“No, Your Eminence, we suspect a mad doctor named Quatt.”
The Jellyman shook his head sadly. “A perverter of the natural order,” he said disdainfully. “I had her banned from research, but I see I should have taken more extreme measures. Why did she murder him?”
“She didn’t — but death was inevitable once she had decided to use Humpty as a living incubation device. As soon as Humpty Dumpty hatched, it was murder.”
“How fascinating! What came out?”
“A chicken. Quatt must have been — ”
Jack stopped as nasty thoughts coalesced in his mind. Why had he supposed it was a chicken? Images of Winkie’s tattered body hove into view. A slash so violent it had split his sternum. Winkie must have heard the shot, come out and seen — not the hit man who was already gone, but Dr. Quatt, who had been waiting for several days with her white St. Cerebellum’s van. Winkie returned home, read the newspapers, assumed Quatt had killed Humpty and then — poor fool — tried to blackmail her. She had turned up to pay him off with whatever came out of Humpty’s shell — something so terrifying that, urine-soaked with fear, Winkie couldn’t even defend himself. A haddock with a kitten’s head was child’s play: Dr. Quatt had created something unspeakably nasty and then grown it in Humpty’s denucleated yolk. And for what? To use against the one man who had ruined her!
“Inspector?” asked the Jellyman. “Something perturbs you.”
“You’re in danger. We’re all in danger. Madeleine, Mum, get the children into the cellar right now and lock the door. You with the mustache, get the officers outside to check the white van parked down the street — and get the Jellyman to safety!”
He used the sort of voice where no one argued, and as Madeleine swiftly guided the family downstairs to cries of “yes, but why?” the guard with the mustache spoke into his radio. The front door opened a crack. It was Chymes.
“What the hell’s going on, Spratt?”
“Quatt has bred some sort of weird Humpty-beast to try to kill the Jellyman. It will be immensely strong and have claws capable of splitting a man open.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
As if in answer, there was a burst of gunfire and a cry. Chymes rapidly opened the door and came in, while the officer with the mustache drew his pistol and spoke on his walkie-talkie. There was a garbled message in return and another five shots, then silence. After a moment there was a knock at the door, and Baines came inside, sweating.
“Did you see it?” asked Chymes.
The officer with the mustache went to the kitchen door as the Jellyman and his aide-de-camp waited patiently.
Chymes opened the front door a crack and looked out. At the garden gate, he could see an armed officer at the rear door of the limo. He beckoned urgently. Chymes shut the door and turned to Baines and Jack.
“His limo is only twenty meters away. If we bunch ourselves around him, we can probably make it.”
“It’s your show, Friedland.”
Chymes opened the door again just in time to see something large and scaly run past the limo and dispatch the armed officer with a swiftness that was impressive, deadly — and gruesome.
“New plan,” said Chymes as he closed the door again. “The Jellyman goes in the cellar.”
“I refuse,” said the Jellyman with finality. “They want me. I won’t take danger to the innocents.”
He meant Jack’s children, of course. Since protocol dictated that the Jellyman could never be manhandled, there was little they could do but acquiesce.
There was another shot and a cry from outside.
“Now what?” asked Baines.
“Newer plan,” said Chymes. “You stay here and defend the Jellyman, and I’ll coordinate the backup response from… somewhere else.”
And without another word, he opened the door and was gone. Jack watched him as he ran across the street and jumped inelegantly through the privet hedge of the house opposite.
“Where’s the backup?” asked Jack as he closed and locked the door.
“On its way.”
“Then we wait.”
There were more shots, this time from the garden, and another cry.
“Whoa!” shouted the officer in the kitchen, “I just saw something dark and scaly go past the windows — and I think it got Simpson.”
“Controlled fire at anything that comes in!” yelled Baines.
“Make every shot count!”
Baines and Jack moved through to the living room and wedged the door to the hall shut with a chair under the handle. Baines then positioned himself between the Jellyman and the kitchen door.
“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…