White and Other Tales of Ruin (32 page)

We
were
involved. Hell, I realised, can never be selective. It’s there for the benefit of everyone.

The boat slicing through the mud behind us slowed down, and a man on the bow loosed a burst of suppressing fire at the bandstand on the left. The noise was shockingly loud. Another hail of bullets came our way, kicking up great gouts of mud and releasing its stench into the air. Bullets buzzed by our ears, ricochets singing behind us, and I was sure I could feel the breeze of their passing, smell their rich metallic tint as they exploded against the wall and the boats’ hulls.

The driver of the powerboat fell back, his face swallowed by a fresh red hole.

“
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

had
to

but at the same time I wondered why nobody in the boat was firing at the thing. I shook my shoulders, pushed sideways as if to turn on my back. Claws raked my skin. Something tapped at the back of my neck, and I felt the warm dribble of blood around my ears and scalp.

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 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


blood, it bled, it was just like us


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
bleed
.”

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.