Quake (16 page)

Gradually, the pain faded a little and Jam did not try to move again. Instead, he allowed his gaze to move around. At first he had thought this place was dark, but there was a reasonable light source - a dancing radiance from a flickering tallow torch. Flame-light caressed the walls, which were black and even and smooth, like obsidian or black marble although he could not make out any real details. He could see a bed, low down against the ground, a wide flat slab, again fashioned from obsidian or marble. And the floor, he realised, was not dust, but sand.

Jam coughed, and pain from his ribcage filled him with molten fire.

How many broken ribs?

He suddenly became aware of a figure standing behind him. He could tell by the shadows against the wall up ahead, and he tensed, waiting for the blows to rain down again. But they did not come, and Jam groaned from a dry throat as he rolled himself over and looked up at the slender dark shape in the gloom.

The figure was dressed completely in black, but instead of the trade-mark Nex balaclava, the face was bare and visible and gleaming in the flickering orange glow. It was deformed - only a little, but the evidence was still there. The Nex was not entirely human.

‘You are the one known as Jam, Spiral operative on the TSAD Division?’

‘Not me, pal,’ said Jam slowly, his voice little more than a slurred croak. ‘You’ve got the wrong guy.’

‘Indeed, you have been responsible for the deaths of
many
of my colleagues.’

‘Sorry, mate.’ Jam forced a smile through cracked and bloodstained teeth. ‘I was just out walking my fucking poodle when your thugs picked me up.’

‘This is yours.’

The Nex produced Jam’s ECube and held it up for him to see. Jam said nothing, and the Nex smiled, a gentle upturning at the corners of his slightly disfigured face. And then Jam realised what was wrong - the eyes were not quite right, slightly offset, and the nose a bit too low, and the teeth too ... pointed.

‘My name is Mace.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Jam, huskily through his pain. ‘I’d shake your hand but your men have broken my fingers, so I’ll just have to wait until I can put a bullet in the back of your insect skull.’

‘Tut, tut,’ said the slender Nex. ‘Such aggression is unnecessary.’

‘Like the aggression your men have shown me?’

‘An eye for an eye ...’ The Nex smiled softly. ‘Do not think because we have been
altered
that we do not have feelings, do not have friends, do not have loved ones. Your people are responsible for the deaths of many Nex ... there were a few retributions being sought.’

‘Yeah, fucking great.’ Jam went silent, his mind working. ‘What do you want? Why haven’t you killed me?’

‘Bright, as well, for a non-Nex. As I was saying, my name is Mace and I will be your interrogator, your torturer, and ultimately your
friend.
We will spend many, many long hours together, you and I, Mr Jam. You will tell me everything that you know.
Everything.
And we will
learn
from one another - yes, you and I will learn one another’s deepest and most intimate secrets.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Now who is showing open aggression?’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Really, Mr Jam, you should learn more respect for those who dangle you from a thread, those who have the power to crush you like a -’ he chuckled with dark humour, ‘- like an insect. Those who hold the power between your life and - ultimately - your death.’

‘Fuck you.’

Mace moved closer, lowering himself to a crouch. Jam realised then that his hands were bound, with serrated titanium wire that dug through his flesh and ground jaggedly against the bones of his wrists.

‘I won’t tell you anything,’ said Jam calmly, his stare fixed on the bright copper orbs of the Nex.

‘On the contrary,’ said Mace, his voice soft and hypnotic as he pulled free a leather pouch and removed a long, slender hypodermic. The syringe was filled with something silver - like the brightest of mercury.

The needle slid in.

The injection filled Jam’s veins and
flowed
with every pulse of his heart.

His eyes went wide, and suddenly he screamed a scream so long and loud that he thought his lungs would bleed. Mace smiled, nodding understandingly as Jam writhed on the floor, knowing that the pain that the Spiral man had felt so far was as a tickle to a child, a brush of feather against skin, a mere inconsequence.

‘On the contrary, Mr Jam, you will tell me
everything.’

Leviathan Fuels: Premium Grade LVA
— Go on, make the switch, because you know your children deserve a better future ...

Charlotte smiled her sweetest smile, her all-winning smile, the smile that was guaranteed always to get her exactly what she wanted. She tossed back her dark curls and moved towards Freddy, one hand coming to rest lightly on his shoulder, her gaze meeting his, seeing the longing there, inherently understanding the bright lust lurking like a tiny flame within their amorphous depths. I have you, she thought. I have you eating from the palm of my hand. And you
will
do whatever I desire.

‘I think we should make the switch,’ she purred with alacrity.

‘What?’ Freddy’s eyes went wide, not quite understanding, confused at Charlotte’s sudden change of direction from lust monster to base domestic conversation.

‘The switch. To LVA. It’s all the rage - every news report on the TV is bleating on about how wonderful this new fuel is. It’s revolutionising the oil industry, you know.’

‘Is it?’ Freddy pulled away, dropping onto the settee with its floral pattern which he truly hated. The floral pattern was a concession he had made for a night’s good hard sex, with a digitalVid showing Charlotte performing all manner of disgusting and perverse acts on his body - with her tongue stud - thrown into the bargain. He sighed at the thought, hating the fucking awful shifting couch, and was dragged back to the present. ‘I don’t think so,’ he mouthed, slowly, uneasily, unable to meet her gaze.

‘But LVA
is
all the rage! Everybody’s doing it!’

‘We’re not.’ Freddy smiled his false skull smile, transferring his gaze from Charlotte’s supple form to the TV beyond. This was what he hated: the constant domestic chit-chat. It tortured his brain. Couldn’t she see? All he wanted was peace and quiet! Couldn’t she
see
? All he wanted was a few fucking minutes’ peace every fucking day to compose his own fucking thoughts without domestic fucking haranguing.

His own space.

His own study! Now, that would work ... a place he could call his own, a place he could be at one with himself. Shut - and lock - the door. Leave the world, and Charlotte’s moaning and braying donkey laughs, behind.

‘But everybody at work has switched to LVA.’ Her lip came out then. A sulky one. ‘Why do we have to be the odd ones out? We’ll appear strange! Our friends will look down on us!’

‘Keeping up with the Joneses, eh? It’s got fuck all to do with your buddies at work, and everything to do with our depleted bank balance. How much was this fucking Godawful settee? Jesus, it’s like an advertisement for vomit.’

‘But you don’t understand, Freddy!’ she whined.

‘The answer is no.’

Charlotte pouted again, moving towards the kitchen door where she leant against the frame and reached for the settee remote control. She spent a few minutes flicking through the designs and watching the floral patterns shimmer and morph across the surface of the settee while Freddy ground his teeth in total annoyance.

It gave him a headache.

A proper fucking
headache.

How had she picked a settee with a hundred digital floral designs, with every single bastard one an absolute pile of shit? A pain to the eyeballs too.
And
a pain to the wallet ... but no, she had to have one, had to have her way, had to maintain that pretence of social superiority and puerile domestication.

‘But
everybody
is getting LVA! I know it sounds like a lot of money to get the transfer done, but we’ll save in the long run, honest we will.’

‘We’ve just spent six months of our fucking salaries on a world cruise! The damn holiday will take us the next two years to pay off! And now you want this? Now listen -which part of “no” don’t you understand?’

‘But
you
don’t understand, Freddy!’ Her voice suddenly changed, from an erotic purr to a schizophrenic snarl in the blink of an eye. Below him, floral patterns flickered and changed and he felt incredibly sick. His stomach
heaved
with the swirling remnants of a fried breakfast. But then, at least his decorative projectile vomit would be a far superior design pattern when compared with the swirling artistic smush squirming beneath his buttocks like dead frogs in a bucket of custard at this inopportune moment in time.

‘No, Charlotte, you’re fucking doing it again. We don’t have a conversation any more! You get an idea in your head, and if I don’t agree with it then you hit me with a tirade of “buts” until I wither and die like a rose under Bio-CHEM. I’m fucking sick of it, you hear?’

‘Sick of it?’ she raged. ‘I’m offering you the chance to keep up with everybody else! I’m offering you LVA - it’s always on the TV, always on the news, all our friends have got it...’

‘But
we
haven’t fucking got it,’ snarled Freddy, rubbing at his moustache in annoyance. He climbed to his feet, grabbed his jacket and stared hard at Charlotte’s face. ‘You’ve changed since we met, you’ve really changed. I don’t know you any more.’

He stormed from the house, slamming the front door.

‘Please do not slam the front door,’ called an automated voice with a comedy robot accent.

Charlotte chewed her lip for a moment. Her eyes flickered to the TV, where yet another ad for LVA ran for the full ten-minute slot. In any hour of TV, only twenty minutes was actually programme content - the rest was made up of ads, although her mother said that it had got worse over the years.

‘Leviathan Fuels proudly present Premium Grade LVA,’ burbled the ad as a smiling man filled his gleaming car with fuel, and then drove across a desert with his family on the rear seat playing happy family games. ‘Four hundred miles to the gallon means you can drive across the Sahara on one tank! And it’s pollution-free with absolute guarantees - go on, make the switch, because you know your children deserve a better future…’

Charlotte reached for the telephone.

When Freddy returned, it was dark, the wind howling outside like some diseased banshee. The house was quiet, except for a low burble of TV, and Charlotte was standing waiting for him. Freddy clutched a credit card receipt in his fist, and Charlotte’s eyes dropped to the slip of paper.

‘Ah,’ she said.

‘Yes, you might well say fucking “ah”. I can’t believe you went behind my back, Charlotte! I can’t believe you’ve been bought by the marketing, the hype. You’ll bankrupt us. We just
haven’t got the money!’

‘But you
don’t understand –‘
Charlotte insisted with urgency.

‘I understand perfectly,’ said Freddy coldly, and reached for the largest gleaming kitchen knife.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Charlotte.’ He took a deep breath, eyes gleaming in the gloom. ‘I am making you see sense.’

As he murdered her, and she screamed and gurgled, the TV happily babbled the benefits of buying LVA fuel to a background symphony of slaughter.

Jam could feel movement. He came awake groggy, aware that he was being dragged across rough sandy stone by his ankles. Occasionally his head would bump against hard objects, such as steps, but thankfully most of the corridors were linked by ramps. Jam’s groggy eyes came open and he could remember the pain following the injection - like pure burning molten metal had been flushed through his body, through every vein and artery and blood vessel. It had crucified him internally, seeped through every pore, wrought evil magic on every limb, every organ until pain had truly been his master. He had wept - but to weep was only to bring more pain on himself and it had gained him nothing.

And now he knew: every human had a breaking point. For some it was financial destitution. For some emotional rejection. For some, cancer. For some, torture. And they had found his limit, his threshold - for Jam had never felt anything like this internal rampant raging fire. And he knew that if they had asked him questions then, to his very great shame, his unbearable sorrow, he would indeed have told them everything.

But there had been no questions.

Just torture ... and then they had left him until, after many hours, the pain gradually began to throb, to fade, to subside.

This worried Jam even more than a torturer’s interrogation would have. As he was now dragged, bound with titanium wire, up and down sand-strewn ramps through narrow dark corridors and past sandstone walls created from mammoth rectangular blocks, his mind ticked over. If they had not asked him questions when he’d been ready to talk, then maybe they already knew the answers. And that thought chilled him more than anything had chilled him before.

What came next?

A welcome death?

Jam’s head bumped against the ground and he grunted. The two Nex dragging him halted, looked back, smiled and kicked him several times. He took the kicks without a sound ... after the injection, they were as nothing.