Tim Lebbon - White and Other Tales of Ruin

He spat dusty blood and felt it dribbling from his ears.

“A hooker’s got to know the city,” she said and grunted as she pulled, gasped, and Tom closed his eyes to see her naked and writhing on his face the day before.

I’m more human than I think, he thought.

There was a continuous rattle and thud as detritus from the ruined alley rained down the lift shaft. And then came three louder impacts, regularly spaced, and time froze again.

The doors screeched open. Tom and Honey rolled out and crawled sideways so that they were away from the lift doors. Tom had a second to look around — they were in a long, dimly lit tunnel, service pipes ribbing the ceiling, condensation dripping onto the rusted metal walkway, fists of fungi pressing out between old bricks in the walls — and then the three grenades exploded. The lift disintegrated and splashed its metallic guts out into the corridor, wounding Tom’s senses even more and stroking his outstretched legs with a brief tongue of fire.

He gasped in relief as the fire retreated… and then screamed as fresh flame leapt from the ragged hole in the wall, white-hot and stinking of intent. It flowered like a cloud of snowflakes gusting through an open door, twisting and wavering almost as if it were conscious. Service pipes burst apart, spraying water and gases which were heated and mixed by the chemical fires, turning breathable air into a deadly mist of poisonous steam.

Tom stood clumsily, favouring his good leg, and grabbed Honey under the arm.

“Where to?” he shouted, coughing and retching as the bad air clawed his throat.

Honey nodded along the tunnel and started running, Tom following on behind. His ankle had swollen and pushed the head of his boot out; his back was cool with shed blood; other bumps and cuts added their own song to his symphony of pain. And in front of him still, leading the way, Honey’s clothing was soaked from her left shoulder down by the blood leaking from her gashed neck. The bullet had scored a line there without actually entering… but Tom was still terribly afraid at the damage it may have done.

The last thing they could do was stop.

From behind them came the sound of flames gushing through the lift wreckage, and a blast as another grenade was dropped. It wouldn’t take the mercenaries long to realise that there were no dead artificials at the bottom of the shaft.

“Where are we going?” Tom shouted.

“It’s a maintenance tunnel to the underground,” Honey called back. Her hand went up to her gashed neck and pressed as she spoke. “The other way leads back into the station those things came from. This way goes to the river, branches out, connects into other underground networks. You can get from one side of the city to the other, if you put your mind to it.”

“We may be able to buy passage downriver.”

“ The Slaughterhouse is this way,” Honey continued, acting as if she hadn’t even heard Tom’s idea.

The noises behind them had stopped, and they paused in their flight. Tom found the silence more distressing than the sounds of destruction. It meant that the mercenaries were thinking. “I think we should get out of this tunnel.”

“I agree,” Honey said, “but I’m still not quite sure where we are.”

“You’re bleeding,” Tom said. He moved to her and tilted her head slightly so that he could look at her neck.

“So are you.”

He kissed her above the wound, tasting sweat and blood. He couldn’t believe that she still wanted to visit the club, but for now their priority was to escape. Where they went afterwards… that was something to think about later.

“I think that way,” Tom said, indicating a door in the wall a few steps away. “If we do our best to get lost down here, we’ll lose them as well.”

“Well, that’s original crisis thinking at least.” Honey grinned at him, a bloodied plastic doll.

They opened the door and entered the corridor beyond. It was much narrower than the one they left, badly lit as well, and here and there on the floor were piles of ragged clothing which may once have contained people. Tom was glad for the bad light; it meant he couldn’t see bone or desiccated flesh. Rats scurried around their feet, flies buzzed them, and fattened things crawled on the slimy walls.

“They say the buzzed sometimes come down here to die,” Honey said. “Getting out of the sunlight sooths the pain. Or something.”

Knowing whom the remains belonged to didn’t help Tom one bit. The further they walked along the dank, damp tunnel, the more corpses they came across. At one point they had to step on brittle bones and shift piles of clothing aside with their feet to get by. Rusted chains jangled as they finally parted, spilling cheap imitation jewellery to the floor.

“Do you think we lost them?” Tom asked.

Honey stopped, turned and cocked her head slightly to one side. “Stop breathing,” she said. They exhaled, and Tom could hear only the blood pulsing through his ears, whispering secret words to him, messages from his body saying, run, this is all wrong, you’re not built for this, this love, this fear and danger . But looking at Honey he chose instantly to ignore them, because she was worth everything.

“I love you,” he said.

“I think they’re burning their way along the tunnels,” she said. Then she glanced at him and smiled. “Love you to. What a strange thing to say.”

“I mean it!”

“Not you, me. I never thought I’d ever say it to anyone. Never in my vocabulary.”

“Well — ”

“We’re not built for it.” Honey gave him a quick kiss, wincing as the movement stretched the wound on her neck. “But I guess we’ll adapt.”

They moved on and took the next exit from the tunnel. It was a hole smashed through a thick brick wall into the neighbouring main sewer, its edges rough and festooned with an alarming swathe of spider web. Tom heard the web tearing as his arm brushed by, and he wondered whether it would serve as another fresh sign of flight for the mercenaries.

“We need to change tunnels again soon,” he said. “As soon as we can, three or four times. They must have biometric scanners, they’ll pick up our sweat from the air, our breath, our shed skin. We won’t lose them by running fast. But hopefully we can confuse them enough to give them the slip.”

There was a coughing explosion from somewhere far behind them and the tunnel lit briefly, softly

They jumped down into the sewer. It was disgusting. It stank, it was thick like congealed soup. Tom could even taste the filth in the air.

Another explosion rumbled through the sewers, knocking a drift of dust down from the curved brick ceiling. It was difficult to tell which direction the blast had come from.

“There!” Tom said, spotting a rotten wooden door leading off from a stone ledge.

Honey scrambled up and tried the door but it seemed to be locked from the other side. Tom joined her and together they smashed at it, groaning as the impacts reminded them of their various wounds. The wood gave after several attempts, and they spilled into another tunnel, this one lit intermittently from above through frosted glass paving blocks.

As they hurried along, Tom tried to think of where they could be. There was a pavement like this down by the river, spread along the main promenade road in front of the classier hotels. There was also a roller skating area back in the centre of the city, a gathering place for junkies and buzzed when the lights went down. But there were probably a dozen more streets and roads and courtyards with glass paving… and Tom finally admitted to himself that he was lost.

Honey was leading them now.

For some inexplicable reason, this change of emphasis disturbed him. Perhaps it was a machismo thing, the idea that he had saved her and should continue to do so. But that was just so human…