Moral Zero (26 page)

Johnny Black was too independent
and too tough-minded, and so his house had been solitary and apart. He had been lucky for too long, but the fires that blazed in his past had put an end to that.

He remembered his train
s of thought like he was still back in those cruel ensuing days and crueller nights, when the grief had bled over into fury and then further into detachment and alien feelings. He ran through those scattered and chaotic black wonderings every night in his mind before he could go to sleep. And they foamed up, phlegm-like, into the burn of the day. He ran through them now. His hat low-down against the glare of the sun. His jaw set and his mind flashing.

There is no reason, no rea
son at all not to kill everyone . . . we aren’t here for a reason, life is purposeless, without any meaning, without  any definition to morality, nothing to say why it cannot be good or morally vacant to murder . . . I wish it was all so precise and rational for me but I am imperfect . . . I hate them, I hate them all . . . There is no such thing as an innocent human . . . they have been tainted beyond reproach, they are parasites, full of cruelty in their selfishness . . . they are bodies . . . meat . . . their insides are maggoted . . . pitifully pumped up with self-importance only to be scattered to the winds like bags of dust . . . they are a terminal cancer not only to the world but to themselves, to me . . . I wish I could truly lose all remaining hope for the species, all vestiges of connection and empathy . . . I wish I could accept that these others are unknowable . . . alien and mechanical . . . illusions . . . just wallpaper . . . strip them down . . . kill them all . . . kill the absence of innocence, commit omnicide and let us be free, let me be free of all this plague, these irritating sores sprung over my body . . . getting inside me, infecting my mind . . . acting as if they cannot succumb . . . I will make them weep and beg to die . . . Such emotion to be extracted . . . I find it fascinating . . . therein lies the connection . . . therein lies the opposite end of salvation . . . not in an impossible execution of the race but in torture, in bringing out a presence of extreme feeling that is hidden so well . . . these people are real . . . real . . . or at least push these automatons, these dreams and technological gambits, these software programs to their limit . . . let me test the boundaries . . . let me hope to break through . . . to rip through like a dog into the world beyond . . . some world better than this . . . there has to be a world better than this . . .

And, as always
, that great block at the end of the track . . . How could they do what they did? How is it possible?

She hadn’t asked to be born into this.

Johnny Black sat on a rock and looked out over the plain, looked at the fat sun low and orange-red in the sky. The world was lifeless.

He imagined antelopes, a herd of antelopes galloping across the plain, the sun streaking its blood orange rays across their backs like bleeding casts. The beasts jumped and danced and the herd seemed two-abreast as they pranced with their shadows, those black antelopes jagged and frisky on the ground, two-dimensional yet closer than brethren.

The rocks throbbed and the air hummed and yet the world was lifeless.

He lit a cigarette and smoked, and the grey-white trail billowed around the brim of his hat and clouded out around him and whisked away like wisps of cotton, a dissipation to nothingness. Johnny Black and his cigarette and the rise and escape of the smoke were the only motions in the whole land to be seen.

He
looked into the sunset and wondered if there were ever some moment when men were not full of blood, full of lust for it in others, a love to prove the colour. If there was some time when humanity was something cherishable, something innocent and full of wonder, and that these prides of character and these alone drove their invention. A time, perhaps in early history, something unrecorded and lost, when humanity was not something malignant and diseased, a grotesquery, their place in this world a carnival of horrors.

Johnny wondered if he,
living his other life as Death’s hangman, was not free of this pestilence, or if he was party to it, lived it and breathed it, and if this were so then in his purity he must be God of it. He imagined men kneeled and kissing the bones around his feet, and he felt disgusted. Let other men be worshipped. Let them worship each other. All he needed was for them to die. A need kept buried and trembling under a small universe of rubble and dirt. All men and women lived and died in the world and none of them were affected by his existence.

A soulless world, full of promise to the newborn, full of promise and full of punctures and let down to nothing.

The sun glazed the land from
horizon to horizon. Johnny sweated and paused to glug water from his backpack. His knees were beginning to ache and he knew soon he would be old. If he was not old from birth.

He looked up and saw a blot shimmering in the far distance.
He had seen that miniature shape on the empty landscape time after time, and yet he squinted at it until he was absolutely sure that it was static, that it could not be anything to do with bandits. Once again he told himself to get some binoculars on the black market, and he knew that once again he would forget, or remember and find nothing.

He finished the bottle and packed it away.
There could be no litter. Not to preserve this waste of a landscape. There were no animals to harm. Nor could there be such thing as manners in the eyes of nought but the gods. Their cruelty was left unfazed by mere pollution.

No, t
he plastic would lie there and roll with the wind and last forever, a constant mark, a pointer that some living being had passed this way, and the bottle would roll into the foot of a bandit and he or she would look at it and grin and go back into the vehicle decorated with heads and hands on spikes and engines would growl.

The hardest test a man could ever face was to stay on the path of right. Even knowing what was right and good proved a challenge in itself. In these times of unbridled chaos everything seemed cold, brutal, evil. Even the advertisements in the cities, the faces of the people you passed, the talk of the Elite, it all seemed no more honourable than the actions of the Wasteland bandits. There was nothing that gave him hope, no sign of beauty inside anyone. You couldn’t dig it out of them with a pitchfork.

It was impossible to go through life and emerge on your deathbed clean, without stinking to Hell and back. What they
expected a man to do to get by . . . You had to smear yourself in it just to go on living.

The
path of right shifted about in his brain over the years like a snake track in a sandstorm. Old paths washed away by the winds of change and new furrows from the storm. Creation out of destruction. In this miasma of darkness as the sun fell away what was right could be something pure and strong in its clarity. Shocks to the system, a gunbolt to the soul.

There was evil in his breast, he knew. It was in everyone. The key was not to water or feed it. Fat chance of that. It had grown like a nettle, stinging parts of him as it networked its way through. The fires that lurched and lunged in his memory had stoked up the heat. His demons were ogres with crushed faces and the only expressions to be seen were on their
chests and arms and legs and they were the expressions of all the people he had ever known or spoken to or seen pass.

The bandits in the Wast
eland and the violent rats in the City and the Elite, the corrupt rulers and their servile insects – half the fucking world seemed to have already given in to the evil. They were weak and they had succumbed from birth. They had fallen to self-preservation, which had bled into malice. But they were nothing. They were raped children. Abused and abusive infants swinging toys. They didn’t know what was in him, and if they did they would run until their legs splintered and collapsed.

The world needed safety from him. His tether was hard and tight but fragile in its tightness, like a piece of glass. He lived alone for others’ protection as well as
for his. A necessary isolation and detachment was required to keep going, to shackle up the last keep of sanity and to lock down the floorboards where all the darkness prowled underneath like panthers.

So too was needed a healthy degree of apathy, to disguise otherwise brutal misanthropy in smoke and mirrors and shadows. Otherwise what? The final course of action, if all that was good – the good he once thought he understood – was gone inside him? He knew the path. The one that blazed in the sandstorm like the wake of a brimstone anaconda, giant in its width and reach and power. The journey through that canyon-deep of furrows led to the heaven of omnicide, the end of all humanity fully concluded, and then beyond the end stepping out of the furrow was a waterfall that glittered and hares and pups jumping around in the long grass, and just him left, watching and waiting, and then suicide, and peace.

Johnny looked into the security cameras and moved through the lifted gate, used the intercom and told the owner, tall and black and hiding gauntness with beard, what he wanted to buy and that he had nothing to sell
, and he looked into the camera and it scanned him like it had so many times before, just in case somebody else was wearing his face, and he walked through the bulk door and up to the bulletproof window and the metal hatch and deposited in the hatch his backpack and anything sharp or hard on his person though there was nothing but his life, and the second door opened and Johnny entered the Store.

He wandered the aisles
with a plastic basket and took what he needed. Water, primarily. Milk, too. Beer. Various meats and cheese. None of it real, of course. Factory foodstuffs, but that was all there was.

He was looking at the
potato chips and thinking about how many he wanted when he heard a commotion. Fierce shouting. He made his way closer when the owner appeared from around a corner and moved past him, holding a shotgun and knives strapped to his waist. To see the owner out of his impenetrable booth when there were customers was a rare sight, but then again Johnny was a regular and had been for a long time. Trust was always guarded closely in the Wasteland, but there could be sprinkles of the stuff to be found, after long enough times and paranoid familiarity. Not enough for the man not to stay well-armed. Easily capable of taking on Johnny, even were it a fair fight, and they both knew it.

What’s going on
Rez.

The man shook his beard.
What you think John. Buncha fuckin idiots. Why the fuck they do it, that’s what I wanna know.

Some people just have a hole in their lives.

Rez snorted. Everbody got a hole. That’s what life is. Steppin around the holes.

Sometimes the holes are too big to step around.

Well. That’s why the world’s the way it is.

Johnny put his hand on his belt
and looked at the shotgun. You going to sort them out?

Like
hell I am. I ain’t puttin my neck out and I ain’t listenin to all their hollerin and cussin. Just left em there.

Where you going then?

Gonna help myself to a beer and wait till they give up and leave. He brushed past Johnny and disappeared into the back of the Store.

Johnny approached the metal booth, locked as he expected, and found he could see through the window on his side, through the booth and out the window on the other side. He saw the bandits and they noticed him.

There were two of them, a man and a woman, and they had removed anything that would obviously reveal them as raiders. There were no bandoliers or necklaces of teeth, no gnarled knives strapped to the chest. Tattoos covered up in cloth and leather.

Johnny stared at them. They must have
parked their buggy or bike away from the Store, or possibly in a black spot of the cameras. More intelligent than most. And they couldn’t have a record if the scans had picked up nothing. Then again most bandits had never been caught and identified.

Still, now they were fucked. The
ever-suspicious Rez had questioned them further, demanding they empty themselves of everything. He saw them disgruntled and impatient and noted unusual items on their persons. Demanded they turn all the way around, patting themselves slowly. The bandits had looked at each other and shown their hand, drawing guns taped to their back. Rez had laughed and laughed as they screamed and swore at him and bullets bounced uselessly off the window.

Wh
o the fuck are you?! yelled the man at Johnny.

Johnny cupped his hand to his ear.

Come the fuck here! Let us in and we’ll share our loot with you. You hear me?

What, Johnny mouthed. He shrugged.

Let us the
fuck
in or we’ll rip you to the fuckin bone you fuckin old useless cunt!

I cain’t hear you.

What?

Johnny raised his voice. I cain’t hear you. I’m a deaf you see.
I cain’t hear nothin.

The fuck?
yelled the bandit. He middle-fingered. Fuck you bitch, come here! He beckoned Johnny aggressively to come, waving the gun at him. The woman skulked and snarled and paced like a vulture.