Walking Dead Read Online Free Page B

out, closed his front door and then realised that he has left all his keys on the hall table.
    â€œDo none of these windows open, Doctor?” called the Prime Minister. “I want to shout at that idle ruffian.”
    â€œThey’re all sealed, sir. The nearest one which opens is out in the corridor.”
    â€œStir him up for me, please, Captain.”
    Foxe, going towards the group in the logic-room, passed Captain Angiah going in the other direction. The Captain’s face had a look like the death-mask of a saint, stiff and drained of all emotion, but still somehow bearing the print of ecstasy. He must have been moving fast, for by the time Foxe was standing beside Dreiser and gazing down at the sleeping gardener, the corridor window was swinging open. Its glass hid the shape behind it, then a fine-boned hand steadied a big pistol on the sill. The snap of the shot was sharp and deep. The gardener’s hat leaped like a large springing beetle. For a moment Foxe thought that Captain Angiah’s idea of stirring a man up was to shoot him dead, but at last the gardener blinked. His head craned, blearily. Still supine he reached for his hat, stared at it and poked a dark finger through the bullet hole in its brim, then peered, with all the whites of his eyes showing, at the stillness around him. The corridor window was shut by now. Doctor Trotter was grinning, watching the scene with narrowed eyes, but the group in the laboratory must have been invisible behind the tinted glass.
    The gardener convulsed to his feet and ran a few steps, stopped, scuttled back for his rake.
    â€œThe rake will come apart in his hands,” said Foxe.
    It did, of course. The man stared for a dazed instant at its fallen head, tossed the handle down, ran to his satchel, grabbed a small object out and hurled it into the trees like a grenade. Before it had fallen he was scampering, head ducked, round the corner of the building.
    â€œHow you know that?” said Mrs Trotter. “The rake break when you say. How you know that? Whad that thing he throw away, Foxy?”
    Nobody had called Foxe that since his schooldays. Ancient miseries, long thought dead, twitched. Unthinkingly he responded in the old way, with the schoolboy’s shield of casual apathy.
    â€œA snake’s head, I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said.
    She became rigid. Her arm began to rise stiffly towards her spectacles, as though she were about to unveil her own counter-armaments.
    â€œDidn’t I tell you all science is one, Mother?” said the Prime Minister, laying his hand on the rising arm and stilling it. “Doctor Foxe, you never told me the end of your story.”
    â€œWhich story, sir?”
    â€œThe drug which made your rats virtuous. What became of it?”
    â€œSG 19? I don’t know, sir. I don’t even know what it was supposed to do, but I expect it was a dead end. We get a lot of them, I’m afraid.”

2
    F oxe’s bike was a lady’s model, ancient, black and absurdly heavy. It looked as though it had been engineered to carry the gaunt governesses of the children of English colonial administrators, forty years back. Its bearings were far from frictionless, and even with seat and handles raised to their limits it was a couple of sizes too small for Foxe. But it had a single invaluable asset, which was that it wasn’t worth stealing. The machine he’d bought on arrival in Hog’s Cay had vanished in twenty-four hours, and so had its smartish replacement, but this old beast remained faithful. Besides, as Foxe told Galdi (who drove the mile and a half to work each day in a 140 mph Alfa), if anybody did nick it he’d have a fair chance of tracking them by sound; its characteristic squeaks and rattles were audible a block away. He didn’t tell Galdi that he cycled because Lisa-Anna had persuaded him to take at least that amount of exercise in Vienna.
    Foxe coasted, clanking, down the