Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 2

by Malcolm J Wardlaw

  “It’s always an asset for the gang to have gutsy types. It puts the undead rubbish to shame. How about ‘Big Stak’, after Stakhanov? Do you know who he was?”

  “A hero of the Soviet Union,” Lawrence said.

  Ugly Toes had never heard of the Soviet Union. When he further asked what Marxism was, Tricky Fingers started laughing. Ugly Toes glared at him and then looked away, patting his palms on the table and humming. Lawrence observed the lesson—these people had spent years watching their lives stolen from under their noses. It did not take much to set them off.

  Tricky Fingers wound up the matter: “Big Stak it is, then.”

  A rapping noise. SMS London stepped up to a dais and announced the afternoon duties. Gang 4 was in the Separation Shop. The men around Lawrence sagged. A few eyed him with open pity.

  Master Sergeant Ratty led them out of the Square towards the three brick chimneys Lawrence had observed in the morning. The path ran straight as a sunbeam through a plantation of row upon row of willow. Many of the rows had been razed back to stumps and new shoots were already reaching out like feelers. Lawrence supposed the plantation yielded fuel for the heating system. The path crossed a tidal creek with sides of steep, slimy mud, overhung with scrub grass and bushes. Such a creek would be lethal at night. A man would have no chance of climbing out after falling into that brown, cold-looking water. The gang queued to get over the creek by a spindly iron-framed bridge. After crossing to the other side, Lawrence observed a winch mechanism. It was a drawbridge. If the prison camp was on an island in this tidal marsh, security would be simply a matter of drawing up the bridges every evening.

  He started to notice a foul smell, of stale toilet and rotten meat. Ahead, steam and brown smoke lifted in lazy coils against the clear sky. The air was hot, the last insects of the season roared all around. A long building emerged over the tops of the mass of willow. It was built of brick, with a corrugated steel roof, neatly whitewashed, just minor smudges of rust around the bolts. It was clear the building was an heirloom of the Public Era. Such perfectly neat brickwork was not found on utilitarian buildings nowadays, while corrugated sheet metal was simply a luxury. It was not that the Public Era had failed to bequeath a vast heritage of sheet metal, on the contrary, the sheet metal in their beloved motor cars alone could have covered half the landscape. The problem was that most of it rotted to dust within a decade of the Glorious Resolution. Lawrence could see no hints of the original purpose of this building. It did remind him of a hanger for an airport of the Public Era—he had seen pictures in history books. In those days, public aircraft came down on land rather than on water, making use of expanses of marble-smooth concrete so that they could roll about on tiny little wheels like the castors of furniture. Any such airport would have been connected into the vast public highway network. If so, his service on the fens did not leave him hopeful. Most of the Public Era roads had been consumed by the marshes.

  By the side of the building the stench was thick, cutting down the back of the throat. Ugly Toes saw Lawrence scowling in disgust.

  “This is the sweet side of the wall,” he said.

  Ratty stepped forward and addressed the gang, his sharp nose high like a sniffing rat.

  “You were under-performance on your last shift in the Separation Shop. That kind of thing gets noticed in the wrong places. Work together and get the whole job done. That is all.”

  Ugly Toes stepped close to Lawrence.

  “Stay by me, Big Stak. When you throw up, make sure you don’t spoil the product, or the whole gang will get extra parade. You understand?”

  Lawrence nodded and followed Ugly Toes through the doorway. After the blazing sunlight, he was at first blind, immersed in stench, able to see only the skylights high above as if he were a diver looking up at the surface. He was smothered by an overpowering atmosphere of decay, which dragged out of him a wretch. Ugly Toes spun him towards a drain in the floor. Through sheer will power, he forced his outraged reflexes to come to order.

  “Follow me,” Ugly Toes said.

  He strode off, shouting at his section to get started fast, time was passing. He led the section towards one end of the shed. The area was furnished with rows of tables of spanking clean stainless-steel. Each was like a shallow bath, contoured to a drain hole in the centre. Lawrence had only ever seen such tables in hospitals. On each lay a hammer, chisel and two dagger-like knives, all very clean. Beyond the tables, a long black curtain stretched across the end wall of the shed. The gang flowed up to the black curtain and pulled it open to expose a jam of carts piled high with dead bodies. These were the carts they had filled at the Tidal Basin during the morning shift. Ugly Toes gathered a group around the shafts of one of the carts. Top heavy with load, each cart amounted to more than a tonne that would catapult a whole team into the air should it overbalance to the rear. Chanting in rhythm, they levered the cart into motion and hauled it out. A couple of value scrambled up on the load and began shoving bodies down onto the tables. Hands grabbed at clothing, unwinding robes, pulling down pants, throwing them all to the floor where other value collected them in wooden barrows and wheeled them away. Everybody melded their effort to fit the work of the team.

  The work of separation began.

  Now, Lawrence was of hardened character. He had seen human bodies literally torn apart by multi-barrelled brass-munchers. He had shot bandits in the face at point-blank range. During countless journeys on the public drains, he had seen heaps of dead surplus fought over by dogs and vultures. He was not easily shocked.

  At first he could not even believe what was happening on the tables. He could not bear to look. He glanced into one of the stainless-steel tubs of ‘separated products’ passing by. It was full of hands, propelled by Gnasher whistling “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”.

  Extreme economic logic…

  Everyone was at work pulling bodies off the carts, cutting off clothing and chucking it onto the floor, slicing and easing off sheets of skin, hefting fresh hides, laying them out, pulling them straight. They did these things as if the place was a laundry. Ugly Toes separated a thigh muscle from the bone and swept it into a stainless-steel tub. He glared at Lawrence.

  “No passengers here, Big Stak. Pick up your tools and work.”

  Lawrence sighed. In that sigh was the resignation he had not slashed his throat with a dagger. He was doomed to suffer this place of abomination. An infantile, frustrated rage flared; in that moment, a vow took root in his mind, a vow that he was going to escape this hell and kill everyone who enabled it to happen.

  Stooping, dreary with exhaustion after the spasm had passed, he got behind a tub and pushed it out, following other value to the cold rooms and bringing it back empty. The Separation Shop sizzled with energy. Somehow, it turned the work into something positive to be part of one big machine, catching hold of an awkward skin, or retrieving an errant steak from the floor. Time dissolved into the flow of work. The other value joked and sniggered. Spiderman proved to be a wag of especially dry wit. Even Lawrence found himself managing a weak huff of a laugh, whilst value all around him were swaying with laughter and cutting away. So this is how my life is going to be, he thought, swapping jokes while cutting up bodies. Christ, what kind of a lunatic would dream this place up? And why?

  By way of making amends for the fight, he helped Spiderman drag a body off a cart. The body’s head was wrapped in blond hair. Spiderman smirked at Lawrence’s blond crew-cut

  “Well, Big Stak, I hope this is no relation of yours.”

  He swept away the hair to reveal the face. It was so crushed from being under bodies that it was impossible even to guess what the living human had looked like. One side was flat as an iron from being pressed against the bed of the cart. Spiderman explored further, pulling the skirt up and the fine, silky undergarments down. This revealed a child-like penis and a scrotum that was just a wrap of crinkled skin.

  “A spay,” Spiderman said. “This’ll hav
e been the fancy of some other lump of meat in here. Do the honours?”

  He passed over a knife, which Lawrence took as a peace offering and got to work, cutting as he had seen the experienced value do it. Spiderman watched with his dark, intense eyes and took the knife back to work on his side.

  “You’ll survive here, Big Stak. You’ve done this kind of thing before. Your dad a whaler or something?”

  “A judge.”

  “Really?” He laughed into a wry jeer. “I bet The Captain gave you a good slagging about that.”

  “Does he sneer at everyone?”

  “You bet he does. That’s his big joy in life. He’s a cold, callous bastard, notwithstanding which I wouldn’t under-rate him. He built this place from nothing to eighteen hundred head of value—and it’s still growing. Fuck knows where it’s leading.”

  Spiderman cut down the front of the eunuch’s torso, whilst Lawrence eased the skin off to reveal sugar-white subcutaneous fat.

  “Careful, eunuch hide is highly prized,” Spiderman said. “It’s soft and strong. That’s better. Were you stupid, or unlucky?”

  “Stupid. I denounced a corrupt superior officer and I got court martialled for corruption.”

  “You should have known better than that, Big Stak.”

  “He was such a smarmy non-entity. It bugged me to see him pocket a hundred ounces every month for doing nothing but turn a blind eye.”

  “You should have got his action, you twat. You’d have a nice house, a car and a pretty wife. Instead you’ve got life in this place.”

  Lawrence fell silent. The face of Sarah-Kelly floated before him, right there, so close and so real, that he could feel the warmth of her skin and smell the perfume she made from cinnamon and lemons.

  “Well Big Stak, you learned your lesson,” Spiderman said. “The pity is, that lesson is a one-way trip. Hold it up will you?”

  Lawrence held up the skin from the torso of the eunuch.

  “Lovely piece that. No moles or sunburn. No tattoos.” He smirked at Lawrence. “You’d make a nice piece too, Big Stak, with your snowy white skin.”

  “I’m not a eunuch.”

  “Better gay than spay, or so they say.”

  “I’m not gay either.”

  Spiderman turned and held up the hide to Yip-Dog, who slipped his hands under it and carried it over to a tub with other skins for the Bating Shop.

  “We’re nearly done,” Spiderman said. Most of the gang were idling, watching other value pull the last bodies from the bottom of the last cart. “Ratty can’t complain about our performance, we must have done the best part of three hundred head. I reckon there’s still half an hour left. Come on, we’ve got to wash our tools and leave them for counting. The only cock-up now would be if they miss a tool. They’ll keep us here until the end of time if there’s a knife missing.”

  Chapter 5

  A cost-centre lieutenant ambled into Oban railway station and posted a letter denouncing Account-Captain Second Class Peterson-Veitch as the kingpin of a smuggling network stealing exotic tusks and animal skins from the Loch Sunart nature reserve, a private garden of the Krossington clan. The denunciation was done without second thought, yet in posting that letter, Lawrence had thrown his life away. Afterwards, he dined with Sarah-Kelly at a restaurant owned by Rackland, one of the merchants who later testified against him.

  He was arrested the following Wednesday. He never saw or heard from Sarah-Kelly again, as no communication was permitted. She probably never even knew of his arrest. These things happened discreetly, for obvious reasons of protecting the good name of General Wardian. So-and-so has been called to a family emergency. Further enquiries would be stone-walled. Yes, they would have done it that way, leaving Sarah-Kelly to the wolves—she had no one to protect her from marauding officials. What was she? A clerk in the trading office of the Mull and Morvern estate. She never realized how vulnerable she was.

  Lawrence first heard of her in headquarters chatter about some hot new blonde in the town. She was variously described as ‘saucy’, ‘uppity’, ‘needs a right good seein’ to’. She had a flat in the town and not the accent of a lady. Supposedly she was running a frenetic—and doubtless commercial—sex life away from prying eyes at Oban Castle, where low-ranking staff normally lived. She already had a prickly reputation. She had refused the butler, the bursar and a captain of the marines, all highly respectable officers that a snippet like her ought to have been flattered to be served by. Having snubbed them, she had no chance of a career.

  Lawrence attended weekly meetings of a committee grandly titled the Cabinet of the Household Inferior (Oban Castle). General Wardian glory trust had overall responsibility for guarding the frontier of the Krossington’s Mull and Morvern Estate, essentially the Island of Mull, the Ardnamurchan Peninsula, the Loch Sunart nature reserve and an area roughly five miles in radius around the town of Oban, a total of just over 600 square miles. The task was to keep surplus flow out and to extract nests of infestation within the frontiers. Inevitably there were customer complaints when General Wardian failed to meet its standards of service. Lawrence was supposed to smooth things out at these liaison meetings. He hated it. He was no bland diplomat and he was never going to be one.

  After one such meeting in early April, Lawrence stayed on to have a leisurely apero on a terrace overlooking the castle gardens. Below him was another, more crowded terrace for glory troops of lesser rank—drivers, quartermasters buying stores and so forth. It amused Lawrence to eavesdrop their conversations. Mostly they discussed banalities such as the local football league, horse racing, golf, motor cars owned by the town’s élite, or else gripes about pay and bonuses. Lawrence’s name came up now and again, in ambiguous terms. He was derided for his aloofness. On the other hand, there was grudging acknowledgement he had worked his way up from probationary basic and had commanded a barge. The more savvy had a pretty good idea what that meant, even if it went unspoken.

  The desultory chat ceased.

  A young woman minced along the path from the castle gates, flat-heeled shoes crunch-crunch-crunching over the gravel. Her gait was not remotely the floating conceit of the society women. She came marching up, stiff-legged, hair jumping at every pace, one arm fixed straight down gripping a leather briefcase, the other metronoming a rigid vivace. Blonde hair shielded her face—all Lawrence could see was a sour, rich-lipped mouth and a prominent chin. He smirked. This must be the hot blonde they were all raving about. Not an ounce of femininity about her. An obvious bitch.

  It was time to get back to HQ, or he would be carpeted by Account-Captain Turner for rolling in at 3 pm from a meeting that finished at noon. As he stood up, he paused, listening to one of the sergeants on the terrace below.

  “I’ve heard from several people there are moves afoot to give that little bint a bloody good lesson in manners. There are blokes at the castle who want to whistle that little number off to a cottage somewhere quiet… nice and quiet. A little bit of horizontal education for her, if you know what I mean. She’s got fuck-all cover: no family, no friends.”

  Lawrence mulled this over on the drive back to Oban HQ. True enough, if someone made enemies, they did not last long. It was all rather a pity. He kept replaying in his mind’s eye the forty seconds or so she had been in view. The lush, full mouth lingered, as did the straight back and the defiant poise of the jaw. Probably she was not really a bitch, so much as contemptuous of the leering, middle-aged oafs on the terrace. She troubled his mind over the next few days. He started to worry about her. One did hear about people in lowly jobs who simply vanished. They were like her, with no family nearby and few, if any, real friends. Most probably they just dropped out of an unhappy situation and went home. It made you wonder, though; suppose the rumour was true? Suppose at this moment, scoundrels were queuing to take their pleasure in her?

  A whole week oozed by. Lawrence saw no more of her, except in his imagination, where she minced about with her rigi
d, sweeping arm and balled fist. What did she look like from the front? She might be moon-faced. She might be skelly-eyed.

  Exactly one week later, he was on the terrace overlooking the castle gardens after the routine meeting with the grandiosely-titled cabinet. He had twice been caught day-dreaming by the cabinet chair. Now, he waited, toying with his gin and tonic. He kept jumping up and circling his chair, pausing to stretch his arms and exhale, as if he had a stiff back.

  A blonde head appeared through the bushes towards the castle gates. He descended the terrace steps towards her. She came marching on in her stilted, graceless way. Her face was wide and even featured, pleasing, with a bold jaw and fine nose. She blinked at him, as if a waft of dust had made her eyes smart. The sour, downturned mouth twitched up. She seemed to recognise him. He halted at the corner of the path, in full view of the oafs leering at her over their pints. She was now just a few yards away, slowing down, her mouth open a little, revealing a wide curve of teeth.

  He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her, hugging her tight, pushing his face into her hair. It smelled of lemons and cinnamon.

  “Oh my gawd!” She stifled a giggle.

  “Pretend you know me, it’s important.”

  He straightened up, feeling his cheeks glowing. His hands rested on her hips and down the tops of her backside. The muscles pulsed as she first pulled back and then stepped forward right under his chin. Scooping her along with his arm, he urged her back into motion.

  “Are you completely barmy?” she asked.

  “Just act along and keep your voice down.”

  “It’s original, I will give you that.”

  It was about twenty yards to the staff entrance of the castle. Lawrence became the world’s greatest actor pacing across a stage, dumb, his lines forgotten. The entire terrace to his right fell silent. He heard an incredulous whisper: “An officer, with that?” Jaw tight with anger, sweat dripping from his armpits, he kept his chin up and pace slow. They stopped just before the entrance, where two amused marines were watching them.