Dan Carver - Ruin Nation

The mummified driver hangs entwined in wrist-thick tendrils, garlanded with nippled tomatoes and crowned with an arse-like pumpkin.

I beckon Speechwriter over. He misreads my grim smile.

“Don’t you feel any kind of sympathy?” he says, exploding into wet-liberal apoplexy. “What kind of a man are you? You! You , with your corrosive urine and your tinkering around in dead people’s innards and your starting riots and your stupid false moustaches?! Is your mother proud of you?!”

“Yes,” I tell the pompous little twat. “She was. But now she’s dead. She was hit by lightning and burned from the inside out, right in front of me. I was ten. Is your mother proud of you ?”

Speechwriter doesn’t know what to say to that. Speechwriter’s mum runs yoga retreats and has an open relationship with some hippy fuckwit who paints his bollocks with woad.

A tow truck pulls in, sees me holding a gargantuan carrot phallus and pulls straight out again.

“This may take some time,” Calamari says.

We’re in a pub. I’m drinking the only non-alcoholic option available: my own distilled urine. And if that’s not enough to curdle the soul, we’re in Lincolnshire.

If all’s going to plan, a contingent of phoney ‘Brownshirts’ should be marching upon New Downing Street right about now. Soon after, they’ll be bombed by whatever collection of aeroplane parts our engineers can coax into the sky. We don’t know what form this aircraft will take but we’re all agreed it should be called ‘The Phoenix’. The propaganda opportunity’s too good to miss.

Calamari has a warped idea of relaxation. If he’s not punching children in the arm with a sharpened corkscrew, he’s suggesting we all go for a leisurely narrowboat trip down the remnants of the Grand Union Canal. But there isn’t much of the canal left to cruise down, so we’ve run aground and decamped to a delightful dive situated between an abandoned themepark, the various sites of an electricity plant and the Rampton mental hospital. It’s weird and I don’t like it, but we’re stuck in stasis until Malmot makes contact. When? We don’t know. I mean, how long does it take to destroy a capital city?

In this little backwater, the only contact with civilised society is the weekly shipment of Country and Western records from some mythic nearby town. Television’s referred to as ‘the Devil’s Box’ and the genepool’s so tiny it makes Battencross Manor look healthy. There’s one attractive woman here and she’s deceased. Her plaster death mask stares out from behind the bar.

“Who’s that?” I ask.

The landlord, broad and barrel-chested, fight-mashed face and a nose like a sheep’s stomach, pivots on the heels of his cowboy boots.

“Mother,” he says, expanding our matriarchal theme.

“Yours?”

“Everyone’s,” is his teary-eyed and deeply worrying answer.

“The last human being in Lincolnshire,” mutters Speechwriter. “Before they de-evolved back into apes.”

Our armed escorts – the State Security Staff, or whatever you want to call them – they’re outside, kicking something. No one seems concerned by the gunshots. I sip my horrid drink. Speechwriter’s being thoughtful.

I pull back the thick, crusty curtains. “It’s snowing!” I say.

“No, I think you’ll find that’s fallout from the powerplant,” says Speechwriter. He pushes his spectacles up his nose and passes me what appears to be the local newspaper.

“You know what this means,” he says, tapping the page.

“What?”

“We’ve underestimated them. Somebody in this village can read.”

Calamari walks in, wearing that pleased facial alignment that means he’s been up to no good. He must have found something to fuck. Now, relaxed and refreshed, he decides to have a conversation with us.

“We’re leaving,” he says. “So douse the place in fuel and set light to it. And you , Jupiter: take the landlord outside and hang him.

…I take no pride in my actions that night.

“Any word from London?”

“Plenty of words,” answers a smirking tough, polishing his rifle. “Just none of ’em repeatable.”

I’ve seen housework elevated into an art form. Our Security Staff take gun maintenance into fetish territory. I guess it kills the time between killing people. So whilst they beaver away at their bang-sticks, I watch the grey wreckage of the English countryside roll past the windows, wondering what kind of a city I’ll return to. Will I still have a home? Will I still have a wife? And do I care either way? Because she’s not a nice person and I’m… I’m worse. I’m a murderer.

“You were pretty handy with that rope back there,” says the polisher.

“I had a gun to my head,” I protest.

“Erm, no ,” he answers. “I don’t think you did.”

“It felt like I did.”

“Never hold up in court,” he says with a shake of the skull. “But don’t beat yourself up over it.”

“I was only following orders.”

“Hah! Didn’t wash in Nuremberg, won’t wash here!”

“I can’t say I care for the analogy. I’m not a Nazi.”

“I know. They gassed their victims. You threw him out of his kid’s treehouse and hanged him with his own belt. Then you jumped on him and swung on his legs.”

“I was trying to do the decent thing.”

“What? Humiliate a dying man?”

“No! I, er… I read it somewhere, or something. You swing on their legs and it breaks their neck. It makes it quicker.”

“Not the way you do it, pal!”

I can’t look him in the eye. I’m not feeling especially proud of myself at the moment.

“The first kill,” he says with a sudden seriousness, “it never sits well. Not if you’ve got a conscience. You just got to think of yourself as a round in a gun. It’s someone else who aims the gun; it’s someone else who pulls the trigger. We’re just bullets, man. We go where the gunpowder takes us.”

“So I shouldn’t feel guilty?”

“No. You should always feel guilty. Because, if you don’t, well, you may as well hand that soul of yours straight to the Devil.” He casts a cautious eye over Calamari and with that sideways wisdom, he puts down his rifle and starts to polish his boots.

But I don’t have a conscience to trouble me, just a very real sensation of falling downwards whilst still standing up. It creeps over me from time to time, leaving me a little numb, but I always get over it eventually.

So time ticks on without me. The miles slide beneath our wheels. When the waking world calls me back, it’s to confuse me with unexpected scenery.

“Where are we? The fucking Peak District?!”

No-one’s answering. If they weren’t all so busy with their combat boots and tins of dubbing, I’d swear I was surrounded by extremely ugly statues.

Where there should be the expansive horizontals of a newly-flattened London, there’s diagonals, curves and the odd unexpected vertical. Green in colour and grassy in texture, it appears to be countryside, replete with luscious rolling hills and… gun emplacements?!

Well, call me old-fashioned, but I’ve never seen a mountain with a door in it – let alone an armed checkpoint. This is Malmot’s work. It bears all the hallmarks of a gateway to Hades.

Speak of the spindly shit and He shall appear. He unfolds himself from an overhead luggage locker. And whilst that last image may not be factually accurate, it’s still my abiding memory of the moment. He manifests in smoke and brimstone and his words unravel in a lazy purr.

“Welcome to Colchester Barracks.”