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.
‘
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,
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.
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.
