Tim Lebbon - White and Other Tales of Ruin

“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked. “I think we should try to go up top now, get out of the city-“

“We’re going in circles,” Honey said. “We’ll lose them soon, then head for The Slaughterhouse . They’ll have trouble finding us in there.”

“How do you know?”

She glanced back and smiled at him, lit by dirty light filtered down from the city. “You’ve obviously never been there.”

The tunnel dipped and they descended several flights of stairs, listening out all the time for the echoes of pursuit. After a couple of minutes they emerged onto an old, deserted tube platform. It was barely lit by sun pipes sprouting from the arched ceiling like the ends of severed arteries, the light weakened by every reflective elbow it had to travel. During the day it may have been light enough to read, but now, at night, the only illumination that found its way down was the borrowed glare of civilisation: street lamps; neon signs; the city’s night-time glow reflected from the underside of low, pollutant-heavy clouds. It was a grubby light, well suited to what it revealed.

The platform and station must have been deserted for years. Tom had heard about these places, way stations on the old underground network, deserted rather than adapted when the trains were changed to monorail. And like any forgotten place it attracted the more feeble side of humanity, those wanting to find themselves lost. The junkies, the wretched homeless, the criminals… there was talk of whole gangs living down here, communing via old tunnels, rising to the surface to attack and rob and do whatever it was they imagined their purpose called for.

“Into the tunnel,” Honey said.

“There’s no light. Who knows what’s in there!”

Honey hugged him and Tom could smell her, sense his brain’s ecstatic reaction to her unique aroma in the rush of blood in his veins. They stood like lovers waiting for a train that would never arrive.

“You’re so brave,” she said. “Who’d have thought you’d have rescued me like that? Who’d can believe I was worth rescuing, by anyone?”

“Nobody’s ever loved you before, obviously.” Honey shrugged slightly, but said nothing.

Tom thought of Doug Skin, her human customer who had supposedly fallen for her, and for a moment he was overcome by something bitter, new and shocking: jealousy. He hated the idea that they were going through this to say goodbye to someone else. They could have left the city and that would have been that.

“Why is your pimp trying to kill you for running? Girls must run all the time.”

“On occasion they do. And Hot Chocolate Bob hunts them down, or more likely has someone do it for him, and they die. Then he buys more plastic bitches on the black market as instant replacements. Gives him a good turnover of girls, fresh meat. Keeps the customers happy.”

“Jesus,” Tom muttered, hugging her tighter as if that would protect her more. “Why can’t he just let you go.”

“Face,” she said. Or perhaps she said fate .

A thump passed through the station. It may have been a sound coming in from the distance, wending its way through tunnels and vents like a gust of air. Or perhaps they only felt it through the ground. A rat maybe, hidden by shadows, jumping from a wall onto the platform… or a violent grenade explosion five tunnels and a mile away.

“Let’s get out of here,” Tom said. “Into the tunnel like you said. If we hold hands we can never get lost.”

“Romance,” Honey said, arching her eyebrows. Yet again, she confused Tom even more. As they jumped down between the rails and out of the weak light, he wondered whether that was love all over.

They walked for two hours. Through the train tunnel, across another platform, into a long, rising corridor, through a set of iron doors that had been blasted open at some point in the distant past. The atmosphere was dank, damp, dangerous, and they held hands as often as they could. Most of the places they passed through had some form of illumination — weak emergency lighting, or more often borrowed light bleeding down somehow from the surface. Some were pitch black. These they traversed as quickly as they could, relying on senses heightened by fear. And deep inside, Tom tried to trust fate as well. He desperately believed that they would have never come this far if an unseen, pointless death down here was all that awaited them.

They heard and felt intermittent signs of pursuit, from a rattling explosion, to a subtly decreased pressure on their eardrums as a heavy door was opened in some distant tunnel.

Eventually, finally, Tom climbed a rusted iron ladder, shoved a manhole open with his shoulders and helped Honey up into the open air.

He stood panting in the deserted street, his right foot and ankle a heavy weight of pain, the cool night air kissing his bleeding wounds as if to soothe. Honey stood next to him and looked around, nodding and sighing quietly. She knew where they were. A hooker has to know the city , she’d said as they took the lift into the underworld. Tom wondered if she’d been a whore forever, but they’d have plenty of time to get to know each other properly. Plenty . The idea that they knew virtually nothing about each other, and yet they were fleeing together for their lives, seemed far too romantic to take seriously.

Looking around, diverting his attention outwards, seemed to ease the pain. They were at the very edge of the city. Tom could even see the enclosure wall, eighty feet high and well lit, it’s top spotted with bored guards.

Honey pointed across the street at a low, curved doorway set in the face of a blank concrete facade. The building was huge and square, more dismissive of aesthetics as any in the city. There were hardly any windows, and those that were there appeared to have been boarded up. Its bulk seemed to swallow the light. Even though a misty rain was falling, there were no reflections from its damp walls.

Above the doorway hung a glowing axe, dripping neon blood onto the heads of anyone who chose to enter.

“That,” said Honey, “is The Slaughterhouse.”

Tom had only been inside a few clubs in his time. Mostly they were visits marred by too much noise, too many drugs, too much drink, too much body chopping… just too much . Artificial he may be — cloned, grown, extruded, constructed and programmed — but Tom was not a man of extremes. The Baker had told him that those who resorted to extremities of existence had lost sight of the beauty at its heart. At the time Tom had found it difficult to understand, but after the old scientist died and the years went by he began to see the truth in the words. Most of those who wandered the streets at night, seeking enjoyment or satisfaction in the arms of mindless experimentation, had lost the simple ability to live . They needed more, and more, and more, without giving themselves the chance to get used to what they already had.

Tom’s club visits had been out of interest in other people, not to find anything for himself.

He’d been to The Club at the End of Time, Fuck-Shit and Hell, among a few other. In one he was mugged, in another he was hit on, in the rest he was ignored. He’d hated every one of them.

The Slaughterhouse… it was as much a club as Krakatoa had been a slight pop. The Slaughterhouse was a world . The second Honey opened the main front door and they passed beneath the axe, that world launched its attack on Tom’s senses.

They were in a corridor not unlike some of the tunnels they’d just been fleeing along. There were a few barred windows in the walls, payment booths, but more like viewing holes in prison doors. There was nobody behind them and Honey did not give them a second glance. The floor was uneven, and in the low light Tom could see what he thought were shattered bones forming its covering, the curve of a skull here, the ragged end of a snapped femur there. His balance was thrown and he held out his arms, staggering at every step. He tried not to look down. He was sure… certain … that the bones must be false. Must be.