jerk of his head. They moved sideways towards the rim of the copse. Through the trees they saw a man waiting, rifle raised to chest height. If they separated and rushed him far enough apart he might be able to hit only one of them, but one down would worsen the odds exponentially.
They pressed themselves agains the widest tree they could find. With his mouth close to Kendrick’s ear, Purkiss told him what he wanted him to do.
The dogs were on the final approach now, two of them well in the lead, hurling themselves across the final hundred-metre stretch of field towards the copse, almost sobbing, moonlight flashing in the ropes of froth slavering from their maws. Purkiss counted down with his fingers and shouted ‘Go,’ and Kendrick emerged from the side of the tree. He lobbed his phone high and arcing and the man raised the gun to take aim at Kendrick, looked up, and for a second lifted the gun higher as if participating in an absurd clay-pigeon shoot. He took several trotting steps back, half-taken in, and before he could register fully that it wasn’t a grenade Purkiss hurled the club of wood so that it spun through the six or seven metres separating them and caught the man in the mouth. He staggered and Purkiss and Kendrick had already broken cover and Purkiss dived the last distance, low to the ground, and caught the man around the legs as he was trying to bring the rifle down again. The butt of the rifle glanced off Purkiss’s head, bringing tears to his nose, but he hung on. Above him Kendrick brought the man down with a blow to his face.
The noise of screaming was suddenly overwhelming because the dogs were upon them.
The first one slammed into Kendrick’s back like slingshot fired at close quarters, forty kilograms of bone and sinew, knocking him off his feet and keeping its place on his back, its agility terrifying, its jaws snapping and probing for his neck. From his position on the ground at the man’s legs Purkiss groped upwards for the rifle but it was out of reach. It was too late anyway because he felt movement behind him and he kicked out blindly, felt his foot connect with softness underlaid with bone and heard an outraged yelp. He didn’t wait to look back but lunged on his knees for the sharpened branch Kendrick had dropped. He pivoted and jabbed and got the dog in mid-leap, an awkward blow to the chest which struck the ribcage, and although it broke the dog’s momentum it only inflamed it further. The beast darted its head in around the stick and got its paws on Purkiss’s chest. He lost his balance and it was on him and over him, drool spattering his face like hot rancid hail, the whites of its eyes flaring in derangement.
On the ground a few feet away Kendrick was roaring. The other two dogs had caught up and they lunged for Purkiss’s feet. He thrashed and jerked, not just to try and hit the snapping snouts but also to keep his legs moving as targets. He got the stick in both hands and used it as a bar against the throat of the dog above him, forcing its head up and away from his face. Dimly he heard a series of wet thuds and a prolonged and diminishing screech from out of his line of sight. It gave him a new impetus. Instead of trying to push the dog backwards and away from him, he rolled back on to his shoulders, carrying the animal over him and pushing hard with the stick when the dog had passed the point of no return, so that it toppled off him. Before he could rise, one of the others sprang to take its place. This time he was ready with the stick. He rammed it straight into the dog’s snarl, the animal’s momentum driving it on to the pointed end so that the back of its throat was impaled. It thrashed away, wrenching the stick from Purkiss’s grasp, and stumbled, choking, pawing at the fragment jutting from its maw.
The blast was shocking, jolting Purkiss almost to his knees again. It set off a high tinnital whine in his ears which was flooded out by a second explosion, a third. He peered about, disorientated, saw the fanned-out group of men yelling and charging across the field, the huddled and ungainly piles of dog