A guard was last in, and he reached out to slam the sliding side door. The driver gave Little John a don’t-mess-with-me stare and turned the ignition. Disco music started up on the radio as the bus crunched over gravel and merged onto Route 24.
The side windows were heavily tinted, but Little John could see other vehicles through the windscreen. Salesmen in BMW wagons, a plumber’s van with a bathtub lashed to the roof and an SUV with a curly brown dog in the back.
It was a weird reminder that normal lives were going on, while Little John rode a van to hell, with bloody feet and glimpses of a sobbing nine-year-old girl in the driver’s mirror.
The Castle Guard convoy stayed in the outside lane and peeled off after a few minutes.
Exit 14C – Sherwood Castle & Resort
Access by invitation ONLY!
They rode a forest track for four kilometres, then turned through elaborate wrought-iron gates and past a Welcome to Sherwood Castle sign.
The van got waved through a checkpoint staffed by Castle Guards and accelerated onto a wide road finished in deep-red tarmac with pristine markings.
Little John noted posts topped with security cameras every fifty metres and saw that the forest on either side was manicured, with thinned undergrowth and winding bark pathways.
They passed an enclosure filled with kangaroos and a metallic silver helicopter with King Corporation logos, winding up for take-off.
‘How Sheriff Marjorie and the rest of the one per cent live,’ a woman in the back moaned, as the road arced and the castle came into view.
‘Get that mask back on!’ the guard demanded. ‘And shut your filthy communist hole.’
30. DOWN IN THE DUNGEONS
Sherwood Castle had existed for almost a thousand years and was in a ruinous state for most of them. When Marjorie Kovacevic won her first term as Sheriff of Nottingham, the castle was a mystical ruin, with crumbling turrets and fat stone walls bedded in ivy.
Anyone who drove the muddy track from Route 24 could pull up in a parking lot with vandalised toilets and dead telephone boxes and spend an afternoon rambling over castle ruins for free.
But the young Sheriff loathed anything that didn’t turn a profit. Luckily the government had recently made Sherwood and Locksley a Special Enterprise Zone.
This offered generous grants to businesses that invested in the deprived area and gave Sheriff Marjorie special powers to blast through red tape and bypass the kind of pesky planning regulations that would normally stop someone turning a historic one-thousand-year-old castle into an ultra-posh hotel resort, with lavish golf courses and a million acres of managed hunting grounds.
No accurate restoration of a tenth-century castle would have created spaces for hotel suites and lavish three-day conferences for divorce lawyers, so a trendy architect had created something she called A bold statement that protects and enhances Sherwood Castle’s original historic beauty.
As the bus got closer, Little John decided it looked more like a glass-and-metal spaceship had crash-landed and squashed a nice old castle beneath it.
The bus turned away from an imposing lobby with a revolving door and went down a ramp into an underground car park. The first basement level was brightly lit and had the sorts of cars owned by people who stay in a resort where a champagne-and-lobster breakfast costs more than the chef who made it earns in a week.
The next level down was gloomier. A smell of rotten food crept into the van as it rolled past rows of huge wheeled bins and a gang in high-vis vests throwing mounds of cardboard boxes into a waste compactor.
‘All male guests, kindly depart here,’ the driver said, adopting an overly polite tone as he stopped and blasted the horn.
This drew two solidly built men out of a metal doorway. They both wore rubber boots and protective suits with full face masks. One opened the passenger door as the other showed off a ferocious-looking stun-stick with razor-sharp barbs.
‘You gonna behave, big fella?’ he asked, as he made sure Little John saw how nasty his weapon was.
‘What you waiting for?’ the other one demanded. ‘Shift!’
Little John had been sitting for ten minutes, during which his left ankle had ballooned. The heat and trash smells were overpowering, and he dreaded the pain when he put weight back on his feet.
He only managed one stumbling step before crashing forward onto his knees.
‘Up!’ one of the men demanded, as the bus rolled off with the four hooded females.
Little John feared a zap from the stun-stick, but the two men looked at his feet and realised no amount of volts would get him walking.
His knees scraped as they dragged him through the door. After a short hallway stacked with potato sacks and boxed mangoes, one man kicked a door and flicked on lights in a white-tiled room dotted with shower heads.
As one guy sliced Little John’s plastic cuffs and dragged him under a shower head, the other unscrewed the lid of a big metal tin and threw clumps of bright yellow powder at him.
‘Close your eyes, numbskull!’ he laughed, after throwing a generous handful in Little John’s face with no warning. ‘You forest scum come in here, wriggling with lice and God knows what else …’
The insecticide powder had the texture of baby talc, but stung on contact with sweaty skin and seared in every wound, especially his feet.
‘Rub it!’ the guard ordered. ‘Deep in your hair.’
Little John thought he’d pass out from the pain. Then the other guy turned on a shower, moving the head so that it blasted him with freezing water.
‘Stop!’ Little John yelled, shocked by the cold, but then relieved because it washed off the stinging powder.
One of the guards grabbed a stiff broom and roughly scoured Little John’s back, butt crack and any other places where the insecticide powder got stuck.
After shutting off the water, the pair dragged Little John dripping wet to a windowless cell barely big enough for him to lie flat.
The light was painfully dazzling and there was a metal toilet and a gym mat, on which had been placed a sealed polythene pack containing a towel, a toothbrush kit and a disposable paper overall.
‘Dry and dress,’ one man ordered, as Little John shivered and dripped. ‘I’ll see if I can get the doctor to look at those feet.’
‘What’s going to happen?’ Little John asked pleadingly, as the door of his cell thumped shut.
‘Can’t say, big fella,’ one of the men laughed. ‘But I’ll bet you won’t enjoy it.’
31. WASTING A PERFECTLY GOOD PILLOWCASE
Robin’s ability to shoot ping-pong balls out of the air and slot an arrow in a quarter-second came from hundreds of hours’ practice. After one-and-a-bit hours, he’d shown Marion how to take a good stance and shoot fairly accurately at tin cans and a crude target made by drawing on one of Aunt Lucy’s pillowcases with a marker pen.
Little John had given up archery when he realised his little brother was more talented than him, and Robin’s only close friend, Alan, preferred activities that avoided getting his sneakers dirty. So Marion was the first person who’d ever shared his interest in archery and he loved every minute.
It was half past nine and the makeshift range was almost too dark to shoot as Marion’s mum walked up the escalator.
‘You two have been up here for ages,’ Indio said, half smiling as she eyed the pillowcase full of arrow holes hanging from the end wall. ‘And your aunt’s not gonna be impressed when she sees that.’
‘Robin’s amazing with the bow,’ Marion said. ‘He’s a good teacher too.’
Robin felt his face redden as Marion slotted an arrow and gave her mum a demonstration by firing into the pillowcase, about five centimetres from dead centre.
‘Hotshot!’ Indio said, as she gave Marion a squeeze and a kiss. ‘But Robin needs his rest and it’ll be ten by the time you’ve done your teeth.’
‘I had a long nap,’ Marion protested.
Indio’s tone stiffened as she pointed
towards the escalator. ‘And I’m not arguing. Teeth and toilet, now. And a shower in the morning. Your fists look like lumps of coal!’
Marion gave Robin a what-can-you-do shrug and turned towards the escalators. ‘Later, Robin Hood.’
As Marion clunked grumpily down the metal stairs, Indio glanced at moonlight coming through the skylights and sounded concerned. ‘It’s kinda creepy up here all on your own. You’re welcome to bunk down with us.’
‘I’ll live,’ Robin said, as he tugged Marion’s last arrows out of the wall.
‘Well, you know where to find us.’
‘Goodnight,’ Robin said, as Indio headed down. ‘Thanks for dinner and stuff.’
He found a missing arrow behind a shelf unit, then shut himself behind the sliding door of Lucy’s den.
Having Marion around had kept his mind busy. His thoughts turned back to family as he sat on the corner of the big bed and burrowed down his backpack, hunting a toothbrush.
32. BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY
While Robin gobbed minty foam into a mug, the duty guard on Sherwood Designer Outlets’ watchtower eyed movement in the north parking lot. He immediately punched the emergency button on his radio and lit the intruders with a giant searchlight.
It was a group of thirty hired thugs. A dozen were on horseback, the rest on small tracked buggies, straddled by a driver with a passenger behind.
The road that once led from Route 24 to Designer Outlets had been damaged by regular floods and was badly overgrown, so nothing with tyres came this deep into the forest.
An excited crowd surged to the edge of the mall roof as the intruders formed a surly line at the rear of the parking lot. A woman trotted out on a black horse, one hand on the reins and the other held in the air to show that she was unarmed.
As the horse pulled up by Designer Outlets’ sandbagged main entrance, Will Scarlock stepped up on a dead air-conditioning tower to greet her.
‘That’s Gisborne’s daughter,’ Azeem whispered in Will’s ear.
Will nodded and spoke quietly. ‘Tell everyone to get their weapons. Then go see if they’ve got more sneaking up from another direction.’
Azeem gave a nod and rushed off, while Will held out his arms to show that he too was unarmed.
‘Young lady,’ he shouted down, ‘to what do we owe the pleasure?’
‘Don’t patronise me, you rotten-toothed goat!’ Clare Gisborne snapped, as she flipped up the visor of a Kevlar soldier’s helmet. ‘You know why I’m here.’
‘There’s been an understanding between your father and the Forest People for years,’ Will said. ‘Gisborne’s gang stays out of the forest and we stay out of his business in Locksley. Perhaps he didn’t explain this to you, before suffering the unfortunate injury to his delicate parts.’
Clare fumed as refugees and sabs on the roof roared with laughter. Will didn’t want to aggravate her, but he needed to buy thinking time.
The mall was well defended and, though Clare Gisborne was sixteen and inexperienced, Will recognised several of her father’s most notorious enforcers among her posse. There was no way they’d let Clare attack the outlets across an open car park, and Will felt sure he was dealing with a diversion tactic.
‘We don’t want to wage war in the forest,’ Clare shouted up. ‘But this is a very exceptional circumstance. My father has given us orders to enter the forest and extract Robin Hood by any means necessary.’
‘Robin is not here,’ Will lied. ‘And if he was, I’d never hand a young boy over to be tortured by your father.’
The rooftop mob shook their guns in the air and cheered with approval, as Will called his eighteen-year-old son over.
‘Sam, there’s not enough of them to attack. But they clearly want everyone up here jeering them, so I’ll bet they already have thugs inside the mall hunting Robin. Take four good people. Go to the Maid family den and don’t let Robin out of your sight.’
‘Roger that,’ Sam said, giving his dad a Boy Scout salute and turning to find a dozen armed people keen to help.
‘My father predicted you’d refuse,’ Clare said, her voice getting shrill. ‘He asked me to remind you where most of your supplies come from. If Daddy gives the order, Forest People won’t be able to buy a pack of gum in Locksley.’
One floor below, Robin was about to yank his shirt over his head when he sensed footsteps moving along the outer wall of the den.
‘Marion?’ he asked, an instant before the door flew open.
Robin lunged for his bow, but it was five metres away and two masked women charged before he got there, crashing each other in the doorway and making the den walls wobble like a cheap film set.
‘Hands on head,’ one woman said quietly, pointing an assault rifle with a laser sight that left a red dot jiggling over Robin’s heart.
‘Robin,’ Marion shouted, as she clanked up the escalator. ‘Mum got a radio message from Sam Scarlock. Gisborne’s people are coming after you.’
Robin wished Marion’s shout had come twenty seconds earlier, but her yell did make the women glance back. Robin used the distraction, flinging his mug of toothpaste spit at them, then doing a backwards roll and lunging for his bow.
As the taller of the two women ran across the bed to grab Robin, he reached the bow and swung it to whack her behind the legs.
‘Marion, stay out!’ Robin screamed. ‘They’ve got guns.’
As the woman he’d whacked stumbled forward, Robin slotted an arrow and fired at the other one. She raised her arms in defence and the bolt slipped under her body armour and made a wet thud into her armpit.
Gisborne wanted personal revenge and had given orders for Robin to be taken unharmed, but the woman on the ground forgot this as she pulled a knife from her belt and slashed at Robin’s back.
Marion had backed away, but saw Robin dodge the knife, then spring to his feet.
After standing and hooking his bow over his back, Robin used his floored opponent as a stepping stone for a parkour-style leap onto a small dining table. From there, he grabbed the top of a wooden panel and vaulted out of the den.
‘Get out of here!’ he yelled to Marion, as he landed hard, then ran for the escalators and dived down the middle.
Unfortunately, Marion’s brothers had cleared away the mound of swimming floats at the bottom so their mums didn’t find out what they’d been up to. Robin painfully banged his hip on the concrete floor as he landed, though he made a reasonable cushion for Marion two seconds later.
Upstairs, one of Robin’s attackers shot a burst of automatic fire into the ceiling and roared, ‘I will squash you like a bug!’
The bullets pierced the ceiling, narrowly missing some people out on the roof and leaving Marion’s two youngest brothers hysterical.
Another of Gisborne’s thugs came through the store’s gate and lunged at Robin as Marion helped him up. But the first Robin knew about the attack was a cartoon clang as Karma bludgeoned his attacker with a frying pan, despite having a petrified two-year-old clamped to her leg.
As Robin notched an arrow, ready to shoot if either of the women from upstairs appeared, Indio thrust a pre-packed emergency bag into Marion’s belly.
‘They went straight for Robin, so there must be an informant,’ Indio reasoned. ‘You’re fast, you know the mall and we don’t know who we can trust. So get Robin out of here. OK?’
‘Yes, Mum,’ Marion said, sounding scared.
Then she narrowed her eyes determinedly and turned to Robin. ‘Ready to run?’
33. THE SWEET SMELL OF SEWAGE
Clare Gisborne’s horse reared when the automatic fire ripped chunks out of the mall roof.
‘You do not want my father as an enemy,’ Clare warned furiously as she fought to steady her mount. ‘This is your last warning!’
Will Scarlock proudly thumped his chest as close to a hundred mall residents lined up behind shaking swords, daggers and guns.
‘Do I think you’re gonna launch an attack on defensive positions a
cross an open car park?’ Will taunted. ‘You’re just a spoiled brat with a big mouth.’
‘We’ll cremate this mall,’ Clare threatened. ‘And your rabble had better stay out of Locksley until Robin Hood is in my daddy’s hands.’
Inside the mall, Robin kept an arrow notched as he followed Marion’s charge down the main arcade between shops. There was no sign of Gisborne’s men chasing, and armed refugees stood up on the food-court gantry, ready to shoot any who showed themselves.
Marion did a three-sixty scan before cutting down a corridor with a sign pointing to disabled bathrooms. They stepped through an unmarked door, into a muggy space full of insulated pipes, at least one of which had leaked enough to puddle the floor.
‘Boiler room,’ Marion explained, as she ducked under thick pipes. ‘We could barricade the door and hide here. But we don’t know how many informants Gisborne has, or how many are hunting you.’
‘Who would rat me out to Gisborne?’ Robin growled furiously. ‘I thought everyone hated him.’
‘Refugees don’t have a lot of options,’ Marion said. ‘Gisborne can afford to offer thousands of pounds for information. That’s enough to get your kids a boat ride out of a war-torn country. Or buy fake citizenship papers, so they can leave the forest and try to get a job.’
‘Everyone’s desperate,’ Robin sighed. ‘Where do we go if we don’t hole up here?’
Marion pointed at a square hatch in the floor.
‘Main sewer.’
Robin smacked his own forehead and smiled wryly. ‘Just when you think your life can’t get worse …’
‘I went through years back, when a big posse of Forest Rangers raided the mall and tried to arrest Mum and Aunt Lucy for releasing sixty ostriches from a farm,’ Marion explained. ‘The good news is, there are no snakes down here. The bad news is, that’s because there are hundreds of giant rats that eat snake eggs. I guarantee you’ll puke, but on the upside, the filth only gets deep if it rains, so you won’t flood your shoes if you walk along the edge.’
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