White and Other Tales of Ruin

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.