Chapter Nineteen

 

 

‘WHAT DO YOU plan to do, my love?’ asked Gloria, hanging back from the light of outside, not wanting to lose any of her brilliance.

‘The only thing I can do,’ Colonel Gerry replied, loading his rifle, and pulling a spare bandolier of cartridges over his shoulder, ‘shoot them. The babies too I think. Solve the problem once and for all. Put the damn things down. They’re a menace. Vermin. They should be treated as such.’

‘They’re only babies darling,’ said Gloria, adopting a shocked expression, ‘if only we’d had our time I had hoped that one day we might have...’

‘Babies? Pah! Do babies run that fast? Eat that way? They’re disgusting, my little lotus petal, and they’ll soon be floating face down in the Atlantic.’

He marched out into the daylight, his rifle firm in his grasp. Behind him, hanging in the shadows where her ethereal body held its substance, Gloria watched him go.