White and Other Tales of Ruin

“We need to get out of the city,” Tom said, uncomfortable and confused with where this was leading. They had to escape now, together, and then time would be theirs’. “We can get to know each other when we’re away.”

Honey looked at him, her lips pressed tight and a frown hardening her face. She was about to say something. But the band started up again, and a veil of blue smoke wafted down from above, setting Tom’s nostrils alight, his blood pulsing through his veins at twice its normal rate. Honey smiled and held out her hands, pulling him close and hugging him tightly. But there was something else there, a hesitance he hadn’t felt before. Almost as if her thoughts hung between them, a weight requiring crushing before they could touch.

“Honey…”

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s find Skin, then we can move on. Get out of there. Finish all this.”

“Leave the city, you mean.”

“Leave the city,” she said. At least he thought those were her words. But she’d already started turning away, and her eyes had left his.

As they started walking, Tom felt much lighter than before. His perception had widened, his senses apparently refreshed and enlivened by whatever chemicals he’d breathed in with the smoke. He could make out the bands’ individual instruments, the harmonies bouncing off each other, the rasp of the guitarist’s rough skin against the strings, the clicks and sighs of the vocalist’s breathing method between lyrics… even the volume seemed manageable now, rather than painful. He wondered what the drug had been and decided, against all logic, that he liked it.

Honey led him up onto an uneven platform welded together from what looked like panels of a ship’s hull. There were even traces of a name along one side of the suspended floor, and star-shaped rust patches as big as fists which may have been where creatures had once clung. There was a group of people at one end of the platform, some of them dancing, others — mostly men — paying more attention to the woman hanging from chains above them. Meat hooks curved through the flesh of her shoulder blades, buttocks and calves, and the chains that rose into the gloomy heights were rusted, the colour of dried blood.

She was grinning as she swung back and forth, her rhythm matching the fast beat of the music in some terribly soporific way. She was naked. Blood ran copiously onto the heads and shoulders of those below. One of the men reached up and squeezed her pendulous breasts, twisting her nipples and pulling hard, changing her direction of swing. Another shoved him aside and flipped into a handstand, his engorged prick flopping as he walked clumsily towards the woman on his hands, offering himself up to be sucked. His gang screamed and shouted and jeered. The woman nudged out with one hand, hitting him on the knee and sending him tumbling.

Her blood drew graceful arcs on the dark grey platform. Her swinging, twisting and rotating was all in time with the music, like some grisly metronome. She caught Tom’s eye and smiled. He looked away, disgusted and embarrassed, as one of the men started to jump and bash his face between her thighs.

Honey passed by the group without a second glance, and Tom was pleased when they started climbing a ladder to the next platform.

“Chopped folks up here,” Honey shouted down before she disappeared onto the floor above. Tom climbed faster, wondering what to expect. He’d seen people walking to and from these clubs, noticed the freakish adjustments many of the humans made to their bodies. He didn’t think he could still be completely shocked. He thought he’d seen it all.

The couple had given themselves over, completely and utterly, to sex.

The man’s prick had been hugely extended, thickened and distorted so that he could screw the woman at a distance, at any angle, and still dip his head to lick her arse or the other openings weeping and swelling across her body.

There were several other men scattered across the smaller platform, all naked and obviously recently sated. A couple of them glanced nervously at the rutting couple, and Tom guessed that they’d been at the woman until this grotesquely chopped man had appeared, someone with the same commitment to sex as this she had. Normal men she could entertain by the half-dozen, but none of them wanted to pit their sexual prowess against this freak.

Tom and Honey walked by as the man withdrew and entered another hole, this one in the woman’s side. She groaned and writhed, her extra sets of arms and hands doing their best to keep her other holes occupied, fingers obviously augmented such was their speed of manipulation.

“You like these places?” Tom asked, amazed. Honey ignored him, but one of the naked men glanced up and smiled sheepishly.

The band cranked into another number. Its opening chords swelled out to the edges of the club, echoing back several seconds later, the echoes themselves forming an integral part of the music. This one must have been a favourite, because a roar went up that hurt Tom’s ears and set the platform they were on swaying. The inhuman couple never stopped fucking.

“Skin’s up there!” Honey shouted, putting one arm around Tom’s shoulders and pointing up into the club’s shadowy heights. There were at least a dozen levels to climb, and the far walls were obscured by a haze of smoke. Chains draped down, ladders snaked up, bridges strung across spaces, people swung on ropes… and Tom knew that they would be here for a long time. There was no quick way up that high, other than a long, exhausting climb. He really didn’t believe that he could shin up a chain the way he felt now; his ankle was numb with pain, and he was beginning to think he’d lost more blood than was safe. The wounds had been sealed by his body’s defence — he could feel the new skin setting already — but the bones in his ankle may have been crushed. Their knitting would take days, and rest was the best thing for it.

Honey was still bleeding from her neck. Tom wondered whether she’d allowed it to continue because of her visit to The Slaughterhouse, a weird pain perversion she revelled in herself when she came here. She winced whenever she turned her head.

They climbed. The band assaulted the club with its music, strafing the platforms with power-chords that would have knocked a flock of birds from the sky. Sheets of smoke rose and fell, drug-laden exhalations that set Tom’s blood bubbling, steamed bubbles of viscous fluid from his pores, hauled up random memories to dart at him like forgotten ghosts. Some memories were good and these he smiled at, but some weren’t so good. The drug, whatever it was, did not allow him to pick and choose. Between a warm memory of the Baker philosophising, and the cold empty loneliness after he’d died, Tom had time to wonder at the sort of people who willingly submitted themselves to this. He thought he saw the platform where this drug haze originated. The people there were crying, laughing, smiling, weeping, shouting and raging at the visions the drugs were uncovering. Perhaps sometimes they found unwanted truths. Tom was afraid.

They passed many chopped people, some of them changed even more drastically than the rutting couple they’d just seen. One woman resembled an octopus, a head and body with at least eight legs splayed star-like around her. Five men and women licked or fucked or suckled between her thighs.

Sex was the thing. To be chopped was to increase sexual performance and expand proclivities.

They took the easier routes up into the club, travelling between several platforms on a moving, rising walkway. Each level presented new surprises, greater mutilations, none of which seemed to surprise or bother Honey. Climbing eventually onto the highest platform, Tom could see the band. Four men and a woman singing, their instruments and an amplification system looking as if it came from thirty years before. They were surrounded by a jumping, stamping, waving throng, some of them gyrating so close to the edge that Tom was amazed they weren’t sent tumbling… and then one of them did fall.

She spread out her veined, leathered wings, glided through a haze of drug smoke and landed clumsily on a platform near to the club’s floor.

“She flew,” Tom said mildly. She had flown! He’d never know, never believed that such a chop was possible. And officially, he was certain, it wasn’t. It was the sort of thing the Baker had only ever dreamed of.

Tom began to wonder exactly what this place was, and why Honey had brought him here.

“He’s there!” Honey shouted, grabbing Tom’s arm and pointing at the band. “That’s Doug, that’s Doug Skin!”

“The drummer?”

Honey was smiling, a wide open smile that contained sheer delight. “No, silly. The guy standing in front taking the band’s holo!”