by John Barlow
“This is what dad tried to stop!” Ben said to himself. “This is why he came back from the Island! To stop all this.”
But he hadn’t succeeded. Sullivan had built his Complex, and John Brewer had disappeared.
Ben knew what he had to do: he had to get closer to Sullivan.
*
“You still here, country boy!” Pol said, rather loudly as she looked up from her game. Then she laughed, embarrassed.
“Yeah,” said Ben.
“Hi,” the girl’s brother said, glancing up. Then he returned to his screen and continued playing.
Pol seemed unsure of herself. All the games in the tent were taken. Ben stood there, not knowing what to say.
“So?” she said at last, breaking the awkward silence. “How long are you here for?”
She sniffed hard, and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand.
“Got a cold?” Ben asked.
She looked at him, confused. “No. What do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Ben. Then: “Hey, fancy showing me the fair? I’ve still not seen it properly.”
The girl’s brother turned his head to listen, still playing his game.
“I...” she said. “I don’t think...” She paused. “Oh, all right! Why not?”
Her brother spun around. “Pol, you shouldn’t!” he whispered. “You...”
“I’ll be fine. We’ll be careful, won’t we?” she said to Ben. “Come on.” She turned to her brother. “I’ll be back soon. You stay here.”
Poking her head out of the tent, she stared up towards the four towers of the power station. In front of the chimneys was that big, square concrete building, five stories high, with the one long window at the top.
“Try to stay out of sight,” she said, pointing at the square building.
“Why”
“The Control Tower,” she whispered, with hateful, worried eyes.
She led him quickly behind a row of tents and down along the perimeter of the fun-fair.
“Keep out of sight!” she whispered to him, grabbing his hand and pulling him along whenever they got to a gap in the line of tents.
“Keep out of sight of what?” Ben said, frustrated at her secrecy.
They stopped at an open tent. It was a coconut shy, but of course there was nobody there.
“Jason Sullivan, the little creep. He’s a worm.”
“Sullivan’s son?”
“Hey, you’re one smart kid, Ben,” she said.
But he could see that it was all false, this attitude of hers. Beneath it she was nervous. Her face twitched when she said that name.
“Jason Sullivan. He stares out of his window, up in the Control Tower. Look.”
They peeped around the side of the tent, and Ben saw the large, single window high up on the Control Tower. The window, though, looked empty, and the rest of the big, square building had no windows at all. It was just a massive square block of concrete. Whatever was inside must have been enormous.
Meanwhile, Pol picked up a ball that lay on the counter and threw it at the coconuts, which were arranged in triangles. The ball hit, but the coconuts didn’t move; they were stuck together. The ball bounced off them and fell to the ground.
Then they made their way along the tents at the back of the fair, finally stopping in front of one with several full-length mirrors in it, each one distorted in some way, making you look big and fat, or small and thin. Most of the mirrors were cracked, but Ben thought it was funny anyway.
“Pol,” he said, as he looked at a seven-foot version of himself, “those Stun Commandos. Are they, like, dangerous?”
“Never seen a Stun Commando before?” she asked, almost amused. “Really?”
“No,” he said. “They’re Sullivan’s troops, then?”
“Crack troops.” She smiled. “His inner circle. You know about the war?”
“Yeah, more or less...”
“People came up here during the war, when the destruction everywhere else had got too bad. They were gonna build a whole new world. Sullivan was! Can you believe that, now? And those Stun Commandos? You really wanna know where they’re from?”
He nodded.
“Prison. Way up on the north coast, about as far from civilization as you could get. High security prison. That’s where the most dangerous prisoners used to be locked up, before the war. Ironic, don’t you think? The worst individuals in the country, absolute scumbags. All the way through the war they were up there, safe as houses, away from the germs and the death and the horror. And afterwards, Sullivan made them into his private guards.”
“The guns?” Ben asked. “Are they...?”
“Stun guns. Electricity, like everything else here. There are no proper guns anymore. No bombs, no bullets. All that stuff was used up during the war. All they have are a few electric stun guns. That’s all there is, you see? Old coal mines and one power station. Our little paradise!”
She looked up at the chimneys, her eyes narrowing.
“This is all Sullivan’s fault, isn’t it?” Ben said, eventually.
“You don’t want to know too much about him,” she said.
But I do, Ben thought. I need to know everything there is to know about Sullivan. Because he knows where dad is.
They stood in front of one of the mirrors and looked at short, stubby reflections of themselves.
“Anyway,” Pol said, “I wanna know about you. Vegetables? That’s rubbish, isn’t it? C’mon, Ben, don’t lie to me. Are you an unfound? Why are you here?”
“Unfounds?” Ben said.
Pol looked at him. “People who survived the war and just keep themselves to themselves. Unfound people. By now most people have got...” she waved a hand in the air, “...a whole new way of life. Ha! Safe inside the fence!”
“Is that what the fence is for?” Ben asked Pol. “To keep people safe?”
She found this funny. “At first it was to keep ’em out,” she said. “But now it’s to keep ’em in!”
“Who keeps you in?”
“Who?” she said, puzzled. “Why, comrade Sullivan, of course!” she said, at a whisper.
“Are you prisoners?” he asked.
Pol shook her head, as if it was too sad to reply. Then she sighed. “He doesn’t have to. Everyone’s too scared to leave. Anyway, Sullivan has no prisoners. No enemies. Not anymore.”
“What happened to them?”
“They’re all buried,” she said, “out in the land of the sea rivers.”
“Sea rivers?”
“You know. Out to the west. At the end of the west road. Don’t go there!”
Ben swallowed hard. Sullivan even had a place to send his enemies. Or to send their bodies...
“Perhaps he does still have some enemies,” he said.
But Pol just laughed at that idea.
For a while they stood there in silence. She looked at the ground, fidgeting.
“Pol,” Ben said, after a long pause. “If you were Sullivan, and you had an enemy, you know, a really serious enemy, like in a war or something, but the enemy had a secret that you wanted to know...”
“Yes...”
“...if this enemy was the only person who knew the secret, and it was the thing you most wanted to know in the world...”
“U-huh...”
“...then you’d want to keep the enemy alive, wouldn’t you? Even though he was your worst enemy?”
She thought about it. Finally, she shrugged. “Sure, you’d want to keep him alive.”
“Even if it was a long time? Years and years?”
“I dunno. Perhaps. If you had enough patience.”
She gave him the strangest look, a cross between suspicion and disbelief. Then, as if she were casting a ridiculous thought from her mind, she said:
“You wanna play hoop-la?”
They ambled across to a hoop-la stall and began throwing rings at plastic ducks without looking to see where they landed. The afternoon was just about drawing to a c
lose, and the sky above had begun to turn from a dull gray to black. Pol kept sneaking little glances at him, a look of suspicious disbelief never far from her eyes.
“Why is there never anyone in the fun-fair?” he asked, out of the blue.
Pol put down the plastic rings and stared straight ahead, her eyes welling with tears.
“This place used to be full of kids,” she said. “All waiting here whilst their parents worked. I mean, there’s nothing else to do. But these days everyone keeps out of sight, hiding in the tents, even when it’s not raining. Terrified that Jason will see them, and they’ll become the next victim.”
“Jason Sullivan?”
She was edgy. She glanced at her watch.
“Listen, country boy...” she huffed, her lips beginning to tremble. “Look, you’re not from here. Take it from me, if Jason Sullivan is looking out the window, you’re in trouble!”
“But what will they do?” Ben asked.
“Playslave,” she said, softly, whispering it into his ear. “They’ll force you to be a playslaves for little Jason, the pathetic wimp.”
“A playslave?”
“Yup,” she said, throwing several hoops. They clattered to the ground, all missing at once. “He’s got stuff up there. A Playstation. You ever heard of that?”
“Yes!” he said, irritated. But in fact he had never played on one, because the only Playstation on the Island had broken years ago, before he was old enough to be allowed near it, and there were no spare parts to mend it.
“Well, he’s got one. And Nintendos. He’s got all the games, everything that there was left after the war. The spoilt brat.”
“And he has slaves to play with him?”
“Not any more,” Pol said. “Not after the last one. The one who disappeared.” She turned away, as if to hide her face, which was streaming with tears. “Come on,” she sniffed, “keep moving. Don’t want him to spot us.”
“Did you know him?” Ben said softly. “The last one? The last playslave. The boy who disappeared?”
Silence. Her eyes were swollen, but there was a defiant stare in her eyes, something strong that would never be defeated.
“Pol,” he said. “This place, the Complex, all this. It doesn’t have to be like this you know.”
She snorted, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “What do you think you can do about it!”
“I don’t know. But I promise you, I’ll be back. When I’ve found my da... I mean, I’ll be back for you, trust me.”
“Who are you?” she said. “You’re not an unfound! No one comes here of their own choice. Are you...”
“I,” Ben began. “I can’t say who I am.”
She moved closer to him and put her mouth close to his ear.
“Be careful! Whoever you are!” she whispered. She kissed him fleetingly on the cheek. Then she peered at his scar: “By the way, have you been in a fight?”
“No, I...” said Ben.
But she turned quickly and was gone.
As dusk settled across the mainland, the Complex lit up like a Christmas tree. Every house and building, every conceivable space was drowned in light, straight from the power station: electricity, the only commodity that was in plentiful supply. TV screens all played the same loop of old game shows and reality shows, the sound turned up high. You could hear the TVs wherever you went, and you knew that inside every house Complex Spirit was being drunk. Because there was nothing else to do.
Welcome to the Complex.
Ben stood at the edge of the fun-fair, and squinted up at the Control Tower. It was beginning to rain. He was thinking about his next step. And wondering if he dared to take it.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sawyer shut his eyes. He felt his head being thrown about, left and right, yanked savagely by the hair until he was dizzy and his neck ached with pain.
“I want ’em, fatty,” Sullivan shouted, right into the melted man’s face. “We want ’em.”
Sullivan was very tall. He wore heavy boots, and his legs looked as if they could have give an emu a good kicking. Long black hair fell down over his shoulders, and his chest was broad and solid, tightly packed inside a black and gray camouflage jacket. A leather gun belt was strapped diagonally across his middle, a strange, square-barreled gun holstered in it, resting on his hip.
Sawyer’s yellowy face quivered. Little beads of sweat appeared on his upper lip and his forehead, glistening in the stifling heat of the room.
“They stole your car, crashed it down a ravine, but managed to escape? With a bunch of emu-lators?” Sullivan shouted.
“Yes,” the melted man murmured, looking down at the floor.
“And the car? You just let them take it? Eh? Just like that! Do you have any idea how many of those cars we have left? You fat, stinking heap of nothing!”
“They had a bullet pig, Sir.”
“A bullet pig? A bullet pig! A pig costs me a car!”
Sullivan stood back, took out his gun, and aimed it at the melted man’s shoes. Sighing with boredom, he pulled the rigger. A thin, crackling trace of light shot out, hitting the melted man on the ankle.
Sawyer cried out, jumping up, wincing with pain. A puff of smoke rose from his socks, where the small electric current had burned a hole in the material.
“Don’t cry, you pathetic baby. It’s only fifty volts. No more than a tickle, look!”
With that he fired again, this time at the man’s big belly, two, three times, each time making a scorch mark in the denim overalls, Sawyer swiveling and doubling up as he tried to avoid the tracery of the stun gun.
“Dance, you slob! Work off some of those spare tires! Dance, fat-so!”
Sullivan aimed the gun just above the melted man’s head and fired a dozen times, leaving little burn marks high up in the gray paint on the wall, and laughing out loud, a deep, booming laugh which, if you didn’t know better, you would laugh along with, because it was curiously infectious. Sullivan was curiously infectious. Despite everything.
“And where were these kids, exactly?” he asked absentmindedly, examining the end of the gun before slipping it back into the holster.
“In the east, Sir.”
“Five of them. And they fought you off, and rode away on a bunch of emus, eh? You pathetic waste of space.”
Sullivan turned away and examined a large map on the wall behind him.
“How long since we’ve had any unfounds out that way?” he said to himself, as he ran his finger along the map.
The control room was painted gray. There were monitors on the walls, and desks full of switches and dials. There were two doors, both of them big and heavy, made of steel. One was painted gray, and led out onto a corridor. The other door, on the opposite wall, was bright yellow. A large, black cross was painted on it, and beneath: DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE. DO NOT ENTER. From behind the yellow door came a hum, low and constant, enough to feel through the soles of your feet.
“What do you reckon, Jason?” Sullivan said.
In the corner of the room a boy was slouched in a chair, looking bored.
“Can I go now?” he said, tired of watching his dad bully the melted man.
“We’ll find ’em, Jase!” Sullivan said. “We’ll find you some new friends!”
His son pulled himself up from the chair and mooched out through the door, back to the private rooms at the end of the corridor, where he spent most of his time playing games on his own.
“And you!” Sullivan said, grabbing Sawyer by the collar and shoving him hard against the wall. “I don’t know why I waste my time with you lot, you useless overweight morons! Buckets of lard, the lot of you!”
Sawyer kept quiet as he stood to leave. He was used to it.
“And another thing,” Sullivan added, “tell your men that I’d rather lose twenty of their pathetic, fat carcasses than one more patrol car. You got that?”
“Yes, Sir,” Sawyer mumbled, closing the metal door shut after him and walking back down a long, gray
corridor which led out of the Control Tower.
“Police force, pah!” Sullivan cursed to himself. Then he leant down and spoke into a small microphone on the control desk:
“Harman, get in here. Now.”
A minute later, the Captain of the Stun Commandos appeared. He was bigger than the door, and had to duck down as he stepped into the room.
“Sir,” he said.
“There’s a bunch of kids on the loose, somewhere out east. Stole one of the patrol cars off Sawyer and his men. Trashed it. I want those kids brought in.”
“We’ll get ’em,” said Harman, not an ounce of doubt in his voice.
“Send your best men. Three of them at least. Apparently, a couple of the kids like a fight,” Sullivan said.
“Really?” Harman said, his lips curling into a smile. “Not as much as we do.”
He turned to leave.
“Oh,” Sullivan added, as if he’d forgotten, “go and pay a visit to the usual suspects. Don’t spare anyone. And another thing, these kids were helped by some emu-lators. The emu-lators’ll squeal, no sweat. Do whatever you have to. Whatever.”
Harman turned and left, marching slowly down the corridor, laughing silently to himself. He really detested emu-lators.
At the other end of the gray corridor was a door. It led to the apartment where Sullivan and his son lived. One side of the room was glass, the entire wall, a long window which looked down onto the fun-fair below. Jason was standing there now, peering down, his face pressed to the glass. Hard, booming music rose up from the fair, the same as it did all day and all night, thumping like a malicious heartbeat.
Behind him in the room several great big plasma screens were on. One of them was paused in the middle of some game or other that he’d got bored with. He ignored it, and stared down at the fair. As usual, there was no one to be seen. Inside the tents, he knew, there were children his own age, playing old, rickety arcade games whilst they waited for their parents to finish work. He could meet them if he wanted. Any of them. All he had to do was click his fingers and his dad would just have them brought up to him.
