and a fireman was explaining to anyone who would listen, “I couldn’t stop him. He must have been mad. Or drunk. Just ran in. I couldn’t stop him. Mad. Ran straight in. Horrible way to die. Horrible, horrible. Just ran straight in … ”
Then Crowley came out of the flames.
The police and the firemen looked at him, saw the expression on his face, and stayed exactly where they were.
He climbed into the Bentley and reversed back into the road, swung around a fire truck, into Wardour Street, and into the darkened afternoon.
They stared at the car as it sped away. Finally one policeman spoke. “Weather like this, he ought to of put his lights on,” he said, numbly.
“Especially driving like that. Could be dangerous,” agreed another, in flat, dead tones, and they all stood there in the light and the heat of the burning bookshop, wondering what was happening to a world they had thought they understood.
There was a flash of lightning, blue-white, strobing across the cloud-black sky, a crack of thunder so loud it hurt, and a hard rain began to fall.
SHE RODE A RED MOTORBIKE. Not a friendly Honda red; a deep, bloody red, rich and dark and hateful. The bike was apparently, in every other respect, ordinary except for the sword, resting in its scabbard, set onto the side of the bike.
Her helmet was crimson, and her leather jacket was the color of old wine. In ruby studs on the back were picked out the words HELL’S ANGELS.
It was ten past one in the afternoon and it was dark and humid and wet. The motorway was almost deserted, and the woman in red roared down the road on her red motorbike, smiling lazily.
It had been a good day so far. There was something about the sight of a beautiful woman on a powerful motorbike with a sword stuck on the back that had a powerful effect on a certain type of man. So far four traveling salesmen had tried to race her, and bits of Ford Sierra now decorated the crash barriers and bridge supports along forty miles of motorway.
She pulled up at a service area, and went into the Happy Porker Café. It was almost empty. A bored waitress was darning a sock behind the counter, and a knot of black-leathered bikers, hard, hairy, filthy, and huge, were clustered around an even taller individual in a black coat. He was resolutely playing something that in bygone years would have been a fruit machine, but now had a video screen, and advertised itself as TRIVIA SCRABBLE.
The audience were saying things like:
“It’s ‘D’! Press ‘D’—The Godfather must’ve got more Oscars than Gone with the Wind!”
“Puppet on a String! Sandie Shaw! Honest. I’m bleeding positive!”
“1666!”
“No, you great pillock! That was the fire! The Plague was 1665!”
“It’s ‘B’—the Great Wall of China wasn’t one of the Seven Wonders of the world!”
There were four options: Pop Music, Sport, Current Events, and General Knowledge. The tall biker, who had kept his helmet on, was pressing the buttons, to all intents and purposes oblivious of his supporters. At any rate, he was consistently winning.
The red rider went over to the counter.
“A cup of tea, please. And a cheese sandwich,” she said.
“You on your own, then, dear?” asked the waitress, passing the tea, and something white and dry and hard, across the counter.
“Waiting for friends.”
“Ah,” she said, biting through some wool. “Well, you’re better off waiting in here. It’s hell out there.”
“No,” she told her. “Not yet.”
She picked a window table, with a good view of the parking lot, and she waited.
She could hear the Trivia Scrabblers in the background.
“Thass a new one, ‘How many times has England been officially at war with France since 1066?”’
“Twenty? Nah, s’ never twenty … Oh. It was. Well, I never.”
“American war with Mexico? I know that. It’s June 1845. ‘D’—see! I tol’ you!”
The second-shortest biker, Pigbog (6' 3"), whispered to the shortest, Greaser (6' 2"):
“What happened to ‘Sport,’ then?” He had LOVE tattooed on one set of knuckles, HATE on the other.
“It’s random wossit, selection, innit. I mean they do it with microchips. It’s probably got, like, millions of different subjects in there, in its RAM.” He had FISH across his right-hand knuckle, and CHIP on the left.
“Pop Music, Current Events, General Knowledge, and War. It’s just I’ve never seen ‘War’ before. That’s why I mentioned it.” Pigbog cracked his knuckles, loudly, and pulled the ring tab on a can of beer. He swigged back half a