The individual’s odour at this moment—your odour facing death—is cruelly sweet, an ecstatic tension before the snap that throws us into attack. I leaped over the table, over agog Alan’s head, and at the end of my parabola opened Sue’s belly with a contemptuously casual downward swipe. She sank to her knees—oven-mitted arms still weirdly holding the ghost of the dish—then fell against my legs as if in confused supplication. I grabbed her by the hair, tugged her head back, dropped and sank my teeth into her throat, sensing, as I did, Lorcan peeking round the kitchen door—NOT YET NOT SAFE YET STAY THERE—and Zoë’s little tremor of guilt and excitement because she wasn’t far behind him, while Walker punched through open-mouthed Alan’s chest and laid giant fingers around his hot and haywire heart and upstairs Fergus entered Trish from behind as she pinned Carmel (legs and arms flailing, face fat with backed-up blood) to the bed by her throat and Lucy lifted Rory off his feet by his hair and the house filled with the concussive smell of traumatised flesh and blood and the condensed quiet music of death.
