Doyle seemed a little wild eyed this time of year.

Bodie knew there would be a full moon tonight, when the offering appeared on his desk at headquarters. Before he opened it, he guessed what the bundle contained, by the pervasive aroma of yeast and tea. As before, the item was carefully wrapped in clean linen. Unshrouding revealed a block of bread heavy enough for a tombstone, greyish brown with amorphous white and black fragments. Bodie reflected, it looked like concrete, if murderers had tossed a body into the cement mixer and let it tumble to gristly bits before setting.

Last year, in the first autumn of their partnership, Bodie'd received such a gift from Doyle. He'd contemplated it in puzzlement, until Murphy enlightened him.

"Barmbrack, dead bread. You'll be needing a sharp knife."

"To fend off zombie attack?"

Murphy had grinned at that. Possessed of his own slab, he had already dissected it, and so offered a morsel.

Bodie was not one to refuse food, having experienced near-starvation occasionally in his turbulent youth. But he'd certainly inspected that chunk of dead bread with grave caution, until convinced it was dried apples, walnuts and currants rather than some corpse's giblets embedded in the baked goods, cinnamon and nutmeg rendering the reddish cast, not blood. The stuff tasted much better than it looked.

This year, the abrupt offering was received by Bodie with gustatory appreciation accompanying his surprise. Being distant from the sea these days, he didn't follow the waxing and waning of the moon, so he never anticipated when this sort of spirit would bite his partner.

Bodie chanced to be in the hallway, when Cowley accepted his share of bread, in exchange handing Ray a cunning little flask of glittering amber liquid out of his jacket pocket. "A portion of the barley, well preserved," the Old Man stated somberly.

Bodie wondered if he was meant to give anything to Doyle on these occasions.

"Only if it's something he needs," Murphy replied rather cryptically.

Something the little blighter needed? How the hell could anyone discover what that might be?

At day's end, there were two slabs of barmbrack still weighting down Doyle's desk. Bodie nudged the stuff with a cautiously extended finger. For Syd Parker, this one had a winding cloth bound round with a hank of dark blue yarn. What would a dead cop need? Bodie wondered, letting his dreary thoughts wander. Yarn, wool, warmth. Mortal remains buried under six feet of damp dirt. Comfort? Maybe, yeah, probably that.

Then there was the other, newly appeared this year. The offering had a lone black feather fastened into its cloth. Bodie's reflection hovered over those recently deceased and settled like a carrion raptor upon the corpse of one Barry Martin. While his shoulder throbbed, a memorial to wicked acts, Bodie dwelt on the absent traitor who'd died such a dishonourable death. Not so long ago, a piercing blade of burning steel was flung from the hand of a turncoat mate. Commander gone bad, comrade at arms in league with the enemy. By his assault on the Old Man, alone, Martin had damned himself.

No question of pity hung in Bodie's mind.

And yet, Doyle had been unable to kill the man, even in self defense, and now still seemed to harbour gentle sentiment. A black feather? Bodie stroked along it's length. In his partner's unfettered imaginings, what did this signify? Harsh colour contrasted against silken texture, virtue versus vice, kindness returned for cruelty. Maybe it was meant to aid in flight from the dark places.

Too forgiving, Ray. Bodie'd leave that particular soul to sizzle a damned lot longer; it wasn't thoroughly baked yet, by his reckoning.

He shuddered in a dank draft from the window cracked open an inch. Why do that, if death's barrier was mysteriously thinned just now? It represented an invitation to visit the living, Murphy explained, with a particularly sardonic wink. Clearly, Murphy relished this sort of thing.

Their call-out to a fire was peculiarly apt to the night, devolved as it was from such a weirdish day.

The conflagration started from an explosion, unplanned on the part of the terrorists, destroying their own stronghold. Cowley already had a surveillance team on the site, placing CI5 well inside the containment perimeter the police and fire brigade hastily established. With such an inferno to contain, it was just as well the modern engines and professional firefighters were available. Though perhaps the soldier lads who'd manned the antiquated green monsters during last year's strike would have been handier at the more violent aspects of this operation.

GLC command wouldn't send any personnel inside, in light of armed criminals attempting to elude arrest, plus all manner of hoarded munitions blowing up at random intervals. But Cowley didn't take orders from the Council. And the Old Man wanted his agents prowling the premises for evidence, searching for bodies, living or dead, evil souls all.

To counter the villains, a whole mob of CI5's finest was dispatched into the hellfired building.

It was exhilarating and terrifying to face such a monstrous entity, vast and consuming with shrapnel fangs and tongues of licking flame. Bodie clasped his gun in an easy grip, readily available, and flung himself into the midst of the chaos. There was an ally; he glanced away. That one over there was an armed enemy. He held still to draw a bead with his weapon, paused a heart's pulse impatiently for surrender, all the while urging the foe to fight. Bodie was dying for some action. Instead, his prey fled, with him in hot pursuit, deep, then deeper into the maw of destruction.

Tracking this one to its desperate stand, he came upon two others, locked in combat, therefore ally and enemy. Ah, there was Doyle, and from the look of his wicked grin, in need of no support. Bodie turned again to pummeling the big bastard he'd just cornered. Fight, yeah that's it, give it your damnedest. Now fall.

Triumphantly towering over his prisoner, Bodie fastened the shackles, then hauled him to rise, all the while sucking in great gasps of ash like a bloody bellows.

The building groaned, rocked as if an entire land mass was shuddering beneath their feet. The barricade of the dead, thinning? Rather too graphic, that, he chuckled.

Grappling the miscreant, Bodie yelled to hasten Doyle's retreat, before scrambling away toward the cold night.

He blinked and the chaos before his eyes shifted. He stared up into blinding light. The trespassing moon, huge, shockingly vicinal in icy grandeur, disdained his trivial existence. He rolled away from that dismissal, and felt mud shift beneath his aching chest. Rose up, staggered to make a stand, dripping muck. Identity, self, here, and all the rest was turmoil still. Calls, the clamour of men, shrieks, both human and machine in cacophony. The rending thunder of dying timbers, crash of unmortised avalanche, cavernous collapse of the edifice.

The monstrous conflagration roared taunts, as mere men hastened back from its lethal surge of energy.

Someone had Bodie by the elbow, dragging him away from oblivion.

He turned to stare into a grimy countenance, possessed of eyes and teeth, supernaturally gleaming skeletal white by contrast against carbon dusted flesh. Only when the apparition spoke did it become Murphy.

Bodie cackled at the sight, tried to reply, but strangled at first inhalation. Gacking and spewing tar mottled spittle, he moaned and crouched, filthy fists clenched against his thighs, as he hopelessly battled the black atmosphere for a single clear portion of air.

Assault, grappling at his shoulders, grasping his head and face. Bodie struggled, continued to resist, until a voice wrung through the battle sounds. "Oxygen, that's all. Come on, take it in, that's right."

Wash upon wash, the sweetest mouthful that ever existed, followed by another even better, and again in delectable succession. He relished the draw, savoured the flavour, lived merely for the promise of another inhalation.

He was rather sure he'd collected his wits when he finally realized there was an oxygen mask pressed against his face. Also that his skin there was tender, unevenly burned, although he couldn't recall the specifics of the injury. He crossed his eyes for a glimpse of the hand holding the mask, followed the darkly shadowed arm up to his rescuer.

Murphy again, or rather, Murphy still.

It came to him next to wonder what had become of his prisoner.

"You handed him off to Cowley. The Old Man was mightily pleased with you, old son. But when I caught you barrelling back into that," Murphy gestured at the gruesome inferno, "I thought you'd pretty much gone off your nut."

That was it, then. A lightning bolt of recall, and Bodie was shoving aside Murphy's aid efforts. "Doyle was farther back than me."

"Eh?"

"Inside the building."

"There's no inside, mate. No more, there isn't."

Bodie didn't want to hear that. He planted his muddy boots on the flooded tarmac and trudged, then accelerated toward the nightmare conflagration. But hauling the weight latched onto his elbow was more than he could manage. Impatiently he struggled to shake it off.

"Come on, use your thick skull," Murphy exhorted, grappling his arm with vise-like tenacity.

Conspiring forces finally slammed him to a halt. Ballast dragged him back, plus the hideous heat of the blaze, which couldn't be approached a single step further, much less breached.

In a fury, Bodie cursed it.

"Hey, here now. Doyle's a clever fellow. Probably just backed out of it a different way. Come on, that's it. Likeliest thing you could do is search the perimeter and find him, yeah?" Murphy's voice was balm, a midnight mist, slowly settling.

Bodie sunk into that and let it cling to him.

They wandered forth, progressing in awkward stumbles, seizing proffered aid in hasty gasps of bottled air and gulps of water, then resuming the search. In the obscuring smoke, each charred visage required approach, confrontation, confirmation of disappointment, prior to weary resumption of their toil.

Bodie muttered to himself. "The baser fire, victorious. Thus repulsed, our final hope is flat despair."

"Huh? Not yet," Murphy paused to cough. "Too soon for that."

There came toward them, wafting on the smoke, a confused clamour. Some sort of conflict there, a riot in progress.

Suddenly, Bodie was running. "Let me," he shouted, elbowing his way to the center of the fight.

"Daft bugger," one firefighter, gingerly fingering a black eye, told Murphy.

"Bloody lunatic," a uniformed police officer nodded agreement.

"Well, it's a full moon tonight," Murphy laughed aloud and lifted an oxygen tank from the disgruntled attendants.

Bodie found himself struggling with an animate, scorched bundle of fireproof blanket, fists and feet. "It's me, mate," he declared breathlessly. "You can't be too bad, I reckon, if there's that much shindy left in you." He dragged it down, tumbled to the soggy turf and writhed there with it.

"Doyle!"

"Bodie?"

"Course tis. Who'd you think?"

"Bodie?"

"Yeah." He pulled them both to sit upright, his back against a lamp post, which fixture seemed incongruous in its mundane solidity.

Murphy searched the messy heap clutched securely to Bodie's chest, seeking Ray's face within the smothering folds of charred fabric.

"It's only Murph with some oxygen for you. Come on now."

"Bodie? S' you?" Doyle's face emerged, puzzled and pouting, smudged in black warpaint, lending him the aspect of hell's own imp. "Uh, thought, erm, I'd lost you."

"Naw. You want some of that, don't you?"

Murphy managed to press the mask in place a few seconds before it was shoved aside.

Doyle grimaced. "Oh gods. Bloke, still alive. Was, when that last hit."

Bodie felt the clasped body shudder, and he held on tighter. "Was a villain. Now he's a dead villain, that's all."

"Fired, missed me. Ricochet, back at him. Wham, blew, sky high. Could see his face, clear. Blasted to bits."

"Better him than you. Now, you just suck up some more of the joy juice there, so Murphy feels useful. And then we'll all go find the tea wagon. Bound to be one out by now."

After a while, they came upright, handed off the oxygen tank to some ambulance attendants, and went to find the mobile canteen. Adrenaline spent, they were all three shivering, staggering. Doyle was in the middle. Tattered, moth-like he kept turning toward the flames. It took the combined efforts of Murphy and Bodie at his elbows to steer him clear.

They stumbled across Cowley, looking stern as a judge. Only his eyes glittered with weird glee as he watched the battle against destruction slowly die with the conflagration. The Controller turned from the sight to examine his men, nodding his approval that they were mostly intact.

It occurred to Bodie, the Old Man was savouring the evidence of their comradeship. Sampling the image with a measure of comfort, he was, like sharing it from a distance.

Sympathetic to the emotion, Bodie's face softened into a slight smile. Then he thought Cowley might laugh. The three of them must look quite a sight. Still, if they did evoke chuckles, there was far more of kindness than mockery there. The Old Man dismissed them with a silent wave of his hand.

Gratefully, they continued their meandering march, and came at last upon sustenance. Standing in deeply trampled muck, they dunked their hands into a bucket of icy water and used some soiled towels draped on a Victorian letter drop box. The view of the fixture jarred Bodie's cerebration, another surreal reminder of normalcy.

An attendant was offering woolen blankets. Another handed out paper cups of tea, and white bread with some butter lurking between the slices. There were bits of debris stuck in the butter.

Bodie eyed the offering askance, and just like that, he returned to this morning's barmbrack. Here was the bread. And over there were the dead.

Murphy was devouring his sandwich, and without further reflection, Bodie joined him.

Doyle stood, holding a paper cup. He was staring at the dying fire again.

Bodie got a blanket, unfolded it, and draped it over his partner.

Doyle turned slowly toward him, blinked, and then nodded.

Bodie realized then, without any conscious effort, he'd found something to give to Doyle, something the little blighter needed.

Doyle's features altered somewhat, and he spoke to Murphy.

Bodie added the weight of his hand to the warmth of the blanket, resting on Ray's sturdy shoulders.

Doyle glanced at him and grinned.

That was when the revelation occurred. Here was something Bodie might need as well.

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QUOTATION NOTATION:

Bodie's phrase is borrowed from "Paradise Lost", by John Milton.

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-- THE END --

November 2007