The purple smoke burned Little John’s eyes and cut visibility to less than a metre. Someone was screaming outside. Bullets zoomed in every direction around the shack, but nobody seemed to be shooting directly at it.
Not being shot was a good thing, but Little John suspected it was only because the Castle Guards had orders to deliver him to Gisborne alive.
There were weapons in the lounge, but the smoke was thickest there, while Agnes and T had donned gas masks and were shooting out of the window.
During twenty hours staring at the kids’ party room, John had noticed that the metal roof over his head was only constructed for summer use, with no insulation and lots of gaps like the one that had rusted the beam.
Little John’s eyes seared and his throat felt like it was being crushed. He stumbled to the far side of the room and, after clattering into a trash can, felt his way along the wall to the Whack-a-Mole machine up back.
Its melamine top flexed as he climbed onto it. From a squatting position, he put both hands flat against the metal roof and pushed with his legs. The purple smoke was thicker than ever as a stray bullet clanked into the roof, branches crashed from a shattered tree and T yelled for more ammo in the lounge.
The Whack-a-Mole creaked under Little John’s weight and the force he was putting on the roof. But the machine was built for abuse and he began feeling movement in the screws securing the corrugated metal to rotting roof beams.
There was a clank of metal, three screws popped, then a blast of fresh air that was like nectar.
Little John bashed the metal several times to enlarge the gap, then bent the sheet aside. Rusted screws jutting from the aluminium scraped his bare back as he pulled himself through the hole and out onto a gently sloping roof coated with dark moss and clumps of fungus.
Little John’s eyes and lungs felt better, but he didn’t share Robin’s head for heights and felt jittery looking down the single storey to the ground.
A burly Castle Guard came charging around the side of the shack in his bottle-green uniform. Fortunately, his focus was on taking out the shooters around the front and he didn’t see Little John, squatting on the roof less than two metres above.
Little John slid down the tin roof on his bum, and held on to a rain gutter as he dropped onto a picnic patio area at the rear of the shack. Rusty metal tables had been toppled and there was sharp debris underfoot.
The shooting had dropped off momentarily, and seeing a Castle Guard so close to the hut gave John a sense the guards were winning. But as he ran across the patio to take cover in the trees, a sniper shot cracked from one of Treetop Buzz’s dilapidated rope bridges.
His bulky frame could easily be mistaken for a Castle Guard through all the smoke, and the idea that an invisible sniper might be lining her next shot on him dialled Little John’s fear to a new peak.
He sprinted barefoot over jagged glass and sizzled his heel on a red-hot bullet fragment, but the pain barely registered.
Little John jumped from the end of the patio and rolled into a drainage channel filled with thorny bushes and trash bags that fizzed with blowflies. One of the women who’d been singing showtunes in the lounge the previous night was unconscious on the ground less than two metres away.
There was no obvious bullet wound, but both her legs were dramatically broken. There was a rope ladder up the nearest large trunk and Little John guessed she’d fallen as she tried to escape over the rope bridges.
Her clothes and boots were far too small for him, but he tugged a small pack off the woman’s back and snatched the folding knife and water canteen attached to her belt.
A ten-metre sprint took Little John to the forest canopy. He was shocked to look down and see both feet oozing blood. The rush of adrenaline quashed his pain, but he realised he couldn’t get far without boots.
The forest is dense. I have water. If I can stumble a few hundred metres and play dead, they might not find me.
But then what?
Back by the shack the fighting had intensified. Three ground-shaking thuds suggested someone had unleashed a heavier weapon, and a streak of fire from a flamethrower shot into the canopy, attempting to incinerate a sniper.
From up ahead Little John heard a hollow booming sound, like the one before the smoke grenade crashed into the lounge. He sensed the motion of the object clattering through leaves, but had no time to react.
It was the size of a baseball and hit his chest with a thud powerful enough to lift him off the ground and send him crashing back through branches. His back jarred on a tree root and he was winded as the non-lethal projectile disintegrated into a grey paste that stuck to everything.
Barely able to breathe, Little John doubled up when a second projectile socked him in the gut. He tried to stand, but was immediately sent sprawling by a tactical boot in the back.
‘Stay still!’ a powerfully built man in a Kevlar helmet and body armour demanded.
‘Give me your hands!’ the woman who’d kicked him roared from behind.
She dug her knee in Little John’s back and locked disposable plastic cuffs around his wrists. Little John opened stinging eyes as the male guard lifted his face out of decaying leaves and studied him closely.
‘This is him, right?’ the man asked.
The woman came around for a proper look. ‘Hundred per cent,’ she agreed.
The man grabbed a radio clipped to his body armour and sounded pleased with himself.
‘This is unit eleven. I have our target secured, with ID confirmed. He has no serious injuries and can confirm he is clear of enemy base. I repeat, target safe and clear. Over.’
The voice that came back through the radio shared the triumph.
‘Nice one, unit eleven! Sheriff Marjorie might give you a goodnight kiss! All other units, target is extracted. Let’s show this forest scum what happens when you take on Castle Guards!’
The female guard tutted. ‘We’re gonna miss the fun part!’
Then she pulled a black hood out of her pocket and tugged it over Little John’s head.
‘John Hood in a hood,’ she joked, then jumped with fright when a huge explosion ripped into the shack he’d just escaped from.
Even flat on the ground beneath a canopy of trees, John felt the heat from the fireball. His new captors shielded their eyes from a blinding flash, as metal roof sheets flew thirty metres into the air.