Apocalypse Now Now

by Charlie Human

  The Spider is different to most schoolyard organisations. In school, like in prison, if you don’t affiliate yourself you’re easy prey. Although you run a low risk of getting ass-raped (unless you go on rugby camp), it’s inadvisable to go without a crew to watch your back. The Spider evolved out of the primordial pit of the Sprawl. We’re a new form of life that survives not through strength but through agility.

  We’re a small operation but a successful one. We found each other by the kind of freak radar that draws together kids that don’t really fit in. There’s me with my congenital eye condition and weird glasses. There’s Kyle the freakishly clever kid. Ty the Inhalant Kid, who has found his life’s purpose at the bottom of a paint tin, and Zikhona, who is big in a sumo wrestler kinda way. When we found each other it was like pieces of a puzzle fitting neatly together.

  ‘Do you think it’ll work?’ the Inhalant Kid asks nervously.

  ‘It better,’ Kyle says. ‘Or we’re seriously screwed.’

  ‘We could always kill Anwar,’ Zikhona says with a scowl. ‘And blame it on the Mountain Killer.’ I resist telling her the dreams I have where Anwar is just one of the many unfortunate souls that die screaming.

  ‘You cut the head off the chimera and another one will grow to take its place,’ Kyle says.

  ‘We’re not a gang,’ I say. ‘We’re a corporation.’

  The truth is that our success hinges on the fact that we remain neutral among the axes of power – the two gangs that control Westridge High. The juggernaut that runs the school is the Nice Time Kids, led by self-styled warlord Anwar Davids. They’re dangerous, organised and the prime suppliers of drugs. Their management style is kind of like the Third Reich – big, cruel and requiring absolute loyalty of their members.

  The other dog in the pit is the Form, led by Denton de Jaager. They run a business of fake doctors’ certificates, parental permission slips and leaked exam papers. They’re more like al-Qaeda – a networked, guerrilla-style militia that blends into the general school populace.

  The problem is that the Sprawl isn’t big enough for both of them. Over the past year the tension has escalated and now they are snapping at each other’s throats, with nothing but the Spider standing between them. Because knives are so cheap and easily available, both gangs carry them. I know Anwar has access to guns too and I wonder how long it will be before Westridge has its debut drive-by shooting. Kyle calls high school a zero-sum game. It’s like Highlander, there can be only one (in this case gangs, rather than sword-wielding immortals with mullets).

  It’s not the gutting of students that worries me though. We have a unique selling proposition, a great democratic product that, along with soccer, is the world’s favourite spectator sport. Yes, I’m talking about porn.

  You’d think that in the digital age a pornography vendor would be as out of date as a crusty old guy in tie-dye selling LPs at a flea market. But like that old hippy there is a method to our madness. We don’t sell a product. We sell an experience.

  You’re looking for Ron ‘The Hedgehog’ Jeremy’s first skin flick? The original Debbie Does Dallas? You’ve come to the right place, we can get them to you by the end of the day. We’re the Cinema Nouveau of the porn world. We deal in the Altman of anal and the Coen Brothers of the cumshot. In a better world we’d be part of Westridge’s cultural committee.

  One student getting stabbed would be inconvenient. A gang war could be the death knell for our business. Lockers would be searched, pupils would be questioned, parents would be summoned, and there are just too many trails leading to us. So I have no choice but to intervene.

  The school bell rings and we shuffle into the school hall for our first assembly of the term.

  ‘Did you tell anyone?’ I whisper to Kyle as we troop into the hall, kids around us jostling and yapping like dogs reacquainting themselves with the pack.

  ‘About your necrophilia?’ he replies. ‘Never, the secret will go with me to the grave. After which you can do with me what you will.’

  ‘My dreams, you tool. Did you tell anyone about my dreams?’

  ‘Oh captain, my captain. Do you question my loyalty?’

  ‘Cut the crap. Did you tell anyone or not?’

  ‘I am your faithful confidant. I would never reveal your sweaty, intimate secrets. They could use thumbscrews, they could use hair shirts, they could –’

  ‘OK, asshole, I get the point,’ I snap.

  ‘Are they still … you know?’ He taps his temple.

  I nod. ‘They’re getting worse I think. Pretty much every night now.’

  ‘What does the head-shrinker say?’

  Dr Basson is the psychiatrist my parents send me to to help me ‘work out issues’. He’s a weird old guy who’s done all kinds of tests on me; intelligence tests, empathy tests, are-you-a-psycho? tests, even crackpot tests that seem like he’s checking for ESP. As far as I can tell my parents are wasting a fortune on the society-sanctioned witchcraft that is the psychology profession.

  ‘He says that they’re my psyche’s way of dealing with stress.’

  ‘Maybe you should take it easy,’ Kyle says.

  ‘Sure, I’ll take it easy. How does being expelled, with no source of income except the money your parents give you, sound?’

  ‘Fucking terrible,’ he says with a grimace.

  ‘Then don’t tell me to take it easy,’ I reply.

  We slump into our seats in the hall and watch as the Form walk in and take their places at the back left. The Form is like the personification of inherited privilege. They carry themselves like wealthy Bond villains and think along the same lines. They’re not interested in money in the way the Nice Time Kids are. They’re interested in keeping themselves entertained by beating up everything and everyone that has the audacity to challenge them.

  The Nice Time Kids, or the NTK as they’re more commonly known, take their places at the back right. If you distilled all the cruelty, all the hormonal surges, all the bad ideas and warrantless arrogance of adolescence into a single obscene organism, it’d be the NTK. They’re messy to a point way past the simple apathetic neglect of the rest of us. They wear their messiness like a badge; missing buttons, torn collars and cuffs, shoes scuffed and filled with holes, all ham-handedly proclaiming their affiliation. The rest of us are in between trying to figure out what the situation between the gangs is. Has there been a truce? Will sanity prevail? Will peace, goodwill and huge porn profit margins smile upon the Spider?

  Anwar Davids, his uneven crew cut showing patches of his scalp in the artificial light, turns his head and smiles. The school holds its breath. Slowly he brings his hand up, widens his smile and draws his thumb across his throat, and then points straight at the solid figure of Denton de Jaager.

  Denton extends his large, chubby hand to look uninterestedly at his nails and then leans back and yawns. A shiver of acknowledgement runs through the masses. At least everybody knows what’s happening.

  The tension is broken as our headmaster, the Bearded One, ascends to the lectern. He raises his hand for silence even though nobody is talking. He rubs his mousy brown beard and begins to speak.

  ‘Welcome back from ahhh what I umm hope was a stimulating weekend.’ There are titters. Judging from some of the glassy eyes staring blankly forward it’s more likely that it was a stimulant weekend courtesy of the NTK.

  ‘Ahh, it’s unfortunate to start like this but, umm, the police inform me that another body has been found on the mountain.’ There’s a collective intake of breath. ‘We have, ermmm, asked a representative of the police force to, umm, speak to you this morning.’

  A small, balding man sporting both an impressive handlebar moustache and an ugly burgundy suit strides onto the stage and pushes his John Lennon sunglasses onto his forehead.

  ‘Good morning, I’m Mr Beeld, a criminologist working on the Mountain Killer case. I know this is rather traumatic for everybody, but it’s important to remember that, worldwide, more people are killed by fal
ling coconuts and defective toasters than by knife-wielding serial killers.’ He gives us a smile that’s meant to be reassuring. ‘Of course, we must take the necessary precautions and awareness is the number-one weapon in the fight against crime.

  ‘What we know is that either the victim knew the killer or the killer is very good at what he does. He used some kind of serrated blade to cut her throat and then carve the bloody likeness of an eye into her forehead. As you may already know, the eye is the calling card of the so-called “Mountain Killer”, a serial killer already responsible for the deaths of twelve people in the Cape Town area.

  ‘The all-seeing eye is of particular occult significance,’ Beeld continues. ‘It represents spiritual sight and transcendental vision. The fact that it is used as a calling card means that this could be the work of a cult, or of an individual with an interest in occult lore. Serial killers generally show a lack of empathy and a superiority complex, often with delusions of grandeur. There is a pathological need for control. And murder, of course, is the ultimate form of control.

  ‘If you have seen anything suspicious, please report it to your local police station immediately.’

  ‘I heard that it was Jody Fuller,’ Kyle whispers.

  ‘Yeah, Esmé told me,’ I reply under my breath.

  ‘Good thing you never actually got together with her.’

  ‘Guess so.’ The thought of Jody dead makes me feel cold all over again. My forehead begins to throb and I have to force myself not to think about the goddamn dreams again. I swear I’m going find that fucker who decided to put my name on his little piece of wall art and make him pay.

  ‘She was stuck-up,’ I whisper.

  Kyle gives me a strange look. ‘Yeah, but she didn’t deserve to die.’

  I shrug. Life is unfair.

  The assembly ends and we push our way out of the school hall and into the granite quad that is the heart of the school’s 150 years of colonial history. Westridge has been expanded with multiple layers of concrete and fibreglass, but it’s this granite centre which contains its ancestral DNA. Rah, rah and tally-ho, boys.

  ‘Hey, Baxter,’ Courtney Adams says with a coquettish smile.

  I ignore her. She’s an NPC, a non-playing character, a pawn who is preoccupied with mindless social programming and is distant from the power centres of the Sprawl. People like her can be used to run interference, used and manipulated, but should never be trusted or considered seriously when planning strategically.

  I pass Ricket Hendries and slip a flash drive filled with Asian girl-on-girl action into his hand. He grins and gives me the thumbs up. I grin back and breathe in the sweet smell of sweat, whiteboard marker and fear. The smells of high school.

  It’s like chess. Jocks, Ricket and his gang of cheap deodorant-scented Cro-Magnons, are knights. You can’t directly manipulate them because they believe that their superior muscle density means they’re in control. But they can always be moved sideways, obtusely angled so that they believe they are the ones doing the moving.

  Rooks are the big violent loner kids like Josh Southfield. His dad is in jail for a white-collar crime, he has gruesome acne and he does badly at school and, as such, has very little to lose. Moving him is as easy as telekinesis.

  And me? Well, I don’t aspire to be king. That’s just like being a highly paid pawn. I’m a bishop, a vizier. I’m always behind the scenes pulling the strings. If I use my full potential I’m the most powerful piece on the board.

  We shoulder our way past the NPCs into metalwork class. Mr Olly, our moustachioed metalwork teacher, looks like a former member of the security police who has been granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for apartheid atrocities. Most of the classherd comply with the instructions Olly puts on the board, their tongues lolling out of their mouths like they have just been shot through the head with a bolt gun in an abattoir and haven’t yet begun to realise that something is wrong. I wait until Olly is distracted and then saunter over to a bench at the back of the class.

  ‘General,’ I say to the youth whose oversized head is the result of a childhood case of elephantiasis. He looks up to reveal cool, grey eyes. Toby September; taunted ceaselessly since birth, he channelled his rage into climbing the social hierarchy and is now general of the Nice Time Kids, second only to Anwar himself.

  ‘Zevcenko,’ he says, taking his time over my name.

  ‘I need an audience with the Warlord,’ I say. The oversized head nods thoughtfully but when he speaks his voice is acidic.

  ‘Lunchtime at Central,’ he says. ‘But I would advise against doing anything that will upset him.’

  I smile. It is a veiled threat, of course, but I was born for this kind of manoeuvring. I bow my head in thanks and return to my desk. First objective achieved.

  Case File: Baxter Ivan Zevcenko

  Dr Kobus Basson

  Baxter Zevcenko is a sixteen-year-old white male residing in Cape Town, South Africa. At our first consultation Baxter arrived looking slightly unkempt, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and jeans.

  He was confrontational at first but our subsequent sessions have allowed him to relax somewhat, giving him the opportunity to speak about his life.

  I am able to discern two distinct parts of his personality, although it doesn’t seem as if Baxter himself is aware of them yet. One part shows strong correlations with the Dark Triad group of personality traits, showing elements of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy.

  He delights in describing his own manipulative behaviour, taking pride in his ability to lie, failing to respond to normal emotional stimulis and aggrandising his own social roles.

  Some of his stories revolve around being the leader of a special group, ‘the Spider’. An interesting choice of name considering the implications of a ‘web’ that Baxter himself is creating. His descriptions of his friends seem to cast them as mere walk-on parts in the grand story of his life, further showing his need for grandiosity and dominance. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that these ‘friends’ either don’t exist, or play very different roles to those that Baxter has described.

  The other, weaker part, shows the potential for caring. The descriptions of his grandfather, for instance, show a love and respect that seem absent in his other relations.

  These two parts often seem to be at odds with one another, battling for control of his psyche, and the result is disturbed dreams, a pattern of maladaptive thinking and manipulative behavior, which I believe is impacting on Baxter’s health and relationships.

  He has an undercurrent of rage that he has described as a ‘dark wave’, and his hostility toward his brother is incredibly troubling. Besides fights with his brother he has shown no signs of violence but his ability to deceive and mask his true personality cannot be underestimated.

  2

  SKULL PRESSURE

  ‘JUMP, JUMP, JUMP.’ The low chant from the class grows louder. Miss Hunter, our maths teacher, stands at the window quivering, her dishevelled blonde hair whipping in the breeze.

  Encouraging a sweet and fragile teacher – distraught at the thought that we don’t care about her class, and driven to hysteria by consistent and vicious undermining of her authority – to throw herself from the second storey is wrong. But it’s also fun. Miss Hunter is the kind of teacher who will never last. She believes in our inherent goodness. That’s her first mistake.

  Control. Teachers know that they now have less of it. They know things have become more complicated and more dangerous, that the student populace is now a networked entity, a hive mind, a multi-cellular organism intent on destroying them. Teachers seek individuals within the crowd to blame for bad behaviour, but we are a faceless mass, absorbing punishment and spreading it among us.

  Two teachers have already had nervous breakdowns this year. Mr Henri ran from the classroom screaming, finally cracking after seeing messages about his wife scratched onto his desk. Miss Franks had just never returned after that picture of her landed on the In
ternet. Gross, even by the Spider’s standards. If she had given me better marks perhaps she could have avoided that.

  Miss Hunter turns to the class. ‘I’m doing this for you,’ she says and it seems like she’s looking straight at me. Sure, Miss Hunter. You’re doing this for us and not because you’ve watched Dead Poets’ Society and Dangerous Minds a few too many times. Give me broadband and YouTube and I’ll have the maths curriculum down in a week. The truth is, Miss Hunter, that you’re obsolete and your inability to see that is pathetic.

  Still, maths is the first class of the day where the whole of the Spider are together and it’s time to get some real work done. Miss Hunter gives me a meaningful look and then flees the class tearfully.

  ‘She’s definitely got a thing for you, Bax,’ Kyle says in his mumbling murmur.

  I ignore him. ‘Let’s get some feedback before we discuss strategy,’ I say.

  ‘Stats say there is a trend toward creature porn,’ Kyle says, putting his phone in the middle of the desk. We lean over the screen displaying graphs of the previous month’s sales. ‘We’re going to have to make more copies of Tokoloshe Money Shot.’

  Creature porn is a strange new addition to the porn canon. Guys and girls dressed in supernatural fancy dress and going at it have captured the warped imaginations of the student body, and we’re planning to exploit the trend to its full potential. Sales are fuelled by conspiracy theories circulated on Internet forums that the werewolves, zombies and other humanoid beasts getting it on with humans are real. Proof that people will believe anything if it helps them get their rocks off.

  ‘Make more copies but keep an eye on it. It may just be a fad like the Swedish sauna orgies,’ I say.

  Kyle nods to Zikhona. She’s our security liaison officer, our enforcer, a mountain of Xhosa sturdiness in the gold bomber jacket that she wears over her school uniform.

  Strictly speaking, we didn’t choose Zikhona, she chose us. I remember the day a convoy of black BMW SUVs had pulled up outside the school. Two men who looked like they fought in cages stepped out of the front car and put their hands inside their jacket pockets. A huge black girl squeezed herself out of the door of the centre BMW and stood at the gate, trying to extract a wedgie from her tights.