Young Writers Society

MORAL ZERO

PART THREE

By Set Sytes

DISTRICT 10, STREET

See, said Red, as they walked down the street in District Ten, The thing with these checkpoints is that they just don’t care none. Unlike the rest of the district, it’s the end of their jurisdiction and they’d rather see the fuckin back of you. Unless they’re already lookin for you and out for your fuckin blood, in which case I guess you gotta judge the risk and maybe find somewhere else to cross. But I ain’t even sure the cops at the checkpoints communicate with those on the beat. And the people on the other side of the gate, that’s a whole new fuckin system man, new force, new rules. They got nothin on you. Districts don’t share criminal data with each other, they barely share anythin. Totally fuckin independent, only connected by distance, like, like ignoring neighbours. The perfect getaway destination.

Red kicked at loose stones on the road as they passed through what seemed like the same kind of street as before but with everything just in a different order, as if somebody had picked the whole street up and shook it and put it down again a bit further on.

Won’t they have a visual description? said Mr White, unconvinced.

Depends how fucked the cop could be to report one, answered Red casually. But that’s why I changed clothes.

What about the hair? You could have put a hat on.

The hair stays.

Mr White’s face was once again taking on rainbow colours as they passed the neon-lit brothels and gun-shops and emporiums and spirit shops and pizza parlours and massage parlours that were not massage parlours at all, and all of them run-down and grimy and sleazy as if by design.

Are you saying there was no risk at all back then?

Oh man, chuckled Red, pointing and clicking his fingers at the shadows around him as if he was imagining himself to be firing pistols to ward off the darkness. There was loadsa risk. A drone coulda ID’d me escapin. The cop coulda had a good enough description for them to match me, say of a sexy young hombre with fuckable hair. Hell, the cop could have been one of those mannin the checkpoint tonight.

Goddamit. Do you know what would have happened to you had you been caught?

Us, Red replied helpfully. They’da took you too for bein with me.

Us, said Mr White irritably. Do you know?

Red shrugged.

I do. We’d have been immediately arrested, imprisoned without bail, sentenced in court the next day with no defence counsel or even case for defence. No jury. No appeal. Then the same day we’d be shot. And if this district is one of those that employ torture, well we’d have that to look forward to as well before we die.

Red shrugged again. Chill man, these things happen.

Mr White put his hands up in the air as if calling to the gods and then put them back down again. Only in Rule Red! Only in Rule! Which is why we have to be more careful! They say that the punishment fits the crime but most of the punishments here seem to be death.

May as well go for the biggest crime then, Red grinned, his teeth reflecting lime green in the glow of the latest sign.

Mr White sighed. Just what were you doing anyway.

Nothin much.

No, really.

Just havin sex.

With who?

I dunno.

You do know though, don’t you?

Yeah.

Mr White shook his head. Red, the risk . . .

Red waved his hands dismissively. That’s why we’re here ain’t it? Without risk what do we have? Without risk we’re nothin doin nothin. What’s the fuckin point? Why are you here?

Mr White paused, not understanding, either what Red was saying or his own reasons for being in Rule. He tried to think. I’m here . . . to escape. The words came difficult and strange, as they always do when trying to put words to something where mere words could not do the job.

Red looked at him as if taking measure of this, and then nodded slowly. Right. See, I dunno where you’re from, but for me, well, back home rules and laws are mighty fuckin thin on the ground. Mighty fuckin thin. Long as you don’t impact on the rich and powerful you can get away with all kindsa shit. That’s cause where I’m from the less you got the more of a fuckin commodity you are. But only en masse, shits ain’t given bout the individuals, see? Drops in the fuckin ocean. The less value they give you the less protection they give you. They look out for themselves and them alone. Like us all. That’s what got built up over time, the instinct to fuck another over. And so you think, right, well it’ll be fuckin chaos right? No sir. No. As each law dropped off the fuckin chart, meaningless in these . . . new ages of the predator and prey, as each law vanished to fuck the people grew more tired. I seen it. I’ve walked amongst the underclass outside the factories and workhouses and old underground bars stinkin from the sewers, and there ain’t life in their eyes no more. They been shit upon so long and it’s been dog-eat-dog there so goddamn much that they got nothin left to chew on.

See, a man gotta have somethin to rail against man. He gotta have a wall to push against else how is he gonna feel strong, how is he gonna feel like his sorry life can get some fuckin remedy to it? Anger’s a powerful thing in a man’s life if it can just get some fuckin direction. Take away that and it’ll just fade away or be turned upon yourself. Rob a man of all controllin forces and you rob a man’s soul. That’s what I think anyhow. That’s what I see. Red ran his hands through his hair and then shoved his fingers in the pockets of his jeans. His lip curled a little and then fell.

Mr White looked confused. But the government, well, uh, the upper classes . . .

Red pulled his fingers out of his pockets again. The families, yeah. Just the one class at the top y’know. But they’re untouchable. The wall they put up ain’t the kind to push against, it’s the kind that’s been there all your life and all the lives before you. You don’t even notice the fuckin thing, it’s like the sky. You go your whole life and until someone points it out to you . . . well you just don’t think. Well I didn’t. None of the hollow bastards I seen back home would. And it don’t matter if the absence of laws are absent cause the fuckin families steadily made it so, cause the fuckin Elite wanted to fuck with – literally too, y’know – every man woman and child of the underclass. Hell, of everone not them. Even them too if they thought they had the upper hand to fuck one over on one of their own without getting fucked over in return. I’m talkin real sick gangster shit man. But that’s just the way of the world ain’t it? A guy could walk about and kill a dozen workers or prostitutes or fuckin orphan kids and there’s no kind of authority to stop him and the families would do jack shit unless it harmed their production. But they can make em breed so damn fast I can’t see why it would.

Red breathed deeply. He was kicking every loose stone and piece of rubbish he saw along the street, his face shifting to every colour as if some magical being torn between every emotion and sin, or some chameleon shifting to become one with the goings on around him.

So a guy like me, he continued, as if it all had to come out if any of it did. A guy like me feels like one of those selfsame hollow bastards, cause everthin on my level is empty, no sense of fuckin danger or immorality to get you hot inside, cause morality itself is like some ancient word it’s used so little and there’s lots that don’t know what it means. Everthin around me is washed fuckin clean of fun and that . . . that evil spark of livin that makes bad men do what good men dream. Y’know? Ground level’s not a playground no more, it’s fuckin sterile, and the ceiling’s so high to reach it may as well be the fuckin sky.

Red sighed and coughed. He reached in his pocket for cigarettes and lit one and smoked it, tilting his head right back and breathing it out as if was nectar to share with the gods, as if every cloud of the day was formed from those who smoke at night. He held the cigarette burning in his fingers and spoke again, as if there was some need in him to explain that he had not hitherto felt.

So you know what happens when you can do anythin and not have any threat of punishment, and that state of things ain’t just a temporary hole in things but it’s the real fuckin state of things? When you can do anythin you end up doin nothin. We thrive on conflict man, on the fuckin risk you are gaggin for me to avoid. Crime drops from all but that which the Elite do, which ain’t measured just seen by all. The upper class are gods, the middle class are escapists and the underclass are fucked. You don’t wanna see the kind of shit I’ve seen people from the families or employed by them get away with. Makes some of these people in Rule look like goddamn fuckin saints. Hell, everone else are just things to the Elite. The lower you are the more of a fuckin toy you are. Y’know? Shit.

Red took a deep breath and smoked. So you see why I’m here, why any-fuckin-body’s here. We’re here to live man. And it’s worth the risk of inconveniencin ourselves.

I didn’t realise death was an inconvenience.

Red laughed. It ain’t that bad.

Tell that to the dead.

I have done.

Mr White yawned and suddenly felt very, very tired. Alright. Let’s find a hotel and find some relatively comfy sheets to die in.

What do you think we been lookin for this whole time? Red rolled his eyes at him. Neither of my eyes are on this conversation amigo.

He stopped right there in the middle of the street and turned to his right and looked up. Let’s just take this one man.

Mr White looked. No way, he said.

HOTEL

Unidentifiable insects roamed the walls with sneering abandon. This place was theirs first and would be theirs still after the humans and semi-humans and all their creations were long dead. Even the moments when you couldn’t see them you could hear them, tickling the inside of the walls, and in the silent seconds each of their tiny legs resounded like clacking boots.

The last attempt to paint the place must have been in some previous age of humanity, when humans cavorted naked and whooping as nought but shaved apes. As if we had only regressed since then, evidenced in this maggot’s palace. The water ran, just about, and the plumbing worked on occasion, but any upkeep and maintenance more than that was the stuff of fancy. Was the place ever liveable? Perhaps in that previous age. Before whoever owned the place had turned their attention to things of greater import, such as dealing, gambling, prostitution and snuff rackets.

The place was a front, that was clear. But Mr White kept his head down and his eyes blinkered and he made sure he knew nothing. They walked to their room on the ground floor, and any of the rotting wooden doors left open slammed shut as others heard their approach. Red narrowed his brow as they passed one, and evidently he heard something salacious for he smirked and shook his head. Mr White was not listening. He just wanted to sleep.

They entered the room and were surprised to find it no worse than the hotel in District Five. Sure, the curtains were rags that had at no point ever been actual curtains except when defined by their use. Sure, the bed was grubby as muck and painted in a thousand stains, not just the sheets but soaked through into the broken-springed mattress, all those essences of soul and sickness that leaked down into the barrel of the world. But it was a place to sleep, and it was dirt cheap, and that had suited Red, at least, fine.

Mr White looked around the small room, as if expecting something tucked away, as if the room could hold big secrets in its corners. He put his hands on his hips. There’s only one bed. I thought there’d be two.

Shotgun the bed.

What.

You can take the floor. Here man, take the second pillow and the extra sheet.

How thoughtful.

No worries. I’m goin sleep now. You alright?

Yes. Okay.

Guess what we’re doin tomorrow?

BAR

As soon as they entered the bar Mr White knew something was different. The lighting was the same, and yet the room appeared darker, shrouded and close. It seemed as though the space within was trying to escape the walls, push away from claustrophobia or some dark energy, as though something within was a force without reckoning, something foreboding and fearful that all other matter and empty space shifted imperceptibly away from. The walls showed strain, buckling towards another dimension.

The whole area was a bubble and it swallowed them up. Inside even the air felt sharper, daggered and skeletal. Air colourless as always and yet inexplicably blacker, swaying with dust and decay and creaking soundlessly. It made its place there not as a giver of life but as though it were a saw upon the human soul. The soft lights, still and yet aching under invisible duress, cast shadows upon the wall so dark as to be empty forms in the universe, empty souls and holes in the world. Looking and losing oneself in those small oblivions turned the inconsequential animate and malicious, lengthening such casts to gangling monsters and cage bars.

The bar smelled of whiskey and smoke and death. This was not intangible, a phantasm of the world under the scope of the mind. This was something real to them and they breathed it in as one might breathe in anything that was there.

They found themselves moving towards the epicentre, and that which pushed all around it pulled them in as though they were at the end of a rope.

Rum and mixer. Red was leaning over the bar. Yeah, anythin. No, that orange one. With the pirate. Yeah. No ice. Cool.

Mr White stood by him and shivered though it was not cold. He turned to the man next to him.

Johnny Black’s face was not as conventionally handsome as Red’s, and certainly possessing none of that effeminate prettiness, none of the cleanness or smoothness, the jovial cheek. His face was hard and weathered, as if dashed by sandstorms. His nose was lean and pointed like a weapon. His jaw was tough and grizzled and leant his features a grim mood, as though the grit of it ground his teeth from a life of too much death. His hair and eyebrows were black as the night and his eyes were pits of surging darkness. His was a face of authority and command, of beckoning attraction and obsession indirectly, from the feel of it all, from how weak and silly you felt in comparison.

He was sitting at the bar smoking and he turned to look at his witness and Mr White shared a gaze that locked his limbs. It went right to his gut and his heart and the soul of his groin tore like paper.

Um. My name’s Mr White, Mr White said. He was stiff and self-conscious of trying to act normal. Self-conscious of sweating. He curled his toes tight.

You got a first name? The man’s voice was hewn and leathered and edged in Death’s whisper.

Mr White hesitated. We . . . don’t need first names.

Fuck that. The man held out his hand, hot and rough. The name’s Johnny Black.

Kidd Red pushed in front of them, holding his drink sloshing the sides of the glass, and the man whipped his hand back, sheathing the thumb into his belt.

I heard of you.

Well. Ain’t that something.

You murdered three people out in Seven. We were there and I was talkin to some folks and your name kept comin up. They said the cops were raidin places lookin for you.

Wowee, Johnny Black said blankly, his voice low and guttering. Wasn’t me. I distinctly remember not being there. I was out in Nine, killing six. He smiled, and his eyes burned, and he put that fat black cigar of his back twixt his white lion teeth.

You’re joking, right? Mr White said.

Now why would you ask a question like that? His deep southern accent was almost well-spoken beneath the cracks, as though he could belong both at a dinner party and on a ranch. He spoke like a hard-living man well-read.

Johnny Black puffed on his cigar, and crackling desert smoke broiled out in front of them, making Mr White cough. He twisted on his barstool and beckoned the bar girl over.

Three whiskeys. The one with the holocaust on the bottle.

She swamped and fired the little glasses so the liquid was hot on top like bubbling blood. She banged them down in front of the three of them and each one sounded like a gunshot.

He laid out a note on the bar top without looking, wrapped around a knife. His eyes were intent on the floorboards.

The bar girl glanced at it, and walked faltering to serve another. He walleted the note and the knife was hidden.

Have you ever seen someone with their guts out around your ankles? Johnny leaned in close all a sudden, his voice drizzled and sweated in coal. You ever killed someone you were fucking, or fucked someone you were killing? You ever seen the limits of human emotion? He withdrew a fraction, a sideways smile stamped on a suave face and a look so hard and penetrating and mordant that Mr White felt like he was reaching in and fingering his soul like a plaything, like a puppet thrashing on his hands.

You’re a psychopath, Red said.

Is that what you think I am? A dance of amusement played about his eyes, a lip curl rocking on his mouth like a boat.

You are. Red leaned against the bar.

Some are quick to judge. Where’s your latest underaged conquest?

Red’s eyes widened.

Yes. I’ve seen you about. Such a fine stallion of a man. It’s a wonder you ain’t hailed as a saint. Johnny Black grinned, his teeth glinting.

Red looked about to start up, but Johnny raised his hand. Easy. We’re all sinners here. Drink up.

They all did the shots and Kidd Red and Mr White were left spluttering with mouths of brimstone. Johnny Black had drunk his down like water, and the only fire was in the darks of his eyes. He watched the other two recover without expression.

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.

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

You don’t have the capacity to understand.

Definitely something 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 drawn 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 backs 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 hyenas. 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.

After they ate they walked the streets like lost boys, each quiet, even Red, in their own private reveries of the night. Kidd Red was a slave to the gazes of the women, moving closer to them, staring, smiling, shoulders twitching in silent little chuckles at each new delight. Mr White looked and thought and analysed everything about him, reading faces and movements like words in a book. Johnny Black moved through the world as if he were his own shadow, said nothing, and the coloured lights that glared down upon them cast down on his low pulled hat that kept the top half of his face black and impenetrable, melting it into the rest of the night. He stalked like a panther and smoked in whispers.

Red had halted to chat with an aug outside. She was young with auburn hair and her lipstick was blue and she had no arms. Her figure was a strongly augmented hourglass, and the heavy top and bottom balanced each other out just enough to keep her standing. Mr White could not hear what Red was saying but it was clear they were flirting outrageously and Red was laughing and swaying slightly as if to an invisible breeze. She laid her eyes on his belt and he put a hand on her ass and pulled her in and she said something and he said something and the night erupted in a shrill thunder, a world-trembling foghorn screech that blacked out all other sounds to the tune of red flashes in the sky like blood lightning.

What the fuck was that? Red looked about in alarm, releasing the girl who vanished into the doorway behind her. The siren had ended as quickly as it had come.

You know what it was, Johnny said. Forget it.

Red looked confused for a second, and then his eyes widened. Oh, fuck. That’s what happens? Fuck.

Remember the rules! Mr White hissed.

I know the fuckin rules man. You know how we all respond to rules. We play them like a . . . like a . . . Red gestured impotently . . . And it’s the same damn thing.

He looked back at the now empty doorway and turned back to them, his face comically sad and puppyish for a second, and then he shrugged and it left him.

Where’s Johnny?

Mr White looked around. He was just here. Just here!

Red shrugged again. Ah, fuck him.

Johnny Black had been lost to the shadows, and within ten minutes Mr White had lost Red too, lost to a brothel and two women of opposite ages that wrapped him in their arms and drew him in to their lair. Mr White wandered the street from top to tail and back again and back again, not wanting to return to the hotel on his own, and worried about Red. He was propositioned by women and men, augs and cyberdolls of all ages and ethnicities and genders. He politely turned them all down and some of them he felt gave him a strange look. As though a man of such resistance was no man at all. Something that didn’t belong.

Two hours later of wandering up and down and going in porn shops and out again and in peepshows and out again and eating pizza in a green-lit parlour and just when Mr White was starting to think he had missed Red who had most likely gone home without him he stumbled into him exiting a completely different brothel.

Oh man. Red clapped Mr White on the back and bent double and vomited.

Come on Kidd. Come on.

It took a long time but eventually Mr White managed to steer a tumbling Red home. Or the closest thing to home they had that wasn’t a bar. A home of nocturnal insects and stained dreams.