Steven turned to Jess. ‘What happened? Did you see what happened?’
She stared at him, her lower lip trembling.
‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Helicopter,’ said Jess.
It was only then that Steven heard the noise. It was distant but it was unmistakable. He rushed to the front of his cage to peer up through the gap in the roof.
‘They’re looking for us!’ said Steven excitedly.
The other children didn’t move.
‘Yes,’ said Jess Took dully. In the cage at the end, Pete Knox started to cry, which set Maisie off.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Steven, but before anyone could answer, the huntsman came back.
He took Jess next. She shrieked and tried to cover her face but he easily pushed her hands aside and clapped his glove over her nose and mouth. She went limp.
Then the others, one by one.
Pete kicked and howled and then succumbed like a kitten in a bucket of water. Steven shouted his name even after he disappeared from view – one arm dangling off the trolley. He fought panic.
The helicopter was closer now. The sound of the blades came to him in waves. It was criss-crossing the moor. Searching. For
‘One, two, three – Help!’ he shouted. ‘One, two, three!’ Maisie and Kylie just looked at him.
He had to give the helicopter a sign. He looked about his cage desperately. There was nothing to use. Steven gripped the top of the gate and hauled himself up. He pushed his head through the gap where the huntsman dropped the meat, swearing as his right ear tore. He tried to get his arm through as well, but couldn’t. His shoulder was too lumpy. He pulled his head back down, scraping his bloody ear again, then waved his right hand in the air until the fingers of his left gave way and he fell back to the floor.
‘Don’t! You’ll make him angry.’
Steven turned on Jonas Holly. The policeman hugged his knees to his chest, visibly trembling, his eyes huge and full of tears. Steven slapped the fence between them, making Jonas flinch.
‘What’s
Jonas closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears.
Steven kicked the fence once more, then turned around. The huntsman was right there – his green hand already reaching for him. Steven threw an arm up but he was too late.
There was barely a struggle. The fumes filled his head and he staggered and scraped his knees. He tried to get up and the huntsman helped him.
Helped him to his traitor’s feet.
Helped him on to the trolley and rolled him up the walkway and through the big shed to the flesh room.
Reynolds had asked to go with the chopper crew. They’d had several flights across the moor already, but he felt sure that his being there would make all the difference to the success of the operation.
The helmet they gave him smelled of sweat, and he grimaced as he tugged it down over his well-shampooed hair.
The co-pilot, whose name was Lee, shouted instructions at his face as though the blades were already whirring. They weren’t.
Reynolds made the mistake of asking about parachutes and everybody laughed so hard that he had to pretend it had been a joke.
He was no expert in aerodynamics, but as he approached the chopper he thought it looked too big for its rotor, and highly unlikely to take off. The closer he got, the more unsettled he felt. The paintwork was scratched all around the door as if it had been bumped in a car park; the vinyl seats were cracked and torn in places. The floor was grimy and utilitarian, with strips of wood screwed to it for grip – like the wooden slats in the changing rooms at the old public pool he’d been taken to as a child. Verruca city. He couldn’t help thinking he’d have more confidence in the whole aircraft if it had only been carpeted, the way an airliner was. Reynolds didn’t like to see the inner workings of things. It made him too conscious of how much there was to go wrong.
His seatbelt was frayed.
He should have sent Rice. Too late.
Leaving the ground was like climbing a rope ladder – a dizzy, lurching ascent. Lee and the pilot, whose name he hadn’t caught, were up front. He was behind them with a jolly, overweight air-support officer who had been introduced as Tuckshop. Reynolds couldn’t bring himself to use the name, but tried to sit as close to his own door as possible to stop the chopper yawing to one side.
They had barely left the big H before they were over Exmoor – the neat fields and Toytown cows giving way to brown patches and yellow and purple swathes of gorse and heather.
They passed over ponies, which did not look up, and deer that scattered. Reynolds peered between the seats at the thermal-imaging screen and watched a small group of them explode in a fountain of bright dots, like Pong gone mad.
