by Heide Goody
“I’m losing track,” admitted Rod. “Is this Nina in the past?”
“This character,” said the King. “She is part ingénue, part fille fatale.”
“I’m not particularly au fait with French,” said Rod.
“She constantly announces her sexual experiences, but is otherwise ignorant. Yet here – in this adventure – her competence and intelligence know no bounds.”
Nina in Georgian England, identified by a rakish cavalier’s hat, bamboozled various stuffed shirt characters with a blank verse commentary that Rod could not follow at all.
“You are aware that she, Nina, is a real person?” he said.
The King in Crimson shrugged. “The play invites us to view all of these characters as simultaneously real and fictional.”
The play progressed. Rod was no longer sure how much time he had spent in the theatre. Scenes galloped from one to the next with baffling speed. The ingenuity of the scene changes and physical effects, however cheap they might have been, however much the ropes and the beams creaked with each rising or falling backdrop, kept his attention.
The red-haired actress now flitted between two roles, mother and daughter.
“Our budget is not inexhaustible,” the King in Crimson commented.
The Nina character sang and danced through a chorus of horse-headed mimes. Rod recalled the magician character in the very first scene. A papier-mâché fish man tumbled like a fool in amongst the animals.
“It borders on the incomprehensible, doesn’t it?” said the King.
“This didn’t happen, surely?” said Rod.
“Happening now, eternally happening,” said the King in Crimson.
The dance routine came to a sudden and abrupt ending. There were drum rolls from the orchestra pit, thunder crashes from above and magnesium-bright lights flared.
Rod stood, as though height could give him clearer understanding. “Is that—?”
Nina, the fishboy and the horses fell as the ever-brightening light consumed them and the curtain fell.
“Was that a nuclear explosion?” said Rod. “Is that … is that what happened?”
The King in Crimson patted his arm. “It’s good to end on a cliff-hanger,” he said, and when Rod looked at him, added, “Do not worry. It is only the end of the first act.”
Part II
04:16am
Abruptly, the sky over the park where the Handmaidens had stopped turned a searing white. Prudence lowered her gaze to protect her eyes. Night had vanished. The light made stark shadows. Prudence saw her hand as a black silhouette against bright green grass.
“Is this day?” said Prudence.
“No,” whispered Yang. “It’s— I think it’s a nuclear explosion but … they’ve stopped it somehow.”
The initial brilliance dimmed fractionally.
“Humans,” said Yang contemptuously. “Attempting to destroy everything, just because they were losing.”
Prudence noticed that where Yang had fallen against the sculpture, blood was smeared across its rough surface. As she watched, the blood seeped, quite purposefully, into the cracks and pores. Prudence put her hand on it and felt a tingling run across her flesh: thousands of microscopic incisions. She pulled away. “It’s a Bridgeman sculpture.”
“What’s that?” said Yang.
“It drinks blood and…” She looked at the way the fish-like form was fixed to the ground by a concrete foot. She leaned close to it. “Can you move?”
In the dark, she felt along the sculpture for signs of movement, and felt a rippling tension pass through the concrete form.
“What is it?” said Yang.
Prudence pursed her lips and thought. Despite not particularly liking where her thoughts took her, she said to Yang, “Bring Ayesha over here.”
“Why?”
Prudence crawled over and tried hauling Ayesha along the ground by her shoulder. She had no success until Yang joined in. Together they dragged her the short distance to the sculpture. Prudence took Ayesha’s hand and, with a silent apology to the dead girl, placed it on the sculpture’s skin. It held automatically.
Yang shook her head, frowning.
“Feeding it,” said Prudence.
“A human ploy to kill us has failed,” said one of the Handmaidens. “We should question the kaatbari and find out what she knows. Something that is useful to our cause.”
“Yo Morgantus will see us rewarded,” said Shara’naak Kye. “We will have vengeance.”
“We should avenge our lost sisters now,” said the dissatisfied Handmaiden. “Kill them and then join the fray.”
“We have instructions. And a promise that our honour will be restored,” said Shara’naak Kye.
The Handmaidens were watching the fiery glare overhead and the violent storm beyond it. They were paying no attention to their prisoners. Ayesha’s body throbbed as the Bridgeman fish sculpture drank from her. In the new light, the dead blonde girl was pale, colourless. Prudence didn’t know if this was because her blood was being drained, or if it was something that happened to all dead people.
“Get on,” Prudence said to Yang.
Yang frowned again, then blinked, struggling to keep her injured eye open.
“Get on,” insisted Prudence.
“You won’t escape them,” whispered Steve.
“Whose side are you on?”
“I am merely stating facts, child.”
“Let someone else come collect this prize so we may be about our slaughter,” said a Handmaiden. Prudence looked up to see if the creature had turned to face them. Apparently not.
“And let them get all the praise and glory from Yo Morgantus for doing so?” said another.
“No,” said Shara’naak Kye. “We obey Yo Morgantus until the Fortress of Hath-No brings the armies of the blind gods and we can—”
Something powerful struck the tower block opposite. A whole corner, a wedge of glass and stone, sheared away and exploded on the road below.
Prudence pushed Yang into the broad eyehole of the sculpture and climbed onto the scoop tail behind her.
“What do you expect this to do?” Yang hissed. “It’s not a motorbike!”
“What’s a motorbike?” said Prudence. She leaned in close, felt the sculpted creature’s uncountable tiny bites tickle her skin. “Get us out of here. Please,” she whispered.
The creature shivered but did not move. How long had it been standing here? How long had it been dormant, forgetting that it was anything other than a statue?
“Please,” she repeated.
A Handmaiden turned. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Are you trying to hide?”
Shara’naak Kye turned. “Are they playing?”
Prudence and put her forehead on the fish’s curved top. “Please!”
“I believe—” said the first Handmaiden. Her words were lost as the Bridgeman fish shot forward, whipping the Handmaiden’s legs out from under her. There was a violent crack and crunch of concrete against shell, and a spray of something cold and wet that Prudence viciously hoped was Handmaiden blood. Yang screamed – not in fear or elation or surprise – just screamed.
04:18am
It had taken Nina longer than was perhaps necessary to work out they weren’t going to be vaporised by a nuclear fireball. There was a new smell in the air, the charred dust smell of an electric heater that had been unused for a while.
Karl had taken the train, empty now but for his two female passengers and the mess the donkeys had left behind, and reversed up the track. There was nowhere for them to go. Sutton Coldfield, beyond the motorway and the barrier, was gone. Maybe they would find a tunnel, maybe find somewhere to hide.
The thin, wrong light illuminated the area around them. It did not look good. Nina had helped Pupfish get the line of donkeys hurriedly down the slope and out of sight. The donkeys didn’t share her sense of urgency. Either they were too stupid to be frightened of magically thwarted nuclear explosions and Venislarn shit, o
r they were just badass quadrupeds.
Down on the narrow lane, with the steep railway verge on one side and the high railings of the consular mission’s Dumping Ground on the other, Nina and the rear of the donkey line caught up with Pupfish.
“We’re bhul-detar, ain’t we?” he said.
“Why’d you say that?”
“Ggh! The look on your face.”
Nina didn’t realise she’d been frowning. She stopped. “Nah. I was just wondering if badass, you know, the word ‘badass’, had anything to do with these animals being bad asses. They act kinda badass.”
Pupfish was shaking his head dismissively. “Donkeys ain’t asses.”
“Aren’t they?”
“Asses are horse, bro.”
“Are they?”
“Aren’t they?”
She realised they had slipped into conversational territory where neither of them had an answer. She’d have googled it, but there was no phone signal and no internet. No internet. The world had already gone to hell. And, if Rod and Vivian hadn’t been lying, this was how the world used to be all the time. It was no wonder that underage drinking used to be so popular.
“Anyway, yes,” she said.
“Yes what?” said Pupfish.
“We’re bhul-detar. The situation’s fubar, as Rod would say.” She pointed up at the railway track. “That herd-beast of Nystar up there wasn’t just blocking the way randomly.” Her pointing finger swung round to the Dumping Ground. “When the nukes blew, I saw movement in there. Priests of Nystar.”
Frowning with fish eyes on the side of his head and no eyebrows wasn’t easy, but Pupfish managed a curious head tilt like an intelligent dog who had just heard the phone ring. “Priests of Nystar. Ggh! We met those evil pabbe-grru shaska in that nightclub.”
“And they dragged you and your girl into Leng-space. Right.”
“I owe them bitches some payback.”
“Maybe another time. We’ve got twenty-eight donkeys to get back to the consular mission. Obviously, we should give this place a wide berth, except—” She pointed ahead. A mash of articulated lorries – three or four, it was hard to tell – blocked the end of the road, sealing the space between the elevated railway and the consular mission’s storage compound. “—we’re going through the Dumping Ground.”
Whatever crazy force had destroyed those lorries had also ripped through a section of the fencing, and a wall of containers shielding the place from prying eyes.
Nina and Pupfish walked together with the lead donkey, Donk. The train of twenty-eight beasts of burden produced a constant soundtrack of grunts, snorts, and the very occasional bray of alarm. Nina would have preferred them to be quieter, but these seemed to be untrained donkeys and didn’t know any command words at all. The ever-present howls and shrieks of a city being torn apart masked the noise a little.
At least Donk was a biddable leader. His long, hairy ears flicked and twitched as they moved down the road to the gap in the high steel fence. Nina shifted her grip on his bridle, sniffed her fingers, and wiped them on her long Georgian coat. “I stink of donkey.”
“I can’t tell,” said Pupfish.
“Cos fish don’t have noses.”
“Ggh! That’s racist, girl. I mean everything stinks of donkey. And fire.”
She nodded. “When this is over, I am going to lie in the deepest, hottest bath for a week. And then it’s Nando’s, Pizza Hut and Maccy D’s every night.”
“In the bath?”
“In the bath. And then clothes shopping.”
“Because you’ll have put on fifty pounds.”
Nina ran a hand down her side. “Lean, mean, calorie burning machine, this. What will you do?”
Pupfish’s gill-gasp was a scoff of disbelief. “You think this will ever be over?”
“You’ve got to believe it,” she said, and found herself immediately, unexpectedly and unhelpfully thinking of Ricky Lee: images of his crushed body sliding away down a twisting road. She didn’t wipe the sudden tears from her eyes, partly because she didn’t want to acknowledge them, partly because she didn’t want to get donkey stink in her eyes.
“Nando’s sounds good,” said Pupfish. “Allana and me. Nando’s. Extra hot on the Peri-ometer. Ggh! Bottomless soft drinks.”
Nina nodded approvingly. “God, I’m hungry.”
Pupfish dug into his baseball jacket pocket and held out something to Nina. “Chupa chups? My emergency stash. They might’ve got wet in the canal.”
She unwrapped the head of the sticky lolly sweet with her teeth. The head had part-melted against the wrapper, but she tore it away and jammed the lolly in her mouth. Pupfish unwrapped one for himself.
“Started buying them for Fluke and me – ggh! – when he tried to give up smoking,” he said.
“You never smoked.”
“Solidarity with a brother,” he said. “Even if he is banging my mom.”
“Yeah. That muda ain’t right.”
They slowed at the ripped entrance to the Dumping Ground. Nina tied Donk to a railing and beckoned Pupfish through to scope the way ahead.
The Dumping Ground (or the Venislarn Material Reclamation Centre to give it its correct name) occupied a large plot of land in an unlovely industrial corner of Birmingham, a mile out of the city centre. Placed conveniently near a railway junction, it openly operated as a cargo containment facility. The only thing the consular mission had to hide was the contents of those containers. Nina climbed crab-wise over the smashed fence and the loops of razor wire which had been torn free, and moved through the alley between two stacks of containers. As she came to the opening into the main yard, she crouched.
“Ggh! That’s some crazy stackin’, man,” said Pupfish.
Nina rolled the lolly in her mouth and sucked thoughtfully.
The centre of the Dumping Ground contained an open area of dirt and weathered concrete, dotted with a small number of containers. There was probably some operational reason for this spacing. Nina imagined it was possibly because the contents of some containers didn’t react well to being next to others. The Venislarn, even their dribblings, secretions and other waste materials, could be tetchy about personal space. There were lights on in the office cabin, and a big yellow straddling crane was trundling about with a container slung beneath it. There was a human at the controls. It would have to be a human; the Priests of Nystar were too massive to fit in the cab and they’d only mash the controls with their tentacles or sharp hoofs. Nina gave the human only a moment’s thought. Collaborator, slave or mind-controlled zombie, people were just doing what they could to survive now.
The crane was moving the container over to a circle of others which had been put into place recently. Nina could tell they had been recently moved because, on an ordinary day, no one would stack containers like that. A number of them had been placed on end, in a circle, and others were placed horizontally, on top of and between upright pairs, to create square archways.
“Reminds me of that thing,” said Pupfish.
“Jenga?”
“I was gonna – ggh! – say Stonehenge.”
Priests of Nystar stomped around in their weird ceremonial circle. In the stretched dusky light, their skin shimmered red and green, the colour of rotten meat. Their hoofs (or were they toe-nails? Nina could never be sure) dug at the earth as they spun and sang. It was definitely singing, even though it was about as tuneful as modern jazz. The masses of tentacles springing from the place where sane creatures would keep their heads swayed in time with the chanting.
“Are they doing some – ggh! – sort of ritual or something?” said Pupfish.
Nina listened to the words. “Ouka ha’ya phik-no… ‘It is time. It is time. Is it the time? Yes, it is the time.’ I think it’s more of a pre-match warm up.”
“And the main event…?”
“Won’t be good. There’s the main entrance over there. We’ve got to sneak round—”
“With twenty-eight donkeys.”
“I can sneak.” Pupfish gave a small throaty chuckle. “This reminds me of a film I did.”
“You’ve only done one Hollywood film.”
“I mean from my old days.”
Nina gave him a frank look. Pupfish’s earlier movie output had been of the decidedly top shelf DVD variety, catering to a very niche audience of those people who wanted to see fish-on-woman action. “I don’t see how this could remind you of any sort of porn film.”
“It was a remake of this really old film, Die Hard.”
“A porn version?”
“Yeah.”
“Dick Hard?”
“It was called This Guy’s Hard.”
“My title was better.”
“And my character, Dong McLayin’—”
“Jeez.”
“—had to sneak through this building swarming with sexy lesbian terrorists who were – ggh! – gagging for a bit of samakha dick.”
Nina wanted to ask why lesbians would be gagging for dick, but there was only so much time before the world truly ended, and they were getting way off topic.
“Do you have a particular plan in mind?” she asked. “And can I check, cos this is important, does it involve you getting your fishy tackle out?”
04:20am
Prudence clung on as the Bridgeman fish skimmed the grass of the parkland at a speed faster than any person could run. She clung to the fish’s head and peered over the side. She could not tell if it was propelling itself on its one foot or really flying. The fish hopped over the low rail separating grassy park from the road. Prudence whooped at the momentary weightlessness. Yang, clinging desperately, fell back against Prudence’s legs.
“This is madness!” yelled Steve, who had clambered up through Prudence’s T-shirt neck onto her shoulder.
“It’s amazing!” Prudence yelled back against the wind.
The fish swerved and swam along the road at the park’s edge.