Shredder by Niall Leonard

Author:Niall Leonard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2015-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

seven

Abruptly rain started coming down in hot torrents, soaking everyone, and to the crowd it was as refreshing and exhilarating as sprinklers going off at a rave. Windows shattered all along the street—the first targets were the shops selling booze—and the air quickly filled with shrieking sirens and clattering bells of burglar alarms, mingling with screaming and shouting and mad laughter and the roar of car engines as drivers trapped in the middle of the maelstrom tried to pull out of the stalled lines of traffic and somehow get out of there. One or two succeeded, bumping over traffic islands and even up along the pavement in their haste, while other drivers simply abandoned their cars in the street and ran.

The mob—blokes of any and every race, most of them in their twenties, plus a scattering of women, plus scores of kids barely into their teens—swirled and clustered and scattered again, seeking targets, egging each other on, swarming over the abandoned cars, dancing on their roofs, raking the interiors for anything stealable—GPS units, sunglasses, CD players—only to dump their loot in the street and run on to their next target. One big shiny four-by-four, brand-new by the looks of it, the looters didn’t even bother to ransack—they just ripped off its wipers, snapped and smashed its wing mirrors and crazed its windows and hacked at its bodywork with rocks and bricks and broken bottles and anything hard that came to hand. It was one of those huge ostentatious expensive cars whose only purpose in London was to inspire envy, and it was working all too well on this crowd.

The Dumpster truck too had been abandoned, with both its doors hanging open, but now black smoke was drifting from the cab, and I could see an orange flicker from the footwell refracted in its windows. Someone had set it on fire. Other rioters were clearing its load of poles and rocks to use as ammunition. All of them were soaked and none of them gave a damn; even the fire seemed to blaze away more brightly in the rain.

I held back, fighting down the feelings of sickness at the chaos I’d unleashed, trying instead to focus on how much time I had before the cops tooled up with riot gear and returned in force to drive us off the street. Last time it had taken them days; this time they might well decide to come back hard and fast, to snuff the riot out before it spread.

I had an hour maybe, at most.

All along the street shopkeepers were abandoning their premises, the braver ones risking the wrath of the rioters to haul down steel shutters in front of their windows; others—like the staff of the café I’d been sitting in earlier—merely bolting their doors, switching off all their lights, and retreating into the gloom at the back, presumably to escape through the service exits.

I was counting on the Turk’s crew to panic too. Nothing could have prepared them for being stranded

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