Then – there was another fusillade of gunfire. But this wasn’t behind them. This was ahead, from the farmhouse, and from the stables. This was the bellow of shotguns and the light twig-snapping sound of handguns. His own farmhands, shooting back. The firing from the raiders broke off abruptly as they scrambled for cover, and Ed and Della found themselves running through the night in unnatural silence, as if they were trying to escape through the muffled darkness of a nightmare.

They reached the asphalt yard, and then they were stumbling up the steps of the farmhouse verandah, accompanied by an ear-splitting salvo of covering shotgun fire.

Dyson was standing by the door, and he opened it up for them as they came running along the front of the house. Then he quickly slammed it behind them, and locked it. Ed said simply, ‘Shit. Thanks, Dyson.’

Inside the farmhouse, the atmosphere was alarmed, and everybody was tight faced with tension. Even Shearson Jones had come down from his bed, and was sitting in Ed’s armchair, wrapped in a white towelling bathrobe that scarcely met over the white moon-like curve of his belly. Peter Kaiser was perched on the arm of the sofa next to Karen, with his arm around her – an affectionate gesture to which she responded by sitting up as rigidly as possible.

Dyson, following Ed and Della into the living-room, said, ‘We heard the shooting. Then we heard you go out to the front gate in the Jeep. I was trying to get the boys together – armed and ready – when we saw you coming back.’ Ed’s chest was still heaving from their last desperate run. He said, ‘Dyson, I’m glad you did. That blast of scatter-gun fire – well, that just about saved our lives.’

Dyson was carrying the light hunting rifle which he usually used for popping off shots at rabbits and rats. He went across to the window, parted the drapes, and peered studiously out into the night. The Jeep was already alight, and rolling tongues of orange flame were pouring out of its blackened carcass like a grotesque demonstration of fire-eating.

‘There’s a whole lot of them out there, Ed,’ Dyson said, quietly. ‘Twenty or thirty maybe. I counted the muzzle flashes when you were running in. There’s no way we can hold them off for very long.’

Ed said, ‘I’m not going to try to hold them off.’

‘You’re not even going to try to save yourself?’ asked Shearson Jones, in his fat, unmistakable voice. ‘What are you going to do? Let them scavenge the few supplies we have left? Lie low while they rob us?’