wire quality, her tongue a twisted red forked sliver on the air. The fumes didn’t seem to be bothering her. They were bothering us.
Then the door opened. I said, “No, wait, don’t . . .”
Kemsley said, “Shoot it!”
Gunshots in a confined space are like having popcorn explode inside your eardrum; automatic gunfire was the popcorn, the bag, the oil and the whole microwave. I half-saw in the flashes from the barrels a figure, all hood and faceless shadow, staggering back as his clothes were ripped to shreds, as fabric popped and burst backwards and outwards and severed and snapped and spat and the men emptied out every bullet they had in the barrel, I could hear the clitter-clatter of falling casings, smell over the stench of the exhaust fumes the sweeter stench of burning powder and overheated metal and, when it stopped, I could hear nothing but banging in our head and taste nothing but dirt and smoke and see nothing but afterburn star flashes on the inside of our eyes. “Stop!” we screamed, “Stop!”
And they stopped. Eventually.
I crawled to my feet, pressed my neon bubble into my chest for childish safety. In the torchlight, I could see the thing standing in the door. Its clothes were nothing but a scalded, smoking spiderweb, blasted threads clinging to each other by the thinnest strain of grey fabric, hood shot straight through so I could see the smog rising behind it, look straight through that non-face, through the nothingness, empty air, that supported the almost nothing of its clothes. The spectre seemed more surprised than hurt, its hood turning downwards as it examined the shrivelled remnants of its garb, no flesh beneath, nothing to suggest that anything worse had happened to it than a saunter through a very thick shrubbery. Then its head - the emptiness that was its head - turned upwards and seemed to fix its attention on the nearest soldier, who, without a finger falling upon him, started to scream.
It was an animal noise, pure and without thought. It wasn’t just that his vocal cords were tightened by agony or terror, it was his whole throat, his lungs, every part of him that had anything to do with air, seemed to clench. His feet left the floor, his fingers spasmed wide, the gun falling down at his feet, his face went back and his throat seemed to buckle. He screamed and screamed so loud and so high and I could see the bottom of his ribcage seem to twist into it, heard it buckle, snap and crack like dry cereal hitting hot milk, pushing more air up through his mouth.
Then we saw it. A thin line of redness drew itself across an eyelid, tiny and vivid in the torchlight, then another across his cheek, then another down his chin, then another over the twisted, warped protrusion of his tortured windpipe, then another, and another, slashing through his nostrils, inside his nostrils, across his lips, over his gums, over the white of his eyes that began to fill with scarlet blood as, faster than the mind could register them, his skin began to break and crack, tear and slice and slide with a thousand little dribbling cuts, never longer than an inch, never wider than the thickness of a sheet of paper, and now there was no air left in his lungs to scream by nor nothing in his body that seemed to let him inhale but he hung suspended there as his skin cracked and parted and sliced and his eyes went red and filled with blood and his teeth stained with blood and there was just blood and the rattle of his bones and breaking cartilage of his windpipe and Kemsley was screaming, “Do something, do something!” in a voice that rolled unnaturally deep and full of bubbles from inside his throat and we realised he meant us, do something, and there was still the spectre in the door just watching and Oda stepped past us, levelled her gun at the soldier’s head and fired. Just fired, just . . . did it. But his head rocked back and his body jerked by the cuts still kept cutting, slicing under his nails, tearing apart his flesh, wiping away all trace of skin except a few loose white shreds like the thin roughness of dry skin exposed to too much sun, drooping off bright red flesh.
We looked at the spectre. We opened our hands and snarled, let the neon