Two hovercraft were curving away from the tower, each containing three minds, radiant hard-wound balls of mercurial malevolence. Greg recognised Toby riding in one of them, along with a couple of crewmen he couldn't place. Mark and Kendric were paired in the second, along with its pilot. There was no sign of the other minds Greg knew to be out there—Armstrong and Turner, not even Hermione. The tower was an empty shell to his espersense, which meant at least one twin had remained behind. The big question was whether the third hovercraft had been inflated.
A faint haze of small minds glowed around the wavering perimeter of his espersense, occasional twinkles within. Animals of some sort, clinging to a dour existence amid the ruins. Abandoned pets reverted to their true feral nature, rodents scrabbling to stay above the mud, an invasion of reptiles.
He pulled Gabriel roughly down the slope and into the bog which covered the street, ignoring her weepy cries of protest. They didn't have to swim. The syrupy mud drowning the tarmac was only a few centimetres deep, lapping over his feet like slushed snow. It was possible to wade. The raft of algae came up to mid-thigh.
Greg was nearly tempted to hide in one of the houses. None of them had doors or windows left. Pick one at random and cower down. Unless the hovercraft boasted some pretty sophisticated sensors, Kendric and Toby would never find him in time. But the dangerously dilapidated condition of the walls stopped him. If the tower went up with anything like the violence Gabriel claimed the friable houses would collapse on top of them.
They reached a mouldering dune which had once been a leylandii hedge, and squelched over it. Greg saw two white aureoles sliding fluidly across the horizon behind them, winding down through the slough channels. The drone of the hovercraft propellers drifted in and out of audibility. Kendric and Toby were fanning out, their search pattern carrying them further apart. At least it was only two.
He steered Gabriel down the narrow dank gully between two houses. There were animals on the other side of the walls, more than he'd originally thought, scurrying around frantically. The garden at the rear of the house backed on to another garden. Head-high panel fencing marked out the boundary, putrefying laths drooping under their own weight. In one corner was a greenhouse whose panes were pasted with hand-sized valentine leaves. Some abandoned horticultural treasure had thrived in the heat and abundant nutrient-soaked mud, making it look as though the aluminium-framed structure was about to burst apart at the seams.
Caustic fingers of silver-white light probed through a gap between a couple of houses a hundred metres away. The propeller noise was loud, fluctuating in strident piccolo whistles. Greg sensed Toby's churlish mind; the man was spite-laden, yearning to be the one who found the quarry. Instinct chafed at him. He knew Greg was nearby. A nature-ordained hunter.
The bulk of the houses blocked off the light as the hovercraft glided down the street. Then the questing fingers reappeared, closer this time, three houses away.
Greg urged Gabriel behind the greenhouse, and waited until the searchlight fluoresced the verdant avocado-green leaves.
The green corona died as the hovercraft moved on, but Greg knew that knot of determination in Toby's mind. He'd order the pilot to take the hovercraft down the gardens once he reached the end of the street.
His espersense tracked Kendric, who was still patrolling the slough channels. They couldn't go back, and the blast would turn the confined gardens into a death-trap of flying masonry.
"Through there." Greg pointed ahead. The row of houses in front of them were virtually identical to the ones behind, only in slightly better condition. Gabriel moved like an automaton.
Greg kicked at the panel fence, tearing through it like tissue paper. There was a fruit cage on the other side, a box made from galvanised steel poles wrapped in a tattered cobweb of black nylon netting. The sight of it sparked an idea.
He reached up to one of the crossbeams with his right hand and began to tug. The pole was held in place between the uprights by two moulded plastic sockets at each end, both of them fractured and bleached by the decade-long torrent of UV-infested sunlight. One of the sockets crackled at the pressure he applied, then snapped abruptly. Greg yanked the other end of the pole out of its socket with a burst of ebullient strength, tearing the netting as it came free. The pole was three metres long, in good condition; the zinc coating had whitened down the years, but it'd protected the steel from rust.
"What's happening?" Gabriel asked.
"I'm improvising a little present for Toby." There was no longer any vindictiveness at the prospect, nor even malice.
This was an intrinsic fight for survival now, nothing more. His mind had relegated Toby to an obstacle which had to be tackled. Hatred was all the other man's problem.
Greg clamped the pole between his knees and tied on a strip of the ripped nylon mesh. It was a laborious job, he had to use his teeth to grip the end of the strip while his fingers formed the knot. Spears didn't come any more primitive, but the rudimentary tail ought to keep its trajectory stable for a few metres.
They slogged towards a narrow alleyway between the two houses ahead, the disturbingly concave walls had so many bricks missing they looked like two vertical checkerboards. There was an unstable aggregation of brick chunks and sandy earth in the gap, rising half a metre above the algae. Greg had lost his shoes somewhere in the slough channels; his feet were unrecognisable, lumps of gummy tar which ached abominably.
If he stood on anything sharp they'd go completely numb as the pain breached the cortical node's threshold. When they reached the small front garden they were knee-deep in the greasy mire again.
The street they found themselves in was virtually intact. Greg could almost believe he'd walked out into a pre-dawn autumn morning of fifteen years ago. Rusted, windowless hulks of petrol-driven cars were parked along the road. Barren trees stood tall, low brick walls were topped by fanciful wrought-iron railings, the lampposts were still vertical. It was a well-ordered slice of middle-class suburbia. Only the algae-matted water shattered the illusion of normality.
A curtain of light streaked out at the far end of the houses a hundred and fifty metres away. Toby's hovercraft had turned down into the gardens. Greg sensed the excitement rising in the man's mind. Toby's native instinct was telling him his prey was nearby.
Greg found it uncanny to observe, almost as though his own ability was being turned against him. He and Toby must share the same mental genotype.
"I want you to walk down to the other end of the street," he told Gabriel.
She didn't reply, standing with shoulders drooping, arms dangling at her side. Her left hand looked appalling, tumescent and inflamed. Mud had dried and cracked on it, as though she was shedding a hardened outer skin, allowing new, blue-tender flesh to break through. He refused the impulse to check his own.
"Listen, Gabriel. You must walk down the street. And when the hovercraft comes, you fall down. OK? That's all. Can you manage that for me?"
A confused frown puckered her forehead. "Walk?"
"Yes." Greg pressed his hand on her back, starting her off. "And when the light shines, you go for cover."
Gabriel's feet had found a shuffling rhythm. "Fall down?"
"That's right."
"Orders," she mumbled vaguely. "I won't let you down, Greg. I won't."
Greg left her doing her apathetic sleep walk, feeling a prize turd for using her as bait; and headed back up the street towards the wide beam of light which kept shooting out, documenting the hovercraft's progress. Algae foamed around his knees. Slithery mud tried to pull his feet from under him. Sometimes he thought he could feel the hardness of the tarmac.