The silverback charged. One second the whole scene was stock still, the next everything seemed to be in motion. The gorillas, the bushes, the grass and leaves, us; the whole tableau was a frenzy, with Spenser the prime mover, a whirlwind spinning forward. He came at us unstoppably fast. A vision overtook me in that moment; I saw light bouncing off car windscreens as the mini swerved behind me in the street, heard the squeal of tyres, felt the rush of something heavy moving wrongly through space. The crash was happening again and this time I was in it, welded to the spot. As the gorilla closed in, Innocent jumped past me to pull Caleb clear, and Caleb swung both hands up to protect himself, and the gorilla thumped straight through them and kept going, running over Xander and bouncing me into the bushes as he swept beyond us and veered away.

The attack, if that’s what you’d call it, was over in a flash. I jumped back to my feet before I knew it, desperate to see where Spenser had gone and if he was readying to charge again. He wasn’t. He’d immediately retreated into the middle of his troop and was studiously ignoring us. Having witnessed the energy unleashed in that one charge, heard the heaviness of his feet as he’d pounded towards us, felt the massive blur of him knocking us aside, I knew that he’d barely tried to hurt us at all. If he’d wanted to do that, he’d have torn us limb from limb. I was still intact. And he’d not touched Amelia, Patience or Marcel. Caleb was also dusting himself down, apparently OK, if white in the face. But Xander was rolling from side to side, both hands gripping his left knee, clearly in pain. And Innocent was bent double, half groaning, half gasping, hugging himself hard. I leaned down and put an arm around him, thinking he was probably winded, since that’s the same sort of noise I make if I hit the ground hard falling off my bike, and it was only then that I noticed his fingers, pressed against his neck, were vivid with blood.

23.