Too late, for Clarke had been hurled halfway across the room by the first bullet, then swatted from his feet and tossed against the wall by the second. His gun went flying as he crumpled to his knees against the bloodied wall, and his hand crept tremblingly to an area over his heart. There were two holes in his jacket, both turning red and dripping through his twitching fingers. ‘Shit!’ he whispered. And: ‘What – ?’
He fell forward on to his face, rolled over on to his side, and Trask and the Cleary girl went to their knees beside him. The Minister was on his feet, aghast, holding on to the edge of the desk to keep from falling; and Paxton had come forward, his gun still at the ready, face pale as a sheet of paper with holes punched out for eyes and mouth. ‘He had a gun.’ He gasped the words out. ‘He was going to use his gun!’
The Minister said, ‘I … I thought he was trying to hand it in. That’s what it looked like to me.’
Ben Trask cradled Clarke’s head, moaning, ‘Jesus, Darcy! Jesus!’ The girl had unbuttoned Clarke’s jacket, torn open his crimson shirt. But the blood had almost stopped pumping.
Clarke looked down disbelievingly at his chest and the red life leaking out of him. ‘Not . . . not possible!’ he said. And the fact was that yesterday it wouldn’t have been.
‘Darcy, Darcy!’ Trask said again.
‘Not possible!’ Clarke murmured for the last time, before his eyes filmed over and his head lolled into Trask’s lap. And as yet, no one had even called for a doctor or an ambulance.
For long seconds the tableau held . . . until Paxton broke the silence with, ‘Get away from him! Are you crazy? Get away from him!’
Trask and the girl looked at him.
‘His blood,’ Paxton told them. ‘You have his blood all over you! He’ll contaminate you!’
Trask stood up and the horror slowly cleared from his eyes. The horror of what had happened, anyway. But his horror of Paxton was something else. ‘Darcy will contaminate . . .?’ He started to repeat Paxton, and took a long loping pace towards him. ‘His blood will contaminate us?’
‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’ Paxton backed off.
‘Darcy was right,’ Trask snarled. ‘About you.’ He pointed at the Minister Responsible. ‘And you.’ And he took another pace after Paxton.
‘Back off!’ Paxton warned him, waving his gun.
Trask caught his wrist and twisted it, and his strength was furious. The gun went clattering to the floor. ‘He never spoke a truer word,’ Trask said, holding Paxton at arm’s length like a piece of stinking, rotten meat. ‘You don’t know anything about vampires except what you’ve read or been told. You have no experience of them. If you did you’d know that bullets don’t stop them – not for long, anyway! But poor Darcy there, if you have any talent at all you’ll know that he’s stone dead. And you killed him!’
‘I … I . . .’ Paxton struggled but he couldn’t free himself from Trask’s grip.
‘Contaminate?’ Trask grated through clenched teeth. He drew Paxton close and rubbed Clarke’s blood into his hair, his eyes and nostrils. ‘You piece of shit, what could contaminate you?’ He drew back a ham of a hand and bunched it into a fist, and –
Trask!’ the Minister snapped. ‘Ben! Let Paxton go! Let it be! What’s done is done. An accident, maybe. A mistake, possibly. But it’s done. And it’s only one of several things we’re not going to like doing.’
Trask’s fist hung in mid-air, shaking with its need to crash into Paxton’s face. But as the Minister’s words sank in, so he tossed the telepath away from him. And lurchingly, almost drunkenly, he went back to Clarke’s crumpled, lifeless body.
The Minister said to Paxton, ‘Get a doctor . . . and an ambulance.’ Then he saw the look on Paxton’s face.
The telepath had recovered both his wits and his nerve; he was cleaning his face with a large pocket handkerchief and shaking his head. His look said, think what you’re saying, what you’re doing. And out loud he said, ‘We don’t need a doctor or an ambulance, just an incinerator. Clarke’s for burning, by us, right now. Right or wrong, we can’t take any chances with him. He’s for the fire just as soon as possible. And me, I’m for bathing. Trask, Cleary, I know how you must feel, but if I were you – ‘