Finders Keepers

None of them were.

Jonas said something that Steven didn’t catch.

‘What?’ said Steven.

‘There’s no meat,’ said Jonas faintly. ‘In the flesh room.’

No meat. Steven frowned. That must be wrong. No meat meant there was nowhere to hide them. Nowhere to hide their heat. If there was no meat, how would the huntsman conceal them from the thermal-imaging camera?

How would he make them all cold?

It took Steven for ever to understand. Time slowed to a virtual standstill. He blinked at Jonas with rusty eyelids, then turned his creaking head to stare into the infinite flesh room. The neurons in his brain fired up the message like a sputtering candle; it plodded slowly down axons, and connected to other neurons via two tin cans and a piece of string.

When the answer finally came, it hit him like a sledgehammer.

‘Steven!’

He spun round at the sound of Jess’s desperate cry.

She and Pete were on their hands and knees; Jess was trying to get back up, but the huntsman’s right boot was on the coupling chain, holding it to the concrete floor. The muzzle of the small black gun banged and slid against Pete’s thrashing head.

Steven and Jonas moved as one – the only way they could.

The gunshot was deafening.

They fell over Pete and on to Bob Coffin. Steven had the hand with the gun in it in both of his hands, pressing it to the floor like a snake, too scared to let go. The shot still rang inside his head like thunder in an iron bucket.

Jonas and the huntsman struggled beside him and under him, but Steven just focused on the gun. His only job was the gun. The huntsman fought like the insane thing he was, and Jonas’s knees and elbows and head slammed into Steven repeatedly, like a boat tied to a dock in a storm.

Slowly the waves subsided but still Steven leaned on the wrist, trembling with effort, until he saw Coffin’s grip on the gun start to slacken. Even then he was too frightened to let go and grab it. Instead he banged the hand against the cement until the gun fell from it, and then used the same slack hand to knock the gun across the floor, where Maisie and Kylie shuffled over to it.

‘Leave it!’ he yelled, and they left it, looking almost as frightened of him as they had been of Coffin.

For a long moment, Steven just lay there, gripping the still wrist, wondering if this could really be the end of it all, or whether Bob Coffin might suddenly throw them both off and murder them all – the way things happened in the movies.

He looked around. Jess was helping Pete to his feet; Pete had pissed himself and Steven didn’t blame him.

Finally, finally, Steven looked over at the huntsman’s face.

Jonas Holly had wrapped the long, loose end of his tether chain around Bob Coffin’s neck. Coffin was puce, his small blue eyes wide and staring up into Jonas’s, small bubbles of spit popping at the corners of his mouth.

‘It’s OK, Jonas! I got the gun!’ panted Steven.

Jonas felt for the key in the huntsman’s pocket and then sat up on his chest. He fumbled for the lock under his own chin, and the padlock clicked open. The chain snaked on to Bob Coffin’s chest with a musical hiss.

Then Jonas rose to his feet, dragging Steven up with him, and hauled the slack-kneed Coffin across the shed. He seemed to have no regard for the fact that they were still chained together, and the movement hurt Steven’s neck.

‘Give me the key,’ he gasped, but Jonas ignored him. Instead he looped the free end of the tether chain over the low hook bolted to the wall. Then he squatted down beside Coffin, whose hands now clawed desperately at the links biting into his flesh.

Jonas stared hard into Coffin’s face and jerked the chain around his neck. ‘This is not love,’ he said softly.

Steven shuddered. He’d heard that voice before. He had not imagined it.

You can run now.

Jonas stood up and crossed the shed as if Steven wasn’t lurching and stumbling beside him, and pulled the end of the cable from the winch. The huntsman was lying on the floor, barely moving, his hands at his throat and a faint whine coming from his bloodless lips. Jonas looped the cable around his boots.

‘Stop!’ croaked Steven. ‘Stop!’

But Jonas walked right through him, knocking him off his feet once more. He kept going, pulling Steven along with him, backwards and in a crude headlock. The feeble hostage who had looked like roadkill now seemed to have the strength of ten men; the teenager hanging from his throat was a drag, not a bar to his progress. Steven clutched at Jonas’s arm for support and looked up at the ceiling – at the curtains of cobwebs in the rafters, and the old-fashioned strip lighting like in Ronnie’s garage. He arched his back and craned his head to see where they were going, and saw the buttons on the wall beside the winch.

Jonas Holly was going to tear Bob Coffin apart.

In his mind, Steven could already see the huntsman stretch, hear the shrieks and the ripping muscles, watch the neck lengthen and split, exposing red-liquorice veins and chewing-gum skin. He could already see the head jerk and pop off, and roll twitching into a corner, while the rest of Bob Coffin fishtailed across the floor, spraying fountains of blood, until the soles of his dead feet hit the wall.

Jonas stopped at the winch and Steven twisted to look up into his eyes.

They were as blank as a shark’s – as cold and dark as the muzzle of the huntsman’s gun – in a face Steven had seen before and would never make the mistake of forgetting again.

‘You killed her,’ he whispered. ‘I know you did.’

Jonas said nothing. And – even over the battle-drum roar of the rain on the roof – Steven heard the winch whirr into life.

‘Get out!’ he shouted at the rafters. ‘Jess, get them OUT!’

Then he squeezed his eyes shut and covered his ears, but he heard the screams anyway, as Bob Coffin started to die.

63

RICE BEAT THE helicopter to the Blacklands Hunt kennels.

Reynolds knew she would.

The rain was biblical now and the second they stepped out of the car they were drenched. Reynolds ran through the yard – past the row of empty kennels on his left, stables on his right.

‘Be careful!’ yelled Rice behind him, but he wasn’t. Irrational fear had gripped him and made him reckless for the first time in his life.

Ahead of him the concrete sloped down towards a large shed. Reynolds faltered as the huge door squealed open, then stopped dead as four children spilled out of the light and into the storm. They were half naked, weeping and terrified, but even through the driving rain Reynolds recognized them as if he’d fathered them.

‘Elizabeth!’ he yelled, and he ran down the ramp.

Jess Took pointed into the shed and cried, ‘He’s killing him.’

Reynolds burst through the door in time to see the final screaming agony of Bob Coffin.

Too late.

There was a loud crack and the chain wound around Coffin’s neck snapped in two. It whipped up and hit the wall, sending a single broken link skittering past Reynolds’s feet like money. The huntsman skidded across the concrete in the other direction, his boots hitting the opposite wall, his knees crumpling behind them.

‘Christ!’ Reynolds bounded across the room and hit the cutoff switch. Jonas Holly and Steven Lamb were right there and he turned to them now, fizzing with adrenaline.

The sight of them stopped him dead.

Jonas Holly was covered in blood and bruises, one eye was barely open and his chest and stomach ran with