Un Lun Dun

91. Reactions

Deeba yanked open the door, and the rebrellas swirled inside.

As she entered, everything went slow. Deeba took everything in, in an instant.

The illumination in the workshop shifted. The room was full of the crawling and sluggishly flying lightbulb insects. A huge fire burnt in the fireplace. The big vat was still there on its swiveling stand. It was full of a vividly glowing, bubbling green liquid. Blue gas jets hissed below it.

Around the room, the benches and stands were the same amazing mess of chemicals in beakers, bubbling test tubes, and coils of glass that she remembered.

On a table in the corner, Deeba saw the UnGun and the book. Mortar sat back on a chair, snoring. His head was encased in a fug of smoke. The cage-door entrance to the elevator was closed, and the lift itself was not there.

The rebrellas went charging and twirling, opening and closing, swinging like swords. They moved more swiftly and impressively even than the unbrellas did. Everyone prefers fighting by choice, Deeba thought.

They bore down on the figure in the center of the room.

The Unstible-thing.

For an instant, it was frozen, examining a beaker full of the glowing gunk from the vat. Deeba stared at it in horror.

Unstible was grossly swollen, its skin stretched and puffy, pale and blotched and sick-looking. Its lab coat was tight on its body. It stared at Deeba with bloodshot eyes.

“Deeba!” shouted the book.

As the rebrellas spun aggressively towards it, Unstible opened its mouth and laughed.

It moved. Despite its new bulk, it was unnaturally fast. It cartwheeled out of the path of the oncoming rebrellas, seemed to bounce. It sprang on one hand, keeping hold of the glowing container in the other, twisting its wrist as its body turned so the glass didn’t empty.

It laughed again, with a noise like a sack of dead animals being dragged across coal and broken glass. Unstible flung the beaker at the closest rebrella.

The glass shattered on the toughened canopy, and Deeba opened her mouth to shout in triumph at how easily it repelled his missile. Then her throat constricted.

The glowing liquid burst over the black rebrella, and where it touched the treated fabric, it combusted.

The rebrella went up in oily flames, with a ferocious outpouring of smoke. It burnt in instants, with a squeal of red-hot metal.

Unstible inhaled mightily, and sucked the fumes that gushed from the burning rebrella into its nostrils. They left behind a heat-coiled, twisted umbrella skeleton, and ash.

Deeba was aghast. For seconds, the rebrellas were motionless. Unstible moved again, like a ballet dancer, grabbing another glass full of the stuff.

“Move!” shouted Deeba, and the rebrellas spun off in different directions. But Unstible hurled the flask it held straight and hard, and it exploded across the stitched-up framework of the blue rebrella.

The liquid spilt across it, and spread fire. “No!” screamed Deeba, as it fell. In seconds it was gone, leaving its ruined metal bones behind. Unstible snorted the smoke in, and its skin stretched even tighter.

“Boring,” it grunted. “Not very interesting minds. But a useful test. I thought I’d solved it. Thought it would work.” It shook a test tube of the glowing stuff. “Then ’Broll found a sliver of spine…wouldn’t leave me a test subject.” It looked at Deeba and grinned. Its teeth were the color of mud. “Thank you for bringing me guinea pigs.”

The other rebrella launched bravely at him. It hit his shins with two enormous thwacks, which sounded loud enough to crack wood. Unstible fell.

Deeba’s heart lurched with hope, but the sick-looking figure bounced straight up again, like an inflatable. It was laughing.

With monkey swiftness, it grabbed the rebrella, and plunged it into a bucket of the liquid below the vat’s spigot. Flames and fumes gushed up, and Unstible leaned over and breathed them in.

It turned and grinned. Its face was soot black, its hair singed off. In its smoking hand it held the remnants of the rebrella, a sorry tangle of ruined metal. With a clank, a piece fell off. Deeba recognized the rod with which she had made the yellow unbrella a rebrella, only minutes previously.

“You think,” Unstible said, “I let things wander around that I can’t stop? That I can’t breathe?”

Deeba kept her eyes on the horrible figure, but out of the corner of her eye she watched Curdle and the rebrella she couldn’t stop thinking of as hers, the red-and-lizard one, creeping quietly towards the UnGun and the book.

The motion seemed to catch Unstible’s attention. Deeba held her breath. But the rebrella froze, and Curdle leapt away from it and rolled, wheezing aggressively, towards Unstible, drawing its attention.

“Curdle, stay back!” said Deeba. As Unstible reached for the carton, she picked up a chair and threw it with all her strength.

Unstible caught it, by one leg, with one hand. It threw it in the fire, and sniffed as it began to burn. Curdle bounded away and hid behind Deeba’s feet.

“’Broll’s right. You are annoying. Distracting my attention. I had intended to breathe you later, for pudding, but congratulations— you’re an hors d’oeuvre, instead.”

Unstible stalked towards her, its newly pudgy hands out. Deeba backed towards the wall.

Her rebrella scuttled the last few meters to the table, leapt up, and hooked the UnGun.

“What…?” said Unstible, turning, and snarling when it saw what was happening. It leapt with that unnatural grace, like a fat tiger, nails crooked into claws. The rebrella levered itself desperately like a catapult, and sent the UnGun soaring over Unstible’s head.

The UnGun spun. It rose. Unstible seemed to change direction in the middle of its leap. It snatched at the pistol, its fingers millimeters from it, but the weapon arced just, just over its hand, and began to descend, and Deeba came forward, reached up as the UnGun came down.

And then it was in her hands, and Deeba aimed.