You Knew Full Well I was a Snake, Chapter One

A heatwave tipped to break midweek hadn’t disappointed the would-be weather-prophets. Rain sweeping in from the sea drove relentlessly down against souvenir shops and ice-cream stands, while the black sky above touched the small coastal resort’s shivering pinnacles and turrets. Through javelins slanting Main Street’s span Jenny hurtled full-pelt, jostling dumbfounded forms wrapped up in plastic macs, and spilling showers from precarious umbrellas already pitted against the gale.

Jenny ran, and timing a split-second glance behind her which flung back whiplike locks of sodden hair, she reestablished it was one of those times when run was all you did.

The van was still pursuing her.

That was as much of the oncoming traffic as Jenny needed to see. Pedestrians at hand, fighting the deluge and startled by recent sounds of a disturbance, now fairly spluttered to see the soaking school-uniformed girl snap her gaze back to centre and speed across a busy intersection without so much as checking her stride.

That said, non-existent holidaymakers probably weren’t acquainted with those situations when your thoughts confined themselves to the immediate from sheer necessity alone.

Such were Jenny’s. Pluses were that she was fast, athletic, reasonably good at sports, and that there were other cars between her and the van.

Minuses were that she held no illusions about outstripping a motor-vehicle indefinitely, and that she barely knew this town. She’d only ever been to the top end by the beach.

Which meant she was going to have to trust to luck in her search for –

There!

Between a cinema and an open-fronted shop, this latter futilely attempting to ply buckets and spades and things.

An alley. And at its entrance, bollards.

Jenny hung a left which in netball would have knocked the sixth-formers’ knickers off.

Seconds later the van, large and low and metallic grey, rumbled by this junction and continued up the high road.

Someone was helping Flashsatsumas to sit, while someone else had started feeding him slices of chocolate cake. On about the fifth he was able to put names to the two Earthlings staring at him. One was his friend Pat, a boy a little bigger than he was, while the girl with five red and green lights blinking on her forehead was Pat’s younger sister Maureen.

The pavement was puddly, and rain was beating down. Behind Pat and Maureen were the remains of a terrestrial dining establishment, although most of its metal tables and chairs lay scattered over the street, as did a goodly portion of brickwork. What was left of the frontage bore such patterns of damage as to suggest it had been ravaged by a thrashing animal of gigantic size, which had possibly boasted some sort of long sinuous tail…

Certain ruminations apparently did the trick faster than chocolate cake.

“Juniper!” cried Flashsatsumas, leaping to his feet.

“With you, mate,” Pat affirmed, and would have sprung for the main road at once had it not been for Maureen.

“You two are a right pair of pillocks!” she shouted aloud. “You saw what it did to the chip shop. Do you reckon three kids like us are going to be able to save Jenny, even if we could catch up with it in time? Flashsatsumas, you’ve got to bring something else to life out of the other stuff we bought. Maybe one of us got something that can fight it!”

Their various plastic carrier-bags were sitting rain-dotted beside the satchel. Flashsatsumas lifted this last, knowing Maureen was right.

“We’ll have to save these slices to bring Mini-Flash Juniper back,” he declared. “Is there anywhere around here we can get some more?”

Pat indicated the pillared entrance to a modest shopping-centre, just a step or two away, so the three friends snatched up their purchases and made all possible haste.

The alleyway had led Jenny to a park, and in the play-area was a big concrete collocation of circular pipes which made a sort of mock-underground maze for children to crawl through. Here Jenny had gone to hide, and now she sat with her back against the tunnel’s cold concavity, arms hugging her stockinged shins. From outside, the din of the downpour echoed eerily over to Jenny along the gloomy tubes.

Even now she’d had a minute, there was still too much of this that didn’t make sense.

For example, Jenny knew there were such things as robbers and terrorists, but a chip shop seemed to her an unlikely target. Nor could she think of any reason the gang of crooks, if that was what they were, should have gone after her in their van as soon as it was over. The only explanation Jenny could come up with was that she must have seen something. It was possible, because try as she might she was still drawing an utter blank between sitting with her friends beneath the awning and fleeing for her life along the high street, and Jenny had likewise heard such incidents often left their victims in shock.

Nor did she need her memories intact to apprehend what an important issue it was.

Because Jenny’s decision to hide had been based on the assumption her hypothetical fried-fish felons were going to want to make a clean getaway.

If they needed her and her information badly enough, they’d risk arrest and stop the van as soon as they found the park gates.

In which case, Jenny’s present refuge wouldn’t shelter her long.

She squeezed her legs ever tighter and listened, fearfully, for the first distant intimation of tramping boots on damp gravel.

Jenny in fact wasn’t likely to hear these, and she was wrong about certain other points too.

Unfortunately for her though, gist-wise she’d hit the nail on the head.

What had been inside the van was indeed coming for her. And she’d chosen a hiding-place of spectacularly unhelpful shape.

END OF CHAPTER ONE