After leaving Middlesex House, Tully, a limping and sickly Gary, Ron and the other ten brave souls were lucky for a time. They were able to take backstreets around the rear of some terrace houses, managing to avoid the attention of anything awful for a good ten minutes or so.
When they finally made it to Chitty Street, Tully was relieved, because she knew they were almost on the home stretch. Just up and through the Anglican Church, onto Torrington Street and then they were at the University - to safety (hopefully) and to the salvation of our Great English homeland.
Chitty Street was uneventful. A team of the crab-walkers were out and about, mulching up every bit of greenery (and metal street signage) they came across, but as we all know - the crab-walkers are no match for literally anything that makes them skittish, like a slow-walking group of equally terrified humans.
As the crabs scattered, they cleared a path to the Anglican Church at the end of Chitty, and they went for it. Straight into the church, through to the pulpit, out back through the bishop’s offices, past a stark naked bishop who was howling like a stuck pig in the corner, and had obviously not been out to be toileted for a few too many hours. Ron left the bishop the last of his beef jerky, careful not to get bitten.
And it was at this point, when the group were feeling rather emboldened by recent successes, that Ron had a rather brilliant idea as to build upon their momentum, and push on through to Torrington Street safely, albeit a little bit slowly. A scheme that was so brilliant and strange - that it just might work.
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He thought that if it were possible to shepherd the crab-walkers around the block, they might act as a sort of barrier against other scarier things. Gary liked it a lot, because being the mortally-wounded member of the group, he was very keen to not get re-mortally wounded, which would almost certainly render him mortally dead.
But, of course, a lot of the success of this scheme depended firstly on whether the crab-walkers were able to be shepherded. Amazingly - they were.
Lewis, a mobile phone salesman from Essex used some latent skills that he had lurking in his subconscious from a childhood growing up on a farm in Cornwall. He clicked his mouth encouragingly and moved the crab people left, then right, left, then right. Then when he started to build confidence, he began to scoop them up out of the Church courtyard, out onto the street running parallel to Chitty, and slowly push them to go around the block.
The scheme worked so incredibly well that Gary remarked that isn’t it funny that when you’re doing some annoying, repetitive task like matching up the black screws with the right holes on an Ikea table - you can tend to get so good at it you’re almost crushed that there was no real world application for this sparkling new skillset. Gary thought that Lewis’ remarkable crab shepherding fitted that category and then some.
The group followed in their shaky triangle behind Lewis as he conducted his human orchestra like moses parting the red sea. It was a perfect symphony of nervous, twitchy humans moving en masse, driving out every single violent offender in their path.
Stalking pumas, angry rhinoceroses, mangy monkeys and spear-wielding finance types were all pushed to the wayside as Keenan, Tully, Gary, Ron and the rest pushed triumphantly up Torrington Street towards the entrance of Imperial University.
They had done it. They were here.
But now their trials were just begun.