As if lured by Laura’s voice there was a loud thumping, crackling sound outside, clear above the roar and grind of the moving mud.
“Oh no,” I said. They were here. They’d followed us, found us and now they were coming, and what fate could we expect from those demons? No slow death, of that at least I was sure. They’d hold us down and shoot us. After some of what I’d seen today, that may almost be a blessing.
“Wait,” Chele said, bending down so that she could see through the window and across the surface of the mud-river. “It’s not the same sound.”
“Then what — ”
“Gunfire,” Laura said. “That’s gunfire, yes, but it’s pad-rifles. I heard them a couple of days ago when…” She trailed off. It must have been bad if she didn’t even want to tell her father about it. It wasn’t the usual crack of gunfire, more like a whiplash ending with a heavy thud. I’d heard about pad-rifles. They weren’t nice things. They fired super-heated composite which spread out in the air to something the size of a fist. By the time it struck its target it was solid again. Being shot with a pad-rifle was like being hit by a medicine ball at fifteen hundred miles per hour.
More reports, closer this time, and then we heard the familiar crackle of machinegun fire joining in.
“There’s a battle going on out there,” Chele said, looking around our room as if contemplating staying.
The mud river seemed to be flowing faster, and even though inside the room was relatively calm, the sounds of scraping and rumbling from outside was becoming more violent. Another gunfire exchange, another heavy grumble of a building collapsing into the muck, and that made up my mind.
“We can’t stay here,” I said. “This place isn’t designed for that.”
“What do you mean, ‘this place’? You don’t even know where or when we are.”
“We’re in Hell,” I said. “We’re in a place designed to make observers feel happy with their lot. Bad things are
“Are they watching now?” Laura asked.
“I don’t think bad enough stuff is happening to us yet.” I smiled grimly at my daughter and felt so powerless when I saw the fear in her eyes.
“I just want to go home,” she said. “I want Mum back.” I hadn’t heard that from her in a long time.
“Then let’s go,” Chele said, standing and edging her way to the window. “I think whatever we’re standing on goes as far as the window.”
“Then what?”
She shrugged. “Through. Outside. You and I are aliens here, Nolan. We get to the action, maybe we’ll have an idea of how to find our way out.”
We left the room through the shattered window, moving from the sunken furniture and balancing on the sill, before stepping across to the head of a wall protruding above the mud river. And once outside, we were able to turn around and see where we’d come into this particular Hell.
“Where are the caves?” Chele said. “Where are the tunnels? Why didn’t they follow us through?”
Looking up at the two-storey house, I could only shake my head and wonder. The dislocation… the sense of wrongness… it was terrifying.
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 facade, 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,
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
“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.
