Dead Men's s Boots

I had no idea what that meant: my best guess was that we’d come down with enough force to make the suspension momentarily irrelevant, and the tyres had scraped against the inside of the wheel arches at however many thousand revs per minute we were currently hitting. If I was right, another impact like that would probably make at least one of them blow.

But Juliet was winding her window down with as little haste as if she just wanted to spit out some gum. She’d already unbuckled her seat belt, and there was a barely audible sigh of cloth on metal as it reeled itself back into the holder.

‘Keep driving,’ she said laconically. Then she slid out through the window and up onto the roof of the car, out of my field of vision, for all the world as if we weren’t driving along a narrow dirt track at ninety-five miles an hour.

I caught the jump in the side mirror. It was something to see: the van was ten yards behind us at this point, but Juliet cleared the distance in a heart-stopping, balletic giant stride that landed her on top of the bull-bars, so perfectly poised that she didn’t even hit the windscreen.

Instead she punched a hole right through it. Then she reached inside and hauled the driver out through the ragged circular hole in the shatter-proof glass as though she were delivering an oversized baby.

She dumped him under the wheels of the van and it jounced over him, making his arms flail and whip like a shirt on a washing line: he died without ever knowing what had hit him.

The van started to veer left, losing speed now that there was no one to lean on the gas, but still with a terrific amount of momentum to burn off and nowhere to spend it.

There was a thunder-crack sound that was repeated two more times: Juliet pivoted on one arm as someone moved inside the van, gun raised to fire again. If she’d been hit, she didn’t show any sign of being hurt. The van’s side ground against the thick trunk of a mature tree and the vehicle ricocheted away again across the narrow track, slewing more violently now and starting to lean over sideways at a steeper and steeper angle.

Juliet swarmed up onto the roof, rode the movement with unconscious grace and was already jumping off as the van’s side smacked down into the dirt and it bounced, end over end.

I hit my own brakes, aware that I should have been watching the road ahead of me instead of what was coming up behind.