And then Alice saw an enormous shape rise up out of the gap. A woman, blood in her eyes, skirts flying. An enormous, powerful-looking woman.
Marlowe cried out. “Brynt! Brynt!” he cried. And the huge woman spun around, looking for the voice, her silver braid flying, and Alice recognized her, the woman from the circus, the tattooed lady, Marlowe’s protector.
The litch was thrashing wildly in her grip, flipping about, its claws flailing. Alice saw it writhe and clamber around the woman’s arm, quicksilver fast, fluid as a weasel, and get on her back and start tearing at her flesh. Alice could see gobbets of meat coming off in the creature’s claws and the big woman was twisting, reaching up, trying to get a grip on the thing. Then she had it, and she dragged it over her head and smashed it onto the roof. But when she leaned back, it was clinging to her arm, and came up with her, its teeth snapping. It leaped again off her and forward, as if to get to Marlowe, and the huge woman, Brynt, threw herself forward and again caught it by one ankle.
Alice was trying to get a clear shot at the creature but couldn’t. And then the woman raised her face and looked at Alice. They locked eyes for only an instant. There was nothing in her face, no expression at all. The litch was snapping and twisting, trying to get free. The big woman grabbed its leg with her other hand also, no longer holding on to anything, and she threw all her weight sideways.
“No!” Alice cried out.
For a long impossible moment the litch hung on. The woman, Brynt, was banging hugely against the side of the carriage. The litch snarled and looked at the boy with desperation, but Brynt’s weight was too much, and then the creature that was Walter Laster was ripped bodily off the roof and the two of them, woman and litch, were blown out over the gap and were gone.
“Brynt!” Marlowe was screaming. “Brynt!”
Alice grabbed the boy, struggling in her arms.
Through his windblown hair she saw Jacob Marber, striding now over the carriage roof, purposeful, at speed, coming for them. A darkness fell over the sun.
* * *
Margaret Harrogate opened her eyes in agony.
Every part of her body hurt. There was torn paper sticking to the blood on her hands and her belly and something was wrong with her legs. She tried to stand, wobbled, fell back. Tried again. Groaned and peered woozily around.
Walter was gone.
The coach was quiet. In the dimness, she could feel through the floor the rear trucks rattling at speed over the tracks. She got to her knees, clutching her belly, then got to her feet. She stumbled for the door. She had to find Walter. Had to warn Coulton, warn the children.
Somehow she climbed over the couplings, into the baggage coach. It too was a mess. And somehow she staggered through that, making her slow agonizing way, and crossed the couplings again in the roaring wind, and entered the side corridor of the carriage where she’d drugged and tied Walter up, back in that fog-lit station in London.
That seemed like a lifetime ago. The carriage she found herself in, now, was in ruins. Doors were splintered open, ripped from their frames, windowpanes were shattered. Wind whistled through. There were bodies lying in the corridor, throats opened, blood greasy and black underfoot. Halfway down the carriage she slid in some congealed mess and just caught herself, gasping in pain.
Some of those lying there weren’t quite dead and they moaned or cried softly to her as she passed. But she didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, not until she’d reached the crowded third-class carriage and glimpsed the rows of passengers still in their seats, asphyxiated, faces leeched and gray, their eyes bulging from their sockets, some of them still clutching their belongings to their chests.
She found Coulton lying facedown in the aisle, his skin white and chalky, shriveled, like a hand left too long in the bath, as if all the blood had been drained from him.
“Oh no, no, no, no,” she whispered, cradling his head in her lap. The blood from her own wounds was getting on his skin, on his face. She closed his eyelids, leaving a bloody thumbprint on each. That was when she heard a scraping sound above her, and she looked up, uncomprehending, and something crashed mightily and the carriage shuddered and rocked side to side, and then she understood. They were on the roof.
She got painfully back up, made her way forward to the platform. The wind ripped at her. She fumbled across to the next car and gripped the railing hard, her teeth clenched, and looked up. She could see Walter, scrabbling and clawing at someone, a huge woman, her shredded skirts rippling out around her there in the wind. She heard Alice Quicke shouting from above the forward carriage, and she tried to think.