irrelevances? Which thought is another irrelevancy, he decided.
'Come on, you two, stay with me.' He led them down the outside
wall, keeping in close to its sheltering bulk, pausing at the corner to
check the load of his rifle and slip the selector on to rapid fire.
A further moment he hesitated. What will I find around this corner? A
hundred naked savages crowded round the mutilated bodies of
Hendry and his gendarmes, or ... ?
Crouching, ready to jump back behind the wall, rifle held at high port
across his chest, every muscle and nerve of his body cocked like a
hair-trigger, Bruce stepped sideways into the open.
Hendry and the two gendarmes stood in the dusty road beyond the first
cottage. They were relaxed, talking together, Hendry reloading his
rifle, cramming the magazine with big red hands on which the gingery
hair caught the sunlight. A cigarette dangled from his lower lip and he
laughed suddenly, throwing his head back as he did so and the cigarette
ash dropped down his jacket front. Bruce noticed the long dark sweat
stain across his shoulders.
The two children lay in the road fifty yards farther on.
Bruce was suddenly cold, it came from inside, a cramping coldness of the
guts and chest. Slowly he straightened up and began to walk towards the
children. His feet fell silently in the powder dust and the only sound
was his own breathing, hoarse, as though a wounded beast followed close
behind him. He walked past Hendry and the two gendarmes
without looking at them; but they stopped talking, watching him
uneasily.
He reached the girl first and went down on one knee beside her, laying
his rifle aside and turning her gently on to her back.
'This isn't true,' he whispered. 'This can't be true.' The bullet had
taken half her chest out with it, a hole the size of a coffee cup, with
the blood still moving in it, but slowly, oozing, welling up into it
with the viscosity of new honey.
Bruce moved across to the boy; he felt an almost dreamlike sense of
unreality.
'No, this isn't true.' He spoke louder, trying to undo it with words.
Three bullets had hit the boy; one had torn his arm loose at the
shoulder and the sharp white end of the bone pointed accusingly out of
the wound. The other bullets had severed his trunk almost in two.
It came from far away, like the rising roar of a train along a tunnel.
Bruce could feel his whole being shaken by the strength of it, he shut
his eyes and listened to the roaring in his head, and with his eyes
tight closed his vision was filled with the colour of blood.
'Hold on!' a tiny voice screamed in his roaring head.
'Don't let go, fight it. Fight it as you've fought before.' And he clung
like a flood victim to the straw of his sanity while the great roaring
was all around him. Then the roar was muted, rumbling away, gone past, a
whisper, now nothing.
The coldness came back to him, a coldness more vast than the flood had
been.
He opened his eyes and breathed again, stood up and walked back to where
Hendry stood with the two gendarmes.
