Terrible Cherubs: Tales of Sinners, Mistakes, and Regrets

by Steve Wetherell

  “Oh. Thank you, no. No, I have to get home. You have a good evening.”

  The mime shrugged, took a bite of the mash bar and skipped away down the corridor.

  “Don’t go back that way!” Dyson called after her, his voice cracking with unfamiliar exertion. “There’s Helping Hands back there. Looking bored, you know?”

  The mime nodded, threw him a smart salute and then marched primly in the opposite direction.

  Dyson watched as she disappeared around a corner, then he watched the space where she had been for a while. Then he turned and walked on, alone.

  +++

  Dyson was aware firstly of the ghost-lights wafting over his head, bulging and blurring from the bottom of his vision to the top before disappearing. Brief and complete darkness before the next light came and went. He was next aware that it was not the lights that were moving but him. He tried to open his mouth to comment on this, but could not. There was something keeping his mouth closed. He tried to reach for it, but could not. He had no arms. The lights came and went, and finally he became aware of the cold metal of the conveyor belt on his naked back. The scream in his throat was animal.

  +++

  Dyson awoke, eyes wet, mouth dry. The thin luminous strip above his door was the only light. He sat up in the dark and reached out for the faucet at the foot of his bed, using precious water ration in order to feel something real against his face. He was awake, and glad of it. The strip was blue, which meant it was some way ‘til morning, but Dyson was in no hurry to return to sleep. He stood up, ducking slightly against the low ceiling, and felt around for his work clothes. He patted his pocket to make sure the omnicard was still where he had left it, then he departed his tiny room and returned to the empty corridors. He walked purposefully until he came to a bar where the signage had long since been lost to vandalism and apathy. It was mostly empty, though night shift was soon to end.

  Dyson looked around at the darkened booths, some of them vacant, some of them haunted, before settling onto a stool. The barmaid had a face that time and circumstance had tempered into a permanent scowl. With a voice that couldn’t care less, she asked him what he wanted.

  “Whisky.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I’m gonna have to scan your card first, buddy.”

  Dyson handed over his omnicard without comment. The barmaid scanned it on her console, her face briefly morphing with surprise as she saw the available credit.

  “Ship come in, buddy?”

  Dyson thought about telling the lady that he rarely spent what he earned, and briefly imagined a conversation wherein he orated whatever hidden philosophies he may have been hoarding for just such an occasion. It proved to be too daunting a possibility, and so he merely cleared his throat instead. The barmaid poured him his drink, setting it carefully before him along with his omnicard.

  Dyson sipped at the whisky and was both shocked and elated at the unfamiliar burn. Alcohol was expensive, rarely bought when stims and synths were so much cheaper, but something in Dyson had decided that today was a day of import. He could not have told you why.

  He sipped a tiny sip again and felt the itch of eyes upon him. He looked to his left where an old man perched on a stool beside him. The old man grinned at him with fencepost teeth.

  “Glad to meet ya, friend,” he said. He spoke with a crow’s voice, and held out a hand that was all tendon and bone. “Glad to meet ya, glad to meet ya, glad to meet ya.”

  Dyson met the old man’s gaze and saw the tell tale signs of more drugs than druthers. He noted the white collar set into the black shirt. The old man saw him looking and straightened himself. “From God’s lips to your ears, friend, sure enough. He tells me all I need to know, and I pass it ‘round if I think a fella’s worthy of passing on to. Do you think you’re worthy, fella? Worthy of God?”

  Dyson turned back to his drink and said nothing.

  The old man snaked upright, his boney hand digging into the meat of Dyson’s shoulder, his mouldy breath in Dyson’s ear. “Let me tell you, son, we think we left Him behind, but He’s dug in deep to us. He’s there all right, and He’s waiting, and when we’re finished finding the core of every sin He’ll be there with his balance sheet, friend, He’ll be there with his balance sheet. Buy an old man a drink? Come on rich boy you buy an old man a drink and I’ll save your fucking soul, buy an old man a drink and I’ll pull you out of damnation, wouldn’t you like that? To be pulled out of damnation? To feel the light of God upon your face again? You too good for the light of God, you shit?”

  The claw tightened, the breath grew hot, Dyson stood suddenly and his own momentum knocked the old man back and off balance, where he sprawled against the bar stools. The old man looked up into Dyson’s silent face and spoke through deep and awful tears.

  “If we had any dignity we’d starve. If we had any pride we’d kill ourselves.”

  A voice rang out across the bar. “That’s enough of that, you old bastard.”

  Dyson turned, flushed with guilt, and saw an agent of the Helping Hand stride across the floor with the confidence indicative of her position. She was short, young and freckled, forgoing the uniform black helmet to let her pink hair bubble out. Her hand hung at the holster of her baton as she walked over to the old man, who dropped to his knees before her.

  “Oh holy God who sends his angels of darkness to punish me for my blasphemy, oh these terrible cherubs with their toddler minds and their monkey rage and their savage truths–”

  The agent swung a kick at the old man’s ribs, sending him into a coughing wheeze. “I said ‘enough’, you stupid old bastard. Ain’t you got ears on your head? You fucking retarded? There ain’t no sky man that listens to you, and if there was he’d think you were a shit, same as me. You worship me if you need to worship something, you hear?”

  She kicked the old man again, and then two more times for good measure, before turning to Dyson. “This old prick with you? He your daddy? He your boyfriend?”

  Dyson shook his head, and the agent suddenly had a knife in her hand, waving it over Dyson’s face slowly so he could get a good look. It was an antique blade, a relic of a long forgotten war, and if anyone else had held it they would have found themselves in the cells without delay.

  “You see that I’m serious, fucker?” the agent said. Her voice remained casual, and her lips, young as they were, stretched thin with self-satisfaction. “You see I’ll take your face away if you fuck with me?”

  Dyson nodded.

  “You want to fight with your boyfriend then you do it at home, you sick fuck. Understand?”

  Dyson nodded.

  The agent kept the knife at his throat, but moved closer so that Dyson could feel the shell of her plastic body armour against his chest. His breath hitched as her fingers closed around his balls. She whispered in his ear.

  “Or maybe I’ll take something else? Maybe I’ll take something else from you and feed it to your boyfriend there while you watch? Would you like that? Does that make you hot, you sick fuck?”

  Dyson said nothing, stared straight ahead and dared not even swallow against the copper taste of fear in his mouth.

  The knife was gone and the agent walked away in a blink of an eye. She did not look back as she spoke. “Or maybe not? Who gives a shit.”

  They stood there in tableau for a while; Dyson, the old man, the bartender. Dyson left his drink and went to work.

  +++

  If you needed something bad enough then everything was too expensive. Valhalla always had a cheap fix ready somewhere, but for those far beyond cheap the government sanctioned highs were not enough. There were those suppliers and entrepreneurs who filled the gaps, growing, distilling and cooking up poison that even rats would turn their noses up at, had there been any more rats. The junkies, those that had quietly decided to die doing what they loved, came to those crooked cooks just as surely as a child to its mother.

  Dyson’s sister, Beko, had been such a child. Barely seventeen and already ben
t in ways beyond imagining. Mouth full of ugly tastes, head full of angry ghosts. So committed to her own destruction, she’d surprised even the people fucking her with just how fucked she was.

  She’d come back to her and Dyson’s shared one room at a little past midnight, skull filled with scavenged powders, her once brilliant black skin faded to the grey-blue of a bloated tick. She had woken up her younger brother, and talked to him at length about spirals while the slow trickle of blood from her nostril became a gush. Then she had died, leaving Dyson alone and just twelve.

  Eventually they’d heard him crying, and sent the Helping Hands to take the body, without telling him where– a small and surprising mercy.

  One of the suits had come to see him, a rounded man with rounded glasses and a ridiculous tie. He’d explained to Dyson that, although he no longer had a big sister to take care of him, he would have the next best thing; a job, so that he might take care of himself.

  And so Dyson, small, stupid and weak, went to work.

  In time, he became a man. Whatever that was.

  +++

  Dyson clocked on to D floor far earlier than usual. The first thing he saw was the mountain of bodies. A slip-sliding pyramid of wrecked flesh in beigey-brown hues, slick with rivulets of red. A totem of obscenity. A thing of things.

  With every other heartbeat a new torso wheeled in from the conveyor belt in the ceiling, flumped onto the pile beneath it, rolled and gaggled like a silly game. Came to rest, struggling, bleeding, merging. There was the background gurgle of many throats trying to scream through sealed lips. There was the feel of a thousand glaring eyes, not all of them dead.

  Dyson stood before the pyramid in revered silence, an acolyte before a strange new God.

  The night-shift worker, maybe ten years younger than Dyson and boney at the shoulders, stood with his pitching fork dangling in his hand. He turned around and revealed a face raw from tears, shiny with terror.

  “I just kinda thought– what if I just stopped, ya know? What if I just stopped doing it?”

  He pointed at the pile with a shaking hand, his pitching fork dropping to the floor with a clatter.

  “Nothing happened. It didn’t stop. It just goes on.” The lad’s lips began to quiver. “It doesn’t stop. Oh, Jesus what do we do, man? What do we do?”

  Dyson slowly bent and retrieved the pitching fork. He pressed it into the younger man’s hands. “We dig, son. We dig.”

  The boy and man worked, harder than either ever had. Dyson felt fire blossom in his back and his knees and his shoulders, but there was fire elsewhere too. Stomach. Heart. Head.

  When the boy faltered, fumbled and eventually fell, Dyson dragged him clear and began to dig again. Bodies were heaved and thrown, making hollow clangs against the metal sides of the chutes as they tumbled away into darkness.

  He worked. Oh, how he worked.

  Dyson’s head eventually tuned out from his body, until the rasping of his breath and the thudding of his heart became hymns in a distant cathedral of agony. He saw face after face before him, women, men, young and old, clones and the processed dead alike. Mutants, failures, food and sustenance.

  Once, he saw his sister’s face, grey and scabby at the nose, beseeching him through sewn-up lips for one more fix. Once, he saw a body still bearing smudges of white makeup, its pubis adorned with mad punctuation, its sex made a punchline. He saw a priest. He saw a bartender. He saw his own face again, many times, sometimes as a boy and sometimes a man (whatever that was).

  Most of all he saw the fork and the chute and nothing in between.

  He had become an engine of sheared gears and red-hot bearings by the time relief finally tapped him on the shoulder. The woman who took over his shift frowned at him, perhaps seeing that Dyson was only slightly there, a ghost haunting his own body.

  “You okay, chief?”

  Dyson said nothing, his tongue dried to the roof of his mouth, his throat closed to a tiny hole. He breathed open-mouthed, a guppy in a desert.

  The woman nodded to the slush of bodies beneath the chute. “You on a go slow or something?”

  Dyson stared at her a while, and then grinned, face stretching in unfamiliar ways. Over the permasound of moving parts and buzzing wire, he laughed until he thought he might die.

  +++

  The elevator door opened, but only with protest. Dyson, placing one foot in front of the other as a toddler might line up bricks, stumbled in and fell heavily against the wall. Those other workers, clocking off, clocking on, paid him little heed.

  Dyson listened through ringing ears to the people talking.

  “They say I’m transferring to the bikes next week, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Ain’t that the life? Get to sit, at least, huh? I did a few months on the treadmills but it ain't the same. Slow down on those things and you say hello to all the feet behind you. We used to fight to get to the front where the handle was, or else stay at the back where all you had to worry about was dodging the odd clumsy asshole. You could make a game of it.

  “Most of them survived it, you know, just got up and got back on again. Some didn’t, maybe if they got stepped on too much. Used to be a couple of Helping Hands stood by, just pick ‘em up and chuck ‘em in the reclamation chute. You know, some of those guys, I know this, man, I know this. Some of those guys weren’t even dead. Just dog tired. Same thing to those fuckers, though, right? Damn right.

  “The bikes, though? Sweet deal if you’ve got the knees for it.”

  Dyson slowly slid down the wall, cheeks cold and throat dry. Darkness took him down through the metal grilled floor and on to somewhere silent.

  +++

  The elevator door opened. The light was like none he had seen before. Dyson got to his feet and, crooked and wincing, stepped out of the elevator.

  There was green, green like he had only ever seen on vid screens. There was grass, softer than his mattress. There were trees that were pretty, nameless and laden with… fruit, probably. He looked behind him to see that the elevator was housed in a gleaming metal box, the only man-made object in a field of improbable nature.

  Above Dyson was sky, and the sight of it nearly pinned him to the ground. Stars. An impossible multitude of stars. More than all the bulbs in Valhalla, surely. As he watched there was a faint violet shimmer that rippled across the sky.

  “A vid screen?” he murmured.

  “No, not that my friend. The stars are real enough, just behind a pulsefield is all.”

  Dyson looked to the man who had approached him. A familiar voice. A familiar face. Both his own.

  “Welcome, friend.”

  The man who was not Dyson smiled in a way that Dyson had never smiled. The one green eye and one brown nestled comfortably in cheerful creases. The teeth bared easily and prettily. The man was dressed not in overalls, but in a loose grey shawl and baggy trousers.

  “What is this?” said Dyson. “What floor am I on?”

  “The top floor… Dyson, is it?” The man held Dyson’s omnicard in his hand, peering down at it. “Though I’m a little puzzled as to how you got here. You’re not authorised to be on this floor.”

  “The top floor?” Dyson mouthed the words as though tasting a foreign tongue. “I… don’t know.” He gestured around him to the floors of grass, the walls of trees, the ceiling of stars. “What is this place? Who are you? Are you the Guiding Light?”

  The man who was not Dyson smiled again. “More like one of the people who guide the Guiding Light.”

  There was a movement and another figure approached, seeming to appear from very far away and coming closer faster than her languid pace should have propelled her. She too was dressed in loose, grey clothes, and under the thatch of silver hair Dyson thought he saw a familiar face.

  “Do I know you?”

  The woman looked at Dyson with barely concealed bemusement. “I should think not.” She turned to the man who was not Dyson, kissed him slowly on the mouth. “This your boyfriend?” she whispered. The m
an laughed.

  The woman turned away and as she did, plucked one of the strange fruits from a low hanging branch. She tossed it to Dyson, who caught it awkwardly.

  “You look hungry,” she said, and then turned and walked away, her body travelling far further than her steps should have taken her.

  The man nodded encouragingly at Dyson. “Go ahead.”

  Dyson bit into the fruit, juice slapping his chin. He did not have a word for how it tasted.

  “Good?” said the not-Dyson.

  Dyson nodded.

  “Why are you here, Dyson?”

  Nothing.

  “Shall I tell you why you’re here?”

  Less.

  “You’re here because the world gave up. We fucked it so hard it just gave up, then we fucked it some more. Fucked it ‘til it stopped twitching. And when it did, when the Great Malaise took hold, we left. Those of us that could. Those rich and clever and pretty. To find a new world to fuck.”

  Dyson looked up at the ceiling of stars, realised they were moving, slowly.

  “But captains need a crew. This journey will take many lifetimes, you see. So who do we hate enough to man the bilges and stoke the boilers? Without beasts to burden, who do we hate enough to enslave for all of time?”

  The man took Dyson’s hand in his own. “We are not so awful a people that we don’t recognise our need for redemption. Who do we hate enough to feed our machines and our bellies? Why, ourselves, of course. Each pioneer his own master, his own slave, his own sustenance. And ain’t that just karmic?”

  Dyson snatched back his hand, exhaustion breeding a strange form of defiance. “Is it? Then how come you’re up here and I’m down there? And how many of us sweat to skeletons so that you might see the stars and walk on nature?”

  The man smiled, palms open. “Do you prefer we all suffer in the dark? We are exactly the same, you and I, bar circumstance. If it were you up here and me down there, would it be any different?”