Live and Let Drood

just meant to disturb us by appealing to our better nature. Lot he knows. I don’t have one. I had it surgically removed long ago, when it got in the way of having serious fun.”
    “We didn’t ask to be called up into the light again,” said the dead man, looking straight at me with his eyeless face. “The dark will be that much harder to bear now that we’ve been made to remember what light is like. The cold will be that much worse now that we’ve been made to know warmth again. And since we can’t take our anger out on the one who raised us, we’ll take it out on you.”
    “Listen,” I said. “I don’t know whether there’s really any of you left in there or not. Whether these are your voices are not. But if you’re really here, if you’ve been made to suffer, I give you my word: I will avenge you. You hear that, Crow Lee? I will make you pay for this!”
    The moment I stopped talking, they all surged forward, stumbling over their broken and decayed feet, reaching out to Molly and me with rotting hands. Grasping hands, full of all the awful strength of the raised dead. I armoured up immediately, the golden armour encasing me from head to toe in a moment. It seemed to me the dead hesitated, as though they hadn’t expected that, and then the will behind them drove them on. I went to meet them, my hands clenched into golden fists. Because if they wanted a fight, I was just in the mood to give them one. After what had been done to my family, all their anger was nothing compared to mine. They threatened me and Molly and the rescue of my family. To hell with that, and to hell with them all.
    The nearest dead man grabbed on to my golden arm with both of his bony hands, and to my shock I could feel his cold wet grasp, right through the armour. It couldn’t get through, couldn’t get at me, but I could still feel it. And that wasn’t supposed to be possible. I’d never felt anything like it before. What the hell had Crow Lee raised here, and what had he put into them?
    I ripped the dead man’s arm off and threw it away. Water ran like blood from the empty socket, but the dead man barely staggered. I punched him full in the face with my golden fist and knocked his head right off. The body didn’t fall, so I kicked its feet out from under it and walked right over the thrashing body on the deck to get to the next. I waded into the army of the risen dead, striking about me with vicious strength. I showed them no mercy because they had none in them for Molly or me. I ripped them apart with my armoured strength, tearing them limb from limb, knocking them down and trampling them underfoot, because they were dead and beyond any pain. And because I didn’t care. They were just in the way.
    They swarmed around me, packing in close, trying to slow me down so they could pull me down. They clung on to me with their dead hands, beat against my armour with their bony fists, and scrabbled at my neck and face with clawed hands. And I just hit them until they fell apart and fell away. They were actually quite fragile after so long in the sea, and all of Crow Lee’s power wasn’t enough to make them a match for Drood armour. Anyone else might have found the dead men terrifying, even dangerous…but for me, in my armour, they were just targets. I hit them and broke them and it felt good, so good. I smashed through their ranks, ripped them apart, tore off their heads and threw them aside. I picked some up bodily and threw them off the edge of the Pier and back into the sea. Where they belonged.
    I fought my way into the heart of them, striking out through the curling mists, the dead pressing so close around me now I couldn’t have missed them if I’d tried. My golden fists made wet squelching sounds as they sank deep into rotting flesh and collapsed chests. I struck them down and walked right over them, hearing brittle bones crack and break under my heavy golden feet. They beat at me with their dead fists but they couldn’t reach me inside my armour. Crow Lee thought he could frighten me, thought he could drag me down, because I didn’t have my armour anymore without my family, because he thought I was just a man. He should have known better. On the worst day I ever had, I was still a Drood.
    Dead hands slipped away from me as fists broke and shattered harmlessly against my armour. I didn’t feel their attacks. Sometimes they threw their arms around me, several of them at once, trying to pull me down through