He let go of her, and vanished into the crowd.

Kelly tried to follow. She didn’t want to imagine what this mob would do to Amber if they grabbed her. She didn’t know what the hell she’d do if it was Amber they’d grabbed – she only knew she’d do something. She’d have to.

The crowd was a living, breathing thing, and it moved and jostled and every now and then Kelly would catch an elbow that would send her crashing into someone else’s hardened skin. In this snarling sea of fangs and claws and horns and wings, she couldn’t even see Ricky or Dave anymore.

She tried moving sideways, but the crowd surged and she cried out as she was squeezed to the front like toothpaste from a tube. Suddenly she could see what they were all gathered here for: they’d captured a Hound.

Laughing and jeering, the demons pinned the Hound to the square itself, right where the ballot box used to be. This Hound had a tighter beard and tattoos on his bare, muscled arms. If the Hound had tried to struggle before this, he had ceased by this point and lay on the ground, calmly awaiting his fate.

His fate arrived in the form of the Party-Monster, yanking the cord of a brand-new, just-looted chainsaw from Oscar Moreno’s rival hardware store. It roared to life and the demons laughed louder. There was some shoving as they reorganised themselves so that the Party-Monster could stand over the Hound’s left arm. Grinning, he lowered the chainsaw, and the chain bit into the Hound’s bicep.

Blood sprayed. The demons howled. The Hound made no sound as his arm was severed. Kelly could barely watch.

The Party-Monster held the chainsaw over his head, his face splattered with blood, and welcomed the cheering. He spun in circles, whooping and hollering like Leatherface at the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, nicking whichever demons were dumb enough to be standing too close. Then he stepped over to the Hound’s other arm, and the crowd leaned in, and Kelly got to her hands and knees and started crawling through the forest of legs. She got kicked a few times, kneed a few times – once hard enough to cause her vision to cloud – but then the forest broke all of a sudden and she was out.

She got up on shaky legs, felt for her gun, and realised she had lost it somewhere in the melee. She could go back for it – but seriously, screw that. She hurried away from the crowd, back the way she had come, only turning again at the sound of Ricky’s voice.

“Ladies and gentlemen!”