by Peter Ackers
"…INDUSTRIAL HELL CITY…"
I was approaching my exit, my city. I took my eyes off the grey road, lifted them into the lightening sky. Despite the fan of colours thrown up by sun as its light refracted in the atmosphere, the world had a monotone look to it, almost as if it were submerged under an ocean whose surface I couldn't see and whose waters were photo-still. I almost wondered what would happen if I opened my door. Would water flood in, rapidly fill all the spaces and then be still again, allowing me to float out of the van and breast-stroke home some three feet above the road, veering to the side or higher to avoid cars also abandoned by their now-swimming drivers? I wouldn't need a lift to reach a high floor in a tall building. There would be no more gridlocks in the city. The timber yard would be empty. The fishing supplies shop would be under massive attack. And with all the tampons sodden and useless, unencumbered menstrual blood would diffuse through the city like a dark mist.
This monotone look had the effect of making my 3-D vision useless, because I couldn't fathom the distance between my patch of motorway and the buildings that were rising up way ahead. The city was rearing up to meet me like a host. The high-rises were first, their nondescript lengths offering no visible pattern or break to judge size; they grew towards the sky like needles withdrawn from veins, seemingly knitting themselves into greater length out of nothing but air. If only man could weave his monuments with the magic of a spider spinning a web, this was probably how it might have been to watch.
Fat, flat-topped buildings burst out of the spaces between the high-rises and sat there between them like chubby little kids at a mother‘s gathering outside the school gates. If the power-offices that occupied the high-rises were the brain of the city, and the supermarkets and launderettes and cafes and schools were the belly and heart (and gallstone, if you include the squat edifice that was the homeless shelter), then the spaghetti-vomit roads and alleys were no doubt the legs and feet. And caked to those feet, like dirt on the most expensive pair of shoes, were the dossers, the criminals, the bastards that I was here to stop. Looking at the city from its glamorous top down to stinking bottom created in my belly a growing sense of nervousness at what I might find within. Because around the foundations of the most fabulous palaces, you still find creepy crawlies.
Although the motorway seemed to zip dead ahead into the centre of the city, I knew it slipped neatly past and onward. So I was forced to turn off my direct route when my exit arrived. A brief feeling that I was heading the wrong way, then all was fine as I saw a sign at an approaching roundabout, which promised me that I would reach my target if I went the way the little arrow was pointing.
The road curved back towards the motorway and over it atop fat, graffiti-emblazoned pillars, and then I was driving down a wide dual carriageway towards a large windowless black building with ugly sharp edges and unexplained outcrops here and there, as if it had been made by a giant kid with obsidian Lego. This was the NCP carpark, located in what the locals called the city's asshole, its back door. Entering the city from this direction, you could question the city guides that described it as a thriving metropolis: it looked more like the entrance to some industrial Hell city, as the dual carriageway seemed to dig itself deeper into the earth as you closed on the carpark, until the grass verges became steep grass banks that abruptly transformed into slanted walls of concrete that turned the road into something like a vehicular version of a swimming pool's water chute. And when the sun was blotted out as you drove under a bridge created by the black building spanning the road, it almost felt like a real water chute without the water, because cars had wheels. You burst through the tunnel created where the ground and the black building met and turned sharply left, and if it was your first time here you didn't know what to expect. Even now as I roared down that dual carriageway like a bullet along a gun barrel, part of me expected my vehicle to slip out of my control, to veer and lurch and strike one of the slanted concrete walls, ride halfway up and be yanked down again by gravity; to cross lanes and smack the other wall – picture a comical back and forth across the road and up and down the walls like a skater in a half-pipe, striking other cars, sending them spinning or overturning, yet not slowing, zipping ever downward in twists, until a river of vehicles rolled/grated/bounced to a neat stop at the flat bottom of the chute.
But instead the road leveled out and the twenty or so cars that had accompanied me here slowed, spread out, took corners or pulled over, and dissipated as people went about their business all over the city that was opened before us. The fun of the ride ended here.
I noticed that there was another reason besides the sprawls and twists of a conurbation for the slowing of all vehicles: a police car was parked in a grey alley between two tall buildings, with its nose jutting out from the shadows, like an alligator's snout barely breaking the surface of a lake. One mistake, I knew, and these bored peelers would snap their jaws around some unlucky motorist who didn't respect the speeding laws.
I drove past the cop car slowly, not looking at it. That might look like guilt, and I remembered the cops I'd come across earlier that night, the chase that had been sparked by my guilty looking eyes. What if my description had been fed to all the other cops? I was no criminal, but they might want me out of the way anyway. They were paid handsomely for their protection, so wouldn't want a Samaritan like me treading on their toes. I could be in danger from this vast gang of heroes. God eat God world.
