White and Other Tales of Ruin (57 page)

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!”

Tom saw a tall, heavily built man right by the stage, not jumping with the rest of the crowd. He simply stood there and pointed a camera at the band as they pelted their way into another track.

Honey closed her eyes and Doug Skin turned to look at them.

She spoke to him with her mind, Tom thought. He’d heard it was possible … the Baker had mooted it once or twice … but not in an artificial, surely? And not a plastic bitch built specifically and exclusively for sex?

He felt the centre of attention. The song was about him, the drugged-up clubbers were laughing at him, giggling as they fucked, writing tattoo poetry about his stupidity on each other’s backs. Their eyes bore in, his skin was transparent, and he wished the Baker were here.

Doug Skin smiled at Honey and pushed his way through the crowd. He embraced her and kissed her neck. Once more Tom felt the uncomfortable rush of jealousy, but then he saw that she held back slightly, tensing as the big man displayed his obvious affection.

“
That him?” he asked, nodding at Tom.

Honey’s eyes shone, but Tom didn’t know why. It could have been the lasers reflecting from walls, or ceilings lights filtered through the smoky atmosphere. Probably … perhaps … it was the twinkle of her love for him.

“
Yes,” she said. “That’s him.”

Skin eyed Tom up and down. “I expected him to be bigger.”

What the fuck is going on here? Tom thought, and maybe he spoke it aloud.

He had no hope of finding out. Because right then hell broke loose, and there were screams and explosions and gunfire, and the sounds of people dying again.

Two minutes later, Tom would see himself dead.

Upon entering The Slaughterhouse, Tom had an inkling of what Honey meant about the mercenaries never finding them in there. They would, of course, given enough time and opportunity, but it would not be an easy search. The place defied the senses.

What neither of them had banked on was Hot Chocolate Bob’s utter determination to find and kill them.

It was slaughter. As if in mockery of the club’s moniker the mercenaries came in shooting, dishing out death at random. They must have known that their entrance would be noticed immediately, so rather than try to find Tom and Honey amongst surprised and angry clubbers, they introduced chaos and terror instead. It was obviously an atmosphere they were used to working in.

They strafed the whole interior of the club with gunfire. People span and danced and fell, screaming and shouting, tumbling from their platforms and hitting those below, or falling all the way to the litter-strewn floor. The band played on for a few seconds, adding a surreal theme tune to the massacre. Grenades popped from the mercenaries’ armour like black eggs being laid, arching up and exploding in mid-air, shrapnel slashing visible swathes through the smoke. One explosion ripped out a ladder and set of chains, tipping a platform and spilling those cowering on it to the floor far below. They hit like rag dolls, limbs askew.

The band cut out as the power stuttered, flickering the lights and adding a stroboscopic effect to the twitching clubbers, the blood spraying the air, the corpses slipping down from platform to platform, bullets and shrapnel ricocheting through swathes of drug smoke, the three mercenaries advancing into the club like huge spiders, swinging their way from platform to platform, spreading out, leaving dead or dying people in their wake.

Skin had pulled Honey down as soon as the gunfire began, and Tom hunkered down next to them, staring over the rim of the huge platform. They were maybe a hundred feet from the floor, the mercenaries a few levels below them. At the rate the chopped warriors were advancing, they’d be on them in seconds.

One of the mercenaries suddenly slipped to one side, flame flowering from his midriff, arms flailing for a handhold. He tumbled from the platform but found a chain before he fell too far. The flames were already extinguished, but a rain of blood and insides was dripping from his dangling legs.

He brought up three guns and opened fire on a platform across from him. Tracer rounds directed his aim to a metal shield that had sprung up there, and Tom could make out a few people sheltering behind it, frantically fumbling with a some huge barrelled weapon.

The other two mercenaries paused to watch.

The fighter stopped firing for a second. The recoil had set him swinging, and the whine of chains was audible across the club. Reload springs lunged from his belt and fed magazines into the machineguns.

Two men stood from behind the barrier, aimed and fired.

The mercenary disintegrated, flames slewing outward as his ammunition ignited.

A second later the victorious attackers were torn to pieces by a five-second hail of fire from the two surviving intruders. Bullets, flame and grenades scattered their remains over what was left of their platform.

“
We should have just left the city!” Tom shouted at Honey. “This is all for us!” But his anger was misplaced and useless now.

“
Don’t talk!” Skin hissed. “They’ll be scanning for your voice patterns. Your one hope is to trust me and maybe I can get you both out of here. But we have to move, you have to follow me,
now
!” He turned and belly-crawled across the floor, shoving people aside with his big hands.

The gunfire and explosions stopped, but the mercenaries had initiated the panic they desired. Screaming and crying and moaning continued, almost as loud as the sounds of killing. Interspersed amongst them, the clanking impacts of metal-booted feet on ladders, chains and platforms, always coming nearer.

Maybe they’d already been spotted.

Honey was following Skin. Tom watched her go, and then followed her. He had no choice. To stay still was to die, to go after Skin was to submit himself to the man’s mercy. He was helpless, useless … and he realised that he’d been almost totally ineffectual since leaving the Baker’s old laboratory.

Honey had always been the one in charge. The strong one. Their only real hope.

People moved aside to let them pass. The band was cowering on the stage, trying to edge back but tangling themselves in power lines and the expansive drum kit. Skin crawled across the stage, Honey followed, and Tom was about to follow her when he heard a high-pitched shriek from somewhere else in the club.

It was not a human sound. It was a
fighting
sound, an angry shrill from vocal chords designed to communicate nothing but pain and terror.

He half-stood and hurried to the edge of the stage, from where he could see at least a third of the club’s space. From the corner of his eye he spotted a dark shadow swinging and scampering along one huge wall, aiming at a place half-way to the ground. Another shape swung from rope to chain to ladder, heading the same way. They screeched in unison now, and Tom tried to make out their target.

And stared into his own eyes.

He was standing down there on a platform, surrounded by chopped people whose bodies were already punctured and torn, leaking blood around his feet. He was standing down there and looking up. From this distance Tom could not quite make out the expression in his eyes … but he recognised his own quiet smile.

“
Holy shit …” Honey said, appearing at his shoulder.

The two mercenaries landed on the platform either side of the second Tom. Without pause they stretched out their arms, locked their weapons onto him and opened fire.

Tom watched himself come apart. The bullets tore him to shreds, blood and bone splashing into the air, skull splitting and gushing brain out across the platform. The gunfire only lasted for two seconds, but the thing that slumped down at the mercenaries’ feet could never have been visually identified … had Tom not seen its face.

One of the mercenaries snatched a quick sample of blood. Then they used their flame units, and the sad remains bubbled black.

Tom crawled back from the edge of the stage, head down, feeling more cold and alone than he could have believed. Even when Honey came back to him, touched his face and slung one arm across his back, Tom felt abandoned. He’d just seen …

He didn’t know
what
he’d seen.