“Get out of here, Ammit!”
He paid no attention, only threw himself at Red Molly with a bellow of rage. He was a big man, but next to the giant he looked not much larger than Peterkin, now lying dead in two pieces up the street. For a moment she was too surprised by this unexpected attack to move. Ammit took advantage while he could. He grabbed one of her wide suspenders and pulled himself up one-handed. He opened his mouth and buried his teeth in her arm just above the elbow.
She screeched in pain, grabbed him by his greasy mop of hair, and pulled his head away. She balled up a fist and drove it not into his face but through it. His eyes bulged in two different directions, as if not wanting to see the red hole that had been his nose and mouth. She lifted him, still with only one hand, and shook that big man to and fro like a marionette. Then she threw him in the direction of the graveyard, blood fanning up from her bitten arm. Ammit was brawny and fearless, but she had disposed of him as if he had been no more than a child.
Next she turned to me.
I was sitting on the cobbled pavement of the Gallien Road, legs splayed, Polley’s .22 automatic held out in both hands. I remembered how it had felt to have that gun pressed into the back of my head. I thought again of Rumpelstiltskin, and how much Polley had reminded me of that fairy-tale dwarf: What will you give me if I spin your straw into gold? Polley would have killed me once he got Mr. Bowditch’s treasure and tumbled me down the magic well hidden in Mr. Bowditch’s shed.
Mostly I remember hoping that the little gun would stop a giant, just as David’s little stone had stopped Goliath. It might, if it was mostly loaded. It had been fired twice already, back in a less magical world.
She came toward me, grinning. Her wounded arm was pouring blood. She didn’t seem to mind. Maybe Ammit’s final bite would start an infection that would kill her if I couldn’t.
“You’re no prince,” she said in that rumbling baritone. “You’re a bug. Nothing but a bug. I’ll just step on you and—”
I fired. The gun gave a polite bang, not much louder than the Daisy air rifle I’d had when I was six years old. A small black hole appeared over Red Molly’s right eye. She reared back and I shot her again. This time the hole appeared in her throat, and when she gave a howl of pain, blood jetted from the hole. It came out under so much pressure that it looked solid, like the shaft of a red arrow. I fired again and this time the black hole, not much bigger than the period you put at the end of a sentence, appeared at the top of her nose. None of it stopped her.
“YOUUU—！” she screamed, and reached for me.
I didn’t pull back or even try to dodge; that would have fucked up my aim and it was far too late to run. She would have caught me in a pair of mother may I giant steps. Just before she could grab my head as she’d grabbed Ammit’s, I fired five more times in rapid succession. Each shot went into her open, screaming mouth. The first two—maybe the first three—took most of her teeth with them. In The War of the Worlds, our most sophisticated weapons didn’t do much to stop the rampaging Martians; it was earthly germs that killed them. I don’t think any single bullet from Polley’s little gun did for Red Molly, nor even all eight, which was every cartridge left in the clip.
I think she pulled her broken teeth down her throat… and choked on them.
5
If she had fallen on me, her weight might have held me pinned until Kellin and his night soldiers arrived, or killed me outright. She had to go five hundred pounds, minimum. But she went to her knees first, gasping and choking and holding her bleeding throat. Her eyes bulged sightlessly. I scrambled back on my ass, tipped over on my side and rolled. The night soldiers were closing in, I’d never beat them to the gate, and the gun was used up—slide back, chamber empty.
She made one final effort to reach me, waving her wounded arm and stippling my cheeks and forehead with her blood. Then she fell on her face. I stood up. I could run, but what was the point? Better to face them head-on and die as best I could.
What I thought of then was my father, who would still be hoping I’d come home. He and Lindy Franklin and my Uncle Bob would have papered every town between Sentry and Chi with pictures of me and Radar—HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY OR THIS DOG? The passage to Empis would be left unguarded, and maybe that was more important than one bereft father, but as the night soldiers neared, it was Dad I was thinking of. He’d gotten sober, and for what? Wife gone, son lost without a trace.
But if Iota could lead the others through the gate, where I didn’t believe the night soldiers could go, they’d be free. There was that.