White and Other Tales of Ruin

fellow passengers had greater problems than me. I often told myself that there were a lot of people worse off, but I’d never actually met them.

“Oh Jesus!” said a voice from further along the coach.

And the windows lit up again.

They were moving us through a town that was dying.

I glanced at the woman across the aisle but she was staring from her window as well, seeing all the same things, probably equally shocked.

“I never thought there was anywhere like this left,” I whispered. Nobody answered me, and I hoped that it was because they agreed rather than because they thought I was naive.

There was a man standing at the base of a flight of steps, jabbing continuously at his arm with a needle, arcs of blood spattering the pavement at every attempt, and his mouth dribbling as he shouted I have no veins, I have no veins. Whatever was in the syringe initially must have drained away by now, but still he searched, not seeing his own life fluid leaking from him, even when he sliced the needle up and down his wrist and a group of watchers stood back so that the resulting fountain did not stain them. A pack of mangy dogs crossed the street with their tails held high and their noses low to the ground, but I turned away.

“God,” I said, glancing over to see what the woman had seen. The back of her head told me nothing.

The coach moved slowly along the street, and the people did not appear to see us. If it was a holo it was beautifully arranged. It picked up every minor facet of reality. A particular sun-glint from a dusty window; steam rising from a dog’s piss as it raised its leg against a wall; shadows sitting in the cracks in pavements, hiding from daylight like the men I could see hunkered down in shop doorways, not wishing to be a part of things.

I tried waving but no one saw, or if they did had no wish to respond. I wondered just how programmed and pre-set this was.

The buildings stared out with shattered windows. A naked woman hung from one of them, her flesh grey and bloated with time, rope digging so far into her neck that rolls of skin and flesh had closed around it. She may have been pretty in the past, but now she was a smear on the wall of the building, a fluid stain marking the masonry below her. I really didn’t want to know what that meant.

A group of men were gang-raping someone in an alley.

A dead person lay in the gutter, ignored and left for the flies and rats.

A lost child wandered along the pavement, crying, raising its hands but catching nobody’s attention.

“Sick,” I said, “this is just sick.”

But I had never been anywhere like this, hardly even imagined it. Wherever Laura was now was surely better. She wouldn’t be seeing these things, wouldn’t be subjected to such horror, no matter how much the sect brainwashed her and tried to pull her further and further from any sort of life she knew.

I retched and leaned forward, grabbed a bottle of water and tried to drown my nausea. There must have been some additive in there for such use, because I felt better within a few seconds. I strained in my seat and looked back at the mouth of the alley. There were no signs of what I had seen; at least it was out of sight now. Out of sight, out of mind, someone had once said to me. I’d wanted to hit them, because Janine had been out of sight for three years by then.

“I’m so glad places like this don’t exist anymore,” the woman across from me said.

I looked over in time to see her misted breath clearing from the window. “So you think it’s a recording?” I asked.

She glanced over and smiled. “Sure it is.” How stupid of you, her voice said, so I did not pursue it.

“Hell,” I said. “Hell on screen. So… why not just beam it to our nets?”

The woman did not answer. I heard a shifting in the seat in front of me, but the man said nothing.

Outside, more things were starting to happen in the run-down street. Isolated incidents at first — a man being beaten against a car, a young boy kneeling astride an equally young girl, knife drawn, her hair tangled in his fist — and then something more concerted, more significant. I was not consciously aware of things changing, but between one blink and the next the trouble-strewn street had opened up into a plaza. A church stood at one side, a line of rag-tag market stalls at another, and the blank walls of warehouses completed the square. A road ran through from either side.

Within seconds of the scene imprinting itself on my mind, a battle had begun.

The women carried no weapons. Their clothes were varied, their skins different shades, but each of them had the same dark expression on their face. Whatever they were fighting for, they were confident in their cause. Every point of impact resulted in the same outcome: one dead woman; one policeman splashed with blood, spark-stick drawn and buzzing as it searched for more skin to sear and break. It was a slaughter. And they hadn’t even drawn their guns.

I pressed my face to the glass, disgusted and shocked but unable to tear myself away. Had this happened somewhere in the world, some vague point in the history of an Eastern European state that my schooling had failed to touch upon? The women looked like those I’d see in the street at home — any one of them could have been Laura or Janine — and the police… they were up to date.

Totally up to date.

Body-moulding armour, shifting and flexing with each movement or muscular tick. A transparent sheen around their head which was a helmet and oxygen mask in one, solidifying micro-seconds before anything impacted upon it, parting and opening as and when necessary for the wearer to breathe or speak or eat. The spark-sticks and the drill guns. Everything I was used to.

“This is now,” I said. “This is happening now.”

Time is an illusion, came the soft voice from inside my head. Be glad you’re not here at this time.

“I’m not a woman,” I said.

For the first time the voice answered me directly. But you may have been a policeman.

I watched a woman fall to the ground and a policeman kneeling beside her, fending off her waving arms and deftly crushing and melting her throat with one glittering lunge of his spark-stick.

I saw how right the voice was. “Who are you?”

Be quiet, it said. Watch. It’s all part of the service.

“Anyone being talked to in here?” I shouted, and the silence from the others in the coach was my answer.

The battle erupted all around the coach but never touched it. There was murder and death and execution, but the one thing I never saw was the taking of a prisoner. These police, for whatever reason, had been instructed to simply kill. No crowd control for them, no law-enforcing, no friendly chat with someone who may have had a vague idea to break a minor law…. these were out on a subdue and destroy mission the likes of which I could never have imagined.

“Is this how it could be?” I asked, and the disembodied voice answered.

Was, could be, will be is not important. You’re not here, that is important. You’re no part of this. Be thankful.

“I am,” I said, and I was. The coach moved on, we passed scenes of terrible pain and cruelty, and I was thankful.

I began to realise how Hell could really work.

The windows went dark. I slumped back in my seat and all hint of external influences passed away. I’d been smelling the fear of that square, hearing the screams and dying sighs, tasting blood on the breeze and the tang of discharging spark-sticks. Now, with nothing more than the slight aroma of my own sweat to keep me company, it seemed all the more shocking.

“That was horrible,” I said.

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?” I asked. The woman turned to look at me.

“I’m not going to tell you. It’s personal.”

I frowned, went to tell her my name but then thought about what she’d said. We were in Hell after all, and I