by Tim Lebbon
Tom’s club visits had been out of interest in other people, not to find anything for himself.
He’d been to The Club at the End of Time, Fuck-Shit and Hell, among a few other. In one he was mugged, in another he was hit on, in the rest he was ignored. He’d hated every one of them.
The Slaughterhouse … it was as much a club as Krakatoa had been a slight pop. The Slaughterhouse was a world. The second Honey opened the main front door and they passed beneath the axe, that world launched its attack on Tom’s senses.
They were in a corridor not unlike some of the tunnels they’d just been fleeing along. There were a few barred windows in the walls, payment booths, but more like viewing holes in prison doors. There was nobody behind them and Honey did not give them a second glance. The floor was uneven, and in the low light Tom could see what he thought were shattered bones forming its covering, the curve of a skull here, the ragged end of a snapped femur there. His balance was thrown and he held out his arms, staggering at every step. He tried not to look down. He was sure … certain … that the bones must be false. Must be.
Waves of smoke frolicked in the air, disturbed by mysterious draughts. A skein of rich fumes settled around Tom’s head. He breathed in, unable to resist the spicy hint of forbidden pleasures, feeling the sense of them settling into his nostrils and setting his blood aflame.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“What, the smell? It’s a mix of everything the club stands for. They extract it, concentrate and vent it over newcomers. Gets them ready. Gets them hot. You’re smelling drugs, fear, sweat, rage, sex and burning bone.”
Burning bone. Tom looked down at the floor and an eye socket stared back.
There was a sudden explosion ahead of them, pounding through the air, hitting his already bloodied ears and stealing his balance. He sagged against the wall. It was slimy to the touch, and the slime smelled of sex. Unconsciously, still reeling from the blast, Tom touched his fingers to his tongue and closed his eyes. He could have been eating pussy. He snapped his eyes open again, wondering what was happening to him, why he was drifting away when those things were here, they’d found them, they would blast The Slaughterhouse until Honey and he were dead.
“Buzz ‘n’ Chaos!” Honey shouted. She turned to Tom, a crazy grin on her face. “You’ve never heard or seen live music until you’ve seen these guys.”
It sounded more like inclement weather than good music to Tom, but he followed Honey through a pair of heavy doors and into the club itself.
Outside, in the corridor, they could have been almost anywhere.
But anywhere was never like this.
The place was a riot of humanity, a deep sea of people, a swarm of experimenters indulging their most devilish whims, the air redolent of highs and sex and a vibrant freedom. The music of Buzz ‘n Chaos stalked the air like a rogue dragon, setting glasses shaking on tabletops and teeth rattling in skulls. There was shouting, screaming, sighing and crying, arguing, talking, wailing and laughing. And there was movement everywhere. The designers of The Slaughterhouse had never allowed economics or gravity to hobble their decadent dream.
The room was the size of the building containing it, but it looked impossibly larger. There were no windows. There were no internal storeys, only platforms, staircases, open lifts, glass slides, chains suspending swinging floors. On every visible surface people sat or danced or stood talking, sipping drinks and smoking and wiping exotic drug patches across their tongues or eyes, eating, climbing sleeping and fucking. Lots of fucking.
It reminded Tom of a giant ant nest, but here all the ants were seeking only one thing — enjoyment. And enjoyment, Tom realised within seconds of entering, came in all shapes and sizes.
“Holy shit!” he shouted above the cacophony. “Honey, what the hell are we doing here? These people are wasters, freaks, chopped because they can’t —”
But Honey did not let him finish. “This is my thing, Tom, where I like to be when I’m not being fucked and beaten and spat on. I know I’m artificial so I can’t be chopped, but these freaks as you call them make me feel … normal. I’m a whore but that’s no worse than most of these. And much better than some. Love me, love what I do.”
He didn’t know what to say. A woman walked past with grotesque gashes across her body, a dozen inches long, their edges pouting around thick strips of cardboard to prevent the wounds from healing. She grimaced, and it may have been a smile. “Oh God, Honey.” Even he was surprised at how much desperation and disgust came out in his voice.
“You told me you loved me,” Honey said, moving in close so that she could talk into his ear, “and yet you don’t know a thing about me. You don’t know what I like to eat or do, whether I have religion, what books I read.”
“You like to dance,” Tom said. “You like to be held. You like puppets.”
“Puppets,” she said. She barked a hard laugh, stood back with her hands on hips and Tom realised that she was exasperated. She looked up as if searching for someone in this multi-level altar to pleasure.
“It’s what you told me,” Tom said, trailing off. The band seemed to be between songs, but the volume in the place had not relented.
“We’re all puppets, Tom,” she said. “Especially us, the likes of you and me. Artificials. I don’t like puppets, I like those who cut their strings and rebel. Watching that Chinaman’s show outside the brothel … it makes me really look at myself. It makes me think about who pulls my stings, and how beholden I am to them. These people here — the chopped people and the lost artificials — they shed their strings long ago.”
“We need to get out of the city,” Tom said, uncomfortable and confused with where this was leading. They had to escape now, together, and then time would be theirs’. “We can get to know each other when we’re away.”
Honey looked at him, her lips pressed tight and a frown hardening her face. She was about to say something. But the band started up again, and a veil of blue smoke wafted down from above, setting Tom’s nostrils alight, his blood pulsing through his veins at twice its normal rate. Honey smiled and held out her hands, pulling him close and hugging him tightly. But there was something else there, a hesitance he hadn’t felt before. Almost as if her thoughts hung between them, a weight requiring crushing before they could touch.
“Honey...”
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s find Skin, then we can move on. Get out of there. Finish all this.”
“Leave the city, you mean.”
“Leave the city,” she said. At least he thought those were her words. But she’d already started turning away, and her eyes had left his.
As they started walking, Tom felt much lighter than before. His perception had widened, his senses apparently refreshed and enlivened by whatever chemicals he’d breathed in with the smoke. He could make out the bands’ individual instruments, the harmonies bouncing off each other, the rasp of the guitarist’s rough skin against the strings, the clicks and sighs of the vocalist’s breathing method between lyrics … even the volume seemed manageable now, rather than painful. He wondered what the drug had been and decided, against all logic, that he liked it.
Honey led him up onto an uneven platform welded together from what looked like panels of a ship’s hull. There were even traces of a name along one side of the suspended floor, and star-shaped rust patches as big as fists which may have been where creatures had once clung. There was a group of people at one end of the platform, some of them dancing, others — mostly men — paying more attention to the woman hanging from chains above them. Meat hooks curved through the flesh of her shoulder blades, buttocks and calves, and the chains that rose into the gloomy heights were rusted, the colour of dried blood.
She was grinning as she swung back and forth, her rhythm matching the fast beat of the music in some terribly soporific way. She was naked. Blood ran copiously onto the heads and shoulders of those below. One of the men reached up and squeezed her pendulous breasts, twisting her nip
ples and pulling hard, changing her direction of swing. Another shoved him aside and flipped into a handstand, his engorged prick flopping as he walked clumsily towards the woman on his hands, offering himself up to be sucked. His gang screamed and shouted and jeered. The woman nudged out with one hand, hitting him on the knee and sending him tumbling.
Her blood drew graceful arcs on the dark grey platform. Her swinging, twisting and rotating was all in time with the music, like some grisly metronome. She caught Tom’s eye and smiled. He looked away, disgusted and embarrassed, as one of the men started to jump and bash his face between her thighs.
Honey passed by the group without a second glance, and Tom was pleased when they started climbing a ladder to the next platform.
“Chopped folks up here,” Honey shouted down before she disappeared onto the floor above. Tom climbed faster, wondering what to expect. He’d seen people walking to and from these clubs, noticed the freakish adjustments many of the humans made to their bodies. He didn’t think he could still be completely shocked. He thought he’d seen it all.
The couple had given themselves over, completely and utterly, to sex.
The man’s prick had been hugely extended, thickened and distorted so that he could screw the woman at a distance, at any angle, and still dip his head to lick her arse or the other openings weeping and swelling across her body.
There were several other men scattered across the smaller platform, all naked and obviously recently sated. A couple of them glanced nervously at the rutting couple, and Tom guessed that they’d been at the woman until this grotesquely chopped man had appeared, someone with the same commitment to sex as this she had. Normal men she could entertain by the half-dozen, but none of them wanted to pit their sexual prowess against this freak.
Tom and Honey walked by as the man withdrew and entered another hole, this one in the woman’s side. She groaned and writhed, her extra sets of arms and hands doing their best to keep her other holes occupied, fingers obviously augmented such was their speed of manipulation.
“You like these places?” Tom asked, amazed. Honey ignored him, but one of the naked men glanced up and smiled sheepishly.
The band cranked into another number. Its opening chords swelled out to the edges of the club, echoing back several seconds later, the echoes themselves forming an integral part of the music. This one must have been a favourite, because a roar went up that hurt Tom’s ears and set the platform they were on swaying. The inhuman couple never stopped fucking.
“Skin’s up there!” Honey shouted, putting one arm around Tom’s shoulders and pointing up into the club’s shadowy heights. There were at least a dozen levels to climb, and the far walls were obscured by a haze of smoke. Chains draped down, ladders snaked up, bridges strung across spaces, people swung on ropes … and Tom knew that they would be here for a long time. There was no quick way up that high, other than a long, exhausting climb. He really didn’t believe that he could shin up a chain the way he felt now; his ankle was numb with pain, and he was beginning to think he’d lost more blood than was safe. The wounds had been sealed by his body’s defence — he could feel the new skin setting already — but the bones in his ankle may have been crushed. Their knitting would take days, and rest was the best thing for it.
Honey was still bleeding from her neck. Tom wondered whether she’d allowed it to continue because of her visit to The Slaughterhouse, a weird pain perversion she revelled in herself when she came here. She winced whenever she turned her head.
They climbed. The band assaulted the club with its music, strafing the platforms with power-chords that would have knocked a flock of birds from the sky. Sheets of smoke rose and fell, drug-laden exhalations that set Tom’s blood bubbling, steamed bubbles of viscous fluid from his pores, hauled up random memories to dart at him like forgotten ghosts. Some memories were good and these he smiled at, but some weren’t so good. The drug, whatever it was, did not allow him to pick and choose. Between a warm memory of the Baker philosophising, and the cold empty loneliness after he’d died, Tom had time to wonder at the sort of people who willingly submitted themselves to this. He thought he saw the platform where this drug haze originated. The people there were crying, laughing, smiling, weeping, shouting and raging at the visions the drugs were uncovering. Perhaps sometimes they found unwanted truths. Tom was afraid.
They passed many chopped people, some of them changed even more drastically than the rutting couple they’d just seen. One woman resembled an octopus, a head and body with at least eight legs splayed star-like around her. Five men and women licked or fucked or suckled between her thighs.
Sex was the thing. To be chopped was to increase sexual performance and expand proclivities.
They took the easier routes up into the club, travelling between several platforms on a moving, rising walkway. Each level presented new surprises, greater mutilations, none of which seemed to surprise or bother Honey. Climbing eventually onto the highest platform, Tom could see the band. Four men and a woman singing, their instruments and an amplification system looking as if it came from thirty years before. They were surrounded by a jumping, stamping, waving throng, some of them gyrating so close to the edge that Tom was amazed they weren’t sent tumbling … and then one of them did fall.
She spread out her veined, leathered wings, glided through a haze of drug smoke and landed clumsily on a platform near to the club’s floor.
“She flew,” Tom said mildly. She had flown! He’d never know, never believed that such a chop was possible. And officially, he was certain, it wasn’t. It was the sort of thing the Baker had only ever dreamed of.
Tom began to wonder exactly what this place was, and why Honey had brought him here.
“He’s there!” Honey shouted, grabbing Tom’s arm and pointing at the band. “That’s Doug, that’s Doug Skin!”
“The drummer?”
Honey was smiling, a wide open smile that contained sheer delight. “No, silly. The guy standing in front taking the band’s holo!”
Tom saw a tall, heavily built man right by the stage, not jumping with the rest of the crowd. He simply stood there and pointed a camera at the band as they pelted their way into another track.
Honey closed her eyes and Doug Skin turned to look at them.
She spoke to him with her mind, Tom thought. He’d heard it was possible … the Baker had mooted it once or twice … but not in an artificial, surely? And not a plastic bitch built specifically and exclusively for sex?
He felt the centre of attention. The song was about him, the drugged-up clubbers were laughing at him, giggling as they fucked, writing tattoo poetry about his stupidity on each other’s backs. Their eyes bore in, his skin was transparent, and he wished the Baker were here.
Doug Skin smiled at Honey and pushed his way through the crowd. He embraced her and kissed her neck. Once more Tom felt the uncomfortable rush of jealousy, but then he saw that she held back slightly, tensing as the big man displayed his obvious affection.
“That him?” he asked, nodding at Tom.
Honey’s eyes shone, but Tom didn’t know why. It could have been the lasers reflecting from walls, or ceilings lights filtered through the smoky atmosphere. Probably … perhaps … it was the twinkle of her love for him.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s him.”
Skin eyed Tom up and down. “I expected him to be bigger.”
What the fuck is going on here? Tom thought, and maybe he spoke it aloud.
He had no hope of finding out. Because right then hell broke loose, and there were screams and explosions and gunfire, and the sounds of people dying again.
Two minutes later, Tom would see himself dead.
Upon entering The Slaughterhouse, Tom had an inkling of what Honey meant about the mercenaries never finding them in there. They would, of course, given enough time and opportunity, but it would not be an easy search. The place defied the senses.
What neither of them had banked on was Hot Chocolate Bob�
��s utter determination to find and kill them.
It was slaughter. As if in mockery of the club’s moniker the mercenaries came in shooting, dishing out death at random. They must have known that their entrance would be noticed immediately, so rather than try to find Tom and Honey amongst surprised and angry clubbers, they introduced chaos and terror instead. It was obviously an atmosphere they were used to working in.
They strafed the whole interior of the club with gunfire. People span and danced and fell, screaming and shouting, tumbling from their platforms and hitting those below, or falling all the way to the litter-strewn floor. The band played on for a few seconds, adding a surreal theme tune to the massacre. Grenades popped from the mercenaries’ armour like black eggs being laid, arching up and exploding in mid-air, shrapnel slashing visible swathes through the smoke. One explosion ripped out a ladder and set of chains, tipping a platform and spilling those cowering on it to the floor far below. They hit like rag dolls, limbs askew.
The band cut out as the power stuttered, flickering the lights and adding a stroboscopic effect to the twitching clubbers, the blood spraying the air, the corpses slipping down from platform to platform, bullets and shrapnel ricocheting through swathes of drug smoke, the three mercenaries advancing into the club like huge spiders, swinging their way from platform to platform, spreading out, leaving dead or dying people in their wake.
Skin had pulled Honey down as soon as the gunfire began, and Tom hunkered down next to them, staring over the rim of the huge platform. They were maybe a hundred feet from the floor, the mercenaries a few levels below them. At the rate the chopped warriors were advancing, they’d be on them in seconds.
One of the mercenaries suddenly slipped to one side, flame flowering from his midriff, arms flailing for a handhold. He tumbled from the platform but found a chain before he fell too far. The flames were already extinguished, but a rain of blood and insides was dripping from his dangling legs.