Three Bullets

by Melvin Burgess

  I offered to look after it for her – the gun, not the vagina, although I’d have had that too, if I could.

  ‘Back off, Marti,’ she said.

  That was Rubblehead. There was no telling her anything.

  We set off without ceremony a whole week after Rowan had been dug out of the rubble. The magnolia tree in front of our house was in flower. I’d known that tree all my life, it was gorgeous every spring. A couple of branches had been broken off where the roof slid down, but it was still pretty. Thomas was giving a singing lesson to one of the fat beardy baritones he fancies so much, practising scales in a big brown voice. I couldn’t make out a word, never could, even when it was in English. Thomas leaned out the window and waved goodbye, and the beardy baritone stuck his head out too.

  ‘Goodbye, Goodbye, See you in the f*****g springtime,’ he sang. I made that out all right.

  That was our send off. Pretty weird in the middle of a war zone. I thought it was great! A few years before, there’d have been a crowd to see me off, but all my friends were either dead, kidnapped and imprisoned, or abroad.

  And was I sorry to say goodbye to the place where I grew up? Was I sad? Did I murmur, ‘See you again old friends’ to the magnolia tree and the remains of the familiar houses as I passed them by for the last time?

  No, I did not. Manchester had stopped being the place I belonged, years before. If I never saw it one more time in a thousand years, it would be too soon.

  Our route was up the Mauldeth Road, through Burnage, out on the Didsbury Road at Heaton Mersey, around Stockport and off across to the Peaks. That last part of the route was still unsure – there was fighting along the Snake’s Pass from time to time, but the main problem was from the air. If you wanted to get to Europe from the north-west, you had to go over the Snake’s Pass, or the A628, and so it was an obvious target for anyone who wanted to polish off a few refugees. There were no other major roads across those hills, but if you went further south there were some little roads, more trees, less traffic. But it was slower. We were still arguing about which way to go as we trollied along the Mauldeth Road. Maude wanted to cut the risk and go south-east; I’d had enough of going in circles, I wanted the more direct route after Stockport – straight across towards Hull and on, on, to the city of sin.

  Things were pretty bad-tempered right from the start, when Maude saw my nicely ironed combats. They were classy numbers – I got them from Harvey Nicks when the Arndale got bombed a few months before. They had a powder blue background with deep green camouflage splotches, of which every fourth or fifth one was pink.

  ‘Pink camouflages?’ she hissed at me.

  ‘They’re not pink,’ I said. ‘Just bits of them are.’

  ‘F**k’s sake, Marti! Those are the most girlie combats you could buy. Just stop it, will you?’

  So she was sulking right at the start, but I wasn’t having any. I have my principles. I had a change of combats in case I needed something a bit more military later on. We hadn’t even left our street at that point. And then things got a whole lot worse...

  Yeah, what rotten luck I had that day. We were about fifteen minutes out, just round about Ladybarn, when my phone went off. My secret phone. I mean, how unlucky can you get? I must surely be the unluckiest person in the world. My Sylvester ringtone, that I never put on my other phone, rang out for all to hear. There was no chance of Maude mistaking it for anything else.

  Well, she looked at me and I looked at her. It was so embarrassing. I thought I might die of embarrassment. I was just checking to see what was going on – there was no sim in it, turned out it was some kind of timer that I must have set by accident – when she launched herself at me. Next thing you knew we were both rolling around on the ground, scrapping for the phone.

  ‘It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine!’ I was shouting, and, ‘No it f*****g isn’t, you lying cow!’ she was yelling. Maude is a trained fighter, but I have the upper-body strength, so I could have easily won if she hadn’t kicked me in the face and bust my nose. I dropped the phone and clutched my face, and she snatched it up from the ground. Although I’m taller and stronger, Maude was always the one with the cool head, plus the training. Plus of course she had right on her side, which helps. So I lost the fight and instead I threw a gigantic tantrum, right there in front of the bombed out Co-op. I flounced, I stropped, I raged, I wept. I told you I never swear. I did then. I swore and swore and swore and swore. I lost it utterly. I howled and raged. I went for her, we had a fight. She won again.

  It’s not fair, is it? I’m at the bottom of every single heap. Find a heap – I’m there at the bottom of it. Why? Why me?

  ‘You don’t care if I die,’ I wept.

  ‘You have one life, Marti,’ she said. ‘This,’ she went on, waggling the phone temptingly in the air, ‘This could save thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives.’ She stuck it in her bra and patted it. ‘You’re a cow. We go south to Huntingdon.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ I said, trying not to cry. ‘You do this, Maude. You go all the way down south, right into the hands of the Bloods if that’s what you want to do. But you go on your own and you take Rowan with you. I mean it. It’s all right for you. Spoiled little white girl. Look at me. Look! I’m everything the Bloods hate. All they need is one glimpse of me and I’m dead.’

  She looked at me like I was a piece of doggy-do under her foot and gave me her parting shot. ‘Tell you what, Marti. You break your promise to your mum, you break your promise to your dad, you desert your little brother – what’s your life worth? Nothing. But come with me and look after your brother and try to help fix your dad’s life’s work, what are you worth then? Everything. You need to ask yourself how you’re going to live with yourself if you dump us. I’m going down south. You better come, you hear me? You be there for us, like I’m always there for you when you need me, or I swear I’ll never speak to you again.’

  ‘And what exactly would I want to say to a dead racist bitch?’ I yelled after her.

  As if I cared. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Even now, just the thought of it makes me want to spit.

  6

  I was furious. Of all the places in the world I didn’t want to go to, the ERAC at Huntingdon was right up there at the top of the list. People like me, we have to fight so hard to be who we are. All my life, people wanted me to be someone else. My friends at school, my family. Even strangers on the street who don’t know anything about me think they know better. My dad, even after he accepted me, was always pining for the little boy he lost. And then just when you’ve finally made it clear to those around you that actually, this isn’t just a passing fad – like, this is who I am, finally! – what happens? Here’s my best friend, no less, the only person close to me in the whole world, actually telling me I have to go down to the worst place in existence – the place that will strip me of everything I am, or could be or ever was. Because I tell you, if I ever ended up inside the ERAC, that was going to be the end of me. My ideas, my politics, my history, my gender, my sexuality – gone, all gone. There would simply be nothing left.

  No one’s sure who commissioned the ERAC. It’s run by Google. Remember them? They used to be really big on the internet. It’s right by one of the big US air bases so it was probably the US who started it. If you asked most people what goes on there, they’d say, Oh, torture, beatings, terror. The usual. Maybe that’s true. In fact, it almost certainly is true. But the ERAC is much more than that.

  It’s an experiment. You know that saying about how history is always written by the winners, yeah? Well, in Huntingdon, they don’t just rewrite the history books. They rewrite people.

  They worked out how to identify thoughts first. Then they worked out how to delete them, then how to implant them. Most of the initial work was done at Manchester Uni, according to my dad, who was a student there doing his PhD in A.I. when it was all starting up. They were all really excited about it in his department, th
ought they were finding new ways of treating mental illness. You see how it could have been? A brand new mind for the crazies among us. Or even the insecure. Or the unhappy or the shy or the anxious, which, let’s face it, is most of us.

  When Google came along to buy it up, the guys at Manchester were made up about that, because although it was no longer theirs, there was suddenly all this money to play with. But of course they were being utterly naïve. What they’d been hoping for wasn’t even a tiny bit what Google wanted. Google didn’t care about a cure for the sick. What they wanted was profits. And where do you get the best profits? The military, of course. My mum was right when she said that cost goes out the window when it comes to warfare.

  Next thing you know, my dad and his fellow let’s-help-mankind mates were out, forbidden to say, do or barely even think about the work they’d done, and the US military was busy using their tech to develop mind-changers, mind-readers, mind-your-own-businessers, you name it. They weren’t interested in people who had crazy thoughts at all – they were interested in people who had bad thoughts. You know? Bad thoughts like, What a bag of sickos the Americans are. Or the commies wanting to nationalise your daddy’s private business empire. Or, What a good idea the NHS was. Those kind of bad thoughts.

  And hallelujah, brothers and sisters! Think of what you could do with that! Peace on Earth, brotherhood among all mankind. No wonder the Christians went for it so bad. Who needs war when you control what people think? Conflict, disagreement, Islam, Buddhists, terrorism – all gone! Pinko lefties get turned into decent rednecks overnight! Now let’s just have a little chat about that oil price, shall we...?

  While all that was going on, the US economy was bombing – had been for years, let’s face it. The debt was getting bigger, the economy was getting smaller. Then one day, the dollar collapsed. The US military woke up and found themselves no longer being paid, so some of them decided it was the destiny of the US to rule things in a much better way, a much whiter way than heretofore. After they won the civil war at home, they busied themselves sorting out the rest of the world, and among the various other jolly things they did, one was to install a pro-US government over here: the Bloods. And Lo! The ERAC at Huntingdon came to pass, so they could make good Christians out of human rubbish like you and me. Queers go in one end and they come out straight. Islamists turn into good Christians, black people go in and come out – well, not white, of course. But racism doesn’t exist any more. It never did. We just realise that we’re inferior, just like our nice white cousins have been telling us all along.

  And the Muslims who’ve lived here for sixty years want to go home and the gays think they’re sick and trans people just want to stop being so confused.

  All that costly military hardware – unnecessary! You don’t have to fight anyone. You don’t even have to argue with them. You just rewrite them and your enemies become your friends. It’s great. Hallelujah! All the Bloods need now is the second coming and everything’ll be just like they want it.

  That’s the aim anyway. At the moment it’s still in the experimental stage. And that’s what the ERAC at Huntingdon is all about.

  My dad was appalled, partly because he had been involved in developing it, but also because his sister, Grace, my aunt, died in a mental hospital. Crazy runs in our family – you might have noticed. The poor old codger really thought he was going to do good, and instead his baby turns out to be a dreadful monster. So him and some of the team from Manchester Uni started work on ways of undoing the damage done by their own invention. Basically, the way the drones flying over the ERAC work, they don’t wipe the old memories out – they just block them. My dad and his mates wanted to develop software that could unblock those old memories and block the new stuff instead. ‘Reinstalling the truth,’ they called it.

  That’s what the phone was about. The software they developed was installed on it.

  My dad’s mates disappeared one by one over the years. He was the last one on the team. If by any remote chance he was still alive, my dad, who was just about the most militant Black man you ever met, he’d be some kind of Uncle Tom by now, working for the Bloods. He’d have told them all about the software so’s they could nullify it, which meant there really was no point even trying any more. A point which I made to Maude, and which she steadfastly ignored, on the grounds that even a small chance was better than no chance at all.

  So that’s the ERAC. Can you even begin to imagine what they’d do to me if they ever got their hands on me? And yet that’s where Maude, lovely Maude, who’s practically my own sister, wanted me to go. All of which is why, once we get to Stockport, Maude’s going one way and I’m going another. Because while she’s the heroic type, who cares not for her own safety and only lives for the safety and happiness of those not yet born, I am of another persuasion. I am of the persuasion that cares for those who live on this Earth right now, and of those who live on this Earth right now, there is one among them that I care the very most for.

  Me.

  See? I told you you weren’t going to like me.

  7

  If you were to ask me how I felt about abandoning my baby brother and my best friend – my only friend – then I would say, actually, I felt furious that I’d been forced into taking that sort of action.

  ‘That you, a cis white person, expect someone like me to go down south into the arms of a bunch of lynching, raping, murdering, transphobic, racist bastards is just astonishing.’ That’s how I put it to Maude. And she rolled her eyes. Yes, she rolled her eyes. Like I was kicking up a fuss about nothing. Well, that’s white privilege for you. They just don’t get it. But it showed me one thing, I can tell you. I was on my own – then, now and for ever. And if I was going to be on my own, I was going to be on my own somewhere nice. That’s it. Forget the rest. Forget my dad. Look what happened to him. Forget my mum – look what happened to her. That’s it. I’m the last of my line, it’s my duty to carry on.

  What’s that you say? Rowan? What about Rowan?

  Well, what about Rowan? Maude thinks she’s family. She can look after him. Speaking of Rowan, that fight me and Maude had on the pavements of the Mauldeth Road set him off into his favourite activity: wailing and screaming. It took Maude twenty minutes or more to calm him down. Off we set again, both of us seething away like chip pans; Rowan’s eyes wide open, staring from one to the other of us, sucking away on his dum-dum like some kind of disgusting arthropod trying to feed on a piece of waste plastic. Which, as far as I was concerned, he was. Maude had my phone, wouldn’t give it back for fear I’d trample on it. We got all the way to Heaton Mersey without exchanging a single word, except for me muttering, ‘Bitch,’ under my breath. Every time I did it, Maude closed her eyes and did some private seething of her own for a couple of minutes. Never said a word and just carried on walking, shoving the pushchair up the road and trying not to bump the poor injured cockroach in it too much.

  Burnage was no problem – there’d been a fight with some racists there recently, and the FNA won, which was how it usually came about in that part of town. Rowan perked up – he was actually being quite good, which was unusual for him. The thing is, he never used to get out much, so travelling along an open road, there was so much for him to see. Except that he kept asking after Mum, and having a cry because she wasn’t there, which was horrible. I was trying not to think about that.

  So we were doing OK. And then...

  Roadblock. It was an FNA roadblock, so we weren’t too worried at first. Maude had her FNA documents, which she was waving in everyone’s face, but it was no good – they wouldn’t let us through. You see what it’s like? Twenty minutes and a couple of miles later and everything had already changed. In the end we decided to double back round and go via Parrs Wood, maybe even go right back to Fallowfield and up the motorway if we had to.

  We made it as far as Parrs Wood and... roadblock! And this time you could see what was going on. Colour was going on. Mainly Asian Muslims
but plenty of Black folk, too. Thousands of them. They’d made it through Stockport, got part of the way down the road towards Manc – and that was it. There they were, sitting on the road looking miserable, or exhausted, or angry or just plain scared, or all four. Penned in. And we were penned in with them.

  Yes, the Muslim hordes. They’d marched all the way from Birmingham, Wolverhampton, maybe even London, some of them. We pushed our way through the crowds to get to the FNA who were in charge of the roadblock, where there were some furious arguments going on between the Muslim FNA, who wanted to let their people through, and the white FNA, who didn’t. Nobody seemed to really know what was going on, which was entirely as per normal. There were no orders coming down from the leadership, wherever they were, but you can bet that exactly the same arguments with the same people on each side were happening there, too.

  Maude tried waving her papers in the faces of the FNA militia – dragging me forcibly by my elbow, I should tell you, because that was a place I had no wish to be. There were weapons pointing in all directions. The white FNA were arguing with the Asians, both the ones on the other side of the roadblock and the ones who were their comrades this side. Things were very, very heated. But Maude, hand it to her, she was shouting away, demanding attention. When that didn’t work, she hit one of the senior officers on the side of the head with her papers.

  That worked. Everyone stopped shouting and they all looked down at us. I have to say, we must have looked pretty weird. The pretty one was dressed in a FNA uniform with a tight belt around her tiny waist. The ugly one was in a set of partly pink hi-fash combats, with a tight stretchy top which showed off her two favourite assets. I was also pushing a pushchair with a baby in it.

  ‘What?’ said the soldier.

  ‘Mission to the ERAC, Huntingdon. We’re carrying important assets. You have to let us through,’ insisted Maude.

  The guy glanced at the papers. Then one of his Asian comrades started yelling again and poking him in the chest, and... he let us through. Yes, he did. I think he only did it to annoy the Asian guy. We walked through, and off we went again, leaving them behind more angry than ever.