by Set Sytes
I like rippin them off that fuckin pedestal, said Red. With all their thoughts and intelligence and – and pride and confusion and principles and shit, and reducin them to this gibberin mess, y’know, this stupid mewlin, thrashin animal.
Red coughed and waved his hands as if weaving patterns in the air. Stupid and senseless. Covered in shit and cum and piss and cryin for more. You know man, if you make someone horny enough, if you take them right to the fuckin edge and over it, you can make them do anythin. Fuckin anythin.
The drunk stared at him. He stared down at his own sick on his ragged shirt and then with unfocused eyes he looked back at Red.
I’ve made girls eat their own shit, Red continued. He staggered a little and then righted himself. Like, respectable girls. Give me long enough alone with em and I could make most do it, I can make em do things that’d make em puke if they thought of it sober. That’s sober from sexual delirium, see. They don’t need to be drunk . . . though that can sure speed things along a bit.
The homeless man shivered and shook his head, shook his head to the world.
Red finished his cigarette and stubbed it out on the wall. I’m gonna go man, gonna find another bar, another home, y’know?
The man watched him leave through blurry eyes, and pulled the pieces of cardboard closer around him.
Red found another bar and made acquaintance with it. He ordered more drinks and the bartenders served him placebos, non-alcoholic drinks disguised as alcohol, but he was in too much of a carefree state to realise. He left his drinks after only a few mouthfuls and forgot to go back to them for the rest of the night, engaged as he was in smutty conversation with a giggling gaggle of teenage girls, dressed as near to his satisfaction as he could reasonably ask for. They found him entertaining in his casual crudeness and clustered around him, prompting him for a good hour for more obscene answers to sexual questions, which he was more than happy to provide. Whether they thought him a mere clown or not did not much enter his appreciation of the scenario, delighted as he was with their exposed cleavages jiggling as they laughed, and watching their pert and fleshy young rears protruding from their tiny skirts and skin-tight pants as they left the throng to go to the bathroom.
Eventually, though, most of them got bored with his words and antics and wandered off to entertain themselves elsewhere. Most, not all.
A shadow appeared on his right, and Red sensed some presence of something not quite human, or at least nothing like him. He turned his head drunkenly, his cock still lodged in the girl’s asshole. Standing softly lit by an overhead lamp was a cop.
It was wearing the unique badge and insignia of the district, nothing interesting, no artist’s design. Black on black and numbered, robotic. Its uniform gleamed, polished, emotionless. Faceless. Genderless. Red assumed there was some expression behind the faceplate, but it was a difficult idea to keep a firm grasp of. The form before him betrayed nothing. It did not shift on its feet or tap its fingers or fold its arms. It did not seem capable of sympathy, did not seem like it could be reasoned or bargained with. It would be like pleading to a machine. Such was the intended effect.
How old is this female? The question was barked and the voice artificially distorted and processed, as though talking through a computer.
The girl span her head, shocked out of her own pleasure. Her form twitched and it made Red’s cock jump inside her. She quickly drew breath in a manner not completely dissimilar to being anally penetrated but she said nothing and they stayed locked together. It was too late to pretend otherwise. Red thought, perhaps, objectionable goods were best hidden.
Seventeen, he lied calmly.
The age of consent here is twenty-five.
That’s what I said, twenny-five.
The cop raised its stick and put its black gloved hand down to its gunbelt as if anticipating trouble. I’m taking you under arrest.
I’m on board with you there, officer. Red spun his cat grin and his head lolled back.
The cop approached, hands moving to its belt to withdraw handcuffs. Red pulled out of the girl, relishing as always in the sigh as she was evacuated, and moved his hand to the end of his cock as it came out into the shadows and he curled his fingers and threw something at the cop which hit the faceplate and stuck. The black gloved hands went up and Red was off, dodging gunshots, his jeans held up with one hand and his half-erect cock still out, pointing and swinging like a broken signpost into the darkness.
Corners after corners turned, backstreets run down, hiding in the gaps in old buildings and inside porn shops and moving again, furtive and paranoid, and hiding in a dumpster and then out, walking until he felt safe, safe enough, and here he was, tired and drunk and denied his sexual release. The adrenaline was wearing off and he felt a little sick.
He lay in a gutter, on his back looking up at the stars. The points of light beckoned to him, flirted with him, looked sadly down at him and he looked dumbly back at them. A light breeze whispered over his face, his eyes watered a little. A couple, hand in hand, stepped over him, temporarily blocking out his view. A few women walked towards his splayed out form and then walked past. His eyes flicked onto their faces but they were conservatively dressed and unattractive and he turned his eyes back to the stars before he could meet their glances of disdain. His hand moved to his groin but it was too much effort and he let his hand flop back to the ground. He tried once more, and flopped once more, theatrical in his drunkenness.
He tried to recall what things used to be like, so many years ago, but it was like thinking of someone else, some young boy who was not him and who was only a fiction. He knew vaguely that this wasn’t always the way, that there were things before, things to grab onto and not let go. As they were stolen from him, as his childhood was taken by the world, he had had to find something new. The fancies of a kid were no longer appropriate in an adult world. There had to be something an adult could cling onto, could desire and nurture and fantasise about – and there was, and he had found it, and it had erased almost everything else in him.
Nothing else could arouse in him such interest, such excitement, such love for the real world. He was the hedonist among hedonists. The pervert god.
The dreams of old, the dreams of the young had become off-limits, barred by squirming pink tentacles, puckering and oozing and wet with juices. His dreams, his desires and ambitions were now all lurid, obscene, full of heat and weeping fury. Passion so intense it could break you down, make you cry, rip yourself apart, rip another apart. Passion to kill. An intimacy so depraved, so sickly, so sick, that it rushed through your body like magma, taking control of everything, making you sweat lust, unfocusing your vision, turning you inside out, turned you vacant, pig meat to rut, to feel a crazed obsession, pounding, pounding his heart faster and faster until it hummed, until it burst, until it bled all over his insides and the blood melded with the rest of the magma and steamed and hissed and the steam blurred out his eyes.
There was nothing like it. He became an animal, a higher being, a holy spirit – a devil guiding the flesh. Writhing and thrusting, commanding and obeying, feeling, connecting, joining, creating and destroying, he touched at the coattails of raw power. To be godlike in his godlessness.
It was all there was, for there was nothing else left to him. He was just thankful that all there was was just enough.
Two hours later and a slightly sobered up Red had met up with Mr White back at the hotel and convinced him to leave. Red had assured him of the fun to be had in District Ten, despite acknowledging that there was only a single, prime illegal, that being (here he muttered under his breath) a ban on all anal activity. Not that conducting themselves in this otherwise tolerant district could possibly be relaxing what with Red being such a connoisseur of the excretory side of life. But Mr White was happy to follow him wherever he led them, and he did so. Red was insistent not to dally around, not even stop for a bite to eat, and Mr White found himself having to walk faster than usual in order to keep up to his pace,
which eventually slowed the further they got from the area, though Red continued to look about him like a twitching animal.
The streets slid on all sides as if they were on rails. Theatre backdrops turned on some hidden winch, a scenery on repeat, re-using buildings, trash, people.
They passed little cracked bulbs nestled in grating coming out brick walls with the bricks crumbling and broken. Some buildings looked as if they had suffered some air raid or street bombing and if anything they passed looked repaired it was work without effort or hope, as if the builders could not summon any care for anything in these streets. Everything was covered in graffiti. Most of it was people just making their mark, leaving a name and a guess at a date for who knew what day was what in Rule. Much of the graffiti was obscene and sordid and some of it was anti-authority and some of it was dark and cruel.
They passed steel bins left empty while rubbish and refuse of every kind was scattered everywhere, as if the bins themselves signalled some command to order that the people shunned. They passed the homeless or what seemed to be the homeless, though in this city they could be anybody. They sat or lay forlorn in clothes or bundled rags or naked and grimy. Some shivered and some sweated and many writhed on drugs or swayed on drink as if conducting some voodoo incantation to rid the street of its evils. Some of those sat were junkies and one or two were well-clothed and clean-shaven and this did not seem to matter. Some begged and were ignored, some didn’t beg and were ignored. By all except pushers and pimps, thieves and worse. Mr White saw them sidle up and sit down as if friends, to young women and men, to kids, to those well-dressed and those naked, to any and all, for even the ugly and old could be exploited, and perhaps in their desperation they were perfect for it. Mr White awkwardly gave a man with his hands out a few coins, and received a strange look from Red. The man looked at the coins in his hand as if they were foreign to him. He bit into one with what was left of his teeth and a tooth broke and his mouth bled over the coins. Another man came out of the shadows and they saw the glint of a blade and they left quickly while he kneeled down and close to the broke-tooth man.
Mr White followed Red close as he half-strut his stride and both their faces glowed in the light of the neon signs that hung crackling from anywhere they could be seen. Their faces were ultramarine in the hazy light of a peepshow theatre, and scarlet and bloody in the outside embrace of a porn shop. Their features flicked green with envy and yellow with sickness and every colour of the rainbow in a dozen different tints and bleeds. They passed drug dens and brothels and gun-shops and run-down emporiums selling things behind fortified counters to any customer with the money and neither would ask questions nor demand answers. They passed a bright pink lit window and above it was a pink sign of a pizza with red neon meatballs. They entered and bought pizza for that was all the food there was and it came cold and crusty and the meat on it was nothing they could recognise. Red bought them both some kind of liqueur which he glugged and Mr White sipped slowly. Red told Mr White not to make any eye contact with any of the other patrons of the takeaway, to not even look at them, and Mr White replied that he would not even consider it.
They left and continued on to the border between District Seven and Ten. Only once did they pass a cop and it did not harass them nor harass anybody else. They could not see its face hidden as it was behind its helmet but its manner of walking and how it stayed in the light and how its head moved from side to side but too quick to examine anything gave the impression of nervousness, as if it knew its continued solitary existence in these streets had even more tentative a future than those prostitutes and homeless addicts. They did see a number of drones, and heard even more, to the point that the buzzing cat-purrs that crept up on them and then past or were hidden behind walls or flying above them along rooftops or down in the sewers beneath their feet became no more an event than their own breathing.
Nearly there hombre, said Red, as they passed though the darkness under a small dilapidated bridge that leaked some dark fluid from its bones. Mr White thought a few drops hit his shoes but he did not stop to check. The lights were less now and as he flicked his eyes quickly at the people in the street they seemed full of cruelty. He did not dare look at their faces and this gave them an absence of humanity, if there was even any there. He saw Red look at some of the bodies of the girls but he was looking less and less and whether this was due to a dropping quality or apprehension or weariness on Red’s part was unknown. Mr White saw a woman in leather straps and netting and something that looked like barbed wire around her crotch lean out of a doorway at their approach. She had a huge exposed cleavage and her lips were bulbous and sticky red, pumped so fat that they seemed to command her whole face. He looked at Red and Red must have seen her first because without turning his head he shook his head emphatically and they walked on.
Mr White shivered and he finished the last of his liqueur which tasted of rotten fruit but all synthetic and shook full of sugar. He wondered aloud where the next bin was for he had not seen one in some time. Red told him to drop it on the street and after a hesitation Mr White placed it down as near the side of the street as he dared go and then hurried back. They passed a middle-aged woman in furs being sick onto the side of a grey-brick building without windows or doors. Her face was pale and blue and Mr White looked for the light but it was not blue but white.
Should we help her? Mr White whispered as they drew level.
I think you know the answer to that one man, said Red, and Mr White already did.
On both sides of his vision were alleyways and small side streets shrouded in the thickest blackness, both full and empty, like beckoning voids, each one seeming a shortcut to oblivion. As though if he ventured down any he would never be seen again. He heard a gunshot from one and then silence and from another a scream and then silence. Both seemed to come from some other world hidden from his eyes, as though the blackness did not contain such dangers but was merely the gateway, and once you passed through you ceased to be part of this world and would be forever lost. His mind seemed to draw him closer to these shadows, shifting his perspective from side to side, but his body stayed on track out of fear and automation and so it seemed like his mind was struggling to escape its bonds while the body stayed firm and the mind lurched out on its own like some drunken phantasm of the night. It splayed out left and right and tried to fly to the voids and the tether caught and it was pulled back, secretly glad, springing back to safety and full of the rush of terror avoided.
We’re here, announced Red abruptly.
Mr White looked ahead and saw a bright white light next to a long gate drawn across the road barring passage. As they walked closer they saw the cold light came from a checkpoint guarded over by six cops and two armoured drones and an automated machine gun that revolved on an axis to point to them as their motion was sensed. As at the Five-Seven checkpoint there was a matching outfit on the other side of the gate.
You know the drill, said Red. Answer their questions, don’t be a cunt, do the same on the other side, boom we’re through. The cop that caught me before didn’t get an ID.
A cop caught you? Mr White’s mouth dropped open.
Just for a second. It’s cool man, don’t worry about it.
Mr White did worry, and as they stepped up to the checkpoint all the shining black helmets of the cops were turned to them as were the drones and the machine gun span its barrel slowly as if held just at the point of firing.
Mr White took a deep breath and held it.
Are you holding your breath? The black helmet was turned to him and he saw his own reflection shine back at him.
No, said Mr White stiffly.
Red looked at him. He really ain’t.
The cop looked from one to the other. Names?
Jonathan White, said Red promptly.
Um, said Mr White.
Um? said the cop, pausing typing, its hands hovering over the keys.
Johnny Um, Mr White said, and swallowed. His face was growing
hot.
The cop’s expression was invisible through the helmet. There was a long pause and then the cop tapped the keys and gave them their papers back.
You can breathe now, came the same flat electronic tones. Johnny Um.
Mr White tried to breathe out slowly through his nose but it all came rushing out at once and he gulped in air. The black helmet seemed to bore into him but all he could see was his own stupid face.
Move on, buzzed the cop, hands hovering once more on the keys, the rest of the body motionless. They moved on. Through a white door and into the checkpoint on the other side of the gate where they faced the same pointless process, and then they were out.
DISTRICT 10, STREET
See, said Red, as they walked down the street in District Ten, The thing with these checkpoints is that they just don’t care none. Unlike the rest of the district, it’s the end of their jurisdiction and they’d rather see the fuckin back of you. Unless they’re already lookin for you and out for your fuckin blood, in which case I guess you gotta judge the risk and maybe find somewhere else to cross. But I ain’t even sure the cops at the checkpoints communicate with those on the beat. And the people on the other side of the gate, that’s a whole new fuckin system man, new force, new rules. They got nothin on you. Districts don’t share criminal data with each other, they barely share anythin. Totally fuckin independent, only connected by distance, like, like ignoring neighbours. The perfect getaway destination.
Red kicked at loose stones on the road as they passed through what seemed like the same kind of street as before but with everything just in a different order, as if somebody had picked the whole street up and shook it and put it down again a bit further on.
Won’t they have a visual description? said Mr White, unconvinced.
Depends how fucked the cop could be to report one, answered Red casually. But that’s why I changed clothes.