Moral Zero

by Set Sytes

  Lights flickered around him. The only telling between day and night down there was whether the lights were yellow or blue. Many places, especially those at the lower levels, were perpetually dark. The underclass etched out their lives in shroud. Controlled, harassed and abused by the Elite for as long as anyone could remember, they did their jobs as would a race of subhumans. They did not protest. If they fought back it was a rare, spur of the moment instinct, and others did not come to their aid. They were regularly extracted to be bred, to be raped, to be experimented on, to be tortured and killed, all at the discretion of those richer than them. They were just numbers on paper, soulless to the families and their subordinates who gave out the directives, or who enabled those looking for entertainment and stress-relief to exercise their power. They ran the economy of the City, made the food and fixed the machines and repaired the defence systems and served their masters, and yet they were nothing and knew themselves as nothing more.

  Some, born in birthing centres under the City as mere output of breeding programs, lived their whole lives under the earth. These were the industrial Hivers, those who worked in the factories and plants. Others might work above ground, perhaps fixing and serving the needs of others. They all lived in the Hive. Assistants of any real value were not taken from the underclass, and were far better off for it, living lives in the shadows of their superiors but in relative luxury, luxury in this case being anything above ground. They made money, not much perhaps, but money nonetheless. The underclass did not have wages. The Elite said that they did not need wages. And if they were given money, they did not know what to do with it. They did not understand its use to them. They had no education. No desire beyond the most basic. No comprehension of anything other than basic needs and obedience to the needs of others.

  Countless people lived in the depths, never seeing the sun. Their lives were those of the eternally artificial, hollow eyes lit from the glare of artificial lights, eating artificial food so processed and low-grade as to be mere gunge, deliberately designed for the consumption of the underclass as it did not cost them. It was pumped out in thick tubular brown or green pastes and they collected it in bowls or cups or buckets.

  Lifetime after lifetime of living down here, the weight of the world on their hunched shoulders, born and bred without natural light or real food, with smoke in their lungs and diseases in their gut. The breeding programs did not take much account for inbreeding – maximum output was the prime directive. Only those with birth defects debilitating enough to hamper their later productivity would be aborted. Those who developed defects later on were left to struggle out the rest of their existence until they died. They were often the sport of the Elite, who were known to take cruel pleasure in tormenting them.

  The life expectancy of the underclass was a very short one. The deeper down you went, the more mutations you saw. The more subhuman they looked, the more subhuman they were treated.

  Red stopped by a railing outside a huge grey structure where a man was sitting on the ground. He looked part alien, with a hunchback and a gnarled face half hidden in beard. His age was indeterminable. His clothes were the same dark blue work uniform of most of the factory workers, a badge on the uniform naming him as a tobacco processing operative.

  Hey man. Red moved up to him and the man turned and stared at him. You got any smokes?

  No, sir.

  Red flinched. Don’t call me sir. I’m no sir.

  I’m sorry, sir.

  Red sighed. Forget it. He trudged off, along the factory streets and past where the great hammers pounded their industry so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think. He walked through clouds of smoke and steam and at times his form was only half-seen, or lost entirely. He walked past the chemical plants where they manufactured all the artificial foodstuffs that everybody ate in the City, in all the cities. Pizzas half as good as real pizza. Bread half as good as real bread. All the best quality going to the Elite, of course.

  Red made his way to an elevator shaft and rode it up through the underground, and then took a short walkway to another and rode it to just below the surface, away from the Hive. He took a shuttle train with other dead-eyed passengers of the night, all clanking bars and rattling lights. He arrived at the minus second floor of the building where he lived and scanned himself in, nodding to the security guards as they stared at him through narrowed eyes, as though he had no right to be there. And he still had further up to go. He had more money than them, much as they might hate to know it. Especially if they knew he’d never even worked for any of it.

  He took the elevator up to the seventh floor and moved down the richly carpeted corridors and soft lighting to his apartment. He could have afforded to live higher up but he couldn’t stand it. He didn’t want to be a part of them.

  He unlocked the door and opened it and moved to the bedroom where his girlfriend lay in bed. She turned on the small light by the bedside and it lit her lovely face in glow.

  Where were you?

  Red took off his boots. I was out.

  It’s late.

  I know. It ain’t that late.

  Have you been drinking?

  A bit.

  I thought you’d given up drinking yesterday.

  I had given it up yesterday. This is today.

  He took off the rest of his clothes and got into bed.

  Do your teeth.

  He got out of bed and went to the en-suite while he brushed his teeth. He could see her in the bathroom mirror. She was sitting up a bit and continuing to talk.

  I don’t see why you have to drink so much.

  I don’t. He spat and washed his mouth out and looked at his reflection, tired and worn.

  Most people drink to escape from reality.

  What’s to escape from.

  The next day they ordered a takeaway and watched an old movie and said nothing because there was nothing to say. When it was over Red tried to talk but he didn’t know what to talk about, and so eventually he put on another movie and they sat and watched that.

  Two hours later when the credits rolled Red leaned towards her and began to kiss her. He left soft, grazing kisses on her cheeks and then her lips, and slowly increased their strength and so level of emotion he could transmit from him to her through his mouth, receiving the same and more in return, but different. Her kisses were lost in the moment, while his were pointing towards the future.

  He moved his hands over her, graceless and without fluidity but trying. A body and mind unsuited to such gentleness. His movements were overly light coupled with small involuntary surges of strength, as though he were some beast worried he could break her if he did not conduct himself with the utmost caution. He stroked the nape of her neck and he tapped his fingers down to her waist and her thigh. She sighed and nuzzled into him and he broke a little inside.

  He gave all his attention to the performance, the pantomime. He seduced her slowly, with infinite care. He seduced her like he did every day, or every other day, or every several days. He kissed her for fifteen minutes and added new acts, old acts to the performance as she fell open to him. He gave himself to her in body but not in mind, not all of it. She was a twisting delicacy to his touch, a quietly writhing rose, and she breathed and moaned softly as he did what he understood to be right. She lay there, moving slightly and obediently to his prompts, pleasured just enough.

  He nibbled her ear. Her body was warm and he fed on this warmth like it was a conduit to something greater, some burning pit, a roadway to Hell. His mind fell down it and he made rituals with the foulest of succubi. Sluts and whores and demons. The depraved and the eternally wrong. Girls needing comfort and fucking, girls needing abuse and fucking. Girls needing humiliating and fucking. Girls wanting to abuse and humiliate and fuck. Girls needing everything. The dirt of life. The extremity of existence. To feel empowered through sickness and intimate brutality. An overpowering of sex, surfeiting. An injection of life to make them foam at the mouth. To give themselves over to him an
d he to them. Unions where all humanity and goodness melts away. Where love’s only existence serves the taboo.

  Sluts and whores and demons.

  I love you. The whisper crawled into his ear.

  She was not a slut, she was his girlfriend, and he was making love to her. He softened and had to concentrate harder, see the body parts, see the curves and feel the warmth and – no, he must retreat, back into his mind, see things in front of his eyes but in new ways, as though he was living in two dimensions at once and connecting them together, overlaying them on top of one another so things could be other than what they were.

  I love you too. He spoke quickly, rushed. He empowered the words with the strength of the fantasy, forcing the love to serve the taboo. An incestuous intimacy of glorious nausea, the pantomime of the bedroom. Playing over and over in his head and his head only.

  Eventually she orgasmed and a bit later he did too, although to what or who not even he knew.

  Was that okay? he asked, moving away from her post-coital clutches and off the bed, to stand up and wipe his penis and brow with tissue.

  You always ask that.

  Yeah. I know.

  WASTELAND

  Johnny felt something was wrong before he was even within three miles of his home. Even before he saw the tire tracks. And the three sets of footprints, hard and heavy where the tire tracks had swerved and turned back in the aftermath. Before he smelled death, heard the buzzing of flies, already thick and eager in this heat.

  They swarmed over a lump that hung from the porch, dangling in front of the doorway as though some offering or tribal wind-chime. As he stepped closer, suddenly feeling icy inside, the thing before him appeared for an instant almost like a bees nest, even though the flies were not bees and no bees had been seen ever in his lifetime. The noise was like static in his head and yet as he stepped further still this seemed to fade out, as though the flies had some sense of propriety and drew back to let him in and it was as though a great hush fell across the land even though this was not so.

  He felt his heart slow and the only sound was its beat throbbing cold blood inside him. He stumbled and fell to his knees in front of that which hung before him as some grisly spectre welcoming him home or shepherding him away.

  He touched the hair of the cat with his fingers and touched the stiff body but it did not feel real. His head was bowed and he did not look up, but on his knees sprung patches darker than the material around them and they were not blood.

  He took his hat off and held it in his hands and to any onlooker his face was something deformed, full of parts that were trying to tear themselves away from the world.

  The door of his home was lying flat and the frame too was broken in even though the door could just have been pushed. On the rock wall nearby was an impression of a woman that had been drawn over and written over in ways both obscene and cruel. He did not see this for he was not seeing anything and nor did he need to.

  Johnny pursued the tire tracks for two days without food or sleep, barely resting, and when doing so falling to his knees out of exhaustion and then just sitting and staring at nothing. He drank the water left on him from his last journey back from the Store, and when this ran out he drank from a well he passed and then he did not drink. He was dehydrated and blistering in the sun and his muscles and bones cried out and yet none of this registered to him. His mind blank, buzzing, blank. Flies and emptiness, and when unemptied searing white and red and black.

  After two days at the height of the sun he found them in a gully changing tires. He came up on them quietly, his head swimming and his mind finally shaping something, forming a command to action, and he knew each new direction would follow the last and only then would it be known to him and not before.

  He raised the rifle he had taken from under the floorboards of his ransacked and ruined home. The one not used. Not taken with him on journeys. The one with a mere handful of bullets. With the wood charred as if it had at one time been in a fire. Old and worn, a relic of something past and now a promise of something new.

  He fired and the man furthest from him fell to the ground as the bullet took his leg. The shot echoed and deafened even in its echo as though God himself had clapped the heavens closed. The other man spun his head about almost comically, brandishing a machete whipped from his belt, and yet in the glare of the sun he could not see Johnny Black. He jumped into the buggy even though the tire was still off and he revved hard but it stalled and then the man’s hand was shot through. The man stared at the hole in his hand as though it some miracle that one such as him could turn holy and then he screamed. Johnny Black bounded down upon them like some mountain lion leaping to its prey and he smashed the man in the buggy in the face with the butt of his rifle and the man’s head jaggled bonelessly like a bobbing toy and the nose burst into scarlet blossom.

  He moved around the other side of the vehicle to the man trying to squirm away like some worm given legs. His small path of movement was soaked with blood and Johnny saw that the man was crying, actually crying, and despite everything he had done in his life seemingly the only pain real and cruel was that done to him.

  Listen, listen, said the man on the ground, and yet what there was to listen was not revealed.

  You pestilent fuck. Johnny suddenly felt the strangest dislike at his own voice, for no words said could put forward the dizziness in his mind, the walls of blood and bits of brain and the cacophony of screams to come.

  The man tried to writhe away again, moving backwards and sideways with his arms which were thin and weak. He had no weapon on him. Listen, he said again, uselessly.

  You think I care? thundered Johnny, his voice so hoarse and acidic you’d have thought it was not a man but some demon. His voice tumbled out without thought, choking out of him like falling scree, rocks sliding on blood and hate.

  You think I’m satisfied with life? You think I don’t want to wreak my vengeance too, take the road of chaos and amorality? You think I’m okay with any of this? This inanity, this idiocy, this jumped up joke of a world? With people, people like you, worse people and better people, people of nothing and no consequence just like me? We’re a race of insects! Clambering over each other for the next meal. What more is there? What good are you? What fucking good are any of us? Why should you stay? You’re a piece of dirt to be ground under. You will die, and it is right that it is by me. If I can be anything in this world it is enough that I am the predator of men. Men like you. Sacks of meat! Blood and bone.

  His voice was a terrifying roar as he raised a shaking finger at the man. I am your end! Snivelling wretch! I am the Alpha and I am the Omega, and I am the end of everything!

  Johnny raised his rifle and pointed it at the man, who hid his face in his hands as if this would be protection enough. Time to die, brother, Johnny growled, and yet seconds passed and the bullet did not come.

  The man moved the hands from his face to see Johnny with the rifle lowered. He sobbed and near-laughed, and then went quiet as he saw the grin on Johnny’s face.

  It’s a little too soon to die, don’t you think? Johnny took a cigarette from a pack in his pocket and lit it with a match and smiled around the cigarette. He raised the rifle again except this time he aimed it at the man’s other leg and he shot it and the man screamed again and then he shot the man’s left arm and then his right.

  Just to stop you getting away from me, you understand, said Johnny, and he looked down at the pitiful mewling figure and smoked calmly. Then he walked to the buggy loaded with his few possessions and took the unconscious man in it minus machete and dragged him out by the cuff of his shirt and dragged him all the way to lie on the ground near his friend. He took out the knife at his belt and quickly cut the man’s Achilles heels and then as the man jerked awake cut the tendons around his left shoulder and then as the man shrieked and struggled held a boot down on his chest and cut into his right shoulder.

  He stepped back as the man flailed like a fish on the rocks. He was
likely still concussed for the pain did not seem to take him as much as it did the other, or perhaps he was made of stronger stuff. Perhaps he had experienced brutality at the hand of others before. But he would not have experienced this nor anything that was to come.

  Go to Hell, spat the bandit, as Johnny approached again.

  I’m already there, growled Johnny with a curled lip. And now so are you.

  Black tortured them each a bit at a time, switching back from one to the other as if trying to keep their agonies level and balanced, working with no emotion except care and attention as though spinning plates and not spinning the slow death of man. Their cries and ragged screams ripped the land around them and yet there were none to hear and if there was there were none who would save them.

  The men on the ground grew feebler with each act visited upon them, and soon the struggles were non-existent even while the life within them still pumped blood through their veins and out onto the rocks. Johnny’s hands were soon slippery and dripping and if he stopped to wipe them it was on the bandits’ own shirts. Soon the shirts were too sodden for this and he smeared his hands on stone, wearing his skin almost to the point of bleeding himself.

  Soon he could see the life draining from their eyes. Their limp bodies and their flapping jaws gave them the appearance of playthings or of things dragged up from the ocean on hooks. He stood up and stretched, lifting his hat to wipe his brow with his shirtsleeve and then lowering his hat once more.

  I guess our time together has reached its end, he said, and he sighed, feeling tired through and through but knowing it was not yet over. He took a long drink from one of the water containers in the buggy and returned to the men. Their eyes could not focus on him and barely moved. And yet there was still a flicker.

  Now let us see what people like you are made of. He kneeled down by the man with his arms and legs shot and slit open his belly. He laid the knife down by his side and with his bare hands and great effort wrenched the man open until he could see the man’s jellied insides, his digestive tracts. He gagged a little but controlled himself. He reached inside and, curling and gripping with his fingers, started pulling guts out like spaghetti.