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72 lines
11 KiB
Plaintext
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<h2>34</h2>
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<p>....<em>It's going to.....</em></p>
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<p>The bindings parted with a savage crack. All of them gave at the same time and the thick branch whipped up, swiping through the air in a vicious whoop. It unleashed in a blur, uncoiling as all the latent tension punched upwards, like the arm of a siege catapult. The sudden violent motion threw Corky backwards.</p>
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<p>"....<em>Go!</em>"</p>
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<p>Danny blurted the word just as Corky slammed into him. Both of them landed beside Doug on the short, tough grass only inches from the drop-off. Danny instinctively grabbed a thick tuft to stop the pair of them rolling over the edge and tumbling down the scree</p>
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<p>The forked branch carried the bomb up, reached the end of its travel, slammed against the cross-trunk and once again the whole tree shook from the roots upwards in a seizmic shudder. A scattering of leaves exploded outwards. The branch hit the trunk, rebounded, slammed in again and stopped dead, but the bomb simply kept on travelling, almost straight up into the air, thrown off its cradle with the huge and sudden acceleration.</p>
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<p>It went on up, a black and heavy shape, soaring into the sky, wobbling just a little on its tail. The fins were clearly outlined against the cloudless blue of the morning.</p>
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<p>"Christ on a bike, I thought it got you," Doug gasped, but only Danny heard him, and that very faintly. His attention was fixed on the rising black bomb. Corky was lying athwart him, face up, mouth agape. Over on the far side, beyond the tree, Billy and Doug stood, eyes wide, stunned by the catapult crack that had sounded so much like a pistol-shot, sounded too much like the sound of a club against a skull.</p>
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<p>The bomb was travelling upwards, thick and massive, a solid black zeppelin, defying gravity. Its ascension transfixed them all.</p>
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<p>Danny's breathing stopped and the whole world seemed to freeze into a sludgy, slow motion. The bomb rose up and up.</p>
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<p><em>"It's going to...it's going to..." </em>His own words were still ringing in his ears, along with the air-shattering crack of the branch slamming the cross-trunk, and Doug's blurt, all of them jangled together, encapsulated in the focus of that single moment of time.</p>
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<p>Billy Harrison saw the thing soar, unable for the moment to comprehend what had happened. Tom's body was in the act of turning, as if flinching from the whiplash of the tree. A deep vibration shivered in the ground, almost able to be heard in a thrumming tremor. Hawthorn leaves floated in a wide slow halo of green around the tree and pieces of old bark scattered like shrapnel from the trunk. The bomb soared upwards and it snared Billy's eyes, a black and powerful silhouette, shark fins jutting out from the tail.</p>
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<p><em>"What's happening?"</em> he heard his own voice ask, inside his head. The moment was somehow charged with a inexplicable and powerful energy. His heart was beating, still fast, squeezing inside his chest, but he felt it like a slow pulse and the harsh whiplash of the tree seemed to stretch out and develop a bass thrum which matched the deep vibration under his feet.</p>
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<p>"<em>Want to cross over? Eh boy?"</em></p>
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<p>The monster had dragged him into the tent and broken him.</p>
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<p><em>Tried to kill him!</em> He had lashed out with the ballpeen hammer, feeling it hit in meaty thuds, wanting to break and shatter and destroy.</p>
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<p>The mad man had taken him down to the water he had gone down into the valley, into the shadow, and death had been hovering nearby. Pain throbbed up from the tender, torn skin and the bomb was going up and up, expanding, rather than diminishing in his consciousness, powerful and mesmerising. Billy stood slack-jawed, watching it, as if his life depended on it; unable to look away, despite the need to be up on the moor and gone.</p>
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<p>Tom Tannahill was half turned and his face tilted to the sky. The panic and exhaustion had squeezed at him so tightly that a little dribble of urine had spurted out to stain the front of his jeans. The bomb rose up.....</p>
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<p><em>"Sorry Tommy, just trying to say, okay</em>?"</p>
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<p>Corky had looked over at him with eyes like fine glass, so fragile they could break and shatter and they focused on him with such powerful regret and sorrow that it had reached and soothed a cooling balm into the raw open wound of his hurt.</p>
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<p><em>Read me the story Tom, would you?</em> Little Maureen's slow voice and the bruises under her eyes and the paunchy, sick swelling of her skin. <em>I need to go to the bathroom Tom. I need to go.</em> And she had gone and everything in his life burst asunder.</p>
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<p>Now the bomb was going up and it held him, held everything that he was, in that one brittle fragment of time. He held on to it, the fear magically numbed away.</p>
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<p>Doug Nicol was on the grass, braced for balance, behind Danny and Corky. <em>Hells bells!</em> It was going up, heavy and thunderous, rising like a black stone.</p>
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<p>The rock had gone up, raised high in his two hands and then it had come slamming down and something had snapped with the sound of a branch cracking, like the sound of the string breaking, the noise of the hawthorn limb smashing upwards against the trunk. The bomb was up.</p>
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<p>The first one had missed and they could have got him this time, but the knife had sliced wrong and their last weapon was gone. They could have used it like the campfire stone, just a weight to crush and break.. Now the bomb was up, on its own course, not theirs, dragging his eyes with it.</p>
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<p><em>Bugsylugs, Bugsylugs,</em> Billy's voice taunted in the background of his mind and he ignored it. That had been then, before this <em>now</em>. The taunt was meaningless, its power gone.</p>
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<p>There was a red pain across his neck, where the wire had bit into him. It had been worth it.</p>
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<p><em>Did my best, honest to God.</em> He had done his best. Together they had almost beaten him. Almost. Nearly. The bomb rose up and up, for that strange and unreal moment filling the entire sky.</p>
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<p>John Corcoran watched it, sharp black against the light blue, black as the gaping barrel of the shotgun up against his eye. The crack of the branch had been like the crash of the pin against the empty chamber; world shattering, devastating. Numbing.</p>
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<p><em>Nothing happened. Nothing happened!</em></p>
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<p>The air had whooped when the bough had uncoiled like the strike of some knotted brown snake. He watched the bomb float up and away, heavy and blunt and somehow mindlessly vicious.</p>
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<p><em>See how you like it, you crazy fucking </em>bastard!</p>
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<p>The pin had come down on an empty space again. <em>Nothing happened</em>.</p>
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<p>"<em>Kill him</em>." Somebody had said from far away. Under his back, the earth shuddered violentlyThe crack of the parting string and the crack of the shotgun's firing pin resounded inside him, with the jar of his teeth on wire, on and on and on, a mental ricochet that seemed as if it might go on forever.</p>
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<p>"<em>Kill him!"</em> Somebody had demanded and he had not hesitated, because the voice had really been his own and this could be the last time, this <em>would</em> be the last time and Corky felt the quivering violence and he'd punched forward, felt the thud and then the fruity slide as the blade went in and the blood came out to make a butterfly pattern on the tent.</p>
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<p>He'd done it again, twice, thrice.</p>
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<p><em>And again he defied him. </em>The voice had been mad and dreamy, black and rising, like the bomb soaring into the air.</p>
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<p><em>You afraid boy? You scared? </em>Not of you, you creepy mad cunt! But he was afraid. Really and truly. He could feel it in the grind of his teeth.</p>
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<p><em>If thine eye offends me. Pluck it....</em>And the black rising shape held him now. </p>
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<p>The bomb went up and Danny Gillan watched it, black as the valley of the shadow of death. Danny soared with it, numbed. <em>Up and over, up and over,</em> the litany that had kept him going up the slope while exhaustion and pain dragged at him and fear tried to paralyse him.</p>
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<p><em>Denied me thrice.</em> The night had been filled with the sounds of weeping and gnashing of teeth on a hard steel wire. <em>Bad luck, Danny Boy. </em> He had knocked the heron out of the air and brought bad luck down upon them all.</p>
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<p>The bomb was floating there, huge in the sky above them. <em>Dung fly!</em></p>
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<p>What did <em>that</em> mean? <em>What....?</em></p>
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<p>The bomb found the reach of its trajectory, slowing down at the apex, the tail now beginning to rise up. It wobbled, seemed to stop still in the air, then, just as slowly, tilted, turned, began to drop.</p>
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<p>The strange little bubble of time that had held them, it burst silently, threw them clear.</p>
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<p>"Watch out," Doug found his voice. A spittle of saliva spat out with the words. "It's going to..."</p>
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<p>He flinched back. The bomb fell straight down, all of two yards out from the edge. It had seemed to go straight up, but the uncoiling branch had thrown it forward too. It dropped like a stone, still wobbling a little, blunt end down. They turned to follow its progress. Down below, something pale fluttered, it was the man's face twisting upwards towards the sky and the black shape.</p>
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<p>The bomb plummeted towards him. His mouth opened and he yelled something, jumped backwards with both arms outstretched, his skin white against the grey of the shale, streaked scarlet with blood. He missed his footing, rolled and skittered halfway down.</p>
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<p>The bomb hit the soft slope, dug in a little, but its momentum ploughed it forward and it bounced out, somersaulting once, heading for the ledge of mudstone rubble twenty yards from where the first one had landed, but close to where the third bomb from the previous attempts had rolled in the shale. It hit the mudstone, tail first. A piece of tailfin flicked off and it too spun, whirling, straight for the soft shale bank.</p>
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<p>The man bellowed in lunatic triumph, despite the fact that he'd slid down the incline almost as far as the basin of the corrie.</p>
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<p>The bomb bounced fast straight towards where the other stubby black shape lay. They watched it, all five of them, high on the side of the gorge, unable to draw their eyes away.</p>
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<p>It hit.</p>
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<p>The whole world turned a brilliant, searing, blinding white.</p>
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