White and Other Tales of Ruin

“Well, that’s original crisis thinking at least.” Honey grinned at him, a bloodied plastic doll.

They opened the door and entered the corridor beyond. It was much narrower than the one they left, badly lit as well, and here and there on the floor were piles of ragged clothing which may once have contained people. Tom was glad for the bad light; it meant he couldn’t see bone or desiccated flesh. Rats scurried around their feet, flies buzzed them, and fattened things crawled on the slimy walls.

“They say the buzzed sometimes come down here to die,” Honey said. “Getting out of the sunlight sooths the pain. Or something.”

Knowing whom the remains belonged to didn’t help Tom one bit. The further they walked along the dank, damp tunnel, the more corpses they came across. At one point they had to step on brittle bones and shift piles of clothing aside with their feet to get by. Rusted chains jangled as they finally parted, spilling cheap imitation jewellery to the floor.

“Do you think we lost them?” Tom asked.

Honey stopped, turned and cocked her head slightly to one side. “Stop breathing,” she said. They exhaled, and Tom could hear only the blood pulsing through his ears, whispering secret words to him, messages from his body saying, run, this is all wrong, you’re not built for this, this love, this fear and danger. But looking at Honey he chose instantly to ignore them, because she was worth everything.

“I love you,” he said.

“I think they’re burning their way along the tunnels,” she said. Then she glanced at him and smiled. “Love you to. What a strange thing to say.”

“I mean it!”

“Not you, me. I never thought I’d ever say it to anyone. Never in my vocabulary.”

“Well — ”

“We’re not built for it.” Honey gave him a quick kiss, wincing as the movement stretched the wound on her neck. “But I guess we’ll adapt.”

They moved on and took the next exit from the tunnel. It was a hole smashed through a thick brick wall into the neighbouring main sewer, its edges rough and festooned with an alarming swathe of spider web. Tom heard the web tearing as his arm brushed by, and he wondered whether it would serve as another fresh sign of flight for the mercenaries.

“We need to change tunnels again soon,” he said. “As soon as we can, three or four times. They must have biometric scanners, they’ll pick up our sweat from the air, our breath, our shed skin. We won’t lose them by running fast. But hopefully we can confuse them enough to give them the slip.”

There was a coughing explosion from somewhere far behind them and the tunnel lit briefly, softly

They jumped down into the sewer. It was disgusting. It stank, it was thick like congealed soup. Tom could even taste the filth in the air.

Another explosion rumbled through the sewers, knocking a drift of dust down from the curved brick ceiling. It was difficult to tell which direction the blast had come from.

“There!” Tom said, spotting a rotten wooden door leading off from a stone ledge.

Honey scrambled up and tried the door but it seemed to be locked from the other side. Tom joined her and together they smashed at it, groaning as the impacts reminded them of their various wounds. The wood gave after several attempts, and they spilled into another tunnel, this one lit intermittently from above through frosted glass paving blocks.

As they hurried along, Tom tried to think of where they could be. There was a pavement like this down by the river, spread along the main promenade road in front of the classier hotels. There was also a roller skating area back in the centre of the city, a gathering place for junkies and buzzed when the lights went down. But there were probably a dozen more streets and roads and courtyards with glass paving… and Tom finally admitted to himself that he was lost.

Honey was leading them now.

For some inexplicable reason, this change of emphasis disturbed him. Perhaps it was a machismo thing, the idea that he had saved her and should continue to do so. But that was just so human…

“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked. “I think we should try to go up top now, get out of the city-“

“We’re going in circles,” Honey said. “We’ll lose them soon, then head for The Slaughterhouse. They’ll have trouble finding us in there.”

“How do you know?”

She glanced back and smiled at him, lit by dirty light filtered down from the city. “You’ve obviously never been there.”

The tunnel dipped and they descended several flights of stairs, listening out all the time for the echoes of pursuit. After a couple of minutes they emerged onto an old, deserted tube platform. It was barely lit by sun pipes sprouting from the arched ceiling like the ends of severed arteries, the light weakened by every reflective elbow it had to travel. During the day it may have been light enough to read, but now, at night, the only illumination that found its way down was the borrowed glare of civilisation: street lamps; neon signs; the city’s night-time glow reflected from the underside of low, pollutant-heavy clouds. It was a grubby light, well suited to what it revealed.

The platform and station must have been deserted for years. Tom had heard about these places, way stations on the old underground network, deserted rather than adapted when the trains were changed to monorail. And like any forgotten place it attracted the more feeble side of humanity, those wanting to find themselves lost. The junkies, the wretched homeless, the criminals… there was talk of whole gangs living down here, communing via old tunnels, rising to the surface to attack and rob and do whatever it was they imagined their purpose called for.

“Into the tunnel,” Honey said.

“There’s no light. Who knows what’s in there!”

Honey hugged him and Tom could smell her, sense his brain’s ecstatic reaction to her unique aroma in the rush of blood in his veins. They stood like lovers waiting for a train that would never arrive.

“You’re so brave,” she said. “Who’d have thought you’d have rescued me like that? Who’d can believe I was worth rescuing, by anyone?”

“Nobody’s ever loved you before, obviously.” Honey shrugged slightly, but said nothing.

Tom thought of Doug Skin, her human customer who had supposedly fallen for her, and for a moment he was overcome by something bitter, new and shocking: jealousy. He hated the idea that they were going through this to say goodbye to someone else. They could have left the city and that would have been that.

“Why is your pimp trying to kill you for running? Girls must run all the time.”

“On occasion they do. And Hot Chocolate Bob hunts them down, or more likely has someone do it for him, and they die. Then he buys more plastic bitches on the black market as instant replacements. Gives him a good turnover of girls, fresh meat. Keeps the customers happy.”

“Jesus,” Tom muttered, hugging her tighter as if that would protect her more. “Why can’t he just let you go.”

“Face,” she said. Or perhaps she said fate.

A thump passed through the station. It may have been a sound coming in from the distance, wending its way through tunnels and vents like a gust of air. Or perhaps they only felt it through the ground. A rat maybe, hidden by shadows, jumping from a wall onto the platform… or a violent grenade explosion five tunnels and a mile away.

“Let’s get out of here,” Tom said. “Into the tunnel like you said. If we hold hands we can never get lost.”

“Romance,” Honey said, arching her eyebrows. Yet again, she confused Tom even more. As they jumped down between the rails and out of the weak light, he wondered whether that was love all over.

They walked for two hours. Through the train tunnel, across another platform, into a long, rising corridor, through a set of iron doors that had been blasted open at some point in the distant past. The atmosphere was dank, damp, dangerous, and they held hands as often as they could. Most of the places they passed through had