Too Cold For Snow

to congratulate himself when he saw the heavy head of a cow silhouetted against the next field. He also realised that his friend was moving back and fore across the field in the most subtle oscillation, weaving his concealing way. They met at the stile, as agreed without so much as a whispered greeting. Krink felt that warmth again, a pleasure in the man’s companionship and the assured way he disported himself even though they were going up one-to-eight against a pack of heinous racists. The Yanomamo people weren’t exactly known for being tall, but there was a proud haughtiness in Kamo’s step. They each took a separate alley way towards the house of their intended prey and Krink’s ears strained to hear the man’s tread among the broken glass but there was nothing, just velvety silence.
     
    There were two of them outside the house, smoking cheroots while sitting down on the seat they’d stolen from the old people’s home. The young Indian left them sitting there, stonily slumped as the curare paralysed their central nervous systems. Two down, fourteen to go. Krink meanwhile had got himself into a position where he could see what was going on inside the house, training his night scope on all of the front rooms: one a TV room where they were watching a porn film set in a South American zoo with an improbable sequence involving a tapir, then the kitchen where four men were standing up drinking beer and in the toilet there was a man seated down. Krink thought he’d rise to the challenge of taking him out before he had time to clean himself and so he slinked as a shadow behind the dustbins and with the gentlest of motions swung himself around a post and into position.
    He’d spotted that the window was slightly open, enough for each hand to flick in a pebble each, guiding the loop of fishing twine into place so that Krink could yank it back so swiftly that the man wouldn’t be able to so much as yelp before the neck was severed with the sheer brutal force that Krink’s hands and ankles could muster after years of training. He felt tendons split like chicken bones and heard the thump of a body hitting the floor. Krink stilled his beating heart, waiting for the men in the kitchen to register the sound but their voices were raised against the sound of a Skrewdriver CD. He noted they were just opening the doctored beer, giving him a sense of impeccable timing. He ducked below the window ledge and crawled around to the front door where his friend was waiting for him. They’d agreed they would go in together. Krink brought out his rice flails and waited for the screams from the kitchen as the hallucinogenic beer worked its mental misery. It was a punctual drug – always kicking in after five minutes of drinking the poison. They would see all manner of things. The men in the front room went in to the kitchen to see what was going on and Krink and Kamo slipped in. Kamo picked up a heavy ashtray on a metal stand and crunched it down on a bonce even as Krink poleaxed another with a brick he’d picked up on the way in. The men in the middle room didn’t know what hit them and the two attackers were moving with such speed and, well, grace that they didn’t know what they’d hit them with either, but just at the point where they thought they’d go upstairs to mop up stragglers someone on the landing opened up with a Kalashnikov, but not before Krink had heard the tell-tale click of the safety catch being taken off and hurled Kamo into the kitchen before the staccato burst of bullets tore up furniture and smithereened the aquarium, where one of them bred terrapins.
    The two of them found a bunch of loon-eyed crazies in the kitchen, limbs flailing as they dealt with their mental demons. One was in a nightmare where he was being chased by himself, or a doppelgänger around his childhood home, where he knew from bitter experience – when his angry father came looking for him with a poker yanked out of the fire – that there was absolutely nowhere left to hide. Another two were cowering, one trying to avoid the strafing of Messerschmitts as he shared a water-filled ditch with some tadpoles, while another, who couldn’t swim, had just fallen off the back of a ferry. Krink decided to not put them out of their misery for a while, even though he could have dispatched them with the deftness of a poacher taking rabbits out of a net, and decided it was time to deal with the man with the submachine gun. He rounded the