While Sheepy thundered across wet pavement with Anna and Strong on his back — trailing a squealing red sled full of illegal rifles — and while the police convoy screamed ahead toward St Andrew Square, back at the bank things had, for a moment, gone still.
Braveheart, soaked and furious, had sprinted back to the front gates just in time to drag the two red-haired crusader sisters away from another accidental massacre. He barked orders at them until they shuffled, ashamed, back inside the building like chastised war-angels.
Outside the Royal Bank of Scotland, the scene looked like something lifted straight from a documentary about Stalingrad.
The bus burned, slumped at an obscene angle.
The café burned, windows gaping like broken teeth.
People lay scattered across the pavement — some dead and pale, some crawling, some screaming for their mothers, others making small, awful sounds that would follow witnesses into their nightmares.
And Billy McNab had been lying face-down in the wet, pretending to be unconscious.
It almost worked.
Almost.
Unfortunately for Billy, Braveheart was a war veteran and not so easily fooled.
Braveheart walked straight over and kicked Billy in the ribs.
"Get up."
Billy groaned, letting the world tilt as if he were waking from a dream, then cracked one eye open. He expected shock to hit him — real shock, the kind movie soldiers get when they see their first battlefield.
But he felt nothing like that.
The bodies at the bus stop.
The cab driver with no face.
The flattened granny under the bus.
The flames chewing on brick and steel.
Instead of horror, Billy felt something much worse:
He thought it was cool.
And that scared him more than anything else.
Still, he couldn't deny it.
This was the kind of chaos his mind had always — secretly, shamefully — wanted.
The kind he'd never been allowed to have in the army he never joined, or the life he'd wasted.
He also knew, in a practical little corner of his brain, that his "I was just a hostage, mate" defence was now hanging by a petrol-soaked thread. Anyone looking at this scene would assume he was part of it. And the cameras… oh God, the cameras. They had probably caught Braveheart's face. And his. Everyone knew they were old schoolmates. Everyone knew they played Dungeons & Dragons together.
And worse: he realised, with a sudden stab of sick self-loathing, that this was probably the kind of chaos Hitler dreamed about — and the fact he felt a flicker of excitement instead of horror meant he was, undeniably, fucked up in the head.
So when Braveheart grabbed him by the collar and hauled him upright, Billy didn't resist.
"This is not working without you," Braveheart hissed. "We need the vault. You're the key. You want even a chance of getting out of this clean? Then you help us. Now. We get the money, we get rich, and we get the hell out of this country if we have to."
Billy considered saying no.
Instead, he looked at the carnage, thought about his dead-end paychecks, his peeling posters of a better world, and realised that this — this madness — was probably the closest he'd ever get to the life he imagined in his head.
"Fine," he said, jaw set. "Let's rob the bastard properly, then."
So Billy, Braveheart, and the two armoured red-haired sisters stepped back through the shattered doors and re-entered the bank — leaving behind smoke, screams, and a burning bus, and stepping straight into a crime scene that was only growing worse with every passing second.
Inside the bank, the world was somehow worse.
There was no rain here to wash away the stench — blood, gunpowder, smoke, and the sour, metallic breath of dying people hung in the air like a curtain.
Wood and glass and paper had been shredded by the earlier volley.
Blood smeared the marble.
Bodies twitched.
The alarm wailed, relentless.
And Sir Egg stood in the middle of it all like a statue of war: armour smoking, visor black, rifle held at the ready.
At his feet, Mags Leitch was coming round — dazed, bruised, and mere seconds from having her head separated permanently from her career. Sir Egg loomed over her, gauntleted fist tightening as he prepared to finish what he'd begun.
Braveheart arrived just in time to seize his arm.
"NO," he snapped. "God's sake, man. You can't just kill everyone."
Sir Egg tilted his head in confusion.
In his mind, he wasn't doing anything wrong. He was purifying the unclean.
"This is a bank robbery," Braveheart pressed, gesturing wildly at the carnage.
"You're supposed to scare them into giving you money — not wipe them all out! Dead people don't tell you where the cash is, and dead hostages don't stop the police. They invite more police!"
He jabbed a finger at Mags.
"Her? She's not valuable as a corpse. She's valuable as leverage. You want to win? You need hostages."
The word slotted neatly into Sir Egg's crusader logic — not as "mercy," but as prisoners or slaves, the medieval analogue that made the most sense in his head.
Slowly, reluctantly, he lowered his fist.
Mags groaned — blinked once at the massacre around her — and fainted dead away.
A useless hostage in practice, but very easy to manage.
Braveheart turned — and immediately wanted to scream.
Like a band of deranged medieval raiders, the other crusaders were stuffing anything into bags: pens, mugs, coasters, paperclips, brochures, even the stapler. To them, it was all treasure. All strange, exotic loot from a conquered city.
Braveheart clenched his teeth so hard he nearly cracked one.
He had given them a ten-pound note specifically so they'd recognize money.
And then one crusader came skipping down a hallway, armour drenched in someone's blood, holding a handful of banknotes.
He beamed.
"Money!"
The others cheered triumphantly, holding up their own meagre piles — a few bills looted from corpses, some fished out of pockets. Maybe a couple of hundred pounds total.
To Braveheart, it was pathetic.
Utterly useless.
A joke.
Billy watched from the side, bald head gleaming under the flickering lights, and finally said what needed saying.
"So… are we going to get the vault, then? 'Cause you want the real money, right? That's where it is. And the assistant manager's got the pass. And… well… we've already got her."
They all looked at Mags, limp in a chair.
Suddenly she became a real asset.
Under Billy's direction they moved fast:
Sir Egg and two crusaders stayed in the hall, rifles trained on the door and the stairwell. Mags was propped in a chair like a medieval prisoner, one crusader's barrel angled toward her in case she tried to grow a spine.
Two more crusaders held the entrance like sentries out of a time warp.
Braveheart, Billy, and the remaining men grabbed Mags' keycard and headed down the stairs toward the vault.
The bank had gone quiet above them — except for the alarms, the crackle of fire filtering through the walls, and the distant scream of the first police sirens coming closer than anyone wanted to admit.
Down below, on the lower level accessed by elevator or stairs, the vault area was cooler and quieter — the alarm above reduced to a muffled, distant howl. Billy's card swipe and code made the massive door shudder and roll open with a heavy, expensive sigh.
Braveheart's eyes went wide.
Rows of tables sat in the centre of the vault, stacked with banded bills.
Around the room, shelves of locked boxes lined the walls, each one containing someone else's valuables — treasures they only needed to crack open.
It wasn't the dragon's hoard he'd imagined.
There was no gold, no silver, no vault bursting with tens of millions — but it was still a lot of money for a man who couldn't even pay rent on time.
Neat rows of notes.
Stacks of cash.
Safe-deposit boxes already half-opened from holiday handling.
Enough to change his life.
Enough to make him dangerous.
Billy did the math the old-fashioned way.
Braveheart did it with greed and adrenaline.
"Six million, maybe," Billy muttered. "Give or take. They move most of it out before Christmas."
Braveheart's disappointment lasted half a second.
"Six million will do for now," he said. "Six million proves the Highland Liberation Army is no joke. And the bodies upstairs will… probably help with the branding."
He sighed dramatically.
"Though buying one of those mega-yachts is still out of reach. Life is cruel. Whatever — bag it up and let's get the hell out of here."
He ordered the crusaders to start loading the notes into bags.
Carts were found, filled, stacked.
Boots thudded.
The vault's order dissolved into frantic medieval looting.
For Braveheart, it was enough to justify everything — the staff corpses, the bodies outside, the burning bus. In his head, history wouldn't remember the details; it would remember the sum. One tragic day more in Scotland's messy history.
Billy, halfway through shoving bricks of cash into a bag, suddenly froze.
He had been imagining beaches, cigars, and "big booty Latino women" in a blissful, primitive ape-man haze when his eyes fell on something in the corner:
A security camera.
It stared directly at him.
Watching him laugh.
Watching him steal.
Watching everything.
"Oh shit," Billy said. "We're so fucked, man."
Braveheart glanced up, annoyed. "What now?"
"The cameras, Braveheart!" Billy snapped, pointing. "Security room. Second floor. Stewart will have everything. Every face. Every move. All of it on tape."
Braveheart stared at the camera like he was trying to remember what it was supposed to be.
Then the memory hit him — crime shows, news reports, famous robberies caught on CCTV — and he realised this wasn't some small mistake.
This was catastrophic.
"Oh… shit."
Billy rounded on him.
"Come on, man! We've gotta get up there! Little screens are watching us right now. We look like shit on them. If we don't wipe that footage, we're done — and Stewart is probably calling in our description to the police as we speak. Fuck, I'm so screwed! That little fucking rat!"
Braveheart's face twisted into fury — at himself, at the world, at the very idea of surveillance.
"Okay! Fine! We go up there and take the cameras offline. If Stewart's telling the police who we are — then once his brains are on the wall, there won't be anyone left to verify a damn thing!"
He thought fast.
The three women in light armour — the two redheads and the blonde — would stay here in the vault corridor, loading the cash and guarding the haul.
Sir Egg and two heavy-armoured men would stay upstairs, securing the ground floor and looming over Mags like the terrifying medieval hostage she now was.
Braveheart himself would take Billy and the remaining crusaders up to the second floor to break into the security room and erase the evidence — including the witnesses if needed.
"Five minutes," he muttered to himself. "Ten if God is kind. Police will send a few cars. Not enough to stop us. Not yet."
The plan was simple:
Grab the money.
Kill the cameras.
March out with hostages and rifles.
Reach the van.
Vanish.
Anyone in their way would either run, or be made to.
Braveheart was not planning to be a cautionary tale on the evening news.
He was planning to be a legend.
Whether the rest of the city agreed was irrelevant.
For now, he had a vault full of cash, a handful of minutes, and a dream built entirely on blood.
And Billy McNab — for the first time in his angry, wasted life — felt exactly where he'd always wanted to be:
Smack in the middle of the worst idea anyone had ever had,
with a front-row seat
and a gun pointed at his spine.