White and Other Tales of Ruin Page 23

  “But if the demons are integral to this place … the law-keepers … surely they’d have just followed us through?”

  Chele strode along the wall several paces and stood with her hands on her hips. She seemed to have found something that pleased her. “I don’t pretend to know any more about this place than you,” she said, and I felt almost annoyed at her ignorance. “Now come look at this.”

  Laura and I followed to where Chele was standing and looked down. There, moored against the outside edge of the garden boundary wall, bobbing on the gloopy current, sat a shallow dinghy complete with paddles.

  “How long has this place been like this?” I said. Long enough to have boats … a long time.

  “It’s just a scene, Dad,” Laura said then. “Make believe made real.” She rubbed her wrists and winced as the muddied scabs broke. Blood showed through and dripped into the mud river creeping past the wall. A part of her would forever be in Hell, now. A part of all of us, because we had all taken cuts and lost blood. It would merge with the mud, and perhaps tomorrow it would be a part of something even more terrible.

  There was a prolonged bout of gunfire from upriver and a roar as another building collapsed, unseen.

  “Let’s not think about it,” I said, thinking all the same. Machine-guns, pad-rifles, it was a war up there. And here we were preparing to paddle right into it. “Let’s just go.”

  Chele knelt at the front of the dinghy, with Laura in the middle and me at the back. It sank so that its rim was almost at the level of the mud, and I feared that any surge or wave would swamp us, the weight dragging us instantly down to whatever lay below. I knew that we wouldn’t be the first or last bodies added to this rancid river.

  Just as we were about to set out the thudding shock of a pad-rifle sounded from somewhere nearby. The rounds roared along the street, and I saw the flowering explosions of brick and mortar as they struck a house on the opposite side. Great clots of masonry strafed the mud, its splashes remaining visible for a few seconds as they were carried away on the current. Windows burst in, a third of the roofing slates were smashed into the air like a flock of startled birds, the front door and surround exploded into the guts of the house, holes the size of our boat appeared across its façade. We ducked down as low as we could get, frightened but fascinated, and watched in awe as the house slumped down into the mud like a tired old man. The pad-rifle continued firing for a few seconds more. It pounded the debris into dust and then fell silent, until the only sound was the crunch of the mud river sucking the house remains down into itself. Soon, the only sign that a building had existed there at all was the central staircase, exposed to the elements like the bare backbone of some long-rotted beast.

  “That was from nearby,” I whispered.

  “Stray rounds,” Chele said.

  “No way, that was sustained. Someone targeted that house. This one might be next.”

  “If we move they may see“

  “If we don’t,” I said, “they’ll find us when they come looking.”

  “Maybe we can be on their side,” Laura said quietly. I was almost relieved at the naiveté of her statement. There was some child left inside her after all.

  “Row,” I said, untying the rotten rope and pushing us away from the wall. Chele picked up an oar and sank it into the mud.

  It was like rowing through porridge. Although the mud flowed like a river and kept its own level like water, when I tried to pull on the oar it felt like concrete. I could see the muscles standing out on Chele’s neck as she heaved. Laura sat in front of me, stroking the terrible wounds on her arms with muddy fingertips. I thought about infections and gangrene and pollution, and as if conjured by my musings a rat the size of a small cat ran along the top of the wall we had just vacated. It stared at me with a hunger than could never have been manufactured. This may just be a scene, as Chele had said, but its components were real enough.

  We tried keeping to the relative shelter of the buildings and garden walls, rowing against the flow, gaining inch by inch. At one point my paddle snagged on something and I nearly lost it. Reaching down into the mud my hand closed around something soft and yielding, and pulling it away from the paddle realised that whatever it was wore cloths. I did not look down lest I saw it.

  But I did catch sight of things in the gardens to my left. I thought they were shrubs and trees at first, branches stripped of leaves and left bare and pale in the grey light. Then I realised that they were limbs. Dozens of bodies were drifted together against one wall, half submerged arms and legs and heads protruding above the mud as if stretching forever for dry brickwork. Faces with mouths and eyes filled with muck. Torsos with horrific wounds. Slicks of blood around them, dark and shiny like oil on water.

  I turned away and kept paddling.

  The gunfire continued, more sporadic now. Perhaps the numbers on both sides were so reduced by the fighting that there weren’t that many left to shoot.

  I hoped that was the case.

  “Push harder!” I said, heaving back, feeling my biceps burning, my back straining with the effort. I’d been close to collapse since we saved ourselves from the quagmire. Whatever kept me going now, it would surely not last for much longer. If we let up the current would grab us and drag us out into the faster-flowing central spread of the flooded roadway. And from there … who knew.

  Either that or we’d be three more bodies washed against a wall.

  Laura dipped her hands in on either side of the dinghy and started to pull as well. She flicked mud up at me — it stank stale and dead, as if filth itself could rot — but I didn’t mind. She was helping. And perhaps having something to do would divert her attention from whatever she was still dwelling upon.

  I knew her so well. I was here, we were moving, but she still felt far from saved.

  Things floated by. At one point a slick of fresh blood enveloped the boat, and the fleshy objects squelching against the wood were stark against the dark brown mess. Many other things, too, a real mix and match of a life, as if someone’s history was being systematically destroyed somewhere up ahead. A perverse, reverse evolution. There was a shoe, laces still tied but empty; a notebook, pages sprawled like a dead bird, one side used, the other waiting for thoughts that would never come; an unopened tin of dried rice; a sock; a dinner plate, still stained with the grease of its last supper. Spectacles, a boxed pen set, half of a door, a flap of leather from a torn jacket …

  It went on.

  And then we reached the end of the street where the mud opened up into a lake of filth, and at last we could see what the humps protruding from its mess were.

  Bandstands. Three of them, the one in the centre so tall that its whole platform was above the flood-line. It reminded me of small-town America, hot-dogs, Fourth of July parades and brass bands. The other two were smaller, submerged beneath the mud with only their roofs and supports touching daylight. And on each bandstand, people with guns.

  Fighting over nothing but mud, filth and shit.

  Dying there, flipping into the air, spinning, tumbling into the muck and being carried slowly towards us by the current, past us eventually, back along the street.

  More corpses to meet the wall.

  The central bandstand seemed to be under siege from the other two, and it was here that the pad-rifle fire had originated. Strangely, its impact on the wooden structures was minimal, and at first I thought it was because they were so open that most rounds missed. But then I saw someone stand against the railings of the central bandstand, prop a pad-rifle on the rail before him and loose off three rounds at the structure to our left. The first two struck a woman hunkered down on its roof, shattering her like a broken mannequin and flinging her pieces far out over the mud. The third round hit the edge of the roof … but only a few shards of wood sprung out.

  “It’s all selective,” I said. “All this destruction is selective”

  “They’re pad-rifles,” Chele said. “You can’t pick and choose“
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br />   “You saw what happened to that house. How do you think those two bandstands are still there?”

  “Bad shots,” Laura said. The gunfire erupted once again, figures dropped and splashed into the mud, some screaming, guts blown out, limbs askew.

  The buildings still stood, bearing the designer-scars of battle.

  “Have they seen us?” Laura asked. We were bobbing against the gable wall of a house bordering the park, pressed there by the current and exposed to anyone who happened to glance our way.

  “I think,” I said, “that their own little scene simply doesn’t include us.” I was comfortable with this idea, if a little confused, and it seemed to fit right into what we were seeing.

  “It’ll have to stop soon,” Chele said. “They’ll all be dead.”

  There was a sound like the buzzing of distant insects beneath the gunfire. And as the three powerboats roared into the park  two emerging from the distant haze of mist, one coming straight up the street behind us  and a line of bullets coughed out brick dust by our heads, I realised how wrong I was.

  We were involved. Hell, I realised, can never be selective. It’s there for the benefit of everyone.

  The boat slicing through the mud behind us slowed down, and a man on the bow loosed a burst of suppressing fire at the bandstand on the left. The noise was shockingly loud. Another hail of bullets came our way, kicking up great gouts of mud and releasing its stench into the air. Bullets buzzed by our ears, ricochets singing behind us, and I was sure I could feel the breeze of their passing, smell their rich metallic tint as they exploded against the wall and the boats’ hulls.

  The driver of the powerboat fell back, his face swallowed by a fresh red hole.

  “Oh God,” Laura said, turning her head away, and I could see that she’d be splashed when the bullet had struck him. She caught my eye and, inexplicably, tried to smile. It came as a grimace, teeth bared, eyes wide, and for a second  for the first time in my life  I was frightened by my daughter. What madness could she have inherited from this place?

  “Into the boat!” the man on the bow shouted. They drew up next to us and he fired again. Tracer rounds tore across the mud lake and strafed the bandstand. Two people dropped, one of them sliding into the mud, and one of the boats from the mist immediately pulled up and disgorged several more fighters onto the tattered wooden structure. They picked up scattered weapons and immediately opened fire on the central bandstand and our boats.

  “Quickly!” the man shouted, ducking down as the gunfire increased.

  “No,” I said. We shouldn’t go with them, should never take sides, because once we did that we were truly embedded in this scene, part of the play and bound into whatever climax awaited these pointless people. The man looked at me, wide-eyed and disbelieving. His machine-gun drifted in our direction. Its smoking barrel looked hungry.

  Something stung my elbow. I looked down and saw a rosette of blood opening on my muddied sleeve, and my arm went numb. A bullet had kissed me. Laura guided me to the edge of the dinghy, stepping over into the powerboat and taking me with her. Blood ran down inside my sleeve, warm and shocking, and it dripped from my fingers as a dark brown paste. It was carrying dried mud with it. I wondered what bacteriological horrors were seeping hungrily into my wound even now.

  In the back of the powerboat sat half a dozen people. They all looked tired, underfed, sick, but their eyes gleamed with excitement. Some of them glanced at us, but most had their eyes on the body of the dead driver where he was leaking across the timber boards.

  They all carried weapons. I saw at least three pad-rifles.

  “Chele!” I said, turning to hold out my hand. She was hunched down in the dinghy, hands over her head, trying to present as small a target as possible. The wall of the house was all but disintegrating under the hail of lead, and a fine powder drifted in the air and stuck to our wet clothes. Chele stood slowly, glancing over at me. She was readying herself to jump. She looked like a ghost.

  “We can’t stay here,” one of the people said, leaping to the wheel and leaning on the throttle. The boat started to pull away. I reached out for Chele and she jumped.

  “Laura!” I said, but she was already there. Between us we hauled Chele in, trying to keep low as the bullets sang around us like angry bees. The boat was humping fast across the mud lake now, each impact feeling as if we were striking concrete.

  I reached for one of the pad-rifles strapped to the engine mounting. I expected them to jump at me, fight me for it, maybe even shoot me … but if we were going to get out of this I had to do something.

  The sound was almost unbearable, the stink of mud richer and more nauseating than ever, and I could taste blood in the air. Perhaps that was the red mist I saw.

  I pulled Chele and Laura close to me, hugging the pad-rifle to my left side. Its heavy plastic was strangely warm, its wide barrel and gas-ports wicked-looking, black eyes promising so many horrors yet to be seen.

  “It’s a reinforcement boat,” I said. “Nobody can last long on those bandstands, not when they’re so exposed. Everyone on this boat will be dead soon, including us, if we don’t get out of here.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “I have this.” I nodded at the pad-rifle. Laura refused even to look at it.

  “But“ Chele began. But she did not have a chance to finish.

  Sometimes, when everything’s as bad as you think it can get, it gets worse. Misfortune upon terror upon horror … all crowd in to drown their victims, ensure a completed job.

  The boat was just approaching the central bandstand when someone shouted out: “Demons!”

  I looked up and saw several black shapes circling slowly down from the grey sky, wide webbed wings drifting them skilfully towards our boat.

  “Now we’re finished!” a woman shouted out, and I swear there was joy in her fear.

  “They’re here for them!” The voice came from the bandstand. Someone was leaning out, pointing at us, and I knew without looking that it was the madman from the barbing world. Black Teeth.

  He’d been spared for some other fate.

  As the demons swirled down, their wings now cracking at the air, the fighters in the boat turning to look at the three of us, bullets zinging past from both directions as we came under concerted fire from the sunken bandstands … I knew that it was time to fight.

  “Chele”

  She spun around and hit the gunwale hard, the impact audible even above the gunfire. Laura cried out. Someone laughed. I dropped to my knees beside Chele and flipped her onto her back, hearing the impact of bullets on bodies behind me. There were several thumps as corpses hit the deck, but Laura was beside me, pressing her hand to the terrible wound in Chele’s face, holding in the blood, wiping away what was left of her eye where the bullet had blown it out, crying, crying for this stranger who’d helped me save her from her cruel crucifixion. And someone was still laughing.

  I glanced around and saw Black Teeth leaning out over the mud, ignorant of the bullets biting at his cloths and hair, or perhaps simply not caring. He was pointing at us, his hysterical eyes wide open. I looked at his hands and imagined them wrapping barbed wire around Laura’s wrists, touching her as he did it, his eyes glinting as his fingers strayed, and before I really knew what I was doing I’d brought the pad-rifle to bear.

  As if badly scripted, the gunfire paused to add gravity to the moment.

  I held the weapon waist high. I’d seen these things working, so I knew I didn’t need to aim.

  Black Teeth stopped laughing for a second and stared at me in disbelief. Then he smiled again, showing the rot in his mouth. Shook his head. He knew I’d never do it.

  I pulled the trigger. The balustrade misted into fragments and the madman splashed back in a wash of red. His laugh seemed to hang in the air for a few seconds like a cartoon speech-bubble, or perhaps it was the rifle report ringing in my ears.

  At least I knew what fate he had been spared for.


  The thought that the demons had known what would happen  had perhaps engineered it  was too dreadful to contemplate, although it all made perfect sense. They were the scriptwriters and we were the actors, although our lines and actions were subconscious, not learnt.

  “Daddy!” Laura shouted, and a black shaped knocked me from my feet.

  I kept hold of the pad-rifle as I went sprawling, holding out one hand to break my fall, feeling it slip in something leaking from one of the corpses. The shape closed in on me again and thumped my back twice. I realised it had landed. I could feel long claws curling into me, clenching, finding purchase so that it could finish the job … whatever job that was.

  Were the demons here to kill us, or let us go? I had no idea. But I had no time to waste thinking about it.

  Chele was dead, most likely.

  Laura may be next.

  I heaved myself up as hard and fast as I could, hoping to catch the demon unawares. It worked, partially, and the thing slipped from my back, clutching out chunks of my flesh as it did so. I screamed and it screamed back, its voice like that of a giant tree frog, a bass rattle that set my hairs on end. I had to bring the rifle to bear  had to  but at the same time I wondered why nobody in the boat was firing at the thing. I shook my shoulders, pushed sideways as if to turn on my back. Claws raked my skin. Something tapped at the back of my neck, and I felt the warm dribble of blood around my ears and scalp.

  The gunfire had started again, and the air smelled of hot metal and death.

  Laura leapt into view, landing right by my face and launching herself at the demon. It grumbled at her and waved its wings. One of them caught her under the chin and sent her falling back over Chele’s prone body, but she had set it off balance and allowed me to scramble away from the clenching claws. I stood, spun around and aimed the pad-rifle.

  For a second, silence fell across the whole scene once again. Gunfire stopped. Shouting ceased. Even the flow of the mud seemed to lessen, the steady roar of debris pushing past buildings dulled. The demon sat frozen against the edge of the cockpit, its black armour wet with my blood, antennae flipping at the air. Its visor was black and held no reflection.