Debra's Gate

"Oh bloody hell." Katie cursed under her breath.

Now what was she going to do? If this was a police car perhaps there was a spare key in the glove box. Opening it she could see it was crowded with pamphlets, documents, a small first aid kit and two small cylinders. She pulled one out. It had pepper spray written on it. This was a weapon. She knew that much, but how to operate it wasn't clear. God, what to do now? Run, wait for him to come back, then try and use this?

As panic and indecision were shaking her to the very core, a man walked across the road to the car parked in front of her. Acting on some primitive impulse, she sprang from the Focus, ran to his car wrenching open the passenger door and leapt in. Pointing the pepper spray at him, which she clasped tightly between both hands with her handbag swinging daintily below them, she then screamed, "Bloody drive or I'll spray you!"

Not surprisingly his reaction was one of shock, so initially he just looked at her in a daze.

With her lips curled back she screamed, "Fucking do it!"

Her face was white, her jaw was clenched and her eyes were wide and threatening. This banshee of a woman wasn't messing around, so he fumbled with the ignition, started the car and screeched out of the space barely watching for other traffic. Katie was sitting across the passenger seat facing the driver directly. As the car catapulted out of its parking space in a chicane action, she was stirred round the front seat like a spoon in a mug of coffee while her eyes and pepper spray remained permanently trained on the driver. He, however was not averting his eyes from the road, which was just as well as the acceleration was impressive and had long since past the speed limit as he caned the engine for all that it was worth. The car lunged from side to side as it overtook two slower cars and then nose-dived to fall in behind a third to get out of the way of oncoming traffic.

"Where do you want to go?"

The driver's voice came at a high pitch and his face was going puce from the adrenaline rush brought on by being threatened and then yo-yoing through the traffic at high speed. Katie snatched a look behind her and was relieved to see no sign of the silver Ford Focus but then something jangled in her mind and she looked back again. The first car they had passed had just been overtaken by a Mercedes. A big white Mercedes. It had already consumed the gap to the car in front of it and its menacing position, poised on the centre line, meant it wasn't happy to remain there for long. Katie couldn't see the people in it but it was too much of a coincidence that someone else would happen to be driving down this stretch of road like a maniac. Then she remembered the old lady. She hadn't seen what car she was in, through her front doorway, but she had seen enough to know the car was big and white.

Katie was thrust against her seat and then went into another circuit in the front of the car as the driver savaged the throttle and jockeyed the steering wheel to scream past another two cars and a van. This time he stomped on the brakes as they were hurtling towards a roundabout. She felt a sharp stabbing pain in her left hip, as her body was flung toward the windscreen. Instinctively she bent her left knee, as her left leg had been braced into the foot well, which resulted in her sliding off the seat while still managing to point the canister at the driver.

The plan that Katie had, to get away, although customised, had been carried out. She had got away from the so-called sergeant but had no idea what to do now. Her sole thought was, all these cars and junctions were hampering her instinct to run.

“Get us out of town,” she yelled from the passenger footwell.

The car lurched and skipped with Katie now oblivious to their route, all her faith being in a little metal cylinder that she couldn’t operate, to coerce this guy into following her commands. Swerving to the left violently the car started to build speed fast. Just as the Teville Gate multi-storey car park came into view, out of the side window, there was a second of weightlessness where the car dropped over the other side of the railway bridge. Katie’s back was soaking and the feeling of nausea was so strong now it was threatening to evict the contents of her stomach again. Releasing her right hand from the cylinder, she pulled herself out of the footwell and looked behind. They must have been doing at least seventy as they flashed through a set of traffic lights, the traffic being remarkably light at the time. In the rapidly increasing distance she could see the white Mercedes just coming into view over the top of the railway bridge, but by now they had a quarter of a mile lead.

She turned back and looked at the guy next to her. He was probably in his late twenties. His hair was short and neat but his clothes were bland. Katie hadn’t taken any notice of the car they were in, but he made it sing as it whipped through gaps and gobbled up distance in a heartbeat. It wasn’t long before they were scorching down the Findon Valley, on the way out of Worthing with no sign of the Mercedes behind them. She now had both hands on the canister again and they were beginning to shake uncontrollably.