White and Other Tales of Ruin

“I’m leading you to a man called String. He’s a bit of a witch-doctor, I suppose you’d say.” She punctuates each point with a nod of the head, as if explaining to me the rules of a game instead of the particulars of our current situation. “String can cure people of the Sickness — he cured me,” she continues, tapping her chest. “But on the way to where String is, you’re likely to see some nasty things. That’s just the nature of things — the way things have to be. It doesn’t really matter, sometimes it’s just got to happen. But the things you see might not be nice. Like what’s around that corner.”

She waves a hand over her head, then turns and gazes in the direction she indicated, giving me her back to stare at as she continues. “I’ve been this way once before, remember. I’ve seen these things already, I’ve experienced them. The Ruin’s a right fucker, but just when you think you’ve seen everything bad it’s got to throw at you, there’s something else. But some bad things are good as well.” She turns back, and her haunted expression sends a shiver down my spine. “Remember that. There are sayings: Cruel to be kind; Good comes from evil.” She bends and sighs as she eases her rucksack onto her shoulders. “I’m not pissed at you. I’m just not looking forward to seeing all the bad stuff again.”

“What bad stuff?” Her words have planted the fear of damnation in me, sent an arrow of terror streaking through my veins and pincering my heart between its dozens of heads. “What am I going to see?”

Jade nods at the tricycle, indicating that I should travel on it, then walks on ahead. “Best see for yourself. Up here. Around the corner.”

At first, I think it’s a stagnant pond. There is a light steam rising from it, though the surface appears uneven and scattered with protruding growths of fungi. Then, I realise what I am really seeing. In a dip in the ground — perhaps where water had once gathered naturally, before the Ruin decimated the atmosphere of the planet — there is a lake of twitching bodies. The movement I had mistaken as ripples on the surface of the water is their dying shivers, translating through the hundreds of corpses as if by electric shock. There is a pool, of sorts; the bodies lay in a quagmire of blackened, soupy mud, dust having sucked up the spilled blood and spread under the bodies. The steam rises, like nebulous spirits making their final journey.

But surely there can be no peace here. Not where for every five bodies that lay still there is one still alive, squirming silently in the white-hot agony of approaching death. Not here, where the stark white dead eye of a child stares from an otherwise shattered face. No peace here, where the rich stench of death and dying is a meaty tang in the hot air.

I stop pedalling and the trike drifts to a tired pause in the middle of the road. I cannot begin to estimate the number of bodies. Shock has frozen my mind, the sheer unexpectedness of this sight paralysing my thoughts.

In the city, yes, I had seen the great mound of corpses along the quay. But there, perversely, it had not seemed obtrusive. Maybe it was the casual way that people had regarded the bodies, barely looking at them, treating them more as a landmark than an object of pity or disgust. In the city, I had been prepared for anything. The Ruin had changed so much and the face of humanity had changed with it, often blending back into ages past like an ill child, retarding in years.

But here, in the country, on a hillside that had once been beautiful, and could be again, the sight is almost surreal with contradictions. The deep blue of the sky, decorated with an occasional cloud cheerful in its fluffiness; and the bloody red mess of open meat, steaming insides, pulsing wounds.

I begin to cry. I cannot help myself and Jade, in her defence, moves away and sits under a tree stripped of life years ago. The tears are warm and heavy in the approaching furnace of midday, streaking the dust from my face and falling like hot blood onto my shirt. They merge with sweat and the leakings from my growths, to form a liquid testament to my wretchedness.

I sit that way for several minutes, willing the tears to stay because they blur my vision and camouflage, however falsely, the sight before me. Then Jade walks over to me and places a hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t understand,” I say, realising the stupidity of the statement. Who could possibly claim to understand the insanity of this moment?

But Jade seems to know.

“There are lots of reasons,” she says. “Population control, for one. At least half of those you see are children. The others are men and women of a … breeding age. No old people. No ill people.”

“But it’s just so misguided. So wrong. How can anyone think this can help?”

Jade is silent for a moment. She seems to be staring over the bodies, perhaps glimpsing some vague future that lies beyond their steaming deaths, but nearer than we think.