Clare Gisborne’s horse reared when the automatic fire ripped chunks out of the mall roof.
‘You do not want my father as an enemy,’ Clare warned furiously as she fought to steady her mount. ‘This is your last warning!’
Will Scarlock proudly thumped his chest as close to a hundred mall residents lined up behind shaking swords, daggers and guns.
‘Do I think you’re gonna launch an attack on defensive positions across an open car park?’ Will taunted. ‘You’re just a spoiled brat with a big mouth.’
‘We’ll cremate this mall,’ Clare threatened. ‘And your rabble had better stay out of Locksley until Robin Hood is in my daddy’s hands.’
Inside the mall, Robin kept an arrow notched as he followed Marion’s charge down the main arcade between shops. There was no sign of Gisborne’s men chasing, and armed refugees stood up on the food-court gantry, ready to shoot any who showed themselves.
Marion did a three-sixty scan before cutting down a corridor with a sign pointing to disabled bathrooms. They stepped through an unmarked door, into a muggy space full of insulated pipes, at least one of which had leaked enough to puddle the floor.
‘Boiler room,’ Marion explained, as she ducked under thick pipes. ‘We could barricade the door and hide here. But we don’t know how many informants Gisborne has, or how many are hunting you.’
‘Who would rat me out to Gisborne?’ Robin growled furiously. ‘I thought everyone hated him.’
‘Refugees don’t have a lot of options,’ Marion said. ‘Gisborne can afford to offer thousands of pounds for information. That’s enough to get your kids a boat ride out of a war-torn country. Or buy fake citizenship papers, so they can leave the forest and try to get a job.’
‘Everyone’s desperate,’ Robin sighed. ‘Where do we go if we don’t hole up here?’
Marion pointed at a square hatch in the floor.
‘Main sewer.’
Robin smacked his own forehead and smiled wryly. ‘Just when you think your life can’t get worse …’
‘I went through years back, when a big posse of Forest Rangers raided the mall and tried to arrest Mum and Aunt Lucy for releasing sixty ostriches from a farm,’ Marion explained. ‘The good news is, there are no snakes down here. The bad news is, that’s because there are hundreds of giant rats that eat snake eggs. I guarantee you’ll puke, but on the upside, the filth only gets deep if it rains, so you won’t flood your shoes if you walk along the edge.’
‘How long?’
‘A few hundred metres. Two minutes if we’re fast.’
‘I’ll do whatever you think best,’ Robin agreed.
Marion grabbed a finger-hook at the edge of the hatch, then let it slam and stumbled back, holding her hand over her mouth and retching.
‘Worse than I remembered …’
As the stench hit the back of the room, Marion opened the emergency rucksack that her mum had given her. She used the puddled water to soak two striped vests, tying one over her face and passing the other so Robin could do the same.
Besides it being smellier than on her previous trip, Marion found the water was deeper too. The only way to keep her boots from flooding with brown filth was to stoop, place one boot in front of another and scrape her body along the edge of the wall where the floor curved upward.
Robin had an easier time because he was shorter, but it was a fight to breathe with dry heaves trying to come the other way.
Chinks of moonlight came from drain holes as they jogged beneath Designer Outlets’ parking lots.
The rats properly freaked Robin out. The size of house cats, with slimy matted fur, black marble eyes and tails as long as his arm.
Marion was gagging and trying to avoid a last breath of sewage as she stumbled for a metal grate, where the brown sludge drained into a stream. In her quest for fresh air, she hadn’t considered rusty hinges.
A tooth-grinding squeal echoed down the tunnel, loud enough to alert anyone within a hundred-metre radius.