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accelerating.  “Come on!”

CHAPTER 7
    It was a hard run to the farms, along College Street before turning on to Wellington Place. Sally had needed an area of grass or earth to farm but the centre of Aberdeen was mostly tarmac and granite. So she’d settled on the Bon Accord Terrace Gardens. They weren’t very big but they were very central. If those farms worked well, she talked about developing Duthie Park, like they had during World War Two.
    When we got there everything was in chaos. Sally’s farmers were running all over the place, pursued by the three Catchers. Sally, meanwhile, was trying to attack a Catcher with a shovel, screaming with rage at the top of her voice. I stopped when I saw her, surprised. She was normally so calm. Then I saw her plants, the rows of crops that she’d been working so hard on. Several of them had been squashed flat by big chicken claw-prints. I guess seeing all her work trampled had snapped something deep inside her.
    However brave it might have seemed to attack a Catcher like that, it was also dumb. No human could take on a Catcher with just a shovel. From what we’d learned via TV and radio, Catchers were even bulletproof. That’s why we preferred lasers.
    But the lasers had one distinct weakness. They consumed a lot of energy, and I mean a lot. They guzzled more energy than a toddler on sugar. We needed to plug them into the mains or hotwire them into a car,which was dangerous. The Brotherhood was working on some portable ones but they would take a while to develop. So if we brought lasers to a fight, they had to be set up ahead of time, like the ambush I’d helped with yesterday.
    If we didn’t have lasers then things got tricky.
    “Nets,” I snapped at Blake as we started running forward.
    “You don’t have to tell me,” he replied calmly.
    I’d seen it before, in him and a few of his crew. When trouble started they didn’t freak out like some did. They calmly assessed the situation and then acted. I guess some people just handle danger better than others.
    “Angus, Connie, you take the one on the right. Andrea, Stuart, the one on the left. The one in the middle is mine. Everyone else, get people out of here.”
    I joined Blake as he ran towards his Catcher, which was beginning to stalk Sally. This wasn’t going to be easy. Jesse and I were the first to take down a Catcher ‘unarmed’ but we’d had to pull a house down on it. Since then we’d come up with an easier, though much more risky, approach.
    “Do you want to be bait or shall I?” I asked Blake, running beside him. He grinned.
    “You can have the fun,” he said, without even a hint of irony. ‘Fun’ was not the word I’d choose.
    I pulled out my shock-stick as I ran, clanging it off the chicken’s legs. Shock-sticks always got their attention. The chickens didn’t seem to know what they were, and anyone carrying one was identified as athreat. The Catcher turned away from Sally and moved towards me. A brief strike to its neck and I dodged out of the way.
    It buffeted me with its wing, throwing me backwards through the air. I landed with a thump on the hard ground. This wasn’t a new Catcher like some of the ones we’d faced recently. Both the skill with which it controlled its machine and how plain it was, just a round body on legs without ornamentation, told me this was an old and experienced pilot. I worried for a second. Maybe this tactic wouldn’t work.
    I lay still, unable to get up, as the chicken approached me. I could hear screams and clanging all around. My shock-stick lay a few metres away, dropped as I landed. I rolled over onto my front and began to crawl for it, but I knew I wouldn’t reach it in time.
    The shadow of the bird descended on me.
    I rolled over again. I wanted to see this part. I wanted to see it trying to eat me.
    “Just try it,” I snarled up at him. “I might be a bit more than you can swallow.”
    It bent over slowly, looking at me with something like