London Eye: 1 (Toxic City)(47)

“Wait!” he said, but she was not looking at him.

This time it was Emily who pulled Jack down. He turned as he fell, looking back along the corridor at the two Choppers who had appeared at its junction with the hotel's central core. They were the same man and woman he had seen talking to Miller outside the room door.

Bullets ripped along the corridor, slicing into the plaster walls, blowing jagged splinters from door frames, filling their world with violence and noise once more.

Rosemary braced herself against the wall, then looked down at her gun, turning it this way and that.

“Safety?” Jack shouted, because he really had no idea either.

The shooting stopped. “That's them!” a voice hissed.

“Okay,” the woman said. “Just get the old bitch.” The two soldiers ran along the hallway, guns raised, and when the woman stopped and braced into a firing position, the male Chopper jerked to a halt and shot his companion in the leg.

She grunted and flopped to the carpeted floor, dropping her gun and rolling immediately onto her back.

The tall soldier seemed to be fighting with his weapon, yanking it this way and that as if someone invisibly was holding the barrel. He pointed it at the woman writhing on the floor before him, shaking his head and moaning, “No, no…”

A shape appeared behind him at the corridor junction. Puppeteer.

“No!” the soldier shouted, and he shot his friend again.

Jack turned away, but he still saw her head whip back, and blood splash across the floor and up the corridor walls.

“Come on,” Rosemary said. She nodded briefly to Puppeteer, then pushed the fire exit door open.

Jack hustled Emily through first, following her and turning around. As Rosemary let go of the door and its closer pulled it shut, he saw Puppeteer approaching the remaining Chopper, right hand held out and fingers playing the air.

The soldier screamed as his feet left the floor and his head was crushed, slowly, against the elaborately corniced ceiling.

“Jack,” Emily said, “I should have got that on film.”

“Kids,” Rosemary said. “So resilient.”

Jack barked one loud, harsh laugh, and then followed Rosemary down the stairs.

“Safety catch,” he said.

Rosemary shook her head. “Dear, I honestly don't know if I could ever shoot another human being.”

“Even if they're trying to shoot you?” Emily asked.

They reached the ground floor and continued down to the basement level. There were no windows here, no viewing panels in the doors, and the stairwell was dark and functional. Jack took a small torch from his rucksack and lit their way.

“Something has to set us apart from them,” the woman said. And though Jack was still angry with her, his respect for her doubled.

The hotel's basement corridor was illuminated by a few narrow, dirty windows at high level. They looked out past iron railings at the street before the hotel. Something was burning out there, and Jack thought it was one of the Choppers’ trucks.

“What the hell are those two Superiors doing?” he asked. “How can they take on an army?”

“I doubt there were just two,” Rosemary said. “And they have such powers, Jack! I know of a fire starter, a woman who can confuse senses so that she's almost invisible, and someone who can change the colour of things.”

The sounds of fighting had ceased for now, but the air was heavy inside the hotel, as though people with death on their minds still stalked its corridors and searched its empty rooms.

“I hope Sparky and Jenna are okay,” Emily said, voicing a fear which Jack had been harbouring since seeing them exit the stairwell. Jenna had been wounded, and he hoped that Sparky would be sensible; no heroics, and no revenge for his dead brother. Not yet.

“They'll be fine,” he said.

“And Lucy-Anne,” Emily added, but Jack could think of no easy way to respond to that.

“We should leave,” Rosemary said. She was gasping for breath, but looked like she would never give up. “If your friends made it down this far, they'll be waiting for us behind the hotel.”

The basement was warren of store rooms, cupboards and corridors ending at closed doors. The air was grimy and grey. Emily pulled a penlight from her rucksack and it complimented Jack's torch, giving them enough light to find their way to a set of doors to the outside.

“Wait,” Jack whispered. He held out his hands for the gun.