Broken Monsters

by Lauren Beukes

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she says, angry with him.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he echoes in a sing-song voice.

  ‘I was driving,’ she remembers.

  ‘Lost your car. Lost your pussy cat. Lost your marbles. At least I only lost my wallet. And my heart. Have you seen it?’ He pats himself down, as if looking for his keys in a forgotten pocket. ‘Oh there it is.’ He points at the screens, which are now showing penises, an infinite variety of penises, except for one screen where a teenage girl is lying on damp grass kissing a boy who has his hand under her dress.

  ‘Slut,’ he says. ‘Dirty little whore. You wanted it. You all want it. Taking sexy little pictures in your sexy little panties on your phones, putting yourselves out there. On the Internet for all of us to enjoy. We’ve got the whole private world in here.’ He rubs his distended stomach. ‘I may have overindulged myself,’ he smirks and she realizes he’s rubbing somewhere below his stomach, and looks away.

  The screens start displaying selfies. Bathroom mirrors and bedrooms, girls pouting and posing, in their underwear or naked, laughing, serious, scared-looking, all of them trying it on for size.

  ‘No,’ Layla says. ‘It’s not for you.’

  ‘Of course it is. It’s what we’ve taught you. Come here. Sit on my lap. I’ll give you a ride.’ He reaches for her with his fat arms and she shoves him as hard as she can in the chest. It sends the roller chair shooting across the room until it catches on an uneven bit of flooring and tips over, spilling him onto the ground. He lies there, drowning in fat, laughing. ‘We can play rough, sweetheart. I can teach you to think that was your idea too.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ She throws the cage at him, and turns and runs. ‘Mom! Mom, where are you?’

  ‘Dead whore!’ he shouts after her. ‘You’re all dead whores inside!’

  She clatters down a flight of stairs into a narrow corridor with a trench running down the middle and robotic manufacturing arms bending over it at uneven angles. She steps into the channel – there’s light on the other side, if she can make her way through.

  ‘Mom! Where are you? I need you!’ Layla yells. Her voice echoes through the cavernous space, bounces back to her so she can hear just how small and frightened she sounds.

  At the sound, the robot arms twitch and all around her, they start jerking to life, shifting on their swivel bases, turning their heads in her direction, curious.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she says, angrily, ducking as one of the arms reaches out for her, a pincer claw grasping blindly. But then another swivels out and grabs at her chest, the metal tips raking over her jacket.

  VelvetBoy’s voice crackles through the intercom as the robot arms dip and lunge at her, tipped with pincers and whining drill bits and fizzing, sparking welding torches. ‘Honk-honk!’ he giggles. ‘Honk-honk!’

  ‘Mom!’ Layla screams. She drops flat in the trench and puts her hands over her head, waiting to die, for a drill bit to bite through her skull. It doesn’t come and she peers over her shoulder to see that the bottom of the channel is just out of the range of the mechanical arms’ articulation.

  She crawls along on her stomach, agonizingly slowly, with the arms plunging up and down, up and down, whirring and screaming and sizzling only inches above her. But then she reaches the end of the trench and there is nowhere to go and the robotic arms seem to know it, pecking down relentlessly. She lies there trying to work out how many seconds she has between the mechanisms rearing up like cobras, and striking down again.

  She launches herself up and out, tumbling across the floor, but one of the welding torches catches her shoulder. She howls in agony. The smell of her blistered skin is exactly like bacon and she knows, sacred food group or not, that she’s never going to be able to eat it again.

  Layla stands up, unsteadily, watching the arms fall silent in a ripple down the assembly line. Her arm is on fire. Don’t touch it, she thinks. Third-degree burns and infections. She has to get help. She has to get out of here.

  ‘Oh please don’t go, we hate you so,’ VelvetBoy mocks from up in his control room. She can see his fat face staring down at her through the greasy window.

  Layla turns her back on him and stumbles deeper into the factory, toward the sound of water splashing.

  Labyrinth

  Gabi emerges through the door onto a walkway above the sprawling factory floor. The narrow band of windows that run just under the ceiling are crusted with gunk, creating a grubby fuzz of light that fails to penetrate the gloom below.

  She takes shuffling steps, testing the walkway for rot, feeling her way through the half-dusk, wary of walking into something with sharp edges, one hand on her gun, the radio on her belt humming with useless static. She’s turned the volume down, low enough so she can hear it, but not so much that it will give away her position.

  Her eyes are starting to adjust, so that she can make out the armatures of the assembly pit, gap-toothed, because the scrappers have taken everything they can, and destroyed what they couldn’t. The remaining robot arms are canted at crazy angles on their heavy stands, wiring dangling like guts, leaning over the rails that run down the center of the pit, waiting in vain for the husks of cars that will never come through here again.

  A trick of the light makes it look as if the remaining robot arms are moving; the heads swiveling to watch her.

  Clayton could be anywhere in here – eight stories of automotive ruin. Not quite the thirty-five acres of the Packard Plant, but it’s still going to be a bitch. But hey, when you don’t have a yellow brick road, Gabi reckons, you can probably follow the disturbing art.

  The factory would be creepy as fuck on a good day, weirder still with all the old furniture that doesn’t belong, as if he’s playing house. But it’s worse, much worse, with the horrible artwork everywhere. Like Luke’s basement full of dead baby dolls. Except there may really be a corpse in one of these, with their distorted faces and corkscrew necks. Like the woman with the melting features or the effigy of Jesus strung up on the railing, looking down, his clockwork mouth opening and closing like he’s muttering a prayer. Evidence Tech is going to have a field day.

  She takes a rusty staircase up to the mezzanine level. The metal steps ring out under her boots, echoing across the floor, as if the whole damn building wants to give her away. She cringes, but hey, reciprocity. If every sound travels and she can’t hear the bad guys, it means they’re not on this floor.

  She moves cautiously deeper into the building, up a set of stairs and past a control room where a fat figure made of discolored beeswax lies on the floor, wedged into a swivel office chair facing a wall of screens and buttons, graffitied and smashed-up. The wax has set badly, in drips that ooze over the edge of the seat. Or maybe it’s intentional. The fat effigy has exaggerated hollows for eyes, like someone gouged out the wax with their fingers, and old toys embedded in its yellow flesh. He’s reaching for the controls with one flabby arm, joined to the body with webbing, like a frog’s foot. It’s disgusting.

  She passes offices with filing cabinets overturned and trashed computers, the floor buried under cardboard boxes, vomiting files and paper. A scattering of neon highlighter markers stand out, like pink and green and blue plastic cockroaches among the junk. There’s so much trash, it doesn’t seem possible that it could all be indigenous to the plant.

  Someone has taken the time to systematically kick down the urinals in the men’s bathroom and smash the porcelain to bits. When everything else is fucked up, mere destruction isn’t enough. You gotta step up your game to total obliteration, she thinks.

  She backtracks, and ends up in an office overlooking the factory floor. But across on the other side of the factory, she can make out the familiar sweep of blue and red police lights, visible through an open loading door.

  Always late to the damn party, she mutters in her head, but she can’t help grinning. She’s already strategizing routes. She’ll take a team upstairs. It makes sense that he’d go up. She hope
s Boyd’s been able to get hold of the building blueprints.

  ‘Hey assholes,’ she calls down, as she bounds down the stairs toward the car. ‘Don’t shoot, it’s me.’

  But there’s something terribly wrong here. It’s not the cavalry and it’s not a loading door that’s letting in the white glaze of daylight.

  It’s her Crown Vic, smashed straight through the wall. The bonnet is crumpled, the windscreen a blue splintered map. The driver’s door is hanging open, a nasty crack running down the window. A smear of red across the glass. Her heart freefalls.

  ‘Layla!’ Gabi holsters her gun and sprints to the car, twisting her ankle on one of the fragments of bricks from the ruined wall. Inanimate revenge.

  She shoves down the obese airbag in the front seat, fighting the deflating fabric in the hope of finding her daughter underneath. But she’s forced to concede that there’s no-one there. The cat in her cage is gone, too.

  An incessant low humming breaks through her panic. Her phone, in her pocket, set to vibrate. There’s no possible way it could be her daughter. But she can hope. That’s what parents do. Hope.

  ‘Layla?’ she says, frantic.

  Fragments of noise come through, garbled. ‘-ersado? Weh—’

  ‘Where the fuck are you, Bob? Why aren’t you here yet? Fucking get here!’ She disconnects and starts running back upstairs. He would go higher. For his grand exhibition. Isn’t that what this is about? Why he hauled all his awful statues and this shitty old furniture over here?

  Layla, she thinks. Layla, Layla, Layla.

  Summonings

  Layla steps out onto the catwalk above a flooded basement, with unidentifiable bits of old machinery protruding like shipwrecks, and slashes of sunlight from the broken windows like tiger stripes on the dark water. The splashing is coming from a big black man, his face drawn in terror, running from a pack of mad dogs that are bounding through the water behind him, baying and howling.

  ‘Here!’ she yells. And he looks up, startled, and trips, landing hard on his knee. It’s her fault, she thinks. He turns, fast, yanking pepper spray out of his pocket, but the dogs are on him, knocking him down onto his back, in the water.

  He comes up, gasping. ‘Get off!’ he yells, kicking at one of the dogs. He maces the second dog at the same time and it jolts back, as if electrocuted, whining and plunging its nose into the water.

  But three dogs is too many, even for a big guy like him. The third sinks its teeth into his wrist and, with a shout of pain, he drops the canister into the water. The dog worries at him, teeth ripping through muscle, its head distends with the movement, stretching like putty, a blur of muzzle and teeth.

  This is not real, she thinks, and then: real enough, the agony in her shoulder reminds her. But it is also a dream, she thinks. A simulation is running in your brain, and you can control dreams if you try, if you’re aware you’re dreaming. Exactly like a video game. If only she had a power-up, a cluster bomb or a special move. What the hell. She has failed to summon her mother, but she remembers the cage and her cat, who might be in here somewhere, wandering lost.

  She leans over the railing and shouts for NyanCat. The sound echoes and the dogs raise their heads as one to look at her, mechanical, like the robot arms.

  But on the surface of the water, the sun slashes swirl and rearrange themselves into new symmetries, and then something explodes from the dark. A tiger. No, a cat, lithe and enormous. The dreamcat lashes out, burning bright, claws and teeth and fury. No toying with grasshoppers now. This is savage, ancient war.

  ‘Run!’ Layla yells down to the man and he does, not looking back at the howling, shrieking, ripping behind him. She climbs down the steps to where they have broken off, a yard above his head and hooks her arm around the railing, ignoring the hot white pain in her shoulder, reaching her hand out. ‘Climb up!’

  Behind him, the dreamcat shreds two of the dogs like paper, leaving red ribbons drifting on the water. The final animal turns and bolts, tail between its legs, but not fast enough. The cat pounces on its back, claws gouging into its yellow flank for purchase. The dog struggles on for a few more steps and then collapses, plunging both of them into the dark water that closes over their heads.

  The man grasps her hand, his palm clammy and ice-cold. He’s careful to only use her for leverage, grabbing on to the edge of the step with his other hand, his legs kicking, until he gets one knee up, and hauls himself onto the stair alongside her.

  The water thrashes for a while and finally stills into uneasy ripples. A red ribbon drifts up and starts spreading across the surface.

  The man sits with his back up against the railing, panting and soaked through and bleeding. ‘Jesus,’ he huffs. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Did you see that?’ Layla asks him. The ribbons on the dark water are fraying, hard to see now.

  ‘I didn’t see nothing,’ he says, not looking back. ‘Not one thing. Are you real?’

  ‘Are you?’ she challenges.

  ‘I think so. Bleeding enough to be. You’re not in such great shape yourself.’ His teeth are chattering like the clacker you give the kid in music class who can’t play a real instrument.

  ‘We have to get out of here. You have to get warm. You’re going to get hypothermia.’

  ‘Nah. I got to find the man who did this. He killed my friend. He does something to you, maybe when he touches you. It makes you sick in the head. Makes you see shit.’

  ‘The Detroit Monster?’

  ‘That’s what they call him. I’m TK.’

  ‘Layla.’ It’s weird to be shaking hands, but hey, maybe it means they don’t have to talk about dogs and dreamcats. ‘Is this the Fleischer Plant?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then my mom’s here. We have to find her. She’s a homicide detective.’

  ‘That so? ’Bout fucking time. Excuse my French.’

  ‘I’m fluent in French.’

  ‘Detective brought her little girl along?’

  ‘No, she sent me away. But I found one of the bodies, before. So … maybe, proximity? That’s how he drugs you? Like a gas.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He makes a decision. ‘We have to get you out. Find your mom and the other cops. Then I’ll come back and rip his head off myself.’ But Layla can see it’s only bluster. He’s as shit-scared as she is.

  All that Sparkles

  Gabi dismisses the second floor at a glance. Another sprawling space filled with garbage and bricks, but no indication of people. The third floor is a maze of offices, the windows smashed in between, stains across the floor. But when she emerges onto the fourth floor, she’s confronted with a wall of newspapers piled high to the ceiling, hardened with damp, like papier-mâché. She’s seen rat’s nests like this. There is a narrow track between the walls of paper, just wide enough to walk through. It turns sharply to the left. This is madness. How long has he been doing this? How many bodies are there? Somewhere ahead, she can make out muffled voices. Male. Not her daughter. Maybe Marcus. There might be another entrance. She’s seen enough of the factory to establish that there’s a (nonfunctioning) elevator on the other side of the building, and there may be another stairwell close to it. But there’s no time for that, and there is no sign of Layla.

  She tries the radio again because routine is all she has right now. ‘Dispatch. I’m on the fourth floor. Could be fifth, depending where you start from. There’s a wall of newspapers like a maze. Suspect is somewhere beyond it. I’m going in. Suspect may have my daughter hostage, or she may be hiding somewhere in the building.’ Please let her be hiding. Let her be safe.

  The radio crackles back uselessly.

  She wipes her hand on her pants, sweaty, even in the cold, readjusts her grip on the gun and moves along the tunnel of congealed paper, working her way through as it branches, forcing her to choose a path. She tries to follow the voices, but the paper swallows up the sound. It smells terrible, acrid and wet rot. The walls rustle and sometimes bulge out as if there are things scuttling bet
ween them, or trying to dig their way through. Rats and cockroaches. She keeps right. Right, right, right, please get it right.

  Something swoops over her head, a flash of white, dry and rustling. She ducks instinctively and it takes everything she has not to open fire on the pages fluttering past. Loose pages in the wind. That’s all. Get a hold of yourself, she thinks angrily, pushing away the thought that there’s no wind.

  She turns left again and comes to the center of the maze – and finds Marcus.

  She only knows him by his nametag.

  He is wired to one of the big industrial pillars, his arms outstretched in benediction, wearing a spiky halo of beams as if in a medieval painting, gold wires stuck into his scalp. One palm has been painted with a sheaf of barley. The other has a sun. Religious symbols, she remembers from one of Layla’s school projects. Life and death and rebirth. There are wooden angel wings attached to his back, painted to look like flames, red and yellow, and a giant clay egg split open at his feet as if he has hatched out of it, amidst a messy nest of kindling.

  She focuses on these details because she can’t bear to look at his face. Where his face should be. Her chest is so tight she can hardly breathe.

  Oh, Sparkles.

  His face is gone, sheared clean off, and in the center, where his nose and mouth and eyes should be, is an ornately carved wooden door embedded in his skull, with tiny gold hinges. She can’t open it. She won’t.

  She doesn’t want to know what might be inside.

  She nearly succumbs to the guilt that takes her down at the knees. But she has to find Layla. Her terror for her daughter is a dark engine propelling her forward, even past this.

  I’ll come back for you, Marcus, she promises, and reels back into the labyrinth.

  Baby it’s You

  Jonno has his back against the wall, holding his phone out in front of him like it’s a weapon. Maybe it is.