But Steven didn’t.
Instinct had served Steven well in his short life, and every instinct he possessed now told him something was wrong.
‘Hup!’ said Bob Coffin, poking and pushing at Jonas and Steven to try to get them started. ‘Get on now!’
‘We’re not cows,’ said Steven, shaking him off angrily. ‘We’re not bloody cows.’
Bob Coffin calmly pulled the gun out of his pocket and pointed it at Steven’s face. Steven ducked and Jess shrieked.
‘Helicopter,’ said the huntsman flatly.
There was no helicopter, but, galvanized by the gun, they all moved up the walkway made slippery by the rain.
Jonas wasn’t leaning too heavily on Steven, but it was still awkward to walk without stumbling. They were bumpingly close – all sharp elbows and hips. The loose end of the yard-long chain that had tethered Jonas to the fence for so long swung between them, the padlock bouncing off their thighs. Steven thought he should have unlocked it at the collar end, but whatever – it didn’t seem like a big problem after the gun.
They walked down the rutted concrete ramp into the big shed.
Steven looked around him at the room he’d only ever seen half of when fully conscious – and through a crack in a wall. It was bigger than he’d thought – big enough for a couple of tractors, at least – and almost empty. There was an old wooden bench on one side of the room, where he could see three knives laid out as if for supper at a grand house: neatly, and in order of length. There was a whetstone gripped in a shiny blue metal vice, a couple of lengths of heavy chain, some shackles and spring clips and a few rusting cans; Steven recognized 3-in-1 oil and Castrol grease from Ronnie’s garage.
Em’s arms around him, her warm breath on his neck… ‘I don’t care’…
His heart ached to think of it.
On one wall was the electric winch, its steel cable the only thing in the shed that glinted with newness. Bolted low on the wall directly opposite was a heavy curled hook. Directly between the two was a drain and a small dark patch – the only evidence, Stephen realized, of countless animals that had been butchered on the spot – the place where the head was severed from the neck and the blood leaked out.
Beside the hook was the half-open door to the flesh room, and Steven’s stomach rolled at what was to come. The memory of being enclosed in the cold, fetid flesh was shockingly clear.
‘I don’t want to! I don’t want to!’ Maisie’s continuing sobs echoed loudly in his head, joining forces with the rain beating on the iron roof.
Even if the helicopter were directly overhead, Steven doubted that any of them would hear it now. He wondered what they might look like through a thermal-imaging camera: an odd party of white blobs shuffling together across the shed, becoming greyer in the cold of the flesh room, and then disappearing altogether once they were inside the meat. Maybe a grey foot would protrude, or a charcoal elbow – but the crew overhead would have to know what they were looking for. What they were looking at.
Bob Coffin turned on a flickering fluorescent strip light and squealed the shed door shut on its un-oiled runners. As the yard and the kennels and the darkening sky disappeared behind them, Steven’s instincts gifted him a powerful mental image of the stone lid of an ancient tomb closing over his head.
Jonas saw the same things they all did: the bench, the vice, the winch, the chains. But he truly looked at only one thing – the half-open door to the flesh room, where Bob Coffin would soon stuff the weeping, terrified children into the stinking carcasses like pimentos in olives. Already the huntsman had a hold of the chain between Jess and Pete. Already he was tugging them away from the others, the gun in his hand making things easy.
But there was something wrong…
Jonas frowned and strained his eyes, and leaned away from Steven to see as much of the small room as possible. It was dark but his eyes were adjusting, and it shouldn’t be that hard to see…
When he realized what he was seeing – or what he wasn’t seeing – Jonas felt the world tilt under him. He stumbled and Steven grabbed him before he could fall.
‘You OK?’
Jonas shook his head.
He wasn’t OK.
None of them were.
Jonas said something that Steven didn’t catch.
‘What?’ said Steven.
‘There’s no meat,’ said Jonas faintly. ‘In the flesh room.’
No meat. Steven frowned. That must be wrong. No meat meant there was nowhere to hide them. Nowhere to hide their heat. If there was no meat, how would the huntsman conceal them from the thermal-imaging camera?
How would he make them all cold?
It took Steven for ever to understand. Time slowed to a virtual standstill. He blinked at Jonas with rusty eyelids, then turned his creaking head to stare into the infinite flesh room. The neurons in his brain fired up the message like a sputtering candle; it plodded slowly down axons, and connected to other neurons via two tin cans and a piece of string.
When the answer finally came, it hit him like a sledgehammer.
‘Steven!’
He spun round at the sound of Jess’s desperate cry.
She and Pete were on their hands and knees; Jess was trying to get back up, but the huntsman’s right boot was on the coupling chain, holding it to the concrete floor. The muzzle of the small black gun banged and slid against Pete’s thrashing head.
Steven and Jonas moved as one – the only way they could.
The gunshot was deafening.
They fell over Pete and on to Bob Coffin. Steven had the hand with the gun in it in both of his hands, pressing it to the floor like a snake, too scared to let go. The shot still rang inside his head like thunder in an iron bucket.
Jonas and the huntsman struggled beside him and under him, but Steven just focused on the gun. His only job was the gun. The huntsman fought like the insane thing he was, and Jonas’s knees and elbows and head slammed into Steven repeatedly, like a boat tied to a dock in a storm.
Slowly the waves subsided but still Steven leaned on the wrist, trembling with effort, until he saw Coffin’s grip on the gun start to slacken. Even then he was too frightened to let go and grab it. Instead he banged the hand against the cement until the gun fell from it, and then used the same slack hand to knock the gun across the floor, where Maisie and Kylie shuffled over to it.
‘Leave it!’ he yelled, and they left it, looking almost as frightened of him as they had been of Coffin.
For a long moment, Steven just lay there, gripping the still wrist, wondering if this could really be the end of it all, or whether Bob Coffin might suddenly throw them both off and murder them all – the way things happened in the movies.
He looked around. Jess was helping Pete to his feet; Pete had pissed himself and Steven didn’t blame him.
Finally, finally, Steven looked over at the huntsman’s face.
Jonas Holly had wrapped the long, loose end of his tether chain around Bob Coffin’s neck. Coffin was puce, his small blue eyes wide and staring up into Jonas’s, small bubbles of spit popping at the corners of his mouth.
‘It’s OK, Jonas! I got the gun!’ panted Steven.
Jonas felt for the key in the huntsman’s pocket and then sat up on his chest. He fumbled for the lock under his own chin, and the padlock clicked open. The chain snaked on to Bob Coffin’s chest with a musical hiss.
Then Jonas rose to his feet, dragging Steven up with him, and hauled the slack-kneed Coffin across the shed. He seemed to have no regard for the fact that they were still chained together, and the movement hurt Steven’s neck.