years ago the Manor was used as a convent by an order of Satanic nuns who weren’t in fact all that good at it, really,” but you never knew.
A plump man wearing desert camouflage and holding a polystyrene cup of coffee wandered up to them.
“Who’s winning?” he said chummily. “Young Evanson of Forward Planning caught me a right zinger on the elbow, you know.”
“We’re all going to lose,” said Crowley absently.
There was a burst of firing from the grounds. Not the snap and zing of pellets, but the full-throated crackle of aerodynamically shaped bits of lead traveling extremely fast.
There was an answering stutter.
The redundant warriors stared one on another. A further burst took out a rather ugly Victorian stained glass window beside the door and stitched a row of holes in the plaster by Crowley’s head.
Aziraphale grabbed his arm.
“What the hell is it?” he said.
Crowley smiled like a snake.
NIGEL TOMPKINS had come to with a mild headache and a vaguely empty space in his recent memory. He was not to know that the human brain, when faced with a sight too terrible to contemplate, is remarkably good at scabbing it over with forced forgetfulness, so he put it down to a pellet strike on the head.
He was vaguely aware that his gun was somewhat heavier, but in his mildly bemused state he did not realize why until some time after he’d pointed it at trainee manager Norman Wethered from Internal Audit and pulled the trigger.
“I DON’T SEE WHY YOU’re so shocked,” said Crowley. “He wanted a real gun. Every desire in his head was for a real gun.”
“But you’ve turned him loose on all those unprotected people!” said Aziraphale.
“Oh, no,” said Crowley. “Not exactly. Fair’s fair.”
THE CONTINGENT from Financial Planning were lying flat on their faces in what had once been the haha, although they weren’t very amused.
“I always said you couldn’t trust those people from Purchasing,” said the Deputy Financial Manager. “The bastards.”
A shot pinged off the wall above him.
He crawled hurriedly over to the little group clustered around the fallen Wethered.
“How does it look?” he said.
The assistant Head of Wages turned a haggard face toward him. “Pretty bad,” he said. “The bullet went through nearly all of them. Access, Barclaycard, Diners—the lot.”
“It was only the American Express Gold that stopped it,” said Wethered.
They looked in mute horror at the spectacle of a credit card wallet with a bullet hole nearly all the way through it.
“Why’d they do it?” said a wages officer.
The head of Internal Audit opened his mouth to say something reasonable, and didn’t. Everyone had a point where they crack, and his had just been hit with a spoon. Twenty years in the job. He’d wanted to be a graphic designer but the careers master hadn’t heard of that. Twenty years of double-checking Form BF18. Twenty years of cranking the bloody hand calculator, when even the people in Forward Planning had computers. And now for reasons unknown, but possibly to do with reorganization and a desire to do away with all the expense of early retirement, they were shooting at him with bullets.
The armies of paranoia marched behind his eyes.
He looked down at his own gun. Through the mists of rage and bewilderment he saw that it was bigger and blacker than it had been when it was issued to him. It felt heavier, too.
He aimed it at a bush nearby and watched a stream of bullets blow the bush into oblivion.
Oh. So that was their game. Well, someone had to win.
He looked at his men.
“Okay, guys,” he said, “let’s get the bastards!”
“THE WAY I SEE IT,” said Crowley, “no one has to pull the trigger.”
He gave Aziraphale a bright and brittle grin.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s have a look around while everyone’s busy.”
BULLETS STREAKED ACROSS THE NIGHT.
Jonathan Parker, Purchasing Section, was wriggling through the bushes when one of them put an arm around his neck.
Nigel Tompkins spat a cluster of rhododendron leaves out of his mouth.
“Down there it’s company law,” he hissed, through mud-encrusted features, “but up here it’s me … ”
“THAT WAS A PRETTY LOW TRICK,” said Aziraphale, as they strolled along the empty corridors.
“What’d I do? What’d I do?” said Crowley, pushing open doors at random.
“There are people out there shooting one another!”
“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? They’re doing it themselves. It’s what they really want to do. I just assisted them. Think of it as a microcosm of the universe. Free will for everyone. Ineffable, right?”