Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

  Alice notices that the side of the door facing into the corridor is covered in plaster. She pulls it to, gripping the outer edge as there is nothing else to hold. It is designed to close by automated command. She doesn’t get it quite flush, but enough to observe that if it hadn’t been damaged, it wouldn’t be apparent that there was a door there at all.

  She walks back towards the source of the sound, and as she draws closer she runs her fingers along the wall until she feels a vertical line. A metre further along there is a second.

  It is another hidden door, but she has no way of getting it open.

  No point in wasting more time, she decides, and resumes her progress down the corridor in search of an exit.

  She has barely taken two steps when she is startled by another sudden noise, a sharp hiss like the one that locked her in that crate. This time, by contrast, it is the sound of air escaping as a seal is opened. She sees the door clearly now, swinging inwards, the sounds of music and voices immediately louder. Vapour drifts through the widening gap in billowing wisps as Alice braces herself to face whatever might emerge.

  The answer is two drunk guys, laughing and haphazardly colliding in their staggering attempts to keep each other upright.

  One of them notices her and holds the door open.

  “You coming in?” he asks.

  “Thank you,” she replies, finding a hint of cheeriness by way of cover, acting like she knows where she’s going, like she’s supposed to be here.

  But where is here?

  She steps into what looks like another club. The coloured lights flashing through steamy darkness and the loud music are in keeping with what she saw upstairs in Sin Garden, but though the place is packed, nobody here is dancing. Perhaps, like Sin Garden, the dance floor is housed in a separate area.

  Another thing that strikes her is that the crowd is mostly male. They’re all just standing around, waiting for something to happen or perhaps talking about what just did.

  Alice stays close to the wall, feeling anxious about drawing attention to herself, still unsure about what people will read on their lenses when they see her face. Finally, she sees a woman, but it is a far from reassuring sight. She is sitting at the end of a row of banquettes, being treated for a cut above her eye, her head tilted back to stop a nosebleed that has already stained her philtrum and her chin. She is dressed in a bright green skintight outfit. On first glance Alice thinks it is a dancer’s leotard but then she notices that it has legs that go down to just above the knee and sleeves that stop at the elbow. The costume is heavily bloodstained too. That nosebleed was a gusher.

  A fight must have broken out on the dance floor, wherever that is, and the woman has been taken back here to recover. Alice deduces that this must have been what the cheering was about.

  Animals, she thinks, and she doesn’t mean the combatants.

  The woman looks a little dazed, a little pissed off and yet strangely resigned. Holding a cloth to her nose, she accepts a drink that is brought to her. It looks like some kind of cocktail. She takes a slug from it as the man treating the cut says something Alice can’t hear. The woman shrugs, like whatever just happened to her was no big deal, but from her body language there is little question that she got second prize in the fight.

  Alice makes her way deeper into the throng, and as she comes around a pillar at the far end of the row of banquettes, all becomes literally clear.

  The focus of the crowd, the focus of the premises, is a glass chamber, transparent curving staircases leading to its roof at either end. It is raised half a metre on a dais, three short steps leading to a low door at the centre.

  Standing close by is a woman Alice recognises from her visit to NutriGen, the one who told them where Korlakian normally works. Alice’s lens is still showing nothing but she always has a reliable memory for names and faces. The woman is called Vera Polietsky.

  Vera is dressed in a similar skintight outfit, and from the fact that she is on her feet, sipping water, it is clear that she was the victor. She looks calm and yet pumped up at the same time. There is dried blood on her knuckles, the beginning of a bruise under her eye.

  On the far side of the chamber there is a bar, a neon logo hanging above the gantry.

  KLAWS

  That’s the name of the place. She saw it upstairs as she walked with Nikki. From street level it looked like another bar and diner.

  This is Mullane’s underbelly. The Seedee underbelly.

  Alice’s instinct is to get out of here, but she knows that this is the world she needs to immerse herself in if she wants to understand how CdC really works. She steels herself, swallows back her disgust and pushes deeper into the crowd, making her way to the front.

  “Everybody, everybody, as you’re all still here I guess you already know the show isn’t over!”

  The announcement sounds over the PA, on top of the music. Alice looks for the source and sees a short, squat, powerful-looking older woman climbing halfway up one of the curving staircases to make herself visible to the whole room. She is dressed in a suit and tie, the starchy formality of her impresario outfit in perverse contrast to the spectacle she’s peddling. From her flattened, much broken nose, Alice estimates that she probably served her time in the chamber before graduating to running the show.

  “As always, we round off tonight’s card, tonight’s Pacific card anyway, with the open all-comers challenge. Costs you two hundred to enter the chamber, but the reward is healthy and the task is straightforward. All you gotta do is put down Razerthorn here. Not a KO, not even a standing count, just put her on the floor for one second, one lousy second, and you scoop the prize. And what a prize! In case you don’t know, we reset the pot each week and it goes up by two thousand every night that it remains unclaimed. This being Saturday, it’s currently standing at … Ten! Thousand! Dollars!”

  There are whoops and cheers, chants of “Razerthorn, Razerthorn,” and “Liza, Liza, Brutaliza.” Given the unlikelihood of the bleeding woman returning for another bout, Alice assumes Liza must be the impresario.

  Something inside her crumbles. She came to CdC hoping to see the future of humanity. Right now she’s seeing a carnival sideshow from centuries past. She’s also looking at an even older scam. Liza is saving the open slot for the end of the night when the only people drunk enough to take up the challenge are going to be in no state to compete.

  That said, ten thousand is a lot of money, even for here. Certainly it would be a good enough reason for someone to stay sober if they already knew it was on offer.

  “Come on, who’s feeling sharp tonight? Who’s feeling lucky? Razerthorn took some punishment that last bout, and she’s already thinking about a nice lie-down. You’re never gonna get a better chance than this.”

  It doesn’t look like there will be any takers. Alice wonders what everybody here witnessed in that previous fight, reckons it’s the punishment Vera doled out that is clearer in their minds than whatever she suffered. They might have been cheering while they were caught up in the moment, but something inside them had to have been scared and appalled, and that’s the part that’s holding sway now the moment is over. Nobody wants to be losing their pay cheque through missing work because they were dumb enough to get their arm broken in a moment of drunkenly deluded stupidity.

  Then suddenly a hand goes up, amid shouts of “Yeah, yeah,” from around the man holding it. He seems ridiculously eager, like he’s afraid someone else is going to get the nod first.

  It’s a geeky guy who looks early thirties. He’s out with other geeky young men and a couple of geeky young women: science and research types walking on the wild side. Precisely the kind of mark Liza must be hoping for.

  Most of his friends are laughing as the crowd parts, forming a path towards the chamber, but Alice can see one of the women grabbing hold of him by the arms, telling him don’t be crazy.

  His eyes blaze and he throws off her grip, letting out an in articulate primal yell with aggressive indig
nation. She looks as surprised as she is hurt, and not a little worried. This is uncharacteristic behaviour, Alice infers. A good night out that already went someplace dark is now threatening to turn into a disaster. He brushes past Alice to get to the front, his friends now standing around her, looking awkward, confused and a little worried.

  “We have a contender,” Liza announces, coming back down the staircase to meet him. “What’s your name?”

  “Javier,” he replies into the mike.

  The crowd cheers, a few start drunkenly chanting “Javier, Javier.”

  “Hey, nobody cheers this guy until we’ve seen the colour of his money,” Liza chides. His fingers work his lens, making a transfer.

  “Okay, we’re good,” Liza announces. “You ready to take on Razerthorn?”

  Javier nods, his face already a study in concentrated aggression. He pulls off his shirt, eliciting a combination of cheers and laughter.

  “Razerthorn, you ready for Javier?”

  Vera looks weary. Not tired, weary. Like this is all a drudge to her, one last thing to take care of before she can clock off for the night. No different to how she might respond at the processing plant if she was asked to shift one extra pallet just as she was taking off her overalls and getting ready to head home.

  “Okay, let’s do this!”

  Liza opens the door to the chamber and Vera steps through first. Liza puts a hand on Javier’s chest as he makes to follow. Not yet.

  People scramble for a view, rushing to the front, buffeting Alice as they pass. The more sober clamber up the stairs and take position on the roof to watch from above. There is barely any clearance between the top of the chamber and the ceiling above, only enough to sit in an awkward crouch.

  Alice wants to arrest everybody and shut this place down. But for now she has to temper her wrath, remember she is in fact-finding mode, incognito and alone. This pinnacle of human civilisation is starting to look like a Bosch painting. When she engineered the opportunity to shadow Nikki Freeman, she thought the worst she would discover was bootlegging and backhanders.

  Holding her arm across the doorway, Liza tells Javier: “Remember, son, you’re trying to put her down, that’s the game. Don’t get yourself damaged. This isn’t a war of attrition. You beat your palm down twice at any time to tap out and she’ll stop. Understand?”

  He nods. Yes, he understands, but something is troubling Alice about the fact that he hasn’t spoken a word other than his name since he volunteered. He looks like he’s on something.

  Liza sends them to opposite ends of the chamber, warning them: “Nobody makes a move, nobody starts anything until this door is fully closed.”

  Liza takes hold of the handle. Javier has his gaze fixed on the door, his whole body on a hair trigger. Vera seems less concerned with her cue, concentrating her focus on her opponent.

  Liza teases the audience, pushing the door halfway closed then opening it again; pushing it almost all the way closed, then all the way open again.

  “Not yet, not yet. I’m not hearing nearly enough noise.”

  More vapour billows around, like she saw emerge when those two drunks opened the door. Alice realises it is dry ice, bringing down the temperature. The walls are running with moisture, the music still pounding, coloured lights pulsing. The volume gets pumped up, excitement rising as people clap to the beat, cheering and chanting names: Liza, Javier, Razerthorn.

  Liza waits until the cheering and chanting has reached a crescendo bordering on hysteria, then she slams the door.

  The trigger pulled, Javier moves with surprising speed. Alice assumed that the wait inside the chamber would have been enough for it to dawn that this wasn’t the good idea it seemed in that earlier moment of euphoria and bravado. She imagined that he would slow down, play it cagey, think about how he might make a decent show of this so that he could get out with some dignity as well as all his limbs intact.

  Instead he bolts headlong towards Vera, lithe and unflinching. She doesn’t move, as though she hasn’t had time to react, taken unawares by his pace, then at the last split-second she sidesteps him, leaving a trailing leg.

  He tumbles over it and would have hit the floor and the wall with painful force were it not that Vera subtly catches his arm with one hand, slowing him down and effectively cushioning his fall.

  Alice wonders whether anyone else noticed this. They’re giving no such indication, all cheering and laughing. Is it a set-up? she wonders. Is Javier a stooge?

  He gets up immediately, swinging for Vera a second time, aggression in his face like this means something, like he hates her. Again she dodges, putting him down far more gently than she could have, but the force of his charge is still enough for him to clatter against the glass with a thump that makes Alice and a few others wince. He gets up again though, looking further enraged, and launches another attack, this time throwing himself into a two-footed flying kick.

  It’s not a set-up and he’s not a stooge, Alice realises. The guy is crazy and Vera is making sure he doesn’t get hurt. She’s spinning him off with expert technique, wanting him to realise it’s futile. Alice wonders how many chances she’s going to give him to grasp this; how soon she wants her shift to be over.

  The answer is soon. The next time he comes at her she deflects him with a degree of force, adding to the velocity with which he clatters into the glass. The collision is such an ugly sound. He leaves a smear of blood on the pane and tumbles to the floor looking dazed. It takes him a few seconds to get up this time, and when he does, he scrambles towards the door.

  “Hey, you just need to tap out, you don’t need to escape,” Liza says. “You should stay and take your bow. Everybody give it up for Javier, he really threw himself into it. Literally.”

  There is a mixture of laughter and cheers. Javier’s friends gather close to the door, ready to greet him. The man who was treating the bleeding woman is hastening towards the chamber also, carrying a medical kit. Javier’s expression is still frighteningly intense as he emerges. He isn’t making eye contact with anybody. His friends gather around him, offering physical support, but he throws them off and turns to the medic.

  “Just need to make sure you—”

  Before the medic can even lay a hand on him, Javier has snatched the first-aid kit and grabbed something from inside. The young woman who had reasoned with him earlier sees whatever it is and reads his intentions. She grabs him again, calling on the others too.

  “Stop him. Javier, no.”

  Javier’s arm lashes upwards in an arc and a spray of blood maps the trajectory. The woman reels, colliding with Alice, who clutches her instinctively to prevent her from collapsing. Her face has been slashed open diagonally from jaw to ear, blood pouring on to Alice’s chest. Her friends rush to help, taking the woman’s weight as Alice stands frozen to the spot, feeling like a helpless witness to all that is unfolding before her.

  A few metres away, Javier is clutching a laser scalpel as he charges towards the chamber. Liza has stepped in front of the door to block his re-entry, but from her angle Alice isn’t sure whether she fully saw what just happened.

  Liza is a sturdy and redoubtable figure, but some force of desperation propels him into her, swiping with the scalpel as he barrels forward. Alice sees more blood spray the outside of the glass and a number of small brown objects are tossed into the air. It takes a moment for Alice to realise they are fingers.

  Liza falls against the wall as Javier races back inside the chamber. Alice is jostled by people moving to keep their distance. Others remain transfixed: with fear or fascination, she can’t be sure.

  Javier makes for Vera once more with absolute singularity of purpose. It is as though attacking her is the only reason for his existence. She has noted the weapon, as her stance is different from before. But even if she deflects him, a passing contact with such an implement is going to do some damage.

  This time she doesn’t wait for him to reach her. Instead she drives forward to meet him, her
eyes locked onto the scalpel. Javier thrusts with it and she tracks the movement, gripping his arm and pulling it past her as she sidesteps. In a blink she has thrown him to the floor while retaining her hold on his forearm. The twisting movement causes the scalpel to drop, a fracture of a second before she drives a knee against his straightened arm, snapping it like a chicken bone.

  It is a compound fracture, bone jutting raggedly through ruptured flesh. It makes Alice weak from the mere sight, many people around her averting their eyes despite having come here expressly to watch violence. It is not enough to stop Javier, though.

  He grabs for the discarded scalpel with his other hand, that enflamed singularity of intention still blazing in his face.

  Vera reads it. She kicks it away before he can reach, then flips him over and puts him in a chokehold. He flails like he is being electrocuted, struggling with all of his limbs. Even the wrecked arm flaps about horribly, Javier making no attempt to cradle or protect it.

  It takes a long time, the strain becoming visible on Vera’s sweating face, but eventually he loses consciousness and slumps limply to the floor.

  At this moment, the music cuts out and the house lights come on. There couldn’t be a less equivocal sign that the show is over, but it still takes everyone a beat to assure themselves that the danger is past.

  The room no longer looks like some pulsing and colourful den of saturnalian revelry, but what it truly is: a claustrophobic steel-walled basement where the floor is swilling with spilt drinks, sweat, condensation and blood.

  Upon an urgent call from the medic, one of the bar staff races across carrying a bucket of ice. Liza is slumped against the wall of the chamber, trembling, staring at the severed sections of her fingers that are lying on the floor. She can’t pick them up because she has lost digits from both hands.

  “The fuck was that guy on?” Alice hears somebody ask.

  “There’s a new super-strain of Spike in circulation,” comes the reply. “The construction crews are taking it, guys trained up for hardcore physical exertion. If a little geek like that took some, it’s possible his system couldn’t handle it. Made him psychotic.”