Utopia: A Dark Thriller: Complete Edition

by Adam Steel

  The tapping sound came again. It was loud and impatient. Closer.

  TAP! TAP! TAP! TAP!

  Her bare feet knocked against harsh wood. Strong arms hauled her up onto something solid and wooden. Splinters from the rough wood, dug into her feet and the exposed skin of her legs. She tried to scream again – a desperate shriek, but it was muffled by the bag. She was hauled upright, while her hands were tightly bound behind her with a thick rope. The bag was ripped from her head and she blinked. What she saw was Diamond Square and thousands of people that had gathered to watch. They were cheering.

  She looked down to see that she was standing on a wooden platform. It was old and bolted together with strong iron nails. Above her a looped rope swung. Mason Deckler was addressing the crowd with his sabre aloft: a great General making a speech to the people. She couldn’t catch the words. They roared with approval. Aya’s heart hammered in her chest. She was panic stricken. She struggled to free herself from the ropes that were cutting into her flesh. The crowd was a bloodthirsty mob. They were all dressed in suits and ties, which gave way to snarling, spitting faces, when they looked at her.

  ‘Traitor!’ they shouted, in staggered roars.

  Aya looked frantically to her side. There was another gallows set up in the square. It was occupied. A well-built, but broken body, hung from a rope. It was swinging slowly. Its feet were dangling freely below the open trapdoor. Its face was turned away, and its head was at an impossible angle. Its neck had been snapped as clean as a twig. Ginger hair fluttered in the breeze.

  ‘MAX!’ Aya screamed, when she saw the grisly trophy.

  The crowd roared in approval.

  Her cry was cut off by a hardy rope being dropped around her head. It was tightened until she could barely breathe. Beneath her she could feel the rush of air from the creaking trapdoor that she had been forced to stand on. The executioner took up a position next to the lever that would open the trapdoor. It was Mada. Her expression was grim and her eyes shone with distaste. She rapped her nails impatiently on the lever. It made a sound of knuckles on glass, as if the gallows where not really made of wood, but some clever illusion.

  ‘Mum, Help me,’ Aya gasped, through the constricting noose.

  The figures who had dragged her up to the gallows, stepped out from behind her. They were unusual from a side profile. They were almost flat in places, like cardboard cut-out people, walking off a page of animation. One was tall. The other was very short. Aya would have screamed when they turned to face her, if the rope hadn’t been so tight. The world swam as she became dizzy through fear and oxygen deprivation. The tall figure stared at her. It was her father’s dead eyes that were staring at her. They stuck out obscenely bulging past what would have been his eyelids, as if some huge bomb had been detonated within him. Most of his chest was flattened. His broken ribs were protruding from his decaying clothes. His skin had wrinkled and sloughed away, revealing a sickly translucent slime. The slimy mess flowed over shattered bones. His hand was linked with the second, smaller figure. It was a little girl. She was rotting. One side of her face had been crushed under some terrific weight.

  “Betrayer,” they hissed.

  “Whore. Traitor. Most unclean.”

  Sara’s remaining eye, oozed out of its socket, as she spoke.

  Mada’s hand pulled down hard on the lever.

  BANG!

  The trapdoor opened leaving empty space beneath her feet.

  Aya sat bolt upright.

  The sound from the trapdoor was still reverberating in her ears and her bed sheets were sprawled across the floor, leaving her sitting in her underwear. Her hands were shaking, and she was soaked through with sweat from the horrific nightmare. Her nightmares had gotten much worse since she had helped Jack steal the prison files from Commander Betts’s office. This had been the worst one yet.

  She was convinced that they would soon find out what she had done. She scared herself thinking about what they might do when they did finally discover her deception.

  The familiar shape of her bedroom surrounded her. It was still dark, but outside, dawn was slowly coming. The sun crept upwards from its hiding place, just under the horizon. She wiped her hand across her brow, and looked to the window to greet it. She welcomed the light. It would help her to dispel the awful nightmare. Her hand quickly flew to her mouth in shock. Outside, in the dim light, a man was crouching. He had both hands on her window. His thin, pockmarked, face was pushed tight up against the glass. She realised that it must have been him who had tapped on the glass in his attempts to rouse her.

  He squinted into her room with beady eyes – straining to see her. He was young – in his early twenties. He was pale, covered in acne, and looked scruffy and unwashed. Aya began to recover from the initial shock when she realised he was squinting at her. She did not think that he looked manly enough for her to be truly afraid – not now that she got a good look at him. She thought that he was more a greasy kid than some phantom attacker. A Peeping Tom! Pervert, she thought crossly.

  She threw her bed sheet around herself. She considered screaming for Mada, but hesitated at the thought of Ajit twisting the kid’s arms and legs into a giant, human knot. The figure rapped again. He shook his head slowly when he saw her disgusted expression, and gestured towards the palm of his right hand which was pressed up against the window.

  Something was written there. Her curiosity peeked and she dared to edge a little closer. The scrawny, young man was still outside the window. He couldn’t get in without making a noise, and she figured that she could still run if he made any sudden moves. There was a single word (scrawled in bad handwriting) on the kid’s palm.

  Aya slowly opened the window a fraction. The young lad outside was jittery and nervous. He leaned in close, and hissed at her in hushed tones.

  ‘I bring a message,’ he said. ‘You have to get out, right now. Don’t go to work today. He wants to see you…At Albert’s Monument in the memorial park. You got one hour,’ the boy said.

  Aya had a hundred questions for him, but he answered none. His message delivered, he was already making his way back over the balcony fence, to slip back down.

  ‘How do I know I can trust you, or him?’ she called after him in a whisper.

  He had already slid over the railings. He gave her one last foul look.

  ‘Max is out. That’s all,’ he said, before he slipped from sight.

  Aya watched stunned, as Pinks slipped away into the receding night and her mind raced with a million questions. She stuffed herself into her CURE uniform. It was left on the end of the bed, ready for work. She didn’t think about the appropriateness of it.

  It didn’t matter.

  Daybreak was coming.

  “You have to get out. Right now.”

  Aya felt that the warning was real. She was sure of it. Jack knew more than she did, and if he said “get out,” she wasn’t going to doubt it. Her dreams had convinced her that something terrible was coming. Soon Mada would be up, and the after that, Ajit would arrive to escort her into work, for one of her last days. She thought of the nightmare again. It mustn’t come true. It mustn’t. The masons in her dream had terrified her. She hoped that they weren’t the ‘real’ ones. How had Jack gotten Max out? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. She just knew she had to get out now, while she still could. She must know, one way or the other. She couldn’t live with not knowing. Mada could be up and camping outside again, she thought. She checked the gap under the door for the tell-tale shadows. Nothing. That didn’t mean that she could just walk out though. Since the last escapade with the imitation Mr Betts’s visit Mada had become even more vigilant.

  Aya slipped into her clothes, and gently eased the window fully open. On her bedside desk, was a collection of photographs. There was one of Kaleem (her father) and Sara, (her younger sister). There was also another of Aarif. Mada had forced her to put it there. She quickly dismantled the frame with Kaleem’s picture in it, and slipped the photograph i
nto her pocket. Then slowly, and carefully, she climbed out the window. She crept down the stairs and out into the lonely street.

  Aya almost ran the distance from her home to Memorial Park. She took great care to stay out of the street lights and away from the windows of the people’s houses. It took her just over half an hour to reach it, and by the time she got to the gates of the park, she was hot, scared and sweating.

  Memorial Park was quiet. It was still early morning, and the first rays of daylight were creeping over the horizon. Aya crept along the pebbled pathways, stealthily moving from hedge to hedge. She had told herself that she was being ridiculous, but it felt like the right approach. Stealing the information for Jack, had made her into somebody else: someone who didn’t feel comfortable walking down the street like an ordinary innocent person.

  Memorial Park was built over the ruins of an older park. Hyde Park it had been called a long time ago. That park, had been utterly destroyed during the Day of Reckoning, and its reconstruction had been early on in the building of Coney City. It was now regarded as one of the older sections of Coney City. Sectors Six and Seven were not really considered a true part of Coney City by most people. They were dismissed almost as easily as the ruins that surrounded the city on all sides and out in The Wastelands. Nothing natural would grow in Memorial Park when it was rebuilt. The land underneath was scorched and scarred. Now that same land bristled on both sides with flowers. Even in the dim light, they were striking and vibrant. The entire park had an extra layer of topsoil that had been specially engineered at the CUB. It pumped nutrients into the plants and was capable of sustaining them even through the winter months. It was a park that never lost its colours or brilliance and had been designed in line with the rest of Coney City. The plants looked tropical. Nothing that colourful could have ever thrived outside of a jungle climate. They had been engineered, along with the soil they grew from. That same technique of unnatural growth had been refined, and used to create the floral gardens of Eden in the north.

  Aya had never been there, but it had been on her list of possible places to elope to with Max. That was, until her birthday, and Max’s arrest. Now the idea of them living happily (and walking through the domes and their gardens) seemed more remote than ever. The flowers reminded her of Mada’s flowerbox, and she wondered if she would ever see Mada’s flowers again. She knew that by deserting Aarif, she would never be allowed home again. She had been to the park before, with Max. They had walked along the tree-lined avenues, and past the fields of everlasting flowers. Aya had thought it romantic. She recalled that Max had been sullen and hadn’t enjoyed it. He had mumbled something about having a recurring nightmare about walks in the park. They never returned after that.

  Aya knew that Mada would never approve of her and Max. She wasn’t sure she cared anymore. Her nightmares had convinced her that he was the right choice. It felt like the only choice.

  The paths intersected at a central point. Ahead of her, a dark silhouette dominated the scene. It was of three figures. Aya approached the stone statue cautiously. She couldn’t see Jack. Above her, Albert Coney (the founder of the masons) looked down with stone eyes. Standing on either side of him were two young boys. They were identical. Even as children, the Coney Twins, looked compelling. They stood in their suits of stone, looking forward, out across the park. It seemed to her as if the statues were designed so that their stony glares never met those of the patrons that would see it. Instead they looked outwards at the horizon somewhere in the direction of the Fin-Sen building. A stone plaque rested in front of the statues. Historic words were ingrained into its rough surface. The message engraved there was famous. Albert had given the speech to his sons long ago in the ruins of what would eventually become Coney City.

  That historic speech had been delivered by candlelight.

  There was no power.

  Aya traced her fingers over the words. She knew the story of Albert and his sons. It had been taught in the new schools with the same awe and reverence as that of a major religion.

  "We will bring light to the world of darkness.

  We will bring hope to the hopeless,

  freedom to the repressed,

  food to the hungry.

  This is the beginning.”

  Underneath it, in heavy script, were Albert’s most famous words.

  “Freedom and Equality”

  The words were prophetic.

  His sons had certainly brought light. Nobody could doubt that. Aya could remember the day the light came back and the day Mada’s apartment no longer needed to share the community generator: a device that was noisy, dirty and unreliable. It was the day of the greatest celebration in Utopia’s history. It was a celebration to mark the day that Coney City was ‘born.’ The city had fallen silent as the battered, old community generators were turned off. They ran on the extracts from coal shale – won hard from labour, and death. Their engines spluttered and died, and the whole city fell into absolute silence. The last few irregular lights blinked out, blanketing the place in darkness.

  It had been night and everyone had stood in the streets with the wind whistling between them. They looked dead, like statues. Watching. Waiting. Millions of people held their breath in anticipation.

  Aya turned into her mind to recall the event.

  It had begun with a slow hum: deep and resounding. It echoed underneath the streets through every home, across a hundred million cables. Something was coming: something deep, powerful and unstoppable. A web crafted meticulously by a spider of God-like proportions was coming to life: its billion strands filled with an unstoppable power. It surged forth faster than light, filling every fibre with surging, churning energy.

  The people held their hands and waited as it approached.

  The ground had vibrated and dust had fallen from the top of ruined walls.

  The birds had lifted off from their roosts, cawing loudly, disturbed by the strong smell of ozone.

  Rats squeaked and raced from their holes in the ruins.

  The people held their hands and waited. They were silent in the darkness.

  A tidal wave of pure energy exploded Coney City into life. A million lights erupted into a glorious luminescence all at once.

  Music blared from speakers across the streets as the new city was born.

  Three million people burst into uproarious applause. The mightiest thunderclap paled into insignificance in the face of the greatest celebration ever witnessed.

  It was the day the machines came to life. When their circuitry came to life again: filled with insurmountable energy after years of decay. It was the day the twins stood up with their mason fellow on the steps of what would become the Fin-Sen building.

  It was the day the ‘techno-sorcerers’ of the masons, had cast their greatest spell. The day they had proclaimed the future was ‘now’ and Utopia had been ‘born.’ It was the day everything changed forever, and nothing would ever be the same for anyone. It was the day the Genie Reactor came fully online for the first time.

  The power grid that had been laid out in Utopia, had only been sporadically tested. It had been used solely to power the mighty construction devices that had begun to rebuild the city. That day it surged with life the veins of the city filled with the glowing, precious life-blood, as the reactor was pushed to full power.

  A God from the machine.

  Above the crowds, the silent monorail trains glided into life for the first time. They were covered in neon lighting, and slowly, they pulled away, accelerating to terrible speeds. From a distance, the trains had been beautiful flying snakes of colour, tracing mighty circles around what would become (THE CENTRE OF EVERYTHING)”

  Aya shook her head as if to dispel the memory and came back to the present. The vivid childhood memory faded and she looked around. The park was deserted and she stood alone at the statue. It was still too early for any normal person to be there. A feeling of intense guilt swept over Aya as she looked at the plaque. Utopia had been everyth
ing she could have hoped for. She felt like a traitor. By stealing the files, she had betrayed a trusted friend. In the week since she had stolen the files, she couldn’t look commander Betts in the face. Her crime had gone unnoticed so far. The station continued as normal, as though nothing had happened. There had been nothing in the news about Marko Marseilles: the man in the file that Jack had retrieved the information on. The news was dominated instead, by the grisly spate of killings throughout the city.

  “The Slash-Knife killer case,” the newspapers called it. The Daily Utopic did anyway. Some of the other (less reputable ones) had other ideas.

  “Alien Abduction!” screamed one.

  “Secret Satanic sect at work!” insisted another.

  The Daily Informer claimed that it was a secret agency of insiders working undercover in the system doctoring everything. Aya had snorted in disgust. It always said things like that.

  The station had received thousands of panicked calls from scared residents and she remembered some of them.

  “It’s my neighbour!”

  “It’s my boss!”

  “It’s the army!”

  “Is there a reward?”

  “Can I still walk to the mall?”