White and Other Tales of Ruin (31 page)

It was a normal dwelling, detached, quite large. The windows were smashed, the guttering shattered, the slates cracked and crazed. Its masonry was peppered with bullet holes and a couple of larger impact craters. These could only be from a pad-rifle. There was something splashed high on the wall next to an upstairs window. It may have been blood.

In both directions along the street more houses stood drowning in the river of muck. It stank of shit and rot, as if all the drains in the world were venting here. It was black and thick, steaming in places, twisting with deceptive currents. Every now and then a car came floating by. Some of them trailed engine parts behind them like loose guts. These came to rest further down the street against the side of a church, like wayward souls seeking entrance and acceptance. The mud river deposited them there and then turned a corner, probably picking up more vehicles and carrying them further away … or perhaps simply disappearing altogether.

It had to stop somewhere.

I looked back at the house we’d emerged from and wondered what was behind it. I had the crazy idea that there would be timber posts propping up the façade, perhaps a litter-strewn studio lot, a maintenance yard for Hell where the demons dressed and undressed each night, smoked cigarettes, talked about who they’d killed that day and whether they were revisiting Mud tomorrow, or perhaps they’d be on coach duty, did you hear about Dave the Demon who some visitor killed before going alien in Barbed Wire, and wasn’t he in for some fun when he was found …?

“
Nolan,” Chele said, “we have to decide what to do.”

“
What?”

“
Look.” She pointed quickly towards the centre of the flow where the mud ran fastest, glancing at Laura to see if she’d noticed.

“
I’ve seen worse than that,” my daughter said, and when I finally saw what they were talking about my heart sank. She shouldn’t be growing up this quickly, experiencing these things, having her teens slaughtered by trauma and pain and a realisation that anyone she saw,
everyone
, was capable of these things.

Three bodies had been tied together and they now flowed by in a tangled mess. It looked like a man, a woman and a child, and I guessed that the man had done the tying in an effort to keep them together in the flood. If that were the case he’d dragged his family to their deaths, because his skull had been shattered by a bullet. His wife and child seemed untouched, but they did not move. The mud had made them its home.

We watched them drift off towards the church and I wondered where in the world they’d come from.

“
Good sense says we go that way,” Chele said, pointing downstream after the bodies. “But logic says we go that way, where the action is. That’s where we’ll find our way out.” She pointed upstream, and the three of us looked along the flooded street towards a large open area at the end. It may have been a park once, but many of the trees had been torn down or submerged. From this distance I could see shapes protruding above the flow of mud, but I could not make out what they were. Buildings? Hills in the landscaped park? Beyond the park I could see nothing, because a heavy, mucky-looking mist engulfed the view.

From that direction came the continuing sounds of conflict.

“
Do we really want to just walk into that?” I said quietly, reaching out to touch Laura’s shoulder.

Chele was looking around, probing the mud gently with her feet on either side of the wall. “We have to. Remember, we’re not meant to be here at all. We broke in to find your daughter.”

I felt a stab of guilt at that, the fact that Chele was only here because of me, but she’d come of her own accord. And her voice held no of blame.

Does she feel nearer to her son now? I thought. My daughter’s a stranger to her, but does rescuing her make Chele’s dead son seem that much closer?

“
Those demons, those caves.”

“
Another scene,” Chele said. “We saw several ourselves before we left the coach, remember? We just slipped from one to the next. Accidentally or on purpose it doesn’t matter.”

“
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

“

“
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.