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.He leapt up just as running feet sounded overhead.Shotguns blasted.The walls shook with crashes, like doors were being kicked in and furniture thrown.He heard feet on the stairs outside, and the door burst open.Sean had never seen a more beautiful sight than the gap-toothed, dreadlocked, tattooed apparition, in the torn, red and black checked swanny, standing in the doorway.They looked at each other for a moment, then Mangu spoke.‘Man, it stinks in here!’ he said.‘C’mon, if you can.We haven’t finished.’Kevin was with Sean’s rescuer, grinning with what Sean could see was a great relief.He wondered how close Kevin had come to being the main course.As they were going back up the stairs, Kevin started to tell him but Mangu turned with a finger to his lips.He held a rifle in his other hand and pulled a machete from his belt and gave it to Sean.‘They’re all up on the next floor,’ he hissed.‘But you never know.’As they reached the top of the stairs, two men attacked.One of them grabbed Mangu and the other fired his shotgun just as Sean ducked.The blast deafened him.He swung the machete, catching the guy on the side of the knee.The fellow collapsed, clutching himself, and quick as a snake Kevin was stabbing him with a large knife.Mangu twisted in his attacker’s grasp and, as Sean looked up, delivered a savage headbutt and a knee between the guy’s legs that lifted him off the ground.‘You can tell he doesn’t drink in the Flying Jug,’ Mangu said.Overhead they could hear thumps and bangs and an occasional shotgun blast.Sean thought of his own weapons just as he heard a shout of ‘Fire!’‘Watch it!’ said Mangu.‘They’re firing out of the windows.’ But Sean was already kicking open doors along the corridor he remembered led to the kitchen.He found his gear in about the fifth room, his sawn-off still in its scabbard, his crossbow, even his saddle and the bags and blanket.‘Where’s Hamu?’ he thought, and turned at a loud bark just in time to be knocked flat on his back by the dog’s leap into his arms.Back in the corridor, Sean smelled smoke.A man appeared coughing, at the top of the stairs.A rifle cracked.He reeled backwards, clutching his face.‘That’s for George, you bastard!’ came a voice beside him.Over their heads the fire crackled and windows exploded.‘We’d better get out of here!’ yelled Kevin in his ear.Two more people burst through the door at the top of the stairs.Rifle shots dropped one man and drove the other back into the billowing smoke.Sean turned at the shots and saw two more of the hunters.They were almost invisible in the shadows.One of them lifted a hand to Sean.One more person, probably a woman but hard to see by then, ran through the door and fell with a shot.Another, with his hair and clothes on fire, tumbled down the stairs and lay still on the kitchen floor.Flames were coming through the door now and licking down the room’s timber walls.A shelf of liqueur bottles crashed and the liquid caught, flaming as it spread across the floor.Sean, Kevin and the three hunters groped out the door and stood in the parking area coughing.Flames curled through the upstairs windows and a section of roof collapsed.‘Serves the bastards right,’ spat Mangu.‘We caught them just as they were going to kill this little guy.’ He nodded at Kevin.‘I think they were going to eat him too.We found a fireplace and a big spit.’ And just like Matapihi, ‘No time for that sort of shit.’ He thumbed fresh cartridges into the magazine of his rifle.‘Sorry we took so long.When you guys weren’t back in three days we rode to Waiouru.They hadn’t seen you and on the way back the dogs found George.We just knew who it was.We came straight here.’ He turned to the other hunters.‘Did you get them all?’‘All but one of them,’ came the reply.Sean’s heart sank.‘Don’t tell me,’ he said.‘It was a tall skinny blonde guy with a front tooth missing.’‘That’s him,’ said one of the hunters.‘Soon as we started shooting he took off.’ They moved back from the heat of the burning building.The hunter laughed
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