White and Other Tales of Ruin

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.