Tim Lebbon - White and Other Tales of Ruin

“Shhhhhh,” the voice said again, and Tom opened his eyes. The room was moving around him, the table tilting, the ceiling fluid and pocked with hundreds more memories yet to be seen. The only stillness in the room was Honey. She had loosened her clothing and tried to make herself naked. Dried blood speckled her breasts and stomach from her neck wound, and as her hand delved inside Tom’s trousers and found his prick he went under again.

The room had velvet lined walls and stank of stale sex. There was a naked fat man between his legs — Honey’s legs, because it was her past history he was seeing and living in snippets — and his hand worked at her slit. He kept glancing up as if his rough assault was pleasuring her, and Tom heard Honey sigh and groan, felt her shifting her hips to maintain the illusion—

— and he opened his eyes and she was feeding him inside her, sinking down onto him and gasping out loud as the penetration matched some hidden memory leaked from his mind. She rose and fell, and Tom could see his wet length revealed and swallowed again like scraps of memory, never the whole picture. He snapped back again, eyes forced closed, and there was another room in that stinking whorehouse, two men at him this time, abusing Honey’s body as if payment meant ownership, if only for a time. One of them fucked her, the other burnt her stomach with hot ash from a cigarette, and she writhed in fake ecstasy.

Tom shook his head to kill the memory and she was dancing on her own… and, finding respite, he felt himself penetrating her and being penetrated at the same time, two minds in one.

He hoped she was feeling the same.

Honey rode him, pressing down on his chest to steady herself, and Tom kept his eyes open for as long as he could. Her smile was constant, whatever fragments of his past she was living, and that had to be good. He pushed back, trying to stay deep inside in case he lost her. But she was in control. And inside their minds, finding each other in an impossible sea of a million strangers’ memories, she let him feel how she felt, guiding him in and thrusting himself up.

And in that sex, blooming and bursting like an endless orgasm, something strange and unknown in Honey’s mind… something very much like love.

Tom sat up and shouted, finding the strength in himself — strength of mind, of body, of purpose and soul — to snap off the connectors, plucking them from Honey’s body as well, throwing them at the sizzling machine beside them.

They were leaking sweat from their pores and tears from their eyes.

“Holy fuck!” Tom said.

“Did you feel it?” she gasped. “Did you feel it go? Did you feel it leave? It’s out there now, waiting for millions people to come along and snap it up.”

“It’ll get lost, it-“

“Love can’t get lost,” Honey said. “Not even if it takes forever.” She kissed him hard and heaved herself up and down violently. She was hot around him, and he didn’t once think about the thousands of other men who had been there, the scum and the sad, the pathetic and the cruel. They made love on the dirty mattress, and when they had come they stayed that way, stroking and giggling and kissing as if it was the first time for them both.

She was a dream. Tom had dreamed of her once, but after their joint buzzing he could not know whether it was decades or minutes ago. Maybe it was when the Baker was giving him the virus, or perhaps it was just now. That did not upset him. In fact, he quite liked it. She was a timeless dream, and she was fleeing the city with him.

“Where can we go?” she said.

“The hills? Maybe north? Anywhere away from Hot Chocolate Bob.”

“He won’t live forever. Bastards like that have enemies.”

They walked on quietly until they felt the cool kiss of fresh air on their skins, tasted it in their mouths. They struggled through a gap in the wall, barely wide enough to crawl through, emerging minutes later from a maintenance pipe on the riverbank. The river flowed into the city. It was so huge, wide and sluggish that its gravity seemed to pull them with the flow, urging them back, back home.

“I’ve never lived anywhere else,” Honey said, looking at the lights behind them.

“I’ve never been anywhere else,” Tom said.

“It’ll be fun. We can discover things.” She looked at him and smiled a mischievous smile. “And Tom, do I know some things about you!”

“Shall we go?” he said, heading off along the course of the river.

“Not forever,” she said. “We’ll come back one day. Not forever, Tom.”

He nodded. They’d come back because he owed that to the Baker.

They’d return to see what they had done.