Black Bess spewed black exhaust and black rubber smoke from huge black tyres.
She was the same type of Mercedes truck that Forest Rangers used, but with Gisborne’s modifications this was like comparing a regular person with a pro bodybuilder.
Beige-uniformed Rangers scattered, terrified by Black Bess’s roar. Her huge front wheels swerved off-road and reared into the parked Rangers’ truck. Glass smashed as the front bull bars ripped the doors and rear fender off the Rangers’ Mercedes, before flipping it on its side.
Three of Black Bess’s wheels were off the ground and Robin thought they were wedged. But one wheel dug in, flinging up huge clods of dirt. After a sudden jerk and a sharp bang, they were clear.
One forward-thinking Ranger had sprinted down the road with a third stinger strip, but she could only deploy it a fraction after Black Bess drove past.
Leafy darkness enveloped the Mercedes as it blasted under the forest canopy.
‘That was no fun,’ Robin gasped, as he looked back and saw a bullet hole in the rear screen. It couldn’t have missed his head by more than twenty centimetres, but with all the noise and chaos, he hadn’t noticed when it hit.
The stinger strips were spring-loaded, so they could rapidly eject in front of an oncoming vehicle. But they had to be dragged out of the road by hand, and the tyre-shredding barbs tended to catch in cracks, or slice the hands of officers who weren’t careful.
While the Rangers’ surviving truck got held up behind their own stinger strips, John accelerated to seventy. But as he got into a groove, slinging Black Bess into winding forest curves, the dashboard screens turned to blank grey and John felt power drain from the engine.
‘What did you do?’ Robin asked, as the engine cut, leaving sounds of gravel pelting the car’s undertray.
‘Don’t blame me,’ John said, baffled as he glanced at the transmission stick and jiggled the key to restart the engine.
Robin wondered if an unseen Ranger’s bullet had damaged something, but the mystery was solved when he looked at the navigation screen:
Satellite Immobiliser – Activated
‘It’s a tracking system,’ Robin announced. ‘I’ve seen the TV ad. If you report your car stolen, the system broadcasts a kill code.’
As they rolled to a halt on the narrow forest road, the boys could hear the Ranger truck closing on them. But the full horror dawned when Robin tried his door.
‘It’s locked us in,’ he yelled.
As John furiously pulled at the door handle, Robin clicked off his belt and scrambled behind his seat. The bullet through the back windscreen had partially torn the glass from its frame. It was laminated safety glass and Robin realised the shattered screen would peel off, like the ring-pull on tinned soup.
John had a job squeezing between the front seats, as Robin threw out two backpacks and his bow. The Rangers’ truck squealed to a halt as the brothers jumped from the flatbed behind the cab and charged for the trees.
After half a minute forging through dense branches, Robin stopped and shushed John.
‘I can’t hear them,’ he whispered.
The forest canopy was sixty metres up, and little light reached the ground.
‘I’ve heard King Corp pays Forest Rangers minimum wage and that outlaws hunt them for sport,’ John said quietly. ‘I guess they don’t like venturing off the main road.’
Robin smiled and took a moment to enjoy the forest’s fresh, earthy air.
‘Finally, some luck,’ he told Little John, then tripped on a tree stump hidden in shadows and stumbled forward.
Robin felt terror, realising there was nothing below his feet.
He felt pain as he got lashed by bushes growing from the ravine’s near-vertical wall.
Finally, he felt nothing at all, as he stopped tumbling twenty metres below where he’d started and thumped head first into a rock.