‘Ram them,’ said Kyle.

‘Yeah,’ said Macca. ‘Let’s splatter them morons.’

‘There are too many of them,’ said Ebenezer, leaning forward for a better look. ‘We will just get stuck.’

‘There’s a lot of them,’ said Trio. She and Trey both had their eyes shut. ‘A whole lot of them. We should go back.’

‘Where they going anyway?’ Lewis asked. ‘Where’s the party at?’

‘They’ve got the call,’ said Trey. ‘All they want is to get into town and meet up with the others.’

‘Ram them,’ said Kyle. ‘We go fast enough, they can’t stop us.’

‘No,’ said Trey.

‘A body can do a lot of damage to a car if it’s going fast,’ said Lewis. ‘I saw a kid get run over at the junction near our school this one time. He bounced, man. Went flying. Was in hospital for, like, a year or something. Don’t know how he wasn’t killed. But that car, whoa, you shoulda seen it. All dented up, crushed, like the geezer had run it into a wall. Nice car and all.’

‘Yeah,’ Ed agreed, twisting round in his seat. ‘We don’t want to wreck the car. Without it our job would be a whole lot harder.’

‘All right. We go slow then,’ said Kyle. ‘Plough through them, like an ice-breaker.’ He mimed the action with the edge of one hand, slicing the air.

Ed looked at Trinity.

‘How many of them, you think? Can we force a way through?’

‘Too many,’ said Trio, pinching her lip nervously. ‘Can’t give you exact numbers. We’re only seeing the front of them.’

‘Give it a go at least,’ said Macca. ‘Even if we only take some of them out it’ll be a few less sickos in the world.’

‘It’s not about taking sickos out.’ Ed was trying not to get wound up. ‘It’s about doing what we’ve come to do and getting safely back to the museum.’

‘Stupid question,’ said Brooke, ‘but can we go round them?’

‘Stupid question,’ said Kyle and he laughed.

‘Another stupid question,’ said Brooke, ‘but how did you get to be such a moron, Kyle?’

‘We can’t go round them,’ Ed butted in, trying to kill the argument. Brooke had stopped Macca from being a pest with her lovey-dovey act and now Kyle was in danger of starting up a whole fresh round of bickering.

‘There’s no way off the motorway here,’ he went on. ‘And they’re filling the whole road. However, there is a turn-off to Slough not too far ahead. We could try pushing through them.’

‘We should go the other way, Lewis. Really we should.’ Trio was sounding very anxious.

‘Didn’t we just pass a turn-off?’ Ebenezer asked.