White and Other Tales of Ruin

Hell

When she was thirteen, religion found Laura. She didn’t go looking for it, of that I was sure, but just as an insidious cancer had taken my wife seven years before, so religion stalked my lovely daughter and eventually stole her away. At least, that’s what I thought at the time. God is always so easy to blame.

She left in the night without saying goodbye.

The day before, we’d taken a trip to the local park. Laura wanted to find a suitable location for a photo shoot — she had dreams of becoming an actress and was slowly composing a most impressive portfolio — and I had a day owed to me at work, so we agreed to make an afternoon of it. I carried the picnic hamper and Laura nattered every step of the way, her non-stop chat and nervous laughter inherited from the mother she had barely had time to know. The hamper was heavy and the day was hot, we had jam tarts and cheese and cucumber sandwiches and bottles of beer for me and orangeade for Laura. She spoke of her hopes for the future, while my thoughts drifted to the past. I’d often come to the park with Janine, my wife, Laura’s mother. I smiled inside, a sort of comfortable melancholy that had all but replaced the raging grief. Then Laura tripped me and stole a bottle of beer from the spilled hamper, I ran after her and tackled her onto the grass, and the afternoon turned into one of those times you never forget, taking on a hue of perfection that cannot be eroded by the tides of time. For those few hours everything was faultless. Bad news was something that happened to unknown people in far-away lands. On the way home Laura hugged me and kissed my sunburned cheek, and she told me she loved me. And I knew that I’d be fine because in her voice I heard Janine. In her smile I saw my wife.

She left in the night without saying goodbye.

There was a note in her room to tell me why she’d gone. She’d scribbled it in a hurry as if afraid the dawn would find her out. It spoke of God and fear and faith and perfection and guilt and envy, and I thought she meant that she felt bad living as she did. But in truth, that note only went to confuse me more.

If only I’d known then that she had not even written it.

I tried to cope, I did my best, but in the end I went the only way I could to survive. I turned to Hell.

It had been a terrible six weeks since Laura had gone. I hadn’t heard a word from her, and although the police stressed that they were hunting high and low, they drew a blank. The International Police Force had been notified and her details had gone onto their database… although in a way I hoped I’d never hear from them. If I did, it may mean that her genetic fingerprint had been matched with that of a body pulled from the Volga in Moscow, or her dental records related to what was left of a car crash victim in France, a million possibles snicking and snacking through the organisation’s computers until match was found, match, a convergence of information that would mean a lifetime of misery for me instead of a vain, empty hope.

So they searched, and I searched, but all the while hope was slipping through my fingers. Whichever radical cult she’d hooked up with, they would have taken her far away from me. Already I would be little more than a vague memory in her mind, a confusing image of what a father should have been, an unbeliever, a waste. I sent out a plea over the net? there were groups that provided a search service, both electronically and, more expensively, physically? but even they admitted that the chances were slim. Most of the religious groups that had sprung up over the past decade eschewed technology, and it was already likely that Laura was essentially removed from existence.

All she’d have left would be herself, and whatever skewed faith she had found.

More than me, at least.

The route to Hell can only be found by those who need it the most. It is never advertised or discussed openly in public — there are no books about it, no documentaries — but just as the true reality of things is hidden beneath the manufactured patina of everyday life, so most people know about Hell. They know about it and believe in it, but they never honestly feel that they need it. Things can never get that bad, they think. My life can’t drop to those depths, surely.

I went looking without knowing what I was looking for. I’m sure that’s how I discovered Hell so easily. I was wandering the streets one evening, listening out for anything that sounded like a religious meeting. There were many gatherings in the city, many religions, all of them right and all of them wrong, as ever. My walk took me along one street, down the next, across open shopping plazas and through a park. There were a lot of people around now that the sun had gone down, and all those I saw appeared to have somewhere to go. I was aimless, and I stuck out like a gorilla with blue hair. My face was slack, my eyes wide and demanding, my mouth moving silently, betraying my encroaching madness. Because I truly believed that’s where I was: at the edge of madness. Janine was seven years in her grave, her perfume as fresh in my nostrils as ever. And now Laura was gone, stolen from me by the perverted followers of some god that had never and could never existed, her mind probably taken from her, twice removed from me. My memories of her were beginning to feel unfair. They should have been her thoughts, not mine. It seemed so wrong that I should have more recollections of my daughter’s life than she, had the brainwashing gone as far as I feared.

I fled the stares and snickers and found myself in an old preserved side-street, the cobbles shining with evening dampness. The gutters overflowed with litter, a drunk lay sleeping in a puddle of piss and vomit. I was way off the beaten track. Perhaps I’d been aiming here all along.

Nestled between the rear entrance of a smoke-filled pub’ and an unknown Chinese restaurant stood a door. It was clean and freshly painted, so out of place. A sign hung above it, looking so perfect, so appropriate, that I knew it was placed there just for me. The flush of warmth and peace mimicked what I would have felt had I found Laura herself, and for a few seconds I was sure, certain that everything was not going to be alright…. it already was.

Hell, it read. Calmed if you enter, damned if you don’t.

The door opened on frictionless hinges. The ground shifted beneath my feet to carry me into the room, and I felt as if I was flying towards my fate. I did nothing to prevent it. I was not afraid. I’d heard about Hell from drunken friends at the tail-end of parties and strangers in airports, and I knew it was the place for me. I needed a dose of misfortune. Things were bad for me, but so much worse for so many other people. I needed to be told this for sure.

I needed to see.

The room was certainly not what I’d expected, but I guessed as I entered that it was merely one of many portals into Hell. It was small, certainly not much larger than the average living room, with several chairs lining one wall and a huge holo-image projected against the wall opposite. It did not move, but it didn’t need to. It depicted a scene I remembered from my days as a teenager, a time when wars raged and the camps had just been discovered in North Africa. This image was taken from one of them. Dry desert. A few stick figures in the foreground, their skin as yellow as the sand, their eyes as dead. And in the background, like some false forest sprouting from the hot desert wastes, hundreds of stakes holding their dead offerings aloft. Desert wildlife, unused to such a proliferation of free food, had made its home amongst the bodies. Lizards fed on the coagulated blood at the bases of the stakes, while scorpions, beetles and flies feasted on the more recent dead. And the eyes of the wandering stick figures in the foreground… when I’d first seen this image twenty years before, I remembered thinking that they looked like they wanted to die. Now, seeing again, I knew how wrong I’d been. These people wanted to much to have never lived at all.

“Bet you’re glad you weren’t there.”

I spun around and was confronted by the most sensationally attractive woman I had ever seen. I hate to use to term ‘unnatural beauty’ — even then the phrase circled my consciousness like a ghost, too dangerous, too unknown to admit to — but if her beauty were natural, then the world was indeed a wonderful place.

“Er…” I said, glancing at the holo, then back to the woman.

“They were killed like that for their beliefs,” she said, face growing serious, her emerald-green eyes darkening as though she were seeing the scene for the first time. “There wasn’t enough wood to make full crosses, not enough nails to hold them up, so they sharpened the ends of the poles and set the people on them. Into their anuses to begin with, then as the killings went on the murderers became more experimental. One man was found weeks later with the spike through his lower jaw, protruding from his mouth. They say he died of dehydration and heat-stroke, his skin flayed by the sun, eyes removed by wandering carrion.” The woman looked at me again as if daring me to challenge what she had said. “Women suffered particularly terrible fates.”

I could say nothing.

She smiled gently, and even the lightest touch lit up her whole face. “But that was a long time ago, and it’s the here and now you’re concerned with, yes?”

I nodded. I felt crazily controlled by this woman, as if she was a teacher and I a young, snotty-nosed pupil. She turned and walked back to the comfortable chair she had been sitting in when I entered. It was a rocking chair, a small table beside it with a cup of steaming tea and a half read book lying face down.

“I need you,” I said. The intention was not sexual and she seemed to know that. My desperation was welling, the idea that I was nearer than I had ever thought possible — always, inside, was the niggling fear that Hell was just a myth, an urban legend — almost bringing me to tears. There was no shame behind my need, simply the knowledge that something had to be done. Right then, I was not prepared to go mad.

She stared up into my eyes. It felt as if she was viewing my soul, bare and helpless before her.

“Oh God, yes,” she said. “Yes you do.” She smiled again and asked me to take a seat.

I looked around as I crossed to the chairs. There was a tall rubber plant in one corner with pale spots on its leaves and dried roots showing through the powdery soil. There were more important things, I supposed. The gruesome holo of the impalings was the only hint at decoration. The chairs were comfortable-looking but functional, no ostentation here, no grand entrance to Hell. Simply a waiting room, and a woman whose like I would never see again.

I turned around, smiled at her and sat down.

The smile froze for an instant as I felt a stab in my left buttock. The woman’s calm expression did not change. She picked up her book, still smiling, and took a sip of tea. The room faded, seeming to dissolve away from me, the woman’s gentle smile remaining in my vision like a Cheshire Cat grin, and I imagined her whispering in my ear I thought it would. I tried to stand to see what had stung me, but before I could rise from the seat I found myself somewhere else entirely.

There.

A quiet suburban street. Cars parked along the side of the road, gardens well-maintained, privet hedges trimmed. The houses were all freshly painted, roofs newly tiled, lawns lush with grass of a constant length.

I was in a bus or coach, my seat so comfortable that it must have moulded to my form. The air in the coach was of a perfect temperature and humidity. On a small table in front of me sat several bottles of water, wine and beer, and three packed meals, red self-heating lights all glowing. The lighting was at an optimum level, and although it seemed that the sun shone brightly outside, the windows filtered the glare. It was perfect.

Glancing down, I saw that I was firmly strapped into my seat.

Be glad you don’t live here, a voice whispered, so intimate that it felt as though it originated inside my head.

I looked outside again and nothing was wrong. Kids played along the pavement, parents chatted over fences or washed cars or cut lawns, a family cycled along the street, passing so close to my window that I could see a shaving-cut on the father’s face. They seemed not to notice us. It was so silent inside the coach — if there were other passengers, their attention was concentrated on what was happening outside — that a sense of foreboding built rapidly, a feeling that nothing could be right with a scene that looked so perfect. Something bad was coming. It had to be. We were, after all, in Hell.

My breathing quickened and I almost went to rap on the window, but then I remembered where I was and why. I’d come because I wanted to see things like this. I needed to know that my life wasn’t so bad after all.

There’s no such thing as perfect, the voice purred, soft, androgynous, a tickle in my ear.

And then the madman came.

It only took a couple of minutes from beginning to end. Our coach moved silently to one side to allow the high-powered car to roar past, scream into a skid and mount the pavement. A toddler disappeared beneath its front bumper and re-emerged as a red streak on the pavement, baseball cap fluttering in the car’s slipstream like a wounded butterfly. A bigger kid went flying, parting company with his bike and spinning through the air, blood spiraling as it caught the calm afternoon sun.

I saw a parent open their mouth and heard the scream, and I thought at least Laura’s still alive, somewhere.

The car struck a garden wall and the driver tumbled out… and then the true terror of what we were about to see became apparent.

He had guns. Slung around his neck, a belt dangled hand grenades like poisoned apples, full of death. A knife gleamed in his belt. His face was grim and spattered with blood, as if this was just another stop in a slew of mayhem, and I saw that he had a good haircut, manicured nails, a fake tan. I wondered what had driven him to this.

The madman stepped in a soft, red, wet mess next to his car. He wiped his foot slowly and carefully on a clump of grass. And then he opened fire.

I ducked, but the coach seemed to be beyond his sight. He swung the guns around, left, right, left again, then dropped one and plucked a grenade from the belt. People tumbled, sagged, screamed, shoved themselves under cars and behind doors with shattered legs, tried to catch their blood. Sounds and colours combined, the bloody red roar of rifle fire, the black explosions of grenades, the glinting screams of agony as windows burst out and glass lacerated, crumpled brick brained, fire rolled and added to itself.

Overhead, storm clouds had gathered from out of nowhere, and lightning forked down beyond the street. High up I saw a passenger plane struck and begin a slow, terrible roll towards earth.

Our coach pulled away quickly, leaving the scene of devastation behind. I should have been shocked, but there was only relief.

Be glad you didn’t live there, the voice whispered again. A woman across the aisle smiled softly to herself, and I knew that everyone was being spoken to.

“Where are we?” I shouted. The woman frowned at me as if I was disturbing the climax of a particularly moving opera. “Where are we?” But I knew. I think it was just panic.

“Shut up,” said a soft voice from the seat in front of me. I could not see the person speaking. The straps did not allow any intermingling.

“But is all that supposed to help?” I said. I turned to the woman, feeling the need for eye contact, but she had averted her gaze. It was dark outside now and there was a definite sense of movement, but the windows gave no reflection. Unless she chose to look at me I may as well have been talking to myself. “Seeing those people shot,” I continued, “murdered in cold blood, and that plane falling from the sky, who knows what the passengers were thinking? How can that help, all that pain — ”

“It helps because you’ve never felt it,” the man in front said. His voice was still low but it carried, bearing authority and experience and a weariness I had never encountered before. I wondered how long he had been here. The certainty that it was forever sent me cold. “Be glad.”

“Glad?” I said, but nobody answered. I already knew what he meant. I tried looking from the window instead, and right then I’d have given anything to be able to see my reflection. It was light inside the coach but the windows were a matt black, offering me no glimpse of how my eyes had changed over the past few minutes. First I had been in the waiting room and now I was here, and whatever had happened in between was lost time. Perhaps I’d been drugged.

“Were you drugged?” I asked the woman across the aisle.

She turned to me and I saw for the first time how striking and wretched she was. I had never thought to find beauty in sorrow, but her hooded eyes and down-turned mouth, the sallowness of her brown skin and her lank black hair… I found it all so alluring. Perhaps because I saw a reflection of myself at last.

“My son was drugged,” she said.

“He’s on here too?” I looked around, straining against my straps to see if there was someone else with this woman’s eyes. But however hard I tried I could see no one else, only the grey tuft of hair rising just above the seat before me. It wavered in an unseen breeze.

“No, he’s dead,” she said. I thought she smiled, but it was a grimace preceding an outpouring of tears. “They took him from school and gave him drugs, fed him them like they were candy, made him an addict and made him dependent. He couldn’t move without his fix, couldn’t wash or eat or shit. They turned him into their slave. His chains were drugs, his life was theirs, and there was nothing… nothing I could do. Nothing anyone could do. People say they care until they realise that they’re helpless, then they fade away into the background, try to make you forget they were ever there. Maybe it’s guilt. I lost a lot of friends after my son was taken from me. Just at the time I needed them they left, because they couldn’t help and they couldn’t live with not helping.”

She wiped at her eyes but the tears had already ceased. Perhaps there weren’t that many left. “Then they sent him back to school with a pocketful of drugs and a flick-knife. He was expelled quickly, my Paul, expelled and arrested and beaten and arrested again and released and beaten, beaten by everyone. Helpless. I’d lost touch with him by then… long before then… but I wouldn’t have been able to do anything anyway. I was helpless. When they found him… he was half the weight he’d been when I’d last seen him.”

“Sorry,” I said when she seemed to stop talking and fall into a trance, staring at my feet or somewhere far beyond. “I didn’t think — ”

“He always wanted to be an architect,” she said. “He was nine years old when he died.” She saw me properly for the first time then, her eyes seeing instead of looking, perhaps probing to discover whether I was someone she could really talk to. “So young, and yet he knew his future so well. How can they steal that from someone so young? How could they?”

I turned back to the window after offering her an awkward smile. I thought of Laura and how, at least, she was still alive. I assumed. I had to assume.

“Hell is other people,” the grey-haired man murmured.

“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I didn’t raise my voice, but I was angry.

“I’m not offering an opinion,” he said, “merely quoting.”

There was nothing I could say to that, and I felt ridiculously admonished. I glanced across at the woman but she was staring down at her hands, twisting them in her lap. In this strange light it looked as if she was kneading shadows.

I wondered how this could be helping her, and in doing so I realised that it was already making me forget my own problems. Laura was still on my mind — she would always be there — but after the woman’s horrible story my own problems felt lessened. Probably not exactly what Hell had intended… but one of my fellow passengers had greater problems than me. I often told myself that there were a lot of people worse off, but I’d never actually met them.

“Oh Jesus!” said a voice from further along the coach.

And the windows lit up again.

They were moving us through a town that was dying.

I glanced at the woman across the aisle but she was staring from her window as well, seeing all the same things, probably equally shocked.

“I never thought there was anywhere like this left,” I whispered. Nobody answered me, and I hoped that it was because they agreed rather than because they thought I was naive.

There was a man standing at the base of a flight of steps, jabbing continuously at his arm with a needle, arcs of blood spattering the pavement at every attempt, and his mouth dribbling as he shouted I have no veins, I have no veins. Whatever was in the syringe initially must have drained away by now, but still he searched, not seeing his own life fluid leaking from him, even when he sliced the needle up and down his wrist and a group of watchers stood back so that the resulting fountain did not stain them. A pack of mangy dogs crossed the street with their tails held high and their noses low to the ground, but I turned away.

“God,” I said, glancing over to see what the woman had seen. The back of her head told me nothing.

The coach moved slowly along the street, and the people did not appear to see us. If it was a holo it was beautifully arranged. It picked up every minor facet of reality. A particular sun-glint from a dusty window; steam rising from a dog’s piss as it raised its leg against a wall; shadows sitting in the cracks in pavements, hiding from daylight like the men I could see hunkered down in shop doorways, not wishing to be a part of things.

I tried waving but no one saw, or if they did had no wish to respond. I wondered just how programmed and pre-set this was.

The buildings stared out with shattered windows. A naked woman hung from one of them, her flesh grey and bloated with time, rope digging so far into her neck that rolls of skin and flesh had closed around it. She may have been pretty in the past, but now she was a smear on the wall of the building, a fluid stain marking the masonry below her. I really didn’t want to know what that meant.

A group of men were gang-raping someone in an alley.

A dead person lay in the gutter, ignored and left for the flies and rats.

A lost child wandered along the pavement, crying, raising its hands but catching nobody’s attention.

“Sick,” I said, “this is just sick.”

But I had never been anywhere like this, hardly even imagined it. Wherever Laura was now was surely better. She wouldn’t be seeing these things, wouldn’t be subjected to such horror, no matter how much the sect brainwashed her and tried to pull her further and further from any sort of life she knew.

I retched and leaned forward, grabbed a bottle of water and tried to drown my nausea. There must have been some additive in there for such use, because I felt better within a few seconds. I strained in my seat and looked back at the mouth of the alley. There were no signs of what I had seen; at least it was out of sight now. Out of sight, out of mind, someone had once said to me. I’d wanted to hit them, because Janine had been out of sight for three years by then.

“I’m so glad places like this don’t exist anymore,” the woman across from me said.

I looked over in time to see her misted breath clearing from the window. “So you think it’s a recording?” I asked.

She glanced over and smiled. “Sure it is.” How stupid of you, her voice said, so I did not pursue it.

“Hell,” I said. “Hell on screen. So… why not just beam it to our nets?”

The woman did not answer. I heard a shifting in the seat in front of me, but the man said nothing.

Outside, more things were starting to happen in the run-down street. Isolated incidents at first — a man being beaten against a car, a young boy kneeling astride an equally young girl, knife drawn, her hair tangled in his fist — and then something more concerted, more significant. I was not consciously aware of things changing, but between one blink and the next the trouble-strewn street had opened up into a plaza. A church stood at one side, a line of rag-tag market stalls at another, and the blank walls of warehouses completed the square. A road ran through from either side.

Within seconds of the scene imprinting itself on my mind, a battle had begun.

The women carried no weapons. Their clothes were varied, their skins different shades, but each of them had the same dark expression on their face. Whatever they were fighting for, they were confident in their cause. Every point of impact resulted in the same outcome: one dead woman; one policeman splashed with blood, spark-stick drawn and buzzing as it searched for more skin to sear and break. It was a slaughter. And they hadn’t even drawn their guns.

I pressed my face to the glass, disgusted and shocked but unable to tear myself away. Had this happened somewhere in the world, some vague point in the history of an Eastern European state that my schooling had failed to touch upon? The women looked like those I’d see in the street at home — any one of them could have been Laura or Janine — and the police… they were up to date.

Totally up to date.

Body-moulding armour, shifting and flexing with each movement or muscular tick. A transparent sheen around their head which was a helmet and oxygen mask in one, solidifying micro-seconds before anything impacted upon it, parting and opening as and when necessary for the wearer to breathe or speak or eat. The spark-sticks and the drill guns. Everything I was used to.

“This is now,” I said. “This is happening now.”

Time is an illusion, came the soft voice from inside my head. Be glad you’re not here at this time.

“I’m not a woman,” I said.

For the first time the voice answered me directly. But you may have been a policeman.

I watched a woman fall to the ground and a policeman kneeling beside her, fending off her waving arms and deftly crushing and melting her throat with one glittering lunge of his spark-stick.

I saw how right the voice was. “Who are you?”

Be quiet, it said. Watch. It’s all part of the service.

“Anyone being talked to in here?” I shouted, and the silence from the others in the coach was my answer.

The battle erupted all around the coach but never touched it. There was murder and death and execution, but the one thing I never saw was the taking of a prisoner. These police, for whatever reason, had been instructed to simply kill. No crowd control for them, no law-enforcing, no friendly chat with someone who may have had a vague idea to break a minor law…. these were out on a subdue and destroy mission the likes of which I could never have imagined.

“Is this how it could be?” I asked, and the disembodied voice answered.

Was, could be, will be is not important. You’re not here, that is important. You’re no part of this. Be thankful.

“I am,” I said, and I was. The coach moved on, we passed scenes of terrible pain and cruelty, and I was thankful.

I began to realise how Hell could really work.

The windows went dark. I slumped back in my seat and all hint of external influences passed away. I’d been smelling the fear of that square, hearing the screams and dying sighs, tasting blood on the breeze and the tang of discharging spark-sticks. Now, with nothing more than the slight aroma of my own sweat to keep me company, it seemed all the more shocking.

“That was horrible,” I said.

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?” I asked. The woman turned to look at me.

“I’m not going to tell you. It’s personal.”

I frowned, went to tell her my name but then thought about what she’d said. We were in Hell after all, and I tended to agree. Personal. She didn’t want to get personal, and I could understand and empathise. What was happening here was way too internalised to get involved with someone just because they happened to be sitting across the aisle. Even the voice came from inside, as if I was actually hearing it somewhere else and only its meaning was being understood here.

“I’m so sorry about your son,” I said, and she averted her eyes and looked at the black window.

I leaned forward and picked up a bottle of water, changed my mind and popped the seal on a beer. The bottleneck widened and a head developed, and I took my first frothy mouthful, sighing at the synthesised real ale taste. I still didn’t know how they managed it, but it was perfect.

Closing my eyes, I leaned back in the seat. Laura surprised me and ran across my memory, laughing as a six year old and leaping on Janine’s back just months before my wife died. I remembered the day vividly. I remembered being depressed and miserable and non-communicative, because both Janine and I knew that she was dying and there was nothing we could do. Fate had done that, to Janine and to me, and I hated it. I hated that Laura would grow up without a mother. And I took out my hate on both of them, because there was nothing and no one else to suffer it.

Reliving the memory, I knew that I should have relished that moment, every moment, not lived in a haze of hate. I saw Laura’s eyes as she leapt on Janine, Janine’s smile as she caught our daughter, and I realised for the first time that my wife was as happy then as she had ever been. Her smile was not for Laura’s sake, nor for mine. It was genuine. A true statement of joy. I should have been a part of that, not apart from it.

I opened my eyes and I was crying. I wiped at the tears and took another swig of beer, and it didn’t taste as good. That was the trouble with artificiality — it could never maintain a constant. Like memories it was only an approximation of the truth.

“My daughter has been taken away by a religious sect,” I said. “I don’t know where she is and I may never get her back.”

“At least she’s alive,” the woman said.

I thought about this, wondering just how we were supposed to take this journey as a healing exercise when we could still talk. “I’m sure your son still loved you, even at the end. My Laura will have been brainwashed to forget me. Love has no place in the sects… not for anything outside, at least.”

The woman didn’t respond and I said no more. I finished my beer, each mouthful more rancid, and then I opened one of the meal containers and ate salmon in white wine sauce. It was real salmon. It melted in my mouth and released the sterile taste of mass produced fish that had never swum in a river, never known rapids. A smaller container held a slab of apple pie and custard, but once opened I could not bring myself to eat.

I suddenly felt bad, being able to eat and drink after what I had just seen. The scenes outside looked so very real. They smelled and sounded totally genuine. I’d just seen dozens of people dead and dying, and I was ready to sit back and drink bad beer and eat salmon. I looked around guiltily, but the woman across the aisle was chewing thoughtfully on a mouthful of something, and from the seat before me I could hear the unmistakeable sounds of eating and drinking. I glanced across at the woman again and caught her wry smile.

“I wonder what’s next,” someone said from further along the coach. Their voice was muffled and dull, and I wondered just how large this vehicle was. I shifted in my seat but the straps held tight, as if aware of my sudden interest in looking around.

“Titanic,” someone answered, their voice even quieter. “I’ve always wanted to see the Titanic going down.”

“Natural disasters make for good viewing,” the first voice said. “Give me a hurricane or earthquake over a war or riot any day.”

Be patient and you will see, said the voice in my head, and it must have spoken to everyone because silence fell once more.

There was a sense of movement as we were transferred from one scene to the next, but I could not tell how fast we were travelling. It wasn’t like a ship, or a hover train, or an aircraft, because there were no sounds at all to indicate that we were passing along rails or through air turbulence. The sense came from inside? an occasional dipping of the stomach or a twinge in my inner ear. I wondered how far we were travelling and just how big Hell may be, when the windows brightened once again and I was faced with the answer.

Hell was huge. If it had boundaries they were scores of miles apart, at least. It had sky, and land, and dazzling sunlight. And when it came to pain, suffering and death… it knew no boundaries.

Perhaps even now Laura was being lectured in the traditional Hell, the metaphysical place where wrongdoers suffered and punishments were meted out, and where Satan presided over his flung-down domain, plotting vengeance, scheming to re-attain his rightful place amongst the angels. But however thorough her brainwashing at the hands of the cult, they could never show her this. If she were here with me now, then she’d believe. Then she’d know that Hell is of our own making, and we have been manufacturing and perpetuating it on our own planet ever since we crawled from the primeval swamp. The place I travelled through was simply a bringing together, a distillation of all bad things.

I looked from the window and felt sick.

Be glad you aren’t here, the voice purred, and I began to cry.

The coach was moving slowly, painfully slowly, across a wide open plain. In the distance a row of snow-capped mountains pointed at the sky like a giant bottom jaw. The top jaw was a line of dense strato-cumulus clouds hanging threateningly across the whole horizon, waiting to close at any moment and bite the scene away. The plain itself, for as far as I could see, writhed and flickered and shifted in and out of focus, and at first I thought my tears were distorting trees and bushes and setting them moving. But I wiped at my eyes again, pressed my face to the window with my breath held… and I saw that the movement was people.

The whole plain, every spare spread of ground, was smothered with humanity. Hunkered under trees, sitting on the sides of small hillocks, hiding beneath tarpaulins or coats pinned to upright sticks, staring up into the sky or scrabbling around in the dust for food, adults drinking from deflated water bags and children hanging onto sagging breasts, bodies coughing blood, eyes leaking blood, mouths gushing blood as people fell to their knees and vomited, some rushing to their aid but trying not to get too close, living-dead wrapping corpses in dirty clothes and men digging long burial pits, the wrappers scratching at sores on their arms, the diggers wiping bloody red from their eyes, birds sweeping down to peck morsels from bodies left out too long after death, and sometimes from those so weakened that they could not wave the birds away, could not save their eyes or testicles or dignity in the few moments they had left in this world before passing painfully into the next…

I gasped out loud and heard similar sounds from around the coach. Even the man in front of me, all but silent and dismissive in his invisibility until now, muttered something under his breath that may have been a prayer.

And then the sounds and smells made it in from outside, and I knew that there was always worse.

Moans, cries, the stench of shit, rot, sighs, screams, muttered desperation, food gone-off, vomit, vomiting, fresh exhortations from a new volunteer helper, the disbelieving mumbles from the thousands who had seen it all before. They knew that nothing and no one could help. I saw a gaggle of nuns threading their way through the hundreds of acres of dead and dying humanity, and I almost laughed at their blind devotion and foolish belief that anything could ever be any different. One of them would stop every now and then, bend down, cross herself and a bundle of rags on the floor before moving on. I wondered how many of them would be alive next week, and how many black and white habits were already hugging corpses in the ground.

We passed by a burial pit. As ever, the diggers did not look our way? we were not there, so there was nothing for them to see? and I had an uninterrupted view of the hundreds of bodies piled at one end. The digging could not keep up with the dying, and even as corpses were wound in old cloth or sacking and flung into the pit, the mountain they had been taken from grew.

There had been people vomiting and leaking blood, but this close to so many dead I could see how extreme their affliction was. Something hissed inside the coach and the odour was suddenly beaten back by a sweet perfume, but I still got an idea of how bad this would smell, how awful the stench of rotting family and friends could be. There was so much blood. The bodies had bled out, their fluids leaving through existing holes and new ones alike. Stomachs were split, chests ruptured, noses rotted away, eyes pushed out of their sockets by the explosive pressure of blood seeking release. I’d heard about Ebola Zaire and Marburg, but this looked so much worse, even more violent than those nightmare viruses. A sheet of flies lifted from the corpses as if flicked at one end, swung around to a new patch of opened flesh and settled once more. New life for old, I thought, and I saw maggots squirming in a dead child’s mouth.

Two young women tipped a body onto the base of the pile and turned to leave with their stretcher. I thought they were crying, but one of them turned and looked directly at me — through me — and I saw the blood leaking from her eyes. Even had I been visible, she could not have seen me.

As we passed by the burial pit I saw an old man rooting among the dead. He was lifting limbs and prising mouths open with a thick stick, knocking out gold teeth, plucking jewellery from swollen fingers, and as we moved on I heard the jingling of his booty as he shifted a big rucksack from one shoulder to the other.

The windows began to fade to black and I turned to the woman across the aisle, but then the voice rang up inside my head one more time. Sometimes it’s impossible to believe just how bad things can get.

And the windows brightened again.

Something was screaming. It Dopplered in from the distance, and at first I thought it was someone inside the coach shouting at what they saw, rebelling, running along the aisle as they sought escape. But then I realised that the sound came from outside. Some of the people across the plain looked up and I followed their gaze… and thought help was at hand.

The aircraft screamed overhead so fast that I could not identify it, let alone make out its nationality. It left behind a shimmering wake and several cylindrical objects high in the sky, spinning and falling through the turbulent air until they each sprouted a parachute, bursts of compressed gas firing them away from each other, spreading across the plain until the five were slowly closing down like the fingers of a grasping giant’s hand.

Medicine, I thought, a cure, parachuted in by some benevolent government who couldn’t risk putting their own people in and infecting them as well. The coach moved slowly across the plain and the cylinders floated lazily down, and more and more people stopped what they were doing and looked up. The ill lying on sheets or bare earth shielded their eyes if they could move, and the less-ill stood and stared, pointing, chattering excitedly, some of them even eschewing their fear of contact to hug their neighbours and rejoice that someone, at last, had done something good for them.

Sometimes it’s impossible to believe how bad things can get, the voice purred in my head, and I didn’t know if it was memory or the words being spoken again.

Either way, I went cold.

“No…” I whispered, and I heard the word echoing up and down the coach as we all saw the first parachute land.

The explosion was at least three miles away, off towards the snowy mountains that looked so picturesque in the distance, but it rapidly blossomed out, an expanding ball of flame rolling along the ground and rising into the air, burning stick-people tumbling before it. The rest of the cylinders landed then, bursting open one by one and allowing their magic to work, igniting the earth and air, and the bodies in between. I saw some people raise their hands in joy when they realised that peace had come for them at last, and others turned to run and were caught by the speeding flames, hair igniting and faces melting away. The burial pits exploded as withheld gases were fired. Makeshift tents were blasted along the ground from place to place as the firestorm set in, and soon bodies accompanied them in the air, sucked helplessly into the ever expanding walls of fire. The nuns were running. Nothing could save them now.

As the fires from the separate explosions met, the windows in the coach faded to black.

I could still feel the heat, hear the screams, smell the stench of everything burning. I was panting. Sweat ran down my sides and a cool breeze issued from some unseen vent, but mere machines could not understand that fear and terror and anger cannot be cooled. It takes more than a breath of fresh air to do that.

I snatched up a bottle of beer and drained it in one go. It tasted foul but the subtle alcohol hit felt good. I kept trying to glance over my shoulder, through the window and back the way we had come, because I wanted to know if there was anything we should be doing for those poor people back there. Diseased, already doomed, then bombed and burned. There was no hope but still I looked back, seeing nothing in the blackened glass, not even offered my own wretched reflection to rage against.

“It’s terrible, terrible,” a voice said from in front of me, probably several seats down. It fell apart even as the man was talking, tears breaking through and giving a raw edge to his words, cracking his breaths. “It just… it’s… those poor…” He wailed then, sending a shiver down my spine, making me want to shout at him to stop, just shut up, because I couldn’t take this now that the windows were dark. I searched for another bottle of beer, but I had only water left. The woman across the aisle hissed at me.

“What?”

She lobbed me one of her beer bottles. I caught it from the air and smiled at her, a pained, nervous twitch of my lips that did nothing to find its way through what was really there. She did not smile back. “Never did drink,” she said. “Just another drug.”

I looked away embarrassed. But still I took a small sip and sat back, eyes closed, trying to cut out the crying.

It occurred to me that so far I had only seen the woman, no one else. There could be two more or twenty more people in here, perhaps two hundred more, the seats were so large and well padded that they seemed to all but absorb any noise made by the coach’s occupants. There was the man in front of me — I could still see a wisp of his grey hair — but so far as I knew that was it. Voices, yes, but no more people.

For the first time it struck me that this could all be for me.

Perhaps everyone who resorted to Hell had this sort of treatment. Maybe anyone else was an actor, put here to treat me as they’d treated hundreds, maybe thousands before. Show the scenes outside, tell their stories, make me realise that I was never worse off than everyone.

I took another swig of beer and the screaming man stopped screaming. There was a thud, like a door slamming shut or a page being turned in a heavy book, and then silence.

The man in front sighed, and I saw a hand raise up and smooth down his wispy hair. It was old, wrinkled, calloused, the hand of a manual worker. I wondered if he worked in the inner-city farms, or the sewers, or the tunnel projects that were meant to link city to city, country to country.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said.

I caught an whiff of burning bodies, as if a flake of scorched flesh was caught in my nostrils. “Of course it matters!” I said, wanting to shout. “Didn’t you see them? Poor bastards, poor…” I trailed off because I realised how inadequate anything I could say would sound.

“It’s all put on for us because we’re in Hell, and that’s how they do things here,” the man said. “Ha! I can’t even see you, for all I know you’re a machine with reaction software, or just one of them.” I heard him tapping his fingers against the window, as if trying to read dark Braille there. “In fact, I’m sure you are.”

“I’m not!” I said. “Maybe you are! Maybe everyone on this coach — ”

“Not me,” he said. “But I don’t worry or hold it against you, because what’s the capital of Syria?”

“Huh?”

He was silent for a couple of seconds and I saw the woman looking over, interest arching her eyebrows. I suddenly felt unreasonably good, seeing something other than fear, dread or sorrow on her face.

“I suppose I’d have to be quicker than that to catch out reaction software, wouldn’t I?”

“Absolutely, Sir,” I said in a slow monotone, and the woman snorted.

Something made the coach sway slightly, and I heard a couple of coughs as people tried to ignore the sick movement in their stomachs. I glanced at the window, waiting for it to brighten again and terrified at what I would see, but it remained dark.

I wondered where Laura was right then. It felt strange thinking of her, because it was almost certain that she wasn’t thinking of me. At most I was an invader in her memory. In a way I wished that I could forget as well, but she wasn’t in pain, wasn’t burning or being shot. I sent love to Laura, knowing she wouldn’t hear it but doing it for myself. It didn’t help, but I pretended it did.

The windows brightened and I thought we were back. Back where I wasn’t exactly sure — somewhere deep in the Welsh mountains, perhaps — but at least our journey was at an end. The view from the window was wonderful, a mountainous rural paradise, and I sat back and smiled as the coach moved slowly through the scene.

So come on, I thought, show us pollution or global warming or deforestation or disease or death. But the image remained pure, the trees and shrubs and flowers and grasses grew lush and healthy. Things weren’t so bad after all. There were a lot of people much more worse off than me. What this meant for them I tried not to consider, because this trip was all about me, and for the woman across the aisle it was purely about her, and so on, and so on…

If thinking that way worked I was not about to argue.

It was only as I noticed the shapes slung between the trees that I realised we still had some way to go. They came into focus, my breath hitched, my heart stuttered. And I knew it wasn’t a holo or a movie or an act.

It was more than that. I knew for certain that this, all of this, was far more real than anyone could have guessed.

I knew, because I recognised one of the shapes strung up on the barbed wire.

Laura.

“Laura!” I strained in my seat, fighting against the straps. I needed to press close to the window, closer to Laura, just to make sure it was her. Her hair was tangled in a knot of wire above her, arms flung out and bleeding where they were tied, legs dangling. I recognised the dress she wore… she’d first worn it on her thirteenth birthday. I’d bought it for her. Expensive. And even before the party started she spilled orange juice down it, and she started to cry because her party was spoiled. I’d told her that it was the girl, not the dress that mattered. The girl inside…

“Laura!” I screamed again. The strap was biting into my waist as I reached for the window. The coach was moving along slowly, and other hanging figures were coming into view. Some of them were still but for the movement of birds and other carrion creatures, but most of them still moved where they hung, each movement drawing more blood or further cries or moans.

Laura moved.

I sat still and watched, and just as she passed out of sight behind a thick clump of trees she shifted again, her mouth falling open into a scream I heard from afar.

“That’s Laura out there!” I shouted, having no comprehension of how this could be so, simply knowing that it was. I could no longer see her but her scream remained. “That’s Laura!”

“Hey, I’m sure you didn’t see?”

“Don’t tell me I don’t know my own daughter!” I shouted at the woman, and she flinched as if slapped.

I looked back at the window and it was fading to black. The atmosphere had changed. The coach jerked slightly, as if struck from one side, and the windows flared brightly again for a couple of seconds before blacking out. They’d only let us see some of the pain and suffering out there this time, and I was sure I’d glimpsed something even worse happening ahead.

Perhaps they didn’t like what I was saying.

“She’s still alive,” I said, kicking out at the chair in front of me. “Hey! You! My daughter, she’s still alive on those trees. I have to get her!”

I saw the man’s tuft of grey hair turn as he tried to lift himself to look at me, but we were too securely fastened. “It’s a holo, a make-believe. It’s not really happening. And if it is your daughter maybe she’s an actress, perhaps they paid her to act? ”

Perhaps, I thought, but then I remembered the pain I’d seen on her face and the scream I’d heard. Laura was my daughter. I’d seen her in pain enough times — scraped knees, toothache, the broken arm when she was nine? to know that she could not have been acting.

I wished that she had been taken away by a sect.

I grasped at the strap around my waist and pulled. It did not budge.

“Are you sure it was her?” the woman said.

I nodded without looking up, still tugging at the strap, trying to find where it was buckled. I thought of Janine on her death bed, how the panic in her eyes had been for the daughter she was leaving behind, not for herself.

I hated myself for not looking after Laura.

There was a sighing noise from somewhere along the coach, and a few indrawn breaths. Footsteps approached along the aisle. The passengers were silent once more, and I felt a shadow approaching.

“Positive?” the woman hissed.

I stopped messing with the strap and looked across at her, just as a dark shape manifested between the two seats in front of us. “It was Laura,” I said.

The thing leant down towards me. It looked like a huge beetle, with a hard shiny skin and a head twitching with several small antennae. Somewhere in there, perhaps, was a man or woman, but just then I felt as if I was looking a denizen of Hell right in the face. I’d never seen anything like this before.

The thing clicked and clacked, reaching out one black hand and offering me the open end of a stun-gun.

Kill me, I thought, they’ll kill me for seeing what I’ve seen…

… or perhaps they’ll just add me to it…

And then it flipped on its back, hands grasping at air as the woman stretched her left leg and kicked its ankle. “I reckon you’ve got maybe three seconds,” she said, crouching back in her seat as if afraid to touch the thing again.

I looked down at where the shape was struggling on the floor. Thoughts rushed at me as I decided what to do first? Are there more of them? Does it have protection software? Is it going to kill me?? and for the half-second it took these to whirl through my head the world stood still. Its armour seemed to impede it, and when it reached out to grab my chair and haul itself up, I kicked out at its hand. The armour was as hard as metal and I gasped as pain dug through my foot.

The thing paused, looked up at me, antennae twitching, perhaps signalling.

I kicked again, using my heel this time, connecting squarely with the dark visor. I heard a crack and but hoped it was artificial. The thing flung one hand up as it rolled back. I reached out and grasped its wrist, twisting, feeling the armour harden under the contours of my hand, the stun-gun slipping from its grip?

I had maybe a second left until the thing shook off its confusion and came for me.

I kicked again, three times, aiming at the visor every time. It was constantly trying to rise, only my kicks keeping it down. I stop kicking, up it gets, I thought. So I kicked yet again, and again, glancing at the mean-looking black stun gun in my hand, trying to figure out how the hell to use it. There was a silver button and what looked like a trigger, again in silver, so I leaned over, forced the barrel end against the thing’s cracked visor and pressed both.

The button must have been a voltage booster.

The thing? and I really hoped there wasn’t a man or woman in there? only twitched for a second or two before it lay still, smoking.

“What’s going on back there?” I heard someone shout, and I welcomed the distraction. Looking down would mean seeing what I had done, and I was afraid that it was a very bad thing. The normal stun guns carried by law enforcement were designed to do just that: stun. From the stench of hot meat I was afraid that this one had done much more.

“I’m getting off,” I said.

“Don’t be mad!” It was the man in the chair in front of me, still unseen, thinking he knew best.

“My daughter’s out there,” I said, “and she’s bleeding and dying. Besides, I thought you said it was all false.” I paused, he said nothing. “I’m getting out,” I said again. Maybe I was trying to talk myself out of it.

“If there’s one of those… things in here, there’ll be more out there. Lots more.”

I felt around with my fingers, trying not to look because I didn’t want to see whatever damaged, dead thing lay inside the armour. I’d heard about genetic alterations, gene mutation… I’d heard about it far too much. I didn’t want to see it as well. My fingers scraped the smashed visor and I tugged free a loose piece of composite.

“You sound like you’ve seen?“ I began, but then the dead thing moved.

It hissed, expelling a stinking breath right up into my face. And I heard a voice, soft and persuasive, deep inside my head. This was much more personal than the voice that had introduced the horrific scenes. This was not only inside my head but inside me, reaching out from places I’d forgotten or tried to forget, sounding like my poor dead Janine and my dying Laura combined… and it was telling me to sit back down.

You don’t want to get up.

You don’t need to get up.

“Don’t listen to it,” the man in front said, and the injured thing at my feet growled a stinking threat up into my face, stinking and angry.

“How do you know — ” I began, but then I stamped back down on its face, feeling my boot heel striking something soft. Inside me, the soft voice grew harsh before fading away.

“What is it?” I hissed, starting to hack at the strap around my waist with the rough-edged plastic. My own blood spotted my trousers.

“Demon,” the man said.

I stopped for a second and glanced up, but even his hair was out of sight. “You’re just kidding me, right?” I started sawing at the strap instead of hacking, and the heavy threads began to pop apart. The thing at my feet moved, I stamped again, and the man gave me his answer.

“No. And yes, I suppose. And yes, I have been here before.”

The woman across the aisle snorted. “And the prize for the most ridiculously confusing answer goes to…”

“I won’t tell you my name,” he said.

“I don’t think she was expecting you to.” The threads were parting faster now, and I guessed I had maybe thirty seconds to go. Then all I had to do was exit the coach, dodge however many more soldiers, droids or demons there were, find Laura where she was strung up between trees, get her down and navigate my way out of Hell.

Easy.

I laughed manically as the strap popped free. Standing up, I saw the coach for what it really was. As wide as the coach on a train but much longer, so long that perspective stole the end from sight. And all the way along, chairs like my own sat at each window, with a narrow aisle in between.

I turned around and the same sight greeted me, except this time there were shocked faces watching me from each chair. I caught a few peoples’ stares, even though I tried not to. There was interest, anger and resentment in equal measures, and I realised that those who had no idea what had happened here must be blaming me for their tour being halted.

“How the hell do I get out of here?” I asked, stepping into the aisle and glancing over the chair at the man in front of me.

“Same way the demon got in,” the man said. And I wondered how he could talk at all.

I’d once seen the results of a speed-bike crash. The rider had been thrown against a wall and was a broken, shattered mess. Limbs askew. Shape changed. I never thought I’d see the same in someone living.

“Huh?” I uttered stupidly. I could not form words because what I saw stole them from me. He was so badly battered and misshapen that it must have hurt him to live.

“Up there,” he said, nodding back over my shoulder.

I turned and looked along the aisle, noticing a dark patch in the ceiling which could only have been a trapdoor. “Do you know the way?” I asked turning back.

His face did something that may have been a smile, and he shook his head. “I’ve been out there once before,” he said, “thinking I could change things, imagining I could help the hopeless. That’s how I got this.” He didn’t point to anything, but he didn’t need to. I could not make out where parts of him started and ended. Tears burned in my eyes and throat, but I guessed that he probably wouldn’t appreciate them at all.

“So up there is out?” I said. And I thought, out of where? Out of the coach and into the forest and barbed wire and Laura? Or out of Hell? Back into that waiting room perhaps, the stunning woman standing by the wall painting and pointing out intricate details of cruelty and pain I hadn’t noticed before.

“If you must go,” he said, “yes, up there.”

I looked at him and wanted to ask him how I could help. But he’d obviously come here for a reason, whether he’d found his way in by accident or not. I could only guess at what traumas he suffered day in, day out, to warrant a second visit to this awful place. He blinked slowly, one eye only closing halfway because of the knot of scar tissue on his eyelid, and I took it as a message. The strap was to stay around his waist. He wanted it that way. He’d always be confined now, however his condition had come about.

That’s how I got this, he’d said, talking of what was outside.

I turned and walked to the trapdoor, and as I looked up through it I could see reflected light coming in from somewhere. Somehow, it smelled like what I had seen outside should look: blood, rot, pain, death, anguish, nothing fresh, all of it corrupted.

Laura.

“I want to help you,” the woman called from her seat. I turned and saw her straining at the strap, glancing nervously at the motionless thing lying by my vacated chair. A wisp of smoke curled from its broken visor, but I was sure I could see black movement in the shadow cast by its body.

“Why?”

She looked at me, frowning, trying to speak but unable to find the words.

“Why?” I said again. I wasn’t used to people helping me, and I didn’t believe it now.

“Laura’s still alive,” she said. And I nodded, because her son Paul was dead and perhaps, in this, she could shed her helplessness.

“Not if we don’t hurry,” I said, and that was that, agreed. I found the shard of visor composite and knelt by her side, hacking, pulling, slicing and sawing at the strap until it came apart. She stood shakily, hanging onto my arm as her tired legs tingled their inactivity away.

“I’m Chele,” she said.

“Hello Chele. I’m Nolan.” I went back to the trapdoor, knotted my hands and motioned her to climb. “What can you tell us?” I asked the mutilated man as Chele heaved herself up through the trap. I heard her banging about above the ceiling, suddenly wondering whether I’d sent her up first on purpose. If there were more of those demon things up there…

“More demons,” the man said.

“Don’t tell me they’re demons, there are no such things as demons!”

“No such thing,” the man repeated, and a rattle in his throat may have been a chuckle. “Well… this is a strange place, and strange things happen. Last time I was here, when I was out there in all of it, I saw one of them sprout wings and take flight.”

“Cyborgs,” I said. “Is that what they are? Constructs? Artificial-”

“They are what they want to be,” he said, “and here, most of them want to be demons.”

“Hey,” Chele called. “Something’s moving out there!”

I looked at the blackened window of the coach, as did the mutilated man. “How did you…?” I began.

“There are so many worst nightmares out there, it’s not even worth me telling you,” he said.

“Why did you come back?”

He looked at me with his tortured eyes. “To remind myself I’m not still here. I really wish you luck.”

Laura, a voice said inside, and I was wasting time. It was probably a waste of time to begin with — I’d seen her blood, seen the pain in her expression — but the bastards had stolen her away and hung her up out there…

… and for the first time since seeing her I actually began to wonder about why she was here.

If Laura, how many others?

“Hey, you, I’m moving off, are you coming?”

“Yes,” I said up into the dark rectangle above me. I jumped up and held onto the hole’s edges, glancing around me before I hauled myself up. The expressions on the few faces I could see told me that they thought I was mad. As for the mutilated man, he had no expression… but his eyes spoke volumes.

Goodbye, they said.

I scrambled up through the hole and into the space above the coach, a false ceilinged area that must have been intended for ventilation and security.

“Hey, you,” Chele called from ahead.

“My name’s Nolan.”

“Well Nolan, there’s a door up ahead, and something out there smells.” She crawled on her hands and knees and I followed.

“I should have brought that demon thing’s weapon,” I said, but Chele didn’t hear. I paused, looking behind me and then ahead again, terrified that I’d see another one of those things crawling my way.

Chele eased herself around, hung her legs out through a low opening in the wall and dropped out of sight. A second later I heard her strike ground. I edged forward and looked out.

Chele was squatting on her haunches, picking at the lush green grass, sniffing it, running her hands across the bright daisies that grew in profusion between the coach and the trees. Dark things darted in the air around her head and she waved them away. I waited for them to attack her, pierce her skin and puncture her insides, but then a couple landed on her arm and they were only flies.

I dropped to the ground next to Chele, knees buckling and rolling me into the grass. I ended up on my front, breathing in the beautiful aroma of grass and dirt and the wilds, nothing artificial here, nothing made… all natural. I closed my eyes for a second and remembered a time with Janine, lying in the sun and making her a daisy chain.

“Where’s the coach gone?” Chele asked quietly, mock-calm.

I knelt and turned back to the coach… and it was not there. There was something there, something big and heavy where the coach should be… but perhaps that was my memory playing tricks, because all I could actually see were rolling meadows, clumps of trees, a valley leading down, down, a river following its route to see where it went.

I turned and looked at the trees I’d seen from the coach window.

Then back again at where the coach should be.

“It’s gone,” I said.

Chele almost laughed, but the sound didn’t sound quite right so she stopped. It was too much like madness. “If this is Hell I’m going to start being a naughty girl,” she said. And I knew that something awful was going to happen.

It was the way the birds sang, fast and energetic, as if they were keen to finish and leave.

It was the way the river flowed away from us.

It was in the blue skies darkening with clouds, how the trees behind me seemed to be a mirror image of those in front, right down to snapped branches and bloodstained trunks.

The threat was there, palpable, hidden from view, but smelled and sensed the more I looked at our surroundings. “Laura,” I said. I started to run back along the line of trees.

“Nolan!” Chele called. “I don’t know if I can run!”

Right then I didn’t care. I’d known this woman for an hour, she’d put herself in unknown danger to come out here and help me, but I didn’t care. My only concern was Laura, and whether she was still alive.

As I ran and heard Chele’s pounding footsteps behind me, I began to glimpse shadows shifting within the treeline to my right. I looked head-on, but I could only see them from the corner of my eye. They moved all wrong, these shadows, shifted position when branches were still, darted from trunk to trunk, evaded my stare but still gave themselves away. If they were demons and they chose to come at us now, we were finished. Pure luck had given me the upper hand with the thing in the coach, luck and Chele’s help, and I hadn’t even had the presence of mind to grab its stun-gun when I came outside. Last time, I saw one of them sprout wings and take flight the mutilated man had said.

I’d smelled burning meat when I thrust the stunner through the broken visor, and the thing had been twitching in pain, and there was no way at all I could have done that to a droid, they were just too strong.

Demon…

More movement in the trees, and this time when I looked the shadows made no effort to hide themselves. They were human-shaped, loping along, steadying themselves against trunks, easily keeping pace with us as we ran in the open. Some were deformed, with hunched shoulders and huge heads. I glanced back at Chele; she had seen as well, and she put on a spurt of speed and caught up with me.

“We have nothing,” she said, and I started looking around for a heavy stick or a fist-sized rock with which to defend ourselves.

Up ahead, between two trees, what looked like a giant spider web spanned the space between the trunks, black lines against the clear blue sky. I slowed and saw that it was comprised of long, drooping lengths of barbed wire. At its centre, where dozens of wires crossed, chunks of something clung to the barbs. I didn’t want to look, I knew I shouldn’t look, but Chele’s horrified gasp drew my eyes down to ground level. A body lay beneath the web, torn and distorted where its weight had ripped it from the constraining wires, flesh weakened by rot, bones parted by death. It provided a feeding ground for small animals now, and I tried not to look too closely. I did not recognise any species.

“That’s not Laura,” I said, but for a few seconds I did wonder. Perhaps in this strange place, ten minutes on the coach had been ten hours out here. I looked again, saw that the shape wore the remains of a boiler suit, not a dress. We ran on.

And the figures came out from beneath the trees.

One second the landscape was bare, and we could have been hiking through the unspoilt uplands of Switzerland or the foothills of the Himalayas. The next, thirty people had stepped out to watch us go by. And they were out of nightmares.

The hunched shadows I had seen resolved themselves into wretched shapes bent double, the huge heads great rolls of barbed wire. They were ape-like in their attitude, some naked, dirty, covered in sores, and where the wire pressed to their shoulders it had settled into the flesh, finding the hard bone easier to rest on. They looked at the ground, never seeing more than four steps in front of them. Perhaps that was from choice.

The others, those standing upright, were bedecked in all manner of military paraphernalia. I saw an old Nazi uniform, all leather and belts; a white outfit from some Arctic warfare unit; a braided jacket from the Napoleonic Wars; dirty green camouflage from the more recent European conflicts. Sandy desert garb, drab olives, a bulky NBC suit… more I did not recognise. And looking into the faces of those wearing the uniforms, I knew that there was nothing at all regular about these men and women. There was a desperation about them all, a glint of defiance in their eyes, as if all the deserters from history had gathered together to avoid, or perhaps accept their punishment.

A few carried weapons, some of which I recognised, others I did not. The glinting gold shell, clasped in the fist of one of the women and feeding green tendrils into the veins on her wrist… I had no idea what that was or what it was designed to do. All I could be sure of was that it was bad. The woman’s face told me that, and the scarring around the moist socket where her right eye should have been.

“Who the fuck are you?” one of the men said. He stepped forward until he was standing nose to nose with me. I could smell the sweet rottenness of his breath, stale sweat, and something worse wafting from a dirty bandage on his right shoulder. He carried a serrated knife clotted with dried blood.

“I’m looking for my daughter.” I glanced over his shoulder and past the milling people, trying to see beyond their threat to the trees where I thought Laura hung. They were only a couple of hundred yards away. I could run there in a minute, be holding my dear, dear daughter to my chest within a minute more, nursing, comforting, hoping that I was not too late and would need comforting myself…

“I said, who the fuck are you? Not, what the fuck are you doing? If I want to know what you’re doing for I’ll ask, what the fuck are you looking for? Get it?”

“Fucking right,” I said, wincing inwardly but unable to avoid the sarcasm. “And as for who I am, my name’s Nolan. Not that it’s any business of yours.”

The man stepped back, his eyes went wide and he brought the knife up in what looked like an expert defensive attitude.

If he goes for me now, I thought, that’s it, no hazy knife defences learnt in karate when I was sixteen are going to save me.

“What are you… where are you from?” He looked at Chele as well, and the others suddenly seemed more interested. Even those hunkered pretences at humanity seemed to raise their heads.

I saw something in this madman’s eyes — not fear as such, but caution and… hope? I told him what I was sure he wanted to hear. “We’re visitors here,” I said, “and I’ve just seen my daughter back there between those trees. Strung up.” The man had a pair of wire cutters hanging from his belt. His hands were slashed and scabbed and scarred, as if his favourite hobby was crushing glass bottles by hand. “You did it, didn’t you?”

“You’re from outside?” His eyes went wider and the knife dropped down.

“Yes. Listen, you’ve got to help me — ”

“How did you get in here? Why didn’t the demons stop you? Where are they, are they following, are they coming?”

“I got past one, jumped the coach, that’s all. Chele here offered to help me. I saw my daughter. And if you don’t stand out of my way…” I cast my eyes across the gathered throng. My threat was so weak, it didn’t even warrant finishing. I’d never felt so scared, so downright terrified, not even when I’d seen Janine lying there in her deathbed. Then I had known what was happening, and I’d almost come to terms with the fact that there was no chance for her, just a long, slow end. Now I had no idea what state Laura was really in, whether she was alive, whether she’d recognise me or even want me…

I’d never felt so damn scared.

“Come on!” the man said, reaching out for me. I drew back and he snorted, shook his head. He had long wild hair, black teeth and boils on his face, but his eyes were bright and intelligent. “Come on,” he said, “we’ll help you!”

He turned to his followers — if that’s what they were — and shouted: “Drop the wire! These are from outside!”

“They all are!” an unseen someone shouted.

“Yes, but these shouldn’t be here. They’re alien.”

I pushed past him, sick, angry, desperate to find Laura. Chele came on behind me. The people followed her, I could hear them mumbling and chattering excitedly, but I forged ahead. Nobody seemed willing to stop us.

I broke into a run.

And then I saw Laura.

And the skies darkened, fat drops of rain like spatters of blood hit my skin, a fast, violent wind smashed through from behind the trees, the branches shook, the barbed wire web swayed back and forth, and I heard my daughter’s cries as the wire tore her more. Her dress was wet with blood, which at least showed that she was still bleeding. Dead people don’t bleed.

“Oh Jesus!” I gasped, because my pale-skinned daughter was a red-faced demon, her eyes wide and her mouth foaming. “Oh sweet Jesus, just why…?”

“Hey,” Chele said, hugging me quickly, tightly, before rushing to the foot of the nearest tree. She was a big woman, I noticed that for the first time as she began to climb. Her clothes were baggy and black, designed to hide her size, and she moved up and along the branches with a grace I could scarcely believe.

The rain was even heavier now, and dark clouds boiled the sky. Through the copse of trees I could see mountain slopes being assaulted by the weather, and creeping down the mountainside like the shaky legs of an old, angry god, two tornadoes twisted their way towards us. Black Teeth and his people were gathered behind me, muttering amongst themselves in a language I hoped I would never know.

“Daddy,” Laura said weakly. I smiled and went to answer, but then I felt myself slipping down and out, the rain turned warm on my face as my tears mixed, and someone caught me under my arms as I slipped to the ground.

She’s alive, I thought, alive and she knows me, she sees me, and she’s not ignoring me or telling me to leave her alone, let her live her own life, not like I’d been expecting, not like people had been telling me, because she’d run away with a religious sect and who… who had even told me that in the first place?

“Laura!” I called out, but it was Chele I heard in response, her voice cutting through the tempest.

“Grab hold,” she said, and I heard a sharp snick as wire was cut. I thought I had my eyes open but I could not see anything, and I may have been mistaken. Someone was holding me against them, their hand on my forehead. “Hold her weight, hold it! Ease her down. That’s right… that’s right… gentle now, she’s a baby…”

Gentle now, she’s only a baby, aren’t you just a big baby? I’d used to say that to Laura when she was five, it would annoy and delight her in equal measures as I swung her around in my arms, called her my little baby and set her down on the grass, watching as she staggered with dizziness. She’d giggle as she fell over…

… Laura cried out, and I sensed the source of her voice lowering until it was at my level.

“Laura!” I called, trying to stand, to see.

There was the sound of an explosion from higher up the hillside and the sky was suddenly filled with grit, splinters and leaves. I opened my eyes in time to see the sky falling in.

“We have to leave here!” Black Teeth shouted into my ear.

“I want my daughter!” I shook off restraining hands and went to the trees. Chele was already back on the ground, trying to snip wire with a pair of cutters she’d liberated from someone. Laura was bleeding and crying and writhing. She wanted to stand and walk, I could see that, but pain held her tight.

Another explosive sound and this time the ground shook, the skies turning from dark to black as the tornadoes plucked trees and earth and rocks and mixed them into a barrage of natural shrapnel. I ducked down and knelt beside Laura, pulling a strand of wire carefully away from her wrist. The rain sluiced the wounds on her body, washing the blood into the earth. I put one hand under the back of her neck and lifted slowly. I looked into her eyes, promising that I was here for her.

“Daddy,” she said, “you came to rescue me.” I could barely hear her but I read the words in her eyes.

“Yes honey.”

“I hurt.”

I nodded. “I’ll look after you now, honey, don’t worry.”

“Now!” Black Teeth shouted, and I noticed that most of the people he’d been with had vanished.

Chele appeared on Laura’s other side and held her up, draping my daughter’s arm gently across her shoulders. “Where to?” she shouted.

Black Teeth said something but he was already turning away, his words lost to the storm.

We followed, lifting Laura because she could not move her legs, and each cry made me want to stop and hold her to me. At the same time I was enraged, ready to take revenge for what had been done to her. I kept my eyes on the madman’s back. The wire cutters had vanished from his belt, but that meant nothing.

He hadn’t denied putting Laura up there in the first place.

The storm pushed us on and the tornadoes shook the earth, sucking it up and raining debris down around us. A shattered tree trunk speared into the earth twenty yards to my left. It groaned and fractured, and jagged splinters fired out like the spines of a tarantula. I felt a sting in my leg but kept on moving. I tried to haul in a breath but the air was moving too fast, being sucked away, and I remembered hearing about people whose lungs had imploded during tornadoes.

Laura had her head down. Her hair was blowing about her head like some mad Medusa, but her teeth were gritted, and I knew that she was holding onto consciousness to help Chele and me as much as she could.

Black Teeth was standing by a huge mound of boulders just ahead, gesticulating and shouting as if challenging the weather to a fight. He turned and stepped behind the rocks, and we followed.

There was a cave. The entrance was small and sheltered, lit by burning torches tied onto the walls, but it soon widened into a sizeable hollow beneath the ground. It was filled with people. Behind us, the roar and savagery of the tornadoes and the accompanying storm. Ahead, a cave swarming with those who had sacrificed Laura to the barbed wire. Where my best chances lay I had not had time to consider, but the storm was death for sure. My knee was bleeding where the shard of tree had slashed through my trousers, but I welcomed the cool dribble of blood into my shoe. It made me feel alive. And it meant that Laura was not bleeding alone.

“Where the hell are we?” Chele whispered.

Laura moaned and suddenly became heavier. “She’s fainted,” I said, hoping that was all. We carried her farther into the cave, her feet dragging on the floor, and no one moved their legs to let us pass. They put her up there, I thought, thinking of my first staggering sight of Laura bleeding and twisting on the wire, hung up to cure like a slab of ham. I wondered why the hell they may have lured us down here.

We found a slightly raised area of the cave, free of people, dry and dusty and flat enough so that Laura did not roll when we put her down. I was tired and terrified, panting with fear and exertion. Chele seemed the same. Her eyes were shifting constantly, looking here, there, somewhere else, never fixing on one place or person for more than a few seconds. It was a form of shock I had seen in my own bathroom mirror the night Janine had finally passed away.

“Chele,” I said. She looked at me, and I smiled to hold her gaze. “Thank you. I couldn’t have done it without you. I’d still be out there in the storm.” As if to emphasise how bad that would be the noise increased for several endless seconds, the vibrations knocking grit from the cave’s ceiling and raising a sheen of dust in the air. There was no panic or screaming, only a disturbing look of resignation on most of the faces I could see, as if they couldn’t care less if the tornadoes plucked them from their hiding places.

I’d seen that look before as well. The faces of concentration camp survivors from World War Two.

It became hard to breathe for a few seconds as air was sucked from the cave, and then the chaos ended as soon as it had begun.

Outside, silence. There was no light coming from the tunnel entrance, but no noise either, no sounds of destruction. Could a tornado die out that quickly, I wondered? Could it possibly all end so soon?

“Hey, Nolan,” Chele said. “I did it for me as much as you.” She kept her voice low because there wasn’t much chat in the cave. Most of those who had come in before us were already camping down for the night. A kid was crying somewhere, someone else was whimpering quietly into the subdued light cast by the burning lanterns. And I was sure I could hear the covert sounds of sex.

“Thank you anyway,” I said. “You didn’t have to leave that coach. I know what happened to you, I’m sorry… and up until ten minutes ago I could have related to it. But look… look at her… look at my baby…” I burst into tears. They’d been threatening for a while, I knew that, but terror and adrenaline had kept them at bay. Now, as safe as I thought we could possibly be, I found it easy to cry. When I felt Chele’s arms close around my chest and back I cried more, because she must have cried so much herself. In a way I felt embarrassed, shedding so much grief over my child when she was still alive. But Chele would know how I felt. I was so sure of that that I didn’t even look up. She would know.

Perhaps by touching and holding me, she could gain some vicarious sense of joy and relief.

“Let’s help your little girl,” she said, releasing me suddenly and squatting next to Laura. I joined her there and touched my daughter’s cheek, feeling the stickiness of blood and the coolness of dried tears. Her eyes fluttered open and looked up at me, and even though she didn’t smile I knew that she recognised me. As she slipped back into unconsciousness I hoped she felt safe.

“She’s lost a lot of blood,” I said, trying to see the shading of her lips and skin in the poor cave light. “And her arms…” I peeled back the sleeves of her dress and winced as they stuck in places, either tangled with dried blood or driven down into the wounds by the tight wire. There were puncture wounds all along her arms from the barbs, and longer, deeper cuts where the wire had been wound and pulled taut by her own weight.

It must have hurt so much. I was crying again, but this time there was rage mixed in with the relief, and while I spat on my handkerchief and did my best to clean some of the wounds I was listening out for the voice of Black Teeth.

“I’ll ask if there’s any — ”

“I’ll go,” I said. “If you don’t mind sitting with her? She’s asleep now, and I need to talk to these people.”

“I don’t mind,” Chele said, but she looked at me strangely.

“I’ll only talk,” I said. “And I’ll get what we need for Laura.”

Chele nodded.

I leant over Laura and gave her a kiss on the forehead. She whimpered slightly in her sleep. I hated to imagine what she was dreaming.

Standing, turning around, I took my first proper look around the cave. It was big enough to comfortably house the thirty-or-so people accompanying Black Teeth. They huddled in groups or alone, sitting beneath burning torches set in the walls. Some of them seemed to be eating, others sleeping, and one couple were screwing in a darkened corner, unconcerned at being seen or heard. They were mostly dressed in old uniforms bordering on rags, many of them carrying wounds and deformities whose causes I could only guess at. Some wore glasses, a few glittered with jewellery. The pathetic creatures I’d seen carrying the rolls of barbed wire were gathered together at one side of the cave, already sleeping. Any pity I should have felt was wiped clean at the thought of Laura sleeping uneasily behind me. Whatever quirk of fate had made them the workhorses of this sick band, I could not feel sorry. They could shake their heads, say ‘No’, and I’d never feel sorry.

“How is she?” Black Teeth asked. He was standing a few yards away, nearer the cave entrance. A woman was washing his face with a dirty rag. Her movements were soft and tender, but her face was hard.

“Do you care?” I asked.

He blinked a few times as the cloth passed across his eyes, smearing dust and dirt over his eyelids. “No,” he said. “I’ve seen too much to care. But I’m trying to be polite.”

“She needs painkillers, bandages. The worst wounds need stitching. We want clean water to wash her, food and drink, and a way out of here. She needs a doctor.”

“He was a doctor, once” he said, nodding towards one of the malformed wire carriers snoring at the other side of the cave.

I glanced over and then back at him. The woman dampened the cloth on the cave wall, wrung it out and returned to her cleaning duties. Black Teeth barely seemed to register her ministrations.

“Clean water?” I said. “Food?”

“Food!” the madman shouted, and he was greeted by a few angry murmurs. “He wants some of our food!”

“Can’t you smell it?” a voice called from the shadows.

“You’re welcome, alien,” someone else said.

“Barb him!”

“I’ve just seen some of your people eating,” I said. “You must have food.”

Black Teeth shoved the woman away, and she retreated to the rear of the cave. “We’re left food each day, so long as we string up enough fodder. Some days eight is enough. Some days, eighteen. We never know, we’re never told, so we always do as many as we can. When we come back here, there’s food or there isn’t. Mostly there is. We work hard.”

“You worked hard on my daughter.” I couldn’t contain the rage. This bastard was trying to explain himself to me.

“She was fodder.” He motioned me to follow, turned and walked to the mouth of the cave. He glanced back over his shoulder when he sensed that I had not moved. “We should talk,” he said.

I was shaking with a combination of anger and hopelessness. I could never attack him and win, even if I could find violence within me. It all felt so pointless.

I looked back at Laura. Chele was holding her head in her lap, cleaning blood from her face. If talking to this man would help my daughter… so be it.

I followed him to the narrow cave entrance, feeling eyes on my back like gun sights.

“Look,” he said. I didn’t realise we were outside until he spoke, but as I looked around… so much had changed.

The storm had not only abated, all evidence of its existence had vanished. The sky was swimming in stars, not a cloud in sight, and from somewhere behind us the moon shed its borrowed light across the landscape. The grasses, shrubs and other undergrowth had vanished, torn up and deposited in piles already rotting and drying out. The trees were ghostly skeletons of wood, denuded of leaves.

“It’s changed so much.” I said.

Black Teeth sighed and nodded. “We’ve barbed in many settings.”

“But why do it at all?”

“If we don’t, we’ll be taken away and fed in elsewhere, used as fodder in another nightmare. What choice is that? What would you do?”

“I’d rather die.”

He laughed, but it was bitter and sad. “Yes, well, maybe… but here, there’s more than dying. Never forget where you are. Alien.” He looked at me, staring, trying to see past or through me. Yet again I couldn’t help notice the intelligence in his eyes and I wondered what he’d been before he found himself here. Somehow I didn’t want to know.

“The food,” I said. “The water.”

He shook his head. “There was food and water left for us today — we had a fruitful day — but it’s been turned bad because we helped you.”

I shook my head. “That’s crazy. What sort of control could they have to actually make food turn bad?”

“They?” he said. “Capital ‘T’? So, who are They? The government? The military? The evil Galactic Empire? The Bliderbergs? God himself?” he looked up to the sky, his eyes moving jerkily as if counting the stars. “You know what I was before? An anthropologist.. I lectured on ancient civilisations, specialising in social and political aspects, how the organisations in an old civilisation can affect us as well, even if there are no direct links whatsoever. Harmful, eh? Dangerous? ‘They’ must have thought so. Because they stole me away and — ”

“My daughter never did anything that could have been a threat to anyone.”

“No. No. Maybe not. Well, that’s my ‘threat’ theory blown out of the water. Not that I ever really believed it anyway.” He smiled and I knew that he was playing with me now, perhaps enjoying my discomfort and pain and confusion because he’d passed up the chance to barb me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe… well, someone controls all this.”

“Really? What if it is God? Where’s the limit to His control?”

“Don’t be stupid. God is dead, didn’t someone once say? Besides… if I ever did believe, that’s been wiped out since Laura was taken away from me.”

“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.”

I raised an eyebrow, partly in surprise, mostly because I hated being condescended to. I wasn’t about to ask him what it meant, but he told me anyway.

“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. Voltaire.”

“Great,” I said. “My life is now full. And you? You believe in God? Living here, like this — ”

“What else is there for me to believe in? The goodness of Man? Give me a fucking break.” He’d suddenly gone from relatively quiet to loud and angry. I thought he was going to strike out.

“You have medicines, though? Bandages?”

“Same provisos as the food and drink. Today… probably not. Let’s face it, you brought the storm and rotted our food. I hardly think there will be plasters and sterile gauze for you.”

“I hope you die,” I said. It surprised and shocked me, and it was a stupid thing to say. He could kill me here and now. He was mad, after all.

Black Teeth didn’t even register the comment. He looked out over the landscape, perhaps scouting for trees to use for tomorrow’s work.

“I need to get away from here,” I said quietly, turning to go. “I need to help Laura.”

“The reason I spared you,” he said, “was because I thought you’d know the way out. You’re an alien, you should never be in here. For me you were… hope. That’s all.” He turned to me, and the sudden change in his expression was startling. In the starlight he looked like a little boy who had lost his ball over a neighbour’s fence, and now he was asking for it back. Innocence hid the blemishes on his skin and the murder and madness in his eyes.

I shook my head and his expression changed again.

“So what?” I said. “Are you going to barb us now? Now you know I can’t help you?”

“I should. We should. They look up to me because I’ve been here longer than any of them. They’ll call for it. You should go.”

“You’re helping me again? Why?”

“I’ve never got to talk to any of the people we barbed before. Never known them as anything other than fodder.”

“Not even my daughter?”

He looked at me, his eyes dead and resigned to worse than death, and suddenly I wanted to leave as soon as possible, run, run aimlessly from these terrible, pathetic people.

“She was asking for you all the time I strung her up,” he said.

I turned and left him instantly, not allowing myself time for thought or reflection. It was the only thing I could do.

“Through the cave,” he called after me. “A tunnel. Don’t come back out this way, otherwise you’re our fodder again. Go elsewhere. At least then it won’t be me who has to kill you.”

I didn’t acknowledge him. I didn’t want to see the into the eyes of the man that had seen my daughter begging for me, and done nothing to help.

Inside the cave, eyes were upon me. I looked into the face of the woman who’d been washing Black Teeth, and there I saw envy. Someone else, a young boy with an old man’s face, seemed ready to kill me. A woman touched my ankle as I walked by and looked up, and I wondered whether she wanted me to kill her. The copulating couple at the rear of the cave still going at it, noisier now, and their cries and grunts added a surreal background to my walk to Laura and Chele.

I knelt down beside my daughter and touched her face. She was still unconscious.

“We need to leave,” I said.

Chele shook her head. “She’s unconscious, not asleep. We shouldn’t move her far.”

“I’ll carry her.”

“Nolan, she’s not a little girl anymore, and — ”

“Believe me,” I said, looking into Chele’s eyes to add emphasis, “we need leave right now.” I held her gaze for a few seconds and nodded.

She looked around the cave, her eyes glittering fearfully in the weak torch light. “Which way?”

“Through the cave. Down there to the back, there’s a tunnel.”

“What makes you so sure?” Chele looked where I had indicated, and I knew what she was thinking. There was very little light back there, and the only people who’d apparently ventured that far were the fucking couple. And what did make me so sure? Did Black Teeth really want to help me, I wondered? That ex-academic whose living now comprised of hunting down people like cattle, winding them in barbed wire and crucifying them between trees?

Threat was as prevalent in the cave as the sounds of sex and the smell of rot. Out there, through the cave mouth, I knew that there was very little left.

“We have no choice,” I said. And I hated that. “Come on, help me lift Laura.”

We picked her up and hoisted her onto my shoulders, so that I was carrying her in a fireman’s lift. There was movement around the cave. The people were fidgeting as they realised we were preparing to leave.

“It’s pitch black back there,” Chele whispered.

I started across the uneven floor, moving away from the oases of light and towards the humping lovers. I heard Chele behind me, and I wondered whether she’d follow me over a cliff and into a pool of molten rock.

Laura was heavy, but the weight was almost comforting. It bore down to let me know that I was helping my daughter at last. She wasn’t as limp as I’d expected — her arms lay tight down my side, and her legs were all knotted muscle — and I suspected that she was waking up. In a way I wanted her to remain unconscious for a little while longer, at least until we were away from these people.

They were standing now, some of them mumbling, others just watching. I only recognised a few words; food, water, bastards, barbed, stupid. They had no hope, no future, no life, and we were responsible for them not having anything decent to eat or drink tonight.

The rutting couple were louder than ever, and now I could see them, pale like landed fish. Beyond them was the black maw of the tunnel. The poor light threw their rampant shadows behind them, huge and monstrous, as if they were some mythical horror guarding an underground tomb.

I passed by the final group of people gathered under the last blazing torch.

One of the copulating couple began to scream, the other grunted, both voices androgynous.

I lowered an arm from around Laura, walked calmly between two people and lifted the torch from its rudimentary wall mounting.

“Take this.” I handed it back to Chele, making eye contact with first one, then the other person I passed by, challenging them to confront me. If they did, there was nothing I could do to protect myself. The only defence I had was my bluff and bluster. So I stared, trying not to let my fear show through.

Another scream from the couple. They’d been rutting for at least fifteen minutes, and the climax seemed a long time coming. There was nothing titillating in the sound, only sickening, because it was more a cry of pain than anything else. Maybe it always had been.

Chele led the way towards the tunnel, and as we passed the screwing couple they let out their final, screamed exhortations. And the torch revealed them for what they were.

The woman sat astride the man, blood and sweat running down her back, buttocks spread provocatively as she glared at us over her shoulder. Her body must have been very fine once, but now the curves were slashed and the swells were torn, knobbled with scar tissue. The man writhed beneath her, a high keening issuing from his throat. I had a frank view of where they were joined, his penis still locked inside her. And I saw why they had both been screaming.

The woman held onto a long strand of barbed wire. Its end was twisted several times around the man’s scrotum, and she’d pulled it tight.

“Want some, alien?” she asked.

Their blood was mingling down there.

I turned away, the acidic tang of bile rising in my throat. Chele had hurried on and I followed the jumping light, glad that Laura was still unconscious. Laughter followed us down into the tunnel, slick as puke, just as sick. Have fun, I thought I heard someone say. It could have been Black Teeth bidding us farewell.

I wondered just where he’d directed us. Wherever, it couldn’t be as bad as where we had just escaped from.

And I thought of the riots and the shootings and the disease-stricken valley being napalmed…

“Why is this happening?” I said, suddenly feeling tears looming once again. Things had been happening so quickly that I’d barely had a chance to think. It seemed like days since I’d escaped the coach, but it was probably no more than an hour or two. Chele kept on walking, offering me no answer. It was a hopeless question.

“Dad,” Laura moaned, “you’re hurting me.”

“Honey, we’ve just got to go on a little longer. How do you feel?”

“Everything hurts.”

I was already flagging beneath her weight, but I managed to stretch and give her a kiss on the chin. “A little longer. Chele, we need to move a long way quickly.”

“You think they might come after us?”

I thought of what Black Teeth had said, about how outsiders were fodder and that barbing them was all they knew. Perhaps he’d fancied some sport, for once. The thrill of the chase. Maybe, for him and his people, revenge would taste sweeter if they had to work for it.

“It’s crossed my mind,” I said. “Any signs of this tunnel leading anywhere?” I had my head down with the weight of Laura slung over my neck, so I couldn’t see much more than my feet and Chele’s shadow, thrown back by the torch.

“Hang on.” She stopped and we stood there for a few seconds, silent and still. “No sign of a breeze,” she said. “Can’t hear anything. If they’re following, they’re very quiet about it.”

“Let me down, Dad.”

“Honey…” But she was heavier than ever, and in a minute or two I would not be able to manage any more. I hadn’t kept in shape, especially since Janine had died. I’d let myself go.

I set her down gently and she hissed, leaning back into me.

“Laura?”

“Pins and needles,” she said, and she giggled. “Bloody pins and needles!”

Laughter was the last thing I’d expected. Screaming, maybe, but laughter… and maybe that’s why it felt so good when I joined in.

Chele simply stared at us, unable to see a funny side. “They’ll hear us back in the cave,” she said. “They’ll think we’re laughing at them.”

“We are!” I said, laughing out loud. “Did you see that couple? That barbed wire? What else can we do but laugh!”

Laura shook her legs, her giggles mixing with groans of discomfort as her circulation returned. Some of her wounds glinted once more as fresh blood started to flow. Her pains became real again, her laughter stuttered and she remembered that she had a lot more to worry about than pins and needles.

“Daddy, don’t let them do it to me again,” she said. “Please, please don’t — ”

“I never will,” I said, wanting to hold her and hug her and love her here in the dark, in a cave in a place that was an idea of Hell. But Chele was glaring at me and I knew we had to leave. “Can you walk, honey?”

Laura nodded. “I think so. I hurt everywhere, so at least it’s pretty even.”

“Do you feel weak?”

She nodded. “I think I need a sugar rush. Don’t suppose you have any chocolate?” She looked at Chele then, almost as if seeing her for the first time. Thank you so much,” she said. I felt a hot rush of pride for my young, insightful daughter. She didn’t know Chele and could have no idea of how she had come to be here with me. But still, she knew a friend when she saw one.

“It’s my honour,” Chele said. “Your dad… he let me help him, and now I’m helping you. And you’re both helping me. More than you can know.”

“Chele was on the same coach — ” I started, but then Chele cut in.

“Later, Nolan. Please, I want out of here and I really, really think we should leave. Laura? You agree?”

“Dad?” Her voice was a plea in itself. I nodded, Chele headed off and I walked behind Laura, ready to catch her should she stumble or faint.

The tunnel turned and erred downward, so steep in places that we had to brace ourselves against the walls to prevent our feet slipping out from beneath us. We were going deeper and that wasn’t good, but the air was also changing — its smells, its tastes, its textures were different from the cave and the place we had left.

Lost underground forever, I thought. Now there’s an interesting idea of Hell. I started looking out for the creamy reflection of skeletons.

And then I looked around, wondering where the coach could be and whether I was looking into some spectator’s eyes at that very moment.

“All those people…” I said.

“What?” Chele did not turn around, and Laura seemed content just to listen.

“All those people in that valley. The disease. The bombs. All stolen away from the real world, all fodder?”

Chele did not answer, but the light jumped along the walls as if startled, and I guessed that she’d shrugged her shoulders.

The numbers staggered me. And I wondered how many people went missing every year around the globe, how many are never found. What chance that a relative will see them on a journey through Hell?

What was the likelihood that I would find Laura whilst trying to come to terms with losing her?

I thought about Black Teeth’s comments, wondering whether I’d created my own god or simply found the real One at last.

There was a loud crack behind us, like two rocks being smacked together. We stopped, wide-eyed and fearful, as a sound bathed us in echoes. It was a sigh or a roar, a whisper or a shout, all concepts of distance and time making it difficult to discern.

Another crack, followed by two more in quick succession.

“They’re gunshots,” Chele said. And as if in answer the cracks turned into one long string of explosions, and the whisper or roar emerged as very definite, very desperate screams.

“They’re being slaughtered,” I said, thinking of the pathetic people we’d left behind, dancing in the cave as bullets found them.

“I can’t be sorry,” Laura whispered. “I can’t be sorry at all.” And her voice, quiet though it was, cut through the destruction.

We stood there for a minute, avoiding each other’s eyes and listening to the murder. I heard screams and shouts between the gunfire and towards the end, as the volume seemed to decrease, moaning and pleading and crying between the intermittent shots. Chele moved the torch so that its liquid light shifted back along the tunnel the way we had come. I looked at her, caught the flames reflected in her eyes, and we both knew what the other was thinking.

Laura said it. “Maybe they’ll come for us now. The demons… maybe they’ll come.”

“Let’s go,” Chele said, turning away and heading back into the tunnel. She did not wait for a response, evidently not expecting one, and I realised that she was taking over. Before, leaving the coach and challenging the group of people head-on, my hurt and desperation for Laura had driven me. Now that I had Laura back perhaps Chele thought that I was losing focus, my attentions divided two separate ways: internally, to what I should be doing for Laura; and externally, trying to get us out of this. Whatever this may be, exactly.

“What are they?” I asked Laura, whispering because I was still listening out for the sounds of pursuit.

“Dad,” she said, and fell silent without turning to look at me.

“Honey? What?”

She glanced over her shoulder, and it hit me hard how much she had grown up.

I remembered the time when I thought that I’d grown from a child into an adult. It was when I fought back against the bully at school, a fat, ugly prick of a kid, who seemed to relish taking out all his own inadequacies on other people. He had terrible acne, so he beat up little kids. He had big ears and a long, hawkish nose, so he beat up little kids. He was fat as a cow, so he beat up little kids. Many times one of those little kids was me, because I was small and weak and insecure, and fighting back had just never even crossed my mind.

Until the bully slapped me around the head in front of a girl I was desperate to impress.

My reaction was instant and unconscious, fuelled as much by raging hormones as a need to protect myself. One kick to the balls and a flurry of little fists to the fat bastard’s nose, and he never picked on me again. He hit on other kids more than ever… I’d beaten him up, so he beat on other kids… but never me. And people looked at me slightly differently after that. Not only because I’d fought back, but because I’d stood up for myself in the face of superior odds. And that, as any kid knows, is what you’re supposed to do when you’re an adult.

Kids have a lot to learn.

“I really don’t want to talk about it right now, Dad,” Laura said, and I wondered whether she’d ever look back and realise exactly when she’d grown up, and what she would she see in that memory. Faces beneath the trees, metal barbs sinking through her skin, demons storming in from blackened skies, forcing themselves down to her, onto her…?

It didn’t bear thinking about, but I knew that I’d have to ask her soon.

“Stop!” Chele said suddenly, and like three drunken Stooges we walked into each other in the dark. The light from the torch blazed across the jagged tunnel walls, revealing an intricate map of dust-strewn spider webs. No spiders, just their ancient webs. Somehow that was worse.

“What!” I hissed. I was jumpy enough without Chele pulling a stunt like this, and for the briefest moment I was actually pissed at her. Then I remembered what she had done and I felt ashamed at my blaze of anger.

“What’s that noise?” she said. She was holding the torch in both hands, away from her body so that the light from the flames did not dazzle her. “It sounds like… something moving down the tunnel. Lots of somethings. Scraping the walls.

Laura hugged herself to me and I could smell her, stale blood and bad breath and fear. I kissed her on the temple. I was determined not to picture what was coming along the tunnels at us, but the more I tried the worse the images were; demons merging with the dark, black body-suits, their antenna twitching at the dank air like mandibles, legs and arms stretching out to fend themselves from walls and floor and ceiling, scampering along and feeling more at home when their hands clawed through the thick spider webs -

“Water,” Laura said. “It’s water, and it’s coming from that way.” She pointed past Chele in our direction of travel.

“Underground river,” I said. “That may not be such good news.”

Chele looked at me and her expression was a mystery. I thought she wanted me to say or do something, but I couldn’t figure out what. I shrugged and raised my eyebrows instead, and she was about to speak when we heard more noises in the cave tunnel. And this time they were coming from behind us.

Clicking, like the chatter of a thousand electrical switches, or a field full of crickets in intense discussion. The echoes added to the effect. It sounded wholly alien and threatening, and I could not believe that whatever was making that noise would be good for us. The fact that it was approaching at a staggering rate did not bode well.

“That’s how they talk!” Laura said, and her eyes were so wide and terrified that I felt my knees weaken with fear.

I held her, both of us sharing in the comfort. Chele moved and I thought she was coming into the embrace as well. I would have welcomed it. But she changed her position slightly, cocked her head, looking first up the tunnel and then down.

“We go down, we hit the water,” she said. “We go back… we have to face whatever’s making that noise.”

Again I thought of man-sized spiders, or spider-sized people, scampering through tunnels with automatic weapons held to bear.

“The water,” Laura said. She broke away from me and staggered down the tunnel past Chele.

“I’ll go first,” Chele said, trying to slip past Laura without harming her with the flaming torch.

“Hurry!” Laura said. “Hurry, Dad!”

I glanced behind me but couldn’t see much. The tunnel had narrowed down considerably and my bulk blocked most of the light, casting my shadow far back along the floor. I wondered whether I would be able to tell when the first of the demons came out of its own shadow into mine.

The clicking increased in volume and intensity, as if they could smell us.

As we turned a sharp corner, the sound of water changed quickly from a whisper to a roar. It drowned out the noises of excited pursuit. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Each passing second I expected a hard hand to settle around my neck, or a slew of bullets to blast out my heart and lungs onto the damp cave floor.

“Dad!” Laura screamed, and her voice was fading away fast.

And then the light went out.

I realised why as I too started to fall, tumbling in the pitch blackness, falling into another world entirely.

A world where Hell was wet.

The room was a pool of mud. I had time to make that out before I plunged straight in, and also in that split second I caught sight of two shapes struggling on the surface, twisting and writhing themselves deeper even as they tried to escape, sweeping the muck in swirling patterns with their hands, kicking it into slow-motion ripples, bubbles popping from their mouths and noses, slower bubbles rising to the surface from their clothes and popping ponderously, releasing the stench of underground, and the smell filled the air above it as the mud filled the room below, an almost visible miasma that stung my lungs as I inhaled before I plunged in.

I managed to hold my head up, keeping my eyes and ears and mouth free of the viscous mess, but the rest of my body felt twisted all ways with the suction hauling me down. I kicked for something solid to stand on but there was nothing. The mud oozed around my legs and body, cold and wet and sickeningly intimate. I looked to where I thought was up but I saw a window, smashed and allowing more mud to flow into the room. I glanced to my side and there was the ceiling.

I listened for the clicking of the pursuing demons, but such clean sounds would have been so out of place here. They were gone. Where they had gone I had no idea. Where we had arrived at was equally bemusing, but thinking about it would be of no help. Survival was my main concern.

That, and Laura.

I’d rescued her from one hell and taken her into another, and now there she was rolling in the mud, thrashing herself lower and lower, sinking, sinking…

“Laura!” I yelled, and it must have been a mumble to her mud-cloaked ears.

“Dad!” A bubble formed at her mouth and burst her plea into the air.

“Keep still! Don’t struggle, you’ll go deeper!” Saying that, I trusted my arms and tried to swim to Laura. She was closer to the wall than me, the parts of her that did show above the surface quickly being swamped by the tonnes of mud gushing through the broken window. And in thrashing my arms and kicking my legs, the mud’s hold on me was tightening. I slipped deeper, feeling the cold kiss of filth on my chin and earlobes.

What sort of God…? I thought, remembering my recent conversation with Black Teeth so far away. What sort of God would rescue my daughter from such a fate, only to drown her in mud and shit? One angry at my disbelief, perhaps? I tried to say sorry but it came out like hate.

“Don’t move, dammit!” Chele shouted, her voice clotted and wet. I managed to turn my head slightly, looking from the corner of my eye, and there she was. She’d made it to the corner of the room and she must have found a piece of heavy furniture to stand on, because it looked as if she was balancing on the surface of the mud itself. She was a wet black sculpture, her clothes so heavy that her sleeves had doubled in length and the hem of her heavy sweater was kissing her knees. I was shocked to see her small breasts bared and lathered in mud. I was even more surprised at my reaction — embarrassment at first, but then a definite stirring, an unbelievable hardening as my daughter struggled her last and we all faced a slow, dreadful death.

“Chele…” I said. More than anything it was a plea.

She was looking around desperately, first at me, then Laura — who by now was little more than a hump shifting below the surface of the mud — and then around her, repeating the process, looking for something to do… and I realised with sad resignation that she was frantic with helplessness. She was not in control at all. She had no idea of how to save us.

I started trying to swim to Laura. The mud was amazingly heavy, and it took what felt like minutes for me to sweep handfuls of it behind me, try to step forward, kicking through the rising mess like a moonwalker in slow motion.

“Keep still!” Chele said.

“She’ll be dead,” I said, not turning my head, keeping all my attention on the few signs I could see of my daughter. Muck still gushed through the window but it seemed to be slowing now, finding its own level. Outside the room — whether we were in a house, a hotel, whatever — there was the steady roar of millions of tons of mud flowing past solid buildings. A thousand years of erosion in minutes. Even as I moved I heard the rumble of what could only have been a structure collapsing.

“Nolan — ”

“Unless you’ve thought of any way out,” I said, “there’s nothing else to do.” I started to cry, the tears washing clean streaks down my face. A glob of mud spilled into my mouth and it tasted of nothing I’d ever tasted in my life before.

“Here!” Chele shouted. “Catch this!”

Something heavy slapped the side of my face. I flinched away, images of what gruesome fish could live in something like this crowding in. What would they look like? What would they eat?

“Grab it!” Chele screamed. Another crash came from somewhere far away, as if to emphasise her urgency.

I turned my head slowly and lifted a hand clear. I was too heavy to move and the muscles in my shoulder and back screamed at me to stop. But if my body had already given up the ghost, my mind had not. Could not, not while Laura may still be there, still alive, holding her breath as her world turned black and the mud probed at her nose and mouth with its cool, grainy fingers.

I grabbed the sleeve of Chele’s sweater and turned my hand so that it was twisted around my wrist. “Do you think you can —?” I asked.

“Shut up and let me try.” She sat on whatever piece of furniture she’d found and began to pull. She was a black and brown statue, her arms and shoulders flexing slowly, so slowly as she heaved back on her sweater. She was topless now, but I was glad that I no longer found that exciting. If I had… it would have been sick. I would have been sick. We’d probably all die in here, whether Chele thought she could pull me in or not.

I moved my legs slowly, trying to climb up so that my body lay across the surface. The less of me in the mud, the easier it would be for Chele to pull me out. I looked across at the window. It had ceased flowing in now, but outside I could see and hear a great river of muck flowing past our building. Things scraped against the walls, dragged along. Vehicles, perhaps. Uprooted trees. Bodies.

“Come on!” Chele hissed. I was moving, but so slowly…

Laura was still there. She’d stopped struggling, and at first I thought she was dead, floating there just below the surface and presenting little more than a hump in the mud. But then she moved; a hand broke through, fingers splayed, twisting slowly, slowly as they opened a shallow pocket in the surface. Shallow, but deep enough to meet her nose and let her grab in a breath.

“She’s there!” I said, and I was ready to go to her, swim through the filth and hold her up and clear her nose and mouth so that she could breathe again, clean her up like a newborn baby, give her another chance of life.

“Look at me, concentrate on me,” Chele said, and I knew that she was right. I would not serve Laura by dying.

Chele pulled, I pushed and in a couple of minutes she was able to reach over and grab one of my hands in both of hers. She strained again, and I could see where some of the mud was being diluted and washed from her body by sweat. It was drying as well, fading to a lighter colour as her own heat bled the moisture from it, cracking as soon as it dried where her muscles worked to pull me to her.

I felt something solid beneath my knee, and with a huge burst of effort I lifted a foot, let Chele give one more pull and then I was up there with her.

I felt drained. Totally, completely exhausted, like a battery flickering on the last dregs of its power. Not long until I ran out. And I couldn’t allow that yet.

“The demons,” Chele said, but it was a question that I did not have the strength to answer. I looked up at the solid ceiling through which I assumed we’d fallen, and there was still no sign of any pursuit.

“Laura.” I saw Laura’s hands still circling, still moving around each other to maintain a dip in the thick mud, at the bottom of which I could just see her nose. Perhaps she was standing on tiptoes, just high enough to be able to breathe… if she could keep the mud at a slightly lower level. If it became more fluid, or if another surge came through the window now, she’d be finished.

“They can’t let this happen,” I said, “not after what we’ve been through to save her. They can’t.”

“‘They’ are probably trying their damndest to get you out of here or kill you,” Chele said. She had her arms crossed over her chest. Her sweater was rolled into a sodden ball, resting by her feet.

“We’ll need that again,” I said, picking it up. “Is that alright?”

She lowered her arms. Dried mud came away from her chest with a crackle. She looked as if she had leprosy, but I felt that interest again, the unconscious stirring at the sight of her nudity. “Not as if I need it,” she said, but she was joking. She even smiled.

I nodded my thanks. “You’re lighter than me. You lay out straight and throw this to Laura. Once she’s got it, I’ll haul you in.” Chele nodded. I looked away.

She threw the sweater out before her and then splashed herself down across the thick mud. I knelt on the furniture — bookcase, dresser, whatever — and kept hold of her ankles. It took three more throws until the sweater landed across Laura’s twirling fingers, and I realised that we were cutting off her meagre air supply.

I could only hope that she realised what was happening… and hung on.

She did. I pulled, finding a reserve of strength I would never have believed in before, desperation tightening my muscles, excitement kicking in when I saw Laura emerge head-first from the mud like a child birthed from the earth. She was gasping and coughing up great clots of muck, her eyes still squeezed shut, and I only wanted to bring her to me so that I could hold her and help her. I hauled, pulled, strained until I could reach down and grasp Chele under the arms and lift her up with me. As she came so did Laura, and then the three of us were hunkered down on the furniture, the mud sloshing around our ankles but we were out, free, alive.

“I must…” Laura gasped, fingering mud from her ears and nose. I wiped it from her eyes, “I must… have done something really bad… in a previous life.”

I could only cry. Chele touched my shoulder and left her hand there long enough for it to matter.

We were still there, wherever there was. And they were probably still after us, whoever they were. And the only thing I wanted to do was to move, get out and away from this building and see what awaited us outside.

I held Laura for ten minutes, cleaning mud from her face, finding her again. Chele wrung out the sweater as much as she could and slipped it back over her head and arms. She stood and leaned against the wall as Laura and I loved each other and wished that none of this had ever happened.

“What do we do now?” Laura asked at last, ending the silence we adults had not been able to break.

As if lured by Laura’s voice there was a loud thumping, crackling sound outside, clear above the roar and grind of the moving mud.

“Oh no,” I said. They were here. They’d followed us, found us and now they were coming, and what fate could we expect from those demons? No slow death, of that at least I was sure. They’d hold us down and shoot us. After some of what I’d seen today, that may almost be a blessing.

“Wait,” Chele said, bending down so that she could see through the window and across the surface of the mud-river. “It’s not the same sound.”

“Then what — ”

“Gunfire,” Laura said. “That’s gunfire, yes, but it’s pad-rifles. I heard them a couple of days ago when…” She trailed off. It must have been bad if she didn’t even want to tell her father about it. It wasn’t the usual crack of gunfire, more like a whiplash ending with a heavy thud. I’d heard about pad-rifles. They weren’t nice things. They fired super-heated composite which spread out in the air to something the size of a fist. By the time it struck its target it was solid again. Being shot with a pad-rifle was like being hit by a medicine ball at fifteen hundred miles per hour.

More reports, closer this time, and then we heard the familiar crackle of machinegun fire joining in.

“There’s a battle going on out there,” Chele said, looking around our room as if contemplating staying.

The mud river seemed to be flowing faster, and even though inside the room was relatively calm, the sounds of scraping and rumbling from outside was becoming more violent. Another gunfire exchange, another heavy grumble of a building collapsing into the muck, and that made up my mind.

“We can’t stay here,” I said. “This place isn’t designed for that.”

“What do you mean, ‘this place’? You don’t even know where or when we are.”

“We’re in Hell,” I said. “We’re in a place designed to make observers feel happy with their lot. Bad things are meant to happen here, people are meant to see, and sitting tight will only draw it to us.” I looked around, suddenly having a clear and dreadful sense of being spied upon.

“Are they watching now?” Laura asked.

“I don’t think bad enough stuff is happening to us yet.” I smiled grimly at my daughter and felt so powerless when I saw the fear in her eyes.

“I just want to go home,” she said. “I want Mum back.” I hadn’t heard that from her in a long time.

“Then let’s go,” Chele said, standing and edging her way to the window. “I think whatever we’re standing on goes as far as the window.”

“Then what?”

She shrugged. “Through. Outside. You and I are aliens here, Nolan. We get to the action, maybe we’ll have an idea of how to find our way out.”

We left the room through the shattered window, moving from the sunken furniture and balancing on the sill, before stepping across to the head of a wall protruding above the mud river. And once outside, we were able to turn around and see where we’d come into this particular Hell.

“Where are the caves?” Chele said. “Where are the tunnels? Why didn’t they follow us through?”

Looking up at the two-storey house, I could only shake my head and wonder. The dislocation… the sense of wrongness… it was terrifying.

It was a normal dwelling, detached, quite large. The windows were smashed, the guttering shattered, the slates cracked and crazed. Its masonry was peppered with bullet holes and a couple of larger impact craters. These could only be from a pad-rifle. There was something splashed high on the wall next to an upstairs window. It may have been blood.

In both directions along the street more houses stood drowning in the river of muck. It stank of shit and rot, as if all the drains in the world were venting here. It was black and thick, steaming in places, twisting with deceptive currents. Every now and then a car came floating by. Some of them trailed engine parts behind them like loose guts. These came to rest further down the street against the side of a church, like wayward souls seeking entrance and acceptance. The mud river deposited them there and then turned a corner, probably picking up more vehicles and carrying them further away… or perhaps simply disappearing altogether.

It had to stop somewhere.

I looked back at the house we’d emerged from and wondered what was behind it. I had the crazy idea that there would be timber posts propping up the facade, perhaps a litter-strewn studio lot, a maintenance yard for Hell where the demons dressed and undressed each night, smoked cigarettes, talked about who they’d killed that day and whether they were revisiting Mud tomorrow, or perhaps they’d be on coach duty, did you hear about Dave the Demon who some visitor killed before going alien in Barbed Wire, and wasn’t he in for some fun when he was found…?

“Nolan,” Chele said, “we have to decide what to do.”

“What?”

“Look.” She pointed quickly towards the centre of the flow where the mud ran fastest, glancing at Laura to see if she’d noticed.

“I’ve seen worse than that,” my daughter said, and when I finally saw what they were talking about my heart sank. She shouldn’t be growing up this quickly, experiencing these things, having her teens slaughtered by trauma and pain and a realisation that anyone she saw, everyone, was capable of these things.

Three bodies had been tied together and they now flowed by in a tangled mess. It looked like a man, a woman and a child, and I guessed that the man had done the tying in an effort to keep them together in the flood. If that were the case he’d dragged his family to their deaths, because his skull had been shattered by a bullet. His wife and child seemed untouched, but they did not move. The mud had made them its home.

We watched them drift off towards the church and I wondered where in the world they’d come from.

“Good sense says we go that way,” Chele said, pointing downstream after the bodies. “But logic says we go that way, where the action is. That’s where we’ll find our way out.” She pointed upstream, and the three of us looked along the flooded street towards a large open area at the end. It may have been a park once, but many of the trees had been torn down or submerged. From this distance I could see shapes protruding above the flow of mud, but I could not make out what they were. Buildings? Hills in the landscaped park? Beyond the park I could see nothing, because a heavy, mucky-looking mist engulfed the view.

From that direction came the continuing sounds of conflict.

“Do we really want to just walk into that?” I said quietly, reaching out to touch Laura’s shoulder.

Chele was looking around, probing the mud gently with her feet on either side of the wall. “We have to. Remember, we’re not meant to be here at all. We broke in to find your daughter.”

I felt a stab of guilt at that, the fact that Chele was only here because of me, but she’d come of her own accord. And her voice held no of blame.

Does she feel nearer to her son now? I thought. My daughter’s a stranger to her, but does rescuing her make Chele’s dead son seem that much closer?

“Those demons, those caves.”

“Another scene,” Chele said. “We saw several ourselves before we left the coach, remember? We just slipped from one to the next. Accidentally or on purpose it doesn’t matter.”

“But if the demons are integral to this place… the law-keepers… surely they’d have just followed us through?”

Chele strode along the wall several paces and stood with her hands on her hips. She seemed to have found something that pleased her. “I don’t pretend to know any more about this place than you,” she said, and I felt almost annoyed at her ignorance. “Now come look at this.”

Laura and I followed to where Chele was standing and looked down. There, moored against the outside edge of the garden boundary wall, bobbing on the gloopy current, sat a shallow dinghy complete with paddles.

“How long has this place been like this?” I said. Long enough to have boats… a long time.

“It’s just a scene, Dad,” Laura said then. “Make believe made real.” She rubbed her wrists and winced as the muddied scabs broke. Blood showed through and dripped into the mud river creeping past the wall. A part of her would forever be in Hell, now. A part of all of us, because we had all taken cuts and lost blood. It would merge with the mud, and perhaps tomorrow it would be a part of something even more terrible.

There was a prolonged bout of gunfire from upriver and a roar as another building collapsed, unseen.

“Let’s not think about it,” I said, thinking all the same. Machine-guns, pad-rifles, it was a war up there. And here we were preparing to paddle right into it. “Let’s just go.”

Chele knelt at the front of the dinghy, with Laura in the middle and me at the back. It sank so that its rim was almost at the level of the mud, and I feared that any surge or wave would swamp us, the weight dragging us instantly down to whatever lay below. I knew that we wouldn’t be the first or last bodies added to this rancid river.

Just as we were about to set out the thudding shock of a pad-rifle sounded from somewhere nearby. The rounds roared along the street, and I saw the flowering explosions of brick and mortar as they struck a house on the opposite side. Great clots of masonry strafed the mud, its splashes remaining visible for a few seconds as they were carried away on the current. Windows burst in, a third of the roofing slates were smashed into the air like a flock of startled birds, the front door and surround exploded into the guts of the house, holes the size of our boat appeared across its facade. We ducked down as low as we could get, frightened but fascinated, and watched in awe as the house slumped down into the mud like a tired old man. The pad-rifle continued firing for a few seconds more. It pounded the debris into dust and then fell silent, until the only sound was the crunch of the mud river sucking the house remains down into itself. Soon, the only sign that a building had existed there at all was the central staircase, exposed to the elements like the bare backbone of some long-rotted beast.

“That was from nearby,” I whispered.

“Stray rounds,” Chele said.

“No way, that was sustained. Someone targeted that house. This one might be next.”

“If we move they may see?“

“If we don’t,” I said, “they’ll find us when they come looking.”

“Maybe we can be on their side,” Laura said quietly. I was almost relieved at the naivete of her statement. There was some child left inside her after all.

“Row,” I said, untying the rotten rope and pushing us away from the wall. Chele picked up an oar and sank it into the mud.

It was like rowing through porridge. Although the mud flowed like a river and kept its own level like water, when I tried to pull on the oar it felt like concrete. I could see the muscles standing out on Chele’s neck as she heaved. Laura sat in front of me, stroking the terrible wounds on her arms with muddy fingertips. I thought about infections and gangrene and pollution, and as if conjured by my musings a rat the size of a small cat ran along the top of the wall we had just vacated. It stared at me with a hunger than could never have been manufactured. This may just be a scene, as Chele had said, but its components were real enough.

We tried keeping to the relative shelter of the buildings and garden walls, rowing against the flow, gaining inch by inch. At one point my paddle snagged on something and I nearly lost it. Reaching down into the mud my hand closed around something soft and yielding, and pulling it away from the paddle realised that whatever it was wore cloths. I did not look down lest I saw it.

But I did catch sight of things in the gardens to my left. I thought they were shrubs and trees at first, branches stripped of leaves and left bare and pale in the grey light. Then I realised that they were limbs. Dozens of bodies were drifted together against one wall, half submerged arms and legs and heads protruding above the mud as if stretching forever for dry brickwork. Faces with mouths and eyes filled with muck. Torsos with horrific wounds. Slicks of blood around them, dark and shiny like oil on water.

I turned away and kept paddling.

The gunfire continued, more sporadic now. Perhaps the numbers on both sides were so reduced by the fighting that there weren’t that many left to shoot.

I hoped that was the case.

“Push harder!” I said, heaving back, feeling my biceps burning, my back straining with the effort. I’d been close to collapse since we saved ourselves from the quagmire. Whatever kept me going now, it would surely not last for much longer. If we let up the current would grab us and drag us out into the faster-flowing central spread of the flooded roadway. And from there… who knew.

Either that or we’d be three more bodies washed against a wall.

Laura dipped her hands in on either side of the dinghy and started to pull as well. She flicked mud up at me — it stank stale and dead, as if filth itself could rot — but I didn’t mind. She was helping. And perhaps having something to do would divert her attention from whatever she was still dwelling upon.

I knew her so well. I was here, we were moving, but she still felt far from saved.

Things floated by. At one point a slick of fresh blood enveloped the boat, and the fleshy objects squelching against the wood were stark against the dark brown mess. Many other things, too, a real mix and match of a life, as if someone’s history was being systematically destroyed somewhere up ahead. A perverse, reverse evolution. There was a shoe, laces still tied but empty; a notebook, pages sprawled like a dead bird, one side used, the other waiting for thoughts that would never come; an unopened tin of dried rice; a sock; a dinner plate, still stained with the grease of its last supper. Spectacles, a boxed pen set, half of a door, a flap of leather from a torn jacket…

It went on.

And then we reached the end of the street where the mud opened up into a lake of filth, and at last we could see what the humps protruding from its mess were.

Bandstands. Three of them, the one in the centre so tall that its whole platform was above the flood-line. It reminded me of small-town America, hot-dogs, Fourth of July parades and brass bands. The other two were smaller, submerged beneath the mud with only their roofs and supports touching daylight. And on each bandstand, people with guns.

Fighting over nothing but mud, filth and shit.

Dying there, flipping into the air, spinning, tumbling into the muck and being carried slowly towards us by the current, past us eventually, back along the street.

More corpses to meet the wall.

The central bandstand seemed to be under siege from the other two, and it was here that the pad-rifle fire had originated. Strangely, its impact on the wooden structures was minimal, and at first I thought it was because they were so open that most rounds missed. But then I saw someone stand against the railings of the central bandstand, prop a pad-rifle on the rail before him and loose off three rounds at the structure to our left. The first two struck a woman hunkered down on its roof, shattering her like a broken mannequin and flinging her pieces far out over the mud. The third round hit the edge of the roof… but only a few shards of wood sprung out.

“It’s all selective,” I said. “All this destruction is selective”

“They’re pad-rifles,” Chele said. “You can’t pick and choose?“

“You saw what happened to that house. How do you think those two bandstands are still there?”

“Bad shots,” Laura said. The gunfire erupted once again, figures dropped and splashed into the mud, some screaming, guts blown out, limbs askew.

The buildings still stood, bearing the designer-scars of battle.

“Have they seen us?” Laura asked. We were bobbing against the gable wall of a house bordering the park, pressed there by the current and exposed to anyone who happened to glance our way.

“I think,” I said, “that their own little scene simply doesn’t include us.” I was comfortable with this idea, if a little confused, and it seemed to fit right into what we were seeing.

“It’ll have to stop soon,” Chele said. “They’ll all be dead.”

There was a sound like the buzzing of distant insects beneath the gunfire. And as the three powerboats roared into the park? two emerging from the distant haze of mist, one coming straight up the street behind us? and a line of bullets coughed out brick dust by our heads, I realised how wrong I was.

We were involved. Hell, I realised, can never be selective. It’s there for the benefit of everyone.

The boat slicing through the mud behind us slowed down, and a man on the bow loosed a burst of suppressing fire at the bandstand on the left. The noise was shockingly loud. Another hail of bullets came our way, kicking up great gouts of mud and releasing its stench into the air. Bullets buzzed by our ears, ricochets singing behind us, and I was sure I could feel the breeze of their passing, smell their rich metallic tint as they exploded against the wall and the boats’ hulls.

The driver of the powerboat fell back, his face swallowed by a fresh red hole.

“Oh God,” Laura said, turning her head away, and I could see that she’d be splashed when the bullet had struck him. She caught my eye and, inexplicably, tried to smile. It came as a grimace, teeth bared, eyes wide, and for a second? for the first time in my life? I was frightened by my daughter. What madness could she have inherited from this place?

“Into the boat!” the man on the bow shouted. They drew up next to us and he fired again. Tracer rounds tore across the mud lake and strafed the bandstand. Two people dropped, one of them sliding into the mud, and one of the boats from the mist immediately pulled up and disgorged several more fighters onto the tattered wooden structure. They picked up scattered weapons and immediately opened fire on the central bandstand and our boats.

“Quickly!” the man shouted, ducking down as the gunfire increased.

“No,” I said. We shouldn’t go with them, should never take sides, because once we did that we were truly embedded in this scene, part of the play and bound into whatever climax awaited these pointless people. The man looked at me, wide-eyed and disbelieving. His machine-gun drifted in our direction. Its smoking barrel looked hungry.

Something stung my elbow. I looked down and saw a rosette of blood opening on my muddied sleeve, and my arm went numb. A bullet had kissed me. Laura guided me to the edge of the dinghy, stepping over into the powerboat and taking me with her. Blood ran down inside my sleeve, warm and shocking, and it dripped from my fingers as a dark brown paste. It was carrying dried mud with it. I wondered what bacteriological horrors were seeping hungrily into my wound even now.

In the back of the powerboat sat half a dozen people. They all looked tired, underfed, sick, but their eyes gleamed with excitement. Some of them glanced at us, but most had their eyes on the body of the dead driver where he was leaking across the timber boards.

They all carried weapons. I saw at least three pad-rifles.

“Chele!” I said, turning to hold out my hand. She was hunched down in the dinghy, hands over her head, trying to present as small a target as possible. The wall of the house was all but disintegrating under the hail of lead, and a fine powder drifted in the air and stuck to our wet clothes. Chele stood slowly, glancing over at me. She was readying herself to jump. She looked like a ghost.

“We can’t stay here,” one of the people said, leaping to the wheel and leaning on the throttle. The boat started to pull away. I reached out for Chele and she jumped.

“Laura!” I said, but she was already there. Between us we hauled Chele in, trying to keep low as the bullets sang around us like angry bees. The boat was humping fast across the mud lake now, each impact feeling as if we were striking concrete.

I reached for one of the pad-rifles strapped to the engine mounting. I expected them to jump at me, fight me for it, maybe even shoot me… but if we were going to get out of this I had to do something.

The sound was almost unbearable, the stink of mud richer and more nauseating than ever, and I could taste blood in the air. Perhaps that was the red mist I saw.

I pulled Chele and Laura close to me, hugging the pad-rifle to my left side. Its heavy plastic was strangely warm, its wide barrel and gas-ports wicked-looking, black eyes promising so many horrors yet to be seen.

“It’s a reinforcement boat,” I said. “Nobody can last long on those bandstands, not when they’re so exposed. Everyone on this boat will be dead soon, including us, if we don’t get out of here.”

“How do we do that?”

“I have this.” I nodded at the pad-rifle. Laura refused even to look at it.

“But?“ Chele began. But she did not have a chance to finish.

Sometimes, when everything’s as bad as you think it can get, it gets worse. Misfortune upon terror upon horror… all crowd in to drown their victims, ensure a completed job.

The boat was just approaching the central bandstand when someone shouted out: “Demons!”

I looked up and saw several black shapes circling slowly down from the grey sky, wide webbed wings drifting them skilfully towards our boat.

“Now we’re finished!” a woman shouted out, and I swear there was joy in her fear.

“They’re here for them!” The voice came from the bandstand. Someone was leaning out, pointing at us, and I knew without looking that it was the madman from the barbing world. Black Teeth.

He’d been spared for some other fate.

As the demons swirled down, their wings now cracking at the air, the fighters in the boat turning to look at the three of us, bullets zinging past from both directions as we came under concerted fire from the sunken bandstands… I knew that it was time to fight.

“Chele?”

She spun around and hit the gunwale hard, the impact audible even above the gunfire. Laura cried out. Someone laughed. I dropped to my knees beside Chele and flipped her onto her back, hearing the impact of bullets on bodies behind me. There were several thumps as corpses hit the deck, but Laura was beside me, pressing her hand to the terrible wound in Chele’s face, holding in the blood, wiping away what was left of her eye where the bullet had blown it out, crying, crying for this stranger who’d helped me save her from her cruel crucifixion. And someone was still laughing.

I glanced around and saw Black Teeth leaning out over the mud, ignorant of the bullets biting at his cloths and hair, or perhaps simply not caring. He was pointing at us, his hysterical eyes wide open. I looked at his hands and imagined them wrapping barbed wire around Laura’s wrists, touching her as he did it, his eyes glinting as his fingers strayed, and before I really knew what I was doing I’d brought the pad-rifle to bear.

As if badly scripted, the gunfire paused to add gravity to the moment.

I held the weapon waist high. I’d seen these things working, so I knew I didn’t need to aim.

Black Teeth stopped laughing for a second and stared at me in disbelief. Then he smiled again, showing the rot in his mouth. Shook his head. He knew I’d never do it.

I pulled the trigger. The balustrade misted into fragments and the madman splashed back in a wash of red. His laugh seemed to hang in the air for a few seconds like a cartoon speech-bubble, or perhaps it was the rifle report ringing in my ears.

At least I knew what fate he had been spared for.

The thought that the demons had known what would happen? had perhaps engineered it? was too dreadful to contemplate, although it all made perfect sense. They were the scriptwriters and we were the actors, although our lines and actions were subconscious, not learnt.

“Daddy!” Laura shouted, and a black shaped knocked me from my feet.

I kept hold of the pad-rifle as I went sprawling, holding out one hand to break my fall, feeling it slip in something leaking from one of the corpses. The shape closed in on me again and thumped my back twice. I realised it had landed. I could feel long claws curling into me, clenching, finding purchase so that it could finish the job… whatever job that was.

Were the demons here to kill us, or let us go? I had no idea. But I had no time to waste thinking about it.

Chele was dead, most likely.

Laura may be next.

I heaved myself up as hard and fast as I could, hoping to catch the demon unawares. It worked, partially, and the thing slipped from my back, clutching out chunks of my flesh as it did so. I screamed and it screamed back, its voice like that of a giant tree frog, a bass rattle that set my hairs on end. I had to bring the rifle to bear?had to? but at the same time I wondered why nobody in the boat was firing at the thing. I shook my shoulders, pushed sideways as if to turn on my back. Claws raked my skin. Something tapped at the back of my neck, and I felt the warm dribble of blood around my ears and scalp.

The gunfire had started again, and the air smelled of hot metal and death.

Laura leapt into view, landing right by my face and launching herself at the demon. It grumbled at her and waved its wings. One of them caught her under the chin and sent her falling back over Chele’s prone body, but she had set it off balance and allowed me to scramble away from the clenching claws. I stood, spun around and aimed the pad-rifle.

For a second, silence fell across the whole scene once again. Gunfire stopped. Shouting ceased. Even the flow of the mud seemed to lessen, the steady roar of debris pushing past buildings dulled. The demon sat frozen against the edge of the cockpit, its black armour wet with my blood, antennae flipping at the air. Its visor was black and held no reflection.

Briefly wondering if I was about to do something awful and unforgivable, I pulled the trigger.

The pad struck the demon in the chest and blew straight through, punching a hole the size of a dinner plate. It took out the side of the powerboat as well. There was a huge splash in the mud twenty yards away and the air turned red, blood misting on the steady breeze and settling on the faces of those watching. Clots of flesh fell from the demon and pattered lightly around its feet. It looked down at its chest. For a second I thought it was going to come at me again, uninjured, hardly even inconvenienced?

blood, it bled, it was just like us

?and then it toppled back over the smashed gunwale and disappeared into the mud.

“Holy shit,” someone said. I heard awe in the voice. “They bleed. They bleed.”

Our boat listed as tons of mud surged through the rupture in its side. The gunfire opened up again, and for a few seconds bullets whistled past our heads from every direction.

They’re shooting at me, I thought, I’ve destroyed some illusion, ruined something fundamental to their existence here, and they’re trying to kill me.

But then I realised that the weapons were aimed elsewhere. A demon danced on the bow of the boat as bullets struck it, before falling back and landing by my feet.

There were several other demons circling the scene above our heads, and a couple of them opened fire with their own weapons. Air flash-fried as the tazers struck downwards. One burst hit the bandstand we were moored against and danced across its timbers like St Elmo’s fire. A woman jerked and spat as the charge entered her and seemed to light her from the inside, exploding from her eyes, ears, mouth. The demons cackled and croaked and fired some more, some of their shots finding targets. But they were no match for the firepower arrayed against them. Fighters on the boat and all three bandstands had opened up against the demons, and within thirty seconds all but one had been brought down. Most of them hit the mud screeching, clicking for help, bleeding, wings trailing and tattered. And on each impact, a cheer went up from their intended prey.

The one remaining demon, wings pushing frantically, tail trailing like a streamer behind it, rose out of range of our weapons and stayed there, circling on warm currents. It was so high up that we could barely see it. A few bursts of gunfire still cracked out, but all aimed skyward. Down at our level calm had descended, as if none of the people could remember what they had been fighting for.

I wondered what was to come next.

“Dad,” Laura said, “she’s still alive!”

One side of the boat was submerged now, and its passengers were scrambling across to the bandstand, those already there helping them up. I looked at Chele. Her face was a ruin, both eyes shattered by the bullet, her nose exploded outward… and Laura was right! There, where her nose had been, bubbles appeared in the blood and ruined flesh. They enlarged, withdrew, grew again and popped. Her mouth was open and her tongue was moving like a wounded fish in its red-water cave.

“Jesus.” For a crazy second I was going to leave her in the boat. Grab Laura, get up onto the bandstand, take the pad-rifle with me and try to get us out of here, out of Hell, back to that place we called normal but which I thought would never be normal again. She was awfully wounded and even if she did survive, what would the future hold for her? A lifetime of operations, plastic surgery, engineered flesh replacing her own, artificial eyes giving her a sterile view of her world… and perhaps, eventually, a trip back here. To show her that things weren’t so bad after all.

I laughed out loud.

Laura frowned, and several people turned to look at me, some of them only half-way to escaping from the sinking boat. “What?” I said, smiling. Laughter must be something none of them heard very often. I smirked at Laura and she actually smiled back, even though she had no idea of the source of my mirth. Then I looked down at Chele and my good humour vanished.

She was my responsibility now. I knew that, and I hated it, and I hated myself for hating it.

“Help me with her,” I said. Laura grabbed her feet and I lifted her under the arms, holding the pad-rifle pressed between my arm and side. As we shuffled her towards the high side of the tilted boat her head tipped back. She coughed and cackled deep in her throat. She would choke on her own blood if we didn’t get her upright soon.

“Help us!” I said, and hands reached out.

We managed to haul the unconscious Chele up the sloping deck, over the gunwale and onto the bandstand. The boat drifted away seconds later, caught by the current now that no one was holding onto it anymore, and as it spun lazily towards the street we’d come up a few minutes before it tipped over. Mud gurgled in and sucked it down, down to whatever the depths held. Soon there was only a whirling pattern on the mud where the boat had been.

Seconds later even that vanished.

I stood on something wet and red and disgusting, wondering which piece of Black Teeth was beneath my feet. His heart, empty of pity? His mashed eyes, and all the terrors they had seen? Perhaps it was his hands, his fingers that had wrapped the wire around Laura’s wrists.

I ground my feet and smiled. I’d never, ever killed anyone before. The closest I’d come was thinking about killing myself.

“She’s still breathing, I think,” Laura said, kneeling next to Chele’s prone body. I looked, so helpless.

“What now?” someone asked. “What now, now that we’ve killed the demons? Are we free? Can we go?”

“Don’t be so stupid,” someone else answered.

“How long has this been happening?” I said, looking out over the mud and hefting the pad-rifle.

“What do you mean?”

“How long?”

“Forever.”

“Minutes…”

The answers were all wrong, though all the speakers obviously felt them to be right. I could sense no confusion there, no doubt.

And then I saw something that was nearer to home than anything I’d seen since escaping the coach with Chele: a disturbance in the mud, halfway between the bandstand and the ruined houses. At first I thought it was the mud river passing over a ditch or culvert, but I noticed that the hollow in the surface was moving, passing across the lake like the concave shadow of a cloud. It was a wave caused by something unseen, an outside influence in here.

And it was so close to home because I knew exactly what it was.

“There!” I said, pointing.

“What? Where? What?” They all spoke, and the tone of their voices all said the same thing.

“How can you accept all this so easily?” I asked, disgusted. The people looked at me, a couple of them frowning as if they’d forgotten something vital. I brought up the pad-rifle and glanced at Laura. She knew what was about to happen and ducked down, covering Chele’s wounded face with her own body. I felt so proud.

Still nobody answered my question, so I opened fire at nothing.

The third shot opened a window to reality.

There was a face revealed there, cringing away from the rupture as glass exploded around them. The woman looked out and the shock was rich and honest. The blood made it so, because she must have never expected to end that day bleeding. And it was as if she saw this scene as it really was for the first time. Before, behind the protective glass of the coach, it was played out for her; a holo clip, a flash of history or a keyhole onto the future. Now it was different. Now she could see and smell and sense the truth of things.

The rest of the coach was still invisible, but the wound in its side located it. I could imagine where it was, if not actually see it, so I swivelled a few degrees and fired again, blasting out a panel and revealing the fluid workings of its engine. I turned again — I saw the woman’s fear as, for a split second, she stared into the pad-rifle’s barrel — and fired twice more, smashing holes in the rear of the coach. They were sharp-edged rents in its skin, like shrapnel wounds bleeding reality. More faces stared out. One of them screamed; I could hear him, hear the pain and shock as he tried to dig shattered glass from his throat. I knew that no one could help him because they were all strapped in. Hell… it was a very personal thing.

The last thing I could feel was regret or pity.

“We can get out,” I said, turning to Laura where she knelt beside Chele. “We can get on this thing and get out of here.” I looked around at the others, their gazes switching between me and the strange, stark holes in the false facade of their lives. “You’re an entertainment, you know that don’t you?” Even as I said it I knew it was untrue — they, and we, were far more than that — but my loyalty was clearly defined: my daughter. That was it, the be all and end all, the reason I’d come here in the first place. The fact that my visit had given me the opportunity to rescue her and actually bring her back to me… that was a stroke of luck and fortune I could not consider. Right then, getting out was my prime concern.

The idea that I could be destroying this for everyone didn’t cross my mind.

The woman in the coach stared at me, unable to move, awaiting her fate with sad, staring eyes. I turned away but still felt her gaze, accusing, confused.

“You do know,” I said again, and the people on the bandstand stirred as if an invisible breeze had raised their heckles. “You all remember what you were — ”

“Of course we do!” a woman said. “And we know where we are, and why we’re here and… we’re not as stupid as you think. But…”

“But what?” I prompted.

“But the demons,” one of the men said. He was looking over my shoulder as he spoke, and I knew that that we were still a long, long way from the end of things.

I looked back at the coach. It was motionless and the sharp-edged rents I’d blown into reality danced with dark shapes. Struggling people joined them at first, but then they were totally blotted out as the shapes took control. New faces stared out… faces with antennae and visors reflecting nothing of our fear and confusion. And then the demons came out. Not only through the holes I had created with the pad-rifle, but also through new gaps in the background scene of houses and mud and mist. Trapdoors opened in the coach’s roof, shedding demons like confetti to the sky. They spiralled upwards, ten of them, fifteen, twenty, and others flowed into the mud, burrowing just below the surface, aiming for the bandstand and casting strong wakes behind them.

People started screaming. They’d brought down a few demons, yes, but the initial flush of success was smothered by the sight of dozens more vectoring in on us. Back came the fear. Back came the supernatural awe that these things inspired.

I aimed the pad rifle at the swimming shapes and fired into the mud. It exploded upward and outward as if a depth charge had blown, scattered wet filth to the breeze, raining down around us brown and black, and red where I’d hit one of the damned things. More came in, lines of bubbles the only evidence of their route now that they’d gone deeper.

“Open fire!” I shouted, looking around at the terrified people. Their guns aimed tentatively at the skies, the mud, and some of them fired a few rounds.

In their eyes, their stance, I saw only hopelessness.

The sky darkened as a dozen demons swept in. I shouted at Laura to drag Chele to the centre of the bandstand floor? I wondered whether any tunes had ever been played here, any brass victory marches or string pleas for peace? and I fired again. The gun thumped in my hands as it expelled a shot; until now it had been recoilless. The round hit a flying shape and turned black into a rain of red, but when I fired again there was a loud hiss of gas, a broken thunk from inside the rifle, and it died in my hands.

I spun the weapon around to use as a club. But I didn’t need it.

The demons didn’t come for me or Laura. Not even for mortally wounded Chele. It was as if we were invisible observers, and the slaughter was a show put on especially for us.

The clicking of their communications was a low, seismic tickle through my spine, standing my hair on end, sending pains through my teeth. Everything went hazy and dim, as if my sight was picking up atmospheric interference.

Mud-covered demons emerged and squelched up onto the bandstand. Others landed from the sky. They walked with the same gait, struck with the same deadly precision.

Not one of the people fired again before they died.

The demons lashed out with lengthened limbs, claws slashing through clothing and flesh, the air turning red, bodies spinning away as insides leaked out, other demons catching them and crushing their heads, paralysing with stun-guns, gutting with elongated claws protruding from where their elbows or knees should be, pushing them from one to another like cats playing with a mouse, slashing or stabbing, moving on, plucking out an eye, emptying a gun into a chest, moving on again. The bandstand floor was awash with human stuff. It ran over the edges and flowed away with the flood, spreading like a bruise on its surface, heavy bits sinking, lighter pieces — scalps and eyeballs and flayed skin — floating towards their final resting place.

There were screams and gasps and the air stank of blood and shit. I felt the greasiness of the slaughter coat my skin, tasted death.

It lasted for thirty seconds.

Everyone was dead but us. Most of the demons turned to leave, but two came our way. They were clicking and clacking quietly, a casual chat during a walk in the park. Their dark body-armour — grown or worn, I still couldn’t tell — was slick with blood. I despaired at the hopelessness of it all, the unfairness, and I selfishly turned away from Laura. No man should see his daughter die.

I looked out over the sea of mud and waited for the end.

“Dad!” Laura hissed. Her voice was so imploring I had to look.

The demons had nudged her to one side and were standing over Chele, kicking her with their clawed feet. When she did not respond or move one of them slung her easily over its shoulder. Blood dribbled from her wounds and added its own signature to her carrier’s armour.

I stepped towards them. There was nothing I could do, but it was an automatic reaction.

They stopped dead-still and the crackling of their communication increased in tempo and volume. It went for a gentle hush to a chaos of static, a white noise in which anything could have been said. The unencumbered demon brought up its stun-gun and aimed it at my face. Laura gasped. I looked at Chele’s back, trying to make out whether or not she was breathing, but I couldn’t tell.

The thing holding Chele dropped over the side of the bandstand and into the mud, skidding across the surface. It disappeared into the mists just as the second demon suddenly took flight, climbing until it was little more that a speck against the brightening sky.

“They left us,” Laura said. “We’re still alive. They left us alone. Why would they do that, Dad?”

I looked across at where the coach stood still and holed, and shook my head.

“I’m cold.” She was shivering. She may have been shivering for twenty minutes but I hadn’t noticed. I went to her and held her, careful not to touch the weeping wounds on her wrists as fresh tears fell onto my arms. They darkened the mud dried there.

“We should go,” I said, understanding none of this.

“Where have they taken her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was she dead? Dad, do you think? ”

“I don’t know, honey. Let’s go.”

“Where?” Laura looked around, so frightened and vulnerable that I never wanted to let her go again.

“There.” I pointed at the coach. Its outline was becoming visible now, a haze around the holes like heat-haze on a blazing summer afternoon. “That’s the way out. Wherever we are, if there’s a doorway that’s it.”

We walked around the bandstand, avoiding the bodies and body parts, looking over the edge into the flowing mud. On the opposite side to where we’d landed we found a tatty old boat, barely capable of floating under its own weight. There was an oar there, though, and it pulled at its rope like an eager puppy.

Things were calming. I looked around, trying to make out exactly what was changing, but I was trying to see something that wasn’t there rather than something that was. Perhaps the mud was a shade lighter, moving a touch slower. Or maybe the light had faded slightly, and all the wrongness was simply less visible now. The houses were still there, but the street we had paddled up was indistinct, an accidental break between buildings instead of an intentional roadway. The smells were diluted too: blood yes, but old and stale; shit and mud, faded and dry; the tang of the memory gunfire.

Slowly, now that the events were over and things had changed, the scene was shutting down.

“Into the boat.” I helped Laura over the handrail and held her hands as she lowered herself down. I followed, careful to spread my weight squarely, but the dinghy was surprisingly buoyant and steady. As I untied the mooring rope and pushed us out into the current, I found that we were being carried straight towards the prone coach. I didn’t even need to paddle.

The nearer we approached, the clearer the coach emerged, until by the time we nudged its side I couldn’t believe it had ever been invisible. Its surface was matt-black and smooth to the touch, all curves and arcs without a sharp angle in sight. We’d arrived directly beneath one of the windows shattered by my pad-rifle fire, and I stood in the dinghy and hoisted myself up to look inside.

The smells should have warned me, but by then I was exhausted and turned off to everything.

I could see the occupants of two seats through the smashed window. They were both blackened husks, still smoking from boiled eye sockets and violent red rents in their skins. Clothes were burnt off or melted into their flowing flesh. The one farthest from me seemed to be slipping slowly to the floor, scorched flesh allowing the body to pass fluidly beneath the restraining belt.

Something dripped.

And then I heard the frightened voices from further along the coach.

“Come on.” I warned Laura about the sight that awaited her and boosted her through the smashed window. She took her time getting in, trying to avoid the sharp glass teeth that sought her soft skin. She had enough wounds already. I followed her quickly, taking some cuts but not caring.

“Who are you?”

“I want mummy, I want mummy…”

“What’s happened?”

“Please don’t kill us.”

There were several more dead people, fried in their seats by the demons, but the living outnumbered them. After what I’d seen and been through I could hardly look at them without thinking, Cattle. Sheep. The demons had only killed those with a direct line of sight through the blown out windows. Presumably the survivors had seen nothing of the battle that followed my pad-rifle attack on the coach.

“We’re just hitching a ride,” I said, looking at the few pale, scared faces in view. “Don’t mind us.”

“Dad, we’re moving.” Laura was looking through the smashed window and when I bent down I could see the bandstands moving quickly out of sight. The scene darkened and vanished. Somebody screamed. There was a sudden, intense acceleration that flung me down into the aisle and Laura onto the carbonised lap of a seat’s former occupant. A screaming sound erupted through the ragged holes as the coach travelled its strange route.

I clung onto a metal seat support leg as we picked up speed, feeling myself shoved along the floor, forces conspiring to drive me along the coach to break my bones against its rear bulkhead. I could just make out Laura’s hand where it clasped the chair’s hand rest. I wanted to reach up and lock fingers, reassure her? she was still in the lap of the burnt corpse, and it was probably still hot? but I couldn’t move. I lay there and let events carry me along, my cheek pressed flat to the floor, part of my view through the shattered window and into nothing outside.

We were being guided, herded, coerced, steered and pulled along, I was certain of that now. Every event, every movement since I’d broken out of the coach to rescue Laura from crucifixion, had been preordained. Attacked when required, left alone or allowed to escape when it best served their intentions and plans… whoever They were. Knowing did not stop it happening, could not prevent the eventual outcome, whatever that may be. I may as well fight against life itself, or rage against God.

So I lay there, waiting… and very soon the screams began once more.

The darkness ended and daylight came again. The cries increased, and I heard Laura’s voice amongst them. I pulled myself up, slowly, fighting the forces still crushing me to the floor, tucking my toes against seat supports so that I was not torn away and flung down the length of the coach… and I saw why there was screaming.

I almost lost my footing, but I’d come this far. Instinct for survival kept me where I was, even though every sense inside, every civilised part urged me to let go.

This was Hell as it must have seemed in the past, created in the image most expected. Rivers of fire flowed across the landscape, erupting in brief busts of bright white flame as sufferers were thrown in by gangs of blackened humanoids. The gang would turn around and lumber back to a roughly-tied cage, extract another screaming victim and repeat the process, again and again. There were deep, smooth trails between the cages and the burning river, worn away by the shuffling monsters over decades or centuries. Nearer, as if arrayed along the route of the coach for our benefit, thousands of people hung crucified on the rigid skeletons of previous victims. Some of the dying people smouldered and burned.

We passed a valley where thousands of naked people tried to dodge showers of molten rock falling from some invisible height. They went down when they were struck and were trampled or burned. Hundreds more damned were thrust into the valley through doors hidden in its depths, like gladiators pushed into the arena to face certain death. I could hear their screams, smell their scorched flesh, sense their agony in my bones. The air was filled with a whole concerto of pain, suffering and death. Even the screams of the passengers could do nothing to hide that.

I saw more. Even though we were a distance away, and the people were really only pale shapes leaping and running and dying against the dark volcanic rocks, I could still somehow make out terrible details: the spectacles worn by one of the men, their bridge pasted with white tape, lenses smashing into his eyes as clumps of rock struck his face; a woman shielding her baby from the onslaught of lava, her back burned bare and roiling with blisters, yet still she didn’t yield; and a child, walking slowly and calmly through the chaos, her face turned my way, eyes filled with something I could not identify in this nightmare place.

There’s always a survivor, someone said into my ear, and I glanced to my side. It must have been the wind.

The scene faded quickly, letting the impenetrable blackness return beyond the window. The coach was still accelerating, but if I let go I’d be torn from Laura forever. She looked at me. Her eyes were wide and terrified, her face bloodied and lined with pain and fear, but she smiled.

I smiled back, and for a moment there was nothing wrong.

And then sunlight burst into the coach. There was a valley outside, a mosaic of odd-shaped fields coating the slopes, a long lazy river snaking down to where the hills faded away in the distance. There was a crowd of people in the foreground. They provided a further splash of colour to the lush green grasses, their summer clothes and tanned flesh merging to form a giant painter’s palette across the valley floor.

They were all looking up.

As the coach moved by, the perspective was all wrong. We were still accelerating, I could feel my insides distorting and my eyes twisting in their sockets, but we still had time to see the giant airship fall in a graceful, leisurely fireball from the sky. The people did not run. They stood there and looked up as if not believing this could happen, even though they could see the flames scorching the sky and the burning people falling like foolish descendants of Icarus.

The front end of the huge ship ploughed into the crowd, flames spreading like ripples on a sun-bleached pond. I thought I saw the girl again, wandering unconcerned through a meadow -

The window flipped back to black.

“Daddy,” Laura said, but then we were blinded with light, the sun shining off fields of ice and snow, huge wooden houses and hotels like boils on the mountainside, the faint black lines of ski lifts heading towards the summits, tiny black dots zigging and zagging down towards an evening’s rest and chat and drinking. And then the cloud of white behind then, following slowly at first but gathering momentum, sweeping the skiers down at two hundred miles per hour and crushing them into red splashes, crashing through buildings, burying everything, everything, and walking across the snows in the foreground without a care in the world was the little girl, and -

There’s always a survivor, someone said -

The scene changed instantly from one of light to dark, the sea at night. A huge swell moved mountains of water, and there were dozens of little boats out there, each of them crowded with thirty or forty men. In the distance oil burned on the water’s surface, but none of the men looked that way. They were staring looking at something else, a black shiny-skinned monster gliding through the swell, and then it coughed out fire and one of the boats exploded into splinters of wood and bone. Men screamed, gargled as they drowned, and the cannon fired again, wrecking another boat. There were men on the deck with machine guns, laughing as they shot the survivors in the water, one of them aiming for hands and shoulders so that the victim would be unable to swim, drowning slowly. The gun fired again, again, and each time a boat came apart, spilling men whole and in pieces into the sea for the bullets or the cold or the sharks to finish off.

The girl bobbed gently in the foreground, watching us. Her dress had spread out around her and she looked like a huge jelly-fish. Bullets splashed and I wanted to shout a warning, but somehow I knew it wasn’t required.

There’s always a survivor, the voice said again, and another nightmare scene manifested, and another, and another. Soon they were racing by like the frames of a film, indistinguishable singly but making up a moving image of pain, suffering and death as I had never before imagined possible, and -

There’s always a survivor.

Chele dropped down from a hatch in the ceiling. I could barely hold on, Laura was pressed back into the stinking, crackling remains of the corpse in the seat, but Chele seemed unconcerned at the acceleration. Her eyes had gone, and out of their sockets protruded thin, weak antennae. Her face was darkened around the eyes and nose where heavy bruises were forming, and along her hairline knobs were pushing through the skin, looking for all the world like horns forcing their way from her skull. One of them split the skin as she approached and she tilted her head as the antennae came through, perhaps picking up on some distant demonic discussion.

She reached for Laura.

I tried to lean forward but the motion of the coach pushed me back, pressed my loose skin and flesh against my bones until I thought that I’d be ripped away from my skeleton.

“Dad!” Laura hissed as Chele’s hand closed around the back of her neck. “Dad, thanks for coming for me. I love you Dad… thanks…”

I didn’t come for you, it was for me, I thought, but I wasn’t about to say it even if I could.

Chele’s hands were blackened, the solid armour of the demons, and her nails had grown long and taken on a metallic tint.

The coach accelerated some more and from the window I could see the hazy image of the little girl.

… always a survivor…

My vision darkened and senses receded. I saw Chele open her mouth to laugh as her other hand swung around, sharpened nails aiming for Laura’s exposed throat, and then I could see nothing.

I heard laughter. Chele’s cruel laughter punctuated by the clicks and clacks of her throat hardening and closing in, allowing her no more say in the matter of her fate than, in truth, any of us have.

When I awoke there was a dog licking my face.

I was lying in a gutter. A few people must have passed me by because there was money scattered by my feet. I sat up slowly, looked down at myself, checked for broken bones, finding an ache or cut on every square inch of skin I touched. I could hardly blame them for not stopping to help, because I should be dead. Little did they know I’d just been through Hell.

I recognised the street. I was lying on cobbles, I could smell Chinese food and as I sat there rubbing my head, the mutt still trying to lick my hand, two drunks burst from a door behind me and staggered along the pavement. They threw some slurred abuse my way but they were too pissed to do anything other than talk.

Laura.

Perhaps I’d been in there, in the pub with those men. Maybe I’d drunk myself into oblivion after oblivion, coming back again and again for weeks on end. The barman would know not only my name and life story, but my direct banker’s number as well. Perhaps by now he even owned my house.

I looked for the door between the pub and restaurant, but there was only a bare spread of wall.

Laura.

I was covered with dried mud and blood, some of it my daughter’s. I could smell her on me. I could remember her, how she’d thanked me what seemed like minutes ago and how I’d kept my selfish truth silent from her in those last few moments before… before…

I stood and ran home, ignoring the pain and stares, the comments and shouts, trying not to see the scared looks on kids’ faces as I breezed by. And with every step I took I expected a meteor to come blasting down out of the sky, a gunman to turn a corner with fifty pounds of explosive strapped to his chest and a belt-fed machinegun spitting death, a wall of water to come washing along the street, thirty feet deep and carrying the city’s story with it, sweeping up history and washing it clean.

I looked for disaster and death, but I saw only typical, mundane life. I wanted to stop people in the street and tell them just how fucking lucky they were, why didn’t they smile, why didn’t they live.

But right now wasn’t the time.

Now, I had to get home.

And Laura was there. Huddled on the doorstep like a shame-faced kid come home after her first night away. She was in a worse state than me, and when I saw her I burst into tears. She looked up, smiling and crying at the same time, and our tears weren’t of sadness or despair or fear. They were because never, ever have two people been so happy to see each other alive.

I knew what we were, and I whispered it into Laura’s ear as the world went on around us.

“We’re survivors,” I said, “because there’s always a survivor.”

I believed that. They let us survive.

I know that I should tell people what I know and what I’ve seen, but somehow it feels secret and forbidden. And every time I work my way to doing so I see Laura sitting in the sunlight or browsing through a book or cooking us a meal, and I dread changing anything. It’s all so perfect now, it’s drawn us together, and it really feels as though we’re doing Janine — my wife, Laura’s mother — proud.

Besides, sometimes I see demons in the dark.

So I live with the guilt and bad memories, and the certainty that every time I go to a concert or sports match with Laura I can cast my eyes across the crowds, and know that amongst them there are people who will suffer an horrendous fate. Normal people who will find Hell, not because they need it, but because Hell needs them. For fodder.

I feel terrible. I hate myself for saying nothing.

But I live with it.

There are worse things in life, after all.