Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  “With what?” asked the Gunner. He broke open his revolver. The spent shell casing hit the puddle at their feet in a mocking, empty tinkle and plop.

  The Bull and the Bullet “I’m out of bullets. Remember?”

  Now it wasn’t just the walls closing in. The floor dropped out of George’s world.

  “WHAT?”

  The Gunner showed him the empty gun.

  “Bu—Wha—Then how are you going to rescue her?” George burbled.

  The Gunner shrugged with a fatalistic gesture George felt was entirely out of keeping with the seriousness of their predicament. Twenty feet away there was death, calmly plowing concrete with its hoof.

  Edie just stared at them, her eyes spread wide in shock.

  “Dunno, son. I mean, with another bullet maybe I can blow him into tomorrow, and we’ll be long gone; but without a round to put up the spout"—he pointed at the Minotaur—"he’ll rip me open from stem to stern. And you and all. And you know what Minotaurs do to little girls?”

  “No”

  There was a pause. The Gunner sniffed.

  “Lucky you. Best not think about it. They’re messy eaters.”

  George was hopping up and down in frustration.

  “So what can we do?”

  “Go down fighting?” said the Gunner.

  George didn’t want to go down, fighting or no fighting. The Gunner’s attitude was tough and brave, but for the first time he found it—annoying. He needed to think. . . .

  His hand thrust into his pocket and reflexively kneaded and shmooshed at the plasticene blob. And suddenly he knew.

  “Give me the empty shell.”

  “What?”

  “DO IT!”

  The Gunner reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the empty casings. He flicked it over his shoulder. George’s scarred hand reached out and caught it on reflex.

  “I’m going to make a bullet.”

  The Gunner turned one stunned eye on him.

  “You what?”

  George was already wodging the plasticine into the empty shell casing. The Gunner snorted.

  “Out of plasticene?”

  George didn’t even look up. His hands were working fast.

  “If I’m this ‘maker,’if this scar is the mark of a maker, then why not? I’ll make a bullet!”

  “Yeah, but plasticene …”

  “You’re made of bronze, but you’re soft enough to move. No reason why it shouldn’t work the other way. If I make it well enough. Like you said, it’s not just the material, it’s what you make of it,” said George. “Keep your eye on the Bull.”

  There was new mettle in George’s voice, and the Gunner found he was swiveling both eyes forward as he’d been told. As he’d been ordered. He whistled slowly.

  “You’re the boss. But speed up a bit, because he’s about ready to steam in and try to hook us.”

  There was a scuff of hoof on paving stone, and a soft thud as the Minotaur dropped Edie.

  “Here he comes.”

  “Slow him down. Buy me time,” snapped George.

  “Yes, sir,” said the Gunner through a tight smile. “Here. Cop hold of this. I’m gonna have my hands full.”

  He handed the revolver backward, fast, and then turned to meet the charging Minotaur head-on.

  The horns went to either side of his waist, and the Gunner threw himself into a backward roll, letting the force of the impact keep them going. George had to leap sideways to avoid being steamrollered flat by the two falling statues. The bullet shape got mashed flat in his fall.

  He ran across to Edie, who was sprawled over the edge of a concrete planter. He heard a crash behind him, and saw that the Gunner and the Minotaur had rolled in a complete somersault. The clash had been the Gunner’s boots hitting the ground again and bracing himself. He held the Bull’s horns like bicycle handles as the Minotaur bulldozered him across the paving toward the edge of the walkway.

  Sparks flew as the hobnails on his boots were scraped back across the stone beneath.

  George grabbed the sea-glass out of his pocket and closed Edie’s limp hands on it. He heard her murmur, but didn’t get what she was saying because he was busy rolling the plasticene in his hand.

  “Hurry up, son!” shouted the Gunner.

  George was already repairing the bullet he was trying to make.

  Edie saw what he was doing. Her eyes were suddenly blazing, as if the intensity of the sea-glass were coursing through her body and beaming out of them.

  “Good, George. Make it work.”

  He didn’t have time to nod. He rolled and molded the plasticene.

  The Gunner was backed up against the railing. A drop beckoned beyond, down into a busy street. He was fighting the immense power of the Minotaur’s bovine muscles. He clenched his teeth and pushed back.

  “Thing . . . about you, Oxo, is that . . . you’d make someone a very . . . nice . . . stew. Or a rissole.”

  The Minotaur shook its horns. The Gunner held on and rode the spasm.

  “You know what rissoles are, don’t you, Oxo?”

  The Minotaur snapped his head right and left. The Gunner only just held on.

  “They’re sort of meatballs. Now—there’s a thought.”

  And his iron-shod ammunition boot swung brutally upward between the straining legs of the Minotaur like a sledgehammer. He kicked with all the pent-up force in his body, and the Bull’s feet jerked an inch off the ground as his boot clunked home.

  The Minotaur bellowed in pain and fury. George felt the force of the roar hit him like a shock wave. The earlier echoing bellow was a whisper in comparison. The Bull shook loose and tried to gore the Gunner right through the chest. The Gunner twisted sideways, and the impact sent more sparks flying off the railing behind him.

  “Make it, George,” said Edie urgently.

  He ducked his head and concentrated on the plas-ticene and the empty casing. He worked it into a flattened cone. As he worked he tried not to hear the grunting and clashing beyond him. He thought of bullets. He thought of what they can do. He thought of what he’d seen them do. He saw them pulverizing the salamanders at the Gunner’s memorial. He saw the Raven blown to feathers, twice. He saw the gargoyle blown to powder on the cage at the Monument. He remembered the bullets in the Gunners hands as he calmly reloaded. He imagined the force that a bullet carries as it crashes through its target. As he thought of what a bullet was, of what he’d seen, of how they looked, he found his hands loosening and almost working by themselves, almost as if they knew what he was doing. And, he noticed, the pain of the scar stopped completely.

  He smoothed the top of the plasticene bullet, and with the nail of his thumb, traced a delicate circle around the top of it, just as he had seen on the real bullets.

  He broke the gun and stuck the bullet in it, as he’d seen the Gunner do.

  There was a sudden whirlwind of flailing legs and hooves and horns as the two statues crashed past. They hit a concrete tub of plants so hard that it cracked and spilled earth onto the ground around their scrabbling, brawling bodies. George ran across and held out the gun.

  “Done it!”

  And the Gunner looked at him, and in that instant the Minotaur saw an opening and hooked a horn through his midriff.

  It flashed and sparked like a grinding wheel as the sharp point went in low and to the side.

  “Uh,” said the Gunner in shock.

  George couldn’t believe the Gunner was gored.

  Not after he’d come back.

  Not after he’d thought he was dead.

  The Minotaur jerked its head, twisting the horn in the wound with the ferocity of a terrier shaking a rat, pushing the Gunner back to the railing high above the street below. The Gunner took the railing in the small of his back as he raised his hands to club down on the Bull’s neck. His hands changed direction and scrabbled ineffectually at the rail.

  George was horrified. The Gunner surely hadn’t just come back to die again? He felt the
black taste in his mouth, felt it tingle spikily in his nose, and found he was running forward, cocking the gun with both thumbs and aiming right at the thick-boned crown of the Bull’s head.

  “Eye,” grunted the Gunner.

  George stepped around the side and adjusted his aim. Not for an instant did the blackness give him room to think that the gun would not fire. He’d made a bullet. That was all he knew. And now he was going to use it to save his friend. His friends.

  The Minotaur’s eye rolled up and looked down the barrel of the gun. It was full of nothing but hate and appetite, and as it roared and pushed, George took up the slack on the trigger.

  And then, before the gun fired, there was a crack, and the Minotaur and the Gunner were gone.

  George’s world had narrowed into such a tightly focused cone of vision that he had to step back to make sense of what was happening. His finger loosened on the trigger as he did so.

  The Minotaur had pushed the Gunner over the railing, which had buckled, sending them both into thin air over the busy street.

  George swung over the void to see what had happened.

  Crash!

  The Gunner and the Minotaur sprawled in impact on the red roof of a double-decker bus. As they hit, the Gunner twisted, and the horn slid out of his side like a sword leaving its scabbard.

  He had enough strength to boot the Bull’s face and send it over the edge of the roof. The Bull’s hand clamped onto the side as the bus pulled away, unaware of the Minotaur hanging from its offside rear and the Gunner spread-eagled on top of it.

  Edie joined George at the railing.

  “He’s hurt!”

  “Yeah,” said George, hoping she hadn’t noticed that it was him talking to the Gunner that had caused him to take his eyes off the Minotaur for the crucial second it took for him to get gored. “We better get after him.”

  They ran for a staircase.

  “Hide the gun,” said Edie.

  He snatched a look at her.

  “People don’t notice us when we’re with the spits because they can’t see them and so we don’t make sense. But two kids on the street, one carrying a cannon like that? Do the math!”

  He saw she was back to her old self and decided not to comment on it as they descended the spiral staircase to the street, three steps at a time.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Death from Above

  The bus picked up speed. On its roof, the Gunner got painfully to his knees and bent over the hole in his side.

  “Just a hole. None of the important stuff. People live with worse.”

  He pulled a field dressing from his webbing and loosened his jacket. He pressed the dressing to his side and grimaced as he quickly wound the tapes around his midriff and tied them off.

  “Sound as a pound,” he grunted. Nevertheless, he slumped back and sat with his legs wide.

  “Get me breath back.”

  His breath was coming hard. He leaned his head back and looked at the sky and the clouds and the rain dropping into his upturned face.

  An angry roar snapped him back into the now.

  The Minotaur was hauling itself back onto the roof at the rear of the bus.

  The Gunner looked around. He couldn’t see anything he could use as a weapon. The bus was accelerating toward an intersection. The traffic light hanging over it had just changed to green. The Minotaur got to its feet.

  The Gunner dragged himself upright and braced himself to meet it.

  “Come on then, Oxo. Do your worst.”

  He knew that the longer the bull kept its mind on him, the longer the kid and the glint had to make themselves scarce. He flicked a look behind him at the approaching intersection.

  “I don’t approve of hurting dumb animals, but in your case I’ll make an exception.”

  The Bull roared and charged. The Gunner braced, and as the Bull was about to hit him, he squatted low—and as the Bull made contact, the Gunner used all the remaining strength in his body to thrust upward. He put everything into it, and felt the just-tied straps on his dressing break as he flexed.

  If it hadn’t been for the scything horns and the Minotaur’s shriek of rage, it would almost have looked funny, like two ungainly ballet dancers, one throwing the other into the air in a clumsy lift.

  The Bull’s impetus met the Gunner’s upthrust. Its hooves left the roof and its legs bicycled in midair, and then there was a thunk, and the Gunner dropped back on the roof of the bus and the Minotaur stayed where it was, suspended over the intersection, its horns jammed over from Above the steel arm holding the traffic lights above the unseeing traffic.

  It roared in rage as the Gunner pulled away on the top of the bus. Its roar was loud enough to turn the rainwater that was beading on the bus roof into a spray that hit the Gunner in the face. He blinked and waved at the Bull.

  “Cheerio, cock. Always say beef should be well hung, don’t they?”

  He couldn’t bring himself to grin at his joke. He watched the struggling Minotaur until the bus turned a corner and he couldn’t see it anymore. Then he bent over his burst wound dressing and concentrated on reattaching it.

  At least the kids were safe now, he thought. And that thought did give him an reason to grin as he hunched over the growing pain in his side.

  George and Edie sprinted down the street in the wake of the bus. The revolver bumped heavily in George’s pocket as he ran. Luckily, it was a one-way system, so there was no chance of losing the bus if they moved fast. A tall lorry kept pace with them, blocking out the sky.

  They rounded a curve to find there was a lot of traffic, but no bus to be seen. The lorry pulled away from them.

  “Where did they go?” panted Edie.

  “Dunno,” answered George. “He’ll probably be okay, don’t you think?”

  “I hope so.”

  She rummaged in her pocket for the sea-glass.

  “We’re okay, aren’t we?” he said.

  The glass was blazing.

  “No,” she said.

  They turned around, scanning the street. They could see nothing.

  “What is it?” said George, his hand closing around the suddenly comforting shape of the revolver handle in his pocket.

  “Where is it?” said Edie, puzzled.

  There was a noise. A small one. A creak, from above them. As one they stopped panning the streetscape and looked up, straight over their heads.

  Something dark and horned wrenched itself free from the traffic lights over their heads and dropped like an anvil.

  They had time to jerk out of the way of its hooves as it crashed to the ground, but not enough time to escape the grabbing hands that caught them—Edie by the upper arm, George by the throat.

  They had no time to cover their ears and escape the blast of victory that roared from between the Bull’s teeth as he lifted them in the air and bellowed triumph at the storm clouds above.

  George could see Edie struggling and kicking and trying to shout something at him, but he couldn’t hear a word. And before he could think what to do next, the Minotaur had jerked him down to its muzzle and was sniffing at him, and then tasting his face with a tongue like a thick slug.

  George gagged, and then he was lofted in the air, and he saw Edie being sniffed at in turn. And as the tongue lolled out and swirled over her hair and head, he saw the plea in her eyes and the way she flinched; and he saw too how the flinching pleased the Minotaur, and saw its strange mouth twist into an openmouthed panting smile; and it was much more than George could take.

  It wasn’t the beast’s leer, so much as the look and the flinching shudder in Edie’s eye that spiked the protective anger that made his hand pull out of the jacket with the revolver in it.

  He held steady and tried to keep still as he pointed it at the Minotaur.

  And as he did, Edie managed one tight little word of reminder. Eye.

  And he adjusted his aim and found the hot eyeball rolling up to meet his over the gun sight, and the Bull began to roa
r, and the black prickly feeling flushed up into him. And not for a moment did he think the bullet he’d made wouldn’t work; only that he might spoil this by missing. And so as the heavy gun shook in his hand, he thought of nothing but controlling the shake; and everything was suddenly still, and the tiny eye he was targeting suddenly seemed big as a barn door and:

  Blam!

  George felt the gun buck in his hand. The roaring was cut off like a knife. The Bull’s hands spasmed open, and George and Edie dropped to the ground.

  The Bull’s head rocked back, then forward, then back again, shaking faster and faster, its mouth straining to make a noise as it juddered horribly like it was trying to shake the bullet—George’s bullet—out of its head. Then it stood up, looked at George with an eye leaking something like molten bronze, snarled, and began to lunge at him—then dropped like a stone.

  For a long beat, all George could hear was his own breathing and heart pounding.

  “Bull’s-eye,” said the Gunner.

  George pulled Edie to her feet, and they watched the soldier limp toward them behind a battered but defiant smile.

  At their feet the Minotaur’s carcass began to collapse into a fizzing heap of bronze filings that the wind caught and began to disperse.

  “Bloody brilliant. Now tell me you ain’t got a maker’s hands. And just in the nick of time, eh?”

  The Gunner was hurt, George and Edie could see from the way he walked, hunched to one side, one hand holding the dressing tight around him.

  “At least he can walk. Probably means it’s going to be okay, don’t you think?” said Edie quietly.

  George checked his watch. It was 3:13. He reached for the pocket in his coat, the coat Edie was still wearing. He found the dragons head.

  “Look. I’ve got to get to the Stone in less than half an hour,” he said. “I better go. Then I’ll come back, and we can figure out a way to help you back to your plinth before midnight.”

  She took off the coat and passed it to him.

  “We go together,” said the Gunner. “We’ve come this far together, we end this together.”

  “But you’re hurt.”