White and Other Tales of Ruin (56 page)

“
Face,” she said. Or perhaps she said
fate
.

A
thump
passed through the station. It may have been a sound coming in from the distance, wending its way through tunnels and vents like a gust of air. Or perhaps they only felt it through the ground. A rat maybe, hidden by shadows, jumping from a wall onto the platform … or a violent grenade explosion five tunnels and a mile away.

“
Let’s get out of here,” Tom said. “Into the tunnel like you said. If we hold hands we can never get lost.”

“
Romance,” Honey said, arching her eyebrows. Yet again, she confused Tom even more. As they jumped down between the rails and out of the weak light, he wondered whether that was love all over.

They walked for two hours. Through the train tunnel, across another platform, into a long, rising corridor, through a set of iron doors that had been blasted open at some point in the distant past. The atmosphere was dank, damp, dangerous, and they held hands as often as they could. Most of the places they passed through had some form of illumination — weak emergency lighting, or more often borrowed light bleeding down somehow from the surface. Some were pitch black. These they traversed as quickly as they could, relying on senses heightened by fear. And deep inside, Tom tried to trust fate as well. He desperately believed that they would have never come this far if an unseen, pointless death down here was all that awaited them.

They heard and felt intermittent signs of pursuit, from a rattling explosion, to a subtly decreased pressure on their eardrums as a heavy door was opened in some distant tunnel.

Eventually, finally, Tom climbed a rusted iron ladder, shoved a manhole open with his shoulders and helped Honey up into the open air.

He stood panting in the deserted street, his right foot and ankle a heavy weight of pain, the cool night air kissing his bleeding wounds as if to soothe. Honey stood next to him and looked around, nodding and sighing quietly. She knew where they were.
A hooker has to know the city
, she’d said as they took the lift into the underworld. Tom wondered if she’d been a whore forever, but they’d have plenty of time to get to know each other properly.
Plenty
. The idea that they knew virtually nothing about each other, and yet they were fleeing together for their lives, seemed far too romantic to take seriously.

Looking around, diverting his attention outwards, seemed to ease the pain. They were at the very edge of the city. Tom could even see the enclosure wall, eighty feet high and well lit, it’s top spotted with bored guards.

Honey pointed across the street at a low, curved doorway set in the face of a blank concrete façade. The building was huge and square, more dismissive of aesthetics as any in the city. There were hardly any windows, and those that were there appeared to have been boarded up. Its bulk seemed to swallow the light. Even though a misty rain was falling, there were no reflections from its damp walls.

Above the doorway hung a glowing axe, dripping neon blood onto the heads of anyone who chose to enter.

“
That,” said Honey, “is The Slaughterhouse.”

Tom had only been inside a few clubs in his time. Mostly they were visits marred by too much noise, too many drugs, too much drink, too much body chopping … just
too much
. Artificial he may be — cloned, grown, extruded, constructed and programmed — but Tom was not a man of extremes. The Baker had told him that those who resorted to extremities of existence had lost sight of the beauty at its heart. At the time Tom had found it difficult to understand, but after the old scientist died and the years went by he began to see the truth in the words. Most of those who wandered the streets at night, seeking enjoyment or satisfaction in the arms of mindless experimentation, had lost the simple ability to
live
. They needed more, and more, and more, without giving themselves the chance to get used to what they already had.

Tom’s club visits had been out of interest in other people, not to find anything for himself.

He’d been to The Club at the End of Time, Fuck-Shit and Hell, among a few other. In one he was mugged, in another he was hit on, in the rest he was ignored. He’d hated every one of them.

The Slaughterhouse … it was as much a club as Krakatoa had been a slight pop. The Slaughterhouse was a
world
. The second Honey opened the main front door and they passed beneath the axe, that world launched its attack on Tom’s senses.

They were in a corridor not unlike some of the tunnels they’d just been fleeing along. There were a few barred windows in the walls, payment booths, but more like viewing holes in prison doors. There was nobody behind them and Honey did not give them a second glance. The floor was uneven, and in the low light Tom could see what he thought were shattered bones forming its covering, the curve of a skull here, the ragged end of a snapped femur there. His balance was thrown and he held out his arms, staggering at every step. He tried not to look down. He was sure …
certain
… that the bones must be false.
Must
be.

Waves of smoke frolicked in the air, disturbed by mysterious draughts. A skein of rich fumes settled around Tom’s head. He breathed in, unable to resist the spicy hint of forbidden pleasures, feeling the sense of them settling into his nostrils and setting his blood aflame.

“
What’s that?” he asked.

“
What, the smell? It’s a mix of everything the club stands for. They extract it, concentrate and vent it over newcomers. Gets them ready. Gets them hot. You’re smelling drugs, fear, sweat, rage, sex and burning bone.”

Burning bone
. Tom looked down at the floor and an eye socket stared back.

There was a sudden explosion ahead of them, pounding through the air, hitting his already bloodied ears and stealing his balance. He sagged against the wall. It was slimy to the touch, and the slime smelled of sex. Unconsciously, still reeling from the blast, Tom touched his fingers to his tongue and closed his eyes. He could have been eating pussy. He snapped his eyes open again, wondering what was happening to him, why he was drifting away when those things were here, they’d found them, they would blast The Slaughterhouse until Honey and he were dead.

“
Buzz ‘n’ Chaos
!” Honey shouted. She turned to Tom, a crazy grin on her face. “You’ve never heard or seen live music until you’ve seen these guys.”

It sounded more like inclement weather than good music to Tom, but he followed Honey through a pair of heavy doors and into the club itself.

Outside, in the corridor, they could have been almost anywhere.

But anywhere was never like this.

The place was a riot of humanity, a deep sea of people, a swarm of experimenters indulging their most devilish whims, the air redolent of highs and sex and a vibrant freedom. The music of
Buzz ‘n Chaos
stalked the air like a rogue dragon, setting glasses shaking on tabletops and teeth rattling in skulls. There was shouting, screaming, sighing and crying, arguing, talking, wailing and laughing. And there was movement everywhere. The designers of The Slaughterhouse had never allowed economics or gravity to hobble their decadent dream.

The room was the size of the building containing it, but it looked impossibly larger. There were no windows. There were no internal storeys, only platforms, staircases, open lifts, glass slides, chains suspending swinging floors. On every visible surface people sat or danced or stood talking, sipping drinks and smoking and wiping exotic drug patches across their tongues or eyes, eating, climbing sleeping and fucking. Lots of fucking.

It reminded Tom of a giant ant nest, but here all the ants were seeking only one thing — enjoyment. And enjoyment, Tom realised within seconds of entering, came in all shapes and sizes.

“
Holy shit!” he shouted above the cacophony. “Honey, what the hell are we doing here? These people are wasters, freaks, chopped because they can’t —”

But Honey did not let him finish. “This is my thing, Tom, where I like to be when I’m not being fucked and beaten and spat on. I know I’m artificial so I can’t be chopped, but these freaks as you call them make me feel … normal. I’m a whore but that’s no worse than most of these. And much better than some. Love me, love what I do.”

He didn’t know what to say. A woman walked past with grotesque gashes across her body, a dozen inches long, their edges pouting around thick strips of cardboard to prevent the wounds from healing. She grimaced, and it may have been a smile. “Oh
God
, Honey.” Even he was surprised at how much desperation and disgust came out in his voice.

“
You told me you loved me,” Honey said, moving in close so that she could talk into his ear, “and yet you don’t know a thing about me. You don’t know what I like to eat or do, whether I have religion, what books I read.”

“
You like to dance,” Tom said. “You like to be held. You like puppets.”

“
Puppets,” she said. She barked a hard laugh, stood back with her hands on hips and Tom realised that she was
exasperated
. She looked up as if searching for someone in this multi-level altar to pleasure.

“
It’s what you told me,” Tom said, trailing off. The band seemed to be between songs, but the volume in the place had not relented.

“
We’re all puppets, Tom,” she said. “Especially us, the likes of you and me. Artificials. I don’t like puppets, I like those who cut their strings and rebel. Watching that Chinaman’s show outside the brothel … it makes me really look at myself. It makes me think about who pulls my stings, and how beholden I am to them. These people here — the chopped people and the lost artificials — they shed their strings long ago.”

“
We need to get out of the city,” Tom said, uncomfortable and confused with where this was leading. They had to escape now, together, and then time would be theirs’. “We can get to know each other when we’re away.”

Honey looked at him, her lips pressed tight and a frown hardening her face. She was about to say something. But the band started up again, and a veil of blue smoke wafted down from above, setting Tom’s nostrils alight, his blood pulsing through his veins at twice its normal rate. Honey smiled and held out her hands, pulling him close and hugging him tightly. But there was something else there, a hesitance he hadn’t felt before. Almost as if her thoughts hung between them, a weight requiring crushing before they could touch.

“
Honey...”

“
Come on,” she said. “Let’s find Skin, then we can move on. Get out of there. Finish all this.”

“
Leave the city, you mean.”

“
Leave the city,” she said. At least he thought those were her words. But she’d already started turning away, and her eyes had left his.

As they started walking, Tom felt much lighter than before. His perception had widened, his senses apparently refreshed and enlivened by whatever chemicals he’d breathed in with the smoke. He could make out the bands’ individual instruments, the harmonies bouncing off each other, the rasp of the guitarist’s rough skin against the strings, the clicks and sighs of the vocalist’s breathing method between lyrics … even the volume seemed manageable now, rather than painful. He wondered what the drug had been and decided, against all logic, that he liked it.

Honey led him up onto an uneven platform welded together from what looked like panels of a ship’s hull. There were even traces of a name along one side of the suspended floor, and star-shaped rust patches as big as fists which may have been where creatures had once clung. There was a group of people at one end of the platform, some of them dancing, others — mostly men — paying more attention to the woman hanging from chains above them. Meat hooks curved through the flesh of her shoulder blades, buttocks and calves, and the chains that rose into the gloomy heights were rusted, the colour of dried blood.

She was grinning as she swung back and forth, her rhythm matching the fast beat of the music in some terribly soporific way. She was naked. Blood ran copiously onto the heads and shoulders of those below. One of the men reached up and squeezed her pendulous breasts, twisting her nipples and pulling hard, changing her direction of swing. Another shoved him aside and flipped into a handstand, his engorged prick flopping as he walked clumsily towards the woman on his hands, offering himself up to be sucked. His gang screamed and shouted and jeered. The woman nudged out with one hand, hitting him on the knee and sending him tumbling.

Her blood drew graceful arcs on the dark grey platform. Her swinging, twisting and rotating was all in time with the music, like some grisly metronome. She caught Tom’s eye and smiled. He looked away, disgusted and embarrassed, as one of the men started to jump and bash his face between her thighs.

Honey passed by the group without a second glance, and Tom was pleased when they started climbing a ladder to the next platform.

“
Chopped folks up here,” Honey shouted down before she disappeared onto the floor above. Tom climbed faster, wondering what to expect. He’d seen people walking to and from these clubs, noticed the freakish adjustments many of the humans made to their bodies. He didn’t think he could still be completely shocked. He thought he’d seen it all.