Free Here Comes the Sun by Tom Holt Page B

up, drained the bottle, and put it down on the table with a bang. ‘You know what,’ he said, ‘it’s done me good, you know, talking about it. I feel -’ he burped savagely ‘- much better now. In fact, we must do this again sometime, right?’
    Gustav closed his eyes. On the one hand, his mother had told him never to tell deliberate lies. On the other hand, his mother had told him a lot of stuff about angels that had turned out to be rather wide of the mark.
    â€˜Right,’ he said. ‘I’d like that.’
    â€˜Yeah.’ Bjorn rose to his feet, groped for his axe, and staggered clumsily to the door.
    â€˜Strewth,’ he said, poking his head out into the cool,
sweet, night air and sniffing distastefully. ‘Smells like armpits out here. Cheers, then.’
    â€˜Cheers.’
    Gustav closed the door after his guest, bolted it, put the shutters up, and collapsed into his chair, trembling. From the distant village street he could hear the distinctive sound of a man with an axe playing Try-Your-Strength games with the village pump. He winced.
    The picture of the angel disappeared from above Gustav’s bed shortly afterwards, and was replaced by a Pirelli calendar.
    Â 
    â€˜Oh,’ said the charge-hand.
    Far below, an enormous brown snake of muddy, foulsmelling water thrust its snout into the gaps between the skyscrapers. Apart from the occasional crash of falling masonry, the great city was quite astoundingly quiet.
    â€˜I thought you meant Memphis, Tennessee ,’ the chargehand went on, slightly apprehensively. ‘So there’s another Memphis, is there? That’s confusing.’
    â€˜Isn’t it?’ his superior replied, through tight lips. ‘Sorry, perhaps I should have explained a bit better. I thought it’d be clear, even to a complete idiot, that when I said flood the Nile as far as Memphis, I meant Memphis, Egypt. Obviously, though, I was wrong.’ He pushed his cap on to the back of his head and scratched his bald patch thoughtfully. ‘You know what,’ he added, after a moment. ‘This is going to take a bit of sorting out, this is.’
    â€˜Ah.’
    â€˜I mean,’ he went on, ‘just to take the small details first, there’s your crocodiles, right?’
    â€˜Crocodiles?’
    â€˜Crocodiles.’ He pointed. ‘Must’ve got swept along with the current or something. Look, there’s one now, just
crawling up the steps of the Fire Department building.’
    â€˜Oh yes, I can just make it out. Gosh, that’s . . .’
    â€˜And in ten minutes,’ his superior went on, ‘when we whack all the pumps back into reverse and start draining the water away . . . Well, there’s going to be a lot of them left behind, right?’
    â€˜Um.’
    â€˜But,’ his superior went on, ‘that’s really a minor point, and probably nobody’s going to notice, what with rebuilding the whole goddamn city, and flying in emergency aid, and what not. Still, I just thought I’d mention it. Let you have the fully-rounded picture, so to speak.’
    â€˜Right.’ The charge-hand nodded. ‘Got that.’
    â€˜There’s also,’ his superior went on, his face gradually tightening like an overstretched guitar-string, ‘the fact that the Egyptians are now one river short. They’re not going to be pleased, you know. I get the feeling they’re, you know, attached to it.’
    â€˜Yes?’
    His superior nodded. ‘You been working in this department long?’ he asked. The charge-hand did some mental arithmetic.
    â€˜Not very long,’ he said.
    â€˜How long exactly?’
    â€˜Um, eight hours,’ the charge-hand replied. ‘Before that, I was on Truth.’
    â€˜Truth. I see.’ His superior nodded a couple of times, and then a few times more simply out of momentum. ‘Doing what,