His palms were tacky with sweat. He looked at his hands, holding them out in front of him. For one, quick, stomach-swooping moment, they weren’t his hands at all. They belonged to someone else.
Big Wooof. Big, big Wooof. Alienated and scared by parts of his own body, James reeled. Owen had been wrong. Some insane kind of transmutation was happening to him, right there, in broad daylight, in front of hundreds of people. Or Owen had been right, and he was simply going mad.
Someone was looking at him. James felt it, like a sixth sense, a hot tingle. He looked up, searching the crowd as it poured around him.
He saw the man, the lean blond man in the black suit. The man was standing twenty feet away, the crowd flowing around him too. The man was staring right at James.
James knew he’d met him before somewhere. Where, where, where?
Why is he looking at me?
James turned his head a few degrees to the right, very slowly. Ten yards to the blond man’s left, another figure was making a silent, still island in the stream of bodies. The dark-haired man in the black jeans.
He was staring at James too.
James froze. He had every intention of running, but his legs wouldn’t move and his body refused to turn. It was as if they had some hold on him, some hypnotic hold, just like that bloody replacement window con man hadn’t. This was how Jack and Gwen and all the poor suckers he touched must have felt: charmed and immobile.
This was what it was like to be a prey item locked in a predator’s gaze.
The blond man turned his head and looked through the crowd at the dark-haired man. The dark-haired man turned his head and looked back. Simultaneously, they started to walk towards James. They took strong, purposeful strides. They moved closer together until they were coming on, side by side, in step.
Two figures. Side by side.
Two shadows beside a phone box, in the middle of the night.
James remembered. The memory returned in a hot, dizzying hit, as if he’d been whacked between the eyes with a mallet. He bolted.
Oh, now people noticed him. They cried out and complained loudly as he shoved his way past them. Who did he think he was? Where did he think he was going? Couldn’t he show some bloody manners?
His spinning mind supplied answers as he ran. To the first two questions, he had no idea. To the third, no he bloody couldn’t.
He looked back. The men were coming after him. He slammed through the crowd to the head of a descending escalator, and pushed his way down it. A woman bellowed as he kicked over the shopping bags she’d set on the step beside her. A man cursed him as he elbowed past. A young guy riding beside his girlfriend tumbled down two steps and clung to the handrail as James barged him to one side.
He leapt off the escalator onto the middle level of the atrium. Above him, the two men were weaving down after him, single-file, switching back and forth to avoid people. They had to wait while the bellowing woman gathered up her spilled purchases with the help of other shoppers. Forced to a halt, the two men kept their eyes on James as they slid down the moving steps.
James started running immediately he was off the escalator. He crashed into an elderly man and knocked him flat. He stumbled as the elderly man fell, but didn’t stop. More people began to shout at him. He ran on.
The two men reached the bottom of the escalator, and started to sprint after him.
James crossed the landing space, looking left and right. He needed another down escalator to reach street level. He turned, and collided head-on with a young husband and wife. They had two kids with them, and the youngest tripped as he tangled with James’s legs. Bumping down hard, the kid started to cry immediately.
‘You stupid bastard!’ the wife yelled.
‘Look where you’re going, shithead,’ the husband roared. He was thick-set and hefty, a bloke used to responding with his fists. He swung an angry punch at James.
Instinctively, James raised a hand, just a warding hand.
The thuggish husband grunted and sailed backwards through the air. He actually left the ground. He flew ten yards and struck a retail barrow set up in the middle of the landing to sell Russian dolls and autographed photos of footballers. The barrow went over beneath him in a huge and noisy clatter. A general commotion began.
James ran to the escalator. People were getting out of his way.
The lower escalator was a long sweep. As soon as he got onto it, James found his progress blocked by shoppers. Some of them tried to shrink and cower away from him. Some of them cried out in alarm.
Penned in, James looked back up the sliding steps. The two men appeared at the top of the escalator and began to rush down after him, dodging around a few solo riders, who flinched from them. The two men were gaining.
James gripped the moving rail. He looked over at the drop, at the faces looking up to see what the fuss was about. The dark-haired man was four steps behind him, reaching out a hand.
James vaulted the moving rail and dropped.
Dozens of people screamed.
Jack put down the cordless slowly. He paused for a moment.
‘Jack?’ asked Toshiko, rising from her seat. ‘Jack, what’s the matter?’
‘Was that Gwen?’ Owen asked.
‘Jack?’
Jack turned to face them. ‘You know,’ he began quietly, ‘you know how this all seemed terribly, you know, wonky?’
Owen nodded. Toshiko just stared.
‘Well, you won’t believe what Gwen just said to me,’ said Jack.
He was flying, arms out, falling. Someone was screaming in a really piercing way.
He landed. He landed with legs coiled like springs to cushion the impact. He didn’t even fall or stumble. As soon as he was down, he sprang forwards and started running again.
A pathway opened in the crowd in front of him, Terrified, horrified faces recoiled out of his way.
More screams rang out in his wake. He didn’t need to look back to know that the blond man and the dark-haired man had followed his example and thrown themselves off the escalator.
They would be coming. Fast now, fast, and making no sound.
He could see the entrance of the shopping centre ahead. Oblivious crowds washed in and out, only just beginning to ripple as they realised something was up. The entrance itself was two pairs of automatic glass doors framed by side panels of floor-length glass.
There were too many people, too many people in his path. Some were too slow getting out of his way; others were too scared or confused. One young guy simply ducked down and James sailed over him.
There was no time to stop, no time to even slow down. The main doorways were too thick with people.
James raised his hands in front of his face in a protective cross. He accelerated. He came through one of the side panels in a splash of shattering glass. Shattering strengthened glass. Fragments flew in all directions, and the main weight of the glass panel collapsed like a sheet of dislodged ice, cascading across the pavement in a glittering, crashing torrent.
Yet more screams and hysterics. Shoppers fled in panic. James didn’t stop. The road ahead was two strides away, heavy with crawling traffic.
He didn’t break stride. He took off. Bang! off the roof of a minicab. Bang! off the bonnet of a Mini. Three powerful skips took him across to the far side of the road.
Behind him, Mr Dine exited the shopping centre through the hole in the glass panel James had made.
Mr Lowe came out a second later through the main doors, slamming pedestrians aside like a charging bull. People tumbled out of his way, some struck so hard they would require medical attention. One girl actually cartwheeled on her way to colliding with a heavy rubbish bin.