Moral Zero (8 page)

What’s the problem with murder and torture here? he said, judging their faces intently. These people ain’t anything to us. And I’m going out of my way to bless them with something so potent they can’t even handle it. I’m an experience-giver.

So
mething a psychopath would say. Red clacked his jaw about like a wounded animal.

You don’t h
ave the capacity to understand.

Definitely so
mething a psychopath would say. Red spat out his trouble, and the whiskey-soiled shine spattered near Black’s polished boot.

Wipe it up.

I -

Wipe it up.

There was a chill silence where Johnny Black and Kidd Red battled it out in a stare and Johnny won by a landslide. Red crouched, muttering, and rubbed up the spit with the knee of his jeans. He straightened and tried to regain himself.

What do you think? Red turned to Mr White. Do you think he’s a psychopath?

Mr White looked down, avoiding Johnny Black’s gaze. No, I don’t think he is, he mumbled. I don’t think you can call someone a psychopath here, not in any honesty, not in a place this screwed up. The whole system is one sprawling sociopath. Either none of us are or we all are. Johnny . . . he beckoned mutely to him, Is just doing what he wants.

Johnny tipped his hat to him, his crooked smile dra
wn and hunting. Nobody’s safe, he said, and winked, just an iron shutter of his eye, held long to point of parody. His other eye flared like sunspots. He opened them both wide, too wide and maniacal, and laughed at the discomfort of the other two.

I end
these people, he said, leaning in once more, as if he was letting them in on a secret. I end them in the best way possible. Even those that don’t die get ended in some way. You don’t get people liking it, not liking it like you like a steak or a kiss, but they are crazy for it. You ain’t seen nothing until you’ve seen them writhing like that, like these beasts, these stuck pigs. Even they know it’s something unparalleled, unconquerable. It’ll always be everything. But you, he pointed at Kidd Red, You keep them going, sharing the corruption. You are sick if any of us are.

Johnny Black stood up tall and touched his finger to Mr White’s chin,
forcing him to meet him gaze. And you, you’re a watcher.

I am no such thing!
Mr White scarleted.

Yes
you are. I knew as soon as I saw you. And I could smell it. The smell of dried cum and dead fucking longing. Unquenchable.

Mr White blustered and raised his hands to protest, but Johnny Black shot them down with a look.

Ain’t this something, he drawled sardonically. Mr White here is more abashed by his voyeurism and Kidd Red – yes, I know your name – more hot up by his perversion and filth than I ever am by my murders and rapes and tortures. God forbid how beetroot Mr White’d go if I claimed he was, oh I don’t know, a goddamn cuckold or something. He flicked a lump of ash from his cigar and caught it in his hand. He sprinkled it in his empty shot glass, and span it clattering away.

Mr White looked horrified and Kidd Red frowned while Johnny Black cooled and smoked thoughtfully.

There’s a lot of vacancies out there boys, he said eventually, straightening up his southern hat and waving the cigar in their faces. A lot of people empty but for our cocks and knives. Red, I’ve got no problem with your fucked up shit, but it is fucked up shit so don’t act like you’re better than what I got, pure like lightning out in the prairie. I’m doing a lot you won’t get, but if you hang around me long enough some of it might come clearer. I’ve got philosophies you can’t even touch. Mr White, you can watch me and masturbate if that’s all you want to do, and while your objects of tainted affection are fucking other guys – including me, long may it ruin her – you will be having more tortured satisfactions then you ever had before. Now listen you two, I’m interested in you both, and company's a hard thing to keep with my methods – so you can stay, but there’s something you always got to remember.

What’s that? Kidd Red’s
eyes were as wide as pearls and twitched in a chaos of unknown feeling. Mr White too was all blinking and swallowing the heart in his mouth like he was some kind of innocent.

Johnny Black clapped his hands on their back
s and strode them out the bar.

I’m one of the wolves.

STREET

The walk took them past back alleys and front alleys of sin and corruption as thick as tar where the tart girls rode their skirts up small and high or small and low like belts or string, their ruddy faces aglow and blushed like blood under soft lights tinted blue and pink and red, somehow wavy and out of focus as if underwater. The air itself seemed full of smoke and sweet in its pestilence like sugar ridden over by insects and the shutters of the shops were riding high all corrugated and shiny looking, wet without rain.

The whores looked at them, pursing their baboon lips and puckering and bending out, their faces when they got close stencilled with dimples and their eyelashes like a black man’s hands with the fingers all splayed and nailless. Their thighs were bony and netted or bulging and naked, sometimes bruised pink if their flesh was creamy or wan, looking blue or sickly yellow on the blackest. The more voluptuous were bouncing out far from their waists as if overripe fruit ready to squeeze before they burst, and those thunder legs ran down to high socks or sockless feet, sometimes the toes curling in the dirt to hide the nails all fungal and flaking, but most at least somewhat manicured and coloured and precariously tiptoed in slutheels, raising midgets to chest height and tall girls gargantine and practised in their clumsless sexual totter. As you looked up their eyes were so dark like oil or midnight orbs, or blue and green like the sun reflecting off tropical seas, except the light was artificial and their implanted irises shone fake and jaded.

Many of the women were older, with skin that hung off them as if the call of gravity was more attractive than loyalty to the body. Their hair was brushed up or dank and straggled and the abandonment of effort seemed not as sad as the effort made all the
more. The whores were men too, cut or not to all degrees including those without anything between their legs, or just with nothing hanging but over pumped sacks like human melons, with skin less leathered and more stretched tight looking like jellyfish or some bright-veined balloon creature of the deep sea. The men were as varied and garish as the girls, some bearded or heavy-set, some stern some giggling, and all dolled up they were in leathers or pimp-colour suits or dresses frilled and drag or contemporary slut. Their faces were unshaven or smoother than the women’s legs, with makeup dark and classy or like circus clowns, and there were mixtures of everything said before, and some had their backs to the wall with no real clothes at all but chains or strips of coloured or black cloth.

The hookers went beyond those two sexes and continued way on, with
sexed up in-betweens, all laying individual claims to the definition of a third gender, and some of the streetwalkers were augmented biologically or mechanically; some were cyberdolls, those glorified robots in models flashy and new or old and worn with bits missing; some bald, some with an eye switched off, one or two dismembered with wires dangling and sparking or clipped and many with skin like rust or mould.

Many whores were bitten by disease. They leaked fluid from anyplace, some of it disgusting some of it sexual, and all of it both to some passer-by. Their voices were sugary and husky and hard and catcalls and whines, some dominant and teacher
-like and many like schoolchildren, teasing and flirting with practised innocence, and some there attracted a mothering or fathering instinct, seeming like lost kids wanting put right; some begged for a spanking or whatever unknown lay waiting in your pants just for them, and many propositions sounded disturbing and were disturbing enough for some passer-by. Many of the younger looking acted the very opposite, as though dogs in heat or succubi in a new land or aliens ready to enslave the populace through seduction and insemination.

As they walked on, all faltering except for Johnny, the air high on stank in thick, mugging patches, making Mr White cough. It was especially foul around a few of the all-human men and women who couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of themselves
any longer. Perhaps given up on the trade in their old age, standing about all creased up and tired, or maybe young and drugged up with eyes rolling back and wetting themselves and telling you to come for some sugar while drool pitted in the corners of their mouths and ran like spiderstring down their chin and into their cleavage or matted chest hairs, whatever the gender. And some of the augments must have disagreed with the whores and those kind of infections had their own kind of smell like something toxic in your vehicle, and many including the trio wrinkled their noses or held them pointedly, obnoxiously, but others drew closer and rubbed the insides of their legs, their noses sniffing like dogs catching the trail.

The lights
spat and fizzed as they passed and some flickered on and off or stayed off, seeming beset inside with painted fireflies of bipolar temperament. Many of the neon signs had letters missing and by deliberation or coincidence or the lasciviously humoured hand of Fate a sign spelled ANAL where it should have spelled BAN IT ALL – like rich neon graffiti but a real sign that somebody had put up, perhaps in protest or mockery or some turn-on to themselves that only they truly understood. And then they passed pink swirls like icing on cake that read out GIRLS and then a pause in the concrete and then SLUTS. Red nodded at the sign and told them that it was his favourite word, but that some people might not like that and think it was giving some negative impression to which he could explain. Mr White remarked that nobody is going to care in a place like this and Johnny said nothing but barely looked from straight ahead. Red said it was a good word now and it had been taken back, and he seemed to wish someone to argue with him but they didn’t.

Johnny threw a cigarette down to the ground where it sank slowly into mud and he had another lit in seconds and billowing smoke out the corner of his mouth, his eyes narrowed and darting towards the shadows as if they called him there for secrets not fit
even for the degradation of the street. Hookers yelled at them as if their words were gospel and unrefusable and Mr White kept apologising and Red was telling him to shut up when he saw a trio of undersized girls with breasts belonging to giantesses near falling out of what could never be called tops and with buttocks flared out behind them like stallions. Red said they were aug’ed to fuck but what about it and Mr White arched his eyebrows back in consternation and said he didn’t know and Johnny said no. Red looked to argue but just whined and kept looking back as the girls blew kisses to him and fondled their meats. One lifted up her skirt and Red saw what looked in the shadows like a fingerless and round-headed arm strapped to the leg in fishnets and he turned back around and shook his head fiercely and strode on a little faster and yet looked back again three more times and scratched the front of his jeans as if absentminded.

Mr White was too taken in by all the sights sounds and smells to offer any conversation and Black was quiet and mean and so Red chattered as if to himself saying nothing of value but saying mostly did you see that did you see her did you see it, fuck, and talked about what they could do and who was going to get it and who was what sex different to how they presented themselves even if it were full on obvious. He asked if they were all hookers or maybe just gals out to get some spare cash and then answered himself saying well then either they all were or none of them were. And then he said who was gonna have who and what they were after, but he didn’t get much response out of Mr White and just silence from Johnny, and Red said to nobody in particular that he hoped Johnny wasn’t going to stab some nice young gal. Johnny asked if they were the only ones that mattered and if an ugly old
woman or a man or aug or even some cyberdoll with full on sentience got stabbed would that be alright, and Red chuckled and asked if Johnny was gonna be a cunt to someone and Johnny said maybe you. Red didn’t reply because he was alerted to more siren calls and was looking at more tits that gave him some positively heaving impression of his future.

Johnny stopped outside a café where unidentified roast meats steaming on trays were served to the insalubrious. They sat outside on wooden deckchairs by circular tables nearly as small as birdtables and shiny with grease smears. They were all littered with gristle and scrunched wraps of food, which marked in pink on white the name of the business,
Redhot’s Big Meat, even though the portions had nothing big about it and the heat steamed off them faster than you could eat, so by the second half you ate cold blackened sinews and picked the bits out of your teeth like a hyena. The street was complete with the dirty hyena laughter to which everybody halfway sober seemed to take offense, and you knew that a wrong glance could send a fist or a knife your way and yet with Johnny with them Mr White felt safe. Red was too busy laughing at nothing, his face gleeful and him rocking back on his chairlegs close to turning over as if it was all infectious and the world about him seemed nought but a ribald pantomime, or perhaps he was just high. Johnny said the meat tasted like human and Red laughed and Mr White looked uneasy at first and then laughed too. Johnny smiled and the light from the café’s sign glinted on his teeth so that they looked like little blue knives.