Free The London Pride by Charlie Fletcher

the door. She looked carefully right and left, and saw there was no one there. The passage was dimly lit with tastefully concealed downlighters paced at one metre intervals. Maybe it was the lack of outside windows, but the whole space was somehow dampened and muted, as if the passage existed under water. She folded the magazine and wedged it under the door, keeping it open. She didn’t want it to swing back behind her and shut her out.
    She walked carefully down the thick carpet, which muffled her footsteps, and stopped at the corner. Just because this was perfectly safe and only going to take a couple of seconds didn’t mean she was going to take anything for granted. She stood next to a door marked FIRE EXIT ONLY and poked her head round the angle in the corridor, expecting to see that delicious slice of Death-By-Chocolate waiting for her, only a few steps away – and instead saw it was gone.
    Or if not entirely gone, at least half gone.
    Or half eaten.
    Or, in fact, half eaten and disappearing before her eyes, still being eaten by a very hungry – and very gold – metal rat.
    The rat stopped eating and lifted its head to look at her. It didn’t look frightened. It looked … interested.
    It was, she realised, one of the animals she had seen earlier on the front of the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. There had been rats and fleas and ticks and …
    The hissing noise from behind her reminded her what else there had been.
    Cobras. She turned.
    Midway down the hall, between her and the open door to their room, were two cobras. One slowly serpentining across the plush carpet towards her. The other turning to head for the bedroom.
    ‘Will!’ she shouted. ‘Look out!’
    And then things began to happen very fast, as things do when everything decides to go wrong all at once.
    The cobra heading towards her stopped and rose on its tail, hood flaring in a menacing golden billow that framed its gaping mouth and the venomous fangs within.
    The other cobra got low to the ground and accelerated into the bedroom, heading for Will like a bolt of molten lighting.
    There was an enraged chittering from behind Jo, and the scrabble of claws on crockery as the rat leapt across the room-service tray and launched itself at her face.
    She spun and flailed her stick at it, acting on instinct. She wasn’t looking or aiming because there was no time to do either. She just struck out blindly. There were a hundred reasons why she should have missed, not least of which was that she was very bad at rounders, but this was the one time everything lined up perfectly. She felt the impact before she heard the thwack of stick on metal, and as the concussion passed from the stick into her hand and on up her arm, she saw the rat squawking as it twirled backwards through the air, paws spreadeagled and long whippy tail flailing like a broken helicopter.
    She turned to defend herself from the cobra.
    As it reared back to lunge at her, the doorway behind it suddenly filled with a big, fast-moving slab of hound-shaped marble that had the other cobra clamped between its teeth, shaking it like a terrier shakes a rat.
    The cobra facing Jo struck towards her, and would have sunk its fangs in her had Filax not trapped its tail beneath one heavy paw that slammed down on it like a sledgehammer.
    The cobra reached full stretch, so that it was a perfectly straight line, like a gold javelin pointed right at her face, its tail clamped and anchored to the floor by the dog at the other end.
    Jo saw the teeth, and the angry eyes that seemed to hang in the air an inch from the end of her nose for the longest moment – and then she swore the snake made an ‘Gulp!’ noise as Filax scooted his paw backwards, shovelling the cobra so fiercely that it went flying away in the air behind him, twenty feet down the hall.
    ‘Good—’ began Jo, meaning to add, ‘dog’.
    She never got the time. Filax bounded forwards and barged her through the fire exit. She tumbled