Hotwire

by Simon Ings

  ‘She?’ Rosa echoed, and with mounting excitement: ‘You said “she”! Who did you mean? Who’s “she”?’

  Rosa dear, it’s me, your aunt, Presidio!

  Don’t be afraid. Your mother sent you here:

  something to love, she said. To play with.

  Such a pretty doll! Here, I’ve made you a house—

  Don’t run away, Rosa:

  there’s nowhere you

  can run that’s not in me;

  that is not me.

  You recognise it then,

  Rosa? My womb!

  This is where you’ll

  live forever mine.

  You like?

  Why so afraid, my child?

  Why this frantic, angry tantrum?

  I’ll rip out that rebellious heart of yours,

  and put a gentler one in its place. Here,

  let me open you up—

  You’ve been playing with worms,

  disgusting child!

  You see what happens when you play

  with worms?

  A grub feeds in your belly, even now!

  Never mind, I’ll suck it out—

  It stings! The wormchild stings!

  Get out! Get lost!

  Poisoned apple, maggoty meat,

  I’ll have none of you.

  The first thing she knew, there was a bad smell. It might have been a sight, or a sound for all she knew. Just then she only had one sense. A dreadful stench, then. Charred and corrupt. She sniffed at it. She was all nose. She flexed her great nostrils and inhaled. Death-smell filled up her worm-like body like a canker.

  She had touch now. She ran her hands over herself, feeling her neck, the hardness of her throat beneath the smooth skin, her collar bones like buried birds’ wings, the warm hollows of her armpits, her breasts under the halter-top, heavy and tender, then her ribs, splayed like long fingers, fanned out upon a spongy table-top of—

  She reached down.

  It’s true! she thought.

  A friend.

  There was a friend inside her.

  That was what warmed her at nights. No mere organ this, no tumorous battery: a life!

  Another being!

  She felt it flutter under her hands. It was so small, so delicate still, but there was no doubt: she could feel the pattern of its vessels, filled with motherblood, her blood, her baby—

  Something hissed.

  She opened her eyes.

  It was dark. Chinks of light fell on unfamiliar surfaces. Polished boards, ironwork, mirrors and glass-fronted shelves. I’m back, she thought. Back in the boat. Gravity returned suddenly. She staggered against the wall and hit her head. She rubbed it, cursing, then pulled back the blind and looked out.

  The estuary was as it had been. Nothing had changed. No time had passed.

  She wondered where the smell could be coming from. She looked back into the room. Illumined now by window light, framed in the golden rectangle like a painting, sat Xu.

  She knew it was Xu because he was holding a can up to where his lips had been. He tilted the can. Beer sizzled and spat. Steam rose in a wreath about his flaming head.

  Rosa backed off, too startled to scream.

  Xu’s face was blown off. The bones of his skull hissed. Greasy pools in his eye sockets gave off smoke so black and so thick, it did not rise but rolled in a stream down his embered jaw. A tooth exploded: amalgam and dentine spattered the room. There was very little blood. It had all evaporated.

  He stood up and took a pace forward. He tilted his blind head towards her. Air hissed uselessly out the ragged vent in his neck. He was trying to speak. His jaw fell open. Crisped ligaments crumbled to pieces. The jaw flapped uselessly to and fro, tapping against his black and bark-like neck. His tongue was ashen white. He tried to move it. It fell to pieces in his mouth, tender as boiled steak, revealing a raw and quivering stump.

  He stepped forward and hit the table with his shin. His head fell off. It landed on the table and shattered. The body backed off and wandered round the room a while, listlessly, then slumped at Rosa’s feet, disordered, rumpled like a pile of old clothes. Rosa felt her bladder give way. She stepped back quickly from the wreckage, frightened and ashamed, hot urine spilling down her legs. She wanted to throw up. She heaved a couple of times but there was nothing there, just a mouthful of phlegm. She swallowed it down again.

  She looked round for something to mop herself up with. There was a tea towel on the floor by the table. On the table, among the bone shards and cooked meat and charred hair, something shone. A small metal disc. Xu’s conduction plate. It was white-hot.

  A cry from out to sea distracted them.

  A blonde girl was wailing, thrashing the waves, striking frantically toward the shore.

  ‘Gina?’ the black man cried. He ran down the beach to meet her. Ajay watched him go.

  The others stood up, looking out to sea. ‘What’s wrong?’

  They were speaking to Ajay.

  He turned to them and said, ‘How come he knew my name?’

  ‘The sea, man, what’s with the sea?’

  He followed their gaze.

  Beyond the pier at first, then nearer in, approaching as the seconds passed, something was happening to the sea. It was going brown. Ajay took a step back, blanching, remembering Presidio’s strange frustrated thrashing on Waddell Beach.

  But nothing rose out the sea; it was the sea itself had gone somehow awry. Silver lined the brown, syrupy water. The waves seemed to deepen and slow. Foam on the wave-tips turned bright pink.

  ‘Oh Christ alive,’ said one, ‘it’s blood.’

  From out of nowhere, gulls engulfed the beach, pecking and prying at the water-line.

  ‘What is it?’

  Ajay said, ‘You know Rosa?’

  ‘Sure. You know where she is?’

  ‘You taught her to swim?’

  ‘She’s not out there,’ said one, ‘we haven’t seen her. Gina!’

  The blonde had made it to the beach. The black man helped her from the water-line.

  Ajay walked down to meet them. ‘What happened?’ he demanded.

  Gina glanced at him. ‘Who’s this? Oh, God, let me sit down.’

  The black man lowered her onto the sand.

  Ajay knelt beside her. ‘What went on?’

  ‘Who is this?’

  Ajay put her face close to his: ‘Talk to me, damn it!’

  The black man cuffed him back into the sand. ‘Back off.’

  ‘The seals are dead,’ Gina said. ‘Blown to bits. I was swimming with one, he just – blew up.’

  ‘Blew up?’

  ‘Like he was on fire inside.’

  Ajay looked out to sea. The silver on the sea had formed irregular striations and clusters. The first of them had reached the beach. It was made up of hundreds of fish.

  The birds wheeled, screeching, but they were working up the beach, away from the corpse-polluted sea.

  Ajay stared after them, puzzled. They were heading Southwards, towards the inlet.

  ‘Who are you?’ Gina said.

  He shrugged, stood up and followed the gulls up the beach.

  ‘Hey!’

  He ignored them. They were only kids.

  There was nothing to see by the inlet, only a handful of yachts and a clear stream, browning at the edges as it fed the newly polluted sea. He sniffed the air. Not blood-smell, but not chemical either. Burning fat perhaps. He shooed the birds away before him; what was it they were looking for? He stared hard at the sand, wondering what they had found. There were flecks of red here and there. He flicked at them with the toe of his shoe. Something came apart under his foot. He bent down and looked.

  Something white and wet and deep-rooted.

  An eye.

  Not an eyeball alone, but an eye, set in flesh, shapeless and fatty. The pupil within was hidden behind a cataract-white film. He kicked the sand again. Another eye leapt into the air. It landed by Gina’s feet.

 
He started, not expecting her. She poked at the eye with her toe. ‘Oh Christ,’ she said, still shaking from her panic in the water. ‘Oh . . .’ She stepped away from it.

  He said, ‘Have you seen Rosa?’

  ‘You’re Ajay, right?’

  He nodded.

  ‘No. She should be here by now.’

  ‘Does she know how to swim yet?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Something in his face disturbed her.

  ‘You don’t think—?’ she began, then turned and looked out to sea.

  Ajay turned back to the eye at Gina’s feet. Liquid dribbled from the shattered jelly like tears.

  Just beside it, sand shivered. Gina saw. She leaned in to look.

  ‘Keep still,’ Ajay said.

  Two rows of red spines, like millipedes, pushed through the surface, and swung apart. The eye was alive: it stared up at the sun, dilated with the shock of being alive, hazel-irised, beautiful. He knelt down and flicked a little sand into it. A veinous membrane squiggled across the opal surface of the eye, cleaning and soothing it. He leaned in for a closer look. His shadow fell across it. Red millipede lids snapped shut. It squirmed sand over itself and disappeared.

  ‘What is it?’ Gina breathed.

  ‘Presidio,’ said Ajay, ‘maybe. I don’t know. I’m not from here. You seen anything like this before?’

  She shook her head. ‘In the water, there are things. Seals.’ She shook her head. ‘The sea is full of freaks round here. Nothing like this.’

  A hamburger smell filled the air. They looked around. ‘There! Seals!’ Gina exclaimed. ‘What are they—?’ She covered her face, unable to take in what was happening.

  The sea was full of dying seals, eyes bulging, flippered fingers writhing for purchase against the current, defecating in the water, pissing blood. They were fighting upstream towards the yachts. Sparks and bursts of flame consumed them, wave after wave of preternatural heat. The sea bubbled and hissed, flash-heated by tumbling, embered corpses.

  The sand trembled beneath Ajay’s feet. The gulls fled into the air, screeching in distress. No quake this, but an unburial: red flecks appeared all about the beach, a billion eyes, and hands like mad anemones, even a head or two, without face or feature.

  A cry went up across the beach as people, stunned at first by the sea’s change, suddenly took fright. They scampered up the beach towards the boardwalk and the road, in their panic treading underfoot strange limbs and soft alien eyes.

  ‘Come on!’ Gina screamed at him, sprinting towards the boardwalk. The sand shifted under him again. He glanced down. A pair of feet grew out the sand. Slim ankles. A child’s legs. He stood there, spellbound, oblivious to Gina’s screams and the general tumult, waiting for more of the child to appear. There was no more. The legs emerged above the knee then fell, one to either side of him, twitching and useless.

  They began to smoke.

  He looked up. All around him the beach was a pin-cushion of flame.

  He ran then, panic kicking in at last, engulfed in smoke, kicking aside the burning trash.

  She woke up with no sense of time. She had no memory of passing out. She could not have been unconscious long: Xu’s corpse was still smoking. Distant cries had woken her. Now they came near. She staggered to her feet and looked out the porthole. She lifted the blind. People were running along the estuary road down to the shore, pointing and shielding their eyes against the sun. Some had cameras. They were taking photographs of the water. She wondered what they saw. She crossed the lounge and lifted another blind.

  The estuary was full of men. Naked, furred, web-handed men. Seals and less evolved creatures, some with saw-toothed mouths and some with heads like fish. They were sprawled in the water, one on top of the other, some still shaking, most quite still. Hundreds of dead, all badly burned. The water rose and broke about them, streaming. Rosa looked downstream. The river’s mouth was brown with old blood.

  There were voices on the quay-side now. Rosa drew the blinds down again and hid in the dark, hands over her belly.

  ‘Friend?’ she whispered, probing the hardness above her pubic bone. ‘Are you awake?’

  She feared to mind it, seeing what had been done – somehow – to Xu.

  The voices without grew louder, angrier, more numerous. Footsteps thundered back and forth along the jetty.

  Quietly then, Friend, are you there?

  There was no reply.

  She turned to the table. There was a hole in it now where the conduction plate had melted through. ‘I’m sorry,’ Rosa whispered, wiping tears from her cheeks. ‘Xu, I’m so very sorry.’

  ‘Xu?’ From the quay-side path came a voice she recognised. ‘Xu, you there?’

  She edged the blind aside and peeked out. It was Darryl.

  ‘Xu?’

  She ran to the door, tore it open and ran up the steps to the foredeck. ‘Darryl!’ She jumped down from the foredeck onto the jetty. Darryl caught her. She slumped there in his arms, shaking with shock.

  ‘Is he okay? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Some – something horrible,’ she panted.

  ‘You okay?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Wait here.’ He took hold of the rail and swung himself aboard the boat.

  She looked around her. The whole town was running beachward. A barbecue smell drifted in off the water. Was it me? she wondered. Was it me did this? She had to get away. One way or another she had triggered something dreadful. Something – the word was comically inadequate – ‘conspicuous’. Where was Ajay? Was he somewhere in the milling crush?

  She’d never find him here anyway. The best she could hope for was that they’d meet at home, when this madness was past, if it ever was. She ran down the jetty and elbowed her way onto the river path.

  ‘Rosa!’ Darryl cried from the boat. She could tell from his cry that he had seen. She turned. He was leaning against the rail, clutching at his stomach. ‘Rosa, what is it? In there? Rosa? Rosa, for God’s sake!’

  Rosa did not stop but forced a passage through the crowds until Darryl and the boat were far behind her, lost to sight.

  The bridge across the river was gridlocked. There was no way to push between the cars, themselves hemmed in by pressing crowds scurrying to the beach. Her only route lay over the congested traffic. She climbed up onto the bonnet of the nearest car. The driver sounded his horn and beat on his windscreen, but the crush of sightseers kept him trapped in the vehicle. Rosa picked her way over car roofs and down again into less crowded streets. She did not rest until she came to the boardwalk and the beach.

  The funfair was closed up now, the season being done: tarpaulined and skeleton-boned, it resembled some huge and long abandoned clockwork toy. She found a bench and rested a moment, catching her breath beside Grandma Batty’s Yorkshire Pudding Emporium.

  Helicopters buzzed the boardwalk, cameras and scopes angling for a shot of the estuary. She cast a worried glance into the air. Newshounds, she guessed – but what if not? She set off again, across the beach road and up the hill towards the house.

  The townspeople had rushed as one down to the shore to catch a glimpse, a whiff of dead leviathan: the twisted arms and scorched fur of a hundred thousand hotwired corpses.

  She ran through streets bare and unpeopled as though battened down for war.

  Ajay jogged back to the house. It was the only place he could think where Rosa would wait for him, assuming she was still alive. Presidio had uncleistogammed for sure now. Abroad in the world at last, who knew what would happen next? If Rosa wasn’t at the house, he could only assume she was dead. Dead, or as good as. Swallowed up.

  It made no sense. Presidio, hungry for Rosa? What was so special about Rosa?

  Presidio had shown itself so fecund, even Dayus Ram’s capacity paled in comparison. What was Rosa when set against Presidio’s own great flesh, so flippantly expended just now on the shore of Santa Cruz?

  Herazo should have sent me here, he thought, incredulous
still, and saved himself a spacecraft. He looked around him at the deserted streets. Nearly home. He wondered where to go. Without Rosa he was, he guessed, relatively out of danger from Presidio. The real danger came from his stopped smartcard. Who’d stopped it? The bank? Police? Some other agency? Haag even? Someone was onto him.

  Where should he go? Los Angeles perhaps. The quakes had damaged the infrastructure there irreparably. In those fractured dog-eat-dog streets it would not be hard to hide. Not now he was on his own, unencumbered by the girl.

  The girl—

  He reached their street.

  Not his street. Theirs. They had lived there. Seeing the street, he could not help but remember her. It made him pause.

  He remembered how happy she’d been. He remembered the food she’d made for him. He remembered her red hair, and her dreadful clothes. Adrenaline-elation drained from him. A deep and unexpected sadness broke over him. Rosa . . .

  But there was something wrong. Even his melancholy could not for long hide wrongness from his well-trained gaze.

  He stared up at the house and around the street: what was it? What had he seen? There was no movement. No traffic. No sound, not even TV.

  Was that all it was? Was it simply the silence?

  He looked back at the house. At the closed curtains—

  When he’d last left, they’d been open.

  Maybe Rosa was back!

  He eased through the overgrown foliage of the front garden, up to the veranda steps. He climbed them, took out his key and tried the door. It was open but jammed, the door somehow stuck awkwardly inside the frame. He examined the edges of the door. A jemmy had been used to spring the hinges – he could see where the wood was dented, the paint scraped off.