Huffman seemed to have a destination in mind. He ran adjacent to the buildings and didn’t look back. I could have shot him and had done, but I wanted him to hurt more than that. I ran after him.
He charged past the outbuildings, past the animal pens, and then swung to the right towards the large tin shed. I was fleeter than he was and had gained on him when I saw him duck into a doorway in the side of the building.
I didn’t want to shoot him dead, but I was otherwise unarmed and there was no way I was entering that building with my gun in my waistband. I drew my SIG, racked the slide, but kept my finger alongside the trigger guard so there was no accidental discharge.
Huffman’s right arm was severely wounded, but he could still use that damn razor. Even so, I went after him without concern for the blade. Immediately inside the building, I put my back to the wall and swept the open space with my gun.
It was dim inside the building. The stench was the first thing that hit me, then my gaze registered the swinging chains and steel stockades, and lastly my ears picked out the rattle of metal and the scuff of feet. I couldn’t see Huffman, but he couldn’t have got too far ahead of me. To my right some of the chains swayed as though pushed aside in his flight. I went after him and the odour of rotting flesh washed over me like a wave.
I’d smelled this charnel house stink before. It was the kind of stench that hung over the village of slaughtered peasants I’d come across in the Indian Ocean or the mass grave I’d discovered in the Balkans. Blood and innards had been spilled here. I was in a goddamn slaughterhouse.
More chains swung slowly on my right, and I veered that way. High up in the walls, just below the corrugated steel roof, were narrow windows. They weren’t there to let in light but to ventilate the building. Instead, I saw creeping tendrils of smoke drifting in. The smoke twisted and coiled like serpents and shafts of dim light were all that illuminated the building, ever-changing strobes between the patterns of smoke.
A clink of metal sounded from somewhere ahead of me, like a door latch lifting and falling. Huffman, the son of a bitch, was trying to give me the slip out of another exit. I rushed in that direction and saw a large silver oblong structure barring my way which I knew instinctively was some sort of industrial-sized cold room. Had Huffman gone in there, hoping to hide from me?
Gun in hand I stepped up to the door. The latch was half open. Cocking an ear to the door, I listened, even though it was a fruitless exercise. The structure by its very nature was surrounded by a soundproofed vacuum. There was nothing for it: the only way of clearing the room was to go inside.
Ordinarily the door would emit a sucking noise as the rubber seal was broken and pressure was displaced in the room, but the door opened without sound. It told me the door had been opened recently, or there was no power to the refrigerated room. I decided I was right on both counts. I peeled the door wide and stared into darkness, my gun poised to shoot. The stench wafting over me was rich with fresh blood.
Something rushed me from the darkness.
Despite my desire to make Huffman suffer, I fired a quick volley of shots into the figure coming at me like a phantom out of its tomb.
Even as I fired, I knew that it wasn’t Huffman. This body had no arms or legs and was swinging from a large hook jammed through its ribs. It looked like Huffman had been there, though, because there was a huge bloodless gash in its throat.
Though I was only a split second in understanding, that was long enough for Huffman to leap out of the shadows at me. He held the razor loosely in his right hand, but that wasn’t my major concern. In his left was a large butcher’s hook. He grasped a wooden handle crossways in his palm, while the gleaming steel hook jutted from between his two middle fingers. It was easily a foot long, giving him a far greater reach than I had. I back-pedalled into the open room.
‘Gonna kill you!?’
He slashed at my head and only the barrel of my SIG halted the hook from holing me like a bowling ball.
There was no time for shouting challenges or curses of my own. Huffman was a man possessed by a demon. He rained blows on me with the hook, then slashed at my body with the razor. My gun halted the hook, but there was only a jacket and shirt between me and the razor blade. There was a stinging pain across my abdomen.
I scrambled away, dimly aware that he’d only nicked me. I knew that because my intestines weren’t pooling around my feet.
Chains bounced off my shoulders as I dodged, then my lower spine banged up against one of the steel stock-pens. The bars formed a right angle a yard to my left, blocking my way out. Huffman thought he had me penned in like the animals that once died here, but I just flipped over the bars and landed ankle-deep in cow dung. Huffman’s hook struck sparks from the metal bar. I lifted my gun, but I was still reluctant to shoot. I powered backwards and Huffman followed me, vaulting the stock-pen bars and landing where I’d just been.
His razor was a silver crescent cutting the air in front of my face. Swerving round it, I slashed the barrel of my gun at his head, but missed. My heel skidded in the crap, and I heard Huffman’s exultant shout. He came after me, ripped upwards with the hook and the point caught in the trigger guard of my gun and snatched it out of my hand.
Should have shot the bastard, I told myself. Then it was too late for self-admonishment: I had to stop him or die.
His arm went up, the wicked point of the hook poised to slam into my skull. I snatched at the dung on the floor and threw a handful of it into his face. He cried out, blinking to clear his eyes, and I rammed a foot into his stomach, throwing him back against the bars.
Huffman shouted wordlessly, just a ragged scream of fury. He slashed the hook one way, the razor the other, arms like a windmill. Blood from his punctured bicep spattered on my face. He swung again, and this time I dodged inside the hook and jammed the sole of my boot into his extended knee. The patella popped and Huffman staggered in pain. Then I drove my stiffened palm into his nose, smashing the cartilage. In the dim light I caught a flash of white and knew that his eyes were rolling up into his skull. But though semi-conscious he wasn’t finished. Instinct made him slash at me again with the hook and I’d no recourse but throw out my right arm to avoid disembowelment. The metal bar of the hook slammed against my arm, but luckily it was below the curve. I pushed my numb arm against the bar, jamming it inside the inner curve of the hook, and rammed the hook tight up against Huffman’s chest. My headbutt caught him directly in his already smashed nose even as I grappled with him for the razor. I wrapped my hand round his right fist.
Finally I found voice.
‘This is for both sisters,’ I said. ‘You’ll hurt neither of them again.’
‘I’m… better… than… you…’
‘No. You’re not.’
There was little strength in his damaged arm.
It was easy enough to wrench his hand up and swipe it across his own throat.
I slashed him so deeply that his throat opened like a second mouth. His trachea was exposed and gaping, his veins and arteries pulsed and jetted blood all over me. His eyes finished their roll upwards into his skull. Then he collapsed. My arm was still entangled in the hook and I felt it wrench away from me. I got a new hole in my jacket and a small nick in the meat of my forearm but I was happy enough at that.
Huffman kicked and shuddered a few times, but I paid him no heed. He was dead, just residual shock animating him. I found my gun ten feet away, but it was clogged with animal dung from where it had slid across the floor. I wiped the gun on Huffman’s shoulder, but I couldn’t trust it to fire without jamming. I stuffed it in my waistband at the small of my back then bent for another weapon.
Just as I did so, an almighty explosion rocked the slaughterhouse on its foundations. All around me the hanging chains rattled like a thousand snare drums.
Larry Bolan was still out there and this wouldn’t be finished until he was dead too.