Part One
THE OIL DRIED up, and the Ruhr Valley went into overdrive, worked to death by the best slave labour you could chuck a grenade at. Everything ran on coal. Museum pieces were revamped, and steam engines broke the speed record. Cholera and giardia had an upsurge but were brought back in line with genetically modified death.
And as the age of the Clueless came and went, it came to pass, by Intelligent Design, that the age of the Earth be re-clocked from four and half billion to seven thousand years, give or take a few hundred.
The great flood was real. A’m fuken telling yah! All you have to do is pitch a tent on Mount Arafat and see for yourself.
But since crossing any kind of border risked trepanation by tungsten bullet, nobody bothered and took it on oath.
And so, by and by a civilisation, and a powerful one at that, was rumoured to have lived before and sent things into space, another dimension, whatever, even people too for fux sake.
But no matter what the truth of that was, everyone left alive in the aftermath went around in a head-bowed, Korean whispers kind of way and waited for the prodigal spacemen to return as the land rotted and divots of countryside were designated low-class-free zones, the only places left where you didn’t have your insides fried inside out with strontium 151. And just to make sure the luminous skull and crossbones held their weight in fear (KEEP OUT. OR ELSE!), each divot of elitist land was ring fenced with uranium shavings and plutonium fairy dust.
No one trusted anyone not to spy on everyone else. Everything was a threat. Even space junk tumbled from the skies.
No one tracked it. There was nothing to track it with. You didn’t get much of a warning, a rumble, and a glittering streak through the night sky. You didn’t duck. You hoped. And if you were lucky, it was your neighbour who ended up splatting a crater, not you.
Borders were strengthened. No one crossed the lines, and the population dwindled ever more.
The old said it was better. The young didn’t know any better.
Until one magical morning the sun arose chilly orange through the radioactive smog and peace arrived, sort of.
It’s not that anyone agreed to get on with each other, just not to fight, steal, pillage, or rape one another (and be caught, because that would have clogged up the firing squads).
Until now here I am with a canvas rucksack held together with rusty tubes and a tin cup dangling at the back, and me like something dumped in the Sea of Tranquilisers by Stretch Armstrong.
I got through border control. No checks, just a gun following my head.
Nothing new there.
I climbed on board a shiny maroon choo-choo train and settled back in the ersatz mahogany-lined cabin.
The doors slammed. A whistle blew. And a red flag chopped down like a bloody cleaver in the hand of a station meister on the platform.
Then it was puff-puff and clanking iron into a greasy-tiled, eggnog-coloured tunnel where the air pressure changed, my ears popped. And so, I reasoned, had my brain.
It was foo fighters or zero point. But I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t get the connection with Madam Blavatsky and the torsion field effect. Or why anyone would be dumb enough to stand near something as lethal as that, never mind in it.
‘Take this and go there,’ I was told.
This being a souped-up version of Delycid that would (painlessly, they said) short-circuit every neuron in my body.
‘Uncouple to re-couple.’
It was the mantra of the mad.
And to prevent me going insane after I’d taken the Delycid I had to take a little green spike of Brexpiprazole.
But after I dropped the Delycid my watch melted into Dali Land, and I couldn’t figure out where my mouth was, and smacked my faced half a dozen times before the Brexpiprazole finally went in.
After that it was fluffy and cosy and opened my eyes inside a cloud of sparkly plutonium blue and couldn’t give a shit.
I snuggled back on the brocade seat, gazed out the window and grinned as fuzzy orange fireballs shot out of the sun and belt down on the rail tracks. And when the rail tracks buckled into vipers, I bit my lip and gave them a good old pneumatic air dicking with a priapic finger.
‘Up fuken yours!’
God, that felt good.
And when a bad-tempered viper crashed its tungsten fangs into the glass there was a great big green bang, and I slumped back exhausted.
Okay, breathe slow and easy, just like they told you to if things get out of hand.
And when I did, the inside of the carriage breathed in and out with me.
‘Okay, enough. I want out.’
I closed my eyes.
It didn’t help.
I could still see the veins on my hands bubbling with beads of turquoise and jade.
All this for the transition from the known to unknown. Something about pilot waves. Whatever they are.
‘A way to break their influence on you,’ they said.
Yeah, right.
And when the train finally eased its way into pink marshmallow buffers at the other end, I sat and smiled and nodded and watched the other passengers disembark through my brand new radium-blue teeth.
‘If it gets weird just remember it’s the waves losing their grip on you,’ they said. ‘Hang on to yourself and things can only get better.’
It took a while before I dared test my legs for stability. But when I did, surprise, surprise, everything felt okay.
Until I picked up my rucksack.
It weighed a ton when I’d packed it. Now it was as dense as fog.
Forget it, sling it, move it, and get off the train before anything else happens.
So I clanked down the steps onto the marble concourse and walked under girders that snapped down with great big iron pluckers and ripped off the heads of the commuters all around me.
My feet vibrated in my boots and every step was a slither on tangerine marzipan, five yards this way, ten meters that.
‘It’ll be the pilot waves,’ they said. ‘They come from everywhere, from everything, the floors, the sky, the people, the drainpipes, dust. They’re the positioning of your former reality trying to drag you back again. But when they start losing their grip on you, watch out. Think with the back of your mind, not the front. That’s important. Or you’ll end up in some unknown universe with no way out.’
Remembering that did not go down well with the state I was in.
So I thought, walk in a straight line. Head for the exit. Go for the doors. Get with the program.
Except that the walls kept bouncing off of me.
‘Just take a deep breath,’ they said, ‘nice and slow. Sail into another country and feel those pilot waves lose their influence over your past existence. You’ll love it. It’s like osmosis.’
‘What?’
I stepped out of Altona Haupt Bahnhof and straight into Rottweilers and Teutonic skinheads clutching half-crushed bier cans.
My rucksack sagged and the back of my head collapsed. A skinhead grinned, lifted his can, and glugged back with his Marlboro poking like a dynamite fuse in the air. After that, my rucksack ballooned up with helium from nowhere, and I was yanked skyward by the straps. And as the rucksack tickled a melody of electrons out of the overhead tramlines a spark of static twanged at my eyeball.
Thereafter I descended about enough to propel myself along on tippy toes into the shadows of Lange Reihe and make my way to Gast Haus Mercure where I oozed through the hotel’s gelatine doors and dumped my rucksack in front of reception.
The receptionist yanked a cigar from his teeth.
‘Guten tag,’ he said.
‘Sprechen Sie English?’ I asked.
‘Yes, but of course.’
Thank God for that.
I signed the register, grabbed the key, and dragged my now lead-stuffed rucksack towards the farhrstuhl.
Dragging it out again on the second floor I wadded backwards through a swamp of melamine mush of a dimly lit hallway. And when a triffid tore itself out of the wallpaper, I screeched.
Opening the door of my room quick, I jumped inside, slammed it shut even quicker, and watched my rucksack sag its way through the elastic floor (by now I couldn’t give a fuck).
Squelching across the room, I flopped back on a gigantic puffball fungus for a bed, closed my eyes, and waited for the Delycid to wear off.
It was dark by the time I came to.
Fumbling around in the dark I found a grimy toggle, yanked it, and the headboard light buzzed on.
It all looked so normal now, given that deep, angular shadows covered up a great deal of scary uncertainty when necessary.
There was a little paint-chipped table by the window and a paint-chipped hard-backed chair that had seen better days.
There was one ashtray on the table, one bottle of mineral water, still capped, and a glass brick for a black and white television dumped in the corner.
A lopsided icebox, filled with miniatures of booze, was propped up against the stained plaster wall.
I stood up, stretched, and cracked open my own bottle of booze and filled the tooth mug with counterfeit eighty-proof Rebel Yell whiskey.
I swallowed hard, blinked and changed the colour of my eyes from grey to brown. And after showering, I stepped up to the mirror over the cracked wash hand basin and blinked at my reflection through a jagged frame of rust.
The room behind me was dim.
I took another slug of whiskey.
I sniffed, swallowed, and held up my hand.
Pale-blue streamers waved out of my fingertips.
I gazed at my face in the mirror again and noted that I looked like a lean-faced escapee from one of the conc. camps back home.
My head glowed. My shoulders glowed. I shrugged, dropped my arm, and walked over to the little table by the bed and peered down at my map. It had red lines bleeding all over it where I’d drawn point to point, Straße zu Straße.
I took another belt from the bottle.
‘Death as we know it…’ I grunted, kneeling on the by-now normal bed to open the window. ‘… is not as easy as it was.’
I turned and looked at the grubby, off-white door. The glow on it didn’t look bright. But when I raised my hand, a red sparkle arched over from it to the door handle.
Not that it meant much, except one of them had to have been here.
‘Find it,’ she’d said twisting the ruby and emerald studded Etruscan ring on her finger.
‘Then what?’
‘Kill it.’
Jacket, cash, map, taser, I didn’t have the guts to kill anything.
‘I’ll stun it,’ I said, ‘and then you can do what you like with it.’
‘That’s not the plan.’
But in the end, I was allowed to swap lead for lightning.
‘If you don’t kill it, it could kill you,’ she said.
‘So what have I got to lose?’
And that’s what stumped her: I couldn’t care less if I lived or died.
‘You’ve been living a low life for a long time for such a young man,’ she said. ‘After this it could change your life. Change your destiny.’
‘For services in the name of republic and country?’ I asked.
I could tell she didn’t like me.
‘We have a job for you,’ she said.
‘I don’t want a job,’ I said.
But that’s when she showed me a picture of my handprint surrounded by spikes.
‘It looks nothing like that,’ I said.
‘It’s the best we have,’ she said. ‘It’s how we found you. And you can see these kinds of lights unaided where the rest of us can’t. And that’s something special.’
I didn’t know what she was on about. It wasn’t special to me. It was normal.
‘Not only can you see beyond the ultraviolet,’ she said. ‘But you can see things no one else can.’
Pictures in an exhibition. I’d done it for something to do on a boring rainy day.
I ended up in a place called the White Feather Centre surrounded by mumbo-jumbo stuff—palm readers and ghost hunters scrying their crystal balls or whatever it was that they thought they were doing.
Place hand here, pay up. I didn’t even have to smile.
What I got for my measly credit allowance was a scrappy print of the outline of my hand with jaggy lines around it.
‘Gee, thanks,’ I said, walking away with my prise.
How the hell was I to know I was being followed by the IBS (Invisible Black Shirts), who dragged me into the back of a governmental commissioned bombproof shiny black limo and my records being bleached so much that I was effectively turned into one of the instantly disappeared.
And that’s how I ended up in Gast Haus Mercure, Neu Hamburg, Neue Deutschland.
I checked for keys and cash and had one last pat-down. I was ready for the enemy. And after checking for stray triffids in the hallway, (there were none), I locked the door, climbed down the stairs, and strode past reception and didn’t look back.
The glass doors slid wide on a deserted outside world where streetlights swung like little tin flying saucers from overhead cables. The cobbles glinted with night condensation and I blinked.
Left?
Right?
‘Recht.’
And walked.
Rostocker Strasse was devoid of life where ultraviolet streamers crossed my path before fading into recessed doorways on either side.
With glitzed black hair and a white face, she seeped out of the shadow of a recessed doorway. Her chromium cigarette holder glinted a foot high. I tugged the collar of my Wolf leather jacket higher, strolled by, and left her to slink back into black.
Walking from map dot to map dot and bar to bar, nothing glowed except for me in the grimy cracked mirrors over every low lit dusty gantry.
I trotted down steps and through a sprung door of a basement bar where bare wires hung through busted ceiling tiles. The red linoleumed floor was potholed like it had been ripped up with grapple hooks. A bare bulb overhead glowed inside a dusty shrine of tarantula webs.
I perched myself on a stool.
‘Was möchtest du, mein Herr?’ die Frau in the Peroxide blonde wig asked.
‘Ik wil graag een biertje, austublief,’ I said.
‘Nederlander?’
‘Nein, ich bin dumm.’ I tapped my temple. ‘Ich hätte gern einen Hof, bitte.’
With smouldering Cheroot dangling from the corner of her mouth, she turned, yanked open a small glass fridge on the back shelf, grabbed a brown bottle, and prised off the cap with a chrome plated church key. And after dumping the foaming bottle in front of me, she snatched a pencil from behind her ear and marked my order on the place mat.
‘Danke,’ I said.
So I leaned on the bar and smoked one Marlboro after another (cheap contraband even deadlier than the real thing) whilst three stooges sat at the other end like ancient like lined mariners with teeth black or missing. One was hunched over with one eye shut, as his other winked at me.
I picked at the edge of the sodden green label of the bier bottle before slugging back the dregs, then paid die Frau, left the bar, and was out on the street again.
‘This is pointless. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.’
‘We can trace them to within a mile or two,’ she said, ‘but never any closer.
‘And that’s where I come in, is it? For a bit more pinpoint accuracy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then what?’
I’d stood in front of her desk in my best threadbare Burberry second hand hand-me-down when she smiled up at me.
‘You kill them.’
I’d never seen one yet. And I only had their word for it they even existed.
‘We call them angels,’ she said.
‘That makes it a whole lot easier to contemplate murder.’
She hunched over her desk, looking up at me as I stood there in front of her. ‘You can’t murder a monster.’
So I agreed to stun it, whatever it was.
‘They have wings to those who can see,’ she said.
‘What are they anyway?’
‘Not as human as they would like us to think they are.’
I strolled into Danziger Strasse, reached in my pocket, and flipped open my Zippo.
Swinging around I walked backwards, set petrol fumes ablaze and lit up a cigarette. When nothing followed me through the ectoplasm of smoke, I faced front again, inhaled deep, and listened to my solitary bootsteps clipping ever onward down one dark, empty street after another.
‘Use these,’ she said.
‘I have perfect vision,’ I said.
‘We know.’
‘Then why?’
‘With these, the distance won’t go out of focus when you look at something close to. And the foreground won’t go out of focus when you look in the distance. They also give extra depth to your field of vision, allowing you to see a few degrees further either side of you than normal.’
‘What difference does that make?’ I asked.
‘A hair’s breadth on your life.’
It had high walls, no windows, and a big, black metal door. Okay, it was bricks and mortar. It was real enough.
I trotted up the steps, grinding grit into concrete, with the street so Deadsville quiet behind me that I could hear every creak my leather motorcycle jacket made.
I glanced over my shoulder one last time before giving myself the final push—dead road, dead windows, dead privet, and white hissing orbs that didn’t glow much on long black sticks for lampposts.
Turning back around I shouldered the door. It gave on even more blackness that belched a thick jet of warmth at me. And when I stepped inside and let go of the door, it swung closed behind me with a solid clunk.
The air inside was as dense as tarred kapok, forcing me to step through it with my hands held out in front of me, until I stumbled over an unseen something and hit the floor with a thud. Wonderful place to stick an invisible two-step, I thought, clawing my way upright on a pillar running with sweat.
Another couple of feet further in and my shoulder clipped an iron brace holding up a ceiling that was so black or far away that it might as well have been a starless version of outer space.
Everything was black—the walls, the floor, the ceiling.
Then at last—let there be light. A bar top with an amber-lit glinting gantry. But no one was home. Until an albino stick insect in a leather waistcoat scooted out and slapped his hands on the bar.
He grinned big. He had even bigger teeth.
I ordered a bier, and he snapped off the cap like a tiddlywink with a smirk and a thumbnail.
I paid with a De Novo Mark, slunk over to an elbow-high table, stood and watched the place fill up.
‘What are they anyway?’ I asked.
‘They don’t belong here,’ she said.
I leaned against the wall, chain-smoked, and slugged on my bottle. I drew looks I wasn’t happy with and slunk back even further into the shadows. Then this little guy came over—Midget Man.
He talked. I shook my head. (go away for fuck’s sake). And he talked even more.
‘Ich bin kein Deutscher,’ I said.
But then something else caught my eye, a guy in the crowd, talking, nodding, and looking around—fair haired, tall, lean, something about him.
His eyes.
But no wings. Only angels have wings.
Midget Man kept on and on and…
‘Horen Sie!’ I said. ‘Das ist furchtbar schwierig für mich. Ich bin kein Deutscher. I am nichts German!’
He tilted his head and blinked.
‘Aber, Du bist!’ he said.
‘Was? I mean, What?’
‘Ah.’
‘Ah, what?’
‘That explains it,’ he said.
‘Explains what?’
‘Everyone is wondering why you are acting so stupid, pretending not to be German.’
I looked down at him. ‘Because I’m not?’
The tall lean guy looked over. I caught sight of eyes-of-glass.
Not real glass. A trick of the light, what little there was of it in that place.
‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘They are masters of trickery.’
My heart pounded. I was terrified. What the hell had I gotten myself into? Something deadlier than I could have imagined as it would turn out. Worse than death itself.
TO BE CONTINUED
