Catch
me
Zoomer reached into her pocket and closed her
hand around a small plastic packet. It was one of her own creations.
She dashed across the bridge in the dark, her
brown leather coat flapping and the gun that was hidden beneath it slapping
against her thigh. Crouching down beside the wall of the building, she pulled
back her long, wavy blonde hair – she didn’t want to get her hair stuck in this – and peeled off the back of the
packet, slapping it against the wall. The sticky solution squelched as it
acquainted itself with the ancient brickwork. It had taken her a long time to
find out where this house was, by tracking various small, discreet purchases of
a certain poison: anyone going to this amount of trouble to conceal the fact
that they were buying those certain substances obviously didn’t want anyone to
find out why. Zoomer wasn’t going to find out what he was going to use the
poisons for; she was going to stop him. Now all she had to do was rip off the
other side of the packet and –
‘Miss Frost.’
Zoomer Frost looked up. It was one of Spider’s cronies, looming over
her. ‘Miss Frost, what you are
attempting to do is illegal.’
‘Oh, is it?’ Zoomer smiled at him. ‘Fancy that.’ She ripped the back off
the packet and shoulder-slammed the man, shoving right past him and charging
back up the bridge.
It wasn’t a good idea to be too close to the contents of that packet
when it was exposed to the air.
She saw the orange mushroom of fire lighting up the night and heard the
blast. ‘Catch me!’ she yelled at the flames where the man had been standing,
though she could hardly hear her own voice. ‘Go on. Catch me now!’
She ran. There would be more of them, there were always more of them,
and now they’d found out where she was...
Her motorbike was just the other side of the bridge. It gleamed at her.
Nothing could catch her when she was on that; with all the special features and
little modifications she’d made, she had once outrun a train, and then
destroyed the track to stop it from following her. But she saw one of them
looming out of the darkness, between her and the motorbike! Of course! They’d
known she would head for the bike. She swerved around and headed in the other
direction, still sprinting. The uninviting liquid blackness of the river flowed
beside her on one side, and on the other were the shadows of alleyways between
the darkened buildings. She could have gone down any of the alleyways, but she
knew the Spider. He’d have men down every one of them. But she knew she could
escape them.
They couldn’t catch her.
Running through the silent streets, the heels of her brown leather boots
struck the cobbles irritatingly loudly. Long ago, she’d found that black
clothes didn’t work so well: wearing black, you could disguise yourself as a
shadow, and moving patches of shadow aroused suspicion. Dark brown was much
better.
Damn! There were the Spider’s men, crowding
the road ahead of her. A black, tattered sign was hanging from an iron post on
the wall of one of the buildings to her left, creaking gently as it swung in
the dark. As she ran she reached up both hands, and when she reached the sign
she jumped in the air and clasped the iron bar with both hands, hoisting
herself onto the top of it. From there, she managed to clamber onto the
building’s roof. Why take the roads? She chuckled to herself. Let them try and
catch her on the rooftops.
‘Hello, Miss Frost.’
Zoomer stopped abruptly. He was there. Right in front of her. On the
roof.
He had caught her.
Her adrenaline drained away and she sagged, giving a tired smile.
‘Hello, Spider. You caught me again.’
‘Yes, it would appear that I have.’ Her old enemy had to tip his head
back to look in her eyes. The name Spider suited him perfectly. He was small
and weak himself, but his web reached everywhere, and you never saw it until it
was too late.
‘You are unable to zoom out of my clutches this time, then, Zoomer?’
Zoomer just sighed. She was still smiling wearily, even when she felt
one of the men gently take her hands and cuff them behind her. They had caught
her. ‘That’s right. You know me too well. You knew I wouldn’t go down the
alleyways in case your men were there, right? So you didn’t put any men there,
instead you put them around my motorbike and at the end of the road, right? I
could have jumped in the river, but that wouldn’t be clever, because the
contents of my pockets don’t tend to react very well with water, do they? So I
had to go up on the rooftops. You knew I’d choose this one because I could use
the signpost to climb up. Naturally there are men on the rooftops on all sides
in case I decided to be absent from this particular rooftop. If I get my gun
out or even make a movement that looks like
I’m reaching for a weapon, I will have more bullets in me than Julius Ceasar
had knives in him, because I realise that all of them have their guns out already. Well done, poisonous, vile
creature. I couldn’t have planned it better myself.’
‘Praise indeed,’ said the Spider mildly. ‘Since you have worked out my
plan in so much detail, perhaps you could tell me what I’m going to do next?’
‘You’ll signal to your helicopter, which is hovering just far enough
away so I can’t see or hear it, and take me to meet my punishment.’
‘Not quite,’ said the Spider, smiling. ‘One other thing first.’
Zoomer immediately braced herself. It was a good thing too. One of the
men had silently come up behind her, and punched her in the back of the head.
Spider watched his enemy crumple to the ground, and smiled.
‘Hanging,’ smirked Zoomer Frost. ‘A little outdated, don’t you think?’
‘Not for criminals like you,’ said the Spider pleasantly. ‘Now if you’ll
excuse me, I’ll leave you with these two, because I must go down and tell the
common people that you are dead. Oh, and to see what your dead body looks like
when it’s hanging limply from the execution tower.’ He left.
The execution tower was silhouetted against
the dawn sky, looking like what it was: the world’s biggest gallows.
Appropriate, because Spider seemed to think that she was the world’s biggest
criminal. But I’m not, because I only
kill the people who need to die. Flanked by two guards and with her hands
still cuffed (she was rather insulted that Spider thought she only needed two
men to guard her) they walked up the million steps to the top of the tower.
They were called the Last Million Steps, because they were the last steps for many people. The butts of myriads of last
cigarettes littered the floor. Ravens circled, their grating cries sounding
like an axe being sharpened.
One of the men Spider had left with her held a coil of rope in his
hands. The other had a gun, in case she resisted the noose being placed around
her neck.
Zoomer stepped forward slowly. The guard was wary because there were a
lot of stories about this one, but the assassin didn’t seem to be resisting at
all. Now that she had finally lost, she seemed perfectly calm.
The cold wind swept her hair back from her
face. She was chilly without her coat, but with all its secret pockets and
little tricks, there was no way that Spider was going to let her keep it. This
view, with the city spread out magnificently below her, and the river twisting
through it like liquid silver, was indeed a view that many people had died for.
The hangman stepped forward and placed the noose around her neck.
That was when Zoomer Frost swung round and butted the hangman in the
stomach with all her strength. He stumbled into the guard, who fired his gun
instinctively, and the hangman gasped as the bullet shot through his lung. Zoomer
stepped forward to where the guard, pinned down by the weight of his dead
companion, fumbled to aim his gun at her. Before he could, she stamped on the
wrist of his gun hand and there was a crunch.
Zoomer tipped her head upside-down to let the noose slide off. Stamping
the heel of her other boot as well, she kicked off both boots and without
hesitation leapt off the top of the execution tower.
She fell for a long time. Cold air in her
face. Hair streaming upwards. The roar in her ears sounding like the engine of
her motorbike. Below her the city rushed up to meet her.
Boom...
She didn’t need to look round to imagine the
orange petals of the explosion slowly uncurling. Sorry, boys, she thought when she remembered the two guards on top
of the tower, but it was their own fault really. Spider had removed her coat,
but – sloppy! – They hadn’t discovered the large amounts of explosives stored
in the heel of each shoe.
The shockwave from the explosion rolled over
her like a tidal wave, blasting her sideways so that she was sailing almost
horizontally towards the river. She hit the surface and actually skipped like a
stone a few times before going under.
The rubble of the execution tower burned
brightly.
‘Damn her!’ said Spider as soon as he heard
the explosion. He quickly turned around to see that the entire top of the
execution tower was engulfed in flames. He allowed himself two seconds to stare
open-mouthed, and then turned to the nearest man and snapped ‘Find her!’
‘But an explosion that size – perhaps she
decided she’d rather take her own life than...?’ The unfortunate man’s voice
dried up in the heat of Spider’s glare.
‘She’s ZOOMER FROST! Find her!’ the small man
yelled. ‘And catch her!’
A long way further downriver, a very wet woman
with no coat and no shoes staggered over a bridge towards a motorbike. They’d
left it there! How clumsy – Spider must be getting old. The woman looked around
to see that the shop in front of her was being re-painted, and the men had left
the pots of paint out overnight: black, white and red, like the remains of the
execution tower. Red paint! How could she resist that?
She swiped the pot and one of the thick
brushes and began to work on something on the pavement. When it was finished,
she leapt onto the motorbike, smiled lovingly, flicked one of the controls and
zoomed away. The sound of the motorbike’s engines shattered the silence ad drew
the men running towards the bridge. All they found were black curves of burnt
rubber and a message written in huge red letters on the cobblestones.
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