'But what else can I do, Hoke? How else can I survive?' She looked beaten, her strength gone, her breathing still unsteady. 'They'll kill us right here if we don't go with them.'
'My dear Muriel, of course we wouldn't do that.' Hubble had dropped the 'Miss Drake' in favour of a more paternal address, and there was something obscene in the wheedling tone he mistook for charm.
'We're the same, you and I, and your father was a valued friend. Whatever your decision, I promise you'll not be harmed in any way.'
And if you believe that, Muriel, I thought to myself, you deserve all the hell you'll get from this ghoul. But the banter was okay, all this talk was giving the stragglers time to reach the walkway. Raising my head, I looked past those in front and saw two Blackshirts stumbling through the doors at the far end. They had to be the last of the pack judging by the numbers here. Okay. Time for the finale.
I lifted the canvas bag from my neck and flipped it open. Four steps took me to the girders on the inner side of the footbridge and, using a diagonal strut for support, I pulled myself up onto the handrail that ran along its length. Over their heads I could see a shadowy figure beyond the glass half of the distant doors.
Good. Cissie had left her hiding place and was sliding an iron bar through the handles on the other side of the double doors, locking them good and tight She wouldn't have done it unless the stairs were empty, so I silently wished her God speed on her journey down.
The Blackshirts were watching me uneasily, unsure of what I was up to and waiting for their chance to rush me; I kept the pistol levelled at Hubble, hoping that would hold them back.
'You got a choice, Muriel,' I said, much calmer than I felt and keeping an eye on the crowd rather than looking at her. 'Come with me, or stay with this vermin and die.'
That confused her even more, but there was no time for explanations. McGruder let go of Hubble to take a couple of steps towards me; the gun redirected at his head gave him second thoughts.
'It'd give me great pleasure,' I let him know, and his agitation settled. He was still too close for comfort though, and I decided it was now or never. But it was my turn to be surprised when Hubble began to make odd gagging noises, as though something was stuck in his throat.
He clutched at his neck, his black fingers shivering, pulling open his shirt, his body starting to convulse.
His eyes looked as though they were about to pop from their sockets, and they were bleeding from the corners; blood was pouring from his ears also, and then from his open mouth. He stooped even more as McGruder reached for him, and then began to squeal, an awful drawn-out sound that was more animal than human. His hands grabbed at his chest, then his stomach, then a shoulder, his body contorting as he tried to touch the pain. His black pants were drenched as liquid poured from his lower orifices, and I knew it was blood that was soaking them, that blocked arteries inside him were bursting, discharging their dammed-up load; soon other, smaller veins were breaking, discharging their flow, and we could see the darkness spreading beneath his sallow skin. His muscles cramped, major organs began to falter, then fail. The moment he had dreaded and had known was approaching fast was finally here. It was time for Hubble to die.
His squealing became a high, keening scream that ended when a fierce gusher of blood exploded from his mouth to splatter the floor and those close to him. His dying was violent and it was horrific, and we watched as if mesmerized. That is, we watched until I decided that no person, no matter how twisted, how evil, deserved such an agonizing death. I shot him between those leaking eyes and he dropped without another murmur.
Everything happened fast then, and I moved like a jack rabbit to keep ahead of it all. A howl went up from the crowd and McGruder went down on his knees beside Hubble's blood-oozing body. Others hurled themselves at me and by the gleam in their eyes I could tell they wanted to drag me down and tear me to pieces with their bare hands. I lashed out with my foot, kicking one in the jaw - that same, healthy-looking guy whose face I'd slammed the door against downstairs - sending him reeling back into the mob and giving me time to pull something from the canvas bag hanging loose from my shoulder.
Holding it in my left hand, I took careful aim along the walkway with my right, my elbow looped around the iron strut, the extra height on the rail giving me the angle I needed. I pumped three rapid shots into the blue-uniformed corpse on the chair surrounded by covered boxes.
Those shots did two things at once: the noise stunned the Blackshirts enough to paralyse them momentarily, and the corpse tumbled over sideways onto the floor, releasing the lever of the hand grenade it had been sitting on - I'd carefully pulled the pin earlier that morning, y'see. I had a few seconds to get off the walkway before the grenade exploded and set off the dynamite inside those covered boxes.
One more thing to do before I left the scene: I dropped the pistol, shrugged off the bag on my shoulder, drew the pin of the grenade in my left hand and tossed it into the crowd, close to the disguised explosives on the other side of the walkway. Then I was gone.
Dizziness hit me as soon as I'd squeezed through those struts and was on the outside of the footbridge.
The river and south pier below seemed to leap up at me, the sudden vast emptiness around me nearly making me lose balance. But I fought against it and quickly slipped down through the gap between the walkway floor and outer ornamental rail, my foot finding the top edge of the raised bridge just below.
Those few seconds I'd needed to escape had passed and I wondered if the grenades were going to blow
- there was no way of knowing what those years in storage had done to their mechanisms - and I had time to look up and see Muriel's white, frightened face peering down at me through the girders, then someone scrambling past her before I ducked under the footbridge.
The explosions came and the world around me erupted, the first boom mingling with the second. I clung to the great bascule as it shuddered beneath me, and the air thundered with the blasts, the roof above my head juddering wildly, threatening to collapse on top of me, now another blast joining the first two, the sound alone almost sending me reeling into the waters so far below. Flames shot out from the footbridge, only the thick concrete a few feet above my head protecting me, and huge balls of fire rolled into the sky.
I screamed against the noise and my own horror, aware that Muriel's body had been carried ahead of those flames, narrowly missing the opposite walkway to fall away through the air, only one arm outstretched, the other one missing, her clothes torn from her but her skin burning. It was a fleeting glimpse, but one that was fused into my brain, a sight I knew even then would never fade - if I lived through this. I shut my eyes, but the image was even stronger.
I began to slip, the trembling of iron and concrete beneath me increasing, so that I had to open my eyes again to find ridges, projections, anything I could cling to. Debris of all sorts - bits of wood, fragments of iron, pieces of bodies, whole bodies - was flying outwards, tumbling almost leisurely to the river below, and smoke, fire, and dust billowed into the air. The top of the bascule was wide enough for me to lay on, and metal ridges and holes containing bolts that locked both sides together when the bridge was lowered helped me cling there while the entire structure shook and groaned. I was afraid the whole bloody thing would come down because when I'd hidden the dynamite along the walkway in the twilight hours of dawn, Cissie helping me haul it all up those tower stairs, I'd no idea how powerful it was or how unstable. Like the grenades, it'd been in storage a long time, so it was unpredictable. Well, now I was finding out, and I was scared as hell.