“Officer Baines,” said the Jellyman, “you are excused. I have nothing to fear from death, and they want only me. You, too, Inspector, and you, Mr. Vaughn.”
Jack looked at Baines and Vaughn, the aide-de-camp. Neither of them moved.
“Is he always this pleasant?”
“Always,” replied Baines, adding over his shoulder, “I’m sorry, Your Eminence, my orders are quite clear on this matter.”
There was a crash as the kitchen door was smashed in and loud reports accompanied by muzzle flashes as the officer in the kitchen slowly emptied his weapon into something out of their line of vision. The gunshots stopped, and they heard a faint metallic clack as the empty magazine hit the tiled kitchen floor. The officer with the mustache never got a chance to reload. There was another crash of broken furniture, and the officer’s arm, still with the pistol held tightly in his hand, slid past the open door and hit the fridge. The Jellyman closed his eyes and spoke quietly to himself, doubtless preparing himself for his physical end.
There was a low hiss from the kitchen and the scrape of furniture as the creature made its way to the living room door. A scaly claw with an elongated central digit like a kitchen knife grasped the doorframe. This was followed by the head of something that looked like an illustration from Jerome’s Bumper Book of Carnivorous Dinosaurs. It stood upright on powerful rear legs, using a gently lashing tail as a counterbalance, but it was no taller than Jack—just a lot more powerful. The body was covered by a series of bony plates like a pangolin, and it had small dark eyes that darted around until they alighted on the Jellyman. Then it hissed again and trod purposefully into the room, the sharp claws on its feet gouging deep furrows in the highly polished parquet flooring.
Baines fired, but the shot merely ricocheted off the beast’s scaly hide and shattered a vase on the sideboard. Jack did the first thing he thought of—he grabbed the creature’s tail and attempted to pull it off balance. With a cry the beast snapped its muscular tail like a whip, and Jack was flicked backwards at high speed through the kitchen door and into the furniture, which broke under him like matchwood.
Baines stood his ground and fired at regular, controlled intervals. It didn’t help. The beast approached him and with one violent swipe sent him to either side of the room. There was nothing now between the Humpty-beast and the Jellyman, who stared back at it with an expression of detached serenity. Jack looked around desperately for a weapon that would make a dent on the creature’s hide, but without luck: His mum’s kitchen wasn’t generally the sort of place where you’d try to kill bioengineered hell-beasts sprung from the crazed mind of a revenge-fueled fanatic.
Blast. And he’d done so well up until now. If only he’d figured this out earlier, Humpty’s degenerate offspring wouldn’t be about to kill the only honest politician the planet possessed. He stopped. Offspring. Strictly speaking, the creature wasn’t anything of the sort, as Dr. Quatt had used Humpty only to incubate it, but then again…
Jack stood up and yelled: “HUMPTY!!”
The creature paused momentarily, thought for a moment and then took a step closer to the Jellyman, who forgave the beast and closed his eyes. The creature raised a powerful arm in readiness to complete Dr. Quatt’s revenge when… a size-B egg hit it on the back of the head.
The effect was electric. The creature roared so loudly that some of Jack’s mother’s pottery animals vibrated off the display cabinet. The Jellyman thus momentarily forgotten, the beast swung around to face its new aggressor, its eyes fixing Jack’s in the sort of way a cat might fixate on a mouse. Jack had changed from being an annoyance—to being prey.
Jack purposefully dropped an egg on the kitchen floor. It made that distinctive cracking ploppy noise, and the beast bellowed angrily and pawed the ground, its sharp talons cutting through the parquet flooring like margarine.
“Oh, dear!” said Jack. “What a butterfingers I am.” He pointed to his right and shouted, “Watch out! A GIANT MONGOOSE!”
The creature flinched and looked to where he had pointed, which gave Jack a chance to take the remainder of the eggs and run to the other end of the kitchen. The beast growled menacingly and took a step closer. Deep within its tiny one-track, kill-Jellyman mind, something vaguely familiar stirred. Small vestigial feelings that had been passed unseen from the egg who had died to give it life. Humpty’s worries—and his fears.
“Oh, dearie me again,” said Jack as he dropped another egg on the floor and backed towards the shattered kitchen door. The creature gave a snort and a growl, took three quick steps closer and raised its arm to attack. But Jack was prepared. He pulled his mother’s egg poacher from the cupboard and brandished it the way you would a crucifix to a vampire. The creature backed off for a moment, then snapped and lunged, caught the poacher and sent it flying across the room.
“Then what about this?” asked Jack, grabbing the egg timer from beside the oven. “Three minutes for the perfect egg? Egg dippy fingers, anyone? With hollandaise?”
He backed out through the door and dropped another egg. The creature, enraged and confused, followed him into the back garden and snapped, growled and lunged while Jack taunted it with an egg whisk.
“Scrambled eggs on toast!” Jack yelled. “Fried, poached, boiled… SOUFFLÉ!”
He backed across the garden and yelled eggy insults until he walked into something hard and unyielding. It was the beanstalk. Shiny dark green, with a beautifully smooth trunk, it seemed almost impossible to resist.
“Tortilla!” he yelled as he threw the egg whisk at the beast with all his strength. The creature caught it in its teeth and then crushed it angrily.
Jack stuffed the three eggs that remained in his overall pocket and started to climb. It was easier than he had thought, and the leaves offered good handholds. But if he had hoped this would offer some sort of escape, he was wrong. The creature snapped the air once or twice when Jack shouted “Eggs en cocotte!”—and then followed him.
Jack clambered up, past the ripening beans and high enough to see the road—and the Jellyman’s Daimler being driven off at high speed. He breathed a sigh of relief, something that didn’t last long, as he suddenly realized that although His Eminence was safe, Jack personally still had to deal with five hundred pounds of dangerously pissed-off Humpty-beast.