White and Other Tales of Ruin

I stood on something wet and red and disgusting, wondering which piece of Black Teeth was beneath my feet. His heart, empty of pity? His mashed eyes, and all the terrors they had seen? Perhaps it was his hands, his fingers that had wrapped the wire around Laura’s wrists.

I ground my feet and smiled. I’d never, ever killed anyone before. The closest I’d come was thinking about killing myself.

“She’s still breathing, I think,” Laura said, kneeling next to Chele’s prone body. I looked, so helpless.

“What now?” someone asked. “What now, now that we’ve killed the demons? Are we free? Can we go?”

“Don’t be so stupid,” someone else answered.

“How long has this been happening?” I said, looking out over the mud and hefting the pad-rifle.

“What do you mean?”

“How long?”

“Forever.”

“Minutes…”

The answers were all wrong, though all the speakers obviously felt them to be right. I could sense no confusion there, no doubt.

And then I saw something that was nearer to home than anything I’d seen since escaping the coach with Chele: a disturbance in the mud, halfway between the bandstand and the ruined houses. At first I thought it was the mud river passing over a ditch or culvert, but I noticed that the hollow in the surface was moving, passing across the lake like the concave shadow of a cloud. It was a wave caused by something unseen, an outside influence in here.

And it was so close to home because I knew exactly what it was.

“There!” I said, pointing.

“What? Where? What?” They all spoke, and the tone of their voices all said the same thing.

“How can you accept all this so easily?” I asked, disgusted. The people looked at me, a couple of them frowning as if they’d forgotten something vital. I brought up the pad-rifle and glanced at Laura. She knew what was about to happen and ducked down, covering Chele’s wounded face with her own body. I felt so proud.

Still nobody answered my question, so I opened fire at nothing.

The third shot opened a window to reality.

There was a face revealed there, cringing away from the rupture as glass exploded around them. The woman looked out and the shock was rich and honest. The blood made it so, because she must have never expected to end that day bleeding. And it was as if she saw this scene as it really was for the first time. Before, behind the protective glass of the coach, it was played out for her; a holo clip, a flash of history or a keyhole onto the future. Now it was different. Now she could see and smell and sense the truth of things.

The rest of the coach was still invisible, but the wound in its side located it. I could imagine where it was, if not actually see it, so I swivelled a few degrees and fired again, blasting out a panel and revealing the fluid workings of its engine. I turned again — I saw the woman’s fear as, for a split second, she stared into the pad-rifle’s barrel — and fired twice more, smashing holes in the rear of the coach. They were sharp-edged rents in its skin, like shrapnel wounds bleeding reality. More faces stared out. One of them screamed; I could hear him, hear the pain and shock as he tried to dig shattered glass from his throat. I knew that no one could help him because they were all strapped in. Hell … it was a very personal thing.

The last thing I could feel was regret or pity.

“We can get out,” I said, turning to Laura where she knelt beside Chele. “We can get on this thing and get out of here.” I looked around at the others, their gazes switching between me and the strange, stark holes in the false facade of their lives. “You’re an entertainment, you know that don’t you?” Even as I said it I knew it was untrue — they, and we, were far more than that — but my loyalty was clearly defined: my daughter. That was it, the be all and end all, the reason I’d come here in the first place. The fact that my visit had given me the opportunity to rescue her and actually bring her back to me … that was a stroke of luck and fortune I could not consider. Right then, getting out was my prime concern.

The idea that I could be destroying this for everyone didn’t cross my mind.

The woman in the coach stared at me, unable to move, awaiting her fate with sad, staring eyes. I turned away but still felt her gaze, accusing, confused.

“You do know,” I said again, and the people on the bandstand stirred as if an invisible breeze had raised their heckles. “You all remember what you were — ”

“Of course we do!” a woman said. “And we know where we are, and why we’re here and … we’re not as stupid as you think. But …”

“But what?” I prompted.

“But the demons,” one of the men said. He was looking over my shoulder as he spoke, and I knew that that we were still a long, long way from the end of things.