Dan Carver - Ruin Nation

But heads crack, limbs snap and hysteria breaks loose. Bricks batter brains, bats break backs. Folk lose their footings and ribcages explode under tumbling bodies; breath lost is never regained. The auditorium becomes a Martian world: a sea of writhing limbs; a sky solid with putrefying fruit.

But nothing stops the sloganeers. Oestrogen Proactive parade with banners daubed with tadpoles and ‘We’ve Swallowed Enough!’ and the chant rings out:

An order goes out and Davenport rolls to the rear of the stage, sheltering from vegetables and the smaller, more metallic forms of objection exploding left, right and centre.

“Okay,” Malmot tells the technician. “Let’s get ridiculous.”

“The semen,” starts Davenport, “can be removed in the same manner as the milk. With, er, specialised machinery. This will, of course, mean jobs for experienced farm workers and we intend to keep productivity high with a series of experimental initiatives.”

“Donkey Porn!” comes a cry from the audience. “No to the exploitation of female donkeys!” cries a red-haired woman I seem to recognise.

‘Donkey Rape! Coming to a Town Near You!’ reads a slogan on an ethnic print poncho held by her male companion; and they rally the crowd with increasingly ludicrous accusations.

“I think you know those two,” says Malmot with a smile. “Oh, the joy of Agitation! I learned everything I know from Oswald Mosley.”

“I said nothing about animal pornography!” Davenport pleads. “With an ever-growing livestock population and the inevitable improvements in milking techniques, we intend to have two billion gallons by the year…”

And then the real carnage starts.

“Wind it up,” Malmot gestures and a snatch squad retrieve Davenport from the stage. “Arm yourselves,” he barks. “We’re leaving!”

But he doesn’t say which direction we’re leaving in. Every path’s choked with blunt-object-wielding maniacs – and I include the police in that definition. They’re kind enough to carve us an exit route – through the flying fists and grimacing faces – but they release the leopards before we’ve a chance to use it.

And then it’s every man for himself. And I’m charging down some staircase or other, fast as my legs will carry me. And then I run into Calamine – about a week and a half late by my reckoning. And we don’t stop to greet each other; we just run.

“What happened to ‘tomorrow’?” I pant, remembering our meeting at my house.

He holds up the bloody wound where his little fingernail used to be. I notice he’s running with a limp.

“Staff Appraisal,” he tells me. “A little test of my loyalty.”

“Did you pass?”

“With flying colours. I’ve friends in high places and a twin brother I despise immensely.”

“That’s great,” I say, ear cocked for thundering footsteps, scraping claws and violent screaming. “Now I suggest we run faster.”

And we’re travelling downwards at such a speed that I swear my ears are popping. And we’re out of the fire escape and hiding behind a roof support in the freight area, the blood punching the backs of my eyeballs. My lungs are bursting and my sharp breaths slice through the silence and echo the length of the loading bay. I pull my shirt over my mouth to deaden the noise, but I sound like a steam engine and the world knows it.

Now I’ve fired a gun in combat and I’ve seen the Red Mist turn men into animals. I’ve seen them glaze over and hunt their fellow man like hounds running down a fox. I’ve seen it on the battlefield. Hell, I was seeing it in the playground when I was seven. Violence is always just a hair’s breadth beneath the surface. We’ve cracked that surface and now we’re reaping what we’ve sown.

The fire escape doors splinter open and what bursts out clearly wants to kick someone until his skull splits open. There’s ten of them, armed with chairlegs and bloody shards of mirror; and I don’t plan on being the next thing they pulp. I see a ventilation duct, dark, dirty, dripping, looking like something you’d plug a colostomy bag into. Suddenly, I’m on Calamine’s shoulders, and, before I know it, I’m levering the grill off and I’m in that duct. And then we’re both inside. And they can follow us in, I reason, but it’s a confined space and, if they want me, they’ll have to queue. And I’ll take the face off at least one of them before I go. And I make some heroic statement to this effect, which Calamine finds uproariously funny.

“We have pistols,” he reminds me. And when somebody invades our privacy, he puts a bullet between their eyes and laughs even louder. No one seems to bother us after that.

“So what have you been up to?” he asks. “Apart from the obvious?”

“So that’s the first best way to wind up a leftie,” says Malmot with a curdled chuckle, when we’ve reconvened in the big, black armoured bus. “Not because it’s disgusting and so plainly stupid, but because the production of semen is a solely male preserve and the pro-feminist factions perceive it as sexist.”

“And eight hundred people died because of a perception,” says I.

“Eight hundred people were admitted to hospital over a perception,” Malmot corrects me. “Seven hundred and fifty of them critical. Fatalities are separate. No word of them yet. Still the counting up to do. Standard practice is to pile up all the bits in a room and see how many complete bodies you can make.”

“Fun for all the family, then,” I hear myself comment. I can’t say I’m feeling so proud of myself anymore.

“Don’t be such a fuddy duddy,” Malmot snaps. “People have been killing each other over perceptions and misinterpretations for thousands of years. Who are you to go against precedent?” And then the smile creeps back across his face. “But let’s not argue over that now. Oh, we’ve crippled the Opposition, all right. And once we’ve sent Nelson Churchill out Jew-baiting and lynched Laeticia Veetabycs for twinky-snatching, there’ll be rioting from Land’s End to the Hadrian’s Wall Blockade. They’ll be deader than stone dead ducks.”

“What about the other parties?” I ask.

“Oh, they’ll try to capitalise on the chaos,” says Malmot, “just as we intend to. But the beauty of these single-issue organisations is that they tend to embarrass themselves the minute they emerge from their dank, backroom boltholes. England has an allergy to tie-dye ponchos, you know, and self-righteous, barely-literate protest songs. Some pansy calls for peace and the general public respond by praying for a tank battalion. We’re going to give them that battalion.

It’s time to get out of London. We get a couple of hundred miles, maybe, and then we break down. It’s my fault. I have trouble with authority.

It’s childish, I know, but I’d taken to urinating against the wheel arches under cover of night. It was my little gesture of disrespect. What I hadn’t realised was that I’m some sort of biological freak. I’d given up alcohol and my body was expelling the toxins, with the result that my urine turned highly caustic.

And so we’re driving along when, suddenly, there’s a screeching, a grinding and all the noises in-between, sparks trailing down the road behind us and the back wheels flying past us and off across the motorway. My piss has eaten through the axle.

“That was an armoured transmission,” says Calamari bemused. I say nothing. I hide.

I’m keeping myself nicely out of the way when I notice something unusual: tyre tracks disappearing into nowhere. I trace them through tangled, brambled undergrowth into a deep ditch, where I discover an overgrown wonderland of massive pornographic vegetables: Novelty GM, the feral crop of a crashed lorry.