Mister Fifty-Two

The town was a wasteland. Huge dunes of brick and rubble scattered over the buried streets and tarmac. A stinking brown lake had formed where fallen buildings had blocked the canal. We were the first to walk through these gone streets in a century.

            I was taking samples from this filthy lake when Carena tapped me on my shoulder. I stood and looked to where she was pointing: a warehouse on the edge of town, the only intact thing in a bleak and hazy skyline. Carefully replacing my sampling equipment back in my pack, I kept one hand on my weapon as we made our way towards it.

            Entrance was easy enough since, although the structure was sound, the bay doors had been blown in. I relaxed, knowing that nobody could have survived the radiation levels that the interior of the warehouse had been exposed to. It was vast and empty apart from the rows and rows of high metallic racking, orange in colour and draped with ragged grey curtains of polythene that waved in the breeze like the ghosts of industry. The floors were a concrete grey as were the walls. An abandoned fork-lift truck and a pile of rotten wooden pallets at the far end were the only other visible things.

            We walked through one of the aisles wondering what it was that had been stored here. At the opposite end, concrete steps concertinaed up to a mezzanine floor.

            This area appeared like a smaller version of the main floor, only instead of the high orange racking stood rows of empty grey shelving units at chest height and was redolent with the dry smell of ancient dust. Each shelf within each unit carried a code of two letters followed by a two-digit number and a bar code, printed on card and stuck to the shelf. Walking past the near end of the rows, watching them vanish towards the far end, I realized that this warehouse would have stored millions and millions of items of whatever it was that people desired before the war had all but eradicated them. Thousands of people would’ve been employed here at its peak. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder where all the bodies were; where all the stored goods were.

            ‘It must have closed down,’ Carena said, reading my mind. ‘Before the war even began.’

            I nodded, and kept walking. I stopped, Carena, not expecting it, bumped into me. I pointed down the aisle where a cylindrical object, about the size of a child of six, stood motionless. A limb of some kind was extended into the shelving unit. Carena and I looked at each other, mutually deciding. Whatever it was, it hadn’t moved for a long time.

            It was covered in dust as we approached: a robot. The limb that extended into the shelf was made of chrome, slim, and jointed with a ball and socket at the elbow. A channel ran vertically up and down its body where the limb was attached. The limb itself ended in a flat claw-like pincer; gripped within this pincer was a dusty box. Supposedly the last person inside the warehouse had been unable to remove it from the robot’s grip. Two lenses on top of its domed ‘head’ seemed to stare, confused, directly at the box. This robot, at least, had still had some work to perform when the bombs fell. I wiped the dust from these two lenses with my sleeve, my face reflected in the black convex orbs. Carena was dusting off the body as best she could when muted metallic noises came from within it. A whirring like the sound of air through a filter, then little clicks and beeps. We stepped back as the robot shuddered, dust falling off it as it hummed. The ‘head’ swivelled this way and that a few times until it rested with its two black lenses once again focussed upon the box in its claw. It remained still for a moment, as though remembering what it was there to do. Then a thin beam of red light appeared on the box, moving up and down the side of it. The robot gave another little beep as the red light moved over the bar code. The limb was retracted from the shelf, moved upwards along the runner in the robot’s body, then levered itself so that the box was dangling above Carena and I. We took another step backwards as it dropped the box at our feet. Dust plumed off it as it fell.

            The same thin red light appeared again, only this time it scanned the bar code upon the same shelf from which the box had been taken. The robot beeped once and reached its thin claw back into the shelf, its pincers opening and closing and grasping nothing; moving a few inches either side, and trying again. The laser scanned the shelf again. Again the robot beeped, and again it tried to clasp something from the empty shelf. During a third attempt, the laser remained shining for a minute upon the bar code, illuminating the shelf number: MR52, but no beeping sound followed. Instead, the whirring and clicking from inside the robot ceased as it shut down.

            Carena and I looked at each other again. She stooped to lift the box, rubbed the excess dust with her glove, and opened it. Inside were some small plastic cups and saucers, purple in colour and decorated with tiny pink and green flowers, a small purple teapot, and a few brown plastic discs. She closed the box and placed it gently in her pack.

Electric Contempt

They all hated the way Joe had started to drag his feet around the office. They hated the way he slurped his coffee, and boy did his breath stink. They hated having to go over to his desk that he had filled full of shit and coffee rings and his stupid little toys plunged into blu-tac podia on his monitor.

            ‘Pick your feet up please, Joe. You’re going to have an accident.’

            ‘Please stop shuffling your feet, Joe. You’re wearing the carpet away.’

            Joe would just open his mouth into a careless grin; the stink of machine coffee drifting past the haggard remains of brown teeth, the last broken peanuts in a black bowl.

            He used to be so pleasant and polite, just like everyone else.

            Nobody could say exactly when his behaviour had begun to change. Nobody, that is, but Joe himself. They assumed that because he had spent over a year working for the agency, rather than on the company’s books, for a low hourly rate rather than a set salary, that he was no longer willing to conform for such a low price. What his colleagues were unaware of, however, was that four months ago Joe had won 30,000 on a scratch card. He filled in the application forms, sent them off with his proofs of identity and proofs of income. The cheque arrived, he deliberated a brazen resignation as it matured in his account.

            He’d heard what they said about him. He knew, could tell by their body language, that his face didn’t fit among their cliques. Sure they were all nice to him at first. Then, after a month or two, he noticed the malice in their curled lips and dagger eyes. They were forever snitching to the boss: Dozy Old Joe never initialled the checklist, again; Dozy Old Joe got the date wrong on the miscellaneous request pro forma; Dozy old Joe...

            He hated that name. He overheard someone singing it in a Mockney accent. They looked embarrassed as he peered over the divider, shuffling his feet against the fraying nylon there.

            Then his phone rang. He got a little electric shock as he picked it up. He got another one retrieving a document from the printer. Another one from a door handle. The anticipation of it, the little lightning tickle, was thrilling. He bought rubber-soled shoes and polyester trousers to store up extra static.

            The next person to call him ‘Dozy Old Joe’ was getting a nice little zap on the earlobe. Then he would walk away, take his 30,000 and go on that Peruvian adventure he always dreamed of.

            The next person was Vincent Long, and Joe was glad, because Vincent was a tosser.

            ‘Hey, DoJo,’ he said. ‘Need that report by close of play today. Think you can do that for me?’

            Close of play. Joe hated that phrase. The word ‘play’ carries connotations of fun, but where the fun was in colouring cells green or red in a spreadsheet was unapparent to the bored, frustrated Joe. What did he call me? DoJo? That’s close enough.

            Joe shuffled over to Vincent’s desk, stretching his index finger out at the other man’s ear as he approached. The lightning that came off his fingertips made him look like Darth fucking Sidious.

            Vincent was dead. Joe relieved himself of further duties.

The Atavists

Over shoulder, dog rest paw; salivating maw moisten smelly floor as jaw works; mechanical mandible. Ball grate molar, great flappy lips hang along a limb like jelly velvet curtain. Breath and death and shit and piss, whistling in nostrils. Cat approach, case joint, sniff at and tap it with leathery pads where splintered flesh remains. Dog growl, show teeth. Cat feign indifference and leave.

            Dog watch cat (covetous cat); crack leak marrow, turn to wall to maul and worry arm to pieces, in peace.

            Stupid cat sniff bones. Master not wake up.

Latent Instincts

Joe Jones walks across the open-plan office in squeaky shoes. I had to look his surname up on the site organogram but would never have guessed that, with a name like Joseph, it would be Jones. Now that I know it, it suits him. His glasses ride low on his nose so that his grey eyes peer over them in a permanent gesture of mild surprise. Clean-shaven jowls ripple a little with every tiny shake of his head, with every murmur he makes to himself.

I overheard him once, just mundane stuff, as he opened a cupboard full of files and documents. ‘Oh there you are,’ he said, selecting one. ‘You’re coming with me, you little beauty. Fully compliant, fully compliant, fully compliant.’ And off he squeaked back to his desk, flipping cheerily through it as though it were old family photos, shaking his jowls and moving his lips in quiet commentary. I heard him in the changing room, his whispers amplified by the metallic lockers. I allowed myself a nervous smirk as I changed my shoes.

Now I’m writing about him, because he’s a real person in the world. Maybe nobody’s written about him before. I watch him, absorb his mannerisms and gestures, but switch quickly to the window when he stops working and looks back.

The Spider and The Sparrow

Landing was easy. Jumping around in suits, gathering dust, fixing robots? Easy. Colonising the place? Impossible. The sullen red ball didn’t want any long-term residencies. Those who went there said it was the suits, that they were unable to withstand the perpetual sandstorms, the absolute dryness.

It wasn’t the suits, but the people in them.

There were no smells but the smell of their own rancid breath inside helmets. No sounds other than their own rancid, shallow breathing and the slow churr of passing robots. There was the standard initial excitement: touchdown, the flag, selfies with the dusty, motionless antiques, dead in their experiments. All but Curiosity, found at the foot of Olympus, its wan cameras staring at the peak.

So the M.O.O.N., Martian Occupation by Orbital Nearness – or the Web –, was built; a spindled hexagon a mile at the radius. Each spoke joined by three thin corridors around a rotating spherical hub, the Spider. Its occupants were known as Flies. A similar, smaller station occupied Venus, the Fly-Trap.

The Web, the largest man-made structure ever built off-planet, dwarfed the lunar science estate and launch-pad. It orbited Mars like the ISS orbited Earth, decades ago. Nothing orbits Earth now. Nothing but the Moon. A big clean-up was ordered by new laws, and people took interest in space again. All the shit just got in the way.

The Web followed Mars’s two onion-moons, criss-crossing over the Valles Marineris. The storms of Jupiter, visible with the naked eye when the planets were closest. What the Flies were there for, was the Sparrow.

Hallam Coop was the test pilot. At forty-two, his hair was greying at the temples but through vigorous spacetime exercises, his musculature and complexion were as taut as they were twenty years previous.  The sparrow was a small, light spacecraft that could be worn like a suit. He stepped into the neoprene boots and trousers, strapped on the triangular, jet-powered wings and Teflon helmet. Coop shuffled, performed a little shadow-box for the cameras on his way to the launch-bay.

‘Sparrow Test Flight. Single circumference of the M.O.O.N. Attempt Number One.’

The bay doors parted with a steely groan. No profound words of pioneering endeavour from Coop. They heard him scream something beginning with ‘F’ as he was sucked away around the west side of the Red Planet. They looked at each other, wondering who to blame for this failure. A man was lost in space.

‘He’s back!’ someone said. And all moved to see their colleague spiralling around from the east. His voice re-appeared in their speakers, still screaming. The Sparrow smashed into the Spider. All were killed, but the web remained, drifting around the sombre planet like a lost wish in the wind.

I Never Did See Battle

The night spent sleeping in a Prius in the car park of the King’s Arms in Frating was warmed by the generosity of the patrons in that village pub. In the morning I arrived, by walking and hitching along the A120, at a Premier Inn outside Colchester where I took breakfast. From there I had gotten to Enfield, then Slough, and eventually to Bexhill. Eager to visit the site where King Harold II fell on my way back north, I began to inspect the BMW as the air felt suddenly cool: a salty scent; thunder, like a raised cudgel, caused me to flinch; the warm rain spattered off the concrete like sparks from an angle grinder.

            Dismissing the inspection and hastily acquiring a signature, I drove away without attaching my trade plates and made it to Middlewich before an observant policeman pulled me over.

I never did see Battle.

Providence

Having failed to hitch for over two hours outside Thorne, I was picked up by a thin, balding man in an HGV. Wiping the rain from my brow, I entered the cab without caring where he was headed which was, as it happened, his depot just off the M18 outside Sheffield. He had to drop me, though, at the junction so as not to ‘get done’ for having unauthorised passengers. Then I noticed he was wearing a black pleated miniskirt, his legs like woolly breadsticks exposed as though trousers were for fools. The clouds had broken and I was gladly purblind in the sunset.

            In twilight, he pulled into a gravel driveway, explaining that this was as far as he could take me and wishing me all the best. My thanks were as swift as my exit. He remained there a minute, perhaps changing into something less weird.

After circumambulating the busy junction for my bearings, I wrestled with my rucksack to find my A-Z. Too far from Leeds where I have friends, too unfamiliar with Rotherham, I decided to hitch into Sheffield where I might catch a train to Stockport.

            A futile endeavour.

            In darkness I tramped four miles along the A630. My sore eyelids blinked at the tower of a Morrisons looming over distant trees like a mirage. That big green ‘M’ was a beacon.

I washed my face in the gents, bought fags and apples, mumbled something of desperate gratitude to an insouciant cashier, and sat outside alternately smoking and eating for an hour.