Sour Alba

Note: This crime novel is a cross between a post-Great War Lovecraftian horror and near-future SF noir. It’s definitely one for grown-ups.

Re: Please Use Inappropriate Headers

It’s 3am and the sky is getting light again. I’m picking up speed.  I’m very high. I’m very drunk. And I’m naked.

Whisky is raging through my rushing veins and the two wheels of my Norton are donkey-punching this dark lonely road between the mountains and the sea. The mushrooms are kicking in nicely, adding giggles to the ice I’d snorted earlier. I’m hitting 90mph on a single-track that holds the equal promise of starlit exhilaration and oncoming fish lorries. Life and death wrestle behind each blind corner as the white light of my headlight slashes the dark surface of the road. It’s very Yin and Yang and so far the flow of the Tao has kept to the sunny side of the street.

I’m speeding through the dark on the knife edge between life and death. To cap it all, I’m laughing like a child at Christmas.
 
I love midsummer. I love this country. I love this bike. And I love the reason for this mad dash. I ran five miles from a campfire on a silent beach to get to my Commando Production Racer. I flowed across the peat bogs and heather. Now this throbbing motorbike is flowing along the tarmac stream that will carry me to the closed shop outside Kinochbervie where I will somehow buy skins to roll the joint back on the beach that will woo those two horny surf chics into making the beast with three backs with me.

Life is good.

Or rather it isn’t. It’s brutal and violent and nasty. It’s also extremely short and when good things come you should weigh the moment before letting them go. I am not normally the kind of person to risk dying headfirst in a consignment of haddock, or indeed to do something so profoundly stupid as to drive drunk after taking too many hard drugs simultaneously or to indulge in random troilism with anonymous surf chics, no matter how eye-poppingly hot they are.

On the other hand, I’m not usually the kind of person who hides out on remote Scottish beaches with a military-level arsenal, 300 kilos of the finest drugs money can’t buy and some baked beans.

The things I’ve been through have changed my outlook somewhat and I’m taking this opportunity to experiment with new experiences and most definitely not being anywhere near a city.

There is a time for caution and safety but now is the time to ride high and ride naked in the plunging dark.

*******

If you were going to be killed, it was perhaps fitting to be killed at night. The ending of the day, the passing of the light, the coming of the long dark and all that.

It was an odd thought to have after being shot, but the soldier had had an odd day. And now, it turns out, it was his last day. The impossible had happened,

With his animated-reactive camouflage and his noise-damping feedback, the enemy should not have even realised he was on the battlefield, let alone find him. His “head in display” should have shown him every nearby enemy’s arc of fire. His micro body armour should have repelled even mortar rounds without him being aware of more than a slight bump.  Finally, his own peculiar facility for dodging bullets was totally effective.

Sadly, the insurgent who shot the soldier had not got that particular memo. The terrorist had very efficiently killed him. And the shooter would be a terrorist – in a war on terror the enemy is always, by definition, a terrorist even if he is just a farmer with a shotgun or a teenager with a rock. In any case, this particular terrorist’s bullet had struck the soldier’s pelvis just inside his right hip, spinning him like an ice dancer. It had fragmented and sent shrapnel burning into his liver. Lumps of flesh flew out of his back. There was a sudden, massive loss of blood. Had it not been for his combat suit’s in-built medikit with its auto-tourniquet function, he would have lost consciousness immediately. It was a mortal wound. The soldier knew that instantly. Frankly, he could have done without it. He had plans. He had some leave coming up and …

Green lines of light stabbed through the darkness as the solider lay in the dust. The PsychOps guys said the lasers did not need to be green but they were to unnerve the enemy. Apparently 17 years of research on gorillas proved this. Of course, PsychOps being PsychOps being part of Military Intelligence (everyone’s favourite oxymoron) the truth was probably that the lasers did in fact have to be green and they gave their own side arse cancer.

Not that that would be a worry for the soldier. His helmeted head was in the dirt. A very definite kind of pain was gnawing at his gut. His consciousness was swimming, despite the drugs.

Smoke and sand blew across the blackened arid hilltop. Dust and fire whirled from two huddled adobe buildings – the terrorist base that was their target. According to the briefing this was the base of a “small team of amateur insurgents lightly armed with…”  Actually, sod all that. He had been shot. And it was a mortal wound.

As he writhed on to ground, his rifle and body armour automatically sent information about where the shot came from back to his HQ. Flashes erupted in four places in front of his position. There was a scream from one of them – he didn’t care which – so at least his killer was having a rotten time as well. Good.

For “small team of amateur insurgents lightly armed with substandard weaponry” his killer and the bastard’s buddies seemed to have an awful lot of fire-power. Yet again, military intell…. Actually, sod all that. Half of the soldier’s unit had been killed. More to the point, he had been shot. And it was a mortal wound.

The pain was getting worse. He could hardly move now. He couldn’t see. This was not good. Death was a matter of minutes away. His face sank into the dirt. Only, it wasn’t dirt. It was dung. He then remembered through the fog and confusions that the “lightly defended” base was on a farm.

What a bloody stupid way to die. Face down in the shit in the dark on a secret mission so obscure no-one would ever know or care about it. Who were they fighting anyway? Ragheads? Settlers? Seekers? He couldn’t remember anymore.
  
He was supposed to be invincible. This raid was supposed to be like all the others – so many others – lightning strikes against foes who never stood a chance, who didn’t know he and his mates were coming, who couldn’t see them and couldn’t fight back.

The pain was unbearable now. The solder screamed into the ground and put his hand to the wound in a desperate attempt to ease the pain. Christ, it hurt. He took his hand away.
 
There was no blood.

Terror struck the soldier. Then grief. If he was not mortally wounded then another of Us had been hit. It was their death pains he felt.
 
And that was far far worse than dying himself.

*******

The best seats in the Insurgent and Ferret are to be found up in the old minaret. It’s a tight squeeze up the winding staircase, alternately decorated with old Hezbollah banners and hardcore pornography, but it’s worth it. The three tables on the balcony, far above the brawling roughnecks and squaddies in the repurposed mosque, offer a uniquely charming view of East London.

On this November evening, the temperature outside is pleasant, a cool 30C. And because the minaret is above the acid fog I can actually sit outside, as in really outside, as in not in an oxygen bubble. From up here the yellow vapours look soothing and pretty, especially when the rays of the setting sun are turning them into clouds of candy floss.
 
Tonight I am drinking the house speciality so I would probably be seeing candy floss anyway, among other things. My right hand clasps the frosted glass of a nice tall Suicide Bomber – absinthe, homemade potato vodka and SS-20 Super Skunk. Ice, no fruit. If I arrange my fingers correctly I can block out the government health warning. In the case of this drink a warning is definitely required. Two of these in a night will induce psychosis, paranoia, palpitations, partial paralysis and possible incontinence. Three will see the unwary wind up in an evil brawl, a strange bed, a casualty ward and, possibly, a foreign war zone.

This one’s my fourth. It’s been was that kind of day. It has to be said that nearly every day is that kind of day these days. Drinking too much too fast is not big and not clever but it is fun. Well, not fun exactly, more numbing. So numbing, in fact, that when I order another drink I can barely key in my electronic signature on the disclaimer waiving my right to sue the alcohol producer or vendor for any ill-effects, present or future, that may result from my consumption of their product. 

I drink for many reasons, boredom, guilt, disappointment. But mostly I drink to block out thoughts. Not my thoughts, you understand, other people’s. And, ye gods and little fishes, aren’t they achingly dull? Dull, empty and facile. No wonder the world’s gone to hell in a chocolate handbasket.

How I ended up in this predicament is a long, long story and by the time I reach the middle I’ll have forgotten the beginning on account of these four – make that five, cheers – cocktails. Basically, thanks to my old place of employ, my brain’s been rigged up with a hardwired jack to allow constant access to online communication without any need for gadgets or servers or those stupid multimedia spectacles that make you look like a cross between Joe 90 and the Borg.
 
It seemed like a good idea at the time and it worked. But it worked too well. In addition to the truly wireless, direct connection to the net whenever I thought about it I also started to get spontaneous random access to the things people nearby were doing online. Before I realised what was going on this things got very confusing and difficult. It all came to a head when I answered an email before it was sent. Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to for me. It was an email from the Head of Security of the UK Orbital Customs And Excise Service (my then employer) to MI5 about an upcoming state visit by the President of the United States.

Oops. Cue five months of very detailed questions in Camp X-Ray XV, followed by a very large pay-off and a series of explicit threats about the kind of medical procedures that could be used – without aneasthesia – to reverse the implant if I did not prove silent and trustworthy.
 
I have since been silent and trustworthy.
 
But my world is far from silent. I am constantly bombarded with unwanted emails, websites, chat, video, which I have to make a conscious effort to close out. It’s like 24-hour spam in my head. Most of the time I can handle it, but every now and then, it really gets to me. Take the time I was standing on the Tube, packed in as usual, shoulder to shoulder as usual, ankle-deep in water as usual, pressed against a crowd of nuns when some idiot nearby started watching a very high quality, very provocative skinflick. That took some explaining…
 
However, it’s the poetry I can’t stand.

Somebody who seems to be within range far too often has a taste for whimsical poetry. And they dog my footsteps. Wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, I will suddenly be assailed by a stanza, line or haiku. And that really gets under my radar. I sometimes can’t tell the difference between this and my own thoughts.
 
There are benefits, though. As well as getting spammed with others’ reading and viewing material I sometimes get what must be a sense of their history – the other things they’ve accessed, sometimes even if they are not online right now. This gives me a quasi-sixth sense about some people. A fifth-and-a-half sense, if you will.
 
I find this a real advantage in my line of work. I’m a private investigator – and knowing things about people they don’t want me to know is my business.
 
It’s not foolproof by any means. Once I was called in to help find a girl who’d disappeared three days previously. I stood in her bedroom for an hour and then, in a revelationary moment, was hit suddenly by a strong sense of a rural setting, clouds and a bank of yellow flowers. I was just asking her parents if they were familiar with any such location when she walked in the front door with her boyfriend. Apparently they’d run off to Wigan to get married (no accounting for taste, I suppose). I was lambasted for being a complete fraud and laughed out of the house. It was only later, when I checked my access log, that I realised that my poetry-loving chum had chosen the exact time of my revelationary moment to post some bloody Wordsworth.

At least they weren’t reading Lycidas or I’d have told the parents their poor girl had drowned. (And yes, I know Wordsworth didn’t write Lycidas – a piece of information I did not possess before the implant and without which I was really very happy.)

That’s when it all gets too much and when it all gets too much I hit the recreational chemicals hard. That’s what I’m doing in the Insurgent and Ferret. It gives me a holiday from consciousness – mine and others’. In the preceding 17 hours, I’ve consumed something like seven wraps of speed, two joints of AK-47, two tabs of ZX-80 LSD, a couple of lines of coke, a mug of shroom tea, a K-hole express, some crystal and a dozen screamers and laughers. Oh and a decaf, skinny cappuccino with a shot of hazelnut syrup – the only item on the above list to require a disclaimer and another bloody health warning. [I cried for madder music and for stronger wine]
 
There! There, it happened again. I haven’t had any wine. And I never mentioned music. Get me another drink quick.
 
However, there’s another reason why I am larging it today. I have the pleasure of meeting my boss. I use the word “pleasure” in its widest sense, bearing in mind that some people define pushing broken glass into every nook and cranny of their genitals as “pleasure”.

His name is Tarquin and he is quite the most loathesome toad you could ever have the misfortune to meet.

He is a straight-down-the-middle, bottom-line MBA monkey. The worst kind of degenerate corporate drone, never happier than whoring his soul and his ass for a profit margin. Greed and avarice are the highest virtues he can imagine. Even though he is no longer employed by a large corporation, he still uses the verbal analingus that gets one ahead in those temples to Mammon and Dullness. He is so far gone he could actually use the expression “deliver on our objectives moving forward” without then apologetically committing hara-kiri in a bid to end the empty madness. [Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.]

Worst of all, he no longer has to work.  Somehow he had remembered enough long words to write a motivational business book. Tarquin being Tarquin, this was based on Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”. It instructed the aspiring entrepreneur on how rise above the adoring, unquestioning hordes in order to impose the Will of the Market. Instead of being scourged with barbed wire and vinegar in front of a firing squad for crimes against taste, Tarquin was, unbelievably, feted by the business community for this vile text. His sodding Nazi-fest of trite jargon sold like hot cakes, he has obscene quantities of money and now, for him, employment is something “the little people do”.

I am one of the little people and I have the terrible misfortune to work for him, specifically for the small detective agency – Insoluble Solutions (Tarquin thought of the name, of course) – he runs as a hobby, well more as an exercise in screwing maximum profit out of little people’s efffort.

Shorn of charm, personality or culture, Tarquin has used his mighty wealth unwisely. He’s had too much expensive and ill-advised plastic surgery. Unfortunately, he has not yet got round to having his face done. He is toned from the neck down but his round, ruddy face face looks like Billy Bunter’s evil twin after a hard night on the lard pies. He resembles nothing more than a pink tadpole. He also dresses like a rich artistocrat: badly and expensively.

He does have one good quality, however. Among his social circle of toffs, bankers and socialites, he is known to be resolutely, determinedly discreet. And that’s why I do jobs for him – he has access to clients I could only dream of. Rich, easy clients who are more concerned with avoiding scandal than getting results. In turn, he employs me because my service with Her Majesty’s Orbital Customs And Excise Service has a whiff of neo-space-age glamour about it, which impresses these unthinking yahoos.

He also knows I have an uncanny knack for the unexpected and am very uncoventional in my approach. Instinctively, he hates these qualities but he knows he can use them. In his portfolio, Tarquin has different specialists for different tasks. Industrial espionage goes to Persephone Sisters. Tarquin gives domestic disputes and custody cases to Bongo Laius. He turns to Ramdam Hughes for anything involving organised crime or violence. He has a handful of employees for subcontracting general police work. And me? Tarquin uses me when he’s desperate.

I like that. It puts me in a strong bargaining position.

As I slurp down another drink and the walls start to melt, I begin to dread his attempts at the “personal touch”. Instead of just behaving like the soulless greedhead he is, he insists on an empty charade of personal chit-chat. Lines like “How’re the children?” (I don’t have any) trip from his lips with all the joyless pretence of a porn star’s kiss.

Speaking of porn, I know something about him that others do not. Something that he would like to keep secret. Sitting beside him one night listening to a very nice old posh lady describing her lost jewellery I got a sudden flash in my head of what he was looking at on the web through his expensive contact lens screens. Remaining calm, I asked the lady about how many internet connections came into the house. There were four. Quickly, using a useful widget I found somewhere I shouldn’t, I checked if they were active. They were not. I then mentally checked the direction of the connection’s signal. It was definitely coming from Tarquin. He was still online, pretending to listen to this delightful old woman in her tasteful chintz living room. In fact he was paying no attention to her or me. He was pursuing his online hobby.

And that hobby was … drum roll … scatalogical goat porn. Nice.

I told no-one. [Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?]

Tarquin once told me he was known to his friends as Nuppy. But as he has no friends that I know of everyone calls him “that two-faced dung-thirsty goat-muncher”. (OK, the statement “I told no-one” might not conform to normal standards of “no-one”.)

I always introduce him to others as “a man of wealth and taste” and, because he is shorn of any and all cultural references, he thinks this is a compliment. Thanks to this complete ignorance of slang, popular culture and anything sexual that does not involve barnyard animals and slurry there is some sport to be had with him. I’ve told him that “do you want to cyber” was a police term for “do you want my electronic business card”. Sadly, he hasn’t had cause to use it yet but I am optimistic.
 
Then there was that time we’d met in the restaurant of a notorious sex club (as with tonight he’d let me choose the venue, the sucker). Madame Zsa’s Tangerine Parlour is not a place to be trifled with. The naive have no place there. In fact, the just mildly twisted have no place there. Thinking about, people who define themselves as “very twisted” would find it daunting.  With vampiric drapes and sound-proofed, wipe-clean surfaces, it is a den of the utmost depravity. There is no perversion too extreme to be found there, no orifice too obscure to be violated. It feels like an ante-chamber to the second circle of hell and it probably is one. You have to watch your language there. A misplaced oath along the lines of “bugger me sideways with a badger” could lead to a lot of pain, confusion and dry cleaning bills.

I should point out at this stage that I am not a member nor, for that matter, an employee. Madame Zsa herself (or himself or itself depending on how things are going) once hired me as an IT contractor to help him or her or them with some security issues. As well as the standard environmental barriers to keep out the weather, terrorists and the flu, the establishment had … special requirements to do with privacy and identity. You see in that kind of place nobody wants to know who anybody is but, on the other hand, they don’t want to be bumping masked uglies with just anybody. That could be socially embarrassing. Also, nobody wants to ask after anybody’s sexual health but neither do they want to come down with a nasty case of exploding pubic lice. Madame Zsa needed somebody who could run discreet checks on certain facts about every member (as it were). As that would violate their privacy, and in some cases break the Official Secrets Act, it was quite illegal.

Obviously I would never be involved in anything like that…

As a reward for my efforts, I received a huge sum of money, some amazingly well-connected contacts and an open invitation to visit. And, oddly, I find myself at Madame Zsa’s now and then, but only in the restaurant. My intimate tastes are too vanilla for the pastimes on offer in that place. In fact, the Marquis de Sade’s tastes are too vanilla for that place.

However, the restaurant is worth checking out for the unique people watching opportunities and because the chef does a mean steak tartare, though it’s best not to think too hard about why. As we sat down to dine that fateful night, Tarquin was distracted by the bevy of naked girls, bankers and fondues at the next table. It is a rule at Madame Zsa’s that you do not stare at the other customers but this was quite a scene. The bankers were mostly men, City types, expensive suits coked out of their minds. The girls were pricey sex-worker pretty, attractive but looking like they were churned out of a pneumatic Barbie factory. They were also being covered in bits of melted cheese, and other things.

One of them looked back at me when I glanced across. [Fair nymphs, and well-dress'd youths around her shone, But ev'ry eye was fix'd on her alone.] She had the most beautiful blue eyes but they were totally, totally dead. She stared at me and time seemed to freeze. I was captivated by those deep azure pools and then suddenly was horrified at the lack of life behind them. In my line of work you encounter lots of lost souls, some of them addicted to mind-wiping drugs, some of them too far gone in their own psychoses to relate to anything outside of their own hallucinations, some of them dead. Every single one of them, even the corpses, had more life in their eyes  than that girl. Then one of the City boys did something filthy under the table with a skewer and she turned to smile at him with all the adoration of a freshly killed puppy.

It made me quite lose my appetite and it made me want to take some kind of vengeance on these self-serving miniplutocrats and their kind. As the rage built within me, I turned my head and – lo – there was Nuppy the Randy Goatboy beside, trying to puzzle his way through the complex task of choosing something to eat. Of course, he was one of them. And he was here in my power.

A plan began to form in my head when I noticed that one of Madam Zsa’s most voracious and sadistic employees was working the restaurant that night, taking a break perhaps from the exertions of the basement levels. I beckoned him over with a haughty wave, something that I knew would irritate him. At first he ignored me, but I kept waving and clicking my fingers until he eventually stormed towards the table, with a look of fury on his face.

As the BDSM professional fumed towards us, I murmured to my very suggestible boss: “I’m just popping to the loo but here comes our waiter. It’s not on the menu but I hear the ‘Detroit steamer’ is … memorable.”

Ahh, happy times.

And any minute now Tarquin would be arriving downstairs and asking the violently homophobic doorman if he was “Dirty Sanchez”, hopefully followed by: “Do you want to cyber?”

Oh crap, then I’ll have to talk to him. Another drink methinks. The room swims I try to stay focused by dipping into the news blog but it’s all a swirling whirl of celebrity gossip and techy tittle-tattle and conspiracy theories. After much searching I found the rump BBC, which is reporting about the elections being delayed again because of the war but it messes with my mind.

Just then a flustered looking Tarquin lurches to the top of the stairs, sweating into his expensive “smart but casual attire”. My guts tense for the inevitable onslaught of faux bonhomie and his weak jokes.

“Move it,” he barked. “We’ve got a job.”

Read the second chapter of The Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory.