Bitter Sixteen

by Stefan Mohamed

  ‘Who is this Tara?’ asked Connor. ‘Sharon mentioned her briefly on the phone but I —’

  ‘I’ll explain later,’ I said. ‘But do you get what I mean?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Eddie, ‘I suppose. Kloe doesn’t have any powers, though. Otherwise I’m sure she’d be here. Our power isn’t “being men”. It’s, like, super strength and stuff.’

  ‘Anyway, Sharon swore she wouldn’t do any more killing after the Worm,’ said Connor. ‘And she hasn’t.’

  ‘What about you two?’ I asked. ‘Have you killed anything since your little challenges?’ Do they know I know? It didn’t matter now. We were just leaving our umpteenth warehouse, and as Eddie pulled the door shut he exchanged a Meaningful Look with Connor. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked. ‘Are you finally going to tell me why you’ve been sneaking off for the past two months?’

  ‘We’ve been hunting Smiley Joe,’ said Connor.

  Of course they have.

  All bow before Stanly, Derp King of the United Derps of Derp.

  ‘When you first arrived, the three of us had a long talk about Mr Freeman and how he used us to kill monsters and then discarded us,’ said Connor, ‘and how we didn’t want the same thing to happen to you. We thought it was pretty likely that he’d find you – he always does – and that you’d probably want to go out monster-hunting.’

  ‘And that even if we told you not to, you’d probably sneak out on your own and do it anyway,’ said Eddie.

  Wow. It’s like they know me.

  ‘So we figured we’d take Smiley Joe out and save you the trouble,’ said Connor.

  ‘And also save London’s children,’ said Eddie. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go after him before?’ I asked. ‘Before I came on the scene?’

  ‘The same reason we don’t go out every night fighting crime in dark alleys,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Apart from the fact that a lot less crime happens in dark alleys than you’d expect,’ interjected Connor.

  ‘Because we still don’t understand our powers,’ said Eddie. ‘Why we have them, what we can do.’

  ‘Who cares why?’ I asked. ‘Honestly? I literally couldn’t give a shit where they came from. The point is that we have them and we can use them to do good.’

  ‘Well, maybe after this little exercise we can start,’ said Connor.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Eddie. He didn’t sound convinced, which made sense, because Connor hadn’t sounded convincing. ‘How about this one?’ He broke open another door.

  The place was immense, with a high ceiling and shiny hooks hanging down, and the usual assortment of empty boxes and broken crap, the windows so caked with dust and cobwebs that no moonlight could possibly find its way in. Eddie took out a torch and shone it around, and I led us over to a door at the back. ‘This looks like it,’ I said, starting to feel buzzed. I was getting my opening-night cocktail again, albeit a remixed version – one part trepidation to one part excitement to several more parts oh Jesus what am I doing and oh yeah and no seriously, what the friggin’ goddamn hell am I doing? This was it. I knew it.

  Connor tried the door, and it clicked stubbornly. ‘Locked,’ I said, usefully. ‘We might have to —’

  Connor wasn’t waiting. He raised his foot and slammed it against the door, shattering the lock, and it swung open. Pathetic fingers of dim light crept out of the basement, illuminating the bunker . . . and its broken door.

  Oh . . .

  ‘Balls,’ I said. ‘He’s out.’ The door was hanging off its hinges, twisted totally out of shape. He was even stronger than I thought.

  ‘He must be around here somewhere,’ said Eddie. ‘He —’

  ‘— is most definitely around here somewhere,’ said Connor. His voice sounded green, if such a thing were possible, and he was looking back the way we’d come. I followed his gaze, and so did Eddie.

  ‘Oh,’ said my cousin.

  Smiley Joe was standing a little way away, silently taking us in. He had his face on, that ghastly face, and as I stared at him I felt madness prickling at the back of my brain, and silently congratulated myself that I hadn’t lost my mind yet. There’s still time, though.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Eddie.

  ‘I second that blasphemy,’ said Connor. Neither of them seemed willing, or able, to make the first move, and still Joe stood, watching. He’s doing a threat assessment. Which one of us is going to cause the most trouble, which one he can take out first. It suddenly occurred to me that I’d never seen Eddie in action before.

  ‘He can make his head go bigger and smaller,’ I said. ‘Watch out for that. Also his arms, I think, maybe. Plus he’s incredibly strong. And he might be able to do other stAHHSHIT —’

  Smiley Joe had reached out and pulled a lever, rattlesnake-quick, flooding the entire warehouse with light. We were used to moonlight and Eddie’s crappy torch and were momentarily blinded, and that was the demon’s moment. He went straight for Eddie, traversing too much space in too little time, like a computer game dropping frames, and gripped my cousin’s shoulders and shoved him backwards. The two of them stumbled across the room and crashed into a pile of crates at the back, splintering wood and sending a cloud of choking dust into the air. Smiley Joe was on top of Eddie, trying to bite his face, but Eddie had his hands around the beast’s neck, just managing to restrain him, his face totally obscured by Joe’s massive head.

  I looked over at Connor. ‘What do we —’

  Connor didn’t look at me. He was reaching inside his coat, and when his hands emerged they both held guns. I know nothing about guns so I couldn’t tell you what make they were, but they were big and black and silver and looked seriously dangerous and I didn’t like them. After everything we’d seen at Blue Harvest, and he was using these death-dealing monstrosities.

  No time for that, you nit.

  Connor fired once at Smiley Joe and the bullet hit him straight in his back. It left a hole in his suit, but there was no blood. The monster swivelled his head, climbed off Eddie and moved towards this new attacker with his lopsided, skittering gait. Connor was calmly discharging bullets, poker-faced, his arms totally steady, the reports of his guns so loud that my head hurt, and I was just standing there uselessly while he unloaded bullet after bullet into the rampaging demon, tearing gashes in the brown fabric of his suit. The body hits might have slowed him down slightly, but the bullets bounced off his head like drunken fireflies, completely ineffectual; in fact, his head was growing as they hit him, that nightmare grin getting wider, as though he were mocking Connor’s efforts. Is he absorbing them?

  Let’s hope it’s a coincidence . . .

  Smiley Joe threw a punch. It knocked Connor to the floor, but he was still firing as he fell, and the guns clicked on empty as he hit the ground. He immediately discarded them, swung his leg to knock Joe off balance and sprang to his feet, and at the same time he shifted his centre of gravity and planted his feet on the wall so that he was standing on the vertical surface, jutting out like a human decoration. Weird. Joe ran at him and Connor threw a whomper of a punch and the demon actually went down, but he still didn’t make a sound. He never did.

  Where did Connor get those guns?

  And how hard must that punch have been?

  Not now!

  Eddie was running back towards them. Connor was back on his normal axis, and Smiley Joe had got back on his feet quickly. The monster was deceptively spry, considering how big his head was, and now he delivered a roundhouse kick to Connor’s stomach that would have broken me in two. The Irishman went down really hard, choking and winded, and Eddie dived in and started hammering Smiley Joe with a meteor storm of blows, his fists pumping like flesh pistons, the same way you’d hit a punchbag if you were really, really hacked off and had superpowers.

  And still I stood there, doing nothing.

  How about doing
something, then?

  I looked around for something to throw, settled on a large plastic crate and levitated it towards Smiley Joe with as much force as I could muster. It broke over his swollen head, distracting him long enough for Eddie to kick him in the face – plenty of face to kick, eh – and knock the monster backwards onto the broken conveyor belt. I started to pelt Joe with as much crap as I could find, whipping crates and tubes and junk from all corners of the room.

  This is my thing. I throw stuff!

  Yay.

  Eddie had pinned Joe down and was delivering vicious volleys to his face, and I had to make an effort not to hit him with any of my makeshift projectiles. Joe’s head kept expanding and contracting, as though he were trying to find the optimum size, and his arms and legs were spasming frantically like an insect trying to right itself, but amazingly Eddie was too strong. I had never seen him this way: he moved with an alien fluidity, a vessel of liquid power. Connor was up now, and he reached into his long coat as he strode over to Eddie and Joe. Jesus, what else does he have in there?

  Wow. Shotgun.

  Connor jumped onto the conveyor belt, face set grimly, and levelled the gun at Smiley Joe’s head, point blank range. ‘Move!’ he yelled. Eddie threw himself backwards and Connor fired, the recoil shaking his body. The blast was thunderous and echoed around the huge room like a cluster bomb, and my ribcage juddered. Smiley Joe wasn’t wounded, but he seemed weakened, at least. There was a loud, solid ker-chack as Connor cocked the weapon, and he fired again. I had given up throwing things. Eddie moved back in, perilously close to the shotgun, and kept Smiley Joe pinned down with punches, hitting his body with enough ferocity to shatter concrete, and Connor was emptying shells into his face, but still the sonofabitch wasn’t visibly taking any damage.

  He is indestructible.

  Nothing is indestructible! How many times!

  I started to half-run and half-fly around the room, my eyes zipping everywhere like hyperactive marbles, desperately trying to find something remotely useful. There had to be something. I heard two shouts and two crashes and chanced a look back, and saw that Connor and Eddie were both on the ground with Smiley Joe advancing on them, his head expanding further than I’d seen it go yet . . . no . . . not just his head. He was getting taller, his shoulders broader, his limbs longer and thicker. Holy bloody shit.

  Why didn’t he do this before?

  It did seem to be taking a lot of out of him, so maybe that was the reason. His pace was slowing, his movements becoming more sluggish. Still, he was massive now, a good few feet taller and wider than he had been, and his arms were so long that he was using them like extra legs, like a praying mantis designed by a howling psychopath. Connor’s shotgun was empty and he was struggling to reload one of his discarded pistols. Eddie was getting up, fists clenched determinedly, even as his face betrayed real fear at the monstrosity bearing down on him, and I thought no. I filled my lungs and flew, barrelling through the air like a missile. I slammed into Smiley Joe as hard as I could, wrapped my arms as far around his chest as I could, and carried him across the room, thinking myself stronger, making myself stronger – I don’t care how big you are you bastard I have superpowers all right and goddamn you they will work otherwise what’s the point of having them – and just before we reached the other side I let him go with a final psychic fuck off and the beast crashed into a pile of plastic crates. They broke beneath his weight, snapping and spitting bits of orange plastic everywhere, and I banked sharply to the right because my eyes had finally fallen on something useful. A fire axe in a case. Dumb luck. I flew towards it and, without thinking, punched the glass. The axe fell into my bloodied hand and I immediately dropped it, yelping. Trying to ignore the pain and thinking you absolute twat, I quickly attended to the shard of glass embedded between my knuckles. It stung like a bastard, to put it mildly, and I gritted my teeth and pulled. The shard slid out of my hand with a fleshy slurp, bringing blood with it, and the pain was sharp and hot, but I put psychic pressure on the wound, picked up the axe again and returned to the fray. Eddie was attacking Smiley Joe with everything he had, and although the lumbering beast was a good deal slower now, when his punches hit they hit: one sent Eddie flying, and he staggered drunkenly before diving back in. By this time Connor had reloaded and was firing non-stop. Each time he emptied a gun he quickly reloaded and started again, and by now Smiley Joe’s suit was torn to ribbons, but I could see no skin beneath, and it suddenly occurred to me that his suit had grown when he had grown. It wasn’t even a suit, it was part of him somehow.

  What the hell is this thing?

  Time to find out.

  Smiley Joe batted Eddie on the head like a cat would, knocking him brutally to the floor, then spun gracelessly and swung at Connor. The Irishman ducked and rolled beneath the sweeping arm, letting the monser punch himself off-balance, and Connor wasted no time in helping Eddie up. He started to walk backwards, dragging Eddie with him, putting ground between them and the beast and firing one-handed, bellowing obscenities, his voice almost entirely drowned out by the clatter of shots. Smiley Joe kept coming, hideous and misshapen, and for a slow-motion second I took it all in: Eddie and Connor, dirty and bruised and bleeding, visibly tiring, and their opponent who simply refused to die.

  Not anymore.

  He won’t refuse this.

  I flew towards them with the axe raised above my head, yelling ‘Say hello to my little friend!’, ’cos why not. Smiley Joe turned awkwardly, and as I brought the axe down I remembered chopping wood for the Rayburn with my dad, him teaching me the exact angles and how much force to use, and I applied all that now and it was a perfect chop. It split Smiley Joe’s huge head right down the middle, to his neck, and the two white halves fell away on either side.

  There was no brain inside. No bones, no blood. Instead, my impromptu incision revealed an ebony-black shape, like something had been scrunched up to fit inside the head – I could definitely detect what might have been legs, and the whole thing looked moist, slimy. Glistening like wet leather, said Richard Burton’s voice in my head, and I wished I was back in the shop with Skank, listening to War of the Worlds. Anywhere but here, hanging speechless and paralysed in the air. Anywhere but here with that thing what is it oh Christ it’s twitching. Connor and Eddie were staring, the three of us dumbfoundedly watching this headless body swaying on the spot, and the twitching black blob where the brain should be. Numbly I wondered if things like this often happened in London.

  And then it moved, unfurling with a slippery noise, and I jerked back as it sprang free of the head, uncoiling further, hitting the ground on six, no, ten, no, a dozen legs, a long black twelve-legged body – Jesus why so many why does it need so many WHY – and no discernible front or back end. It stood where it had landed, possibly looking at us, possibly not, and now the great body from which it had come toppled backwards. It hit the ground with a dead thump and immediately began to shrink, losing definition, the suit colours blending away as the whole thing degenerated into a shapeless, oozing grey mass. It smelled kind of acidic.

  The black thing ignored the death of its vessel, or whatever the body had been. As we watched it suddenly jerked, and then split at the middle with a wet ripping sound, becoming two six-legged blobs, and now mouths – oh yes, mouths – multiple mouths opening all over the shiny black bodies like eyes and, oh God, what mouths; ringed with teeth, lamprey mouths with blood-red tongues lolling. These two new abominations – monsters, things, how do I even describe them – moved into what I felt I could safely assume were fighting positions, hissing like broken steam valves, and for a moment they stood there, all mouths agape, too many legs, too many teeth, just too goddamn much of everything.

  ‘Um . . . Connor?’ I squeaked. ‘Guns might be nice now?’

  The first thing leapt at me, all of its mouths wide open, its breath and flying saliva smelling of decay and death, and at that moment I realised wh
ere the children went. I jumped into the air and it missed, but only just, and I turned around, still airborne, levitated the creature and threw it. Happily, whatever strength or mojo this thing – things? – had had before was gone, because it left the ground easily, crashing through several boxes and rolling away. It righted itself messily, hissed and scrambled back towards me, all its legs pumping. The other was busy with Eddie and Connor, who were doing a lot of dodging and not much attacking. With every movement they made the creatures seemed to get bigger. Not that shit again. I flew higher and the beast stood its ground below me, jumping up and down, spit flying from its multiple mouths, and I looked around, spotted the axe and psychically swung it. The blade severed one of the creature’s legs and it let loose a nails-down-a-blackboard scream and caught the weapon in one of its mouths, razoring it to shreds, hissing and shrieking with a rage so horrifying and primal that I couldn’t hope to understand it.

  Something about the intensity of the creature’s roars, and the sheer unutterable fucked-upness of the whole thing, caused me to momentarily lose control of my flight, and for one second, maybe less, I dropped towards the creature, giving it the opportunity to leap up and latch on to my left arm, one mouth extending, jaws seeming to unfold from nowhere. I felt its teeth sink into my flesh and I screamed in agony and rose again involuntarily, thinking no no no no, and the thought manifested as a command, stopping the creature from chomping any further. It kept trying, though, and there was already plenty of blood, but I kept thinking at it, thinking no, keeping the bite at bay, and as I focused my energy, trying to drown out the pain, it was as though some sort of connection had been established, I could feel the thing’s strength, its power, its nightmarish anger, and I dropped back down to the ground, brain bellowing almost as loudly as my mouth, and whipped up a cloud of debris with my thoughts, taking anything I could grasp and battering the beast with it; a vortex of sharp plastic fragments and wood and broken glass from the case I’d smashed tore into the thing, this filthy foul alien thing, I didn’t care what it was, I didn’t care where it had come from, I didn’t care if it had a self or if it could think, if it even knew what it had done, I just wanted it to hurt and to die, and I was on my feet now, standing my ground, eyes fixed on the thrashing, gnashing bastard, no more flight, just lots and lots of pain, and still it tried to chomp down and I thought no and NO and NONONONO and I felt something give, something at the other end – yes yes yes – and the teeth came free of my arm, my thoughts forcing the jaws back, back where they weren’t supposed to go, and there was an awful, brilliant crack as something in there snapped, and I dropped the plastic and the glass and picked the creature up with my mind and started slamming it against the floor, again and again, harder, harder, harder, yelling, not words, just noise, and I could feel it losing, feel it weakening, feel it dying – yes yes yes come on die die die DIE I swore I’d kill you one day I promised I would – and I could see all of the children that it had taken, ghostly faces at the edges of my vision, phantom hands clapping, voices chanting my name, cheering me on as I pulverised it, black goop flying from its limp corpse in viscous, stinking ropes – eat me, would you? Eat Tara, would you? CHEW ON THIS – and it was dead now, I knew it was dead, but I wanted it ruined, I wanted it in bits, I wanted it humiliated and pathetic, and I kept smashing it against the floor, and still they were cheering, I could hear my name – Stanly! Stanly! STANLY! Stop it, it’s dead – and yeah, God, I knew it was dead, that was the point, wait, stop, what —