Un Lun Dun - China Mieville [144]
“Come on!” Deeba shouted, and shook the UnGun. “Paper planes?” she shouted. “Paper cuts? Drop a ton of books on them or something!” But the onslaught of folded planes was ebbing.
Unstible’s skin was marked with little wounds, which didn’t bleed, but oozed wisps of smoke. Brokkenbroll peered out from behind his unbrellas.
He looked at Deeba, holding her useless empty weapon. She desperately tried to snap open its cylinder to reload, but it wouldn’t budge. The Unbrellissimo looked at Unstible, still sucking in the stream of green fumes.
Brokkenbroll didn’t look triumphant: he looked bewildered, and afraid.
“What are you…?” he said to the Unstible-thing, and his words dried.
He snapped his fingers. The unbrellas folded their canopies and made towards Deeba.
The rebrella did not. Deeba saw it fold up under Brokkenbroll’s nose, and understood. It had infiltrated his shield, to get close to him. When it did not obey him, Deeba saw a look of total horror cross Brokkenbroll’s face.
He did not have time to do anything. The rebrella whacked him resoundingly in the head. He keeled over backwards.
Instantly, in time with his fall, the unbrellas stopped moving towards Deeba, and eddied in confusion.
The rebrella smacked Brokkenbroll several times more, until he was definitely unconscious.
Deeba could not take her eyes from Unstible’s horrifying transformation. It inhaled like an industrial pump, and swelled into a revolting parody of a human. The smoke pouring from the vat sluiced into its body. The vat itself was beginning to shake, and creak.
Unstible staggered towards Deeba, but it was too grossly inflated now to walk. Instinctively Deeba raised the UnGun, but it was empty, and she could only lower it again. Unstible smiled.
“It’s,” it spat out through an inrush of reeking steam, “time.”
It smiled wider, and wider. It opened its mouth and stretched back its lips, and still kept smiling. Its mouth began to gape, and the skin at the corners stretched, and Unstible’s jaw dropped and its head lolled back, and that mouth opened so wide suddenly its head hinged all the way open, turned inside out, and a huge, dense cloud poured out.
The Smog inside Unstible was so thick it completely blocked out light. It was dark and tinged with the green of the steam. It gushed out of Unstible as if from an exhaust pipe.
Unstible’s skin collapsed. There was not a fleck of blood. It fell in on itself, as the fumes, the only things that had filled it for a long time, left.
The skin lay in a man-shaped rag on the floor. The Smog expanded luxuriously into the room. It seemed impossible that so much smoke had fit in Unstible, no matter how stretched. The Smog was everywhere, and Deeba couldn’t breathe, or see.
She felt the grit of airborne soot and rubbish sting her, and she tried to keep her eyes and mouth shut. The chemical stench was inescapable. She spat. She fell to her knees.
The room began to shake. For a second Deeba thought it was her imagination, but she could dimly hear the roaring of the huge cauldron as the magic compound boiled into gas, and joined the Smog’s substance.
There was a bursting roar, and Deeba felt the Smog rush from her, and the air clear.
Wind tugged at her hair. She opened her eyes, and was staring up into the crawling stars, and the loon, and a dark, soaring cloud.
Deeba looked around in confusion. Dust was settling everywhere, coating the aimless unbrellas, the ruined furniture, and the room’s other coughing inhabitants. She saw Unstible’s skin where it had fallen.
The vat was burst. The liquid had reached some critical heat and exploded.
It had blown off the roof. Deeba looked up again and let out a cry of terror.
Rising directly above the room, the Smog flew.
It was growing as it rose, spreading