China Miéville - The Last Days of New Paris

The man falls and dies. The chains that link him to his fellows snap.

One by one they begin to scream. They stare at their dead colleague. There is the sound of tearing canvas.

“Wait,” shouts Sam. “It’s broken the circle! Those machines…”

“What have you done?” someone yells in French.

From under the shroud, a shell roars out. A line of fire blasts a hole in the wall.

There is silence. Fingers grip the torn hole from beneath. They clutch. Something bellows.

The priests are pulling off the wires that link them, scrabbling to get away. Alesch is shouting, flattened against the wall, and Mengele is running. The thing beneath the tarpaulin grips it and begins to tear. With a wall-cracking cry, the beast uncovers itself, rips itself to light.

Fall Rot.

Caterpillar treads grind. The oilcloth falls shredded to unveil a tank. A Panzer III, stained by conflict, rolls forward on the concrete. From the front of the chassis, in front of the gun-turret, protrudes the torso and head of a giant. A man.

Fall Rot.

He is vast. He wears an outsized German helmet. His skin is cold white, his veins and muscles marked as if by wormtracks. He drips shadows from his eyes. His mouth is full of sharp teeth. He bunches immense arms.

The demon is a centaur of tank and great man-shape. It is festooned with German flags.

“They’ve made their own demon, ” Sam screams. Absurd as ever, she raises her camera and begins to run right at Fall Rot. Her face is pure hate. “They built it…”

Made under German orders, by Mengele’s biological researches and Alesch’s toxic faith, from the broken matter of Hell’s natives and from the energies of manifested executed art and their own murderous tech. To be a loyal demon, to be made of Nazi triumph. The avatar of the defeat of France.

But their protections were precarious. The encircling prayer is gone, and Fall Rot rampages.

It grabs two crawling priests, one head in each fist. It slaps them together, killing them offhandedly, swings their limp bodies as clubs against their comrades.

It howls in what should never have been a language, spews dirt and exhaust. Sam comes for it, spitting magic.

Mengele hauls Alesch by his robes and screams at him to focus. The room is filling with smoke and rubble and crawling priests and wounded soldiers. The Nazi doctor stands in the construct devil’s path. He slaps Alesch’s face and points.

Fall Rot rolls toward them.

“Sie werden mir gehorchen,” Mengele shouts. Alesch makes some holy sign. Fall Rot winces and swats the air.

Behind that man-shape the tank’s gun swivels so the barrel smacks into Fall Rot’s pale side. It keeps pushing. “My God,” Thibaut whispers.

The devil howls as the metal shoves brutally right into its body. It shatters ribs, rips skin that fountains blood, pushes aside innards and organs and plows on in. The devil screams.

The gun rips right through Fall Rot and the demon’s chest reknits imperfectly in its wake, bones jostling back roughly into position, blood drying, skin fusing inaccurately. The weapon sucks free from the other side of Fall Rot’s meat with an audible plop.

“Sie…” Mengele says, and goes silent. He raises his pistol and fires repeatedly into the demon’s flesh. He does not miss. Fall Rot keeps coming. The gun turns, dripping Fall Rot’s blood. Alesch shouts a prayer, pushes Mengele forward.

The demon laughs and fires. The doctor disappears in a blast of blood and flame and mortar.

The exquisite corpse attacks.

The manif rushes for Fall Rot, clicking in a frenzy, all its hate for the devilish pushing it hard and bringing its transmuting attentions to bear. With a scream of gears, Fall Rot lurches forward. It backhands the exquisite corpse, sends it spinning.

The made demon and the living art circle each other. The manif stalks, staring with its old-man eyes. The machine-demon swivels jerkily, keeps the art in its sights. Its gun grinds back into Fall Rot’s body, making it bay, and the barrel stops midway through the meat, aiming through the sternum.

The manif’s limbs are twitching, reaching for energies so the air vibrates. But it has never faced a devil like this. Fall Rot rolls forward, barrel pointing squarely at the exquisite corpse.

Thibaut shouts a wordless warning but Fall Rot does not fire. It looks quizzical. It reaches out and grabs its adversary, one huge long-nailed hand at each of the manif’s joints. Those claws tense. The exquisite corpse shudders.

The devil-thing made by science and demonology, built to obey and disobeying that injunction, infernal avatar of an invasion, lifts its face and croons.

With one awful wrenching motion Fall Rot rips the exquisite corpse apart.

There is a blast of energy, a great release. Everyone quakes. The manif’s components scatter. The engines whine.

When Thibaut’s head clears he looks up to see the devil sucking at the ragged end of the exquisite corpse’s head. It licks at the broken machine parts where it tore the art apart. Thibaut retches. The devil laps.

They made this demon manifophagic. That’s the energy, Thibaut understands. The fuel is the sacrifice of manifs, that’s what kept this secret channel open, so they could grab Hell-flesh and make this. It eats art.

Fall Rot throws the exquisite corpse’s head in one direction, its human legs in another.

Sam calls Thibaut’s name. She is wrestling with Alesch. Thibaut staggers toward her. He raises his gun but cannot fire at the bishop for fear of hitting her. They are fighting in the dust, by the gauges and dials. Thibaut feels the shake of tank treads. Fall Rot is coming.

He sees Sam stab Alesch with a sharpened tripod leg. The bishop screams and convulses. She gets him to the floor and kneels over him and brings her weapon down again. He moans. She bellows into the camera that protrudes from him.

A radio, too, tuned to an afterlife channel? She reaches up and presses buttons on the Nazi engines.

Fall Rot gropes with its big hands and its big face smiles. Its gun pulls free of its body.

Sam keeps pressing as the demon comes, quick sequences repeated until there is a sudden static crack. “Here!” Sam shouts in English. “It’s open! It’s here!”

Fall Rot will go loose in Paris. It will eat the manifs of Paris, and grow stronger.

It raises its arms and Sam screams into her camera again, and the room rumbles.

Fall Rot looks down.

A bass roar grows. Louder and higher, it rises with Doppler shift. There’s a screaming across the below as if a plane races through great caverns and tunnels, keeps on getting louder and louder until it is unbearable, until Thibaut and Sam clap their hands to their ears and he sees Fall Rot do the same, its expression anguished, and Thibaut feels his insides quiver and something rushes up toward the light.

The flat earth detonates.

A convulsion. Thibaut is thrown back hard in a blaze of shattered stone.

A bomb-blast. A raid from beneath. Thibaut glimpses fire and an explosion billowing up through the earth, an igniting plume, shoving into the tank-centaur, enveloping it in fire, flame that roars up, makes Fall Rot roar, too, in agony it doesn’t understand, goes up then stops, a frozen moment of conflagration. A still moment.

Which then as he watches reverses very suddenly and fast, like rewound film, and sucks everything away. Rushes back into the new chasm. Takes the tank-thing Fall Rot rushing with it, into the deep, leaving not a trace. Returns to the pit.

Thibaut lies coughing for a long time. A huge crater slides down into black. There is no tank, no tank-ruin, no too-big human torso visible. Thibaut stands.