The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [346]
“What about us?” wailed Linton, coughing and on the verge of tears. “We’ll be reduced to text!”
“Best thing for all of you!” growled Heathcliff. “And I’ll be there at the shoreline, ready to rejoice at your last strangled cry as you dip beneath the waves!”
“And me?” asked Catherine.
“You will come with me.” Heathcliff smiled, softening. “You and I will live again in a modern novel, without all these trappings of Victorian rectitude. I thought we could reside in a spy thriller somewhere, go shopping at Ikea and have a boxer puppy with one ear that goes down—”
There was a loud detonation and the front door exploded inwards in a cloud of wood splinters and dust. Havisham pushed Heathcliff to the ground and laid herself across him, yelling, “Take cover!”
She fired her small pistol at a masked man who jumped through the smoking doorway firing a machine gun. Havisham’s bullet struck home and the figure crumpled in a heap. One of Heathcliff’s two minders took rounds in the neck and chest from the first assailant, but the second minder pulled out his own submachine gun and pressed himself against the wall. Linton fainted on the spot, quickly followed by Isabella and Edgar. At least it stopped them screaming. I drew my gun and fired along with the minder and Havisham as another masked assassin came in the door; we got him, but one of his bullets caught the second bodyguard in the head, and he dropped lifeless to the flags.
I crawled across to Havisham and heard Heathcliff whimper, “Help me! Don’t let them kill me! I don’t want to die!”
“Shut up!” hissed Havisham, and Heathcliff was instantly quiet. I looked around. His agent was cowering under a briefcase, and the rest of the cast were hiding beneath the oak table. There was a pause.
“What’s going on?” I hissed.
“ProCath attack,” murmured Havisham, reloading her pistol in the sudden quiet, “support of the young Catherine and hatred of Heathcliff runs deep in the BookWorld; usually its only a lone gunman—I’ve never seen anything this well planned before. I’m going to jump out with Heathcliff; I’ll be back for you straightaway.”
She mumbled a few words but nothing happened. She tried them again but still nothing.
“The devil take them!” she muttered, pulling her mobilefootnoterphone from the folds of her wedding dress. “They must be using a textual sieve.”
“What’s a textual sieve?”
“I don’t know—it’s never fully explained.”
She looked at the mobilefootnoterphone and tossed it aside. “Blast! No signal. Where’s the nearest footnoterphone?”
“In the kitchen,” replied Nelly Dean, “next to the breadbasket.”
“We have to get word to the Bellman. Thursday, I want you to go to the kitchen—”
But she never got to finish her sentence because a barrage of machine-gun fire struck the house, decimating the windows and shutters. The curtains danced as they were shredded, the plaster erupting off the wall as the shots slammed into it. We kept our heads down as Catherine screamed, Linton woke up only to faint again, Hindley took a swig from a hip flask and Heathcliff convulsed with fear beneath us. After about five minutes the firing stopped. Dust hung lazily in the air and we were covered with plaster, shards of glass and wood chips.
“Havisham!” came a subdued voice on a bullhorn from outside. “We wish you no harm! Just surrender Heathcliff and we’ll leave you alone!”
“No!” cried the older Catherine, who had crawled across to us and was trying to clasp Heathcliff’s head in her hands. “Heathcliff, don’t leave me!”
“I have no intention of doing any such thing,” he said in a muffled voice, nose pressed hard into the flags by Havisham’s weight. “Havisham, I hope you remember your orders.”
“Send out Heathcliff and we will spare you and your apprentice!” yelled the bullhorn again. “Stand in our way and you’ll both be terminated!”
“Do they mean it?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” replied Havisham grimly. “A group of ProCaths attempted to hijack Madame Bovary last year to force the Council to relinquish Heathcliff.”
“What happened?”
“The ones who survived were reduced to text,