Islanders

by John Barlow

  A second later he saw the big gut of a melted man in front of him, rolls of fat spilling out from the edges of his blue overalls, and a couple of tiny, black eyes poking out from the mountains of sallow face flesh.

  “You want something?” the man said, his jaws curling up into a stupid, sarcastic smile as his grip on Ben’s head got stronger. “You weren’t trying to get out were you?”

  Ben was confused. It might have been the iron-strong grip that his skull was in, but something didn’t make sense.

  “Leaving the Complex is not a smart thing to do, kid. Are you stupid?”

  “I...” said Ben, as he felt the big man’s fingers dig hard into his scalp, “I was just playing.”

  “Were you, now!” he said, huffing in amusement. “ Well, nobody plays here! Not without my permission! You understand?”

  The fat man kicked Ben, as if he were a piece of rubbish.

  “I’m really sorry!” Ben said, trying to make the pathetic man feel important.

  “Playing, eh?” wobble-guts said. “If I catch you sniffing round here again, I might just take you to the Control Tower. Fancy being a playslave, do ya! You can play all day long there! Fancy that, eh?”

  Ben didn’t understand, but he shook his head.

  “Right, clear off!” the melted man said, waving his hand in the air. “I’ve got better things to do with my time.”

  Ben did was he was told.

  “Pig,” he said quietly over his shoulder as he wandered off into the city, still wondering what it all meant.

  The Complex? Playslaves?

  He was in a back street, a real dump. Suddenly, he felt very much alone. Alone, and cold. There was something in the air that made his throat itch. And it was almost dark. His eyes quickly adjusted to the light, but it was murky, although still only midday.

  The backs of old buildings cast long shadows, forcing out what little light broke through the thick canopy of smoke that hung overhead. Some of the buildings were brick, others concrete that had gone green where water trickled down. Every building seemed either half-finished, or crumbling away. Windows were cracked, their frames blackened with mould, and behind them ragged strips of filthy curtains flapped in the wind.

  He walked slowly down the street. Then up another, identical street. And another. Wherever he went, the houses had broken windows, and walls were stained and deteriorating, with long winding cracks right up the brickwork, as if the place had been in an earthquake. Up above, the sky was a dull, metallic color, a permanent dusk, and there hung in the air a foul, sickly stench. However, there was something else about the place: there was definitely music in the air. Ben strained to hear what it was, a far-off grating of electric guitars and the muffled thud of drums.

  Turning a corner, he found himself on an even darker street. On one side were brick houses, on the other a factory, twice as tall as the houses at least. There were a few tiny windows high up in its walls, which were built of concrete blocks that had turned dark with soot. Everything, it seemed, had turned dark with soot. Ben saw a familiar logo painted across the factory wall in big red letters:

  Complex Smokes, the Taste of Freedom!

  Underneath was the image of a young woman, laughing. She held a cigarette close to her lips.

  Past the factory were more houses, as well as concrete warehouses and long corrugated iron shacks. There were more adverts here, on walls, hoardings, even on flags that fluttered, dirty and lifeless in the wind. Drink Complex Spirit! one bill-board said. And another, in massive red and black letters:

  Keep the Beasts At Bay... with Complex Spirit!

  Below the words was an image of the metal fence, and a mysterious, half-obscured monster peering through, its teeth dripping with saliva, its gnarled fingers poking menacingly through the mesh.

  Ben walked up one miserable, deserted street after another. There was not a soul in sight. Meanwhile, the heavy thump of music got louder, and eventually, after perhaps a mile, he heard sirens and buzzers mixed in with it. The music sounded like the kind of stuff Bad an’ Worse liked, thrash metal or hardcore punk, those CDs that nobody else on the Island ever listened to. But here it was even worse, noisier, more aggressive, sickening and unpleasant.

  With the heavy music now beating hard in his ears, he turned one final corner and there they were: the four circular chimneys of the power station, towering into the sky. They were so close that you had to bend your neck back to see the top of them, way up in the dark sky, staggeringly big and broad, with equally massive columns of black smoke billowing from them, up into the dark clouds above.

  In front of the chimneys was a large, square building, five or six stories high. It was nowhere near as big as the chimneys, but it was still an imposing structure, and about the ugliest building imaginable, something eerie about its flat, featureless walls, which were almost completely bare. Only at the very top was there any glass, one long window running around an entire corner, looking down on everything.

  Between Ben and the chimneys and the ugly concrete building were a load of big, canvas tents. He stared at them, confused. There must have been a hundred tents, forming a great expanse of canvas. And some way off, poking up in the midst of the tents, was a helter-skelter. Further off still, he saw what he thought was a carousel.

  Nothing made sense. The music made his ears throb... there were the flashing lights of the helter-skelter... the spinning carousel... It made no sense at all. Yet it was true: in front of the power station was a fun-fair.

  It was definitely a fun-fair. The helter-skelter flashed with colored lights that ran down it in spirals. And the rest of the fair was made up of booths and tents of every description: coconut shies, rifle shooting, dart throwing, all pumping out their own loud music, adding to the cacophony of hard, obnoxious rock that filled the air.

  Every stall, though, was completely empty. There was not a single person there. In the distance, the carousel turned relentlessly, with no one on it; the horses were bare metal, strangely angular and unnatural, their steel and iron flanks looking too heavy and cold to be much fun to ride. They reared up, riderless, like ghosts in the dirty half-light.

  Tentatively, he walked forwards, crossing a street which seemed to act as the border to the fair. He looked around. There was nobody on any of the rides. The wind was getting colder, and under the raw thud of music he now heard something else; or, he felt it, a kind of vibration, very deep, like a low rumble, coming up through the ground.

  Then a flicker of light caught his eye. And another. From somewhere he heard laughter. Nothing made any sense. A canvas door of one of the tents blew open momentarily. Inside he saw the flicker of a TV screen. Taking a huge breath, he strode over to the tent, pulled open the canvas door, and went in.

  Smoke. It hit him like a wet glove across the face. Rotten, foul tobacco smoke, so thick in the air that it was difficult to see to the back of the tent, about twenty feet away. The place was crammed full of people. There was a sort of high table in the center of the tent. Men and women were slumped there, most of them in oil-stained overalls, and each one cradling a glass of Complex Spirit.

  They were all smoking those disgusting cigarettes, all of them. Packs of Complex Smokes lay around everywhere. Everybody was watching TV. A dozen TVs hung up around the tent on steel poles. From them came a very loud, distorted sound of screaming and shouting. The people in the tent stared up at the screens like zombies, moving only to suck on their smoldering cigarettes or to take another drink.

  Ben recognized what they were watching, too: Oprah Winfrey, a chat show from years ago. They had a few DVDs of stuff like that on the Island. On the show, people sat on a stage, arguing, screaming hysterically at each other, whilst a rowdy studio audience wailed and yelped, shouting encouragement. Complete rubbish.

  In the tent, though, no one seemed to have an opinion on Oprah’s latest controversy. The faces of the people watching were dead, their eyes empty and uninterested. They were even less alive than the adults on t
he Island. It was as if they were hardly alive at all.

  There was a sudden rush of cold. The canvas doors of the tent were thrown wide open. Ben looked around. Suddenly everybody was moving, pushing past him towards the exit.

  In the entrance stood a man. He was tall and broad, and wore a dark blue uniform, incredibly clean and neat in comparison to the grubby clothes that everyone else wore. On his head was a shiny black helmet with a Perspex visor, which was pulled up, his quick, searching eyes scanning the interior of the tent with an expression which was enough to frighten anybody, a deep, unforgettable cruelty, a kind of natural malice. In his hand he held a pistol, a strange one, black shining plastic, with a square barrel. Everyone squirmed past him, their heads down, shuffling out of the tent like wounded animals.

  Ben was caught up in the movement of bodies. He struggled to stay on his feet as people pushed past, hobbling and scurrying out. As if to protect himself, he covered his face with an arm and tried to get to the side of the tent, away from the crowd. Then he felt something, a gentle pressure on his shoulder, something tugging at his bomber jacket. And before he knew it, he was outside.

  He blinked, unsure what had happened. Through the doors of the tent he saw that the man in blue was now laughing, standing alone, the helmet beside him on the bar. He drinking a glass of Complex Spirit that had been put there for him.

  “Say nothing!” someone hissed into his ear.

  Ben turned, and met the stare of a girl. She was fragile-looking and about as old as him. Her hair was mousy and drab, and it was pulled tightly back, giving her a serious aspect, which complemented her equally serious eyes, which seemed to urge Ben to do exactly as he was told.

  “Come on,” she whispered, tugging harder at his arm, “before they grab you.”

  Ben saw that all the other people were now disappearing silently into other tents. The girl set off, dragging him behind her as if he was a badly-behaved dog. Before he knew it, she had hauled him into a nearby tent.

  This one was different, though. No smoke and no adults. Instead there were about twenty arcade games lined up around the edge. Some of them he recognized from the computer on the Island: really ancient stuff, SuperMario and Pacman, things that the adults sometimes played on the PC in the schoolroom.

  In front of each game stood someone about his age. They were all dressed in scruffy clothes: jeans or oily, ripped army fatigues, with faded canvas jackets on. They stared silently at the screens in front of them, their hands rattling the controls automatically. No one spoke. No one seemed to be having much fun. There was no music playing in here, but the sound of the games had been turned up high, and there was a steady, almost rhythmic stream of bangs and pops and buzzers.

  Ben stood at the entrance and wondered what to do. There were no machines free, and in any case he was here to find out about Sullivan and his dad, not to play old arcade games. They had better games on the Island.

  A boy looked up. He was about ten or eleven, and his face was pale, the skin flaky and white, his lips thin and cracked.

  “Who’s he?” the boy said, then ran his sleeve across his nose and sniffed.

  “I was just about to ask him the same question!” said the girl, screwing her face up and staring inquisitively at Ben.

  “And who was he!” said Ben, trying to make a joke out of everything. “That man in the blue uniform! Who was that?”

  She stepped up closer to him and lowered her voice. “He was a Stun-Commando, you idiot. And you better stay out of their way. The tents with games in are supposed to be off-limits for them, you know, for workers’ kids. But if you go into an adult tent they can grab you.”

  “Grab me for what?” asked Ben, seeing that the girl was not joking.

  “To work, of course!” she said. “Especially someone like you,” she added, “so healthy-looking. They’ll have you working in the power station, or one of the cigarette factories. Just stay out of their way.” She looked at him suspiciously, her eyes drawn to the scar low down on his cheek, as if it was a secret sign.

  “You wanna play?” the boy said, in a nervous kind of voice. He sniffled as he talked, and Ben now saw that beneath his nose the flesh was red and sore, and his eyes were watery.

  “Yeah,” said Ben, pretending not to notice how pale and weedy all the kids in the tent looked.

  The game was about as basic as you could get. The machine itself was falling to bits, the controls clunky and loose. As he played, the boy and girl watched, impressed at his speed with the controls, although in fact it was an easy, mindless sort of game.

  “Where are you from?” the girl asked. All three of them stared intently at Ben’s screen as he shot spinning orange disks out of the black sky.

  “Vegetables,” Ben said, thinking that this was as good a cover as any. “Just here for a delivery.”

  “Wow,” the boy said. “Wow. You live outside!”

  “Yeah, it’s no big deal,” Ben said, as he began to enjoy the old arcade game. Despite its decrepit controls it was nice to have a proper screen, rather than be huddled over a PC with El Billio counting the minutes until you had to stop playing because some know-all wanted to look at the National Geographic CD-ROMs (usually Silver). “Can you play here as long as you want?” he asked.

  The boy laughed. “What else is there?”

  “Great, isn’t it! Welcome to The Complex!” said the girl, disgust in her voice.

  “The Complex?”

  “Here. The city. This place. Our parents work here, so we don’t have much choice. We live here.”

  “You’re not a drone, are you?” said the boy, looking at Ben strangely.

  “N... no... I’m not,” he replied, wary of saying too much. But his curiosity got the better of him. “What’s a drone? You mean like a slave”

  “Oh, that’s just their nickname,” the girl said. “Coal drones, we call them. The workers who live up around the coal mines outside the fence. Sometimes they’re allowed to come here when they’re not down the mines. They’re not really slaves.”

  “That’s right,” the boy said, butting in. “They’re free, like everyone else. But it’s better to be here, inside the Complex. As long as you’re inside, you’re safe. Living out there, with all the danger and death, must be awful. We’re free of all that here, thanks to the fence.”

  Just then a siren went off, echoing around the sky. Then more sirens, a strident, ear-bursting chorus of them, until the air was full of their deafening noise.

  “What’s that,” Ben said, as the sirens subsided and he could take his hands away from his ears.

  “End of the shift,” the girl said.

  “So is this where you wait for your mum and dad?” Ben asked.

  “Hey, these country boys are pretty smart!” she said, laughing.

  The girl and her brother went to the entrance of the tent.

  At least I’m not stupid enough to think that living inside a fence makes me free, Ben said to himself. But he kept quiet, and followed.

  Outside the tent there was a rumble of movement. A great swarm of people came from the direction of the chimneys, dressed in filthy overalls, their faces caked with oil and dirt, their eyes blank and lifeless. They made their way down the winding alleys and walkways of the fun-fair, many of them disappearing into the tents. And at the same time, an equally large swarm of people emerged from the tents, and moved slowly in the opposite direction, towards the four enormous chimneys.

  “Your mum and dad work close by?” Ben asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “In the power plant.”

  Gradually, all the children inside the games tent left, joining their parents, who had just finished work. The girl, meanwhile, remained on her tip toes, scanning the mass of dull, worn-out faces that went by. Then, as the crowd subsided, she looked at her brother, her face full of disappointment, but as if she had expected it.

  “Come on, you know where they’ll be.” She turned to Ben. “By the way, I’m called Pol.”

&nbs
p; “Pol? Short for Polly?”

  “Just Pol. Short for Pol and long for Pol.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said, grinning. “You don’t look like a Polly!”

  “See you later, country boy,” she said over her shoulder and sent him a smile. “I’ll be here this afternoon.”

  With that, Pol and her brother walked off in search of their parents.

  Ben was now alone, with twenty video games. He was tempted...

  What would his Dad have done…?

  All morning he’d been repeating the same phrase to himself.

  What would his Dad have done now?

  There were more important things than games, he told himself. He decided to explore the Complex some more. Especially the fence. He didn’t understand anything about this place. And he didn’t know anything about his dad.

  He was going to find out, though.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Coby sat inside Fried Liver, surrounded by lemons, as they drove on winding dirt roads through the woods. At the back of the van were the twins, hunkering down amid dusty sacks of potatoes and a pile of loose cabbages. Silver, meanwhile, was right behind the driver’s seat, from where she could talk to Terra. No one knew for sure where Ugly Pig was, but they could all hear the slobbery smack of his jaws. He was definitely eating; it was like having something in your bed, quietly munching away at the bed sheets.

  It was going to be impossible to stay hidden down on the floor all the way. One by one, their heads poked up amid crates of tomatoes and lettuces. Terra watched in her rear view mirror as arms and shoulders and anxious faces sprouted up from amongst the celery and peas like shoots of quick-growing, human broccoli.

  “Keep your heads below the level of the windows!” she called out, “unless you fancy spending the rest of your lives working in a coal mine!”