“Not a word.”
They were in the third floor of a once-exclusive apartment complex, looking out through net curtain at the wide street below. The trees and bushes down there, untrimmed and unchecked since Doomsday, had gone wild. Expensive cars sat on flat tyres along the centre of the street. And parked on the opposite side of the road, a dark blue Land Rover. She could just make out the driver sitting inside keeping the engine running, and outside stood two heavily-armed Choppers, and the man.
Rook's retinue of birds remained out of view. Lucy-Anne saw a few pigeons and, high overhead, a family of buzzards circled.
She watched Rook watching them, and wondered what he was here to do. Was he a spy for Reaper, gathering as much information as he could about the Choppers and what they were doing? Or was this something else?
Shouting. She returned her attention to the street, just as one of the Choppers shoved the man forward. He was crying and shivering. He looked very thin. Lucy-Anne wanted to reach out to help him, but knew she could not.
Rook had slipped his hand beneath the net curtain and flipped a catch, and Lucy-Anne held her breath as he eased the window open.
“Get on with it!” she heard the Chopper shout. “It's your last chance, you stupid bastard. You know what you've got to do, so do it!”
The other Chopper said something Lucy-Anne didn't catch, but the loud one shouted him down.
“You saw what he did to me in the back of the Rover. Just look! Bit me!” He held out his gloved hand, displaying nothing. He nursed his rifle in his other hand, barrel never wavering far from the snivelling man.
The man faced away from the Choppers, and that's how Lucy-Anne knew he was not feigning the tears. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen anyone looking so wretched.
“Go on! Do it! Do it!”
The man squeezed his eyes closed and seemed to gather himself, and for a moment silence descended across the street. Lucy-Anne held her breath in anticipation of what she was about to see. What can he do? she thought. But nothing happened, and the man slumped down to his knees and started crying again.
“Right, well, another waste of bloody time,” the Chopper said. “Got the camera ready?” His colleague chuckled and nodded as the soldier raised his rifle, sighting on the back of the man's head.
Rook glanced sidelong at Lucy-Anne, eyes glittering, as if testing her.
She screamed, “Leave him alone!”
Rook chuckled, then grabbed her arm and pulled her back from the window.
Machine-gun fire raked the building's fa?ade, shattering windows, bullets ricocheting, the sound unbelievable where it was channeled back and forth between the high buildings. Lucy-Anne curled into a ball and watched bullets stitching the plaster ceiling above her.
Rook was crawling towards the back of the room, and as he knelt up he whistled, a high-pitched sound which seemed so unnatural coming from a human mouth. He seemed suddenly more alive than she had seen him before, and for a moment as he raised his arms she thought he might take flight, mimicking the birds he seemed so close to, and over which he exerted such control.
The gunfire halted.
“The man!” Lucy-Anne said, but Rook was only grinning. He whistled again, attracting another burst of gunfire. They were shooting blind. The Choppers had no idea who was watching them, or from where.
The light from outside suddenly faded, and even beneath the staccato gunfire she could hear the descent of birds.