The Midnight Mayor

our blood and I’d been shot bugger that shot after all the things that could have happened some bastard had

the rats were going

running into the night

too frightened to stay

couldn’t stop them, my friends, come back and sing this song,

what bastard shoots strangers anyway?

A man was lying on the floor a few feet from me. He was still alive, wailing, just wailing like a hurt child, too low and pitiful to be a scream, too quiet to be a roar, just . . . crawling and wailing. Half his ear was hanging off. The rest was too bloody for me to see. We were grateful for that. His comrades lay behind him. One of them was going, “huhn . . . huhn . . . huhn . . .”

The blood in his breath caught the sound in his throat, made it crackle.

The others weren’t moving at all.

I tried to raise my head.

A shadow was standing against the furthest wall.

I could see a pair of red eyes blinking in the darkness. They were perfect marble spheres in the black oval of the creature’s head, deep and mad and endless. They moved towards me. A torch had fallen from the hand of one of the men; the light cut across the feet of the creature as it moved. Human legs, wearing a long black coat, but still attached to those mad red eyes. The creature knelt by me. Its skin was a silverish metal colour, its veins dark black beneath the surface. Its hair was fused black wire that trailed behind its head, its ears had stretched to spiked points, its fingers were black curved claws coming out of strangely jointed arms, and when it breathed, black smoke rolled from its nostrils and lips. If dragons were silver and human, then this was a dragon. Its eyes were the insane brightness of the creatures that guarded the city gates.

I whispered, “Anissina,” and was pleased to feel the breath move, not lungs then, still had my lungs, for the moment.

The half-creature curled back its silvered lips to reveal sharpened teeth. The shadows moved behind her, the metal walls of the shed creaked. One shadow seemed to have my name on it. Time for that in a moment . . .

“Anissina,” I breathed again. “True Alderman.” Then I added, because I was feeling depressed, “You should see what’s behind you.”

She didn’t get it. She closed her metal fingers around our throat. And the shadow behind her said, “Now . . . that doesn’t look like first aid to me.”

Anissina turned, hissing, claws reaching up to tear at the shadow that had spoken, and I closed my eyes. Even then, the gun was near enough and the flash so bright that I could see it explode, star-pattern, on the back of my retinas, feel it jolt through my brain. I heard an animal scream, a piteous, wailing mewl, and opened my eyes again in time to be dazzled by another bang, another flash, and Anissina fell, rolled to one side screaming, the metal shimmer vanishing from her skin, her claws retreating back into nails, hair regrowing from the metal strands on her head, and she was screaming! There was blood flowing from the half-blasted remnants of her left leg, and worse, blood now in her belly, her hands clasped over the middle of her gut and she lay on the floor screaming until the shadow that had pulled the trigger knelt down next to her and very firmly put a hand over her mouth.

The torchlight fell on that hand, the colour of rich chocolate melted in a dark pan.

I wheezed, “Help me.”

Oda said, “Of all the people to ask that of me, I would have thought you’d know better.”

Oda’s voice, Oda’s hand, Oda’s gun, Oda’s general sense of humour.

“Shot,” I breathed. “Shot.”

“Yeah. I noticed. Entry and exit, Swift, left side of your upper abdomen, just below the ribs. Stop complaining. As bad news goes, it’s one of the best of the bads. Care to tell me why this should-be-dead Alderman was throttling you, or was it just your nature again?”

“She’s working with Mr Pinner,” I groaned, trying to sit up and thinking better of it. “Jesus, he’s coming here — we have to go!”

“An Alderman? This Alderman? With the death of cities? Why?”

“Screwed-up reasoning.”

“She know anything?”

“The hat,” I hissed. “The traffic warden’s hat.”

Oda’s eyes widened in the torchlight. She carefully pried her hand back from Anissina’s mouth, who started gasping and wheezing, on the edge of a scream but without the strength to make it, clawing at the blood flowing from out of her belly. Then she leant over to me, gun still in her hand, and carefully ran her fingers down my throat.

“Liar,” she whispered. “The sorceress . . . Ngwenya . . .”

“We can find her hat.”

“We can kill her, end it, should have killed her, ended it!”

Her fingers rested on my windpipe, applying just the gentlest little pressure, just enough to let me know. “Innocent,” I whispered. “She didn’t know . . . she didn’t know! Spat at, beaten, stolen, hurt! Innocent! Damnation, strangers, damned, hell, burn! For God’s sake help me!”

“For His sake?”

“Help me,” I whimpered. “Please. Anissina knows where her hat is. Give me back my hat! I can break the spell! Please! You still need us!”

“I can kill the sorceress.”

“He’s coming, Mr Pinner is coming, end of the line, damnation, give me back my hat, he’s coming please . . .”

“You couldn’t even be Midnight Mayor, could you?” breathed Oda.

“Please,” I whispered. “I saved your life. I could have let you die. Please. Help me. I saved your life! Oda!”

She grunted in reply, lifted her fingers from my throat, turned to Anissina, twitching on the floor. She leant over her, lowered her face in so close it was not an inch off Anissina’s, breathed gentle, steady hot breath into her clammy face, and, as softly as a mother rubbing a child’s tummy, pushed the barrel of the gun into Anissina’s belly.

The woman screamed.

I turned my head away, tried to bury my cheek in the floor.

“Where is the hat?” asked Oda.

Screamed so loud the floor hummed with it.

We closed our eyes, counted, maths, if I am one eight millionth of a city what does this make me in percentage terms? Do the maths, divide and . . .

“Where is Ngwenya’s hat?”

“He’ll . . . he’ll . . . he’ll . . .”

“Mr Pinner will flay you alive, yes,” breathed Oda softly. “Of course he will. But the thing is this. You’ve been shot in the stomach. Right now, the contents of your bowels are spilling into your bloodstream. Faeces, gastric juices, stomach acids, digestive enzymes. They’re going to get into your veins, and start eating. The acid is going to burn you from the inside out, the enzymes are going to gobble away at your body until there’s nothing left for them to chew on, digest you from the inside out, the faeces spilt from your stomach are going to turn your blood to sewage. If you’re fortunate, septic shock will take you out before the worst of it. If not, then having the skin peeled from your bones will seem the balmy mercy of the Almighty compared to the death you will endure. And that’s just the start. Damnation awaits you, Alderman. I cannot say what manner of suffering it will be. That is a secret that will be shared only by you and the Devil, and he does not care for reason. Where is the hat? Anissina? Where is the traffic warden’s hat?”

“H-H-Harlun and Phelps,” she whispered. “Boom Boom took it, didn’t r-r-realise its power, what it m-meant. I hid it in Harlun and Phelps. I th-th-thought they would n-never . . .”

Oda stroked Anissina’s chin with the end of the gun. “God loves you,” she whispered. “Remember that, when the Devil comes. God is suffering as you suffer, crying out when you cry out. He loves you. He weeps for you. He