The Beating of His Wings by Paul Hoffman Read Free Book Online

his kind of courage was not bravery. Neither was he a fool and he was at once alert to the peculiarity of Cale’s insolence. Cale was one of his victims and he knew how victims behaved, but for the second time that night they weren’t behaving as they ought to and, to be fair to Meatyard, as they usually did. Cale was behaving oddly and in an odd way.
    ‘We can all come away from this,’ Cale lied.
    ‘How?’
    ‘We say that it was Gromek who took the girl and that all of us, you included, ashamed to let such a thing take place, were forced to drag him off her and he died in the struggle. The girl will back that up.’ He looked over his shoulder, still moving forward slowly. ‘Won’t you?’
    ‘No, I fucking won’t!’ the girl shouted back. ‘I want him hanged.’
    ‘She’ll see reason, she’s just upset.’ All the time Cale was closing in on the suspicious but hopeful Meatyard, his mind fizzing as he tried to think what to do next.
    ‘They nearly squashed his neck off,’ said Meatyard. ‘No one will believe he got killed by accident. I’ll take my chances.’
    He backheeled the door again and the first syllable of a scream for help was already out when Cale hit him in the throat with all his strength. Unfortunately for Cale and the lunatics, all his strength didn’t amount to much. It was the precision of the blow that hurt Meatyard, that made him jerk to the left and caused the back of Little Brian’s head to knock the rusty blade sticking out of his chest. In agony from the knife, he dropped Little Brian. Cale hit the heel of his hand into the middle of Meatyard’s chest. When he was ten years old either blow would have dropped Meatyard as if he were standing on a trap door, but he was not ten any more.Meatyard lashed out and missed, but the follow-on landed a clout on the side of Cale’s head. He fell as if he’d been hit by a bear. The blood pounded in his ears and what little strength he had in his arms was draining away to pins and needles. Meatyard took two steps and would have given Cale a kick big enough to land him in the next world, but there was still some brawn left in Cale’s legs so he kicked away Meatyard’s standing foot and he went down with a wallop on the wooden floor. Luckily for Cale, Meatyard was winded and this gave him time to get to his feet. His head was full of wasps, his arms shaky. He had one punch left in him, but not a good one.
    In the struggle the lunatics had backed away, as if Cale emerging to take charge had robbed them of the collective will that had brought them this far. It was the girl who saved them. ‘Help him,’ she shouted, rushing forward and leaping on top of Meatyard. This decided Meatyard on his most desperate plan, one he’d thought up while his flesh was crawling as he was made to watch poor Gromek choke to death. He grabbed hold of the girl and swung her like a club at the three men barring his way to the large window on the other side of the room. They let him go because it was keeping him away from the door that mattered. Anywhere else he moved was a trap – so they let him back away to the window and shaped up to surround him for the last time. Earlier, desperation and a lack of anything to lose had given them a reckless courage but now none of them wanted to get their neck broken when more caution would see this to its end. So they gave him more time to back away than they might otherwise have done.
    ‘Quickly,’ said Cale, on the verge of fainting as the blood swirled in his ears. He felt as if his very brains would burst. Most of them didn’t hear him. Meatyard made his way to thewindow and the lunatics stood and watched. He was, after all, going nowhere. The window was nailed down but it wasn’t barred because it was on the fourth floor and some sixty feet from the ground. Meatyard knew this, but he also knew, from his voluntary efforts to get on Gromek’s good side by cleaning the ward, that there was a rope anchored to the wall