Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk (42 page)

In fact, it was simple. The drill, on the point of penetrating the roof of the tunnel, had hit the same geological flaw that had been responsible for the original cave-in: a jagged air pocket between two strata. In attempting to save the miners, it had instead finished them off, triggering a second cave-in. Their meagre, sordid refuge had become a tomb.

Radio silence from underground confirmed the awful truth. Several of the rescuers sank to their knees, overwhelmed with shock and dismay. Others took off their safety helmets as a mark of respect, tears rolling down their cheeks.

Barnaby, numb, decided to approach the crowd and offer condolences. Barely had he begun to speak, however, when a woman in a saffron sari shouted, “Murderer!” The rest of the crowd joined in, calling him all the worst words they could think of in English, and countless more in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and the regional language Oriya. Then rocks and stones were thrown: a few at first, but swiftly becoming dozens.

Jakob hustled Barnaby away, shielding his boss from the rain of projectiles with his own broad back. The crowd gave chase, a mob howling in grief and outrage. A few frontrunners caught up with the fleeing plutocrat and his bodyguard, but Jakob despatched them easily with backhand blows.

The bulk of the crowd gained on them; they were mere metres away as they reached their hired Tata Safari VX. Jakob bundled Barnaby into the passenger seat, then vaulted over the bonnet and dived into the driving seat, locking the doors. As he gunned the engine, people swarmed around the 4x4 and began hammering their fists on the windows and bodywork. Jakob floored the accelerator, powering through the throng. Bodies scattered. Anyone who didn’t leap out of the way was knocked aside. The Tata veered away from the mine, fishtailing on the gravelled approach road. The crowd receded behind it, still pursuing, a wall of waving arms and fury-etched faces.

Jakob didn’t bother stopping at the hotel in Talcher to pick up their belongings. He headed straight for Biju Patnaik Airport near Bhubaneswar, ninety miles away. Their luggage and other paraphernalia could be sent on later. Jakob’s priority was getting Barnaby onto the Gulfstream and in the air. He phoned ahead as he drove, and by the time the Tata pulled up on the tarmac beside the runway, the pilot had the turbofan engines cycling and had obtained clearance for immediate takeoff.

BENDER

T
HE CROWD AT
the colliery couldn’t follow Barnaby, but the shame did, all the way back to the UK. Opprobrium was heaped on GloCo from all quarters. Newspaper editorials castigated him. TV pundits berated him. He became a public whipping boy as never before.

It was as though he had somehow deliberately caused the cave-in, as though he were personally responsible.

He started to drink, harder and more intently than he ever had. He holed up in his house and went on a week-long bender. Whenever he felt himself sobering up, he would reach for another bottle. He had plentiful supplies, a whole cellar full of wines and spirits. He could have stayed in the house and drunk for twelve months straight before he ran out of booze.

He woke up on the sofa late one afternoon to find Lydia standing over him. Her nose was wrinkled. She was looking down at him as she might have at a pig wallowing in its own filth.

“The state of you,” she clucked. “Have you no self-respect?”

“Think I pissed it away this morning. Along with half a kidney.” He groped for the bottle of Mersault Premier Cru that stood on the coffee table, uncorked and half empty.

Lydia slid it out of his reach. “That isn’t the answer.”

“It is,” he said. “Especially if the question is, ‘Did a teenage boy just die down one of your mines? Quite aside from the seventy-two grown men?’”

“Alcohol won’t solve your problems.”

“No, but it does mean I don’t have to think about them. Everyone hates me, Lydia.”

“Since when has that bothered you?”

“Since I started hating myself too.”

She grabbed him by the shoulders, hauling him upright. “You go and have a shower – a long one – and shave. When you come back, I’ll be downstairs. All the way downstairs.” She nodded towards the basement.

“You want to...?”

“Don’t you?”

He was drunk, but not that drunk. “Yes. God, yes, I do. I just assumed you wouldn’t, given... how I am, at the moment.”

“If you keep on talking, I might change my mind.”

He stood. He swayed. He made for the door. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

WORLDS IN HER EYES

S
HE WAS NAKED
except for a PVC corset that strained around her, as though trying to withhold a flesh explosion. Barnaby hadn’t seen her wearing it before. She was, he thought, really getting into this.

“I don’t trust you to tie a knot or fasten a shackle properly right now,” Lydia said. “I’ll just bend over that sawhorse there, okay? I won’t move, I promise. I’ll stay put. I give you my word. Do you trust me?”

“Yes.”

“Then do what you have to.”

She draped herself over the sawhorse provocatively, offering him her rump. Barnaby grabbed a whip and began flailing. He wasn’t as accurate as normal, but made up for that with enthusiasm. The whip’s cracks were deafening in the enclosed space of the basement. Bright scarlet weals appeared across Lydia’s buttocks and thighs. She flinched, but didn’t cry out. Blood beaded from the wounds. Barnaby kept going. He thrashed and thrashed, breaking into a sweat. No safeword – none that he heard, at any rate. The whip lashed out. He was panting hard. He wasn’t aroused at all. That wasn’t what this was about. He just wanted to hit and hit, hurt and hurt. He hated the world. The world hated him. Why wouldn’t everyone go away? Just fuck off and leave him alone? He hadn’t done anything wrong. He was simply making money, same as everyone did. He hadn’t forced those miners to go down into that pit. They had gone of their own volition. They got paid. They knew the risks. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his... It wasn’t...

He collapsed to the floor, lungs heaving. The room spun around him. The pattern of the flock wallpaper became swirling mandalas. The cranberry-glass lights pulsed like hearts.

Lydia crouched over him. Her legs were streaked with blood. He looked into her eyes. The blue, the green...

Good God, they were the world. How come he had never realised that before? There were patterns in the irises. The blue, the oceans. The green, the continents.

“Barnaby,” she said. “It’s time. Time for you to take your turn.”

He slurred out some words. “What are you talking about?” Something to that effect.

“Don’t you see?” she said. “Isn’t it obvious? Hurting me hurts you. And I am everything. What you do to me, I give back to you. It’s nature’s way.”

Was she even speaking? Her lips were moving, but they didn’t seem to synchronise with what she was saying. The voice didn’t sound quite like hers, either.

“It’s no coincidence, Barnaby. You started beating me, accidents started happening to GloCo. There’s no act without consequences, especially where a woman like me is concerned. I’m not one of those emaciated nothings you used to use and abuse. Those
girls
. I’m more, so much more. I’m trying to teach you a lesson here. Hoping you’ll understand. Hoping you’ll learn.”

She took his hand, helped him up, led him across the room.

“The Berkley Horse, I think,” she said. “As good a place as any to start.”

He should have protested, could have resisted. Too drunk still, perhaps. Too exhausted. But also... It felt right. As though it was meant to be.

People could switch. People could change.

“You think you’re at your lowest ebb,” Lydia said as she fastened the straps around him. “But it could get worse. Equally, it could get better. Depends on what you’re prepared to do, the sacrifices you’re prepared to make.”

“I want it to get better,” he murmured.

“Then it will. But it won’t be easy. You continue to fuck the planet. Get ready for the planet to fuck you back.”

He was pressed tight to the Berkley Horse, his back, buttocks and legs exposed. He couldn’t have writhed even if he wanted to. He was held fast.

He had thought that to be immobilised like this would be unpleasant, constraining, inhibiting. But, strangely, it was the opposite. Liberating, almost.

Lydia fetched the riding crop, the same one he had used on her, their first time. He glimpsed her out of the corner of his eye. She ought to be walking stiffly on account of the weals, but she seemed unhampered by them. It was as though she was not fully present, her mind elsewhere, transported out of her body, beyond sensation.

She flexed the crop, testing it.

Barnaby waited for the pain, and when it came it was tortuous, bewildering, dizzying, deserved, and wondrous.

TOP TO BOTTOM

B
ARNABY ON ALL
fours, his ankles parted by spreader bars.

Barnaby, ball-gag in mouth, suspended from manacles.

Barnaby bent double, a rope around his testicles, tightening.

Barnaby with Lydia squatting on his face, smothering.

Barnaby in the pillory, Lydia behind him, thrusting.

Barnaby on his back, feeling a jet of hot urine hit his belly and trickle off the sides.

Barnaby and the cold, searing bite of the nipple clamps.

Barnaby never once saying, “Gaia.”

A CHANGED MAN

G
LO
C
O’S FORTUNES BEGAN
to pick up.

For a time its prospects had looked dicey. Its CEO was AWOL, nowhere to be seen. Its shares were nosediving. The Talcher mine tragedy had turned it into a toxic brand. There was talk in the City of a shareholders’ revolt, hostile takeovers by any number of rivals, even nationalisation by the government, GloCo being one of those British companies that was ‘too big to fail.’

GloCo was a captainless ship, sailing on under its own relentless momentum, but who knew where? What reefs or maelstroms lay ahead of it, with no one at the helm to steer it safely past?