Un Lun Dun

45. Nasty Rain

Hey! the ghost mouthed, seeing them on the computer. It scattered the ghost-papers it held, and floated towards them shaking its fist.

“Print it!” said Deeba. Hemi stabbed at the buttons. “Quick!”

The chubby ghost reached for the paper as it emerged, but Hemi snatched it and gave it to Deeba. The ghost banged on the keyboard and the screen went blank. What you doing? he bellowed silently as Deeba and Hemi ran.

The paper was hard to read. The typeface was surrounded by whorls of ghost-print, a flickering of all the fonts once used on official forms. And the paper had obviously been recycled. Its previous forms— scribbled messages and newspaper pages— floated around it.

But through all the spectral interference, Unstible’s name and the details of his “immigration to Thanatopia”— his death— could be made out.

“That proves it,” said Hemi, pausing in the building’s entrance. Deeba folded the printout carefully into her pack.

“I told you,” she said.

“Alright, alright,” said Hemi, shoving her towards the door as behind them a crowd of irate bureaucrat ghosts appeared.

When they emerged, the UnSun had dawned. Deeba stared at the strange, familiar shape.

“We got to tell Brokkenbroll,” said Deeba urgently. “And the Propheseers.”

“Whoa, whoa,” said Hemi. He looked behind him nervously as they walked through Wraithtown. “ ‘We’? This is your thing. I’m sorry, but I did what you paid for. Good luck, I’m gone.”

“Wait, what?” Deeba stopped and stared at him. “You can’t. You’re joking. It isn’t Unstible who’s doing things. Don’t you see? Something’s really wrong. I need to get to the Pons Absconditus. Can you help?”

“Its touchdown’s nowhere near here,” Hemi said. “You could get a bus but…” He seemed to sniff the air. “It’s a Rogueday. I don’t know how often they run on a Rogueday.”

“Hold on,” Deeba said. “Rogueday. You remember where I first met you?”

“’Course,” he said. “I was breakfast shopping.” Stealing, Deeba thought. “In the market, just up the way.”

“I’ve got a friend there who might help us.”

“There’s no us,” Hemi said. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I cannot get involved.”

“But…don’t you care?” Deeba said. “It’s UnLondon…” She stopped suddenly. She’d never seen him so agitated. She realized that it wasn’t that he didn’t care— it was that he was overwhelmed. And she remembered what had happened to him in the market.

She needed his help. Deeba almost despaired. One thing that stopped her was that though Hemi kept acting as if he was about to walk away, he didn’t. She thought quickly. He obviously had to fend for himself.

“Look,” she said, thinking carefully. She took out the rest of the money she’d brought. “This is all I have. It’s yours, all of it, if you’ll help me. I can’t do this on my own.” Her voice almost caught.

Hemi eyed the cash. He hesitated. He reached for it slowly.

“Nuh-uh,” Deeba said, pulling her hand back. “Cash on delivery. Get me to the bridge— it’s all yours. Or at least to the market— we’ll work something out. Promise. Please.”

“I’m not sure about this,” Hemi muttered. “I’m really not sure about this.”

They were at the edge of Wraithtown, peering across a stretch of concrete at the market, the traders and shoppers. A wall must have stood there years before, and they were huddled behind its ghost. Deeba squinted through misty spectral bricks, past the upside-down bathtub and concrete mixer and supermarket trolleys that were growing at the plaza’s edges.

“It’ll be fine,” Deeba said.

“It will not be fine,” Hemi said. “They hate me.”

“Well, I guess now I’m here, you don’t have to come in,” Deeba said hesitantly.

“Whatever,” Hemi said vaguely. “I might as well stick it a bit longer, earn the rest of the dosh.”

“Okay,” said Deeba without looking at him.

She held on to his hand and walked through the ghost of the wall. She felt a faint resistance, and then she was through.

“And I promise,” Deeba added, “I won’t let them chat any rubbish at you. And that includes Obaday.”

Halfway to the market, Hemi stopped.

“Wait,” he said. There was terrible urgency in his voice. He pointed up.

Light was leaving the sky. Racing across the pale circle of the UnSun came black cloud, like squirted ink. It was rushing up from the streets, spreading above the roofs, tugging itself through the air, approaching the market.

People had seen it. Some were standing their ground and looking up, scared but trying to be brave. Many were running. They scattered towards the surrounding houses.

“Quick, quick, quick,” said Hemi. “We have to get under cover. It’s the Smog.”

“What about your unbrella?” he said as they ran.

“It’s not an unbrella,” Deeba said breathlessly, “it’s an umbrella…”

“Can it protect us? No? What’s the point of that?”

Hemi looked around quickly, and ran to a manhole cover in the street.

“Help me!” he said, and he and Deeba began to pry it from the ground.

Hemi’s hands moved fast. He tensed with effort, and for a moment she couldn’t see what he did with his fingers.

“Got to get the lock,” he muttered, then: “Yes!” Something clicked, and they hauled the cover from the street. “Get in, quickly.”

He followed Deeba onto the ladder in the dank hole. Hemi hauled the covering back over them, wedged it with a stone, so they could peer through the crack.

Ankles in shoes scampered around them, as well as wheels and other odder limbs. The air was darkening.

There was a clattering. The metal lid began to ring like a cymbal. Pellets ricocheted.

Some way off, Deeba could just see a woman who had been issued an unbrella standing unafraid as the onslaught began. The unbrella leapt, pulling the woman’s hand above her head, spun, blocking the Smog’s attacks, sending its missiles flying.

Chunks of carbon were slamming into the pavement, centimeters from Deeba’s face. The air was full of slugs of metal that hit hard enough to chip the pavement.

“It’s too dangerous,” said Hemi, and lowered the lid.

They clung in darkness. The noise was enormous. Below the hammering of the Smog’s attack Deeba could hear shouts, and screams of pain. And underlying everything a noise that could be thunder, or could be an enormous growling voice.

“It’s showing what it can do,” Hemi whispered. “It’s been attacking like this every few days. And it’s had its addicts or its smombies start fires. It’s declaring war.”

The cacophony eventually eased, and stopped, and only the moans of injured could be heard. Slowly, Hemi pushed back the lid and they stepped out.

Throughout the market, injured people lay. A few were lying still, punctured and bleeding from where the Smog’s missiles had hit them. The stalls were ripped and smoking.

All over the pavement and between the rows of tents the market was littered with remnants of the attack. Nuggets of metal and mineral from thumb- to fist-sized lay and smoldered. As Deeba watched, they slowly evaporated. They fizzed like dissolvable pills, and their matter boiled off in smoke that wafted away.

The sky was clear. The Smog had gone.

People emerged from dugouts and the cellars and the barricaded emptish buildings into which they had leapt. They examined the shredded awnings.

There were also the lucky few with unbrellas.

“This is going to work,” said a woman. She twirled her broken unbrella, its spokes bent into an ugly claw, its upper surface boiling with smoke from the attacks it had deflected. “Did you see?”

Her companion was a man in an outfit of tied-together ribbons. “You’re right,” Deeba heard him say reverentially. He twirled his own unbrella. It was bent in its shaft. “Nothing could touch us. I wasn’t even doing anything— were you? It’s all Brokkenbroll. They’re all obeying him.”

Hemi knelt by a victim of the terrible mineral rain, a woman in a puffy dress interwoven with ivy. He looked up at Deeba and shook his head.

Some of the injured were being carried away, or tended to by various strange-looking doctors. There were a few others beyond help.

The market after the attack was a strange mixture of the exhilarated and the destroyed. Deeba and Hemi walked through the triumphant, the injured, and, here and there, the dead.