White and Other Tales of Ruin (49 page)

The mist had moved quickly up the valley, and now Doug could see that it was actually dark and thick, like a brown soup churning through the air, consuming everything it touched. Nearer, as close to them as Peter’s house, birds dropped from the sky, flowers shed petals, leaves fell from trees as the nanos commenced their senseless, programmed task of deconstruction. And every leaf that fell, every bird that was taken apart, soon gave up its component parts to make more of them.

Gemma woke again and sat upright, turning to look at her parents and her great-uncle. “It would have been so easy,” she said sadly. “The answers were all there, if we’d only had the will to help ourselves.”

“
Come here,” Doug said, and she hunched herself into his hug, wrapping her arms around her mother’s waist at the same time.

Light began to fade and a strange hissing sound drowned out the birds and the breeze, like a trillion grains of sand dancing in the air.

Doug’s sight faded, his skin itched, his insides turned warm. He went to tell his family he loved them, but he could no longer speak. His muscles still worked, though, for the moment, and so he hugged them. They hugged him back.

At least they would all be together in the end.

* * *

* * *

Mannequin Man And The Plastic Bitch

She was a dream. He had imagined her once, he was sure, and as she lowered herself and began grinding her hips Tom had that sense of déjà vu again. He licked at her vulva and stroked her arse and she pushed down … and he thought that in the dream she would be dancing, not fucking. Or maybe it was that elusive dance of love.

He had paid for his troubles to be taken away, soothed and suckled and swallowed by this plastic bitch. Within a few minutes later they’d been bearing down heavier than ever before, because he’d experienced that which he’d never believed in, thought existed only in songs and poems and his own warped mind … love at first sight.

Stupid, naïve, and utterly impossible. She probably had a dozen men every day telling her they loved her, and maybe once or twice in her life she’d actually believed. But none of them really
did
love her, or ever could. Love a whore? Love a plastic bitch?

Stupid.

“
Love you,” Tom said, but his words were stolen by her pussy pressing into his mouth. He told her with his tongue instead, a gentle touch as if he were eating the dish of his life. She let slip a small squeal of pleasure.

None of them had ever done that with him before.

He paused, she stopped sucking him, and they lay there for a few seconds looking at each others’ sex and wondering what was happening.

And then they started again … but it was different. There was a tenderness that hadn’t been there before. Tom lost his sense of desperation — he didn’t
have
to come, not just yet — and she started taking her time. It became a pleasure, instead of simply a transaction.

“
Love you,” he said again, careful this time to pull away so that she couldn’t help but hear.

There was no reaction. Tom gazed at her goose-pimpled buttocks, the sweet crack pouting at him from between them, and suddenly he wanted to shrug her off, turn her around and kiss her.

But kissing was never allowed. Too many viruses were targeted orally.

“
I love you,” he said again, trying to force her off. In his naiveté he thought that showing her she didn’t
have
to suck him would set him apart in her mind. But when he flipped her over her stare was as hard as before, her mouth firmly set. Her eyes, though … there was a depth there that had been absent when he’d first entered the room.

She sat beside him on the bed, staring.

“
What’s happening?” Tom said, because something was. The whore shook her head, but there was doubt in the way she hesitated, doubt or confusion.

She — Honey, she’d told him her name was Honey — reached out and grabbed his dick, squeezing and kneading it like a cow’s teat. He couldn’t lose his hard-on, much as he believed this to be so much more than sex, and when she lowered her head and started sucking he sat back and closed his eyes.

Wondering what was going on.

Thinking of the women, genuine or artificial, he’d thought he could love.

Realising here and now that this was, in reality, the one and only time.

He came, and when the pleasure had passed and he looked down he thought he’d sprayed across her face. But then he saw that the moisture on her cheeks was tears.

She smiled and wiped her mouth. There was no hate in her eyes.

That, at least, was a start.

“
What do you like?” Tom asked.

“
I’m not allowed to like anything.”

He smiled. “Yes … but what
do
you like?”

She looked at him so long and hard that he thought she’d malfunctioned. But then she let the ghost of a smile touch her features. “You’re talking as if we’re on a date.”

“
We are, aren’t we?”

“
How much did Hot Chocolate Bob charge you for this?”

He thought of the slimy, drugged up pimp he’d negotiated with on the street. “Two hundred.” Realising he’d forgotten to do it, he plucked a credit card from his pocket and offered it to Honey.

She nodded her head slightly and glanced over his shoulder at the wall clock. “Then for another seventeen minutes yeah, we’re on a date.”

“
So…?”

She took the card, tapped in the amount and scanned it. She should have shown him first so that he knew he wasn’t being swindled, but he trusted her. Stupid of him, blind, but he trusted her.

“
Isn’t it a bit late to ask me?” Honey said. “You get your kicks out of knowing what you missed?”

“
Sorry?” He frowned, genuinely puzzled.

Honey smiled again as she handed back his card. “I like it from behind so I don’t have to see the customer’s face. I like it up the arse. It gives my snatch a break. I like it fast, that way I don’t have to pretend —”

“
You weren’t pretending just then.”

She shrugged. “Sometimes it feels okay.”

“
Don’t believe you.
Sometimes
? How often?”

Honey didn’t answer. The silence hung heavy and awkward until Tom spoke again.

“
Anyway, I didn’t mean sex. I meant
everything
. What do you like? Whether it’s permitted by your pimp or not, you must have your likes and dislikes. You must have enough life for that, at least?”

Honey looked down at her feet, stretching her toes. She was still naked, but it didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest. Then she looked up at Tom through her golden fringe. The image was so shy and lonely that he wanted to take her in his arms, buy her, get her the hell out of here forever.

Trouble was, there were no places to go.

“
I like dancing,” she said. “There’s a club three floors down in the basement, and sometimes if I’m having a slow night I’ll dance to the music.”

“
On your own?”

“
Of course on my own. The music’s torn apart by the time it gets up here, gutted by the floors and rooms between us, but I still get the beat. Sometimes I can even identify the songs.” She looked away from him, out the window. It was still daytime but heavy smog made it twilight. The sodium street lamps fell like moonlight on her face. “I like the slow ones.”

“
I can’t dance,” Tom said, full of regret, wanting so much to be able to hold her for his remaining twelve minutes, pirouette around the room, jive into true love.

“
I’ll teach you,” Honey said, and then she frowned, stood, walked to the dressing table and lit a cigarette. Confused. Perhaps not knowing what she’d said, nor understanding why.

“
What else?” he asked, rescuing her. He looked at her naked back, buttocks and legs, imagining that he knew the geography of her already, was able to go there and touch her exactly how she liked to be touched, and where, and for how long.

“
Finger puppets.” She blew smoke and smiled. “I love finger puppets. The more intricate the better. There’s a Chinese guy down the street. Lunchtimes he brings out this wooden box, sits behind it and puts on a puppet show. He doesn’t try to hide or pretend it’s not him doing it, but it doesn’t matter, because his fingers have such sweet movement. He dances and fights them across that box, and for a few minutes it’s another world, more imagined than any netcast or movie. He touches you, that guy.” She paused for a while, turned to look at him. “Or rather, the finger puppets touch you. He just moves them. For a while they have a life of their own.”

Tom was caught up in her eyes. She looked happy, and he was glad that he’d brought it on by asking questions.

She spoilt the moment by glancing at the clock again, but he persisted.

“
Anything else?”

“
I like being held. That’s all. Just held. After some of the things that have been done to me …” She trailed off, running her fingers along a white scar across her belly. Tom had thought it was a poorly done repair job when he’d seen it earlier, but now it was something worse. Far worse.

“
Have you ever been in love?”

“
I’m a whore. An artificial, a plastic bitch. I’m incapable.”

“
I’ll bet you’re incapable of
enjoying
anything, either. Like finger puppets and dancing and being held.”

Honey lit another cigarette.

“
Can I hold you?” he said.

She sat on the bed next to him, crossing her legs demurely, folding her arms and hiding her breasts. It gave her such a sense of innocence that a lump came to Tom’s throat.

“
Only … I can’t dance. And I left my puppets at home.”

Honey looked at the clock. “You can hold me for six minutes.”

“
Longer,” Tom said, shuffling over and wrapping Honey in his arms. It was awkward at first — strange, after what they had been doing, that a simple touch could feel so clumsy — but after a minute it got better. The tension in Honey’s muscles drained away, her head dipped onto Tom’s shoulder, she dropped her cigarette and sighed heavily. “Longer,” he said again.

“
Three more minutes.”

“
Honey …” He hated that she was still clock-watching. He knew that all this wasn’t just a part of the act, another twenty dollars-worth, because he could feel the heat of her skin and the coolness of tears on his chest. Something had happened, removing the sex from this moment and replaced it with something far, far more.

Tom knew that Honey had not been designed for that.

“
I want to stay like this forever,” she said, and it was like a punch to Tom’s chest. “Forever. But you saw Hot Chocolate Bob. You … don’t know what he’s like. You just can’t imagine.” She lifted her head to look at him. “If we’re five minutes over he’ll be up here. He’ll kick you out, or worse, and as for me …”

“
What? What?” Tom didn’t want to know what the pimp would do, but he thought that knowing would take some of her hurt and bleed it into him.

“
Us plastics are quite hardy,” Honey said. “We can take a lot of beating.”

“
Part of the design,” Tom said bitterly.

“
Part of the design. Warriors and whores. Need to take abuse.”

“
Come with me!” he gushed, realising how foolish this sounded. An hour ago he’d paid some pimp for a fuck with a random whore, and now he was asking her to run away with him,
be
with him. Foolish, but it felt
so right
.

“
Don’t be stupid,” Honey said.

Tom felt defeated, lost. And stupid. “I’m sorry.” He’d come in this artificial whore’s mouth, and he thought that gave him the right to tell her he loved her.
Stupid
.

But he
did
.

“
Do you mean it?” Honey said, after a long pause.

“
What?”

“
What you said earlier. Do you mean it? I’ve heard it a million times before, but I’ve never had cause to believe.”