‘What’s his real name?’ said Johnny.

‘Eh? Yeah. Garry, I think.’

Bigmac was staring at the end of the road. The blue light was still visible. It had stopped about half a mile away; they could see it reflected off an advertising hoarding.

‘Just Garry?’ said Johnny.

Bigmac’s face was wet in the light of the street lamps. Johnny realized that he was sweating.

‘Might be Dunn,’ said Bigmac. He shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

Another siren echoed around the night. An ambulance went past on the main road, ghostly under its flashing light.

‘Look, Bigmac—’

‘Bugger off!’

Bigmac turned and ran, his Doc Martens crashing on the pavement. Johnny watched him go. He thought of all the things he should have said. He wasn’t stupid. Everyone knew what happened to cars around the dark tower. What could he say now?

And his body thought: You don’t say anything. You do something. It started running all by itself after his friend, taking his brain with it.

Despite a bedroom full of weight-training equipment that would have been of considerable interest if the police had ever bothered much about a recent theft down at the Sports Centre, Bigmac wasn’t in much of a condition. He had been born out of condition. Johnny caught him up on the bend.

‘I told you . . . to . . . buggeroff! Nothing . . . todo . . . withyou!’ said Bigmac, as they headed towards the distant lights.

‘They crashed it, didn’t they.’

‘Nozzer’s a good driver!’

‘Yeah? Good at going fast?’

There was a crowd standing around at the traffic lights further down the road. As they ran, another ambulance overtook them and rocked to a halt. The crowd parted. Johnny caught a glimpse of – well, not a car, but maybe what a car would look like after trying to be in the same place as a liquid-cement truck. He knew it was a cement truck, because one had climbed up the pavement and lay on its side. Its load was fast becoming the biggest brick in the world.

In the distance there was the scream of a fire engine, getting nearer.

He grabbed Bigmac’s arm, pulling him around. ‘I don’t think you want to go any closer,’ he said. Bigmac shook himself free, just as the police managed to lever the crumpled door open.

Bigmac stared.

Then he turned, tottered over to a low garden wall by the roadside, and was sick.

When Johnny reached him his whole body was shaking, with cold and terror.

‘Bugger you, I could have been in that, you—’

Bigmac was sick again, all down the front of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Johnny took his coat off and put it over the other boy’s shivering shoulders.

‘—they kept goin’ on at me, I told them, I said—’

‘Yeah. Yeah, that’s right,’ said Johnny, looking around. ‘Look, you just sit here . . . there’s a phone— You just sit there, all right? You just—’