White and Other Tales of Ruin

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?”