White and Other Tales of Ruin

“Don’t talk!” Skin hissed. “They’ll be scanning for your voice patterns. Your one hope is to trust me and maybe I can get you both out of here. But we have to move, you have to follow me, now!” He turned and belly-crawled across the floor, shoving people aside with his big hands.

The gunfire and explosions stopped, but the mercenaries had initiated the panic they desired. Screaming and crying and moaning continued, almost as loud as the sounds of killing. Interspersed amongst them, the clanking impacts of metal-booted feet on ladders, chains and platforms, always coming nearer.

Maybe they’d already been spotted.

Honey was following Skin. Tom watched her go, and then followed her. He had no choice. To stay still was to die, to go after Skin was to submit himself to the man’s mercy. He was helpless, useless … and he realised that he’d been almost totally ineffectual since leaving the Baker’s old laboratory.

Honey had always been the one in charge. The strong one. Their only real hope.

People moved aside to let them pass. The band was cowering on the stage, trying to edge back but tangling themselves in power lines and the expansive drum kit. Skin crawled across the stage, Honey followed, and Tom was about to follow her when he heard a high-pitched shriek from somewhere else in the club.

It was not a human sound. It was a fighting sound, an angry shrill from vocal chords designed to communicate nothing but pain and terror.

He half-stood and hurried to the edge of the stage, from where he could see at least a third of the club’s space. From the corner of his eye he spotted a dark shadow swinging and scampering along one huge wall, aiming at a place half-way to the ground. Another shape swung from rope to chain to ladder, heading the same way. They screeched in unison now, and Tom tried to make out their target.

And stared into his own eyes.

He was standing down there on a platform, surrounded by chopped people whose bodies were already punctured and torn, leaking blood around his feet. He was standing down there and looking up. From this distance Tom could not quite make out the expression in his eyes … but he recognised his own quiet smile.

“Holy shit …” Honey said, appearing at his shoulder.

The two mercenaries landed on the platform either side of the second Tom. Without pause they stretched out their arms, locked their weapons onto him and opened fire.

Tom watched himself come apart. The bullets tore him to shreds, blood and bone splashing into the air, skull splitting and gushing brain out across the platform. The gunfire only lasted for two seconds, but the thing that slumped down at the mercenaries’ feet could never have been visually identified … had Tom not seen its face.

One of the mercenaries snatched a quick sample of blood. Then they used their flame units, and the sad remains bubbled black.

Tom crawled back from the edge of the stage, head down, feeling more cold and alone than he could have believed. Even when Honey came back to him, touched his face and slung one arm across his back, Tom felt abandoned. He’d just seen …

He didn’t know what he’d seen.

“I guess they’re just looking for you now,” he said to Honey. His voice sounded shallow and vague.

“What happened?” Honey said.

“I think I died.” Tom smiled at her. Already, the mysterious threads were coming together. “Let’s go. If we escape, we can talk about it then.”

“You could hide,” she said. “You could leave me, let them come after me and catch me if they can — ”

Tom did not even honour this with a response.

Skin led them to the rear of the stage and across a narrow metal walkway, connecting the stage platform with the blank outside wall. There was a flimsy handrail, the only thing between them and the floor a hundred feet below, but it had been distorted at several points by bullet or shrapnel impacts. None of them trusted it.

Tom felt naked and exposed, expected the intrusive kiss of a bullet at any moment. The way Honey moved ahead of him — shoulders hunched, arms pulled in, legs slightly bent — he thought she did too.

The Slaughterhouse had gone amazingly quiet since the mercenaries killed Tom’s doppelganger. Tom could still hear the clambering, clanking footsteps of the hunters as they searched for Honey, but the clubbers had all fallen silent, either dead or shocked dumb. Perhaps they feared that now the killers had found and killed their target, any slight sound would merely set them on the rampage again.

Tom, Honey and Skin reached the wall. Skin led them through a door, cleverly concealed in the shadows of a concrete overhang. It emerged onto the head of a staircase. Tom stood on the landing and looked down, down, until the flights disappeared in a grey haze. It seemed far deeper than the club.

“It’s the only way I can think of to get you out,” Skin said. “It goes straight down to the basements. The theatres. From there you can get out onto the streets or down into the sewers and tunnels … just about anywhere.”