The same evolutionary calculation that had saved hunters millions of years before taught Jericho to climb a second before the barrel spat its first bullets. He had changed position by the time they left the muzzle.
Then things speeded up.
The gun on the tripod swung around and rattled off its rounds, then turned further on its axis. All the windows exploded. The burst took in Jericho’s bike, but he had managed to climb high enough to avoid being hit himself. Two of the bullets struck the rotating wheels of the engine. There was a sound like a cracking bell. The airbike took a terrible blow.
It dropped.
‘Down!’ yelled Daxiong and threw himself sideways. Three hundredweight had to get moving, but almost all of Daxiong’s colossal body was muscle, so he managed to shove Yoyo and reach Chen Hongbing with a few long strides, the gun following after him. Bullets drilled into the wall and ceiling. Wood, glass and plaster sprayed from gaping holes. Daxiong saw Yoyo fall. At a frequency of eight rounds per second, the gun shredded the door they had been standing outside just a moment before, kept on turning, pursuing him as he breathlessly tried to flee. He collided with Hongbing and pulled him to the floor.
The wall exploded above their heads.
Jericho fell.
Apparently unconnected factors combined unexpectedly, including the principles of construction of flying machines, the effects of heavy ballistics and the ambitions of the city parks commission. Tokyo, for example, symbolised a people that had always lived in a state of extreme self-confinement, which was why you hardly ever saw a tree there. Shanghai, on the other hand, was bursting with parks and tree-lined streets, which enormously enhanced the quality of life, and was also ideal when it came to considerably softening the fall of an airbike plummeting from about twelve metres in the air. Encouraged by the humid climate, the birch trees in the hinterland of Siping Lu had grown luxuriously rampant. The bike crashed into the dense foliage of a tree-top and threw Jericho off. He toppled into the branches, which grew denser as he fell; he flailed around, fell further, whipped by twigs and thrashed by thickening boughs until at last he managed to cling on to one and dangled from it, legs flailing, four to five metres above the courtyard.
Too high to jump.
Where was the airbike?
A crunching and splintering announced that he had overtaken the machine on his way down. It was raging high above him. He threw his head back and saw something flying at him, tried to get out of its way, too late. A branch crashed against his forehead.
When his eyesight had cleared, the airbike was coming straight at him.
Xin rolled over.
Dense clouds of plaster dust formed before his eyes. Near the shattered door he saw Yoyo creeping over to her father on her elbows. By now the spinning rifle had completed its first circuit, and was moving on, still spitting fire, to its second.
‘Yoyo, get out!’ he heard Daxiong shouting. ‘Get out of here!’
‘Father!’
Xin waited till the bullets had passed by him, then jumped up and slipped his index finger over the touchscreen of the remote control, stopped the weapon, pulled his finger down and to the right, and the gun followed his movements, and spat a burst of fire at the very spot where Chen and the giant were just getting back to their feet. The bullets missed them by millimetres. Still crouching, they staggered into the next room. Xin fired into the wall, but the masonry had already survived the first shots.
Whatever. In there they were trapped.
He calmly swung the gun round to the left. In a fierce staccato the gun hammered its rounds into the concrete, ploughed through a half-shattered shelf and brought it crashing down completely. A line of craters appeared in quick succession, tracing a line that continued all the way to the girl on the floor.
Yoyo stared at it. Panicking, she tried to get to her feet, but she was ridiculously slow. Her eyes widened when she realised that she was about to die.
‘Bye bye, Yoyo,’ he hissed.
Turbine mouth downwards, the airbike crashed through the branches as if to kill Jericho and swallow him up at the same time.
He had to jump!
The splintering and crashing came to a stop. The machine’s rump had jammed less than half a metre above him and come to a juddering standstill.
Bark, leaves and twigs rattled down on him. He looked into the shattered rotors of the turbine, swung towards the trunk and spotted a branch below him that might support his weight.
Worryingly thin, on closer inspection.
Too thin.
The rain of twigs resumed.
He had no choice. He dropped, climbed back up, felt the wood yielding under his weight and wrapped his arms around the trunk.
Xin heard the scream, which had come not from Yoyo but from the giant, who stormed in from the next room, hurled himself like a demolition ball against the tripod and brought it crashing down. The rifle pointed at the ceiling now, bringing down lumps of brick the size of fists. Xin pressed Stop and drew his handgun. He saw Hongbing running over to Yoyo, who leapt to her feet and pulled open what was left of the splintered door to the flat.
As Xin took aim at her, Daxiong pulled his legs away.
Xin collapsed onto his back and nimbly rolled sideways. Daxiong crashed to the floor. Xin raised his pistol, but the giant pushed himself up with amazing dexterity and knocked it from his hand. Xin gave him a kick at the spot where his wardrobe-sized chest met his chin, which must therefore have been something like an Adam’s apple. Daxiong’s pharaoh beard splintered. The giant staggered backwards and uttered a choking croak. With a racing dive Xin was on the pistol, grabbed hold of its butt, felt himself being grabbed and held aloft like a child. Kicking out in all directions, he struggled in vain to free himself from the man’s grasp. Daxiong’s great paws gripped him like vices as he carried him to the glass façade.
His plan was obvious.
Xin reached back and fired haphazardly. A muffled groan led him to assume that he had hit his target, although it didn’t keep Daxiong from hoisting him higher and violently hurling him through one of the windows. There wasn’t much glass left in the frame. Under other circumstances the impact would have meant certain death, but the injury had cost the giant some of his strength. Xin spread his arms and legs like a cat, tried to find something to hold on to and caught hold of a strut that hadn’t been shattered in the hail of gunfire. His body swung outside. For a moment he looked down at the green sea of leaves below him, tensed his muscles to get back inside, saw Daxiong’s fist flying at him and slipped away.
He fell – a little way.
In an instant he spotted and grabbed the bulky box of the air-conditioning system. A jolt ran through his body, his hands clawed around the box, which scraped sideways. Far below him there was crashing, splintering and rattling as if a huge animal were raging in the tree-tops.
Jericho? That was exactly the spot where the detective had fallen.
No matter. He had to get back into the flat. Using all his strength he pulled himself up, braced his feet against the masonry and started climbing.