against the edge of the cockpit, its black armour wet with my blood, antennae flipping at the air. Its visor was black and held no reflection.
Briefly wondering if I was about to do something awful and unforgivable, I pulled the trigger.
The pad struck the demon in the chest and blew straight through, punching a hole the size of a dinner plate. It took out the side of the powerboat as well. There was a huge splash in the mud twenty yards away and the air turned red, blood misting on the steady breeze and settling on the faces of those watching. Clots of flesh fell from the demon and pattered lightly around its feet. It looked down at its chest. For a second I thought it was going to come at me again, uninjured, hardly even inconvenienced?
?and then it toppled back over the smashed gunwale and disappeared into the mud.
“Holy shit,” someone said. I heard awe in the voice. “They bleed. They
Our boat listed as tons of mud surged through the rupture in its side. The gunfire opened up again, and for a few seconds bullets whistled past our heads from every direction.
They’re shooting at me, I thought, I’ve destroyed some illusion, ruined something fundamental to their existence here, and they’re trying to kill me.
But then I realised that the weapons were aimed elsewhere. A demon danced on the bow of the boat as bullets struck it, before falling back and landing by my feet.
There were several other demons circling the scene above our heads, and a couple of them opened fire with their own weapons. Air flash-fried as the tazers struck downwards. One burst hit the bandstand we were moored against and danced across its timbers like St Elmo’s fire. A woman jerked and spat as the charge entered her and seemed to light her from the inside, exploding from her eyes, ears, mouth. The demons cackled and croaked and fired some more, some of their shots finding targets. But they were no match for the firepower arrayed against them. Fighters on the boat and all three bandstands had opened up against the demons, and within thirty seconds all but one had been brought down. Most of them hit the mud screeching, clicking for help, bleeding, wings trailing and tattered. And on each impact, a cheer went up from their intended prey.
The one remaining demon, wings pushing frantically, tail trailing like a streamer behind it, rose out of range of our weapons and stayed there, circling on warm currents. It was so high up that we could barely see it. A few bursts of gunfire still cracked out, but all aimed skyward. Down at our level calm had descended, as if none of the people could remember what they had been fighting for.
I wondered what was to come next.
“Dad,” Laura said, “she’s still alive!”
One side of the boat was submerged now, and its passengers were scrambling across to the bandstand, those already there helping them up. I looked at Chele. Her face was a ruin, both eyes shattered by the bullet, her nose exploded outward… and Laura was right! There, where her nose had been, bubbles appeared in the blood and ruined flesh. They enlarged, withdrew, grew again and popped. Her mouth was open and her tongue was moving like a wounded fish in its red-water cave.
“Jesus.” For a crazy second I was going to leave her in the boat. Grab Laura, get up onto the bandstand, take the pad-rifle with me and try to get us out of here, out of Hell, back to that place we called normal but which I thought would never be normal again. She was awfully wounded and even if she did survive, what would the future hold for her? A lifetime of operations, plastic surgery, engineered flesh replacing her own, artificial eyes giving her a sterile view of her world… and perhaps, eventually, a trip back here. To show her that things weren’t so bad after all.
I laughed out loud.
Laura frowned, and several people turned to look at me, some of them only half-way to escaping from the sinking boat. “What?” I said, smiling. Laughter must be something none of them heard very often. I smirked at Laura and she actually smiled back, even though she had no idea of the source of my mirth. Then I looked down at Chele and my good humour vanished.
She was my responsibility now. I knew that, and I hated it, and I hated myself for hating it.
“Help me with her,” I said. Laura grabbed her feet and I lifted her under the arms, holding the pad-rifle pressed between my arm and side. As we shuffled her towards the high side of the tilted boat her head tipped back. She coughed and cackled deep in her throat. She would choke on her own blood if we didn’t get her upright soon.
“Help us!” I said, and hands reached out.
We managed to haul the unconscious Chele up the sloping deck, over the gunwale and onto the bandstand. The boat drifted away seconds later, caught by the current now that no one was holding onto it anymore, and as it spun lazily towards the street we’d come up a few minutes before it tipped over. Mud gurgled in and sucked it down, down to whatever the depths held. Soon there was only a whirling pattern on the mud where the boat had been.
Seconds later even that vanished.
I stood on something wet and red and disgusting, wondering which piece of Black Teeth was beneath my feet. His heart, empty of pity? His mashed eyes, and all the terrors they had seen? Perhaps it was his hands, his fingers that had wrapped the wire around Laura’s wrists.
I ground my feet and smiled. I’d never, ever killed anyone before. The closest I’d come was thinking about killing myself.
“She’s still breathing, I think,” Laura said, kneeling next to Chele’s prone body. I looked, so helpless.
“What now?” someone asked. “What now, now that we’ve killed the demons? Are we free? Can we go?”
“Don’t be so stupid,” someone else answered.
“How long has this been happening?” I said, looking out over the mud and hefting the pad-rifle.
“What do you mean?”
“
“Forever.”
“Minutes…”
The answers were all wrong, though all the speakers obviously felt them to be right. I could sense no confusion there, no doubt.
And then I saw something that was nearer to home than anything I’d seen since escaping the coach with Chele: a disturbance in the mud, halfway between the bandstand and the ruined houses. At first I thought it was the mud river passing over a ditch or culvert, but I noticed that the hollow in the surface was moving, passing across the lake like the concave shadow of a cloud. It was a wave caused by something unseen, an outside influence in here.
And it was so close to home because I knew exactly what it was.
“There!” I said, pointing.
“What? Where? What?” They all spoke, and the tone of their voices all said the same thing.
“How can you accept all this so easily?” I asked, disgusted. The people looked at me, a couple of them frowning as if they’d forgotten something vital. I brought up the pad-rifle and glanced at Laura. She knew what was about to happen and ducked down, covering Chele’s wounded face with her own body. I felt so proud.
Still nobody answered my question, so I opened fire at nothing.
The third shot opened a window to reality.
There was a face revealed there, cringing away from the rupture as glass exploded around them. The woman looked out and the shock was rich and honest. The blood made it so, because she must have never expected to end that day bleeding. And it was as if she saw this scene as it really was for the first time. Before, behind the protective glass of the coach, it was played out for her; a holo clip, a flash of history or a keyhole onto the future. Now it was different. Now she could see and smell and sense the truth of things.
The rest of the coach was still invisible, but the wound in its side located it. I could imagine where it was, if not actually see it, so I swivelled a few degrees and fired again, blasting out a panel and revealing the fluid workings of its engine. I turned again — I saw the woman’s fear as, for a split second, she stared into the pad- rifle’s barrel — and fired twice more, smashing holes in the rear of the coach. They were sharp-edged rents in its skin, like shrapnel wounds bleeding reality. More faces stared out. One of them screamed; I could hear him, hear the pain and shock as he tried to dig shattered glass from his throat. I knew that no one could help him because
