The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived (37 page)

Norman
vaulted the low wall between the graveyard and the vicarage garden, plodded
over to the Rune and glared at him, face to face. ‘Can’t see me, can you? Can
you see this?’

Norman
raised the hand-grenade, waggled it before the Rune’s eyes. The Rune’s eyes
stared through it, as if fixed upon some point at the rear of the grenade.
Unpleasant habit that.

‘Anyone
home?’ Norman leaned forward and donked the Rune on top of his great shaven
head. Not hard, just enough to say ‘anyone home?’

The
Rune’s face remained without expression. His eyes still focused on some point
known only to himself. He slid gently down the steamer chair and bellyflopped
into a flower-bed.

This
particular Rune was dead as dead can be.

Norman
stared down at the corpse.

And
then he became gripped by a terrible fear.

This
was a dead Rune, and the only good Rune was a dead Rune, so to speak. Except
not so, because a dead Rune, a ghost Rune, could grip a dead boy by the ear and
shake him all about.

Norman
released the trigger-release thingy, tucked the hand-grenade into the top left
waistcoat pocket of the terminated Rune.

‘Go out
with a bang, not a whimper,’ said Norman, making off at the double.

‘Make off this minute!’
the living Rune demanded. ‘That is an order. Get to it!’

‘Shan’t,’
said Boris. ‘You can’t make me. ‘I can shoot you.’

‘Won’t
help anything. You don’t know how to fly the saucer.

Tick tock, went the town
hall clock.

‘Five minutes and counting
down,’ said the large controller.

‘Duck your head,’ said
Jack Bradshaw. ‘There’s going to be a bang.’

‘Booom!’
went the Rune in the vicarage garden, spreading bones and guts and
ichor — and moving swiftly on.

‘Gag and gasp,’ and
‘Thelma, Louise.’ The tall boy’s eyes were open.

‘I know
why you dumped us,’ said Thelma. ‘But we thought you could use a little help.
So we brought everybody.’

Cornelius
struggled up, giddy and sick. The town’s folk crowding the armada of boats
cheered. ‘Good one,’ said the tall boy. ‘What’s the time.’

‘Four
minutes to twelve,’ said Louise.

‘Then
blast the piers. Boris has tied grenades to them. Shine the searchlights. Shoot
at the grenades.’

The armada
wasn’t too far from the piers now. In fact, it was a bit too near to them
really.

‘There,’
cried searchlight sweepers zeroing in.

‘And
there,’ cried others.

‘Shoot!’
cried Cornelius.

‘Care
for a go yourself?’ asked Thelma, hefting a decent-sized bazooka from the deck.
‘We took a few prisoners on the way and grabbed a bit of hardware.’

‘Will
you marry me?’ asked Cornelius, taking the bazooka and going down on one knee.

‘Only
if you can get the Reverend Cheesefoot to officiate.’

‘Fire!’

The
tall boy whopped the trigger, tumbled from the recoil. The bazooka shell swept
over the bay and tore into the west pier.

‘Booom!’ went another
explosion. This one at The Universal Reincarnation Company.

From
the sizeable hole that now yodelled in the wall, issued Jack Bradshaw and Old
Claude.

‘Where
are we?’ asked the ancient.

‘My new
office,’ howled Jack. ‘You’ve blown it to pieces. My new office.’

‘I
didn’t blow it to pieces. You blew it to pieces.’

‘It’s
all your fault.’

‘It’s
bloody not.’

‘It
bloody is.’

‘You bloody will.’

‘I
bloody won’t.’

These
bloodys were being exchanged in the flying saucer.

‘I
don’t have time for this,’ said Hugo Rune, reaching down a great hand and
fastening a ferocious grip upon those parts of Boris’ anatomy, which, had He
given just a little more thought to when He worked on the original design for
males, God would have placed on the
inside.

‘Aaaaaagh!’
screamed Boris. ‘You dirty pervert. Unhand my anemones.
[26]
Aaaagh!’

‘Fly
the saucer,’ barked Rune into his ear.

‘All
right, I’ll fly it. I’ll fly it. Aaaagh!’

Booom! went the east pier.

Booom!
went the west pier.

Turning,
billowing, flames rising, fun-fair bits and bobs, the ghost train, the
helter-skelter, countless Sony the Hedgehog video machines (good riddance),
candyfloss stalls, a decorative shell shop. Deck planks. The gents’ toilet.

Rolling,
bursting.

Armada
men and women jumping from the decks into the storm-lashed sea. Wind hurled
debris. Mushroom clouds shredded.

Lightning
flash.

Thunder
roar.

Struggling
shapes on the wildly bucking white motor launch.

‘Did we
do it?’ asked Louise. ‘Is it done?’

Cornelius
gaped into the gale. ‘It’s not done, the piers are still standing.’

Victorian
built those piers. Take a lot more than that to have them down. Made to last.
Sturdy. Solid.

‘To the
beach!’ cried Cornelius. ‘We must try to knock the pylons down — disconnect the
cables. Do something.’

Two and
a half minutes to twelve.

‘I just knew that wouldn’t
work.’ Tuppe was now very puffed on the crest of Druid’s Tor. Very good view of
the bay from up there. Even with the mighty storm and everything. ‘It has to be
done from up here. It really does.’

And
there existed the means.

An
abandoned bulldozer.

What
chance that the keys might still be in the dashboard then?

With
two minutes left?

‘Thanks
be. The keys are still in the dashboard,’ said Tuppe, scrambling up. ‘Only trouble
is’, he keyed the ignition and the engine roared, ‘I won’t be able to see where
I’m going and work the pedals at the same time. Still where there’s a will, and
all that sort of stuff. Which radio mast to demolish? The one with its cables
leading to the west pier, I think.’

‘This pylon here.’
Townsfolk from the armada, many in a most horrified state having viewed the
destruction of Skelington (a man with a bogus Rolex on his wrist wept over the
burnt-out remnants of a car upon the beach), were gathered on the prom beside
the east pier. (Handy.)

Cornelius
had found a pair of sturdy bolt-cutters. ‘I’ll shin up this pylon,’ he shouted.
‘Cut the powerline. Then if we all work together we might be able to rock the
pylon. Push it over.’

‘Sounds
about as unlikely as anything else,’ said a lady in a straw hat (it was a
different lady). ‘But why not. We’ve got…‘ she had a little peep at her
wristwatch, ‘at least a full minute left.’

Cornelius
kissed Thelma. Well, you do in times like this, when every second counts. It’s
a tradition, or an old charter, or the ‘aaaaah’ factor, or something.

‘Get a
move on,’ Thelma told him and the tall boy was off up the pylon.

‘Take it up! Take it up!’
shouted Rune.

‘I am
taking it up,’ winced Boris. ‘You have to do a system’s check. Stabilize the
ionizers so as not to risk positronic overload. Don’t you know anything about
the trans-perambulation of pseudo-cosmic antimatter?

Twist!
went the hand of Hugo Rune.

‘All
cleared for take off!’ went Boris, in a very high voice.

‘Gotcha!’ said Norman,
creeping up on the saucer. He couldn’t see Boris, of course (too short), but he
could
see that big bald head.

‘There’s the bastard,’
whispered Old Claude, spying out the big bald head bent over the screen of the
big Karmascope. ‘Now just you leave this to me.’

‘Where
did you get that three-foot-long, high-energy electric cattle prod from?’ Jack
Bradshaw enquired.

‘Same
place as the sulphur, sonny. Same place as the sulphur.’

Cornelius had made it to
the top of the pylon and was edging his way towards the strange-looking
ceramic-bell-sort-of-jobbie arrangement which carried the cable (like they do).
The wind and the storm weren’t helping. Cornelius shielded his eyes. Gazed out
to sea. And then he saw something, lit momentarily upon the horizon. Another
snap of lightning, and there it was once more: a thin line of white running
straight across where sea met sky. Now what could that be? An early dawn? The
tall boy didn’t think so. He edged along and climbed across and straddled the
big cable.

Roar and rev, went the big
bulldozer, turning in another circle. ‘There’d be a knack to this,’ croaked
Tuppe. ‘But not one I possess.’

‘I’ll have you, you
bastard.’ The voice of Norman, not Claude. The dead boy leapt up onto the
saucer’s rim, unpinning his hand-grenade.

‘Going
up!’ went Boris, pulling back on the joystick.

‘Whoa!’
went Norman seeking something to cling to with his spare hand.

The mechanical gubbins in
the town hail clock began to clank their ratcheted wheels and hoist weights up
chains and do all those things that clocks do preparatory
[27]
to striking.

The Murphy bolt-cutter bit
into the cable. But there was a lot of cable and it wasn’t that big a
bolt-cutter.

Cornelius
strained, the bolt-cutter chewed, beneath him the town’s folk grew restless.

A lady
in a straw hat pointed out to sea. ‘What is that?’ she asked, viewing the line
of white that Cornelius had seen.

A line
of white which was now a good deal nearer.

‘It’s—’

Thelma
stared.

Louise
stared.

Everybody
stared.

The
lady in the straw hat said, ‘That’s a tidal wave, that is. Typical, isn’t it?
Last thing you need at a time like this is a tidal wave.’

Tidal
wave!
The cry went up.

It
reached Cornelius.

‘Oh
no!’ cried he, chomping away with the bolt-cutter. ‘Thelma! Louise! Head for
the Tor. Everyone, run for the Tor.’

Everyone
ran.

‘Cornelius,
come on!’ shouted Thelma. ‘I’ll catch you up. Run, just run. Thelma and Louise
joined in the running. ‘Race you to the top,’ said Louise.

And on
the top Tuppe’s bulldozer finally got its act together and trundled towards the
pylon.

But the
seconds were ticking right away. Tick, tock, tick.

Crackle, crackle, crackle,
came a burst of electrical discharging.

CRACKLE,
CRACKLE, CRACKLE.

38

The large controller
turned at the sound of this crackling.

‘You!’
said he, like you would. (Well, you
would.)
‘Me,’ said Old Claude. ‘And
it’s time for you to get your medicine.’

‘Grab
him, Jack,’ said the large controller.

‘Me?’
said Jack. ‘Stuff that. You threw me down the lift
shaft.’

‘Good
boy,’ said Claude, waggling the crackling cattle prod. ‘Chunky, wallop that old
fool, will you?’

‘Bally
won’t,’ said Chunky, folding his arms. ‘Bally murdered me, you did.’

‘Where
are your friends when you need them, eh?’ asked Old Claude. ‘Right here and
angry,’ said the voice of another Rune. New to the afterlife, this one, wearing
a suit. The Transglobe American Publishing version, newly poisoned and later
exploded in the vicarage garden.

‘Bravo,’
said the large controller, as this Rune grabbed the ancient from behind and bear-hugged
his arms to his sides.

‘No,’
shrieked Old Claude, as the final seconds ticked away and the cattle prod spun
from his fingers to land at Jack’s feet. ‘Kill him, sonny. Kill them both
before they kill everyone. Living and dead.’

‘What?’
went Jack.

‘That’s
their plan,’ agreed Chunky. ‘Bastards, they are.

‘All in
the twinkling of an eye.’ The large controller reached forward and dipped his
big fat hand towards the blood-red button which is known and loved for this
kind of thing.

‘No!’
Jack picked up the cattle prod, flicked the switch and flung himself at the
large controller.