Un Lun Dun

96. Six-Shooter

The enormous Smog-mouth plummeted towards her. Deeba raised the empty UnGun.

It’s no mistake! she thought. In the book! It’s not “Nothing but the UnGun” the Smog’s scared of, it is supposed to be “Nothing and the UnGun.”

She held the weapon in her right hand, the rebrella with her left. The Smog was right above her. She could feel the wind it pushed as it dropped. All of the Smog was congealed into a dark, rushing shape. It concentrated itself so densely it looked almost solid.

It growled as it came.

Nothing’s the opposite of something. If I fire something, anything, from the UnGun, it shoots it out, and exaggerates it. So if I shoot nothing…

Deeba fired.

There was an enormous implosive rush. This time, the UnGun didn’t recoil. It didn’t push her back. It pulled her forward, and she staggered to stay standing.

With a roar, the UnGun sucked. It sluiced with impossible strength into its barrel.

A huge chunk of the Smog’s cloud-matter was drawn from the sky. In the instant that Deeba pulled the trigger, a tightly twisting vortex sprang from the Smog and funneled into the UnGun.

The Smog broke off from its dive and curved away. The face it had made boiled and re-formed. It looked confused.

It was noticeably smaller than it had been a moment before.

The Smog turned like a vast rearing horse, and snarled. It stared at Deeba, and the cloud swept down again, changing shape as it came.

Deeba hefted the UnGun. It was heavier than it had been. Five chambers left, she thought. She fired again.

The sucking sound roared across the heavens again, even louder than before, like water rushing into a cosmic drain. Another great whirlpool of Smog coiled superfast out of the cloud, slurping out whole banks of its stuff, which gushed out of the air in a dense stream, into the UnGun.

The weapon clicked in Deeba’s hand, the cylinder twisted, and another empty chamber slid into place in front of the hammer. Deeba fired again, and suctioned in another swath.

With three bullet slots full, the Smog was at least half-gone. At last it understood what it was facing. It gathered itself, and in a rolling mass like a storm front, the dark, green-tinged cloud fled across the sky.

Deeba planted her feet and aimed carefully. She fired twice in quick succession. Huge clots of Smog yanked backwards like stretching dough, gushed into the pistol.

One nothing left, Deeba thought.

There was only a small, dense patch of Smog left in the air, but it was large enough to send down a murderous rain if it got away. It flitted frantically in a zigzag over UnLondon, curling around towers and behind high roofs. It was already miles away.

Steady, thought Deeba. She watched it sink towards unlit streets, to hide below roof-level. Deeba shifted her aim, pointing not at it, but at where it was heading.

As its front entered her line of sight, she fired.

One last gust swept into the UnGun. The big lump of Smog strained against the currents, but stretched and twisted, and spiraled, and was pulled in. For seconds, the night sky over UnLondon was full of a horizontal tornado, a corkscrew of poisoned smoke gushing into the UnGun. It hauled backwards over the abcity, the wind rushing through its eddying particles with a noise exactly like screaming.

Until with a long, loud gurgle the last of the Smog disappeared down the barrel, and the sky was clean.