He stopped, looking puzzled. He slapped at something on his neck and twisted his head.

A tiny metal sphere was imbedded in the back of his scalp. The boy turned back to Smith. ‘What is it, sir?’

Smith stared.

‘I don’t⁠ —’ Phipps’ face turned red. His lip started to vibrate, as if he was going to burst out crying. ‘I’m sorry⁠ —’ he blurted out.

And then his head exploded.

The blood slapped Smith straight in the face, covering his chest and hands, a fine spray filling the whole room.

The boys yelled and screamed, falling to the ground. Smith stumbled forward, blinded by the liquid, trying to find Phipps’ body.

Joan was screaming for John, and Arthur, and trying frantically to get up over the mass of boys trying to hide.

Benny had pulled Alexander down and thrown herself on top of him. ‘Don’t look!’ she was shouting. She looked up. ‘Doctor!’

Smith grabbed for the headless body and clutched it to him, his fingers finding the remains of the neck and the perfect hands as he tried to blink away the blood from his eyes.

He thought he could hear distant laughter ringing through the sound of the gun in his ears.

Everything he could see was red.

A vision was swimming before him in the red, a cat pinned out on a slab.

He was making sounds himself, he realized, as he rocked the body to and fro, the head still fountaining the red stuff. Noises came from the back of his throat without calling, and names. Names that he didn’t recognise.

Benny had clambered to her feet, and threw herself across the beds, scrambling to make her way through the screaming children to the Doctor. She grabbed the handle of the umbrella as she went without thinking, perhaps just after a totem, a reminder.

Joan tripped and faltered across the red sprayed room also. ‘John!’ she called. ‘John!’

Smith was fumbling with the fingers of the corpse, pulling them roughly from the trigger of the gun. The meaty thing fell aside, washing him in more red as it went.

He pulled the gun up to his chest and rubbed a red line from his eyes with his sleeve, trying to see through the window. Trying to see the enemy.

There they were, two of them, down there. The ones who’d killed the boy. His fingers tightened on the trigger. There was no need to think.

But he did think.

He thought about Puff the Magic Dragon, who lived by the sea. He thought about Verity, whispering words in his ear on the shingle beach. He couldn’t hear the words yet, they were mingled with the sound of the waves on the shore, wearing the pebbles down to sand.

And then Benny was at one shoulder and Joan at the other.

‘John,’ said Joan.