White and Other Tales of Ruin

by Tim Lebbon

  “You Yankee?” says a huge man sitting under an awning.

  “No, English,” Jade replies instantly. I’ve already been here long enough to know that there must be a reason for her denying her birth.

  “Good. I hate Yankee. Fuckin’ killing bastards.” Jade nods and smiles, and this seems to secure her in the big man’s favour.

  “We’d like a couple of bikes, if you have any to spare,” she says, unfazed by his vicious outburst.

  He laughs, a sound that would have seemed ridiculously overplayed had it not been for the machine pistol dangling from his belt. As he bellows his mirth at the sky, I take the opportunity to size him up. He’s not just big, he’s massive, at least twenty-five stone, all of it sweaty and sickly and grey. He’s wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts which are grotesquely too small, cutting into his flesh and stretching out in places like the skin on an overcooked sausage. With each shudder of his body, I fear they will burst. His bare chest is studded with black, oozing growths. I’m amazed at how hearty he seems.

  “You want bikes? I have bikes! “ He waves his hand at the pool, as if drawing our attention to a fine display of quality antiques. In a way, I think to myself, they are. “But the final question as always, lady? Price?”

  “I’ve got your price,” she says, heaving her rucksack from her shoulders. Her loose shirt flaps open and I catch a glimpse of her breasts swinging freely as she bends down. I suddenly fear what this fat man’s price will be, and wonder how close I would get before he could unclip the gun from his belt.

  “I’ll take the shiny trike and the hefty mountain bike,” Jade says, pulling a small package from the backpack.

  “Hmm, big spending if you want those, little lady,” Fat Man says. I hear something I don’t like in his voice — it is quieter, more serious — and tense as he stretches his neck in an effort to see down Jade’s top. The Sickness picks a bad time to announce its presence to me, jabbing at my chest with white-hot fingertips of pain. I groan and swoon, but pinch a twist of skin on my leg to prevent myself from fainting.

  Jade glances back at me and moves off towards Fat Man. She whispers something to him, actually standing on tiptoe so that she can speak into his ear, one hand resting on his pendulous stomach. I can barely imagine how she could give him a better chance to grab at her, but he does not. Instead, the grimness of his face falls away under the emergence of an expression so childlike and angelic that I almost laugh out loud.

  Jade turns, looks at me, nods towards the pool of bikes. I wonder what the hell she has shown him. I sidle sideways and lean across the heap of metal, grabbing the handlebars of the stainless steel trike and tugging hard.

  Within minutes we are away, the Fat Man calling cheerfully after us and telling us to watch out for the fuckin’ murdering Yankee.

  Jade takes the mountain bike, I’m on the trike. I’m surprised to find it well oiled and maintained, the brakes old but well-adjusted, saddle soft and pliable.

  “Two questions,” I start, but both are obvious. She eases back until she is pedalling alongside me. We are travelling two-abreast along the main road, but there is no motor traffic.

  “He hates Americans because the rest of the world does,” she says. “We’re blamed for it all. The wars. The starvation. The Ruin.” She’s silent for a moment, and I’m about to ask my second question when she continues. “He should visit the States sometime, see what’s left of it.” She pedals harder and slips down a gear, motoring on ahead. Her move offers me a pleasing view of her rump, flexing as her legs pump her along the degenerating tarmac.

  “Second question,” she says, “is what did I give him? Right?” She glances back over her shoulder and I nod. “None of your fucking business.” I try to hear a joke in her voice, but there is none. Or if there is, she can hide it well.

  We pedal for an hour in silence, Jade leading, me following comfortably on the trike. More than once I think of asking her whether she wants to swap, but my body is stiffening and burning as the infected blood from the growths on my chest surges once more into my veins. One day, a surge like this will kill me. One day soon — perhaps today, riding this bike, my feet describing thousands of circles an hour — black blood will leak from a growth and block an artery, popping a dozen blood vessels at a time until I die. If I’m lucky, it may only take a minute or two.

  On the outskirts of the town we pass through the ribbon of huts and tents which go to make up the camps for the un-homed. Eyes follow us on our way, but there is little real interest there. Even the children I see appear old, apathetic and grim instead of lively and playful. We pass a body at the side of the road. A sick fascination forces me to slow down so that I can properly see the dog chewing on its open stomach. There are lizards here, too, darting in and out of the empty eye-sockets to dine on the delicate morsels within.

  We pass by. Jade seems unconcerned, but I cannot help but stare out over the sea of torn tents and makeshift hovels. There are families of eight living in one tent; great open ditches full of shit and flies and the discarded bodies of the dead; queues to gather water from a meagre stream, the liquid resembling diseased effluent rather than water. Smells assault us physically, the stench clenching my stomach and throat in its acidic grip. But throughout the ten minutes it takes us to pass through the shantytown, Jade does not slow down once. She does not glance to either side. She does not seem to care.

  She has seen it all before.

  As we leave Malakki Town and head into the surrounding hills, there is a change. I can feel it in the air, a potential of something that I cannot describe or adequately read. Jade senses it too, and she keeps glancing back at me as if afraid I have begun to lag behind. In truth, I feel as energetic and excited as I have for months, a power pumping through my muscles which has more to do with my sense of freedom than the potential cure I am travelling towards.

  The new aura of well-being makes me think about the night before: the passion we had for each other, as if love were at a dirth.

  There is a gunshot. Jade’s bike swerves, then leaves the road, flipping over into the dry ditch. I hear a scream, and for a terrible few seconds I cannot tell whether it is Jade’s voice, or my own. Then more gunshots, breaking the air apart like the answer to a silent question.

  iii

  The hillside is smooth, stripped bare of plant life, topsoil scoured away by the biting winds. Sound travels further here. The gunfire is coming from around a bend in the road ahead. Its executors, and executed, are hidden from sight by an old stone wall.

  Jade curses bitterly, trying to untangle her legs from the wreckage of the bicycle. I notice that she is keeping her head down almost without thinking about it, and I wonder how many shoot-outs she’s been witness to. I crawl along the dry ditch, leaving the trike behind, hands reaching out to drag the bike away from her legs. I try to tell her to keep still, but the gunfire has increased to a screaming crescendo and she can only frown at my words.

  Eventually, through a combination of her kicking and me pulling, she extracts her legs from the twisted bike. There is a raw gravel burn on her left knee, blood already seeping from a hundred pinpricks in the skin and merging into angry red rivulets. She sucks her palm, spitting out black pellets of stone, sucking again, spitting. I feel queasy watching her, and then the Sickness comes along and sends me into a faint.

  The gunshots fade away — either the shooting has finished, or I’m really losing it. I slump in the ditch, Jade staring at me past the splayed fingers of her right hand, palm pressed to her mouth. The last image I see is Jade spitting a mouthful of blood and gravel into the air, and the sun hiding behind clouds like the ghost of an airship.

  iv

  “About time,” the voice says. I open my eyes and grimace as the sun dazzles me. I feel heat on my front, and realise instantly that my shirt has been removed. The sun is slowly cooking the growths on my chest, turning them an angry red as if embarrassed at their nakedness.

  “How long...?” is all I can manage. />
  “Half an hour,” Jade says, leaning into view. She tips a water bottle over my face and then splashes more across my body. I flinch, but then sigh with pleasure.

  Groggily, I sit up. I realise that the hillside is silent, just as I see the crimson mess of Jade’s hand holding the bottle. “Oh Christ, your hand.” I reach out, but she withdraws.

  “It’s all right! Bloody, that’s all, looks worse than it is.”

  She has washed her leg and is wearing what looks like her knickers as an improvised bandage. She looks away from me, as if ashamed of her wounds, and wraps a strip of cloth from her shirt around her hand. It instantly soaks red. She cringes, flexes her hands and draws in an uncomfortable breath.

  “How’re you feeling?” she asks.

  Memory suddenly jerks me upright, instils me with a sense of urgency. “Where are the guns? Who was shooting?”

  “Don’t worry, while you were doing your Rip Van Winkle they got into a truck and drove off.”

  “Did they see us?”

  “If they had you wouldn’t have woken up.”

  I try to stand, sway, sit down again. “Who were they shooting?”

  Jade looks up the gentle hillside, trying to see past the crumbling wall. “Once we get moving again we’ll find out.”

  “So many guns...” I say, trailing off, leaving the obvious unsaid. So many guns, how many people?

  We haul the tricycle from the ditch, brushing off the accumulated rubbish of decades. Apart from a twisted spoke or two the machine is undamaged, but that’s more than can be said for Jade’s bike. It’s ruined, all pointing spokes and bent frame, the saddle deformed almost ninety degree out of true. The front wheel is buckled beyond repair, the rear tyre flat and shredded. I realise how lucky Jade had been. Torn hand and slashed leg, true, but if the ground had been as unkind to her as it had to her bike, we’d be looking at more than a bit of leaking blood right now.

  “You were lucky,” I say.

  She nods. “Come on, we’d better get a move on.”

  “Jade.”

  “What?”

  “Why are you so pissed with me?”

  She stares at me. I realise how old she looks under the superficial attractiveness, how her eyes never really laugh but bear whatever terrible things she has seen like a brand. I wonder how I would feel if I was cured of the Sickness; I like to think it would give me a new-found energy, a reason to be grateful, a duty to thank life every single day. I know Della would want it like that.

  “I’m not pissed at you, Gabe. Oh Christ, it’s something you’ll know soon enough.”

  Her words scare me more than I’d like to admit, burrow their way into my thoughts like insubstantial maggots. “What are you leading me to?” I ask, for the first time. Until now, I’d always trusted her implicitly. A stupid reaction for someone I didn’t know, maybe, but there had really been no reason to think otherwise. And she seems to know what she is doing, she’s streetwise and confident, knows things, like how to get the bikes and how to get me to String. But just what the hell had I really gotten myself into?

  “I’m leading you to a man called String. He’s a bit of a witch-doctor, I suppose you’d say.” She punctuates each point with a nod of the head, as if explaining to me the rules of a game instead of the particulars of our current situation. “String can cure people of the Sickness — he cured me,” she continues, tapping her chest. “But on the way to where String is, you’re likely to see some nasty things. That’s just the nature of things — the way things have to be. It doesn’t really matter, sometimes it’s just got to happen. But the things you see might not be nice. Like what’s around that corner.”

  She waves a hand over her head, then turns and gazes in the direction she indicated, giving me her back to stare at as she continues. “I’ve been this way once before, remember. I’ve seen these things already, I’ve experienced them. The Ruin’s a right fucker, but just when you think you’ve seen everything bad it’s got to throw at you, there’s something else. But some bad things are good as well.” She turns back, and her haunted expression sends a shiver down my spine. “Remember that. There are sayings: Cruel to be kind; Good comes from evil.” She bends and sighs as she eases her rucksack onto her shoulders. “I’m not pissed at you. I’m just not looking forward to seeing all the bad stuff again.”

  “What bad stuff?” Her words have planted the fear of damnation in me, sent an arrow of terror streaking through my veins and pincering my heart between its dozens of heads. “What am I going to see?”

  Jade nods at the tricycle, indicating that I should travel on it, then walks on ahead. “Best see for yourself. Up here. Around the corner.”

  At first, I think it’s a stagnant pond. There is a light steam rising from it, though the surface appears uneven and scattered with protruding growths of fungi. Then, I realise what I am really seeing. In a dip in the ground — perhaps where water had once gathered naturally, before the Ruin decimated the atmosphere of the planet — there is a lake of twitching bodies. The movement I had mistaken as ripples on the surface of the water is their dying shivers, translating through the hundreds of corpses as if by electric shock. There is a pool, of sorts; the bodies lay in a quagmire of blackened, soupy mud, dust having sucked up the spilled blood and spread under the bodies. The steam rises, like nebulous spirits making their final journey.

  But surely there can be no peace here. Not where for every five bodies that lay still there is one still alive, squirming silently in the white-hot agony of approaching death. Not here, where the stark white dead eye of a child stares from an otherwise shattered face. No peace here, where the rich stench of death and dying is a meaty tang in the hot air.

  I stop pedalling and the trike drifts to a tired pause in the middle of the road. I cannot begin to estimate the number of bodies. Shock has frozen my mind, the sheer unexpectedness of this sight paralysing my thoughts.

  In the city, yes, I had seen the great mound of corpses along the quay. But there, perversely, it had not seemed obtrusive. Maybe it was the casual way that people had regarded the bodies, barely looking at them, treating them more as a landmark than an object of pity or disgust. In the city, I had been prepared for anything. The Ruin had changed so much and the face of humanity had changed with it, often blending back into ages past like an ill child, retarding in years.

  But here, in the country, on a hillside that had once been beautiful, and could be again, the sight is almost surreal with contradictions. The deep blue of the sky, decorated with an occasional cloud cheerful in its fluffiness; and the bloody red mess of open meat, steaming insides, pulsing wounds.

  I begin to cry. I cannot help myself and Jade, in her defence, moves away and sits under a tree stripped of life years ago. The tears are warm and heavy in the approaching furnace of midday, streaking the dust from my face and falling like hot blood onto my shirt. They merge with sweat and the leakings from my growths, to form a liquid testament to my wretchedness.

  I sit that way for several minutes, willing the tears to stay because they blur my vision and camouflage, however falsely, the sight before me. Then Jade walks over to me and places a hand on my shoulder.

  “I don’t understand,” I say, realising the stupidity of the statement. Who could possibly claim to understand the insanity of this moment?

  But Jade seems to know.

  “There are lots of reasons,” she says. “Population control, for one. At least half of those you see are children. The others are men and women of a ... breeding age. No old people. No ill people.”

  “But it’s just so misguided. So wrong. How can anyone think this can help?”

  Jade is silent for a moment. She seems to be staring over the bodies, perhaps glimpsing some vague future that lies beyond their steaming deaths, but nearer than we think.

  “But it does work,” she says, pained. “More food, more medicine, more water. Times have changed since the Ruin, you know.”

  “I never dreamed ...” I cann
ot finish. I can barely comprehend the terrible truth of what I have seen. On the harbour, the bodies ... I suppose I thought that they had died in some natural, acceptable way, and merely been stored or placed there. The gunshots I heard, the shouts, and the riots I had placed in a mental file marked ‘Disregard’. My own tenuous hold on reality, perverted by the Ruin, could never stoop as low as this, and so my mind precluded the possibilities that had been laid out so obviously for me to see.

  “I don’t believe it,” I say. I have stopped crying, but the anguish is even deeper now that the tears have dried. “It’s just horrible.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jade says suddenly, “I should have warned you.”

  I smile up at her where she stands next to the tricycle, reach for her uninjured hand and feel a warm rush of relief when she returns the pressure of my grasp. That means a lot. It helps.

  We turn from the terrible sight and I try to crowd the hateful images from my mind. But though I avert my eyes, my senses will not let me forget. I can still smell the unmistakable stink of death. I can almost taste it in the air. Either that, or the bitterness of my own impotence is polluting my body as well as my mind. And even as I cycle away, Jade walking beside me, I can hear the sounds from the pool of dead people. The sounds of dying, and corpses deflating. The sounds of the Ruin.