metal peg that secured it. Then he hauled on it, and my feet went out from under me. I crashed to the stage, face first. I felt one of my front teeth shatter. I was pulled upwards until I dangled in the air, suspended so my head was level with David's.
I could see Mac in the crowd. He looked agitated.
Slowly, meticulously, David stripped naked. Then he took a knife from one of the guards and walked centre stage. He spread his arms and addressed the crowd.
'In the fountain of life I shall be reborn,' he intoned.
The Blood Hunters replied: 'Make us safe.'
'With the blood of the lamb I wash myself clean.'
'Make us safe.'
'From the source of pestilence comes our salvation.'
'Make us safe.'
'Life for life. Blood for blood.'
'Make us safe.'
He turned towards me, cradled my head and moved to kiss me.
'I'll bite your fucking lips off,' I growled. He backed away.
'I thank you for your gift,' he said.
Then, suddenly, the right side of his head wasn't there anymore. He reached up to feel his face, as if he were confused at what was trickling down his cheek. Someone in the crowd started to scream. David's hand came away from the gaping wound and he held the bloodied fingers up in front of his face, trying to focus on them. He emitted a bark of laughter and said: 'As if by magic!' Then he collapsed in a heap.
Mac stood on the right side of the stage, smoking pistol in his hand.
'You promised!' he shouted at David's crumpled form. 'You fucking promised! He's mine. I told you that and you promised.'
The fallen cult leader craned his head to look at Mac. He gave a sick, gargling laugh and blood bubbled up out of his mouth. 'Safe now,' he gasped. And then his head fell backwards, lifeless.
While all this was going on my eye caught a flash of movement as the door to the balcony swung open. I couldn't see anybody emerge. It didn't swing shut, but it was pushed further open, as if someone else was entering. Then again and again it swung a little shut but was pushed back open. There were people crawling onto the walkway overlooking the hall, hidden from view by the waist-high wooden guard rail. Who the hell was up there?
The crack of David's head on the wood jolted the guards out of their shock and they ran at Mac, machetes raised. He gunned them down. While they were still falling, he turned to the screaming crowd and fired over their heads. 'Shut the fuck up!' he yelled. Silence fell. 'I'm in charge now, right? You!' He pointed at one of the Blood Hunters in the wings. 'Cut him down.' The Blood Hunter didn't move. Mac waved the gun at him. 'Now!' Still he didn't move. Mac paused, seemingly unsure what to do in the face of this refusal to comply.
It was as if his head suddenly cleared and he realised the position his unthinking rage had placed him in. He'd just killed the religious leader of a group of insane cannibals, all of whom were armed. And they were all looking at him.
'Nice one, Mac,' I said. 'Good move.'
There was a collective roar, a guttural explosion of fury from every Blood Hunter in the hall. Then they rushed him. They could have shot him, but I guess there was something about wanting to inflict the pain personally, needing to feel the kicks and punches landing. Some of them even threw their guns aside as they ran. Like a tide, the cultists swept left and right to the stairs and streamed up them onto the stage. I was ignored, forgotten. Mac fired, mowing some of them down as they approached, but it was no use. They fell upon him and he screamed as he vanished beneath a flurry of fists.
Two things happened at once. The boys and men who'd been held prisoner ran forward and grabbed all the discarded weapons they could; and an army of girls appeared on the balcony above us.
Matron stood directly opposite and above me on the balcony, machine gun pointed down. To her left and right, flanking the room on all three sides, were fifteen young girls, all similarly armed.
I saw Rowles look up in astonishment. Then he looked at the stage and he smiled broadly.
'Fire!' he yelled.
All the girls opened up at once, pouring fire down into the throng of Blood Hunters. Those boys and men who'd grabbed discarded guns did the same.
The Blood Hunters didn't stand a chance. It was a massacre. Some of them realised what had happened and tried to bring their weapons to bear, but the onslaught was too fierce, the fire too concentrated. The gunfire seemed to go on forever, a cacophony of stuttering weapons with a staccato accompaniment of spent cartridges hitting the floor. The noise reached a crescendo and then gradually died away as magazine after magazine clicked empty and the guns fell silent. As the smoke rose, and the smell of cordite swamped everything, silence fell.
The stage was piled head-high with twitching, bleeding Blood Hunters; dead, dying and wounded. And me, upside down, swinging gently above the slaughter, splashed with blood and gore, laughing hysterically.
Matron was appalled at what had occurred, but she took control with assured, businesslike calm. She sorted out the youngest children, both boys and girls, and sent them outside to collect weapons from the battlefield. The men and older boys set to work pulling the Blood Hunters off the stage and sorting them into three piles: dead, mortally wounded, and those who could perhaps be saved. Matron co-ordinated the triage.
There was a brief argument between Rowles and Matron, with Rowles arguing that they should all be shot in the head. Matron wouldn't hear of it. Rowles surprised me by accepting her authority.
After I was cut down I sat at the far end of the hall and nursed my wounds, unable to believe that I was still alive. After a while Matron came and sat next to me, resting her hand on my knee.
'You all right?' she asked. I didn't need to answer that. 'No, of course you're not. Sorry. Stupid question.'
I smiled to indicate I didn't mind and she grimaced. 'Ouch,' she said, as she leant forward, took hold of my jaw and opened my mouth to reveal my missing front tooth. It had snapped in two, leaving a jagged, serrated edge that I couldn't stop probing with my tongue. 'That must really hurt.'
'Not yet,' I lisped. 'Your drugs are still taking the edge off. But I wouldn't mind another hit before you pull the root out.'
'No problem. Hold still.' She took hold of my re-broken nose and wrenched it into place again, making me yell. 'You need a splint on that. I'm not sure it'll set quite right, though.'
'Great,' I laughed. 'I'm a limping, lisping, gap-toothed scarface with a broken nose. What a catch.'
She placed her hand on my cheek. 'Oh, I don't know.' She flashed me a cheeky, girlish grin that made me feel all sorts of interesting things. I actually blushed.
'Are all the girls okay?' I asked, changing the subject.
She nodded. 'David kept his side of the bargain. They didn't touch them. Which isn't to say they enjoyed being locked in a caravan for so long.' She surveyed the makeshift morgue in front of her. 'I was hoping they wouldn't have to open fire; that just the threat would be enough to get the Blood Hunters to disarm. It seems that these days everyone has to end up killing somebody.'
I looked at her and suddenly I realised where we'd gone wrong, all those months ago.
'It should have been you,' I said to her.
'Sorry?'
'In charge. It should have been you, not Bates.'
'Don't be ridiculous,' she scoffed.
'Think about it. Every time things went wrong you were the one who did the right thing. You stood up to that woman on the drive; you stood up to Bates and Mac when Hammond was killed. While I was making plots, pretending to be something I wasn't, you were always the honest one. Of all the lessons Mac was trying to teach me about leadership, that's the one he never understood: you can only be a proper leader if you're willing to stand up for what you believe in and be counted when it matters. I never was. You always were. It should have been you, Jane. Not Bates, not Mac, not me. You. Maybe then none of this would have happened.'
'Oh fuck off, Nine Lives' said a voice from the stage. There was Mac, fished out from the very bottom of the pile of bodies. He was covered in cuts and bruises, but not a single bullet had made its way through the crowd to him, curled up on the floor at the epicentre of the lynch mob. 'The last thing we need right now is a fucking moral,
