“Oh God,” Laura said, turning her head away, and I could see that she’d be splashed when the bullet had struck him. She caught my eye and, inexplicably, tried to smile. It came as a grimace, teeth bared, eyes wide, and for a second? for the first time in my life? I was frightened by my daughter. What madness could she have inherited from this place?
“Into the boat!” the man on the bow shouted. They drew up next to us and he fired again. Tracer rounds tore across the mud lake and strafed the bandstand. Two people dropped, one of them sliding into the mud, and one of the boats from the mist immediately pulled up and disgorged several more fighters onto the tattered wooden structure. They picked up scattered weapons and immediately opened fire on the central bandstand and our boats.
“Quickly!” the man shouted, ducking down as the gunfire increased.
“No,” I said. We shouldn’t go with them, should never take sides, because once we did that we were truly embedded in this scene, part of the play and bound into whatever climax awaited these pointless people. The man looked at me, wide-eyed and disbelieving. His machine-gun drifted in our direction. Its smoking barrel looked hungry.
Something stung my elbow. I looked down and saw a rosette of blood opening on my muddied sleeve, and my arm went numb. A bullet had kissed me. Laura guided me to the edge of the dinghy, stepping over into the powerboat and taking me with her. Blood ran down inside my sleeve, warm and shocking, and it dripped from my fingers as a dark brown paste. It was carrying dried mud with it. I wondered what bacteriological horrors were seeping hungrily into my wound even now.
In the back of the powerboat sat half a dozen people. They all looked tired, underfed, sick, but their eyes gleamed with excitement. Some of them glanced at us, but most had their eyes on the body of the dead driver where he was leaking across the timber boards.
They all carried weapons. I saw at least three pad-rifles.
“Chele!” I said, turning to hold out my hand. She was hunched down in the dinghy, hands over her head, trying to present as small a target as possible. The wall of the house was all but disintegrating under the hail of lead, and a fine powder drifted in the air and stuck to our wet clothes. Chele stood slowly, glancing over at me. She was readying herself to jump. She looked like a ghost.
“We can’t stay here,” one of the people said, leaping to the wheel and leaning on the throttle. The boat started to pull away. I reached out for Chele and she jumped.
“Laura!” I said, but she was already there. Between us we hauled Chele in, trying to keep low as the bullets sang around us like angry bees. The boat was humping fast across the mud lake now, each impact feeling as if we were striking concrete.
I reached for one of the pad-rifles strapped to the engine mounting. I expected them to jump at me, fight me for it, maybe even shoot me… but if we were going to get out of this I had to do something.
The sound was almost unbearable, the stink of mud richer and more nauseating than ever, and I could taste blood in the air. Perhaps that was the red mist I saw.
I pulled Chele and Laura close to me, hugging the pad-rifle to my left side. Its heavy plastic was strangely warm, its wide barrel and gas-ports wicked-looking, black eyes promising so many horrors yet to be seen.
“It’s a reinforcement boat,” I said. “Nobody can last long on those bandstands, not when they’re so exposed. Everyone on this boat will be dead soon, including us, if we don’t get out of here.”
“How do we do that?”
“I have this.” I nodded at the pad-rifle. Laura refused even to look at it.
“But?“ Chele began. But she did not have a chance to finish.
Sometimes, when everything’s as bad as you think it can get, it gets worse. Misfortune upon terror upon horror… all crowd in to drown their victims, ensure a completed job.
The boat was just approaching the central bandstand when someone shouted out: “Demons!”
I looked up and saw several black shapes circling slowly down from the grey sky, wide webbed wings drifting them skilfully towards our boat.
“Now we’re finished!” a woman shouted out, and I swear there was joy in her fear.
“They’re here for them!” The voice came from the bandstand. Someone was leaning out, pointing at us, and I knew without looking that it was the madman from the barbing world. Black Teeth.
He’d been spared for some other fate.
As the demons swirled down, their wings now cracking at the air, the fighters in the boat turning to look at the three of us, bullets zinging past from both directions as we came under concerted fire from the sunken bandstands… I knew that it was time to fight.
“Chele?”
She spun around and hit the gunwale hard, the impact audible even above the gunfire. Laura cried out. Someone laughed. I dropped to my knees beside Chele and flipped her onto her back, hearing the impact of bullets on bodies behind me. There were several thumps as corpses hit the deck, but Laura was beside me, pressing her hand to the terrible wound in Chele’s face, holding in the blood, wiping away what was left of her eye where the bullet had blown it out, crying, crying for this stranger who’d helped me save her from her cruel crucifixion. And someone was still laughing.
I glanced around and saw Black Teeth leaning out over the mud, ignorant of the bullets biting at his cloths and hair, or perhaps simply not caring. He was pointing at us, his hysterical eyes wide open. I looked at his hands and imagined them wrapping barbed wire around Laura’s wrists, touching her as he did it, his eyes glinting as his fingers strayed, and before I really knew what I was doing I’d brought the pad-rifle to bear.
As if badly scripted, the gunfire paused to add gravity to the moment.
I held the weapon waist high. I’d seen these things working, so I knew I didn’t need to aim.
Black Teeth stopped laughing for a second and stared at me in disbelief. Then he smiled again, showing the rot in his mouth. Shook his head. He knew I’d never do it.
I pulled the trigger. The balustrade misted into fragments and the madman splashed back in a wash of red. His laugh seemed to hang in the air for a few seconds like a cartoon speech-bubble, or perhaps it was the rifle report ringing in my ears.
At least I knew what fate he had been spared for.
The thought that the demons had known what would happen? had perhaps engineered it? was too dreadful to contemplate, although it all made perfect sense. They were the scriptwriters and we were the actors, although our lines and actions were subconscious, not learnt.
“Daddy!” Laura shouted, and a black shaped knocked me from my feet.
I kept hold of the pad-rifle as I went sprawling, holding out one hand to break my fall, feeling it slip in something leaking from one of the corpses. The shape closed in on me again and thumped my back twice. I realised it had landed. I could feel long claws curling into me, clenching, finding purchase so that it could finish the job… whatever job that was.
Were the demons here to kill us, or let us go? I had no idea. But I had no time to waste thinking about it.
Chele was dead, most likely.
Laura may be next.
I heaved myself up as hard and fast as I could, hoping to catch the demon unawares. It worked, partially, and the thing slipped from my back, clutching out chunks of my flesh as it did so. I screamed and it screamed back, its voice like that of a giant tree frog, a bass rattle that set my hairs on end. I had to bring the rifle to bear?
The gunfire had started again, and the air smelled of hot metal and death.
Laura leapt into view, landing right by my face and launching herself at the demon. It grumbled at her and waved its wings. One of them caught her under the chin and sent her falling back over Chele’s prone body, but she had set it off balance and allowed me to scramble away from the clenching claws. I stood, spun around and aimed the pad-rifle.
For a second, silence fell across the whole scene once again. Gunfire stopped. Shouting ceased. Even the flow of the mud seemed to lessen, the steady roar of debris pushing past buildings dulled. The demon sat frozen
