While Robin gobbed minty foam into a mug, the duty guard on Sherwood Designer Outlets’ watchtower eyed movement in the north parking lot. He immediately punched the emergency button on his radio and lit the intruders with a giant searchlight.
It was a group of thirty hired thugs. A dozen were on horseback, the rest on small tracked buggies, straddled by a driver with a passenger behind.
The road that once led from Route 24 to Designer Outlets had been damaged by regular floods and was badly overgrown, so nothing with tyres came this deep into the forest.
An excited crowd surged to the edge of the mall roof as the intruders formed a surly line at the rear of the parking lot. A woman trotted out on a black horse, one hand on the reins and the other held in the air to show that she was unarmed.
As the horse pulled up by Designer Outlets’ sandbagged main entrance, Will Scarlock stepped up on a dead air-conditioning tower to greet her.
‘That’s Gisborne’s daughter,’ Azeem whispered in Will’s ear.
Will nodded and spoke quietly. ‘Tell everyone to get their weapons. Then go see if they’ve got more sneaking up from another direction.’
Azeem gave a nod and rushed off, while Will held out his arms to show that he too was unarmed.
‘Young lady,’ he shouted down, ‘to what do we owe the pleasure?’
‘Don’t patronise me, you rotten-toothed goat!’ Clare Gisborne snapped, as she flipped up the visor of a Kevlar soldier’s helmet. ‘You know why I’m here.’
‘There’s been an understanding between your father and the Forest People for years,’ Will said. ‘Gisborne’s gang stays out of the forest and we stay out of his business in Locksley. Perhaps he didn’t explain this to you, before suffering the unfortunate injury to his delicate parts.’
Clare fumed as refugees and sabs on the roof roared with laughter. Will didn’t want to aggravate her, but he needed to buy thinking time.
The mall was well defended and, though Clare Gisborne was sixteen and inexperienced, Will recognised several of her father’s most notorious enforcers among her posse. There was no way they’d let Clare attack the outlets across an open car park, and Will felt sure he was dealing with a diversion tactic.
‘We don’t want to wage war in the forest,’ Clare shouted up. ‘But this is a very exceptional circumstance. My father has given us orders to enter the forest and extract Robin Hood by any means necessary.’
‘Robin is not here,’ Will lied. ‘And if he was, I’d never hand a young boy over to be tortured by your father.’
The rooftop mob shook their guns in the air and cheered with approval, as Will called his eighteen-year-old son over.
‘Sam, there’s not enough of them to attack. But they clearly want everyone up here jeering them, so I’ll bet they already have thugs inside the mall hunting Robin. Take four good people. Go to the Maid family den and don’t let Robin out of your sight.’
‘Roger that,’ Sam said, giving his dad a Boy Scout salute and turning to find a dozen armed people keen to help.
‘My father predicted you’d refuse,’ Clare said, her voice getting shrill. ‘He asked me to remind you where most of your supplies come from. If Daddy gives the order, Forest People won’t be able to buy a pack of gum in Locksley.’
One floor below, Robin was about to yank his shirt over his head when he sensed footsteps moving along the outer wall of the den.
‘Marion?’ he asked, an instant before the door flew open.
Robin lunged for his bow, but it was five metres away and two masked women charged before he got there, crashing each other in the doorway and making the den walls wobble like a cheap film set.
‘Hands on head,’ one woman said quietly, pointing an assault rifle with a laser sight that left a red dot jiggling over Robin’s heart.
‘Robin,’ Marion shouted, as she clanked up the escalator. ‘Mum got a radio message from Sam Scarlock. Gisborne’s people are coming after you.’
Robin wished Marion’s shout had come twenty seconds earlier, but her yell did make the women glance back. Robin used the distraction, flinging his mug of toothpaste spit at them, then doing a backwards roll and lunging for his bow.
As the taller of the two women ran across the bed to grab Robin, he reached the bow and swung it to whack her behind the legs.
‘Marion, stay out!’ Robin screamed. ‘They’ve got guns.’
As the woman he’d whacked stumbled forward, Robin slotted an arrow and fired at the other one. She raised her arms in defence and the bolt slipped under her body armour and made a wet thud into her armpit.
Gisborne wanted personal revenge and had given orders for Robin to be taken unharmed, but the woman on the ground forgot this as she pulled a knife from her belt and slashed at Robin’s back.
Marion had backed away, but saw Robin dodge the knife, then spring to his feet.
After standing and hooking his bow over his back, Robin used his floored opponent as a stepping stone for a parkour-style leap onto a small dining table. From there, he grabbed the top of a wooden panel and vaulted out of the den.
‘Get out of here!’ he yelled to Marion, as he landed hard, then ran for the escalators and dived down the middle.
Unfortunately, Marion’s brothers had cleared away the mound of swimming floats at the bottom so their mums didn’t find out what they’d been up to. Robin painfully banged his hip on the concrete floor as he landed, though he made a reasonable cushion for Marion two seconds later.
Upstairs, one of Robin’s attackers shot a burst of automatic fire into the ceiling and roared, ‘I will squash you like a bug!’
The bullets pierced the ceiling, narrowly missing some people out on the roof and leaving Marion’s two youngest brothers hysterical.
Another of Gisborne’s thugs came through the store’s gate and lunged at Robin as Marion helped him up. But the first Robin knew about the attack was a cartoon clang as Karma bludgeoned his attacker with a frying pan, despite having a petrified two-year-old clamped to her leg.
As Robin notched an arrow, ready to shoot if either of the women from upstairs appeared, Indio thrust a pre-packed emergency bag into Marion’s belly.
‘They went straight for Robin, so there must be an informant,’ Indio reasoned. ‘You’re fast, you know the mall and we don’t know who we can trust. So get Robin out of here. OK?’
‘Yes, Mum,’ Marion said, sounding scared.
Then she narrowed her eyes determinedly and turned to Robin. ‘Ready to run?’