Anyway, it was rumored that someone over in United Consolidated had done his promotion prospects a considerable amount of good by the anonymous application of a high-speed earful of paint to an immediate superior, causing the latter to complain of little ringing noises in important meetings and eventually to be replaced on medical grounds.
And there were his fellow trainees—fellow sperms, to switch metaphors, all struggling forward in the knowledge that there could only ever be one Chairman of Industrial Holdings (Holdings) PLC, and that the job would probably go to the biggest prick.
Of course, some girl with a clipboard from Personnel had told them that the courses they were going on were just to establish leadership potential, group cooperation, initiative, and so on. The trainees had tried to avoid one another's faces.
It had worked quite well so far. The white-water canoeing had taken care of Johnstone (punctured eardrum) and the mountain climbing in Wales had done for Whittaker (groin strain).
Tompkins thumbed another paint pellet into the gun and muttered business mantras to himself. Do Unto Others Before They Do Unto You. Kill or Be Killed. Either Shit or Get Out of the Kitchen. Survival of the Fittest. Make My Day.
He crawled a little nearer to the figures by the statue. They didn't seem to have noticed him.
When the available cover ran out, he took a deep breath and leapt to his feet.
"Okay, douchebags, grab some sk—ohnoooeeeeee…"
Where one of the figures had been there was something dreadful. He blacked out.
Crowley restored himself to his favorite shape.
"I hate having to do that," he murmured. "I'm always afraid I'll forget how to change back. And it can ruin a good suit."
"I think the maggots were a bit over the top, myself," said Aziraphale, but without much rancor. Angels had certain moral standards to maintain and so, unlike Crowley, he preferred to buy his clothes rather than wish them into being from raw firmament. And the shirt had been quite expensive.
"I mean, just look at it," he said. "I'll never get the stain out."
"Miracle it away," said Crowley, scanning the undergrowth for any more management trainees.
"Yes, but I'll always know the stain was there. You know. Deep down, I mean," said the angel. He picked up the gun and turned it over in his hands. "I've never seen one of these before," he said.
There was a pinging noise, and the statue beside them lost an ear.
"Let's not hang around," said Crowley. "He wasn't alone."
"This is a very odd gun, you know. Very strange."
"I thought your side disapproved of guns," said Crowley. He took the gun from the angel's plump hand and sighted along the stubby barrel.
"Current thinking favors them," said Aziraphale. "They lend weight to moral argument. In the right hands, of course."
"Yeah?" Crowley snaked a hand over the metal. "That's all right, then. Come on."
He dropped the gun onto the recumbent form of Tompkins and marched away across the damp lawn.
The front door of the Manor was unlocked. The pair of them walked through unheeded. Some plump young men in army fatigues spattered with paint were drinking cocoa out of mugs in what had once been the sisters' refectory, and one or two of them gave them a cheery wave.
Something like a hotel reception desk now occupied one end of the hall. It had a quietly competent look. Aziraphale gazed at the board on an aluminum easel beside it.
In little plastic letters let into the black fabric of the board were the words: August 20—21: United Holdings [Holdings] PLC Initiative Combat Course.
Meanwhile Crowley had picked up a pamphlet from the desk. It showed glossy pictures of the Manor, with special references to its Jacuzzis and indoor heated swimming pool, and on the back was the sort of map that conference centers always have, which makes use of a careful misscaling to suggest that it is handy for every motorway exit in the nation while carefully leaving out the labyrinth of country lanes that in fact surrounds it for miles on every side.
"Wrong place?" said Aziraphale.
"No."
"Wrong time, then."
"Yes." Crowley leafed through the booklet, in the hope of any clue. Perhaps it was too much to hope that the Chattering Order would still be here. After all, they'd done their bit. He hissed softly. Probably they'd gone to darkest America or somewhere, to convert the Christians, but he read on anyway. Sometimes this sort of leaflet had a little historical bit, because the kind of companies that hired places like this for a weekend of Interactive Personnel Analysis or A Conference on the Strategic Marketing Dynamic liked to feel that they were strategically interacting in the very building—give or take a couple of complete rebuildings, a civil war, and two major fires—that some Elizabethan financier had endowed as a plague hospital.
Not that he was actually expecting a sentence like "until eleven years ago the Manor was used as a convent by an order of Satanic nuns who weren't in fact all that good at it, really," but you never knew.
A plump man wearing desert camouflage and holding a polystyrene cup of coffee wandered up to them.
"Who's winning?" he said chummily. "Young Evanson of Forward Planning caught me a right zinger on the elbow, you know."
"We're all going to lose," said Crowley absently.
There was a burst of firing from the grounds. Not the snap and zing of pellets, but the full-throated crackle of aerodynamically shaped bits of lead traveling extremely fast.
There was an answering stutter.
The redundant warriors stared one on another. A further burst took out a rather ugly Victorian stained glass window beside the door and stitched a row of holes in the plaster by Crowley's head.
Aziraphale grabbed his arm.
"What the hell is it?" he said.
Crowley smiled like a snake.
Nigel Tompkins had come to with a mild headache and a vaguely empty space in his recent memory. He was not to know that the human brain, when faced with a sight too terrible to contemplate, is remarkably good at scabbing it over with forced forgetfulness, so he put it down to a pellet strike on the head.
He was vaguely aware that his gun was somewhat heavier, but in his mildly bemused state he did not realize why until some time after he'd pointed it at trainee manager Norman Wethered from Internal Audit and pulled the trigger.
"I don't see why you're so shocked," said Crowley. "He wanted a real gun. Every desire in his head was for a real gun."
"But you've turned him loose on all those unprotected people!" said Aziraphale.
"Oh, no," said Crowley. "Not exactly. Fair's fair."
The contingent from Financial Planning were lying flat on their faces in what had once been the haha, although they weren't very amused.
"I always said you couldn't trust those people from Purchasing," said the Deputy Financial Manager. "The bastards."
A shot pinged off the wall above him.
He crawled hurriedly over to the little group clustered around the fallen Wethered.
"How does it look?" he said.
The assistant Head of Wages turned a haggard face toward him.
"Pretty bad," he said. "The bullet went through nearly all of them. Access, Barclaycard, Diners—the lot."