Dan Carver - Ruin Nation

Did I mention why I stopped going to church? Well, you tell me how Torment creates a good man? All God’s ‘chosen’ people, He shat on them. Turning to piety, that’s the brain’s defence mechanism. God isn’t testing your faith, He’s testing your endurance . Like a kid burning ants with a spyglass; or pulling the legs off a spider. Or Josef Fucking Mengele, for Christ’s sake.

God’s the drunk parent who burns His children with cigarettes for sport, orchestrating genocides to fill the quiet patches in His eternal diary. And on a smaller level, a deeply personal level, He singles out individuals for special, degrading treatment. This is how I find myself in Lord Battencross’ bedroom with a pistol in my hand.

I wondered how my life and the teenager’s death would intertwine. It seems I’m to end it. But then…

The room, for all its red flags and posters of Che Guevara, is still the epitome of genteel poverty; it’s beautifully furnished and larger than my whole house. The wallpaper screams elegance. The bed sheets may be worn but they’re still silk. It’s just the seven dead goons that ruin the feng shui. That and the young man with his face slashed up into mosaic pieces.

“Don’t bother with the boy,” says Calamari. “He’ll bleed to death soon enough. Shoot Spencer.”

Spencer, kneeling at my feet, looks up at me. I raise the gun to his temple. And I freeze.

“Amateur!” he spits.Calamari snatches the weapon and unscrews the silencer. “The bang is very important,” he explains.

Two shots at point-blank range; Spencer’s skull explodes; he collapses, leaking red into the Persian rug.

“Now take this,” says Calamari, handing me the gun. “And, for God’s sake, smile. You’re a hero!”

I watch him bend over the twitching corpse.

“Who’s ‘special’ now?” he asks, jamming his fingers into the entry wounds.

I feel sick. I turn back round in time to catch him digging in the dead goons holsters. He takes out Spencer’s semi-automatic. He presses the barrel to my forehead and pulls the trigger. Click! Nothing but a click.

“Dud bullets!” he laughs. “Just in case.”

I don’t ask just-in-case-what? I know what.

“Now swap those magazines for live rounds,” he growls. “And look sharp! We’re expecting visitors.”

The English stiff upper lip? It’s a myth. Lord Battencross ebbs away in his mother’s arms and the poor cow explodes with grief. The air’s full of tuxedoes and crinoline gowns and suddenly, as the man found holding the gun, I find myself standing on the window ledge with a makeshift noose around my neck.

“No, no!” Calamari cries. “He stopped them!”

I don’t know what happens next. I pass out from asphyxiation.

Durham sits in his prison cell, half-heartedly adjusting the mandibles of his stag beetle costume. I mentioned before that he likes entomological role-play. He sticks on a pair of antennae and he sets about getting down and dirty the six-legged way, with no forethought for who might charge in and arrest him. In this case, me.

Now get this: Circumstantial evidence has worked in my favour for once. If you believe the papers, then I’m the brave Army officer who rumbled Durham’s plans and set out on a doomed mission to foil them. I may not have saved young Lord Battencross, but I took on his executioners – single handed, I might add – and dealt out summary justice. I then set off with a team of crack commandoes, tracked the vile, insectoid pervert down and stormed his filthy lair. I confiscated his weapons, burned his massive haul of drugs, liberated the underage prostitutes he kept chained in the basement and then delivered the scheming coward into the hands of the authorities to face trial and a firing squad. The Brownshirts have disappeared and now I’m a hero. But that’s if you believe the press. And who’s just nationalised all the newspapers and replaced their editors with government-friendly stooges? Clue: Begins with ‘M’. But I’ll level with you: I only went on Durham’s capture mission because no one remembered to tell me not to. What I’ll be doing later, at his interrogation, is anyone’s guess. I’m just going with the flow.

So Durham flops backwards on his domed wingcase and promptly slides off the plank bed and onto the floor. He was apprehended rubbing abdomens with a disinterested women half his age. She looked relieved when we burst through the window. I guess dressing up like a giant dung beetle just isn’t everybody’s bag. Was the huge ball of shit real? I don’t know. Tear gas makes for a pretty good room deodoriser.

You wouldn’t take this man, currently floundering around helpless on his back, for the criminal who ordered Lord Battencross’s assassination. Equally, you probably wouldn’t figure him for a sinister paramilitary leader. Well, you’d be right on the first count and wrong on the second, because our Mr D. is far more than an arch deviant in shiny neoprene trousers and bicycle-lamp-lens compound eyes. Yes, Dirty Old Durham is as damn near to a Chief of Police as possible in a corrupt country where authority rests in the hands of those who shout loudest and hit hardest. His ‘Brownshirts’ rule the streets, second only to Malmot’s more menacing and seldom-seen-in-daylight secret service. Durham wants to merge the two factions with the Army and declare himself Leader of Everything. So you’ll understand when I tell you that Malmot has taken umbrage to this and chosen to frame his former colleague for murder.

So he’s hauled off his shell and dragged into your classic darkened room. The bare desk with the bright lamp, the smooth-talking but sinister questioner with the fuming cigarette, the dark figures looming in the background – I’m one of them – they’re all present and correct. All we need’s a nervous breakdown and a signature and we can be out of here and back in time for breakfast.

But our beetle’s made of sterner stuff. He knows all the tricks. He’s wise to any subtle, mental manipulation. Professional pride, I figure, but, having been an extractor of confessions, he’s unlikely to give one without an almighty struggle. Bring on the pliers, I think to myself, because he sure ain’t going for the sweet talk. And then I feel slightly ashamed of myself. Perhaps, I’m becoming desensitised.

Durham’s skewered like a pincushion, sharpened bits of this, that and the other jutting out of him at various angles. Is he bothered? Ask the stenographer. Forty-eight pages of yawns and non-committal grunts would suggest not. In fact, the written record reveals little except me losing my temper.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” I find myself yelling. “How many fucking legs do you think he’s fucking got?!”

Because the torturer can’t seem to tell where Durham starts and the beetle suit ends, the big twat keeps hammering away at extremities made of vacuum-hose and papier-mâché and wondering why he’s not getting anywhere.

After another twelve pages of nothing much, even our mild mannered stenographer’s stamping her little feet and calling him a retard and Calamari winds up asking the poor lad to leave. Then it’s grumpy faces all round as the incompetent youth takes the walk of shame and Durham bids him goodbye with six different middle fingers simultaneously. You’ll notice he hasn’t spoken yet. I’m wondering if he can. Perhaps he communicates in clicking noises?

This is all too much for Calamari who has, in the past, applied for a torturer’s position, but was turned down for being over-qualified.

He strides forward and smacks the ringing metal lamp with his massive, meaty fist – directing it into the prisoner’s bulbous eyes.

“Take the mask off.”

“No,” comes the answer in a surprising, bronchial bark. I’d expected a sustained chirrup and a quick tune played on his back leg. I have to say I’m disappointed. A black, hairy limb reaches forward for a cigarette and pokes it into the pink-lipped hole between the antler-shaped jaws on his helmet.