White and Other Tales of Ruin (24 page)

“
Titanic,” someone answered, their voice even quieter. “I’ve always wanted to see the Titanic going down.”

“
Natural disasters make for good viewing,” the first voice said. “Give me a hurricane or earthquake over a war or riot any day.”

Be patient and you will see
, said the voice in my head, and it must have spoken to everyone because silence fell once more.

There was a sense of movement as we were transferred from one scene to the next, but I could not tell how fast we were travelling. It wasn’t like a ship, or a hover train, or an aircraft, because there were no sounds at all to indicate that we were passing along rails or through air turbulence. The sense came from inside

an occasional dipping of the stomach or a twinge in my inner ear. I wondered how far we were travelling and just how big Hell may be, when the windows brightened once again and I was faced with the answer.

Hell was huge. If it had boundaries they were scores of miles apart, at least. It had sky, and land, and dazzling sunlight. And when it came to pain, suffering and death … it knew
no
boundaries.

Perhaps even now Laura was being lectured in the traditional Hell, the metaphysical place where wrongdoers suffered and punishments were meted out, and where Satan presided over his flung-down domain, plotting vengeance, scheming to re-attain his rightful place amongst the angels. But however thorough her brainwashing at the hands of the cult, they could never show her this. If she were here with me now, then she’d believe. Then she’d know that Hell is of our own making, and we have been manufacturing and perpetuating it on our own planet ever since we crawled from the primeval swamp. The place I travelled through was simply a bringing together, a distillation of all bad things.

I looked from the window and felt sick.

Be glad you aren’t here
, the voice purred, and I began to cry.

The coach was moving slowly, painfully slowly, across a wide open plain. In the distance a row of snow-capped mountains pointed at the sky like a giant bottom jaw. The top jaw was a line of dense strato-cumulus clouds hanging threateningly across the whole horizon, waiting to close at any moment and bite the scene away. The plain itself, for as far as I could see, writhed and flickered and shifted in and out of focus, and at first I thought my tears were distorting trees and bushes and setting them moving. But I wiped at my eyes again, pressed my face to the window with my breath held … and I saw that the movement was people.

The whole plain, every spare spread of ground, was smothered with humanity. Hunkered under trees, sitting on the sides of small hillocks, hiding beneath tarpaulins or coats pinned to upright sticks, staring up into the sky or scrabbling around in the dust for food, adults drinking from deflated water bags and children hanging onto sagging breasts, bodies coughing blood, eyes leaking blood, mouths gushing blood as people fell to their knees and vomited, some rushing to their aid but trying not to get too close, living-dead wrapping corpses in dirty clothes and men digging long burial pits, the wrappers scratching at sores on their arms, the diggers wiping bloody red from their eyes, birds sweeping down to peck morsels from bodies left out too long after death, and sometimes from those so weakened that they could not wave the birds away, could not save their eyes or testicles or dignity in the few moments they had left in this world before passing painfully into the next …

I gasped out loud and heard similar sounds from around the coach. Even the man in front of me, all but silent and dismissive in his invisibility until now, muttered something under his breath that may have been a prayer.

And then the sounds and smells made it in from outside, and I knew that there was always worse.

Moans, cries, the stench of shit, rot, sighs, screams, muttered desperation, food gone-off, vomit, vomiting, fresh exhortations from a new volunteer helper, the disbelieving mumbles from the thousands who had seen it all before. They knew that nothing and no one could help. I saw a gaggle of nuns threading their way through the hundreds of acres of dead and dying humanity, and I almost laughed at their blind devotion and foolish belief that anything could ever be any different. One of them would stop every now and then, bend down, cross herself and a bundle of rags on the floor before moving on. I wondered how many of them would be alive next week, and how many black and white habits were already hugging corpses in the ground.

We passed by a burial pit. As ever, the diggers did not look our way

we were not there, so there was nothing for them to see

and I had an uninterrupted view of the hundreds of bodies piled at one end. The digging could not keep up with the dying, and even as corpses were wound in old cloth or sacking and flung into the pit, the mountain they had been taken from grew.

There had been people vomiting and leaking blood, but this close to so many dead I could see how extreme their affliction was. Something hissed inside the coach and the odour was suddenly beaten back by a sweet perfume, but I still got an idea of how bad this would smell, how awful the stench of rotting family and friends could be. There was so much blood. The bodies had bled out, their fluids leaving through existing holes and new ones alike. Stomachs were split, chests ruptured, noses rotted away, eyes pushed out of their sockets by the explosive pressure of blood seeking release. I’d heard about Ebola Zaire and Marburg, but this looked so much worse, even more violent than those nightmare viruses. A sheet of flies lifted from the corpses as if flicked at one end, swung 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?”