who knows our initial scuttler and it’s not strangers, we are not strangers, Anissina! It wasn’t a stranger who stole the traffic warden’s hat; that would be fine, that would be nothing! It was a Londoner. It was one of the family, united because of the streets and the stones and the stories! That’s why the city is going to burn, it was a betrayal! We will kill you before we die, Anissina. Burn and be damned - GIVE ME BACK MY HAT!”
We screamed it, the curse on the city, and as we screamed, we raised our right hand, felt the twin crosses blazing blue-blooded brightness, saw the men with the guns flinch away, and felt something more, felt a stiffness in our skin, glanced at our flesh and saw . . . a darkness settled over it that hadn’t been there before, a clawing, growing darkness spreading out from the palm of our right hand but now wasn’t the time, one by one, and there was something wrong with our eyes, something hot and prickling and
Here they were!
Come on, my little beauties, you know this song . . .
Up came the rats. They tumbled out of every hole in the wall, hair raised on their backs, teeth bared; they spilt from the pipes and the cracked vents in the ceiling, crawled over each other to come through the doors; and they were angry because we were, because their home had been invaded when they hadn’t asked, no invite, no reboot. They spilt around our feet and crawled up the legs of the men with guns, who screamed and,of course, as frightened men do,
fired.
Something went boom. I couldn’t name where, the blast spread so fast through my skin, tore up the back of my throat and liquidised my knees, a great big rolling cloud of mushroom-shaped fire spreading through my nerves. I went down and backwards because that seemed to be the direction the pain was headed in, and I wasn’t going to argue with the pain. The rats parted beneath me, ran across my arms, my face, my chest, scuttling still in their hundreds out of the walls, bearing down on each of the men, who didn’t have lips left to scream, just fell, black bundles melting under black bodies, the torches going out, the lights going out, everything going out inside the room. I could hear shouting, screaming, gunfire as they shot at the rats, and I could feel the blasts, little fat bodies bursting on the earth as the bullets went in, little yellow eyes dying, little claws twitching, little whiskers flicking through the air, little teeth nibbling and biting into soft, warm, human flesh, sinking in like they were eating raw pink chicken. And there was blood on my hands burning bright blue wriggling bright blue blood our blood and I’d been shot bugger that shot after all the things that could have happened some bastard hadthe 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,