White and Other Tales of Ruin

by Tim Lebbon

  “No. And yes, I suppose. And yes, I have been here before.”

  The woman across the aisle snorted. “And the prize for the most ridiculously confusing answer goes to …”

  “I won’t tell you my name,” he said.

  “I don’t think she was expecting you to.” The threads were parting faster now, and I guessed I had maybe thirty seconds to go. Then all I had to do was exit the coach, dodge however many more soldiers, droids or demons there were, find Laura where she was strung up between trees, get her down and navigate my way out of Hell.

  Easy.

  I laughed manically as the strap popped free. Standing up, I saw the coach for what it really was. As wide as the coach on a train but much longer, so long that perspective stole the end from sight. And all the way along, chairs like my own sat at each window, with a narrow aisle in between.

  I turned around and the same sight greeted me, except this time there were shocked faces watching me from each chair. I caught a few peoples’ stares, even though I tried not to. There was interest, anger and resentment in equal measures, and I realised that those who had no idea what had happened here must be blaming me for their tour being halted.

  “How the hell do I get out of here?” I asked, stepping into the aisle and glancing over the chair at the man in front of me.

  “Same way the demon got in,” the man said. And I wondered how he could talk at all.

  I’d once seen the results of a speed-bike crash. The rider had been thrown against a wall and was a broken, shattered mess. Limbs askew. Shape changed. I never thought I’d see the same in someone living.

  “Huh?” I uttered stupidly. I could not form words because what I saw stole them from me. He was so badly battered and misshapen that it must have hurt him to live.

  “Up there,” he said, nodding back over my shoulder.

  I turned and looked along the aisle, noticing a dark patch in the ceiling which could only have been a trapdoor. “Do you know the way?” I asked turning back.

  His face did something that may have been a smile, and he shook his head. “I’ve been out there once before,” he said, “thinking I could change things, imagining I could help the hopeless. That’s how I got this.” He didn’t point to anything, but he didn’t need to. I could not make out where parts of him started and ended. Tears burned in my eyes and throat, but I guessed that he probably wouldn’t appreciate them at all.

  “So up there is out?” I said. And I thought, out of where? Out of the coach and into the forest and barbed wire and Laura? Or out of Hell? Back into that waiting room perhaps, the stunning woman standing by the wall painting and pointing out intricate details of cruelty and pain I hadn’t noticed before.

  “If you must go,” he said, “yes, up there.”

  I looked at him and wanted to ask him how I could help. But he’d obviously come here for a reason, whether he’d found his way in by accident or not. I could only guess at what traumas he suffered day in, day out, to warrant a second visit to this awful place. He blinked slowly, one eye only closing halfway because of the knot of scar tissue on his eyelid, and I took it as a message. The strap was to stay around his waist. He wanted it that way. He’d always be confined now, however his condition had come about.

  That’s how I got this, he’d said, talking of what was outside.

  I turned and walked to the trapdoor, and as I looked up through it I could see reflected light coming in from somewhere. Somehow, it smelled like what I had seen outside should look: blood, rot, pain, death, anguish, nothing fresh, all of it corrupted.

  Laura.

  “I want to help you,” the woman called from her seat. I turned and saw her straining at the strap, glancing nervously at the motionless thing lying by my vacated chair. A wisp of smoke curled from its broken visor, but I was sure I could see black movement in the shadow cast by its body.

  “Why?”

  She looked at me, frowning, trying to speak but unable to find the words.

  “Why?” I said again. I wasn’t used to people helping me, and I didn’t believe it now.

  “Laura’s still alive,” she said. And I nodded, because her son Paul was dead and perhaps, in this, she could shed her helplessness.

  “Not if we don’t hurry,” I said, and that was that, agreed. I found the shard of visor composite and knelt by her side, hacking, pulling, slicing and sawing at the strap until it came apart. She stood shakily, hanging onto my arm as her tired legs tingled their inactivity away.

  “I’m Chele,” she said.

  “Hello Chele. I’m Nolan.” I went back to the trapdoor, knotted my hands and motioned her to climb. “What can you tell us?” I asked the mutilated man as Chele heaved herself up through the trap. I heard her banging about above the ceiling, suddenly wondering whether I’d sent her up first on purpose. If there were more of those demon things up there …

  “More demons,” the man said.

  “Don’t tell me they’re demons, there are no such things as demons!”

  “No such thing,” the man repeated, and a rattle in his throat may have been a chuckle. “Well … this is a strange place, and strange things happen. Last time I was here, when I was out there in all of it, I saw one of them sprout wings and take flight.”

  “Cyborgs,” I said. “Is that what they are? Constructs? Artificial—”

  “They are what they want to be,” he said, “and here, most of them want to be demons.”

  “Hey,” Chele called. “Something’s moving out there!”

  I looked at the blackened window of the coach, as did the mutilated man. “How did you…?” I began.

  “There are so many worst nightmares out there, it’s not even worth me telling you,” he said.

  “Why did you come back?”

  He looked at me with his tortured eyes. “To remind myself I’m not still here. I really wish you luck.”

  Laura, a voice said inside, and I was wasting time. It was probably a waste of time to begin with — I’d seen her blood, seen the pain in her expression — but the bastards had stolen her away and hung her up out there …

  … and for the first time since seeing her I actually began to wonder about why she was here.

  If Laura, how many others?

  “Hey, you, I’m moving off, are you coming?”

  “Yes,” I said up into the dark rectangle above me. I jumped up and held onto the hole’s edges, glancing around me before I hauled myself up. The expressions on the few faces I could see told me that they thought I was mad. As for the mutilated man, he had no expression … but his eyes spoke volumes.

  Goodbye, they said.

  I scrambled up through the hole and into the space above the coach, a false ceilinged area that must have been intended for ventilation and security.

  “Hey, you,” Chele called from ahead.

  “My name’s Nolan.”

  “Well Nolan, there’s a door up ahead, and something out there smells.” She crawled on her hands and knees and I followed.

  “I should have brought that demon thing’s weapon,” I said, but Chele didn’t hear. I paused, looking behind me and then ahead again, terrified that I’d see another one of those things crawling my way.

  Chele eased herself around, hung her legs out through a low opening in the wall and dropped out of sight. A second later I heard her strike ground. I edged forward and looked out.

  Chele was squatting on her haunches, picking at the lush green grass, sniffing it, running her hands across the bright daisies that grew in profusion between the coach and the trees. Dark things darted in the air around her head and she waved them away. I waited for them to attack her, pierce her skin and puncture her insides, but then a couple landed on her arm and they were only flies.

  I dropped to the ground next to Chele, knees buckling and rolling me into the grass. I ended up on my front, breathing in the beautiful aroma of grass and dirt and the wilds, nothing artificial here, nothing made … all natural. I closed my eyes for a s
econd and remembered a time with Janine, lying in the sun and making her a daisy chain.

  “Where’s the coach gone?” Chele asked quietly, mock-calm.

  I knelt and turned back to the coach ... and it was not there. There was something there, something big and heavy where the coach should be … but perhaps that was my memory playing tricks, because all I could actually see were rolling meadows, clumps of trees, a valley leading down, down, a river following its route to see where it went.

  I turned and looked at the trees I’d seen from the coach window.

  Then back again at where the coach should be.

  “It’s gone,” I said.

  Chele almost laughed, but the sound didn’t sound quite right so she stopped. It was too much like madness. “If this is Hell I’m going to start being a naughty girl,” she said. And I knew that something awful was going to happen.

  It was the way the birds sang, fast and energetic, as if they were keen to finish and leave.

  It was the way the river flowed away from us.

  It was in the blue skies darkening with clouds, how the trees behind me seemed to be a mirror image of those in front, right down to snapped branches and bloodstained trunks.

  The threat was there, palpable, hidden from view, but smelled and sensed the more I looked at our surroundings. “Laura,” I said. I started to run back along the line of trees.

  “Nolan!” Chele called. “I don’t know if I can run!”

  Right then I didn’t care. I’d known this woman for an hour, she’d put herself in unknown danger to come out here and help me, but I didn’t care. My only concern was Laura, and whether she was still alive.

  As I ran and heard Chele’s pounding footsteps behind me, I began to glimpse shadows shifting within the treeline to my right. I looked head-on, but I could only see them from the corner of my eye. They moved all wrong, these shadows, shifted position when branches were still, darted from trunk to trunk, evaded my stare but still gave themselves away. If they were demons and they chose to come at us now, we were finished. Pure luck had given me the upper hand with the thing in the coach, luck and Chele’s help, and I hadn’t even had the presence of mind to grab its stun-gun when I came outside. Last time, I saw one of them sprout wings and take flight the mutilated man had said.

  I’d smelled burning meat when I thrust the stunner through the broken visor, and the thing had been twitching in pain, and there was no way at all I could have done that to a droid, they were just too strong.

  Demon …

  More movement in the trees, and this time when I looked the shadows made no effort to hide themselves. They were human-shaped, loping along, steadying themselves against trunks, easily keeping pace with us as we ran in the open. Some were deformed, with hunched shoulders and huge heads. I glanced back at Chele; she had seen as well, and she put on a spurt of speed and caught up with me.

  “We have nothing,” she said, and I started looking around for a heavy stick or a fist-sized rock with which to defend ourselves.

  Up ahead, between two trees, what looked like a giant spider web spanned the space between the trunks, black lines against the clear blue sky. I slowed and saw that it was comprised of long, drooping lengths of barbed wire. At its centre, where dozens of wires crossed, chunks of something clung to the barbs. I didn’t want to look, I knew I shouldn’t look, but Chele’s horrified gasp drew my eyes down to ground level. A body lay beneath the web, torn and distorted where its weight had ripped it from the constraining wires, flesh weakened by rot, bones parted by death. It provided a feeding ground for small animals now, and I tried not to look too closely. I did not recognise any species.

  “That’s not Laura,” I said, but for a few seconds I did wonder. Perhaps in this strange place, ten minutes on the coach had been ten hours out here. I looked again, saw that the shape wore the remains of a boiler suit, not a dress. We ran on.

  And the figures came out from beneath the trees.

  One second the landscape was bare, and we could have been hiking through the unspoilt uplands of Switzerland or the foothills of the Himalayas. The next, thirty people had stepped out to watch us go by. And they were out of nightmares.

  The hunched shadows I had seen resolved themselves into wretched shapes bent double, the huge heads great rolls of barbed wire. They were ape-like in their attitude, some naked, dirty, covered in sores, and where the wire pressed to their shoulders it had settled into the flesh, finding the hard bone easier to rest on. They looked at the ground, never seeing more than four steps in front of them. Perhaps that was from choice.

  The others, those standing upright, were bedecked in all manner of military paraphernalia. I saw an old Nazi uniform, all leather and belts; a white outfit from some Arctic warfare unit; a braided jacket from the Napoleonic Wars; dirty green camouflage from the more recent European conflicts. Sandy desert garb, drab olives, a bulky NBC suit … more I did not recognise. And looking into the faces of those wearing the uniforms, I knew that there was nothing at all regular about these men and women. There was a desperation about them all, a glint of defiance in their eyes, as if all the deserters from history had gathered together to avoid, or perhaps accept their punishment.

  A few carried weapons, some of which I recognised, others I did not. The glinting gold shell, clasped in the fist of one of the women and feeding green tendrils into the veins on her wrist ... I had no idea what that was or what it was designed to do. All I could be sure of was that it was bad. The woman’s face told me that, and the scarring around the moist socket where her right eye should have been.

  “Who the fuck are you?” one of the men said. He stepped forward until he was standing nose to nose with me. I could smell the sweet rottenness of his breath, stale sweat, and something worse wafting from a dirty bandage on his right shoulder. He carried a serrated knife clotted with dried blood.

  “I’m looking for my daughter.” I glanced over his shoulder and past the milling people, trying to see beyond their threat to the trees where I thought Laura hung. They were only a couple of hundred yards away. I could run there in a minute, be holding my dear, dear daughter to my chest within a minute more, nursing, comforting, hoping that I was not too late and would need comforting myself …

  “I said, who the fuck are you? Not, what the fuck are you doing? If I want to know what you’re doing for I’ll ask, what the fuck are you looking for? Get it?”

  “Fucking right,” I said, wincing inwardly but unable to avoid the sarcasm. “And as for who I am, my name’s Nolan. Not that it’s any business of yours.”

  The man stepped back, his eyes went wide and he brought the knife up in what looked like an expert defensive attitude.

  If he goes for me now, I thought, that’s it, no hazy knife defences learnt in karate when I was sixteen are going to save me.

  “What are you ... where are you from?” He looked at Chele as well, and the others suddenly seemed more interested. Even those hunkered pretences at humanity seemed to raise their heads.

  I saw something in this madman’s eyes — not fear as such, but caution and … hope? I told him what I was sure he wanted to hear. “We’re visitors here,” I said, “and I’ve just seen my daughter back there between those trees. Strung up.” The man had a pair of wire cutters hanging from his belt. His hands were slashed and scabbed and scarred, as if his favourite hobby was crushing glass bottles by hand. “You did it, didn’t you?”

  “You’re from outside?” His eyes went wider and the knife dropped down.

  “Yes. Listen, you’ve got to help me —”

  “How did you get in here? Why didn’t the demons stop you? Where are they, are they following, are they coming?”

  “I got past one, jumped the coach, that’s all. Chele here offered to help me. I saw my daughter. And if you don’t stand out of my way …” I cast my eyes across the gathered throng. My threat was so weak, it didn’t even warrant finishing. I’d never felt so scared, so downright terrified, not even when I
’d seen Janine lying there in her deathbed. Then I had known what was happening, and I’d almost come to terms with the fact that there was no chance for her, just a long, slow end. Now I had no idea what state Laura was really in, whether she was alive, whether she’d recognise me or even want me...

  I’d never felt so damn scared.

  “Come on!” the man said, reaching out for me. I drew back and he snorted, shook his head. He had long wild hair, black teeth and boils on his face, but his eyes were bright and intelligent. “Come on,” he said, “we’ll help you!”

  He turned to his followers — if that’s what they were — and shouted: “Drop the wire! These are from outside!”

  “They all are!” an unseen someone shouted.

  “Yes, but these shouldn’t be here. They’re alien.”

  I pushed past him, sick, angry, desperate to find Laura. Chele came on behind me. The people followed her, I could hear them mumbling and chattering excitedly, but I forged ahead. Nobody seemed willing to stop us.

  I broke into a run.

  And then I saw Laura.

  And the skies darkened, fat drops of rain like spatters of blood hit my skin, a fast, violent wind smashed through from behind the trees, the branches shook, the barbed wire web swayed back and forth, and I heard my daughter’s cries as the wire tore her more. Her dress was wet with blood, which at least showed that she was still bleeding. Dead people don’t bleed.

  “Oh Jesus!” I gasped, because my pale-skinned daughter was a red-faced demon, her eyes wide and her mouth foaming. “Oh sweet Jesus, just why …?”

  “Hey,” Chele said, hugging me quickly, tightly, before rushing to the foot of the nearest tree. She was a big woman, I noticed that for the first time as she began to climb. Her clothes were baggy and black, designed to hide her size, and she moved up and along the branches with a grace I could scarcely believe.