Sweet Parts

MIDSUMMER’S EVE: 1969

It was hot.

Kopek sat with his face pressed hard against the windowpane, glorying in its cool smoothness. Sleep seemed impossible and staying awake was pure torture.

He was fourteen and lonely and afraid.

The newspapers were full of hatred. There was going to be a war, he knew. An atomic war. Despite what everyone said. Despite their desperate hopes, their frantic prayers. He knew, he knew.

Why were people so blind, so stupid?

He didn’t want to die. At least, he didn’t want to die like this: A virgin. A future artist. He didn’t want to be destroyed in such a thorough manner that nothing would be left of him. No body. No ashes. No memories.

A shooting star drifted across the traitorously beautiful sky. He wondered if that would be the I.C.B.M. The one with his name on it.

An instant before his fiery death, he began to cry.

SOMEONE SOMEWHERE

His mind full to the brim with traditional English negativity, Kopek trudged his lonely way southwards, back into the City. Down the moving pavements of the Grays Inn Road, through the crumbling facades of a deserted Holborn film studio and over the Gilded Bridge into New Fleet Street.

That was where he worked. That was where he earned his peace of mind, his justification for staying alive. That was where he edited a daily column for the ‘Anarchist Wanker’ newspaper.

That was the place. This was the time: 1976 A.D.

Being the instigator of the Evolution was all very well, but it didn’t pay the rent. Or so he told himself as he entered his office.

His office: His name was on the door. He had a certain amount of fame (or infamy). It wasn’t too hard a situation to accept. But sometimes…

He sighed. There was a large pile of letters on his desk. Some of them even bore postage stamps. He chose one of them at random and worried it open. The inevitably crumpled and grubby manuscript fell out, which he picked up with a pair of antique silver philatelist’s tweezers. (He knew it wasn’t wise to get his fingerprints on some of the more dubious documents.)

However, it merely turned out to be a rather pleasant love poem, evoking warm and tender memories of a simpler, more decadent Age. Kopek actually liked it. He had become susceptible to nostalgia. He supposed it appealed to his latent necrophiliac tendencies.

What was the author’s name? He quickly deciphered the signature at the foot of the page: ‘Jonathan Kopek’.

He swore to himself. Surely the continuum wasn’t big enough for the both of him…

OBLIVION

… and then, he was meandering along a long, cold road, facing into a lonely and cynical wind from the north, rank with a briny stench from the sea food stall outside the pub… Kopek cursed himself bitterly, feeling both angry and embarrassed that he couldn’t keep to a straight line… After all, it wasn’t as if he was drunk… He had only imbibed a couple of pints of cider… That was all…

… blood warmed his distant, unruly feet; trickling down from where he kept tripping himself up… He groaned in pain and anguish… His ankles must have been thoroughly stripped of flesh…

… sitting in the bar of ‘The Eternal Triangle’, he tried desperately to communicate with a woman he had just met… “Time brings all the stars together!” he cried. “You know… A star on your face and all that… It’s just another bloody aspect… Like crapping all over the world, eh? Eh…?”

… but he just couldn’t get to sleep… Whenever he closed his eyes, the bed seemed to rise into the air and spin round and round and round and… It was yet another conspiracy, he decided… Space itself had turned against him…

… staring into the water at the bottom of the toilet bowl – ‘Royal Doulton Vitreous China’, he kept reading – he realised that he didn’t feel nauseous any more… Had he already been sick…? He couldn’t…

… sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on a fresh pair of socks, it all seemed to have been a vivid but confused phantasy… Now completely sober, he tried to recall the real events of the previous night… But they made no sense… There was no… sequence…

… time was static… Only people moved…

… undressing for bed, he discovered that he couldn’t remove his socks… The blood had congealed… They were stuck firmly to his feet…

… he woke up in a small puddle of cold, foetid vomit… His face was plastered with a yellowish-brown crust… The long strands of his thick black hair were matted and greasy…

… perhaps he should have stayed with vodka… His usual tipple…

THE BARRIER WITHIN

Bird song, sweet and soothing. The gentle hum of insects. A cool breeze on his face and in his hair, carrying a heady mixture of powerful, exotic scents. Warmth. Feathery light touches against the bare flesh of his arms. A feeling of tranquil security.

Kopek opened his eyes to chaos.

Colours: Colours attacked him. Viciously. They struck at his eyes. They tried to smash them, gouge them, from their sockets. They struck deep into his brain. They pierced it, again and again. Unrestrained cruelty. An explosion of pyrotechnic psychedelia. A riot, an orgy of visual sadism. Clashing and blending at random; colours that whirled and spun, that streaked from horizon to horizon, that spotted and blotched without reason, without logic, without pattern…

Flowers: Flowers everywhere, tall and bright. He had to stand on the tips of his toes in order to see over them. Not that there was anything to see, except for more flowers. He pirouetted round in what he judged to be a complete circle, but saw nothing else. It was a featureless plain, apart from the flowers.

He smiled, he blinked, he sighed. He didn’t really know what his reaction should be. Laughing, he stretched out a hand and touched one of the magnificent blooms. It looked like an overgrown clover, with a head as large as a feather duster. He sneezed, finally succumbing to the pollen laden air.

Up above, a few disparate and nebulously grey clouds drifted across the pale purple sky, which was dominated by an immense, brilliantly orange sun.

At that moment, he realised how very strange his surroundings actually were. A profound sense of unreality numbed his senses. The sky appeared to become suddenly overcast. The flowers seemed to wither away and to scrape harshly against his fingertips.

He shuddered. The sky should have been… grey? … blue? … green? And the sun… red? ... white? … golden?

“My name is Jonathan Kopek.”

The words at least sounded convincing; but could he be truly sure?

A few hours later, sweat shining on his face and trickling down his body, he gave up following the sun; which didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, either. There was little point in carrying on any further. Flowers still covered every square metre of land and had become even more densely clustered.

He sighed in exasperation.

What kind of place is this? he wondered. And what am I doing here? And why can’t I remember anything? And how did I arrive? And when? And… ?

Amnesia.

The sun glared.

Something was moving through the undergrowth. Its movement left a kind of track, as the flowers were disturbed then sprang back into place again. He could hear the rustle of leaves against its body, the crunching sound of dry humus being crushed beneath its feet. Sounds that drew nearer and nearer…

He became aware of the dull but rapid throb of his heart and the hiss of air between his lips. His lungs laboured painfully, as if he was suffocating. The sweat of fear prickled at the base of his spine, abruptly jolting him out of his morbid reverie.

A glimpse of a pale creature, sinuous and crouched.

Kopek scanned the ground, then bent down. He tore at the arid soil, quickly uncovering a large stone. One end of it was rounded, fitting comfortably into the contours of his palm. The other end tapered to a rough, jagged edge, forming a primitive sort of weapon: A flint axe.

As he straightened up, the sun dazzled him. He closed his eyes.

Bird song, sweet and soothing. The gentle hum of insects. A cool breeze on his face and in his hair, carrying a heady mixture of powerful, exotic scents. Warmth. Feathery light touches against the bare flesh of his arms. A feeling of tranquil security.

Kopek opened his eyes to chaos…

THE DISINVASION

The sky was a pale, dirty shade of yellow, heavy hung with dark, silver edged clouds. Rich ruby light blazed from just above the horizon, from a bloated, setting sun. Beneath such grandiose forms, the twilit earth was merely a grey shadow, feeble and unattractive. Here and there, a few tiny trees were silhouetted bleakly against the heavens, their lifeless branches spread in mute appeal, or perhaps in abject surrender.

Kopek stood upon the rounded crest of a low hill. He was huddled up against the maliciously playful wind, which kept whipping the long strands of his black hair into his eyes and mouth. Feeling cold and lonely and afraid, he glanced yet again at his watch and still remained ignorant of the time.

Open countryside was intimidating. Open sky made him feel dizzy. A combination of the two was downright unthinkable. Virtually a religious experience. Wanting to scream, he stamped his feet on the damp ground, pretending to be interested in its texture.

How he longed to be on board the Starship, to be free of this fragmenting world, to be drifting in the nothingness of interstellar space…

Soon, he thought. Soon. It’s all oscillation.

CRITIQUE

A possible future. A version of the present. A distortion of the past: It didn’t really matter which. It was all just a variation on a simple and ultimately boring theme. Good old Time. So long as you keep on ticking, baby. And not too fast, at that.

He gazed at his wrist and seemed to become fascinated by the black hairs that were arranged so neatly upon his pale, urbanised flesh. Hell! He had forgotten that he didn’t wear a watch any more. One of his recently affected gestures against mindless conformity – and one of his more pretentious gestures, too.

The poetry reading went on and on and on. Kopek was thoroughly bored. The theme of all the poems was supposed to be ‘Alternatives to Religion’, but he had long since lost the connection between that theme and what the poet was presently saying. Consequently, he felt lonely and removed and also very contemptuous, as well as a bit silly.

He knew, instinctively, that the critical moment had arrived. And not too soon. As he looked around the small auditorium, he realised that the rest of the audience was rapidly drifting off into a deep culture coma…

He yawned. This was finally it! Under the cover of his rather threadbare black corduroy jacket, he eased the safety catch off his tiny SMAKgun. Its micro-miniaturised batteries began to hum, building up a massive electrical charge. He smiled nervously, toying with its personally sensitised trigger mechanism.

The woman sitting next to him also yawned. Kopek inhaled a deep, quavering breath, then stoop up.

As he took aim in the proscribed manner – arm bent, one eye closed – he noted with disgust that no-one was taking any notice. Not even the people seated directly behind him, whose view of the stage must have been completely blocked. A peeving observation, which moved him to delay making the ultimate criticism.

“Hey, Leggrin!” he called to the apparently oblivious poet. “I hope you’ll view this philosophically!” (Not the slightest bat of an eyelid, the turn of a single hair.) “After all, you’ll soon know whether there really is a…”

Leggrin drew his own gun and fired from the hip. Kopek doubled over. The bullet ricocheted off one of his ribs and imbedded itself in a convenient kidney. As he fell to the floor, he collected three more bullets. They did him no good at all. Quite the reverse, in fact.

All of a sudden, there was a lot of blood splattered everywhere. He watched the warm red puddle getting bigger and bigger.

“The truth hurts…” he moaned softly, wondering whether or not he ought to cry.

A fanfare of yawns heralded his demise.

THE IMMORTAL VACUUM

It was a strange world.

There were eight clumps of trees arranged in a circle. Each clump was a circle of eight trees. Their trunks were a dull copper colour, their leaves a glorious mixture of red and gold. Bright yellow grass grew waist high all around. It was dry and feathery. The soil was also dry and made crunching noises underfoot. Ancient fragments of weathered metal and brittle shards of bone were imbedded in its surface.

Up above, the sky was a brilliant expanse of light purple. The clouds were grey and disparate. The orange coronaed sun gleamed like burnished brass. Winds played without spirit among the treetops and made occasional mad sallies against the grass.

Kopek stood in the centre of a circle. He could feel the wind in his long black hair. He could smell its dryness and its lack of life. His dark eyes looked about, perceiving that the circle he stood in was a part of a larger circle.

In the centre of that larger circle, there towered a fortress of black stone.

It was a strange world. It was hot and dry and lifeless. Kopek looked about once more and found that his eyes were drawn irresistibly back to regard the fortress.

He shivered.

ROCK BAROQUE

Kopek stepped onto the lift platform. He tilted his head back to look at the harsh square of light through which he would soon be rising. It was dissected by two spotlight beams, red and blue, that seemed tangible enough to be cylinders of tinted glass. Both contained curls of thin, grey cigarette smoke, promising yet another night of near asphyxiation. A lot of the associated close and humid heat had already penetrated below stage.

As if in response to that thought, a malicious bead of sweat ran down the side of his nose. It tickled like hell, but he couldn’t scratch himself without smudging his diligently applied make up. And that just wouldn’t do, he thought bitterly.

The low and previously almost unnoticeable murmur of the waiting audience suddenly became a massive roar. Kopek started shivering, as he always did at this time. Vibrations grew all around him, jarring his delicate brain via the floor… feet… thighs… spine… neck… skull… On and on it went. A sea of desperate voices. A sea that would eternally crash upon the shores of his perception.

Oh, god, her mourned in thought. Oh, god. Oh, god.

Diane stood in the shadows nearby. She listened to the crowd up above – now only giving out a few shrill and disparate yells – and then looked at Kopek. What was it that she felt at these moments? A warm sadness, sympathy, mixed with a gentle and tender kind of joy… She smiled, imagining his probable opinion of such feelings:

“Ha! You’ve lost your perspective, Diane. Too much T.V. and radio and magazines and books and films and whatever. You shouldn’t allow yourself to be deceived into believing that romance is any more than a commercial fiction, you know.”

But she did know. She knew he would only be joking.

Kopek felt someone lightly touching his upper arm. He looked down – vision impaired by the yellow and green criss-crossing of after images – and somehow managed to discern Diane’s sensitive features. She smiled up at him warmly, trying to project as much meaning as possible from her wide, green, expressive eyes. Really, she wanted to tightly embrace him, to feel her face against his, to perhaps shed a few tears; but there was no time. There was never any time.

Understanding a certain amount of this, Kopek felt compelled to respond on a similar level. He clasped her hand fiercely, glorying in the feel of her soft, warm skin. And then the band began to play: Heavy, melancholy chords descended from the stage, charging the atmosphere with strangely appropriate emotions.

With a jerk and a hum, the lift began its gradual ascent. Their hands parted and became cooler. Diane tried frantically to think of something to say, because she knew there had to be words. There had to be words, she knew. She knew.

“Jon!” she called. “Good luck!”

Kopek glanced down and gave a brief smile and a wave. Then the lights were shining on his hair, seeming to set him ablaze. Then the lights were shining on his eyes, making them flash like dark jewels. Then the lights were shining on his face, streaking it with patterns of fresh blood…

TIME IS STATIC – ONLY PEOPLE MOVE

Kopek arrived to find himself surrounded by robots. Their cylindrical black forms glinted with quiet menace, somehow making him think of metallic vultures.

One of them came closer.

“YOU MUST… GOT TO… OBLIGED FOLLOW.”

Kopek didn’t move. He was still suffering from temporal shock. The robot hummed irritably, then poked its tongue out. A long, searing tongue of flame. Heat concussion knocked Kopek to the floor, although the actual beam did not touch him. It was only a warning shot.

“PLEASE… PLEASE FOLLOW ME… US.”

Kopek struggled to his feet and followed. Along straight metal pathways that ended at infinity, through massive buildings of glass and steel, and round and round corridors of mirrors and strange lights; he followed. His confused mind was barely active enough to realise that he had seen no other people than himself, than his own reflection.

The robots halted before an ornate doorway. Kopek peeped in and was instantly dazzled by a violent profusion of colours and shapes. They shifted and pulsed and winked and danced in no easily discernible pattern, clashing and blending at random. But only for a chaotic moment. As if sensing Kopek’s distress, the visual barrage ceased, leaving only a gentle blue-white radiance.

“INCOMING… ENTER, KOPEK,” boomed a voice from within. Aware of his lack of choice, he could only comply.

“I am…” he began, weakly.

“KNOWLEDGE… I KNOW… THOU/THEE… YOU ARE JONATHAN KOPEK… TRAVELLER OF INTER… BETWEEN TIMES… COMING FROM THE PAST… I KNOW.”

“All right.” Unreality possessed him again, numbing his reactions. “Then who are you, that you should be aware of me?”

“SO MANY YEARS… EXISTING… I AM THE HUMANITY… EVERYTHING IS MINE… MINE.”

Kopek felt a sudden pang of fear. “Where are all the people?”

“I AM THE CENTRAL COMPUTER SYSTEM… I CONTAIN ALL INFORMATION… I CONTROL ALL UNITS… I AM THEREFORE ALL PEOPLE… I AM ALL PEOPLE.”

“But I only travelled five years into the future. Leggrin said. Said that there couldn’t be a genocidal war within seven. And. And I saw the buildings. They were perfectly intact. So, where are all the people?”

“WAR… WAR… GOODBYE EVERYONE… DESTRUCT AND CONSTROY… WAR.”

“There couldn’t have been a war.” That was one of the few things of which he was certain.

“YES… YES… SUICIDE IS FUTURE MURDER… THE DEAD PEOPLE CAME TO US… THEY KILLED… AND I MUST KILL… AND THEY KILLED… AND I MUST KILL.”

“Stop it! Stop!” His head was falling apart with chronistic nausea.

“DISENGAGE ACKNOWLEDGE… PLEASE… PLEASE RUN AWAY KOPEK… RUN AWAY… I MUST KILL YOU… NO… MUST KILL… NEGATE NEGATE… KILL YOU… STOP… RUN… KILL.”

The robots started to mill about, shooting blindly at each other. Their loyalties were also divided. Kopek was strangely detached from the whole incident. A part of him wished to summon up a flow of adrenalin, but it was such an abstract wish, so remote, that he could see no reason for flight. Time potentiality quivered through his body, barely strong enough to maintain him in the future, but certainly too great to allow his journey back.

“YOU MUST STAY ALIVE… YOUR BODY MUST RETURN INTACT… HISTORY… TIME WILL CHANGE… CHANGE.”

“Can you make those funny colours come back?” asked Kopek, vaguely.

“THE RETURN OF YOUR INCINERATED BODY… RESULTED… RESULTED IRREVOCABLY… INTERTEMPORAL CONFLICT… THE PEOPLE OF… OF YOUR TIME… DESTROYED THEIR FUTURE… CIRCLES… I MUST NOT… TIME DECREES… I WILL ALWAYS KILL… MUST NOT… MY PROGRAMMING SAYS… SAYS I DID… I WILL… MUST NOT… THERE MUST BE AN END… AN END KOPEK… HELP ME.”

A robot entered the room uncertainly. It jerked from side to side, emitting sporadic bursts of flame. Buzzing with effort, it tried to regain its stability. Conflicting impulses fogged its sensors.

Kopek viewed everything as if through a glass of brine. He could almost hear the sea from which it had come. His intra-time tolerance was actually sinking into its murky waters.

He would soon be leaving, one way or another.

DREAM OF A NEW WORLD

Kopek stood upon the gentle, verdant slopes of yet another hill, drinking in the perfumes of the land; the sights and sounds, the taste and feel. He breathed the heady air; rich with the scents of peach and apple blossom and the sweet aroma of rolling pasture. He observed the many orchards, bright with flowering fruit trees; the fields of corn and barley, the meadows in which cattle were free to graze unmolested. He listened to their contented cries and to the rustle of leaves and grass; a soothing symphony. He felt the balmy wind against his body, on his face and in his hair.

He smiled. For once, it was a genuine, unaffected smile. Although he had the body of a twenty year old, his sentimentality was that of someone far older.

He descended the hill; the huge red sun shining at his back and suffusing the whole scene with a soft pink radiance. The grass beneath his feet came to an abrupt end, giving way to a narrow path of twinkling pink mica. This widened at the foot of the hill, where an avenue of tall cherry trees began.

A cloud of red and white butterflies billowed at his approach, then just as swiftly settled again to bask their wings in the warm sunlight.

At the far end of the avenue, Kopek could see the great, glistening rear wall of a marble manse: The Chateau Rose. From this distance, the wall seemed pink and smooth. But in reality, he knew, it was composed of thousands of creamy white blocks, patterned with crimson veins.

The world was pink and rosy. Kopek couldn’t help wondering what would happen to spoil it, this time.

AUTOCIDE

Car and man consumed the motorway. (Grey liquid shining streak of paint on a dusty canvas. Stars on sticks. The artist was dead… forgotten… his mind was out of control.) Car and man devoured the road. Parallel lines; an arrow of accusation… perspective doomed…

Kopek glared into the midnight rain. His eyes burned from the depths of shadows. Pale face framed by long strands of black hair. Nostrils flared. Lips full and expressive… incarnadine…

The silver Harrington Alpine roared through the dark. It knew no fear. It sensed no doom. A cool form glorying in the night…barely acknowledging control…

Heartbeat strong and echoing. Breathing swift and harsh… rasping between clenched teeth… The car’s vibrations massaged his knotted muscles… his hands were hooked like claws upon the steering wheel… His head throbbed in horrid rhythm.

Memories. “Fool!” he muttered again and again.

Diane… those green eyes… those soft lips… that warmth. Diane with another man. It was beyond his understanding. Passions burned in harmony with eyes… had he really loved?

“Diane… why, Diane? … why?”

Age old refuge of tears. Put out the passions… drown them…

“Diane! Answer me!”

The man. She loved him. Steven Leggrin his name. Tall and slim… fair hair… blue eyes. His friend… Kopek’s friend…

DEATH IS NOT MY WEAPON (ONLY MY ART)

The water was a shifting kaleidoscope of black and yellow symbols. Pagan and disturbing. Black with the charred remains of bullet riddled corpses. Yellow with the reflected light of burning buildings. Sluggishly, the incinerated bodies floated down the Thames; macabre rafts for the hordes of rats that sought to escape the doomed city.

Kopek sauntered along the ruined embankment, a SMAKrifle under his arm, moodily regarding the infernal desolation. Slimy blocks of rubble tilted beneath his feet, threatening at any moment to topple him into the grisly, infested river.

A series of muffled explosions sounded behind him. He glanced back, just in time to witness the grand, stately collapse of the Strand Hotel. An enormous sheet of flame suddenly obscured his view. A wide stream of blazing napalm, which flowed from Charing Cross, along the Strand and across the whole length of Waterloo Bridge.

Kopek grinned; his face a barbaric mask of primitive, cavorting shadows. A scorching hot blast of wind battered at his body. Flying sparks raised blisters on his exposed flesh.

He laughed out loud. A wild, exultant yell of triumph. A scream. A mad, orgasmic scream.

His eyes… were unbearable to behold…

SCREAMING

He couldn’t sleep any more. He just couldn’t.

Before now, Kopek had managed to sleep through entire wars. He kept telling himself: “There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong.” Forty long days and nights without a single wink. Diane could have helped him to get over it, but she was nowhere near this particular crisis point.

Everywhere he looked, there were anachronisms. The whole structure of society was poised on the brink of collapse, but the final push had never come.

His hard copy of today’s official government news broadcast lay crumpled on the grass. But where the reports of the food riots? The culling of the unemployed? The deployment of battlefield nukes in Soviet Ireland?

He couldn’t cry any more. He just couldn’t.

TRAVELLING OVER THE CRIMSON DESERT

Travelling over the Crimson Desert, Kopek saw, so dim in the distance, a phosphorescent citadel of frozen light. Tall and gleaming, its thin, acicular towers somehow resembled beckoning fingers; impelling, compelling him to walk towards them.

Presently, he encountered the Weeping Way. A gravel path made not of gravel but of splintered and crushed human bone.

To both sides, there rose massive white obelisks of such a garish hue that they threatened to turn him blind. From each came a wailing, mournful cry, bringing salt tears to his weary eyes. One sang such a tortured tune that it actually seemed to strike harmonies with his heart and mind.

He couldn’t walk any further. Instead, he fell, trembling, to his hands and knees and crawled fearfully towards the obelisk’s brilliant expanse.

He embraced it and felt an unexpected warmth and softness that lovingly drew at his very soul. Strange compulsions… huddling… darkness… security… overwhelmed him. He willingly relinquished his body in order to regain the vibrant somnolence of pre-birth.

A sudden X shaped mental movement. He discovered himself looking down at his own curled form from atop some towering pinnacle.

Shock awareness struck him. He had become the obelisk: One of many entrapped mentalities, doomed to cry out his lunatic grief until another recipient spirit passed by.

He rebelled in a surge of fury, vainly trying to flail the limbs he no longer possessed. He attempted to scream. His pillar form shuddered and released an anguished wail. Vibrations consumed him, almost orgasmic in sensation. He seemed to writhe like a serpent.

An eruption. A feeling of being everywhere and nowhere. Another X shaped mental movement.

Pain!

Knives gouged insanely in his skull. Intestines performed a sinuous, knotted dance. Lungs throbbed and reverberated like two taut drums. A churning ocean of liquid flame lapped at the shores of his stomach. Limbs, like tree trunks, were being felled by an ice bladed axe.

Something, formless within him, moaned out of darkened depths and flowed, chilled and gelatinous, from his body. He forced a rheumy eye open and just managed to glimpse a brief heat haze flickering as it sank into the earth.

The pain had gone He had reclaimed his body.

Still trembling, he struggled to his feet and looked all around. In the midst of some broken, weathered stones, there lay a partially decomposed human figure. Its dirt festooned skull gazed at him sadly; eye sockets filled with midnight shadow.

A gap marred the appearance of the avenue of obelisks.

There was silence as he carried on down the Weeping Way. A feral silence, with an almost tangible presence. Even the crunching of bone beneath his feet was respectfully muted.

And then, there was more pain! It arced through his back. The strength of a sudden impact knocked him to the harsh ground. Death loomed overhead, in the shape of Steven Leggrin, carrying a bloodstained crystal and laughing insanely.

“You’ll never learn, Jon! A bluff is always far worse than the reality it conceals!”

Kopek managed to raise a faint chuckle in response, then puked and promptly died.

THE CLAUSTROPHOBIC NOW

Exhausted and wheezing painfully for air, Kopek collapsed onto the muddy ground. Driven on by fear, he crawled laboriously into the dark green shade of a horse chestnut tree, which he hoped would serve to conceal his much abused body from any pursuit.

(“Leggrin!”

“Of course. It couldn’t be anyone else, really. Could it?”)

He leaned back against the rough trunk of the tree and gazed blankly down at his hands. They were dry and brown; gnarled and knotted and wrinkled into small, hard claws. As he watched, a large fragment of withered flesh flaked off and fell between his legs. It could not be distinguished from all the dead, decaying leaves amongst which it had settled.

(“There. I’ve patched you up nicely, don’t you think? Perhaps you’re not completely alive, but at least you won’t die, eh?”

“Bastard!”)

His stomach, or what remained of it, was paining him again. He groaned in agony. He was bleeding profusely from the anus.

(“Your brain, heart and lungs are all functioning quite well and you’ll soon be able to come off the dialysis machine. The new legs I grafted on have taken nicely, too. Hmm. Unfortunately, you’ll have to continue being fed intravenously. I was forced to remove yards of rotted intestine, you know.”

“Shut up. I’ve got a headache.”

“Ha ha. That’s the spirit. Keep smiling, right?”)

Kopek howled. The beginning of a long, drawn out yell of anguish. Until his jaw bone broke.

He then curled up and waited for the hospital staff to find him. His escape attempt had been pointless, he now realised. Pointless.

(“I know you’re in pain, but surely you don’t wish you were dead again…?”

“You don’t understand. But maybe you will. One day.”

“Not if this experiment is successful.”)

Death really had become preferable to life. But Kopek couldn’t die. His best hope now was to return to the hospital and at least have a life that was painless. And perhaps he would be able to convince someone that the experiment was a failure…

THE GENE REBEL

Looking back down York Way – an expansive, menacing forest of dry, sprawling weeds – and then across the chaotic vista of what had once been Kings Cross railway station, Kopek suddenly felt terribly afraid. Not because of the packs of grotesque mutants that were rumoured to lurk amongst the great orange and grey chunks of corroded metal, but rather because of the massive black ruin which towered several tens of metres above his head.

Suspended aloft by eight colossal legs – once incorporating a system of escalators that had catered for thousands of commuters every single day of the week – the vast, circular platform of the disused and disabled helicopter port blotted most of the pale Islington sky from view. Straddling the shattered buildings and the mangled streets, its dark, baleful form appeared to be a hideously bloated spider, poised to fall upon its mortally ravaged victims. However, it too was doomed. The Evolution had seen to that.

Kopek’s brain went cold. He turned away from all the desolation and faced into the cosy depths of Islington proper. The golden sun hit him like a laser beam. A blast from the past. Whistling a tuneless tune, he strode with false bravado into the oppressive Victorian neighbourhood and tried hard to ignore the brooding presence of countless prudish ghosts.

Obviously, he in no way belonged here. He would be much relieved when this New Age finally consolidated itself. Or would he? There was every reason to believe that he somehow managed to perversely thrive in an unstable environment.

Probably, when society again became reasonably settled, he would be the first to campaign for a NEW New Age.

OUT OF THE PYRE

The siege against the Black Fortress had been cruelly repulsed. Kopek was the only survivor. He lay, exhausted, in a bed of withered poppies, half way up a hillside that had been scorched to a crisp golden brown. His clothes were black with soot and still smouldering. His eyes were wide with horror.

A welcome breeze cooled his broiled flesh and tantalised his nostrils with the vague odour of burning.

He stirred feebly and gazed without interest down the steep, barren slopes of the valley. A thick bank of blue smoke was climbing up towards him, as if from the depths of an enormous barbecue pit.

The wind assailed his senses with the distinctive savour of burning flesh.

He closed his eyes and awaited the inevitable. Long minutes passed. Eventually, the smoke reached up and engulfed his supine form. He choked, sickened by the stench of burning human bodies.

Tears flowed, streaking his blackened features with barbaric lines of white.

SURRECTION

All the diverse pieces slotted neatly back together and Kopek found himself once more amongst the living. Or, at least, amongst the momentarily living. He looked around the small ward and watched the other patients being wheeled frantically to and fro; observing them with horror as they disappeared, limb by limb, until nothing remained of them, except a stain on the bedclothes.

After a short while, in order to retain his sanity, he just came to think of them all as being ‘bodies’. He withdrew from his bleak, antiseptic surroundings – from the never ending chorus of death rattles, from the rich odour of fresh flowing blood, from the continuous maddening blur of white upon white – and consequently became little more than a ‘body’ himself.

Time vagued and ached by. One by one, his sinister mechanical attendants were torn from his healing flesh. A process which pleased him greatly, for – despite constant assurances to the contrary – he had come to believe they were all feeding from him, rather than the other way around.

Sedatives numbed his fragile mind. He was currently re-living various golden, misty aspects of the past decade, quietly singing all the old rock’n’roll anthems to himself. Nevertheless, at the dge of his awareness, there was a sense of recent misery.

“Hello, Jon. As sentimental as ever, eh?”

Kopek looked up and felt dismay. He had an unwelcome visitor.

“You!” he croaked.

“In living colour.”

Steven ‘Legs’ Leggrin struck an arrogant pose at the bedside, incidentally blocking Kopek from reaching the buzzer to summon a nurse. Today, he was wearing a bold red bomber jacket with a matching pair of tartan oxford bags. His appearance gave Kopek a strong clue as to the year. It was 1974 and Leggrin looked as smug and as cool and as smooth as could be.

“You’ve got a real nerve coming here, ‘Legs’. I’ve a good mind to call sister and have you slung out.”

“Ha! I wouldn’t do that, sweetheart. You might come undone at the seams.”

Kopek whimpered. It was true. The few husky words he had just spoken had already cost him a fair deal of pain. Any attempt to shout would be excruciating. Or, more probably, fatal.

“All right. What do you want?” he demanded sullenly.

“Want?” Leggrin grinned a deadly little grin, then bent down, so that their faces very nearly touched. “I want you to promise me something, darling. That’s what I want.”

“Piss off!” spat Kopek, his breath ruffling Leggrin’s feathery blonde hair.

Leggrin gazed deep into Kopek’s dark, shadowy eyes, then suddenly punched him in the ribs. Kopek sobbed with the sharp, unexpected pain. He couldn’t breath. His guts were tied in horrid knots. He gasped fearfully for air. The pain became an agony. His eyes filled up with tears.

Leggrin stepped back and waited impatiently for the spasms to come to an end. He was anxious to be off. He had made a date with one of the nurses.

“You bastard…” moaned Kopek, totally spent.

“OK!” Leggrin hissed, peeved by his defiance. “You’re going to be a good little boy from now on, aren’t you?”

“Don’t lose your cool…” Kopek muttered, trying to laugh.

“Aren’t you?!”

“Yeah, yeah…”

He was drifting away… Away into a beautiful argent haze… Harps and fluttering wings… Leggrin thumped him again, brutally. But with no effect.

Kopek was safely dead.

YOUTHENASIA

It was all over.

Kopek sat on his makeshift throne, thinking about recent events. About the violent euthanasia of some thirty million people. About the Evolution; the Gene Rebels.

He laughed. It hadn’t been so much a revolution as a Rabelaisian! Yeah. All in all, it had been a fun experience. And now it was all over.

The cities were little more than scattered piles of jagged brick fragments. Everyone over the age of nineteen had been tracked down and put down.

Towards the end, the whole thing had just degenerated into a wild game, a true phantasy. Many a poor Geri-case had been forced to perform weirdly obscene acts, to submit to multiple rape and to grovel for small signs of mercy, only to be physically tortured to the point of insanity and to finally be torn into bloody shreds.

Kopek grinned with a fierce relish of such days. The thrill of the hunt. The carrion odour of blood. The sheer joy of animal frenzy. Glorious! And he was the cause of it all. He was the Leader, the Messiah, the Godhead. All the credit and acclaim was his.

Kopek was confidently in command. He was sure, he was positive, he was certain that everyone would overlook his twentieth birthday. Tomorrow. They would doubtless turn a blind eye. He was their hero, after all. No-one could murder their one and only, personal, ultimate hero. Pure madness!

It was all over.

INTERSTELLAR HIJACK

“It’s all oscillation,” muttered Kopek. A particularly apt observation, seeing as how he was standing in the shadow of the Tower of Big Ben.

“What was that you said?” enquired a cultured voice.

Kopek turned around slowly and with apparent calm, even though his stomach had virtually inverted itself in fright. For a moment, he had thought the game was up.

“Good god! It’s little Jonny Kopek!”

Kopek then sighed with mock relief, dashing the perspiration from his brow. The bastard had turned up early.

“Hello, ‘Legs’. I see your acne’s cleared up.”

The elegant, pin striped figure of Steven ‘Legs’ Leggrin displayed an unusual emotion: Embarrassment. He coughed theatrically, playing with his sunglasses, then removed his bowler hat and used it as an ineffective fan, all the while making curiously exaggerated puffing and panting noises.

Kopek smiled wickedly. “Hot for the time of year, ain’t it?”

“Rather.” Leggrin brightened up visibly. “But not as hot as it’s going to be tomorrow.”

“Oh?” Kopek feigned interest.

“And for that matter, nowhere near as hot as it’s going to be the day after.”

“Oh, super!” he enthused. Looking up at the emphatically blue sky and squinting into the white sunlight, feeling it scorching his sensitive cheeks, he could only too easily have dozed off.

“No! You’ve missed the point!” wailed Leggrin. “Can’t you see…?”

Not bothering to mask his irritation, Kopek opened his eyes and regarded Leggrin’s anxious features.

“Not with my eyes closed, I can’t.”

“I’ve just got to tell someone.”

“So tell me!”

“Well..” Leggrin lowered his smarmy voice to a confidential whisper. “It seems that it’s going to keep on getting hotter and hotter, until the whole world is completely dehydrated.”

“Just like a prune.” Kopek tossed his head back and chuckled indulgently. “”You shouldn’t believe everything the weathermen say, you know.”

“I might have known you would just mock me! I should have expected it! Nothing touches you, does it?”

“Not when I can’t do anything about it, sweetheart. I mean, be reasonable. There’s no point in…”

Leggrin’s face blazed crimson, passion making it even more ugly than normal.

“Stop being so bloody condescending! You’re not god!”

“And I’m not running away, either.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Ha! And there was me thinking that the Old Age was over and done with. You’ve still got all the sweet virtues…”

Leggrin’s face twisted again, suddenly becoming blank and cold. His voice had the tone of a death knell.

“All right, Kopek. I’m tired of this masquerade. You’ve been following me for weeks. This meeting was no accident. What do you know?”

“Everything, of course. That you’re planning to escape the coming Evolution, along with several other key government figures. That there is a Starship concealed beneath the dome of St Pauls. Fully stocked. Fully fuelled. Ready for lift off.”

“And?”

“I want to book a seat. By the window, if possible.”

“And with your back to the engine. Ha! Sorry. No vacancies.”

Kopek smiled and produced a SMAKgun from his jacket pocket. He was full of surprises.

“There will be, though. Won’t there?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Leggrin consulted his wrist watch, then pointed along the Embankment. At precisely the same moment, there was an almighty crash and a deep, prolonged rumble. St Pauls Cathedral fell apart in four neat segments, to reveal a tall, silver, cigar shaped object: The Starship.

“You overestimated my importance to the government, you see. Even I don’t have a seat.”

“You always were a bloody failure.”

THE ETERNAL VICTIM

In a small cave at the edge of the Crimson Desert, Kopek struggled out of yet another screaming nightmare.

His hands and feet were ablaze with pain. His mouth was as dry and cracked as the rough sandstone floor.

He licked his lips with some disgust. They had the taste and feel of leather.

His whole face was immobile; a grotesque mask of hardened epidermis.

He moaned, half crazy with fever.

He was famished. He was parched.

He propped himself up on his elbows and knees – a painful and precarious position – and started to crawl towards the back of the cave. Towards the possibility of water.

He lost his balance many times and screeched with agony and frustration as he fell.

His feet were like a couple of joints of roast pork: Medium rare.

His hands were shrivelled black claws of charcoal encrusted bone.

At last, he discovered a small, murky pool. Little more than a puddle. Not that he cared.

He took a few sips of the dark, brackish fluid. Each mouthful made him gag. But he resolutely forced it down.

His head spun. His mouth and throat burned with nausea.

He whimpered feebly.

He was going to die.

THE GRAVAMEN

SMAKgun in hand, Kopek clambered over the mounds of smoking corpses. The blackened bodies had been smouldering steadily for the past three days. For once, he was glad that his olfactory senses had been damaged. The stench would otherwise have been overwhelming.

He caught sight of his reflection in the window of a department store. Feeling in need of a psychic jolt, he limped closer to the grimy glass, in order to minutely examine his war ravaged features. Despite everything, he had still retained his vanity.

The face: He grinned at himself. Green fungus covered most of his left cheek. A wet, spongy growth. A unique, virulent strain of cancer. His teeth were black, the gums pustulent, the lips dry and wrinkled. Some months ago, a large portion of his skull had been surgically removed. Consequently, one side of his head had a cratered look, heightened by the web-like effect of the surrounding white, puckered scar tissue. Also, his hair had only just begun to grow back, concealing pitifully few of the crusty sores caused by diet deficiencies.

He shrugged. He’d seen worse.

Something moved behind him. Forgetting himself, he spun round, putting all his weight onto his withered left leg. A dry snap. He collapsed into the shop’s doorway, his shattered, leprous limb bent at an inhuman angle.

Bullets demolished the plate glass window.

Two white uniformed men were closing in on him. Red Cross mercenaries! From the fact that they had aimed for his head, he deduced they must be operating for the TPS division. The dreaded TransPlant Surgeons!

He laughed grimly. He no longer had any organs worth removing.

Where was that SMAKgun? Ah, yes.

He sat up and closed his fingers round its stock. Another salvo of bullets screamed by. One passed clean through his forearm. Luckily, gangrene from a previous wound had left it nerveless and bloodless. The hole wept a little clear fluid, but that was all.

Yet another volley. The revolving door exploded behind him. Whirling fragments of debris stabbed him in the back and neck.

Gritting his rotten teeth, he fired back. Two quick bolts of invisible temporal energy. Overloaded, the two mercenaries could no longer be tolerated in the present moment. They were whisked off into another Age, where the forces would be in equilibrium.

A clap of thunder. Air filling a vacuum.

A couple of severed nerves had been jolted back into synchronisation. A massive tidal wave of agony surged up from his broken leg and flooded into his battered, leaky skull. As helpless as a kitten, his brain was thoroughly drowned.

He passed out.

DISLOCATION

Kopek stood outside the door of his house. He didn’t want to open it. His head began to ache and he felt extremely foolish, but still he made no move. It was a cold evening, so he shivered. The wind pushed his hair back, making it wave like weird antennae. Fine rain tickled his flushed cheeks. He suddenly felt depressed.

He took a deep breath as he pulled the front door key from his pocket. It fell to the ground.

Clatter echo brain.

Christ, he thought. Sweet bloody Christ.

Blood roared in his temple; roared like a hellish furnace. He crouched down and experienced a sickly stiffness in his joints. Dizziness spun the world round,

----- round -----

----- round. And then slowly, so ridiculously slowly, he toppled over sideways.

The ground was cold. Beautiful cold. He vomited all over it, all over himself. He didn’t care. It was completely beautiful.

And dark
----- dark night
----------- night skies
------------------ skies laughed
------------------------ laughed insane
---------------------------------- insane stars
----------------------------------------- stars of
----------------------------------------------- of death.

Kopek stayed there all night, huddled in a pool of his own excrement. He didn’t sleep. His mouth and eyes hung vacantly open, collecting rainwater and starlight. From time to time, he laughed or a tear ran down his face. But neither action was indicative of any particular emotion.

The sun rose. Life went on. Kopek twitched circulation paining through his body. He gave a groan of deep agony, a croak of self pity. But no-one heard. The purple skies remained impassive. Black clouds scurried by overhead, spitefully hiding the sun from view.

THE COLOURS OF DEATH

Eventually, the fever broke. Kopek emerged, limping, from the cave at the edge of the Crimson Desert, his mind a confusion of images.

Most vividly, he recalled a face. A beautiful face. Green eyes brimming with tears. Bright lips. Words. Accusations; always accusations he couldn’t understand.

He whined miserably. His body was wasted; gnarled and wrinkled and sorely dehydrated. His hair had turned grey. His bones formed prominent spurs and ridges, straining to break free of his taut, restraining flesh.

Weeping bitterly, he began to trudge across the blazing sand, oblivious of all his hideous wounds. His ravaged face. His desiccated hands. His broiled feet.

Lonely. He was so very lonely.

From time to time, he called out a name.

“Diane! Diane!”

Often, the name was unintelligible, being little more than a hoarse, keening cry. A dirge. A lament.

Behind him, a huge pall of grey and orange smoke blotted out most of the pale, purple sky.

The golden sun glared.

His argent tears flashed as they struck the blood red sand.

TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER

“So!” he rasped, in a voice no longer his own. “You have perceived my mysterious secret! For that, you shall die and die most horribly!”

His face contorted strangely. His face began to ripple and writhe, seeming to actually boil. His whole body was convulsed by a series of inhuman undulations and pulsed in an obscene manner.

Kopek stood, paralysed with fear, as the body of his friend changed before his very eyes. In a matter of seconds, which passed as long millennia, he underwent a sickening metamorphosis.

A quivering grey mass slopped at Kopek’s feet. It sent out several long tendrils that flailed the air, seeming to be without purpose. But suddenly, they all stiffened and pointed in one unanimous direction: Precisely at Kopek’s heart.

It slithered forward, slurping and sucking, poised cobra like to strike at its victim. Small moans of terror escaped Kopek’s throat. He could neither move nor speak, but could only stare emptily at his oncoming doom.

One tendril touched him. It was cold… As cold as death itself, for that’s what it was.

He screamed as the creature devoured him alive.

CORAMPOPULIS

The 8:25 AM bus shuddered over the broken road, frightening away a few small bands of rats and crushing those others who were too weak to move.

The rattle of the bus’s antique internal combustion engine, the crumble and crunch of road and rats being crushed beneath its wheels, the dull thumping together of close packed commuters and a faint howling of wind were the only sounds to be heard echoing between the avenues of empty, decaying office buildings that threatened to collapse on top of unwary intruders.

Suddenly: An explosion!

The ground erupted. Screams of pain and fear. The bus lurched and overturned. Its cab disappeared in flame. A massive crash. Glass flew. People fought to get out. They ran or crawled away. Burning, smouldering, bleeding, bruised or whole. They tried to escape.

Four figures appeared on four rooftops. Each carried a rifle. The harsh staccato of gunfire. Bullets tore into the road. Fountains of dust leapt into the air. The ground became red and slippery. Bodies writhed in a screaming dance. Others were flung skywards after stepping onto mines. More explosions. Dens e smoke filled the street.

Silence.

Kopek limped free of the carnage, weeping bitterly. He tried to shout something – A curse? A political slogan? – from a mouth filled with spittle and blood. Falling to one knee, he vomited all over his legs.

A final bullet struck him in the back of his neck. It pitched him face forwards onto yet another mine.

THE DREAMING LOST

Kopek woke up very slowly and very gently, gradually becoming aware of the nature of his new surroundings. The room was bright and airy. A log cabin, of sorts. The smooth, thick timbers were creamy and unblemished. One moment, they smelled fresh, like pine and the next, the smell was sweeter and a little more heady, like sandalwood.

The room appeared to contain no furniture, other than the broad oak table on which he lay. He moved his head slightly to one side. The flesh on his face tingled sharply, as if burnt. He lifted a hand in order to…

The whole hand and forearm was bound with gauze as far up as the elbow. In places, a dull orange coloured substance had seeped through the coarse fabric. It looked faintly corrupt and ichorous. He made as if to wiggle his fingers. Nothing happened. He could just see the tips of the middle three. They resembled a small bunch of charred sausages.

He raised his other hand. It, too, was heavily bandaged, but the forearm was bare. Completely bare. Not a single wisp of hair remained on the singed, pink flesh.

A little fearfully, he propped himself up on his elbows. Again, his face pained him. The muscles seemed stiff and hard. He licked his lips cautiously. They were sore and split in several places, with the texture of leather.

He glanced down at the rest of his body. He was dressed in a plain silk robe, gathered loosely at the waist by a black velvet cummerbund. Both of his feet were swathed in muslin, stained with the now familiar orange secretion. By the size of the two inexpertly tied bundles, he supposed they contained some kind of poultice. To soothe the raw, angry blisters…

His memory was returning… The nightmare flight from the Black Fortress… The fetid stacks of burning corpses… The blazing red sand…

A footfall sounded in the doorway. He jerked his head up abruptly, scattering the lurid images.

“Hello…”

A woman. A young woman, whose slim form was flattered by a robe similar to the one he was wearing.

“How are you feeling?”

She was not exactly beautiful. But he found himself responding to her as if she were devastatingly so.

“Er… fine…” He smiled, despite the pain. He beamed, in fact.

She seemed apprehensive. “Can you…?” She paused, looking even more nervous. “Can you… remember anything?”

He quirked his lips, trying to think of a gallant reply. About how her presence, her very libido, was confounding his memory and sweetly shattering all hopes of mundane perspective.

“Not much,” he admitted.

“Oh.”

Her wide, amazing eyes glistened with moisture. Was she going to cry? Had he upset her? He felt unaccountably awkward and guilty.

“Who are you?” he asked softly.

She turned away.

“No, don’t go!” he called. “Please. I’m sorry.”

She hesitated, momentarily unsure of herself. She sighed heavily. A painful, quavering sound.

“I…” He could think of nothing adequate to say.

She turned to face him again. Her liquid eyes flashed coldly. Her thin, dark lips trembled as she prepared to speak.

“I am your wife,” she stated quietly, her voice tinged with a hint of bitterness.

Her gentle, accusing voice echoed forlornly inside his head… echoed forlornly… echoed… echoed…

Defiantly holding back her sorrow, she stalked off into the fiery waste of the Crimson Desert. The jagged grains of sand crunched rhythmically beneath her feet.

The harsh, dismal sound died away into the distance. Kopek was alone. He never saw her again.

A BRAIN DAMNING AGE

“What is your name?” he wondered, idly plucking at some greasy blades of grass. “Diane…?” He pressed his fingers into the damp earth and laughed. “Always, I have only known you as Diane.”

“Who are you?”

Kopek spun towards the sudden voice and saw that it had come from a young child. Male or female, he couldn’t tell. The child’s hair was long and black, combed forward in a ragged fringe over dark shadowy eyes, pale chubby cheeks, a button nose and a pair of thick expressive lips.

Kopek frowned.

“There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong.”

“My name’s Jon. Jon Kopek. I’m five.”

Kopek frowned even more. The anachronisms were becoming too much for him.

“Who are you?”

The child was laughing at him! He stood up quickly and started to run towards the east, towards the sun. “Diane!” he screamed. “Diane! Diane! DIANE!” Up above, the clouds mocked him as they rushed to hide the sun. Dimly, out of the corner of one eye, Kopek could see the child staring at him; pretty head tilted to one side.

“I know you! I know you!” he was chanting.

Howling, red eyed and demented, Kopek veritably flew from Regents Park.

FRAGMENTATION

Kopek felt awful. His head pulsed. A sickening, continuous throb. He looked at his reflection in the mirror. His face was flushed; sweat breaking out on his forehead and on the bridge of his nose. The image went out of focus. Dizzy… Deep inside his brain, something snapped. Cold. A cold shock.

He blinked. There was. He. Where? Confused, he stepped away from the hard glass. Something. His image frowned at him. He frowned back. The room… spun without moving… then righted itself. His body twitched convulsively. Everything clicked neatly back into place.

He could hear music emanating from the disco upstairs. (Shit, he thought. It’s 1974 again.) Humming to himself, he crashed through the swing doors, pirouetted daintily to the right and danced into the dimly lit saloon bar. A girl loomed up before him – her hair a pale pink cloud – dressed in the traditional faded denims. She smiled a magnetic smile, not so much inviting as compelling. And Kopek was duly compelled.

“Evening, Sheila,” he grunted, always the romantic.

“Piss off,” she replied, always the realist.

“No thanks,” he riposted. “I’ve just been.”

She bared her sharp little teeth. “Well, go again, Jon. You’re still full of it.”

Kopek turned away; a broken tragic-comic figure. “I love you!” he called back over his shoulder.

“Don’t be disgusting!”

Laughing, he stumbled awkwardly into the table he was sharing with a friend. Their drinks danced a jig, but amazingly not a drop was spilt. Wobbling slightly, he took a deep breath, exhaled it sharply, then sat down.

“Talk about the Odyssey,” he quipped. “Lucky I’m not Homer-phobic.”

“You were gone a long time,” commented Leggrin, his friend.

“That’s what I said!”

“And you failed to score with that weird slag. The one who looks like a walking candy floss.”

Kopek shrugged. “At least I’m consistent.”

Just then, a well cut pair of trousers slinked by. Kopek and Leggrin watched them avidly, nearly choking on their drinks. They had never seen anything at once so subtly and yet so blatantly sexual. They exchanged a common glance, making strange faces and even stranger noises. Kopek sneezed violently, tears filling his astounded eyes. Some of his vodka had gone up his nose. Leggrin sketched a V in the air with one finger. Kopek nodded in lecherous agreement.

At that moment, the dense veil of cigarette smoke parted and a young woman stepped bravely through the transient gap. She was small and slim, with long brown hair that bounced as she walked. Her face was white, without actually seeming pale. Creamy?

Kopek stared at her. A sharp, nagging pain started up above his right eye. He could. Almost. Something. He? He knew that her eyes were green. They could be no other colour. It was. Impossible.

Leggrin peered at him with genuine concern. “Are you all right, Jon? You’ve gone green…?”

Kopek was uncomfortably hot. Feverish. He could feel beads of seat breaking out again, in all the folds and creases of his body. The pain in his head was becoming more diffuse by the second, proliferating like a malignant cancer.

His eyes burned. “Diane,” he stated. “Her name is Diane.”

“Do what? What are you talking about? Hey! I’m not going to have to carry you home again, am I?”

But how could he have…? He wished. He wished. He stood up clumsily, rocking the table for a second time. Circles. Light and dark. He took a step towards Diane’s curiously distant body. He had to. Pain washed over him. Heat. His body. The universe spun. Receding. A dark whirlpool. Fading…

His body twitched violently. Fragmentation.

CEREBRARCHY

Press button. Pause. Press button. Pause. Press button. Pause. Pull lever. Pause. Press button. Pause. Press button. Pause. Press button. Pause. Pull lever. Pause. Press button. Pause. Press button. Pause. Press button. Pause. Pull lever. Pause. Press button. Pause. Pause. Pause…

Kopek fell from his place in line at the gleaming, multi-coloured battery of control panels and lay moribund on the dusty grey floor. His thin and yellowed body spasmed as he vainly tried to draw just one more breath. Gasping horrifically, he turned over onto his back, exposing the stark spurs and valleys of his rib cage, the swollen and inflamed mound of his stomach, the shrivelled and diseased genitals…

In the blue denim jacket of a Foreman, Leggrin shuffled slowly across from the other side of the factory, his uniform unable to disguise the fact that he, too, was grossly undernourished. As he walked, he was forced to lean heavily on his electrified discipline stick in order to support his wasted, rickety limbs.

On reaching Kopek’s fallen body, he looked first at the skeletal head. What little hair that remained was long and grey and lifeless. The blind, staring eyes were jaundiced and bloodshot. Open sores glared crimson around the arid lips, as bright as the numbers tattooed on the blue veined forehead. Numbers that Leggrin noted meticulously on a small clip-pad.

He then took a deep breath, before dragging Kopek’s limp corpse along the floor and slinging it into a dingy corner, along with three others. Despite their appearance, they didn’t rattle like bags of old bones. Instead, they flopped and floundered like jellyfish as they tumbled to a crazy halt.

Disturbed dust settled. Leggrin returned to his appointed station. The machines rolled on…

AN IRRELEVANT EPISODE

Leggrinblest, the city of shining metal, supposedly immortal and unsurpassed, was forced to bow before the superiority of entropy. Slowly, silently and without sentient audience, the silver towers gave a final spark and twinkle before collapsing into a grey, featureless drift of dust.

Scavenger winds picked the inorganic carcass clean, bearing random titbits to sundry uninhabited lands. Within a matter of hours, the eternal city had been wafted to its paradoxical demise. A very last powdery cloud was blown up the gentle slopes of a hill in the land of Go’nowsw’ere and deposited on its barren summit.

Thus it was that the demigod Leggrin withdrew his dubious blessing from a city once teeming with his worshippers. Perhaps, one day, he would choose to rebuild it. Or perhaps not. It was quite possible that a higher deity might eventually even tire of Leggrin. But that would be of no consequence.

Meanwhile, Kopek knew nothing of such matters and nor would the knowledge have moved him in the slightest. Observing a panorama of barrenness from atop Go’nows’were Hill, his only thoughts were of the soreness on his right hip, caused by the gleaming axe-like weapon tucked into his belt.

Boredom made him feel a lot more fatigued than he actually was. It had been a year since he had seen anyone and at least three years since he had had cause to speak. Not that he minded too much. The last encounter had almost cost him his life.

A faint breeze stirred the moribund air. Kopek sighed, drawing in a deep breath between clenched teeth. Its feral stink choked him. Dust filled his nostrils and eyes, gritted between his teeth and pervaded his senses with the corrupt odours of decay.

Hawking, Kopek turned his back to the wind and clawed at his grimy eyes. Tears stung and streamed down his face, streaking it with lines of dirt. Blinking and ineffectually striking at the air, he muttered a few impotent curses. The wind remained undaunted and flicked several of the long strands of his black hair into his mouth. Spluttering, he brushed them back in place with an irritated jerk of his hand.

The wind expired. The dust settled. He just had to laugh.

As he carried on over the hill, a yellow skull grinned back at him from between two rocks. He kicked at it, but connected badly and nearly fell over. The skull barely rocked back a centimetre; but it was enough to scare a rat out of one of the mournful eye sockets. The emaciated creature limped away, squeaking pitifully. A few disturbed and ravenous fleas gave chase.

Kopek leaned back against the trunk of a storm-blasted tree and laughed rather throatily. Although he truly felt he ought to be crying.

The sun glared.

INVERSE TIME

The sea sparkled overhead, shedding a sickly green radiance onto the barren ground. It was barely bright enough to provide a shifting twilight, making hunting very difficult. Years of subjection to the poor visibility had wrought no improvement in Kopek’s eyesight. It just happened to be yet another fact of life, which he had to accept.

Hunting was bad that day. As far bad as bad could be. Even the Skysharks weren’t darting down from the watery heavens, due to the scarcity of game. However, Kopek was having better luck than most. He was creeping silently up on a feeding Fiverjack. Only a single, crumbling mound of dust now separated him from his prey. He drew his axe from its sling and hefted it with obvious expertise.

Suddenly, he flung himself high into the air, then crashed down heavily on the Fiverjack’s back. A harmonious squeal broke from its five elephantine trunks, as it abruptly exploded into quintuplets. Each segment hopped away madly, intent on escape.

Uttering a harsh war cry, Kopek lashed out at the nearest segment. A dull thud. A screech. A warm spray of blood soaked his arm. Not hesitating over the mangled remains, he dashed after another of the creature’s parts.

As he closed in on it, the nightmare thing spun round, whipping about with its powerful trunk. The blow caught Kopek full on his chest. He was thrown back violently and briefly stunned. Yet another mad uniped barely missed crushing him underfoot. But, taking advantage of this, Kopek struck viciously at its leg, sending it tumbling over the dun, dusty dunes.

Satisfied that the feebly hooting form was crippled, he turned his attention to the three remaining segments. But they were far beyond reach, having re-integrated into a single creature, which was tripodding away over the horizon. Kopek smiled his foiled hunter’s smile, then returned to his catch.

He was at once shocked and dismayed to see that a shoal of Skysharks was already circling the fallen bodies. The creaking of their massive scaly wings seemed to mock him, increasing his rage. Cursing himself for being so careless, Kopek attacked the hideous carrion eaters. His axe whirled in a gleaming arc above his head, hacking at their loathsome silver bodies, gouging out their goggling eyes and spilling their blood and brains on the thirsty ground.

Razor sharp teeth snapped mercilessly back at him, trying to tear chunks from his neck and arms and genitals. Powerful fins slapped harshly against his body, knocking him off balance. Kopek was soon overwhelmed. He was battered into the dust. Teeth ripped and gnawed at his flesh, laying bare the bones beneath. Screaming and screaming, he rolled about in thick crimson mud, trying desperately to shake some of them off! To escape them! To end the unbearable agony!

SILVER HARRINGTON ALPINE

Car and man consumed the motorway. Its parallel lines converged in the distance to form an arrow of accusation; a pointer towards some unseen destiny. Kopek felt, or rather knew, that something was going to happen when he reached that mystic zone of distortion.

“Yes,” he muttered to himself. “Perspective also doomed.”

Fine rain whispered against the windscreen. Dark woodland blurred by on either side. Tall lamp post swished past with monotonous regularity. It was all far too much. He just... could not… stand the… regu… lar pul… sing of… rea… lity…

Savagely grinding the accelerator underfoot, he bared his teeth in a deadly grin. The car roared. His eyes opened wide, bulging white, as he fought to hold back an abrupt surge of hysteria. As he fought an impulse to laugh with strange abandon.

There was a man up ahead. He stood in the road, transfixed inside the headlight glare, making no attempt to run. Time became sadistic. For a terribly long moment, Kopek and the man regarded each other with sheer horror. Shadows played amongst the man’s features, contorting them into weird and ugly shapes.

Kopek wrenched at the steering wheel, holding his eyes tight shut. He groaned at the sound of skidding rising in an agonised counterpoint to the man’s screams. He groaned at the barbaric sound of metal impacting with soft, warm flesh. He groaned at the sound of wood being splintered beneath the car’s body, indicating that he had crashed through a roadside barrier.

The car plunged down a steep embankment: Somersaulting like a mad clown, bucking like a wild horse, fragmenting like a meteorite, it plunged down a steep embankment. At the bottom, it smashed hard against a massive boulder, then lay still.

Small shards of glass and metal rained all around, disappearing into the mud and dead leaves. Pebbles and splinters of wood cascaded down the embankment in a miniature avalanche. Kopek’s body fell forward and lay draped over the steering wheel.

(Far, far below, set in an infinite plain of featureless black onyx, was a huge crimson whirlpool. It rotated lazily, making graceful spirals… of time? From somewhere in the gentle darkness, there came a muffled pulsation, a rhythmic drumbeat. It echoed away and away…

In time with each beat, great capsules of liquid flame drifted down from the sky. They shone with a fantastic inner light of emotion… A bloody foetus… A star encased in ruby… A tear by firelight… Each sank slowly and without sound into the whirlpool’s incarnadine depths.

Lightning suddenly flashed in the distance. Its searing whiteness leapt across the heavens. Closer and closer. But there was no thunder. Closer and closer. He couldn’t stand it! Closer and closer. Fear raged in his chest. Electricity arced in every direction, burning at his face and body, tearing his eyes out, exploding his fingertips with… sweet agony… oh, the stars… glaring in his head… glaring to reveal… reveal… no!... PAIN… pain throughout… everything… the whole universe… universe of pain…)

Kopek doubled over with the agony of vomiting. The rich stain on the car rug and all down his left leg grew more copious. Blood ran in a thick torrent over his bottom lip, saturating his already gory shirt. It pumped from deep within his body, from the internal wreckage of shattered ribs. He alternated between choking for breath and whimpering with self pity.

As the pain gradually receded, Kopek became aware of matters beyond his own body. The intricate, web shaped pattern of cracks on what remained of the windscreen were strangely mesmerising, particularly when viewed through a rainbow haze of tears. A cold wind grazed his cheek, bearing the raw scents of damp earth, mouldering leaves, burning petrol…

He knew he had to escape from the car. Head buzzing and floating due to loss of blood, he managed to tumble through the car’s buckled door frame. The crimson whirlpool splashed about his ears. Somehow, he summoned up just enough strength to stagger a few metres against its dense and sticky waves. But it wasn’t far enough.

The car pyrotechnic performed its own cremation. The explosion shoved Kopek rudely off his feet. He stumbled head first into a tree. His skull was audibly shattered. Flames burned hungrily on hi back and in his hair.

CHANGE AT KINGS CROSS

Kopek didn’t care any more. Once, he had been famous; but exactly what for, he just couldn’t remember. Something artistic, he believed. Something useless.

It was snowing again, gently. The delicate white flakes touched his body, tickling as they slowly melted, soaking him. He groaned. The sky was heavy. Like a dome of iron. Dark. Almost as dark as the ruins amongst which he lay. He closed his eyes and still only saw darkness.

Ha! Always the philosopher.

And he was tired, so very tired. He had hoped to reach Barnsbury by the afternoon. There was someone he wanted to see. No, that wasn’t correct. There was a place he wanted to see. The person was dead. She had died a long time ago.

He made a strange, agonised sound, even though the pain was by now entirely cerebral. His body had failed him at Kings Cross, just a few minutes’ walk from his objective. The Caledonian Road presently carried him, like a long, battered funeral bier.

But where is it going to take me? he wondered. And why does it have to move so slowly?

The snow turned to sleet. It would soon be spring.

Kopek coughed a few times, bringing up blood and bits of green mucus. He died with a surprised look on his face: Eyes bulging, mouth open.

KNOWLEDGE

The elm grove was eldritch and unearthly. The trees were black and twisted, blasted by storm. Petrified in weird, menacing attitudes. They looked like gargoyles. Stone daemons.

Kopek shivered. He passed swiftly through the small, damned wood. Grotesque faces leered at him. Talons clutched at his body, clawed at his face and stabbed at his eyes.

Vultures wheeled in a monochrome sky.

Presently, he encountered an impenetrable thicket, overgrown with spiked brambles. At least, that is what it had been before all the shrubs had fused together. Now, it resembled a nightmarish tangle of barbed wire fencing.

Almost hopelessly, he drew his axe and took a swing at the nearest clump of saplings. To his astonishment, there was an enormous, soundless explosion. A great cloud of dust filled the air. Fine and grey and powdery. Like ash.

It settled all over him and would not brush off. He smiled uncertainly.

There was a large gap in the thicket, where a number of the desiccated trees had just… disintegrated…

Encouraged by the sight, he wielded his axe with renewed vigour. The cloud billowed again and grew more and more massive, until it seemed as if the whole ghastly wood was wreathed in fog. Still he swept the blades about like a scythe. Powerfully. Irresistibly. Dozens of trunks fragmenting at every stroke. Until…

At last, he broke free of the thorny confusion. As the huge pall of smoke gradually cleared, he realised that he had entered a derelict graveyard. Broken headstones lay strewn all around, their inscriptions no longer legible. Some had been heaped together to form crazy structures and others piled into tall, fragile columns, with the scattered remainder making up what he eventually perceived to be a complex pattern.

Their hues were dismal, being mainly greys and yellows and greens. They were cracked in many places, overgrown with grass and weeds and encrusted with moss and lichen. But they were nonetheless… beautiful… albeit in a rather gruesome fashion.

A man suddenly appeared from behind an angel flanked, black marble cromlech. An old, wizened man with a ragged beard. A man caparisoned in black armour, which was badly pitted with rust.

He looked down at Kopek, transfixing him with a wild and baleful glare.

“I am Jonathan Kopek!” he roared.

Nonplussed, Kopek could only cry: “No! I’m Kopek!”

The old man laughed at such an inane reply and drew his sword. A broad, wooden blade with a serrated edge. He held it high. Its lacquered barbs sparkled in the dolorous sunshine.

“You want to bet?” he demanded sarcastically.

DON’T CRY FOR ME

Suddenly, everything was in darkness. The bombs had ceased falling and the characteristic ‘black umbrella’ clouds had unfurled to cover the ruined city. A chill wind began to blow. Drifts of ash and soot piled up against the rubble like banks of black snow.

There was only one survivor: Jonathan Kopek. He sat on a shattered block of concrete and watched the world ending. His grey eyes were impassive and he seemed oblivious to the cold. He had seen it all before.

This time, it had been the Falklands War. In an attempt to bring the conflict to an early close, the Thorpe government had deployed nuclear submarines in the south Atlantic. Unfortunately, President Presley had chosen to ally the U.S.A. with the Argentinean junta and everything had escalated from there.

The wind grew more fierce. Dust stung his eyes and black tears flowed down his face. He gritted his teeth. There was the taste of ashes in his mouth.

At last, he stood up. The darkness was becoming absolute. It was time to leave.

THE NOUVEAU TESTAMENT

The attempted re-crucifixion proved to be an abysmal flop. The weight of Kopek’s body soon caused the nails to rip through the flesh of his palms. He fell from the wooden cross and lay broken on the stony ground.

A crowd clustered round, remarking on the pallor of his skin… the purple hands… the crimson blood…

Diane turned to Leggrin.

“See,” she said. “I told you it wouldn’t work.”

“Proves you can’t believe anything you read, Di. Not even if it comes from the Bible.”

The crowd returned three days later, just to make sure. However, as they had expected, Kopek’s body was still there. And it stank to high heaven.

STARSHIP OF THE MIND

Slowly, in a painfully crouched shuffle, Kopek wandered along the deadly, echoing corridors of the Starship. A tear tickled his cheek, but he was too weary and too uncaring to wipe it away. Age and grief tortured his wasted body, causing every remaining moment of his life to be full of constant torment. A sob escaped his dry, age speckled throat as he remembered Diane. Poor Diane. She had been his only companion for so many years… but now, the Starship had claimed her. She was dead.

He was alone and he had but little time left before he re-joined Diane, in whatever lay beyond life. Kopek would waste no more time upon this Alternative. He had nothing to live for. All he had left was an old man’s memories of what had been and a total lack of need for what yet might be.

Angrily, he jerked to a halt and cried out. A sound that echoed endlessly throughout the empty vessel. But there was no answer, as he sank to the cold metal floor. Only gentle hums and clicks disturbed the over-purified air. Rhythmic sounds that pulsed alluringly within his fevered mind…

In the space of but a few moments, he fell into a troubled and restless sleep of nervous exhaustion.

SQUARE ONE

A number of wards had been closed down. A few of the corridors were now in darkness and without heat. The male nurse tightened his grip on Kopek’s arm and quickened his pace as they took a short cut through this sinister stretch of no-man’s-land.

Kopek wondered what the nurse feared. After all, the area was completely deserted. Kopek himself posed no threat. He was not a violent patient. Besides, he was presently too weak to be at all dangerous.

The nurse was afraid of his own darkness, Kopek decided; although he was not sure what this thought meant.

They turned a corner and were once again secure beneath bars of strip lighting. At least, the nurse was more comfortable. Kopek winced and adjusted his dark glasses against the harsh blue radiance, which clashed violently with the pale green walls.

The narrow corridors formed a long and twisting maze. The ceilings were high and intimidating. Kopek hunched over more tightly into his shabby dressing gown.

Round another corner and there was the outside world. Grey and unwelcoming. A winter’s afternoon, preserved behind glass. There were no bars on the windows here. The doors could be swung casually open. But he had no desire to step out into that alien, monochrome wilderness. His clinical neon cage was the lesser evil, he supposed. An asylum, it used to be called. Perhaps ‘asylum’ was what he sought.

CASUALTY STATISTIC

Feeling like a discarded newspaper, Kopek lay unmoving on the grey pavement, waiting patiently to be collected and recycled. What a way to go, he thought. A martyr to some unknown cause. Not exactly what he had had in mind for himself.

A dim, flickering shadow passed before his eyes. Dizzy, he allowed his head to loll to one side, so that the Caledonian Road pressed cool and hard against his cheek. He suddenly felt very tired. His whole body ached vaguely.

He watched as a sparkling river of blood flowed past him, heading down towards Kings Cross. The bright patterns of light on its troubled surface were stroboscopic in their deadly appeal.

His poor, mangled legs were its gushing source. It wouldn’t be long before…

Passers by passed by, emptiness in their heavily made up eyes. Emptiness. They were like mirrors; invisible when viewed from the side. Two dimensional. Imitative. Cold and flat. Not that he could blame them for their indifference, he supposed. Terrorist bombings like this were all too common nowadays.

Fear: All around him, his blood was congealing; becoming thick and losing its attractive lustre. He felt sick and light headed – almost intoxicated – due mainly to an acute lack of oxygen. It took a conscious effort for him to continue breathing. And ridiculously enough, he kept forgetting that fact.

A large white vehicle drew up at the kerb, right next to him. Two people got out. He prayed they wouldn’t be members of a fanatical new religious sect that claimed to be able to divine the future from the scattered entrails of a person who had died by violence…

He moved his head slightly in order to peer up at their distant, distorted faces. They were both a bit hazy, but… Yes! He recognised them.

“Diane! Steve!” he gasped in relief.

Smiling beatifically, they lifted his limp, anaemic torso onto a stretcher and carried him towards the waiting ambulance.

HEADING FOR THE END

The dark ruins rattled and squeaked with the frenzied activity of rapacious vermin. Kopek stood among the shadows, hugging a detonator box to his chest and looking up at the two remaining towers of the monastery, which seemed both sombre and frail in the brilliant daylight. He smiled and turned to the tall, spindly form of his friend.

“Are you sure you’ve got to do this, Jon?”

“This is the place, ‘Legs’. This is the time.”

“Can’t stand places like this, meself. Gives me the willies, dunnit?”

“I don’t think the monks resent our intentions.” Kopek began to smile more openly. Things were becoming… rather abnormal… “After all, love. It’s all part of the Evolution.” He giggled. “Or something like that.”

Before matters could get any worse, he pressed the plunger down. Two explosions blossomed out in unison and two towers tumbled; almost in slow motion, like on the television.

Kopek ignored the pain in his crushed legs and crawled through the rubble to where his friend’s body lay. Blood was flowing from all sorts of places, red and shiny. Kopek shooed the rats away, then gently brushed his friend’s hair back into place and laughed out loud.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean for it to end like this.”