'He gets his eternal reward a little early. He'll thank me when I see him again.'
'Um, Rob,' said the man in front of me. 'He's gonna slit my throat, man.'
'He's right, you know,' I said. 'I am. So if you don't want to break poor Carol's heart, best drop the weapon.'
Rob stared at me, trying to maintain his cool. But eventually he bent down and placed the gun on the ground.
'Thanks,' I said, and smiled at him. 'Now kick it away.' He did so.
A minute later I had them both on the ground, face down, hands behind their heads. It didn't take much to persuade them to talk, but it took me a lot longer to believe what they were telling me. When I'd learned all I could, I had a choice to make. I'd been quite prepared to kill one of them to make the other one tell me what I needed to know, but to kill them now would be murder, plain and simple.
Nonetheless, the best course of action was clear. Kill them, bleed them, cover myself in their blood, dump the bodies in the river, then saunter up to the next pillbox and kill the occupants before they realise I'm not really a Blood Hunter. Repeat for all remaining pillboxes. Even the odds while I had the chance. It was the safest thing to do.
I tightened my grip on the knife, gritted my teeth and prepared to strike, but I had a sudden flash of the confusion and fear in Wolf-Barry's eyes as I'd plunged my knife into his chest. I choked. I couldn't do it. Even now, after everything I'd done, I couldn't conceive of embarking on that kind of killing spree, no matter how necessary it was.
I felt like I'd failed some kind of test.
I made them undress, cut their clothes into strips, and bound them tight. Then I swam upstream and rejoined Norton.
I had a lot to tell him.
I couldn't sleep at all that night. In the pub at Hildenborough we'd talked ourselves hoarse trying to come up with a plan of action that didn't leave us all hanging upside down with our throats slit. By the time we finally agreed on a plan of attack it was dark and everyone was exhausted. Norton accepted his role without complaint and walked out into the night to do his part. Bob had prepared beds for us in the big house where three months ago I'd fought for my life. Strange to be sleeping there as a guest of honour.
But of course I couldn't sleep. I ran the day over and over again in my mind. Killing Wolf-Barry, shooting the others, the head of the dead woman hanging limp as she was carried away, the stench of the Blood Hunters, the sense that I should have killed them there and then, the nagging feeling that I still wasn't as ruthless as I needed to be. The knowledge that, had Mac been in charge of us, things would have been a lot simpler. Not to mention my anxieties about the coming day, the probability of battle, the anticipation of more killing, the possibility of my own imminent death and those of my friends. I was afraid of the nightmares sleep would bring.
Plus, it felt wrong to be sleeping safe and sound while Norton was risking his life out there in the darkness.
So I lay there, listening to the owls and the foxes, wishing that my father were here to take charge on my behalf. I wished I could go back to being a boy again, that I could retreat to a world where my only worries were acne, BO and whether that girl from the high school would laugh at me if I asked her to meet me at lunchtime for a bag of chips at the bus stop. That was what my life should be like. I was fifteen, for God's sake. Whoever heard of a fifteen year-old general? Well, Alexander the Great, perhaps. Whatever happened, things would be settled once and for all by the end of the day. Either I'd be dead and the school would be destroyed, or the Blood Hunters would be wiped from the face of the earth like the plague they were. When dawn finally broke I greeted it with a kind of relief; waiting to fight is far worse than actually fighting.
Breakfast was a sombre affair. Green hadn't spoken a word since we'd rescued him, and he sat at the end of the table, picking at his bacon and eggs. Haycox was in shock, coming to terms with the fact that yesterday his life had changed from horse grooming to disembowelling and decapitation. I hardly knew any of the boys who made up Green's theatre troupe, but they were artsy types, uncomfortable in a fight, reeling from the deaths of their friends Russell and Jones. Bob was subdued because he'd had a very hard time convincing some of the men in Hildenborough to provide support for our plans; after all, they'd lost friends in an attack on the school once before. But the opportunity to revenge themselves on the Blood Hunters was enough to sway them in the end.
The only person who ate well was Rowles. He cleaned his plate, and then went back for more. He didn't seem worried at all. But if you looked closely you could see that he was dead behind the eyes. I worried about that boy.
When we were finished we washed up and got dressed. Rowles, Haycox and I had our combats, the others had to make do with green and brown clothes that Bob had begged and borrowed the day before. We met the new Hildenborough militia on the forecourt of the house and went over the plan once again. Weapons were distributed and goodbyes said. Then we walked down the drive towards the rising sun.
We were going to pick a fight.
There's something mediaeval about pitching a tent outside a fortified castle and laying siege to it. But since the Blood Hunters had to do without smart bombs, air strikes or fuel, it seemed logical to re-adopt the neglected arts of war.
The marquee sat to one side of the school's main gate, outside the walls, on the grass between the road and the school wall. The gate itself lay on the ground in pieces, run down by a truck. The truck in question lay on its side about twenty metres inside the gates. There was a corpse hanging out of the driver's side window. The sandbagged machine gun emplacement at the main gate had been scattered by the impact, I had no idea of the fate of the boys who'd been manning it. The Blood Hunters had collected the sandbags and rebuilt it, remounting the GPMG and pointing it down the drive at the school.
With the drive covered, and the pillboxes manned at the rear, all approaches to the school were pinned down. But the long driveway in front, the playing fields at the back, and the paddocks and gardens on either side provided no cover for attackers who made it over the wall, which meant that a straightforward attack would be suicide. Stalemate.
The Blood Hunters were going to have to starve the school into submission. And I wasn't going to allow them that much time.
I turned my binoculars towards Castle and was relieved to see a Union Jack flag dangling from a window. That was the signal; Norton had made it past the guards and was inside. There was nothing left to do now. Time to begin.
I broke cover about half a mile down the road and strolled as nonchalantly as I could towards the school. I tried whistling but my mouth was too dry. It took them a minute to spot me. Three of the biggest guys I've ever seen ran towards me, weapons raised for firing.
I grinned at them. I was going for confidence but I probably looked unhinged.
'Take me to your leader,' I said. So they did.
There was a crowd milling around outside the entrance to the marquee as we approached. A whole tribe of people in jeans and t-shirts, wearing flip flops and trainers, carrying machetes and guns, their faces, arms and hair soaked in human blood. The meeting of mundane and surreal was hard to accept. So was the smell.
I've never been religious. It just never made any sense to me. But I sang the hymns and intoned the prayers at school assemblies and the compulsory Sunday morning service in the chapel. The kind of religion I was exposed to always seemed harmless enough. Either the vicars were pompous bores or young men who tried to be cool by playing guitar or something embarrassing like that. One of the boys in my dorm had attended a thing called the Alpha Course one summer holiday, and the subsequent term he'd stopped smoking and joined the school's Christian Fellowship. But that was about as sinister as it got. And I sort of got it. It was about feeling part of a community, taking comfort in a belief that there was some point to everything. I didn't feel the need of it myself, but I kind of understood why some people did.
But this… I couldn't begin to wrap my head around this. How fucked in the head did you have to be to think that human sacrifice was going to save your immortal soul? How desperate for certainty did you need to be to imagine that smearing yourself in human blood was a good idea? I wondered whether the Blood Hunters were just a collection of weak, scared people in thrall to a charismatic nutter, or were they some expression of something deeper, more fundamental? The Aztec part of us, if you like.
I might as well have been walking through a crowd of Martians. I couldn't comprehend these people on any
