White and Other Tales of Ruin

around to a new patch of opened flesh and settled once more. New life for old, I thought, and I saw maggots squirming in a dead child’s mouth.

Two young women tipped a body onto the base of the pile and turned to leave with their stretcher. I thought they were crying, but one of them turned and looked directly at me — through me — and I saw the blood leaking from her eyes. Even had I been visible, she could not have seen me.

As we passed by the burial pit I saw an old man rooting among the dead. He was lifting limbs and prising mouths open with a thick stick, knocking out gold teeth, plucking jewellery from swollen fingers, and as we moved on I heard the jingling of his booty as he shifted a big rucksack from one shoulder to the other.

The windows began to fade to black and I turned to the woman across the aisle, but then the voice rang up inside my head one more time. Sometimes it’s impossible to believe just how bad things can get.

And the windows brightened again.

Something was screaming. It Dopplered in from the distance, and at first I thought it was someone inside the coach shouting at what they saw, rebelling, running along the aisle as they sought escape. But then I realised that the sound came from outside. Some of the people across the plain looked up and I followed their gaze… and thought help was at hand.

The aircraft screamed overhead so fast that I could not identify it, let alone make out its nationality. It left behind a shimmering wake and several cylindrical objects high in the sky, spinning and falling through the turbulent air until they each sprouted a parachute, bursts of compressed gas firing them away from each other, spreading across the plain until the five were slowly closing down like the fingers of a grasping giant’s hand.

Medicine, I thought, a cure, parachuted in by some benevolent government who couldn’t risk putting their own people in and infecting them as well. The coach moved slowly across the plain and the cylinders floated lazily down, and more and more people stopped what they were doing and looked up. The ill lying on sheets or bare earth shielded their eyes if they could move, and the less-ill stood and stared, pointing, chattering excitedly, some of them even eschewing their fear of contact to hug their neighbours and rejoice that someone, at last, had done something good for them.

Sometimes it’s impossible to believe how bad things can get, the voice purred in my head, and I didn’t know if it was memory or the words being spoken again.

Either way, I went cold.

“No…” I whispered, and I heard the word echoing up and down the coach as we all saw the first parachute land.

The explosion was at least three miles away, off towards the snowy mountains that looked so picturesque in the distance, but it rapidly blossomed out, an expanding ball of flame rolling along the ground and rising into the air, burning stick-people tumbling before it. The rest of the cylinders landed then, bursting open one by one and allowing their magic to work, igniting the earth and air, and the bodies in between. I saw some people raise their hands in joy when they realised that peace had come for them at last, and others turned to run and were caught by the speeding flames, hair igniting and faces melting away. The burial pits exploded as withheld gases were fired. Makeshift tents were blasted along the ground from place to place as the firestorm set in, and soon bodies accompanied them in the air, sucked helplessly into the ever expanding walls of fire. The nuns were running. Nothing could save them now.

As the fires from the separate explosions met, the windows in the coach faded to black.

I could still feel the heat, hear the screams, smell the stench of everything burning. I was panting. Sweat ran down my sides and a cool breeze issued from some unseen vent, but mere machines could not understand that fear and terror and anger cannot be cooled. It takes more than a breath of fresh air to do that.

I snatched up a bottle of beer and drained it in one go. It tasted foul but the subtle alcohol hit felt good. I kept trying to glance over my shoulder, through the window and back the way we had come, because I wanted to know if there was anything we should be doing for those poor people back there. Diseased, already doomed, then bombed and burned. There was no hope but still I looked back, seeing nothing in the blackened glass, not even offered my own wretched reflection to rage against.

“It’s terrible, terrible,” a voice said from in front of me, probably several seats down. It fell apart even as the man was talking, tears breaking through and giving a raw edge to his words, cracking his breaths. “It just… it’s… those poor…” He wailed then, sending a shiver down my spine, making me want to shout at him to stop, just shut up, because I couldn’t take this now that the windows were dark. I searched for another bottle of beer, but I had only water left. The woman across the aisle hissed at me.

“What?”

She lobbed me one of her beer bottles. I caught it from the air and smiled at her, a pained, nervous twitch of my lips that did nothing to find its way through what was really there. She did not smile back. “Never did drink,” she said. “Just another drug.”

I looked away embarrassed. But still I took a small sip and sat back, eyes closed, trying to cut out the crying.

It occurred to me that so far I had only seen the woman, no one else. There could be two more or twenty more people in here, perhaps two hundred more, the seats were so large and well padded that they seemed to all but absorb any noise made by the coach’s occupants. There was the man in front of me — I could still see a wisp of his grey hair — but so far as I knew that was it. Voices, yes, but no more people.

For the first time it struck me that this could all be for me.

Perhaps everyone who resorted to Hell had this sort of treatment. Maybe anyone else was an actor, put here to treat me as they’d treated hundreds, maybe thousands before. Show the scenes outside, tell their stories, make me realise that I was never worse off than everyone.

I took another swig of beer and the screaming man stopped screaming. There was a thud, like a door slamming shut or a page being turned in a heavy book, and then silence.

The man in front sighed, and I saw a hand raise up and smooth down his wispy hair. It was old, wrinkled, calloused, the hand of a manual worker. I wondered if he worked in the inner-city farms, or the sewers, or the tunnel projects that were meant to link city to city, country to country.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said.

I caught an whiff of burning bodies, as if a flake of scorched flesh was caught in my nostrils. “Of course it matters!” I said, wanting to shout. “Didn’t you see them? Poor bastards, poor…” I trailed off because I realised how inadequate anything I could say would sound.

“It’s all put on for us because we’re in Hell, and that’s how they do things here,” the man said. “Ha! I can’t even see you, for all I know you’re a machine with reaction software, or just one of them.” I heard him tapping his fingers against the window, as if trying to read dark Braille there. “In fact, I’m sure you are.”

“I’m not!” I said. “Maybe you are! Maybe everyone on this coach — ”

“Not me,” he said. “But I don’t worry or hold it against you, because what’s the capital of Syria?”

“Huh?”

He was silent for a couple of seconds and I saw the woman looking over, interest arching her eyebrows. I suddenly felt unreasonably good, seeing something other than fear, dread or sorrow on her face.

“I suppose I’d have to be quicker than that to catch out reaction software, wouldn’t I?”

“Absolutely, Sir,” I said in a slow monotone, and the woman snorted.

Something made the coach sway slightly, and I heard a couple of coughs as people tried to ignore the sick movement in their stomachs. I glanced at the window, waiting for it to brighten again and terrified at what I would see, but it remained dark.

I wondered where Laura was right then. It felt strange thinking of her, because it was almost certain that she wasn’t thinking of me. At most I was an invader in her memory. In a way I wished that I could forget as well, but she wasn’t in pain, wasn’t burning or being shot. I sent love to Laura, knowing she wouldn’t hear it but doing it for myself. It didn’t help, but I pretended it did.

The windows brightened and I thought we were back. Back where I wasn’t exactly sure — somewhere deep in the Welsh mountains, perhaps — but at least our journey was at an end. The view from the window was wonderful, a mountainous rural paradise, and I sat back and smiled as the coach moved slowly through the scene.

So come on, I thought, show us pollution or global warming or deforestation or disease or death. But the