One Man’s Pest
ONE MAN’S PEST
“About time we got proper equipment,” Dawn says.
His new carbine slides gracefully into his hands, his armored suit fits like a second skin.
At first Guy assumes it’s the runes branded into their gear, but he comes to realize it’s familiarity, not witchcraft, that lets Dawn handle their new instruments with such ease.
Everything except the chemical ammunition is refitted military equipment, castoffs scraped up from some failed coup or another.
“The same as we used in Ostlerfell,” Dawn says as he shows Guy how to load his firearm. “Only difference is the nozzle attachment.”
Today their search has brought them to a midcity hoopskirt factory.
It seems like another false alarm, one of the many contriver-worm hallucinations that have spread steadily outward from Conundrum.
A preliminary pass of the factory reveals only a nest of giant hellrats.
A cloud of BSPAF smokes them out, and they scurry between sewing machines, through trenches of scraps, almost as big as the hellrat puppets the Opera used for the devil’s chorus of familiars.
As they scatter, wailing like the damned, Guy’s ear shakes with the high-pitched violins of Faustech’s overture—though it’s likelier just acoustic recoil from the new carbines.
Dawn takes out the creatures with a string of silver bullets, aiming with flawless precision as they dive across grated catwalks. He watches their flinty claws spark against cellulose and iron, following the lights with his crosshairs. Gunfire cracks, and one by one they fall in plumes of sulfur.
“Hefty bastards,” Three says. Her marksmanship is not as polished as Dawn’s, but the rats are large, slow targets.
It takes only an hour to clear the infestation.
The brood-nests are burned, and the stink of brimstone begins to clear.
They pile the carcasses and Dawn ferrets through them, looking for a good specimen to bring home.
Cooked properly, there’s no spicier meat in the city.
“Save this one,” he grunts, hauling what looks like the brood-parent over his shoulder.
“Oh, so you make a face at me when I squeeze just a drop of mad honey from a job,” Three replies, “and you’re gonna bring home a whole hellrat?”
“You want a thigh or not, Captain?”
She grumbles and floods formic vitriol into her tank. “Guylag, go make sure we got them all. And set the trap while you’re down there. No job unfinished, and all that.”
Guy hauls the teratopod snare over his shoulder and strikes his torch.
Blue light dangling at his belt, he crouches beneath the row of sewing machines and squeezes into a disposal trench.
He wades shin-deep through a soup of oddments and digestive enzymes, mounting half-liquid piles of textiles and rusted equipment.
He keeps an eye open for an undissolved scrap of something pretty, something bold and bright Tyro might like, since her sleeves are already in need of patching.
“‘I might as well sin,’” he sings, raking a glove through the grime.
A ripple meets his wrist, and he stills, listening for the shriek of a rat.
Something moves just out of sight, just under the surface of the textile sludge.
Carefully, he cranks open the mouth of the trap and sets it.
A bright scent drifts from it, clean as Fauniche perfume.
His hair stands on end, drawn up by a force not quite a sound, not quite a smell.
As he scans the dark, venom resonates inside him.
“Here,” he says quietly. “There’s one here.”
His team doesn’t respond, but the teratopod does.
It slithers toward him, coated in a skin of frayed fabric.
Smaller, softer than its brood-parent, it barely rises above the caustic water, and still Guy shrinks at its approach, pressing against the wall and pulling his carbine from his side.
His heart beats an anxious pizzicato in his ear.
The creature stills. When it opens its many mandibles and slides out a long, barbed proboscis, his trigger finger tenses, but he stays his hand.
The appendage passes him by and snakes toward the trap.
A strange, soft moan emanates from the blanket of scraps and threaded sequins, and Guy hears a tiny minuet, a jumbled rearrangement of Faustech’s last aria before he’s dropped through the hellfire chute.
Terrified, poison resonating in his ear, he can’t help but think the thing is repeating his own song back to him.
“Moulène! You done?”
A crack rends the air. Guy jumps, and so does the trap.
He fumbles with his carbine, sure he’s misfired—but when he steadies himself, lifting the barrel toward the teratopod, the metal is still cool.
He squints through the flickering blue light of the torch, to see the trap has snapped shut over the creature’s tongue and forelegs.
The rest of it thrashes freely in the slick mire, tail whipping, legs grasping at the walls.
Guy backs up, waiting for the creature to pull the apparatus apart and turn its attention to him—yet after a few seconds of contortion, the worm goes still. Guy’s heart, finally, slows.
“You’re not gonna get any of this hellrat when we get back,” Three calls.
He waits for a second before answering. “I caught one.”
“What?” Her silhouette hunches over the grate. “Speak up.”
“I caught one!”
“Caught what? Another raccoon?” She disappears, then with a creak and hiss of her arm, heaves the grate away. A rope descends, and she after it. “What are you mewling about, Guy?”
She falls silent when she sees the teratopod, motionless but for a few undulations of spiracles. She wraps a hand around his belt, pulling him away from the creature. “Shit, you all right?” she hisses. “You bit?”
“I’m good,” he breathes.
She releases him. “Well. Honestly, I expected more theatrics from you.”
Dawn drops down after her. The moment his feet hit the sludge, the trap bumps, and the creature’s tail whips.
“God!” Three flinches. “Have some grace, Corporal—spook it and we’ll have another Incident.”
Dawn looks over the thing, its absurd size, its patchwork quilt of scraps. “Shit,” he breathes. “I thought it went in the trap.”
“You’d think,” Three sighs. “All right, boys, go find a phone and call Bert. R he falls silent as they cross the fungal bridge toward the barracks.
“Talk to me, Corporal,” Guy says.
Dawn takes another few seconds to answer. “I … just can’t quite believe that thing.”
“Neither can I,” Guy admits.
“This is … something new. Something that matters. Not just another termite. Not another inconvenience to sweep back under a rug.” He glances over his shoulder. “This seems real.”
He lays a solemn weight on the word. It’s one he uses rarely, usually only when he returns from one of his bad episodes, when Dawn draws back to reveal what is left of Flint, raw and tense and wordless for hours on end. The look on his face now, solid, present, both relieves and unnerves Guy.
“It is real,” he says, because he can say nothing else.
The Root of Joyous Healing comes into view.
The activity of R&D hums across the void, welding sparks illuminating the smoky haze like lightning in a storm cloud.
When they drop onto the gangway to the barracks with their prize, their compeers emerge from the woodwork.
Margot offers some of her famously rancid sink-brewed lager in exchange for a hind leg, and Bell, already up to her neck in debt ink, offers a generous IOU for the liver.
Dawn ignores them, dropping the rat by Three’s workshop and drawing his knife.
“Go find Ty,” he says. “It’s about time she learned to skin something. If she wants to use a razor, she ought to use a knife, too.”
Guy shrugs off his tank. “You gonna make a butcher out of her?”
“Better a butcher than a thumb-twiddler.”