the windscreen wipers like crazed baboons in a safari park, while the shot rioter’s friends gathered around him and hauled him to his feet. They dragged him away, semiconscious from pain and loss of blood, with his sneakers trailing behind him along the dirty wet tarmac, leaving the driver still slumped over his wheel.

  Nobody was watching me, and the kid I had mugged for the laptop was still down for the count on a bed of broken glass. I stuffed the laptop into the nearest litter bin, burying it under a heap of greasy fast-food wrappers, and just at that moment four figures came tumbling out of the smoke-filled doorway, coughing and choking. One of them was Zoe, in that T-shirt dress and unlaced trainers, dragged along by Roly-Poly, who kept her right arm clamped in his big hairy left hand.

  They turned left, heading away from me, Swarthy taking the lead, Blondie to the rear. I raced after them. Blondie wasn’t much good as a rear guard, being more concerned about where he was heading than what he was leaving: by the time he heard my footsteps behind him and started to turn I was already on top of him. His right hand plunged into his jacket, leaving him wide open to a haymaker to the jaw, delivered square on with all my momentum behind it. The impact nearly broke my fist, but it sent him spinning on the spot and falling in a stunned heap just as Dean had done.

  Swarthy—ten meters up ahead—glanced over his shoulder and bawled something to Roly-Poly, but Roly kept going, shouting something back in what I presumed was Turkish. They hurried on up the street, away from the heart of the riot, straight towards an off-street car park.

  I stooped over the comatose Blondie and pulled his right arm out of his jacket; his fingers were still curled round the handle of a gleaming black pistol, not as ostentatious as the Turk’s but presumably just as lethal. I grabbed it. There was no time to go back for the scaffolding pole, and against two armed men it wouldn’t be much use anyway. I checked for a safety catch but couldn’t see one, and I scrambled up and after Zoe.

  I caught up with them just as they approached a sleek BMW sedan a few years old. Roly-Poly was fumbling in his pockets—it looked like he was searching for his keys—but Zoe was wriggling in his grasp so hard he was finding it impossible to get them out. He released her with his left and tried to grab her with his right, but she dived under his grasp. He fumbled after her and snatched the neck of her T-shirt dress, pulling her up short.

  “Let her go!” I yelled. I held Blondie’s pistol out in front of me, two-handed, hoping it looked as if I knew what I was doing. The three of them looked round in amazement, just for an instant, and Swarthy reached inside his jacket for his own gun. I pointed mine at him and squeezed the trigger.

  The bloody thing bucked in my hand—I’d known it was going to happe
n but was still completely unprepared for it—and the shot went wild, pinging off the rough stone wall a meter above Swarthy—but instantly his head jolted forward. He raised a hand instinctively to his head, where the ricochet had struck, before his knees folded and he fell on his face. All the while Roly-Poly had been cursing and wrestling with Zoe. He tried to drag her back towards him, but her dress stretched and started to rip, and it gave her enough room to turn round and hurl herself at him, screeching like a rabid tigress and driving her fingernails into his face, aiming for his eyes.

  Now it was Roly-Poly’s turn to yell, and he pulled his head to one side and grabbed at Zoe’s hands, pulling them free; he still had both his hands full of furious, writhing, spitting girl when I reached him. I tossed the gun away—I didn’t trust myself with it when Zoe was so close.

  He was a big man and I knew a blow to the belly would likely bounce off, so I went for the face, bending his nose sideways with a right and following through with a hard left that splattered it over his face. He yelled in pain and fury, dropped Zoe and came for me, swinging wildly and trying to grab me, while I ducked and dodged and came back, landing more blows to his face, splitting his lips against his teeth, knocking his jaw sideways—but the bastard wouldn’t go down. It was like one of those arcade games with an end-of-level boss that just soaks up the damage and keeps coming, and I was wishing I’d kept hold of the pistol or even the scaffolding pole when my right foot went into a pothole and I stumbled backwards.

  It was only for a second but it was all the time the big man needed, and his fat right hand grabbed my shirt and held me steady while he cocked his massive left for a backhander, shrugging off my blows to his face as if I’d been swatting him with a duster.

  There was a crack, and his fingers loosened—then a second crack and a third, and Roly-Poly looked puzzled and scared, and the blood flowing from his mouth and nose became a gush, and he toppled sideways like a tree, his short-bitten fingernails gouging scars in my skin even as I wrenched myself from his grip.

  Zoe was standing behind him, panting, tears of anger making tracks down her soot-stained face, her ripped dress hanging off her bare shoulder, Swarthy’s gun smoking in her shaking hand. Roly-Poly was lying slumped and dying, three holes in his back bubbling blood as air escaped from his punctured lungs. Zoe tossed the gun to the ground beside him and hurled herself at me so hard she nearly knocked me off my feet. I buried my face in her neck and breathed in her scent, hardly daring to believe I was holding her again. When she grabbed my hair and hauled my face to hers and kissed me I knew it was true—and that we had to hurry. I pulled away, grabbing her hand to tug her after me.

  “We can take their car,” she said. “I can drive—”

  “There’s something we need to pick up,” I said.

  We were just in time. The Dumpster truck had nearly burned out, and through the thinning pall of smoke I saw blue lights flashing off helmets and riot shields. The cops were massing for an assault on the mob, and the mob knew they were coming. With the shops just about stripped bare and nothing left to destroy, they were starting to disperse, running off in hooting knots of six and seven, a few of them still lugging battered cardboard boxes. One guy was pushing a supermarket trolley loaded with cigarettes and booze down the street, but like a typical supermarket trolley one of its wheels had gone wonky. It veered off at an angle towards the curb, caught on a brick and went toppling over, spilling his booty all over the road in a soggy heap. The looter abandoned it and ran.

  And that bloody kid with the bandanna was up again, rooting through the litter bin where I’d dumped the laptop. He must have seen its edge protruding from under the garbage, and now he tugged it free and wiped the grease off its lid with the sleeve of his grotty tracksuit top.

  “Oi!” I shouted, and he ran for it. But he wasn’t much of a sprinter and I was on him in six paces. I grabbed his greasy hair and hauled him backwards, yowling. He swung at me with the laptop, and I seized it with my free hand, ripped it out of his grasp and sent him on his way with a kick.

  “You thieving prick,” he spat. Then he ran for it.

  And so did we.

  eight

  The nearest Underground station had closed early, metal grilles dragged across its entrance and locked with heavy chains, either to protect the staff or to prevent more rioters turning up by tube to join the party. I bashed the cage pointlessly in frustration, and we ran on.

  Night was falling properly now and the rain had stopped as abruptly as it had started, leaving the roads shining under the sodium streetlights and huge filthy puddles along the gutters where the drains had been overwhelmed. News of the rioting must have spread because the streets had emptied of traffic—no buses, no trucks, and only a few cars. One of those came past us at a crawl, crammed with middle-class kids pressing their smartphones up against the windows in the hope of catching footage of an actual riot—like tourists in an urban safari park.

  Zoe kept her hand in my mine and followed me wordlessly, never asking where we were going or what had happened to me. I was glad, because I had no idea where we were headed—I just wanted to put as much distance as I could between us and that havoc I’d unleashed.

  But that wasn’t so easy. There was a weird electricity in the air, a diffused version of the tension I’d sensed leading up to the riot. Knots of youths were gathering on every corner, wondering when it would all kick off in their area, unaware of how riots worked. It’s not like a football match: nobody blows a whistle—one yob will try something on, another will take it further, a few of the more timid types will ape them, until everyone’s at it and no one knows how it really started. Everyone just suddenly understands that policing only works as long as the people being policed go along with it. The line separating law and order from anarchy is in our heads; it’s less substantial than the plastic tape cops use to cordon off crime scenes.

  We passed one kid with his ear glued to a mobile phone, shouting to his mates that Camden and Walthamstow and Ealing were burning, that the cops were overwhelmed and couldn’t keep up. I tried not to think about how much of that was my fault, how many businesses were being destroyed, how many innocent people were being hurt, just so I could save one person—Zoe. And when I thought about it like that, I knew I’d do it all over again if I had to.

  Zoe glanced behind her and abruptly changed direction, dashing out into the road with her hand still clamped in mine. She tugged me backwards so hard I nearly dropped the Turk’s laptop before I turned to see what she was up to.

  A lone black taxi was heading our way, its yellow light gleaming in the dusk, the rattle of its diesel engine reassuringly normal—except it was hammering along at about thirty, rather than the leisurely trundle of a driver scouting for business. Zoe had realized that as well, and she’d dashed into the road right in front of it—waving to the driver from the curb would never have worked. The cab slowed a little, and I saw the driver think about swerving round her, but then he seemed to change his mind, and hit his brakes. There were only two of us, after all, and we looked like an ordinary couple, and besides, Zoe’s dress was ripped and wet and clinging to her body, and that would have been enough to distract any London cabbie—the straight male ones, anyway. All the same this driver didn’t quite halt; he slowed to a crawl and rolled down his passenger window to hear where Zoe wanted to go before he’d commit himself and unlock his doors.

  “Can you take us to Richmond?”

  “Which bit, love?” He was sixty-something, with a sunburned face wrinkled by too many cigarettes, and thick white hair slicked back. I could guess why he was on the streets when all other public transport had been suspended—he’d been in the cabbing business forty years, he’d seen everything, the odd riot didn’t bother him. And he needed the money.

  “Richmond Hill,” said Zoe, and she tugged at the passenger-door handle. The cabbie hesitated half a second; then he stopped the cab properly and jabbed a switch on his dash to release the rear door locks. His eye
s kept checking his mirrors as we clambered aboard, watching for any sudden burst of activity on the street behind us, and the instant I’d slammed the cab door shut he floored the accelerator, throwing me backwards into Zoe’s lap. She yelped and squirmed out of my way, giggling, as if we were running off for a dirty weekend rather than fleeing from gangsters and anarchy and slaughter.

  “If you’d said Hammersmith, or Croydon,” the driver’s voice came over the speaker system, “I would have told you to sling your hook. Half the bloody city’s gone up—it’s worse than last time. I mean, all the people they threw in jail back then, the ones who nicked stuff and set fires everywhere, and called in all their mates on mobile phones—they’re at it again! A lot of good prison did them. They should cut these people’s hands off like they do in Saudi Arabia….”

  Zoe lifted my right arm and snuggled under it, up close to me, while the driver babbled on like one of those talk-station DJs, or rather like one of the clueless guests that ring up talk-station DJs to spout half-baked opinions based on gossip they’d heard in the pub. But after all the fear and madness his patter seemed normal and reassuring, and the taxi, kicking up massive waves of spray as it sped through the empty streets, felt like a lifeboat ferrying two shipwrecked survivors to shore.

  I glanced at the purple digits on the dashboard in front, jumping up by thirty pence every twenty seconds, and a worrying thought occurred to me.

  “Have you got any cash?” I said to Zoe.

  “Think so,” she said, and she raised her backside from the seat and fumbled underneath for a moment before producing a crumpled wad of twenties. She saw me staring at it in confusion.