pressed forward again.
They kept coming, and Suzie kept killing them. Facing impossible odds, knowing they were bound to drag her down eventually, Suzie was still grinning broadly. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her look happier.
Reluctantly, I switched to another mirror. I’d worn the other one out, and I had to see how Walker’s agents were doing out on the streets against Lilith’s far greater forces. The first one the mirror found was Dead Boy. He was striding carelessly down a half-demolished street, his long purple greatcoat flapping in the gusting wind, his dark floppy hat crammed down over his curly hair, while an armed crowd charged right at him. Dead Boy laughed in their faces, and didn’t even bother to increase his pace. He took a deep sniff of the black carnation in his buttonhole, tossed back a handful of the nasty little pills that an Obeah woman made up specially for him, drank the last of the whiskey in his bottle, and tossed it aside. His corpse-pale face was full of a dreadful anticipation.
“Come on, you bastards! Show me what you’ve got! Give me your best shot. I can take it!”
The mob hit him like a hammer, flailing arms wielding knives and clubs and even broken glass, but he stood his ground, and almost immediately the crowd broke around him like a wave hitting a solid outcropping of rock. Dead Boy struck about him with his pale fists, and there was a vicious strength in his dead arms. He moved impossibly quickly, thrusting himself forward into the face of his attackers, and those he hit fell and did not rise again. The raging mob struck him and cut at him, and hit him with everything that came to hand, doing their best to drag him down by sheer force of numbers; but still he stood and would not fall. His dead body soaked up appalling punishment, but he felt none of it. He just kept going, forcing his way into the heart of the mob, going to slaughter as to a feast, laughing aloud as he crushed skulls and stove in chests and tore limbs from their sockets. He was dead, and his strength was no longer bound by the limitations of living flesh. Blood made his face a crimson mask, and none of it was his.
In the end the mob simply split apart around him, streaming past in search of easier prey. He was only one man, and he couldn’t stop a crowd. Dead Boy cried out angrily after them, and struck out at those who passed, but the mob quickly learned to give him a wide berth, and soon enough they had all moved on and left him behind. Dead Boy stood alone on a burning street, surrounded by the dead and the dying. He shouted after the departing mob, demanding they come back and fight, but none of them were zealot enough or stupid enough to listen. Dead Boy shrugged, cleaned his face with a dirty handkerchief, then sat down on the nearest pile of bodies and opened his tattered purple greatcoat, to check the extent of the damage he’d suffered.
There were bullet, holes, of course, but he’d dig the slugs out later. He liked to collect the more obscure brands. There were cuts, with pale edges but no blood, and puncture wounds that were nothing more than puckered holes in his unfeeling flesh. He’d stitch them up later. Or superglue them, if he was short of time. There were some wider tears, exposing pale pink and grey meat, and he scowled at one especially wide rip down his left side, big and deep enough to expose half his rib cage. Some of the ribs were clearly broken. He sniffed and pulled a roll of black duct tape from his coat pocket. He wrapped it round and round his torso, to hold himself together until he could perform more detailed repairs.
“Thank God for duct tape. Maybe I should invest in one of those industrial staplers…” He shrugged easily and tore off a length of the tape with his teeth. He smoothed the tape flat, then held up one hand and glared at it. “Shit, I can’t have lost another finger…”
He was still searching through the rubble and the bodies for his missing finger when his head came up sharply. His senses might have been dulled, but his instincts had never been sharper. One of Lilith’s children was heading down the street towards him. Dead Boy stood up and pushed his floppy hat onto the back of his head to get a better look.
Lord Pestilence was a stringy grey figure in a tattered grey robe, his face so gaunt it was little more than brittle leather over a grinning skull. Thick pus oozed from his empty eye-sockets and dripped from his mirthless smile. His bare hands were covered in weeping pustules. He rode a primitive hobby-horse fashioned from human bones, and wherever he went he spread disease. All around him people fell back choking and bleeding, dying slowly and horribly from a hundred different plagues. Lord Pestilence rode his hobby-horse down the middle of the road, and didn’t care whether he struck down enemy or ally; it was enough that he was free at last from his prison under the Street of the Gods, free once again to spread sickness in the world and glory in the suffering he caused.
Dead Boy saw him coming, and was the only one to stand his ground, when everyone else did the sensible thing and fled. Lord Pestilence headed straight for him, giggling like a happy child, and Dead Boy considered the old god thoughtfully. Lord Pestilence lashed out with typhoid, cholera, polio, AIDS, Ebola, and green monkey fever, and everyone for half a mile around fell twitching and choking to the ground; but not Dead Boy. He just stood his ground, waiting, his pale face impassive. Enraged, Lord Pestilence urged his bony hobby-horse on, throwing increasingly obscure diseases and maladies at the single figure that stood so contemptuously in his path. Until finally the old god made the mistake of coming within arm’s reach of Dead Boy, who lashed out with a move too fast for living eyes to follow. He clubbed Lord Pestilence right off his hobby-horse and sent the old god crashing to the ground. He lay there a moment, crying out at the unthinkable indignity, and Dead Boy stamped on his chest. Old bone cracked and splintered under the force of the blow, and Lord Pestilence unleashed all his awful power in one terrible blow at the grim figure standing over him.
A hundred thousand diseases issued from the old god, every fever and blight and growth that had ever vexed mankind, and none of them could touch Dead Boy. Diseases were for the living. Thwarted, the magic recoiled and turned back upon its sender. Lord Pestilence screamed and howled horribly as the diseases took hold in him, all at once, eating him alive. Cursed to know at last all the pain and horror he’d spent lifetimes imposing on others. His leathery skin cracked and bubbled, and finally ran away like watery mud. He fell apart, bit by bit, crying out like an animal now as the diseases turned his insides to soup, and his bones cracked apart into shards and splinters, and finally dust. In the end, there was nothing left of that old god Lord Pestilence but a grinning misshapen skull. Dead Boy stamped it into pieces, just to be sure.
“It’s not easy being dead,” he said solemnly. “But sometimes it does have its advantages.”
I moved to another mirror, and ordered it to show me Larry Oblivion. The dead detective, the post-mortem private eye. I’d heard a lot about him, most of it uncanny or unsettling, but I’d never met him in my own time. Only in the future, as one of my Enemies. And now there he was in the mirror before me, and looking very different. He looked… so much more alive. He strode purposefully down a smoke-streaked street, looking fine and sharp and so stylish with his Gucci suit, his manicured hands and his razor-cut hair. He had the look of a man who always travelled first class, and didn’t have a care in the world. Except for being some kind of zombie. I never did get the full story about that.
A crowd of minor godlings with animal heads and inhuman appetites broke off from raping and feasting on the running people, and spread out to block his path. Blood dripped thickly from their clawed hands and furry mouths. And Larry Oblivion disappeared. Vanished into thin air, gone in the blink of an eye. I didn’t know he could do that. Neither did the godlings, apparently, as they heaved themselves about, this way and that, stamping their hoofed feet on the ground. They weren’t used to being cheated of their prey.
Blood flew abruptly on the air, gushing from a severed throat, and one of the godlings crashed to the ground, kicking spasmodically as its life-blood flowed away. More and more of the godlings cried out as they were attacked by something none of them could see, striking impossibly quickly, killing them with contemptuous ease. One by one they fell, old gods brought down by a more recent power. The dead detective, Larry Oblivion.
At first I thought he must be using some kind of invisibility, but the mirror said otherwise. It would have been able to see through that. So I got the mirror to slow the image right down, and sure enough there was Larry Oblivion, moving too quickly for the eye to follow. He was here, there, and everywhere, come and gone in a moment, appearing out of nowhere to strike down an unsuspecting godling with a shimmering silver blade and already disappearing before his victim hit the ground. He flickered on and off, only present for such small fractions of time that even the mirror had trouble keeping up with him. I’m getting such a headache, it complained, but I drove it ruthlessly on. I needed to know what was happening.
In the end all the godlings were dead, and Larry Oblivion appeared out of nowhere next to the bodies, looking as immaculate and stylish as ever, with not one hair out of place. He’d moved so quickly there wasn’t even a single drop of blood on his Gucci suit. But he was holding a Faerie wand. I smiled, satisfied. A lot of things about
