Post Mortem by Gary Bell (free children's ebooks pdf .TXT) 📕

him on the next short stretch, I could see the dim glow of a phone against his ear. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

This time he took a different turn and I let him gain a few seconds before following through the car park of Slade Tower; the ten-storey block had warm lights behind closed curtains and red steel balconies at every level, but I still couldn’t see anybody around. A moment later, even the Audi was gone.

‘Where’d he go?’ Zara was craning her neck in all directions.

‘I don’t know.’ I turned back out onto another slender one-lane road, then another. Somehow, they seemed to be getting narrower.

Then Zara shrieked, making me jump out of my skin. ‘Watch out!’

I slammed my foot onto the brake and we were both shunted forwards into the hard grasps of our seat belts. Something metal – two things, in fact – had come rolling out of the darkness on either side, directly into our path. They were bicycles, one rolling from the pavement to the left and another from the right. Without passengers they wobbled unsteadily, as if the owners had simply vanished, then crashed into one another with almost expert precision and clattered to the tarmac, blocking the road.

‘What the …?’ I looked around for the riders.

Something was wrong with the picture outside. It took me another moment to realise what it was. Every street light on this particular stretch was out. The nearest lights were those in the highest windows of the flats on either side.

I looked at Zara and her face was stiff. With one elbow, she slammed the lock down on her door. ‘Lock your door,’ she breathed.

‘Excuse me?’

‘The door!’

I was turning to do it when my attention was stolen by a child in front of my car. Ten, maybe eleven years old at a push, dressed entirely in black with his hood up. I assumed he was going to pick up the bikes and be on his merry way. Instead, he came to a standstill in front of my bonnet as if we were playing some stationary game of chicken. I blasted the full beams to move him along; from that distance, the light turned his skin the colour of spoiled milk with freckles, making his green eyes burn while casting an enormous shadow up the road behind him.

Instinct brought my hand to the horn.

‘Don’t!’ Zara started, but the hand was already down, and I held it there for a hearty five or six seconds. Even with the horn close enough to blow him backwards, the kid didn’t even blink.

Then I saw the rest of them. Five. Ten. Twenty. More.

They were everywhere, not a single one of them old enough to shave. Boys and girls, black, white, Asian, it didn’t matter, almost all with their hood up or hat pulled low. They were standing on the pavement and the grassy verge behind it; there were even some watching silently from the balconies, faces no more distinguishable than those of smooth plastic dolls in the shadows. They’d appeared as if from nowhere, like the birds in Hitchcock’s eerie film. A sickness started to rise up from my stomach.

There were two dull thumps behind us before I’d even shifted into reverse, and when I checked the mirrors I saw two heavy wheelie bins dumped on their sides there, blocking me in. Back at the front, the boy had now turned his attention to the chrome jaguar emblem leaping from the bonnet, and he was wrapping both hands around it.

‘Oi!’ I yelled, slamming the horn again. ‘Get your hands off my –’

I didn’t even notice my door opening until the interior light flared above our heads. Here was another boy, this one older with severe acne across both cheeks, holding a knife that looked bigger than his forearm and pulling on the door with all his might.

‘Get out of the fucking car!’ is what I think he said, though I couldn’t hear much above Zara’s own yelling. I managed to catch the door just in time and yanked it back with both hands. The boy might’ve been armed, but I weighed twice what he did; his knife-arm got caught in the first slam, causing it to bend horribly, and on the second attempt I got it closed and locked.

I revved the car, inching forwards until I touched the first boy’s waist. Instead of moving aside he simply clambered up onto the bonnet and balanced there, brightly coloured trainers on steel, bending down to pull at the jaguar as if it was a stubborn weed in the garden.

By now the rest of the children had come closer. They surrounded the car, pressing their faces up against the glass, howling with laughter.

‘Nice car, fat man!’ one of the girls jeered.

Zara held her phone up for them all to see, took a deep breath that sounded shaky with adrenaline and yelled: ‘Fuck off, you little pricks! I’m ringing the police! You’re all in for –’

She was interrupted by a dense clunk as the first boy went flying backwards off the bonnet. He landed among the fallen bicycles and held the jaguar emblem up high like a trophy.

‘You little fucker!’ I roared. The rest of the children began to cheer.

What came next sounded like a hailstorm of biblical proportions; rocks, shoes and makeshift weapons of all denominations began slamming off steel and glass. Two whacks and both wing mirrors went spinning off into the dark. I heard air escaping the tyres as something sickeningly heavy bounced across the roof. A chunk of concrete fell straight through the rear window with a loud crunch.

I reversed several feet, shunting the bins backwards until I had enough room for a decent run-up, then I hit the accelerator. For a split second, it looked as if the boy with the bicycles wasn’t going to move. He soon realised that I had no intention of stopping and rolled aside.

The bicycles screamed beneath the wheels, and the car veered from side to side as the