The Human Zoo (Book 4): The Ruin Nation

by Wood, Kolin

“You still married?” Charlie said, although this time his voice had lost the teasing edge.

  In the dark, Juliana was sure that she saw the black mirrors flick over in her direction. Behind her, there was a rub of material as Tanner slowly shook his head. He said nothing.

  “Nah, me either. Although it had nothing to do with the disease. The bitch ran off with the postman, the fucking postman, man! I mean, can you be any more cliché? Try and be original at least!”

  Tanner laughed again, only this time more reservedly as the heavy moment passed. After a pause, he asked, “So, what’s the story here? Seems like people are starting to get their shit together.”

  From the darkness, Charlie sighed. Juliana heard a hand slap down on his thigh. “Shit together… hmmm, well, I guess that depends on what you mean by shit. Sure, they’ve got the market and the bars, plenty to trade and eat. There’s even power in some parts, you know that? Lights and music. But, let me tell you something, and I’m not even playing you on this point, man. There’s evil happening in this place. I mean it; straight outta the dark ages, medieval shit.”

  Juliana reached behind to take the bottle from Tanner. “We just came up from the south… from the Capital,” she said. “Can’t be any worse than down there.” She pulled again before passing it over.

  Charlie took it. “The New Capital, eh? Yeah, I heard about that place. They got that crazy, old bastard Lord running it, huh? Farringdon, is it?”

  Juliana watched him drink. “He’s dead,” she said, offering nothing more and hoping that Tanner would refrain from saying anything more too.

  Liquid spilled down Charlie’s chin and he wiped it with his sleeve. “Dead, eh? That why you came up here?”

  Neither Tanner, nor Juliana replied.

  “Well let me tell you something straight, if you are here looking for Disneyland, this ain’t it.”

  The phrasing he used caused her to smile briefly. Disneyland. Even saying the words now seemed totally ridiculous.

  “Yeah, I heard that a man can go down there and claim his fortune…” Charlie continued. “Friday night fights where the winner is set for life. I even heard they got their own currency. To be honest, I’ve been thinking of making the journey down there myself. Nothing to keep me here.”

  For a few moments, there was silence while, in the darkness, Tanner and Juliana frowned at each other. It was almost the exact same way that Tanner had described the Refuge to her when selling her on the idea of coming up here. Although she had never truly believed that things would be much better, she now felt foolish to have entertained the notion at all.

  When Tanner spoke, there was no hint of humour in his voice. “The only thing you’ll find down there, Charlie, is death. I can assure you of that.” Changing subject, he added. “What medieval shit?”

  This time Charlie laughed. “Oh, it’s just some religious nutcase, playing out some old testament-style shit. Only this cat ain’t even about God!”

  Juliana listened intently. How can somebody be a religious nutcase if they don’t even believe in God?

  “Tidus Church?” Tanner asked, and Juliana looked back at him in surprise.

  Charlie nodded eagerly. “That’s him,” he said. “Feeds them all. You know; the ones who’ve totally lost their minds. Got a friggin' army of those filthy motherfuckers holed up in some half-finished tower block over on Grafton Street. He’s on some moral crusade to clean up humanity or some shit. The hell if I know. They all shave their heads for him like he is the second coming of Christ. It’s spooky.”

  Juliana struggled to process what she was being told. How did Tanner know so much?

  “What does he want with the Refuge, this Tidus?” Tanner asked, curiously.

  “Bodies, I heard,” Charlie replied. “There’s a rumour that he feeds ‘em to the vagrants, thinks it’s helping them to evolve. Thinks of himself as some kind of a peace-keeping force around here, but most of the time, from what I’ve seen, people take their troubles to him. Lots of ‘em believe that he’s some kind of soothsayer… think that he can see the future…” He trailed off from the sentence, and for a few moments there was silence.

  Soothsayer? At that point, Juliana was questioning the sanity of Tanner’s friend. She very much doubted whether Tanner would be buying into any of it either. When she turned to look at him, he was staring straight back at her, a questioning look in his eyes.

  “What about the North?” Tanner asked, maintaining his stare with her.

  Unseen, Charlie shrugged. “Few settlements, I guess. There’s one big farm northeast of here, got it all squared away. Got a friggin’ armoury, so I hear; big steel fences running the entire property. Whole place runs on solar… got a field of ‘em, they have. But they don’t like newcomers. Keeping it all to themselves—and who can blame ‘em, eh?” He extended his arm for the bottle and it was duly passed over. When he spoke again, his voice was barely more than a whisper. “Heard talk from a few of the boys that they were planning on a little visit up there… Go and see what’s what, maybe work out a way to get inside to take the place… Might be an opportunity to be had.”

  From the quiet yet playful tone of his voice, Juliana could tell that Charlie liked the idea of having his ex-army buddy along for such a skirmish, and she was quick to interrupt. “What about beyond that? Any safe lands to the far north?”

  “Who knows?” Charlie said, almost as if he was dismissing the question. “It’s all the same out there, sweetheart. North, south, east, west… You must’ve seen it on the way up here; clusters of people living together on the edge. People are scared to live in the open. The small holdings are overrun. People killed for nothing. Women, children even, at the whims of the twisted, feral fucks that have laid claim to the tree line. Hell, if it’s the arsehole of existence that you are looking for then, by all means, go look.”

  Juliana thought back on their journey up from The Capital. The road had been long and hard, but they had stuck to the main route, only occasionally veering off. Several times, they had been set upon—usually by an unwitting and badly armed gang, but the altercations had been swift and the dealings severe. Doyle, in particular, had wasted no time putting down any that came too close. Most, however, upon realising that the group were armed with guns, had simply run off. Nothing had seemed too dire.

  “I think that we are gonna stick around for a bit.” This time it was Tanner who spoke. “Nutcase or not—people look to be doing okay.”

  Charlie shrugged as he raised the bottle. “Hey, I’m not going anywhere now either; at least for a while. One place is the next, is the next for me anyway.” He drank heartily, belching with gusto. “It’s good to see you, my friend.”

  The white moon of his face showed in the dark as he turned to face Juliana. She saw him wink and she sighed. She was not sure that she welcomed this new addition to their already fucked up entourage. And it was then that she wondered, Where in the hell is Doyle?

  Chapter 8

  Doyle awoke with his head pounding. He opened bleary eyes and blinked them a few times, realising quickly that it was too dark to see much. A raging thirst accompanied the malignant furriness of his tongue, hindering his desire to swallow. With his mind spinning, he rolled over onto his side. The hard and cold, stone floor bit into his elbows as he pushed himself up onto them. A contraction to his stomach brought a hot flush of acidic bile which spilled down his chin and splattered against the ground beneath his face.

  The pungent, fowl stench of vomit sneaked into his nostrils, and he fought to his knees in an attempt to escape the caustic fumes. Looking around, the stark, concrete surroundings of his room held no place in his memories and, for a few groggy moments, he believed that he was back in the prison. Fear gripped him tightly. Any minute now the General or one of his awful lads would come barging in, a squealing girl in tow.

  But his eye sight improved and, with it, his fragmented memories returned.

  This was not the prison.

  This was just a rand
om room somewhere in the depths of the Refuge, and he was simply hung-over to the point of death.

  Right where he should be.

  Because nothing mattered anymore.

  In response to the thought, his stomach heaved again. Doyle’s slow retreat inside of himself had come as no shock to him. From the outset, he knew that it was happening, but had made no attempt to stop the creeping apathy which now infected every aspect of his being. He simply didn’t care; not about himself or anybody else. Why should he? What would be the point? The world was a fucked up mess and he wanted no part of it. He thought that he had cared, once, but watching Juliana with Tanner had affected him more than he dared to admit. When she was with him; she treated Doyle with disdain, barely offering a smile, and who could blame her? Doyle had been partly responsible for her imprisonment and subsequent abuse at the hands of those animals. In fact, he was lucky that she hadn’t killed him; stuck a knife in his back while he slept perhaps, or left him in the Capital to rot, chained to the wall, covered in a slowly-drying, second skin of blood.

  Almost every part of him wished that she had done it. At least it would have all been over by now.

  Something brushed his arm in the darkness, and Doyle snatched it away, turning in shock.

  A ghostly face looked down at him. The apparition bore no hair on his head and his eyes were like dark pits.

  “Who… who are you?” Doyle asked, suddenly worried by the notion that perhaps he was dead.

  For a few moments, the apparition simply stared at him. When it spoke, the voice was soft and measured. “I am Tobias,” it said. “Come, brother, come meet your family.”

  Strangely, Doyle felt no fear. With help from above, he stood, groggily, scuffing a hand through the pile of vomit on the floor which he wiped on his filth-covered trouser leg. For a few seconds, the room span and Doyle fought against the urge to vomit again. A strong arm hooked him around the waist and began to gently persuade him to walk. Doyle allowed it to happen. He was in no mood to fight. Whatever the ghost wanted, Doyle was not about to try and stop it; he didn’t care enough to.

  The earthy aroma of wet concrete refreshed the air as they walked down a long, dark corridor with no lights. Rough, gritty flooring crunched noisily under the steady fall of their feet. On either side of them as they passed, rooms with no doors stood like open mouths, full of darkness and menace.

  The ghost steered him around a corner and suddenly there was light. A jaundiced yellow smear led a path to an opening at the far end of another corridor. A low murmuring sound, like dozens of voices talking softly, emanated out from within.

  Doyle stopped, turning to face the ghost.

  “Do not worry, brother,” it said in the same, controlled tone as before. “Your troubles are over now. Come. Come and embrace your new life. We are all kin here. Nobody will judge you.”

  More gentle pressure on his back forced Doyle to take a few ambling steps forward until he was stood just inside the angular aperture.

  The room was huge. Grey concrete walls, peppered with windows containing no glass, rose up to meet the stark ceiling above. Thick, steel girders ran in neat, parallel lines, parts of a building construction usually unseen to the general public. In fact, the entire room stood stripped back to its most basic foundations; an incomplete space of unknown intent. That same, not-unpleasant smell of damp sand and rain-soaked concrete still clung to the building but as Doyle stood there breathing in he noticed something else: the rich, sweet smell of cooking meat. Hunger squeezed his stomach like a tightening fist and caused his mouth to flood.

  Food.

  He couldn’t remember the last thing that he had eaten; something hasty, out on the road more than likely, some days ago.

  “Come, come sit.” The ghost tugged his arm and Doyle stumbled forward.

  Faces looked up as he walked through the seated crowd, each one of them a mirror of the ghost he followed. Sombre expressions and pitted eyes inhabited the shaved heads of those bowed in greeting as he passed. The whole scene felt so surreal that he couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t dreaming.

  After what felt like a sea of people, the ghost finally stopped, turned to him, and smiled. Now in the light, Doyle was able to appraise his guide properly. Yellow slits in the dark wells of his eyes matched his teeth. Lumps of partly digested meat filled the gaps between them.

  “A new soul in need of the guidance,” the ghost said, stepping aside to allow room for another man to come in close.

  The person stood tall, even taller than Doyle but slimmer, with angular shoulders covered in a light, flowing robe. “Do you seek the truth, brother?” the new man said, smiling.

  Doyle looked up into his face, into his deep brown, trusting eyes, and at that moment, he felt the overwhelming urge to fall down and cry. He found himself nodding as he lowered himself onto his knees and rivers of hot tears fell down his cheeks. He shivered, as a cold, hard hand cupped the back of his skull.

  “We all have sins, brother. We each carry our own demons. But now is the time to cut yourself free of that torment. Join us. Join your brothers. You will feel no scorn here; I promise you that.”

  Doyle continued to weep. He reached forward and took the man’s musty robe in his hands and buried his face within its tresses.

  “Help me…” Doyle said without looking up, his voice quiet and pitiful.

  The hand patted his head gently. “Sit, brother.”

  Doyle did as instructed. He sat, his streaming eyes fixed to the floor.

  “My brothers,” the tall man said in a loud, booming voice which carried around the sparse room easily. From the corners of his vision, Doyle noticed a carpet of faces turn in his direction, but he did not look up as he struggled to control his breathing.

  “Everything in this universe exists as one! From the grains of dust that speckle the surface of the earth to the smallest drops of moisture that hang beneath the great clouds in the sky, everything is connected. We are all connected; to the planet and to each other. The fish that swim and the animals that tread, the birds that fly and the reptiles that slither, all things exist as they should be!” The last few words were inflected with a deeper menace than the rest, and Doyle looked up through his bleary, tear-filled eyes, noting the seriousness of the expression upon the face of the tall man.

  “A curse has befallen me, brothers; for the visions that I have seen have darkened my soul and forced me to view the world plainly, through black lenses, without extravagance or embellishment. And it is through these tempered eyeglasses that I have learned the truth… so that we can learn the truth. A new world has arrived, brothers. Together, we must stamp out the deceit of the past and crush the false diatribes of the so-called ‘believers’; the very same people that have held mankind in the grip of guilt-ridden slavery for centuries. For I ask you this: what arrogance must we have to assume anything but what we see before us as absolute truth?”

  A gentle murmur emanated from the crowd around him and Doyle found himself joining in.

  “Who are we to snatch mere strands from the very limitations of our understandings and make them so, to lay them down as fact and impose them upon the people, to create laws around them?”

  Suddenly, the fire in the voice of the tall man was gone and the calm demeanour from before returned. When he spoke next, his voice was quiet. “WE are nobody,” he said.

  He bowed his head and it was then that the room suddenly spoke as one, repeating the words like a mantra: “All that I see, there is. All that I feel, I know.”

  He waved an arm in the air and Doyle watched as some more of the apparitions appeared, each one carrying a metal tray full of steaming food which they set down on some slabs in a space on the floor. The smell was delicious and unbearable and Doyle looked around to see that everybody was staring at the feast laid upon the stone.

  “The idolater, Jesus Christ, was supposed to have said ‘Take it and eat it, for this is my body’. Man has symbolised this fable with the consummation of brea
d and the drinking of wine. Well, now, my brothers, we will reclaim the stories that we tell our children.”

  As one, the room around him began to cheer until the noise was almost too boisterous to tolerate, but he didn’t care. The meat, when it came, was succulent, salty, and fresh, and Doyle ate heartily, wiping the bloody juices away with fervour as they spilled down his chin, staining the front of his filthy, green t-shirt a deep, crimson red.

  Chapter 9

  John collapsed against the broken wall. The sun-warmed brick burned the skin on his bare back. Becca slumped on the grass beside him, her face to the sun, one arm draped over her eyes to stop the glare. John found himself gazing at her again. He had been doing that a lot recently. The total sum of their physicality together amounted to a half hour holding hands in the forest, and yet something about her made him feel anxious and on edge; something and everything. Due to the excessive heat, she had stripped down to the bare necessities—a filthy bra and frayed jean shorts—and now, as he gazed at the naked, sun-kissed flesh of her stomach and the gentle swell of her small breasts, that feeling intensified, clouding every other thought in his head and rendering them redundant. He wanted to kiss her. More than anything. He wanted to take her in his arms and tell her how he felt, but he was unsure.

  The building behind them belonged to a row of modest houses in a small suburb on the edge of the city. The route through the woods had been a long and arduous one; more on account that they had gotten lost than the distance that they had had to travel. The cost was that the supposed ‘one day journey’ had taken two. Luckily for them both, in the midst of their squabbling over which direction they should have been walking in, the pair had stumbled upon a small house in the forest. With darkness fast encroaching and the threat of crazies and rats all around them, they had taken refuge there, huddling together on the bare floorboards in an upstairs bedroom, unwilling to light a fire or even talk for fear of alerting the monsters to their presence. The night had been a long one, and it was no secret that both John and Becca had been mildly surprised when they awoke to find themselves still alive and breathing the following morning.