CHERUB: Mad Dogs Read Online Free PDF Page B

over Michael’s trainers as the Runt screamed in pain. Meantime, two saloon cars had pulled up in the road.
    ‘Everyone outta here,’ Dee shouted.
    Within fifteen seconds, Michael, Major Dee and another member of the gang were inside a car and the back wheels were spinning.
    As they moved away, Michael felt inside his pockets and realised that he’d lost his phone.
    ‘Someone give us a mobile,’ he begged. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to Gabrielle.’
    *
    Stuart was fourteen, a lanky kid in an oversized puffa jacket. He had his mobile phone lined up to take a picture of Owen’s body and he was surprised when the spade hit him in the face. Blood exploded from his nose as he stumbled backwards and collapsed to the pavement.
    Gabrielle’s other hand contained a small garden fork – the kind you might use to dig in flowers – and she jammed its three prongs into the belly of an older lad before ripping it out.
    Two boys down. Before any of the five other lads got their heads together, she’d burst out of the lock-up and was sprinting along the paved area in front of the playing fields.
    She got thirty metres before someone got a hand to her shoulder; but she stopped running and used her opponent’s forward momentum to roll him over her back, slamming him hard against the concrete.
    Of the remaining four lads, only two were on her tail and both were losing ground. As Gabrielle neared the gates, she noticed the Runts’ bikes resting against the wall between the men’s and women’s changing rooms. The guys would catch her easily on bikes, giving her no choice but to grab one herself.
    Gabrielle pulled up and grabbed a Muddy Fox mountain bike leaning against the wall. As she swung her leg over the saddle, one of the guys chasing kicked the back wheel. It almost knocked her off balance, but she just about kept in the saddle and started powering away.
    The two boys were mounting their own bikes as she shot through the gates and out into the side street. There were now more than a dozen people standing in the road, surrounding the bloody knife and the spotty lad she’d knocked out beside the Fiat.
    If she’d had time to think, Gabrielle would have turned the other way, but she couldn’t do a one-eighty with two boys on her tail, so she had to cut between two parked cars and mount the pavement to get through the crowd. As she did this her back wheel slipped, knocking her into a line of wooden fruit trays on the pavement outside a greengrocer’s shop.
    Oranges and limes bobbling across the pavement caused an angry shout from the shopkeeper, who dashed out to gather the fruit and blocked the path of the two Runts. They slowed right down to avoid the woman and the lead rider kicked her out of the way as Gabrielle reached the junction with the main road.
    As she slowed down, she could see more bikes on both sides of the road heading towards the Green Pepper. Then, as she noticed Aaron Reid lying with a serious head injury just a few metres away, she heard the unmistakable sound of a shotgun blast.
    Gabrielle was worried about Michael, but with Runts coming from every direction, Major Dee’s henchmen on the scene and the police sure to be arriving any second, she reckoned it best to head away and made the best of a small break in the traffic.
    A car braked to let her in, but the time she’d taken to make her decision had allowed the two pursuing Runts to catch up. Gabrielle worked through the gears on the mountain bike until the parked cars were going by in a blur. But the two bikes following her were keeping up and she’d noticed two more – the bikes that had been behind Michael before the first shotgun blast – heading along the pavement.
    Four against one wasn’t ideal, but Gabrielle hoped her high level of fitness would soon start to count. The lights at the top of the road were red and a queue of vehicles was building up. With a narrow pavement and cement mixer blocking the channel between the parked cars,