Authors: Charlie Human
‘You see?’ Ronin says. ‘You’re being stupid and I’m going to prove it to you.
‘THE WORST IS OVER!’ he screams into the tunnel. ‘Come on, universe. Do your worst! I challenge you – no, I dare you! Jackie Ronin dares you to throw something at us.’
He turns back to me with a grin. ‘You see. Absolute bullshit. Try to think more logically. Science, not superstition, that’s the way forward.’
There is a rumble, followed by a hissing slither. We all look up in horror. ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Well that’s just lovely, Ronin, really lovely.’
The sewer system is full of fat, congealed fat; our modern diet of greasy food clogs our sewers as badly as it clogs our arteries. Rivers of the stuff begin to pour into the tunnels ahead of us, bringing parts of the city with it. Broken glass, pieces of metal, and other things that don’t dissolve when thrown down sinks and toilets, embedded in the swirling yellow, grey and beige mass.
‘Oh God,’ I say. ‘What’s happening? It’s something bad, isn’t it?’
‘Well, to unpack your question,’ King starts, ‘it’s not so much just blindly happening as—’
‘The short version, please,’ Ronin growls.
King sighs. ‘Yes, bad. The egregore has reached a critical mass and he’s using it to create nightmares.’
The fat continues to pour from the sewers into the tunnels. It seems to be held together by some kind of invisible force.
‘Can we destroy it?’ asks the Witch.
‘We can goddamn try,’ Ronin replies, and he sweeps the Blackfish from under his coat and fires in one smooth motion. The sound of the gunshot goes through my skull like a hammer and the intense ringing in my ears causes me to lose balance for a second.
‘We’re in a confined space,’ I say, shaking my head to try and get rid of the sound. ‘Some warning would have been great.’
Ronin grunts his indifference, his eyes on the fat. It seems entirely unperturbed at having been shot.
‘We’re going to have to hit it harder than that.’ The Witch’s voice is grim.
‘We need blood to channel enough magic to gut-punch that thing,’ Ronin says.
‘Well don’t look at me,’ I protest. ‘I’m an apprentice, not a blood sacrifice.’
‘Rats,’ Ronin says. ‘Or birds. There must be something in these sewers we can use.’
‘Actually there are several tribes of rat living here,’ Nom says matter-of-factly. ‘A complex socio-economic system. They use bottle caps as currency to—’
‘We need to catch some of them and bleed them dry,’ Ronin interrupts.
Nom’s nose seems to twitch like a bok-boy’s. ‘I will put your proposal to them,’ he says.
He rests his head against the wall and emits a series of squeaks. There’s a scratching sound, and dozens of rats squeeze themselves from a crack and assemble in front of us. Their spokesperson, a large grey rat with red eyes and a scar on its face, stands on its hind legs and addresses us.
‘Ambassador Sadler from the Seventh Tribe of Dust and Mud welcomes you. The Seventh Tribe has heard your pleas and graciously responds,’ Nom translates.
‘I could just grab them,’ Ronin whispers, eyeing the fat pooling in the tunnels ahead. ‘Stop yapping and let me grab them.’
Nom glares at him and chitters to the rats. The leader responds.
‘They say that they have felt the presence of the intruder in their realm. They have martyrs willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater good.’
The rats present themselves to us, their necks bowed. It doesn’t exactly feel right, but the sangomas have no such qualms. Magic is a dirty and dangerous discipline.
Ronin grabs a handful of rats, slashes them open and drips blood on to the floor of the tunnels. He hands me a couple. ‘Take them,’ he says. ‘You’re going to need them for later.’ My nose crinkles in disgust.
Ambassador Sadler chirps angrily. ‘He says you dishonour their souls and deny them access to the Great Sewer if you do not use them,’ Nom says.
I take the dead rats and tie them by their tails to my belt.
The Witch opens her mojo bag and pulls out a rattling string of beads. She ties it to her ankle and stomps on the ground, and the beads snap sharply like a snare drum. She sets the beat and Tone picks it up by clapping his hands, a sharp, syncopated rhythm that echoes off the tunnel’s walls. Ronin nods his head, swaying from side to side like a gnarly old red tree in the breeze. They begin a droning call-and-response song, chanting in Xhosa, Zulu and Afrikaans. Their voices complement each other, not exactly harmonious, but strong and commanding.
A coiling mess of dirty yellow energy rises up from the rat blood and rushes towards the fat. When it hits, the mass is pulled apart, and for several seconds lumps of fat hang in the air like they’re suspended on a giant loom. Then it’s sucked back into shape again and the energy snaps out of existence with a high-pitched metallic ringing sound.
Ronin leans on his knees panting heavily and spits on the tunnel floor. Tone does some kind of breathing exercise, and even the Witch looks unsteady on her feet.
The pooling mass of fat, on the other hand, hardly seems to have noticed. In fact it’s starting to turn into a clearly defined shape: a massive head with whiskers, a sinuous body with patchy scales of glass and metal, and legs with claws made of rusty nails. A dragon made of fat. A fatdragon.
‘If that spell didn’t do it, then nothing else we have will stop it,’ the Witch says with a grimace.
‘So what do we do?’
‘May I suggest running?’ King says, lifting his kaftan gingerly up around his ankles.
Running. Always running. Still, it’s a solid plan and I like it. We turn and sprint just as the fatdragon becomes aware of our presence and lurches towards us. A warm, mucusy blast of breath follows us as we tumble down the corridor.
I shoot a look over my shoulder. The dragon is squeezing its way through the tunnel like toothpaste from a tube. Its snout writhes from side to side and a deep, squelching roar erupts from its mouth, bringing with it a river of diapers and sanitary towels. It looks up at me with strange multifaceted eyes, dozens of globules of fat like jellyfish stuck together, and seems to give me a gormless smile.
Just for the record: there is no way I’m getting eaten by that thing. Beaten to death by goblins? Fine. Decapitated by Crows? I’ll take it. But going anywhere near that clearly unhygienic maw is completely out of the question. Non-negotiable. I run faster than I have ever run before.
The dim concrete tunnels rush past us as we sprint. The fluorescent lights begin to flicker, making everything look like it’s happening in slow motion. Sweat prickles on my face and starts to burn my eyes. I trip on a rusty bicycle frame and pitch head first into the gunk.
‘Come on, sparky,’ Ronin shouts over his shoulder.
‘Thanks for the encouragement.’ I wipe sewer grime from my glasses, push myself up on to my haunches and look behind me.
The fatdragon is dragging itself through the tunnel with gooey squelching and sucking noises. It smiles again, and the jagged brown glass shards of its teeth glint. I leap to my feet and run. There’s heavy gunfire up ahead, but I can’t turn back.
‘No retreat, no surrender,’ I whisper to myself, pushing my glasses firmly back on to my face.
I blunder out into a vast circular concourse where several tunnels meet. Ronin and the rest of our team have dug in behind a huge sewage tank. They’re being pinned down by a platoon of goblins with automatic weapons.
I dive behind a rusted staircase that leads up towards some sort of control station, just as a line of gunfire chews into the wall behind where I was standing. Another sewer grime facial. I look across to Ronin and the others. Trying to reach them will get me ventilated by goblin bullets, but an old staircase is hardly what I’d called a
primo
bullet shield. Already a couple of rounds are zinging past my head, and I don’t really want to wait until the goblins’ aim gets more accurate.
That’s when I come up with the brilliant idea of
making a break for it.
I dart out from behind the staircase, and immediately a bullet clips my scalp and spins me to the ground. I scrape my hands breaking my fall but my jaw still thuds painfully into the concrete. The searing pain from the head wound is white-hot, and I scream. A sticky wetness runs into my eyes and I try to wipe it away with my sleeve.
Another scream fills the concourse as if parodying mine. I stop screaming and look up. Through a veil of my own blood I see the fatdragon coiling above me. Pieces of goblin drip from its smirking mouth, and it stares at me with those bubbling translucent eyes.
I’m pulled to my feet and propelled forward into a run by a pair of hands.
‘Hope I didn’t interrupt a special moment,’ Ronin says. ‘But time to move.’
We duck through into one of the tunnels at random. A dead dwarf lies slumped over the handlebars of his four-wheeler, a bullet hole through his cheek.
‘
Gremesh nasta ek.’
Ronin touches the dwarf’s forehead and then pushes him off the bike and into the muck. ‘Get on, sparky,’ he says, clambering on to the bike.
I slide on to the seat behind him and wrap my arms around his waist.
‘Please be advised that we might experience some mild turbulence,’ Ronin recites in an air-hostess voice.
‘Oh God,’ I say.
He fires up the engine and the wheels spin, sending a barrage of muck everywhere. My arms are almost pulled from their sockets as we roar off. I can feel the maggoty moistness of the fatdragon’s breath on my neck.
‘Faster,’ I shout to Ronin.
‘What’s that?’ he shouts back. ‘You want me to slow down?’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ I say. ‘Can we not do this now?’
He slows the bike down.
‘Maybe I should take it easy,’ he says. ‘Laws ARE there for a reason.’
‘OK, you’re a good driver, is that what you want to hear? You drive fantastically, you should be a driving instructor.’
He guns the engine and my arms are jolted again.
‘You’re such a fucking child,’ I shout as we hurtle around a corner.
The dragon gains on us slowly. Ronin’s trench coat flaps against me as we speed through the tunnel, a rhythmic
dapdapdap
that for a second is in perfect rhythm with the slapping of fat behind us.
‘Do something,’ Ronin says. ‘Try to slow it down.’
I sigh, untie a dead rat from my belt and look at it. There’s a horrible spell that the Boer taught us. Not pleasant at all. I really don’t want to do it.
‘Sparky,’ Ronin calls. ‘Running out of time here.’
I steel myself and then bite into the little rat body. Blood, dark, obscene and metallic, rushes into my mouth. I gag several times but manage to stop myself from either swallowing or spitting it out. I drag the bok spoon from my mojo bag and use it as a focus point, and then turn and spit the blood out behind me in a dark fountain.
The blood starts to shriek and transforms into a huge throbbing net across the mouth of the tunnel. The fatdragon slams into it and is momentarily stopped. It thrashes and whines, infuriated by the sticky obstacle that is stopping it from devouring us.
We careen up the curved side of the tunnel wall to avoid a pile of debris and then swing madly back the other way, Ronin only managing to maintain control of the bike with his superhuman drunk reflexes.
‘Up ahead,’ he shouts. ‘There’s a ramp.’
Sure enough, I can make out the outline of a ramp leading upwards to where construction work has opened a ragged hole in the tunnel ceiling. I immediately know what Ronin is thinking.
‘No!’ I shout. ‘Ronin …’
He guns the engine and sends the bike towards the ramp with the precision of a kamikaze pilot. I lock my hands together around his waist and brace my head against his back.
My stomach hops as we hit the ramp, does a double backflip as we ascend it, and pikes as we sail through the hole in the ceiling, hanging gracefully for a moment in my abdomen before plunging into my intestine as we hit the ground above. The wheels slide along the dirt of the construction site as if on ice, then lock and tip the bike over. I’m plucked from around Ronin’s waist and flung across the empty lot in a flailing tangle of limbs before slamming into a large mound of sand.
Ooooooooof.
Air. That’s what I need. Lots of it. Unfortunately my lungs have been shocked into forgetting how to breathe. I suck vainly at the atmosphere around me like a goldfish out of its bowl before finally sweet, beautiful oxygen rushes into me.
I have sand in the bullet wound in my head, blood and dirt mixing together into a gruesome failed toddler art project on the side of my face. My mouth tastes of rat blood and I retch several times.
Next to the mangled corpse of the bike, Ronin is picking himself up out of the dirt and brushing off his trench coat. He limps to the edge of the hole and looks down into the tunnel.
‘It can’t get up,’ he says, and gingerly walks over to me, clutching his leg. He slumps against the pile of sand next to me, fishes around in his coat pocket and hands me a grimy bandanna. I press it lightly to my head and wince.
‘Just a scratch, sparky.’ He takes a swig from his hip flask.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You OK?’
He nods, smacks his lips together and contemplates the flask.
‘Can’t believe drinking is actually a positive thing,’ he says. ‘Kinda takes some of the enjoyment out of it.’
‘You’re an idiot.’
‘Yeah,’ he agrees. ‘True.’
We sit for a while and nurse our wounds.
‘Back there, when I was trying to kill you …’ he starts.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘It’s OK. Thanking each other is not really our thing.’
‘Who said anything about thanking you?’ He takes another swig. ‘You’ve turned me back into an alcoholic. You’re an enabler.’
‘I’ve decided I’m no longer going to try and be good,’ I say. ‘It’s not really who I am.’
‘Well we’ve both failed then.’
‘Yep.’
‘Feels pretty good, doesn’t it?’
I look at him and smile. ‘It’s the best thing ever.’
I grab the flask out of his hand and wash out the taste of rat blood with the bitter alcohol. Ronin stands up and holds out his hand. I grab it and he pulls me to my feet.
We locate a manhole a few blocks away and Ronin wedges the cover open. We climb down in the dim, flickering light. The tunnels are older here, crumbling and permeated by a dank and musty smell that clings to my skin. Scrawled graffiti covers the walls. Ronin runs his fingers over some of the Afrikaans words.