White and Other Tales of Ruin (28 page)

“
He was a doctor, once” he said, nodding towards one of the malformed wire carriers snoring at the other side of the cave.

I glanced over and then back at him. The woman dampened the cloth on the cave wall, wrung it out and returned to her cleaning duties. Black Teeth barely seemed to register her ministrations.

“
Clean water?” I said. “Food?”

“
Food!” the madman shouted, and he was greeted by a few angry murmurs. “He wants some of our food!”

“
Can’t you smell it?” a voice called from the shadows.

“
You’re welcome, alien,” someone else said.

“
Barb him!”

“
I’ve just seen some of your people eating,” I said. “You
must
have food.”

Black Teeth shoved the woman away, and she retreated to the rear of the cave. “We’re left food each day, so long as we string up enough fodder. Some days eight is enough. Some days, eighteen. We never know, we’re never told, so we always do as many as we can. When we come back here, there’s food or there isn’t. Mostly there is. We work hard.”

“
You worked hard on my daughter.” I couldn’t contain the rage. This bastard was trying to
explain
himself to me.

“
She was fodder.” He motioned me to follow, turned and walked to the mouth of the cave. He glanced back over his shoulder when he sensed that I had not moved. “We should talk,” he said.

I was shaking with a combination of anger and hopelessness. I could never attack him and win, even if I could find violence within me. It all felt so pointless.

I looked back at Laura. Chele was holding her head in her lap, cleaning blood from her face. If talking to this man would help my daughter … so be it.

I followed him to the narrow cave entrance, feeling eyes on my back like gun sights.

“
Look,” he said. I didn’t realise we were outside until he spoke, but as I looked around … so much had changed.

The storm had not only abated, all evidence of its existence had vanished. The sky was swimming in stars, not a cloud in sight, and from somewhere behind us the moon shed its borrowed light across the landscape. The grasses, shrubs and other undergrowth had vanished, torn up and deposited in piles already rotting and drying out. The trees were ghostly skeletons of wood, denuded of leaves.

“
It’s changed so much.” I said.

Black Teeth sighed and nodded. “We’ve barbed in many settings.”

“
But why do it at all?”

“
If we don’t, we’ll be taken away and fed in elsewhere, used as fodder in another nightmare. What choice is that? What would
you
do?”

“
I’d rather die.”

He laughed, but it was bitter and sad. “Yes, well, maybe … but here, there’s more than dying. Never forget where you are. Alien.” He looked at me, staring, trying to see past or through me. Yet again I couldn’t help notice the intelligence in his eyes and I wondered what he’d been before he found himself here. Somehow I didn’t want to know.

“
The food,” I said. “The water.”

He shook his head. “There
was
food and water left for us today — we had a fruitful day — but it’s been turned bad because we helped you.”

I shook my head. “That’s crazy. What sort of control could they have to actually
make
food turn bad?”

“
They?” he said. “Capital ‘T’? So, who are They? The government? The military? The evil Galactic Empire? The Bliderbergs? God himself?” he looked up to the sky, his eyes moving jerkily as if counting the stars. “You know what I was before? An anthropologist.. I lectured on ancient civilisations, specialising in social and political aspects, how the organisations in an old civilisation can affect us as well, even if there are no direct links whatsoever. Harmful, eh? Dangerous? ‘They’ must have thought so. Because they stole me away and —”

“
My daughter never did anything that could have been a threat to anyone.”

“
No. No. Maybe not. Well, that’s my ‘threat’ theory blown out of the water. Not that I ever really believed it anyway.” He smiled and I knew that he was playing with me now, perhaps enjoying my discomfort and pain and confusion because he’d passed up the chance to barb me.

“
I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe … well, someone controls all this.”

“
Really? What if it
is
God? Where’s the limit to His control?”

“
Don’t be stupid. God is dead, didn’t someone once say? Besides … if I ever did believe, that’s been wiped out since Laura was taken away from me.”

“
Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.”

I raised an eyebrow, partly in surprise, mostly because I hated being condescended to. I wasn’t about to ask him what it meant, but he told me anyway.

“
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. Voltaire.”

“
Great,” I said. “My life is now full. And you? You believe in God? Living here, like this —”

“
What else is there for me to believe in? The goodness of Man? Give me a
fucking
break.” He’d suddenly gone from relatively quiet to loud and angry. I thought he was going to strike out.

“
You have medicines, though? Bandages?”

“
Same provisos as the food and drink. Today … probably not. Let’s face it, you brought the storm and rotted our food. I hardly think there will be plasters and sterile gauze for you.”

“
I hope you die,” I said. It surprised and shocked me, and it was a stupid thing to say. He could kill me here and now. He was mad, after all.

Black Teeth didn’t even register the comment. He looked out over the landscape, perhaps scouting for trees to use for tomorrow’s work.

“
I need to get away from here,” I said quietly, turning to go. “I need to help Laura.”

“
The reason I spared you,” he said, “was because I thought you’d know the way out. You’re an alien, you should never be in here. For me you were … hope. That’s all.” He turned to me, and the sudden change in his expression was startling. In the starlight he looked like a little boy who had lost his ball over a neighbour’s fence, and now he was asking for it back. Innocence hid the blemishes on his skin and the murder and madness in his eyes.

I shook my head and his expression changed again.

“
So what?” I said. “Are you going to barb us now? Now you know I can’t help you?”

“
I should. We should. They look up to me because I’ve been here longer than any of them. They’ll call for it. You should go.”

“
You’re helping me again? Why?”

“
I’ve never got to talk to any of the people we barbed before. Never known them as anything other than fodder.”

“
Not even my daughter?”

He looked at me, his eyes dead and resigned to worse than death, and suddenly I wanted to leave as soon as possible, run, run aimlessly from these terrible, pathetic people.

“
She was asking for you all the time I strung her up,” he said.

I turned and left him instantly, not allowing myself time for thought or reflection. It was the only thing I could do.

“
Through the cave,” he called after me. “A tunnel. Don’t come back out this way, otherwise you’re our fodder again. Go elsewhere. At least then it won’t be me who has to kill you.”

I didn’t acknowledge him. I didn’t want to see the into the eyes of the man that had seen my daughter begging for me, and done nothing to help.

Inside the cave, eyes were upon me. I looked into the face of the woman who’d been washing Black Teeth, and there I saw envy. Someone else, a young boy with an old man’s face, seemed ready to kill me. A woman touched my ankle as I walked by and looked up, and I wondered whether she wanted me to kill her. The copulating couple at the rear of the cave still going at it, noisier now, and their cries and grunts added a surreal background to my walk to Laura and Chele.

I knelt down beside my daughter and touched her face. She was still unconscious.

“
We need to leave,” I said.

Chele shook her head. “She’s unconscious, not asleep. We shouldn’t move her far.”

“
I’ll carry her.”

“
Nolan, she’s not a little girl anymore, and —”

“
Believe me,” I said, looking into Chele’s eyes to add emphasis, “we need leave right now.” I held her gaze for a few seconds and nodded.

She looked around the cave, her eyes glittering fearfully in the weak torch light. “Which way?”

“
Through the cave. Down there to the back, there’s a tunnel.”

“
What makes you so sure?” Chele looked where I had indicated, and I knew what she was thinking. There was very little light back there, and the only people who’d apparently ventured that far were the fucking couple. And what
did
make me so sure? Did Black Teeth really want to help me, I wondered? That ex-academic whose living now comprised of hunting down people like cattle, winding them in barbed wire and crucifying them between trees?

Threat was as prevalent in the cave as the sounds of sex and the smell of rot. Out there, through the cave mouth, I knew that there was very little left.

“
We have no choice,” I said. And I hated that. “Come on, help me lift Laura.”

We picked her up and hoisted her onto my shoulders, so that I was carrying her in a fireman’s lift. There was movement around the cave. The people were fidgeting as they realised we were preparing to leave.

“
It’s pitch black back there,” Chele whispered.

I started across the uneven floor, moving away from the oases of light and towards the humping lovers. I heard Chele behind me, and I wondered whether she’d follow me over a cliff and into a pool of molten rock.

Laura was heavy, but the weight was almost comforting. It bore down to let me know that I was helping my daughter at last. She wasn’t as limp as I’d expected — her arms lay tight down my side, and her legs were all knotted muscle — and I suspected that she was waking up. In a way I wanted her to remain unconscious for a little while longer, at least until we were away from these people.

They were standing now, some of them mumbling, others just watching. I only recognised a few words; food, water, bastards, barbed, stupid. They had no hope, no future, no life, and we were responsible for them not having anything decent to eat or drink tonight.

The rutting couple were louder than ever, and now I could see them, pale like landed fish. Beyond them was the black maw of the tunnel. The poor light threw their rampant shadows behind them, huge and monstrous, as if they were some mythical horror guarding an underground tomb.

I passed by the final group of people gathered under the last blazing torch.

One of the copulating couple began to scream, the other grunted, both voices androgynous.

I lowered an arm from around Laura, walked calmly between two people and lifted the torch from its rudimentary wall mounting.

“
Take this.” I handed it back to Chele, making eye contact with first one, then the other person I passed by, challenging them to confront me. If they did, there was nothing I could do to protect myself. The only defence I had was my bluff and bluster. So I stared, trying not to let my fear show through.

Another scream from the couple. They’d been rutting for at least fifteen minutes, and the climax seemed a long time coming. There was nothing titillating in the sound, only sickening, because it was more a cry of pain than anything else. Maybe it always had been.

Chele led the way towards the tunnel, and as we passed the screwing couple they let out their final, screamed exhortations. And the torch revealed them for what they were.

The woman sat astride the man, blood and sweat running down her back, buttocks spread provocatively as she glared at us over her shoulder. Her body must have been very fine once, but now the curves were slashed and the swells were torn, knobbled with scar tissue. The man writhed beneath her, a high keening issuing from his throat. I had a frank view of where they were joined, his penis still locked inside her. And I saw why they had both been screaming.

The woman held onto a long strand of barbed wire. Its end was twisted several times around the man’s scrotum, and she’d pulled it tight.

“
Want some, alien?” she asked.

Their blood was mingling down there.

I turned away, the acidic tang of bile rising in my throat. Chele had hurried on and I followed the jumping light, glad that Laura was still unconscious. Laughter followed us down into the tunnel, slick as puke, just as sick.
Have fun
, I thought I heard someone say. It could have been Black Teeth bidding us farewell.

I wondered just where he’d directed us. Wherever, it couldn’t be as bad as where we had just escaped from.

And I thought of the riots and the shootings and the disease-stricken valley being napalmed …

“
Why is this happening?” I said, suddenly feeling tears looming once again. Things had been happening so quickly that I’d barely had a chance to think. It seemed like days since I’d escaped the coach, but it was probably no more than an hour or two. Chele kept on walking, offering me no answer. It was a hopeless question.