CHAPTER FOUR
I didn’t want to look round for fear it would slow me down, I kept running. Unused to exercise, I was powered now mainly by adrenaline and fear.
Glasses was an older man, I guessed in his late forties or early fifties, perhaps he wouldn’t be able to pursue on foot. I guessed right when I heard the car approaching. All three of them were in it now and chasing after me, there could be no doubts now.
I tried to shake them off by zig-zagging into alley ways and through gardens, across open green spaces and down an under-pass, hoping they would take a wrong turn, not knowing where I would surface. I didn’t stop for breath until I felt sure they were no longer on my heels, then I found myself in narrow alley with the back gardens of terraced houses on either side. No car could fit down here, and the view in both directions was obscured by overgrown shrubs.
The men in the car had indeed lost me, but now I could hear a helicopter, though it sounded strange. Peering through a dense bush I looked up to see it wasn’t a helicopter, but a fully armed UCAV or Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle, commonly known as a drone.
This was a Microdrone, no more than a metre-and-a-half wide. The use of drones wasn’t exactly commonplace in the UK so not only was I surprised to see one, but also that they might dare to use it in a residential area in broad daylight.
They must really want me out of the way.
So far they’d been used by the military, and some local police forces claimed to use some unarmed UAV’s only for observation and pinpointing the location of their
assailant. However this flying robotic device was equipped not only with facial recognition technology and heat-seeking software, but also a bank of automatic guns.
The drone operator must be somewhere nearby, I had read about these fairly recently and remembered the range on smaller ones like this one wasn’t that great, perhaps five hundreds metres. It hadn’t found me yet, but it was looking, occasionally it got close enough that I could see the rotors turning. And the guns, mounted one on either side at the front, like something from the Terminator movies. I was being stalked by SkyNet.
I was careful not to show the robotic ‘hunter killer’ machine my face, or irises in case I might trigger the facial recognition software and alert it to my presence. I also needed to quickly address the heat-seeking capability too and looked for some way to quickly cool myself down.
The day had turned chilly, but after such an exerting run bearing the weight of my rucksack, the sleeping bag and supplies from the shop dangling from my wrist in a plastic carrier bag, I was sweating heavily.
Taking off my clothes, the jacket, hoodie, then the t-shirt, I soon began to shiver but hoped my cooler body might be less visible to the drone, which had begun circling a bit too close to my location for my liking. I needed to move but also to stay out of sight.
When the drone swung past and banked a turn so it was facing away from me, I slowly crept forward along the alley way. I could see that one end of the alley opened out onto a side street and knew I needed to turn right at the end. When I got there though, I spotted a chubby police officer standing there, in his hands, a remote control. His eyes flitting between the drone and down at his monitor, he looked like a kid with a toy plane. I quickly pulled back behind the fence. Shit.
I had no choice but to return the way I’d come, though Glasses was sure to be at the other end of the alley, I thought perhaps I could find a way into the back gardens and away through there. As quietly as I could manage, I tapped and pulled at fence panels and gate latches to try and gain entry but then I snagged my arm on a protruding nail and tore the skin as I withdrew in shock, there was blood, and instinctively cursed aloud, but regretted it instantly.
The rotor sound came louder, it moved with purpose now, they had detected me. I looked up then, in time to see it rise up over the top of the garden fence, its inhuman eyes gazing down on me with one objective - to kill me.
Bullets rang around me but - incredibly - missed. Perhaps they were intending to issue warning shots, or more likely, they hadn’t yet perfected this new method of killing their subject. I didn’t wait around for the second round to start to find out. Running now, not bothering to be quiet, I slammed my bloodied arm against each of the garden gates until the fifth one I came upon obliged by swinging open for me.
Inside the garden I saw that the boundary chain link fences were low, I could traverse across into each of the next gardens fairly easily, although the jumps would have been easier still without my cargo. I contemplated dumping the bags but soon dismissed the idea. I needed those supplies. I made the jumps so as quickly as I could, feeling momentarily like an athlete in a hurdles event, running largely on adrenaline. I was still shivering, more with fear than the cold. The drone continued to rain bullets down, and again I aimed to provide for it a difficult target by zig-zagging.
Only stopping when I was at least three streets away and hidden under a car port, almost certain the drone had lost sight of me, but waiting it out until I saw it leave. Besides I had to catch my breath, and wrap something around my wound, it wasn’t very deep, the blood made it look worse than it was. Panting hard, I wriggled to pull on my t-shirt. After twenty minutes the sound was gone, the drone must have returned to its operator, and I guessed the battery was running down. The last thing they needed was the publicity a weaponised drone crashing in the city would undoubtedly generate.
Once again I started to run through the quiet streets, leaving the drone, police and Glasses behind me. I had no idea how long I ran for, but when finally I stopped, gasping for air, I slouched over and rasped deeply like an old 40-year-long-Marlborough-smoking man.
My mind was racing, I thought of my dead friends; Glasses in pursuit; and now the microdrone - these guys had absolutely meant to kill me, and they were British police. I considered myself reasonably up to date with conspiracy theory, or as I liked to call it, conspiracy reality, but this was something I hadn’t anticipated. Not just the fact that there was a price on my head, but also that they would use such advanced technology to try and achieve it.
I wondered if anyone else in the street, residents or passers-by, had seen it and what they made of it, especially when it opened fire. My thoughts ran to how they might cover that up, and imagined that nothing was off the table now. Witnesses would probably be murdered too, the only sure way to keep them quiet, their deaths explained away somehow, suicides, gas explosion, house fire.
I pulled on my hoodie and jacket and began to alternate between walking and jogging. It took quite a bit longer but was undoubtedly a safer way to travel, I made my way using the quietest and least populated roads and dirt tracks toward the place I had chosen to camp, the Ringland Woods.