I pull back the thick, crusty curtains. “It’s snowing!” I say.
“No, I think you’ll find that’s fallout from the powerplant,” says Speechwriter. He pushes his spectacles up his nose and passes me what appears to be the local newspaper.
“You know what this means,” he says, tapping the page.
“What?”
“We’ve underestimated them. Somebody in this village can read.”
Calamari walks in, wearing that pleased facial alignment that means he’s been up to no good. He must have found something to fuck. Now, relaxed and refreshed, he decides to have a conversation with us.
“We’re leaving,” he says. “So douse the place in fuel and set light to it. And you, Jupiter: take the landlord outside and hang him.
…I take no pride in my actions that night.
Chapter Six
The Predictable Descent into Chaos
“Any word from London?”
“Plenty of words,” answers a smirking tough, polishing his rifle. “Just none of ’em repeatable.”
I’ve seen housework elevated into an art form. Our Security Staff take gun maintenance into fetish territory. I guess it kills the time between killing people. So whilst they beaver away at their bang-sticks, I watch the grey wreckage of the English countryside roll past the windows, wondering what kind of a city I’ll return to. Will I still have a home? Will I still have a wife? And do I care either way? Because she’s not a nice person and I’m… I’m worse. I’m a murderer.
“You were pretty handy with that rope back there,” says the polisher.
“I had a gun to my head,” I protest.
“Erm, no,” he answers. “I don’t think you did.”
“It felt like I did.”
“Never hold up in court,” he says with a shake of the skull. “But don’t beat yourself up over it.”
“I was only following orders.”
“Hah! Didn’t wash in Nuremberg, won’t wash here!”
“I can’t say I care for the analogy. I’m not a Nazi.”
“I know. They gassed their victims. You threw him out of his kid’s treehouse and hanged him with his own belt. Then you jumped on him and swung on his legs.”
“I was trying to do the decent thing.”
“What? Humiliate a dying man?”
“No! I, er… I read it somewhere, or something. You swing on their legs and it breaks their neck. It makes it quicker.”
“Not the way you do it, pal!”
I can’t look him in the eye. I’m not feeling especially proud of myself at the moment.
“The first kill,” he says with a sudden seriousness, “it never sits well. Not if you’ve got a conscience. You just got to think of yourself as a round in a gun. It’s someone else who aims the gun; it’s someone else who pulls the trigger. We’re just bullets, man. We go where the gunpowder takes us.”
“So I shouldn’t feel guilty?”
“No. You should always feel guilty. Because, if you don’t, well, you may as well hand that soul of yours straight to the Devil.” He casts a cautious eye over Calamari and with that sideways wisdom, he puts down his rifle and starts to polish his boots.
But I don’t have a conscience to trouble me, just a very real sensation of falling downwards whilst still standing up. It creeps over me from time to time, leaving me a little numb, but I always get over it eventually.
So time ticks on without me. The miles slide beneath our wheels. When the waking world calls me back, it’s to confuse me with unexpected scenery.
“Where are we? The fucking Peak District?!”
No-one’s answering. If they weren’t all so busy with their combat boots and tins of dubbing, I’d swear I was surrounded by extremely ugly statues.
Where there should be the expansive horizontals of a newly-flattened London, there’s diagonals, curves and the odd unexpected vertical. Green in colour and grassy in texture, it appears to be countryside, replete with luscious rolling hills and… gun emplacements?!
Well, call me old-fashioned, but I’ve never seen a mountain with a door in it – let alone an armed checkpoint. This is Malmot’s work. It bears all the hallmarks of a gateway to Hades.
Speak of the spindly shit and He shall appear. He unfolds himself from an overhead luggage locker. And whilst that last image may not be factually accurate, it’s still my abiding memory of the moment. He manifests in smoke and brimstone and his words unravel in a lazy purr.
“Welcome to Colchester Barracks.”
Colchester had a varied and interesting history – right up to the point where it collapsed into the ocean. Prior to that, there were the famous rucks between the Romans and Boudicca’s Iceni tribe – characterised by butchery, sexual assaults and temple-burnings – and then, in the thirteenth century, it became popular with Flemish weavers.
Things hotted up a little during the first English Civil War when Cromwell’s boys besieged the city and starved it into submission. Attempts to frighten off the Parliamentarians with a bloody big cannon failed when it fell from the battlements, shattered and passed into legend as the ‘Humpty Dumpty’ from the nursery rhyme. “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men” couldn’t put it back together again. So the Royalists surrendered and the Roundheads shot ’em.
Fast forward a few hundred years and we find military chiefs building a major barracks here. Why? Because “higher than average levels of female promiscuity” ensure “a steady supply of the resources essential to a smooth-running military unit.”
And it’s for this same reason that Malmot chooses to refortify the walled city and the army compounds, reopen the nightclubs and turn Colchester into his base of operations.
Now you’ll have watched a few war films. You’ll know what these bases look like and the way they’re run. Well, take that basic notion and then wind the architecture back a couple of thousand years. Take away the barbwire fences and concrete and substitute colossal earthwork ramparts. Once you’re past the gates, you proceed up a deep trough into the main enclosure, a bowl-rimmed plateau of epic proportions atop what’s basically a Bronze Age hillfort. But hillfort doesn’t do the thing justice. It’s a mountainous structure, pockmarked with semi-buried buildings and crowned with the funnels and gutters of a complex water catchment system. There’s no electricity – the wind turbines have yet to be assembled – and the light comes via bonfire and flame torch, casting flickering shadows over black, hunchback vehicles. Now and again, something large and mean clanks past on steel tracks, engines roaring on rough-arsed biodiesel. Hordes of soldiers carry out incomprehensible duties. I hear barked orders, female laughing and male grunting.
Places like this don’t spring up overnight. They take years to plan and decades to build. God knows what it takes to keep them secret, but I’m sure it’s measured in lives. And God knows why Malmot requests my company on a midnight stroll of the perimeter – just me, him and two semiautomatic-toting soldiers in scowls and greatcoats.
“Are you an ambitious man?” Malmot asks me.
“Quietly ambitious, Sir. I don’t like treading water but, equally, I don’t like to rock the boat.”
“What a nicely vague mishmash of metaphors, Jupiter. Clearly you know which side your bread’s buttered.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“And who’s baked it.”
“Er, yes, Sir.”
“But you’re not about to spread the jam, are you?”