I fired once and hit the girl in the shoulder. The bang of a.45 is absolutely deafening, and disorienting, too. I fired again and hit her in the side. Lumps of red flesh flew off her hip, and she rolled over backward and sideways, just behind the boy. She tried to get up so I shot her again, blowing off her left kneecap.
“Jim!” screamed Jill.
I swung around, pointing my pistol at the young man. But I was too late. He had already thrust his knife into the middle-aged woman’s stomach, right up to the hilt, and her blood was running down his wrist and staining her skirt. She was staring at me in pain and shock and for some reason I couldn’t help noticing the large brown mole on her upper lip, as if she had suffered that blemish all her life, only to die like this.
I aimed at the young man’s head, but he ducked down behind her. I tried to dodge to the side, but he swung her around, as if he were dancing with her, with the knife still buried in her stomach. No matter which way I tried to get a clear shot at him, he kept her between us.
“Terence!” I yelled. I needed someone to outflank this young Screecher, and hit him from the side. “Terence, where are you for Christ’s sake!”
It was then that I turned to Jill. She was standing under the trees, her eyes wide, holding on to Bullet’s collar.
“Jill! Set Bullet on him! Jill, he’s going to kill her!”
But it was too late. The Screecher yanked his knife upward and the woman’s intestines piled out on to the ground, unravelling themselves like yards and yards of overcooked cannelloni. The Screecher turned and ran away through the woods, and he was running so fast that all I could see was a brief gray shadow and a flurry of leaves. There was no point in wasting a Last Supper bullet on him.
I turned around. The gingery-haired girl had gone as well.
“Did you see which way she went?” I asked Jill.
“We have to call for an ambulance,” she told me. Her voice was jerky and erratic and she was trembling uncontrollably.
I gripped her arms and shook her. “Did you see which way she went? The redhead? Send Bullet after her!”
“They’re going to die,” said Jill. She tried to turn around and stumble away but I wouldn’t let her.
“Listen, Jill, they’re probably dead already. Terence will call an ambulance. You and me, we have to go after the Screechers. That’s what we’re here for.”
She shook her head. “I can’t send Bullet after those people. I can’t. I can’t do this any more. I didn’t realize.”
“Jill, for Christ’s sake pull yourself together. We have to get after them now!”
“No,” she said. “I can’t do this any more. I thought I could but I can’t.”
I let her go. There was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t let Bullet run after the Screechers on his own, and he certainly wouldn’t listen to me.
I walked over to the little boy. His arms and legs were sprawled as if he were jumping into the air, but he would never jump again. He was white-faced and dead. The woman moaned and I crossed over to see how she was. Her intestines were stuck all over with leaves and twigs and she was staring at them in despair.
“Pray for me,” she whispered.
I nodded. “Every morning, from now on, until the day that I die. I promise you.”
“You’re a strange bloke,” she said.
I didn’t answer her. What can you answer, when a dying woman says that to you?
Hunt for the Dead
Charles Frith was furious. He paced around his office, throwing up his arms from time to time as if he were singing the finale to a grand opera.
“You don’t know what it took to cover this up! Seventeen dead people in a 403 bus! A woman and a boy disemboweled in a public park! This is worse than the Buster Crabb business!”
The red phone rang and Charles Frith picked it up. “What?” he barked, even louder than Bullet. Then, “Oh, sorry, Home Secretary.”
I leaned close to Terence and said, “Buster Crabb business?” As far as I knew, Buster Crabb was a movie actor with big muscles. I think I’d seen him in some third-rate Western.
“Buster Crabb was a Royal Navy diver,” said Terence, hoarsely. It was obvious from the way he was talking out of the side of his mouth that “the Buster Crabb business” had been a serious embarrassment. “They found his body in Chichester harbor, early last year. No hands, and his head fell off when they tried to lift him out of the water.”
“Hey, yes,” I nodded. “I think I read about that. It was that time that Khrushchev visited England, wasn’t it, and they thought this guy had been secretly diving under Khrushchev’s ship?”
“That’s right,” said Terence, uncomfortably.
“That was MI6?”
“Perhaps. Possibly. But you certainly didn’t hear it from me.”
Charles Frith banged the phone down. “It’s the Daily Mail again. They’ve got hold of this bloody idiotic idea that MI6 has been secretly running some kind of mad-scientist experiment, turning our agents into sociopathic assassins, and that some of them have escaped. ‘Human Killing Machines on the Loose.’ Sir David’s frothing at the mouth.”
“Sir David’s always frothing at the mouth,” said Terence.
“I just want to know what the devil we do now,” said Charles Frith. “I mean, what’s the plan, Jim? I thought we were going to track these buggers down and exterminate them before the press or the public got wind of what was going on. That’s what I promised Sir David, anyway, and if we can’t do it I need to know now.”
“It might be an idea to let the Mail run with their story about ‘killing machines,’ ” Terence suggested. “We can always prove them wrong later. and it’s better than telling them that South London is infested with Screechers.”
“Forget about the press relations,” I told him. “Press relations won’t mean anything if we can’t locate the strigoi mort.”
“You’re talking about this fellow Duca?”
“It’s not a fellow, sir,” I insisted. “It’s a thing. We have to find it, and destroy it, and we have to do it real quick. Duca’s been infecting people much faster than I expected. You only have to do the math.”
I turned Charles Frith’s blotter around and jotted on it with my mechanical pencil. “Seventeen people contain one hundred seventy pints of blood, but the human stomach only has the capacity to swallow four pints at a time. Obviously Duca didn’t know in advance how many passengers were going to be riding on that bus, and even if there were more than he and his fellow Screechers needed, it still would have been necessary for him to kill them all. But if they did need seventeen people, we could be talking about forty-two Screechers here.”
“Oh my God,” said Charles Frith. “This is out of control already, isn’t it?”
“If you have forty-two Screechers in the South London suburbs and all of them are looking for eight or nine pints of fresh human blood three times in every twenty-four hours. then, yes, this is out of control.”
The green phone rang. Charles Frith picked it up and bellowed, “What?”
He listened for a moment, and then he said, “No, Commissioner. Absolutely not, Commissioner. I’m sorry, Commissioner, not a chance. No. And a very good day to you, too.”
He slammed the receiver down and said, “Sir Kenneth Bloody McLean. They should demote that man back to constable. No — cloakroom attendant.”
He sat down in his big leather armchair and swung from side to side, breathing like a man who had eaten a large lunch, smoked a cigar and then run up eight flights of stairs. Eventually, he said, “What’s it going to take to find this Duca fellow? Thing, I mean?”