Futuretrack 5 by Robert Westall

Author:Robert Westall [Robert Westall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Old Vic pointed the gun at me again. I pushed back his arm. His face glared. The gun exploded. The bookcase fell and the flames leaped everywhere…

I wakened, sweating. Lay consoling myself that the nightmare was getting less vivid.

I looked across at Keri’s bed, but she’d gone. Racing. God, Glasgow was an awful place. No Est enclave; Glasgow was being allowed to go to pot. The huge, black Doric columns of the public buildings were covered in graffiti from top to bottom; the famous art gallery was roofless after a fire. We’d found a boardinghouse that cost the earth, run by a giant, frizzy-haired Scotswoman who called everybody “hen,” ambushed you in corridors, and talked interminably about her wee man, who’d been dead thirty years. But at least there was a stout bedroom door and I’d bought a padlock and moved Mitzi in with us, in spite of mother hen’s protests that even pets weren’t allowed.

“Mitzi’s house-trained. She frets if I leave her.”

She’d taken our credits, so there wasn’t much she could do.

First morning, there was hammering on the bedroom door. Keri unlocked it, was driven across the room by a horde of guys letting off flashbulbs and thrusting TV cameras in her face.

“They missed you on the Box last night, Keri. What you trying to do to us?”

“You racing today? Or is there a secret romance?” The cameras swung momentarily onto me.

“Racing,” said Keri. Well, more a low snarl.

“Aren’t you sleeping with him?”

She nodded to where she’d parked Mitzi’s oily muddiness pointedly between the two beds. Then made the mistake of yawning and stretching. Cameras clicked.

“Hold it, Keri! Perfect! Undo your zip a bit more?”

I couldn’t kill them all.

The race circuit ran round the city centre. (At least, in London they’d kept the circuit free of broken bottles.) The spectators seemed permanently drunk, waving on their favourites with those bayonets and cutlasses that Glaswegians were always so fond of. Several people lost ears; everyone enjoyed the joke. I kept my crash helmet on. I said racing was so dangerous in Glasgow even the spectators needed crash helmets. Keri didn’t find it funny.

I’ve never seen Paramils walk so wary; always in threes, blaster holsters open. But you never saw much of them, especially after dark.

The famous Keri Roberts didn’t win the first race; she wisely stayed behind the field, sussing out the track. Came back with blood on her leathers, but somebody else’s.

Between races, she worked hard proving that I didn’t exist. Busy swopping those incredible Racer jokes. Like the guy who had the top of his skull ripped off by a low traffic light, but still won by a short head.

I tried to find things to do, like checking her tires. But the bike they’d given her was very new. And Racers have no time for mechanics. They began elbowing me away from her, treading on my feet, kicking me when my back was bent.

She won the second race. In such style that the wing of a robo-truck ripped her leathers from gauntlet to shoulder.

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