Too Cold For Snow

corner and hurled a flash grenade up the stairs and bounded up as the magnesium lit up the landing in the equivalent to a solar flare and saw the man shielding his eyes, although seconds too late now that his retinas had been crisped. Krink sliced him and went to check the other rooms, as his friend took on the strongman of the house, with Krink having wagered that he couldn’t deal with him without a weapon in less than five minutes. It was already turning out to be a Titanic slugging match with the huge man raining down blows on a skull that seemed to be reinforced with titanium set on neck muscles which transformed into shock absorbers. The Indian hit the man’s nose three times but the man swatted him away as if he was a fly. But the young Yanomamo sensed it was time to summon up his anaconda familiar.
    The great snake reared ten then twenty feet above the man and opened its mighty mouth. Just the sight of the enormous gaping maw with fangs as big as bull elephant tusks was more than enough to get the man to drop his guard and as the body crushed his rib cage like a crisp bag, Kamosiwe could hear the distant voice of Krink suggesting they should high tail it out of there. The forensics team, when they arrived the next day, would be able to scratch grooves in their heads as they tried to puzzle out what the enormous sloughed-off snake skin was doing there, although the red-eared terrapins moving across the linoleum floor of the kitchen misdirected their thoughts for a while, before one of the newest members of the team pointed out that the snake had to be fifty metres long if it was a centimetre.
    Krink and his partner ran across the field as the police sirens dopplered up the valley. They gunned the car over the hill and then drove at a sedate pace past sleeping hamlet and slumbering village to a trucker’s chip shop where the radio was switched to a police channel and they listened to the barked excitement coming through the static as they wolfed down two substantial meals.
    A half hour later Krink phoned the message ‘The birds have returned to the nest’ through to the answer phone of a man who knew another man who knew how to get the news through to the women who would by now have known all about the commotion, but Krink wanted them to know that this was a free service. Holding Kamo’s hand, as they sat in a lay-by waiting for the drive-in movie of the sunrise to begin, he thought it was the least he could do. Even as the Amazonian moved in to reply with a tentative kiss.

Marigolds
     
     
    It was called a mountain – Mynydd Mallaen – but there weren’t enough tightly packed contour lines on the Ordnance Survey lines to make it so. It was hooching with Transylvanian bald-necked bantams which had escaped from Billy Kerry’s coops down the valley and where they’d rapidly established a colony. They screeched like demons and threw up dust devils as they hunkered down on the ground. There they threw earth over their feathers to suffocate ticks. The birds attracted alert platoons of foxes and feral cats with claws like Freddie Kruger, nearly as sharp as metal. Despite the attention of these predators, the bantams were sufficiently alert and fecund to grow in both number and audacity. Some even attacked magpies and one suicidal bird, not long out of the egg, actually rode on a cat’s back for a few yards before falling off.
    Local legend had it that it was a place of druidical sacrifice. When the mists settled as a cloak – as they so often did on these brackened ridges – some swore blind you could hear screams coming out of the quarry. One old man, more fanciful than the rest, even said you could hear a thud as bodies hit the ground.
    And then there was the taciturn ghost of Christmas Evans: the woolly-haired preacher who sometimes opened the door of the farmer’s Land Rover, shuffled inside, helped himself to a lift as far as the milk churn at lane’s end and then got out without so much as a Biblical bye your leave.
    One Friday, in a convoy-cum-cavalcade that was as noisy as it was colourful, they arrived: the advance guard of the intentional community, the commune. The three vans, with their spiral decorations of rams’ heads and swirling painted suns ‘n’ stars were a vanguard of intent, rolling in on twelve bald tyres. These vehicles weren’t going anywhere else after this: this was journey’s end. Through a gap in a blackthorn hedge, Tryfan watched them. The cantankerous farmer was