Neville the Less

  * * *

  Out in the yards, the initial sonic boom of the loudspeaker had knocked a dozen fruit bats off their perches, defoliated a variety of less hardy bushes and cleared the air entirely of insects. It’d slammed the nearest victims - Hayley, Cookie, Robert and Beau - back against the Ute and hammered their ear drums with all the force of a spray gun against wet bread. Their spines had been scrunched, their bones had been rattled and their heads had been left clamped between rigid hands. Cookie, indeed, had crumbled to his knees, utterly convinced that the throat of God was being cleared just above the rooftops.

  But all that had followed the boom - the enormous awakening of Ava; the blood, the blood; nearly killed me; code wolf; get the gun out - it’d turned them all, in totally united and renewed fervour, toward the Duchy.