kagablog

She snuck back into the house before sunset and pilfered the mid-thigh, horizontal pleated black silk dress, which she had been eyeing for some time now. It was not the sort of garment you went jungle bashing in and clashed amusingly with the lace-up combat boots that she was planning to use for her escape, but she saw this as the last opportunity to take it and was determined to look good when she left the house. She missed all the lush pool parties Alphonse had thrown, and the crazy dress-ups she had indulged in. So her closet raid was laced with an unexpected and intense nostalgia for the large, strange house, which she suddenly knew she would never see again. She had planned to be frugal in the walk-ins, but quickly spotted ruffled, high collar satin shirts, asymmetrical, quilted sleeves and a pair of pink crocodile skin tights that she simply had to have. She was tormented by shoe racks, but it was simply ridiculous to entertain notions of taking Victorian knee-highs, patent pumps or glass platforms beyond the tree line. She had to settle for a pair of shiny silver plimsoles, strappy black sandals and a good supply of ballet slippers because they were easy to store. A world was dying and it was retaining all its treasures. Now all she could do was watch the ship sink from her one-man lifeboat, packing what she could into a small, battered brown suitcase she had discovered in one of the attics. The item was an old belted affair and plastered with ‘FRAGILE’ stickers and other assorted holiday decals. She liked the sensation of liberation that it gave her and swiped it immediately. She was becoming excited about leaving and wanted to treat the escape like a vacation - a vacation from which she would never return. She even managed to barricade herself into one of the more secluded bathrooms and take a hot shower – a luxury she had not afforded herself in weeks. She was afraid of running into Michelle, who she was sure would have her beheaded. But Michelle seemed to have left the house. She met with little resistance, save for lugging the suitcase up the belfry ladder. She took what ammunition she felt she could carry and stuffed the pockets of her newly pilfered fur jacket with candy bars. She put on the dress at midnight, brushed her hair and paced around all night, smoking cigarettes and waiting for things to quiet down. She was now feeling enthusiastic about her trip, but still avoided looking over to Alphonse’s window. She was hurt by what he said, and her pride kept her from making any private farewells. The sentimentality of the gesture would probably be lost on him anyway and she would have to deal with his making fun of her. Within the lavender handbag she discovered hand drawn maps crammed with diagrams, notes on the backs of cocktail napkins and other paranoid documents. She weighed the pink cassette on her palm, curious as to what lay encoded on its magnetic tape. The ‘letter’, which she had promised to deliver, was in fact nothing more than the Braille card and she wondered what significance it might have to prompt such a vast undertaking. The journey to the Outer Necropolis was a long and hazardous one. Perhaps Alphonse had been lying. Perhaps he did care about her welfare after all and was simply unable to admit it, concocting this ridiculous ploy to get her to safety without losing face. This sort of practical joke was not beneath him. She weighed all these things in her mind, smoking cigarettes in her designer dress, watching the jungle and biding her time till the hours before dawn.

When it came time to leave, she bid farewell to her nest and climbed down, moving quietly down to the plantation before inserting the tape into her walkman. She donned her large headphones and listened to the burr and crackle of vintage recording equipment. She could hear the room ambiance of his chamber, as well as the background noises of morning birds, which had been captured so deliciously by the ribbon microphone. When he began to speak, his voice was low, rambling and confidential. She listened carefully to his fluted, ethereal voice and followed the florid instructions he gave to the letter. From the darkness of the gardens, she could glimpse the light of his distant window, and at times she would see his shadow moving like a specter against the glow. It was eerie seeing this faraway image of him and hearing his velvety voice so close in her ears. It was the sort of unnatural disassociation he would have liked and she felt an inexplicable pang of sadness to be leaving him there.

“When all the punks have sunk down into their sick and desolate dreams, I want you to descend from your tower like a princess in a fairytale (faint chuckling). Go to the stone fountain in the old garden, down past the lower terraces where our poor little Typhoid Mary was beheaded.”

Taty passed like a ghost through the rundown plantation, entering into the tangle undergrowth of the ancient garden. Here, when she was sure she was alone, she switched on a small handheld electric torch. The hiss and burr of jungle insects had subsided at this time of night and the air was suffused with a peculiar quietness. The large stone fountain loomed out of the glare, its stone lip brown with dried blood. It occurred to her that the architecture of the fount was strange and antiquated, as though part of another structure entirely.

“The fountain has always been dry and empty,” Alphonse said, the sounds of morning framing his voice strangely against the night.

“The jungle people say it was used to collect the blood of sacrificed animals in ancient times. We just used it for garden parties and watched animals make love in it, pouring champagne down its worn spout. Sordid really…Anyway, behind the structure are the old storm drains.”

Taty stood over the creeper infested metal grate, a recent addition to a stone pipe, which seemed to descend directly down into the rich earth. She shone her torch past the bars, down into dripping darkness, finding nothing but the slippery walls of the receding pipe.

“Lift the grate and you will find a rung ladder set into the side of the drain. Go all the way down.”

Taty paused the tape and raised the heavy grate. Pushing aside heavy curtains of vinery, she discovered a set of metal rungs vanishing down into blackness. She had brought a length of silk rope with her and tied one end of this around the handle of her suitcase. She tied the other end around her right ankle and slowly lowered the heavy case down until the cord went tight. She pulled her machine gun on, balancing precariously with one leg down the hole, hiking her haute couture dress up in a scrunch around her tummy. She was sure the descent would be a disaster, as the case was pretty heavy. But after a few rungs she got into the swing of things. The stonework cloistered around her, slowly narrowing into a constrictive flue. This eventually opened out into an immense space filled with watery sounds and the chattering of many bats. She clung to what had now become a ladder, suspended in utter darkness, struggling to shine the torch around her. She saw that the ladder had emerged from a ceiling of ancient masonry and dropped into pitch dark. Some heavy columns stretched downward from the ceiling, but the beam could not radiate far enough for her to see where they led. The reverberations told her that the space was immense. She clutched the small rubber torch in her teeth, examining the ceiling for a moment, wherein had been carved strange designs of dancing skeletons and peculiar reptilian beings. There were also simplified motifs of a large temple structure rising into clouds and rays of fire shooting from the sky. She began to slowly lower herself into the enormous gulf, the circle of the beam growing wider and dimmer as she moved away from the ceiling. She saw that tiny hole from which she had emerged was in fact the pupil of a large stone eye. Enormous stone faces raised their faces in silent screams, looking out from the shadows, scaled with centuries of lime. It took some time to reach the bottom: a square platform of mossy flagstones. She rested for a moment, unfurling her dress and sitting on her suitcase to have a cigarette. She played the beam of her torch in the twists of smoke, discovering an open area of tiny, geometric flagstone islands, between which gurgled inlets of pure jungle water. Large, pale crabs wafted like disembodied hands in the clear liquid, gazing into the light with red and gold eyestalks. She could only just make out the semi-circular wall of the vast cavern across the many platforms - a carved plane, dotted with the yawning holes of archways; openings that appeared to vein deeper, into a larger complex of passages and chambers. She untied the rope, grabbed the handle of her suitcase and picked her way cautiously across the tiny platform islands until she had reached the wall. A clumsy green arrow made of card had been taped to a lintel, pointing out one of the many archways. It seemed obvious that this was the way Alphonse intended her to go. She traversed the passage beyond, un-pausing the tape as she walked.

“The Lost Quarter,” Alphonse announced.

“Some say it stretches all the way out to the Outer Necropolis. Nobody has made that crossing though, too many holes, too much wreckage, too many wrong turns. A universe of dead-ends. The old stones break and sink deeper in places. They crumble into the God-awful cracks an earthquake must have once made. We used to play golf down there in the good old days. Can’t tell you how many balls we lost…”

Taty emerged into a deserted plaza, roofed over with high vaulting. In the beam of her flashlight she spotted several dejected golf flags receding into gloominess, their ends spiked into crudely drilled holes.

“Follow the map I gave you to the eighteenth hole,” Alphonse said, prompting her to pause the tape and rummage in the suede handbag. She dug up a sordid excuse for a golf green overview, tattooed in ballpoint on the back of a lipsticked napkin. She used this to navigate in the netherworld, stumbling over fallen pillars and past cracked motifs, lugging the suitcase whilst attempting to keep her dress from being damaged. It was cold underground and she had to put on her fur, pausing beneath a relief depicting strange pyramids on the moon. It was some time when she came out onto another dark terrace, whereupon could be seen a filthy yellow flag with the numeral ‘18’ scrawled upon it in dried blood. She stopped to rest, sinking back down onto her suitcase to dredge out a candy bar and light another smoke. She played the tape while she smoked, listening to Alphonse’s voice in the dark.

“Just behind this hole you will find a wide gallery of steps leading down to the aqueducts. You will find my speedboat tethered to a stone jaguar I like to call Boris…”

She finished her cigarette, crossed the expanse and clambered down slippery stone steps until she reached the edge of a wide, stygian canal. Huge snakes slithered out of the light and crocodiles sank with soft expulsions of bubbles. She staggered around the edge of the canal, shining her flashlight this way and that until the beam alighted on a massive effigy of a snarling cat. Someone had, rather tastelessly draped a leopard print blanket about its shoulders lending it the appearance of a kitsch souvenir postcard. A long abandoned picnic hamper lay upended beside it and empty ginger beer bottles and pâté tins spilled out over the stones. Taty directed the torch beam at the water, and sure enough, tethered to one of the massive paws, was a sleek wooden speedboat with brass trimmings. All of a sudden she froze as the light caressed the shadowy figure of a tall man. He stood just behind the jaguar, unmoving and grinning quite insanely in the sallow light. The figure was dark-skinned, yet pale, as though drained of blood, clad in a beret, mime tights and a red and white striped shirt. His paleness was accentuated by a layer of chalky dust which had been rubbed into his skin. When Taty stopped shaking and the man hadn’t moved, she realized that she was somehow in no immediate danger. The figure remained quite still, as though awaiting some form of command. She pressed play and Alphonse cackled lightly in her ear.

“You’ve probably never driven a speedboat before. But that’s of course the reason we have zombie chauffeurs. Don’t be afraid of old Paw Paw. He only eats crocodile cocks and canned quail eggs…”

Taty pulled off her headphones and cautiously approached the zombie.

“Paw Paw?” she whispered.

The zombie detached itself from the armpit of the stone beast. It broke cobwebs as it shifted, releasing clouds of dust into the subterranean gloom. He had obviously been stationary for a long time, and when he spoke, moths flew from his mouth.

“Taxi to the Louvre?” he enquired in a thick French accent.

“Huh?”

“Le tour d’Eiffel?”

She pressed play, hoping for guidance.

“Ask him to take you into town,” Alphonse suggested. “Ignore anything he might say about baguettes (faint sniggering).”

“Bonsoir mes enfant!” the milk eyed zombie grinned.

“I need a ride into town?”

“Mais oui!”

He took her suitcase and led her to the speedboat, staggering stiffly, like a dusty marionette. When he had drawn the vessel in, she climbed primly aboard and sat in one of the cream leather seats with her rifle across her lap. She felt like a Hollywood star in hell and began to wish she had brought a camera with a killer flash. A large headlight had been mounted on the stern and Paw Paw ignited this, illuminating a hadean stone channel skirted by monolithic ruins. The size of it all shocked her immensely – this huge world she had been stumbling unknowingly in, blinded by darkness. The canal was a relatively narrow thoroughfare, but one of many such aqueducts. And all these fed into a distant, central canal the breadth of a large river. Arched temples and tattered palaces cluttered the spaces between the waterways, hinting at monumental forms cloaked within the chocolate shadows. At one stage this place must have been a grandiose wonderland, a sort of tropical Mount Olympus inhabited by unimaginable creatures. Now of course it was simply a huge seashell, the collective husk of a forgotten era. And what else was there to do in such places but play golf and stage desolate picnics? It was a dead world. The moth developing within the chrysalis had perished, leaving an intricate corpse for lonely scavengers – a universe as impossible to re-enter as a dream upon waking. Paw Paw pushed them off the edge and they drifted into still waters. Stalactites reached down from high, vaulted ceilings, dropping pearls of jungle water into the broken ziggurats. Crocodiles wafted lazily in their wake, hoping that she would fall off the side.

“Ah la Seine!” Paw Paw shouted exuberantly, his voice echoing dismally into the avenues of the sunken city.

“Les cafés! Les arbres! Along the banks of tourist!”

The voice rang and collided, scaring clouds of bats, which volleyed off between the buildings like pigeons. Taty squinted up at the zombie, wondering why on earth he was so ecstatic. Paw Paw simply coasted along, oblivious, lost in a sepia tinted, utterly inexplicable vision of Paris on a sunny afternoon. In this sustained delusion of his, he piloted a freshly painted gondolier across the caramel waters of the Seine with the sun on his face. Autumnal trees shadowed men on bicycles, who ferried baguettes, cheese and great bushels of grapes beneath their hairy Gallic arms. The air was alive with the sound of accordions. The men’s mustaches flicked merrily as they weaved their bicycles between women in Chanel dresses, who waved long paintbrushes in synchronized dance routines, leaping like penguins into the Seine. Cinematic couples argued in riverside cafés whilst thousands of Picasso’s smoked in doorways, all waving in syncopation as Paw Paw trawled past. Taty watched the zombie warily, oblivious to the all-consuming continental hallucinations with which the imp had poisoned his dead mind. For unbeknownst to Taty, Paw Paw was one of the earlier products of the Jennerator, a fanciful experiment in good cheer and brainwashing. Sullen drippings and the scuffling of predators underscored the sound of his rowing. A small fridge had been set into the seat and she regarded it with sudden hunger. Inside she discovered a plate of mouldy cling-wrapped sandwiches placed beside a meaty human skull. Some bottles of ginger beer clinked against a box of liqueur chocolates. Taty extracted the chocolate box but quickly hurled it overboard when a horde of huge black beetles swarmed out of it. A crocodile snapped the box up before it even hit the water. She found a tube of caviar and sucked on it, cracking a bottle of ginger beer whilst lighting up a cigarette. Paw Paw had by now begun to sing ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’ at the top of his lungs. The sound of his deep voice spilled out into the lost city, dissolving into a scary mush of reverb as the aqueduct widened to join the grand, central canal.

Large, stepped pyramids ghosted past in the headlight. They picked up speed in the central canal and Paw Paw widened the beam so that the decaying districts passed by like a theatrical frieze. Large pillars rose like towers from the still, dark water, dissolving into the patchwork facets of a distant ceiling. The fact that the city was completely roofed over further intensified its atmosphere of unreality. In the buttery knife of the light it became a children’s miniature, the backdrop of a shadow puppet play. They weaved in wide arcs between the towers as bats warped collectively through the roving glare. They entered what must have been the downtown district of the forgotten citadel. Narrow harbours and strange, geometric quays wafted by like pieces in a board game. Taty lounged with a ginger beer, watching it all slips past, talking on her walkie-talkie with her boots up on the skirting. She was finally leaving the inertia of the house and all the twisted, kaleidoscopic dreams festering within its walls. The sudden sensation of liberation was intoxicating and she felt as though she were waking from a thousand year sleep.

“Yeah, so I’m outta here,” she told Number Nun.

Number Nun nodded to herself, twirling in sunny waters, trawled in the wake of strange whales. Long remoras had attached themselves to her limbless body and they trailed from her back and stomach like silvery belts. The vivid fish within her had multiplied and a polyp infested anemone chugged merrily against the inside of her ribs. The creatures did not seem to bother or degrade her mechanisms and she tolerated them with a sort of benign divinity, occasionally spurting them with wisps of synthesized protein, issued from mechanisms within her breasts.

“It’s a miracle Childbride. You must thank the Blessed Virgin for sparing your miserable existence.”

“Yeah, its great.”

“I really thought they would have spiked your head on the gates by now.”

“Well, I hid in the watchtower.”

“Good. I am pleased that you are finally learning to take care of yourself.”

The city had started to thin out, giving way to an enormous cave system. Jagged peninsula’s lay in the gloomy water like the bones of giants. Far above, the vaulted ceiling melted into jagged, candle wax formations of water-distorted limestone. The headlight juggled, conjuring strange shadows from the twisted nodes of rock. Far ahead, Taty could make out a slit of whiteness, which grew steadily larger as they buffeted out across open water. The far end of the cavern was cleft by a massive crevice. This rift was overhung with vegetation, within which could be glimpsed the angular forms of dangling pterodactyls. The light of dawn light filtered through these immense curtains of greenery, diffusing out across the dark subterranean lake in a haze of silver. The wan illumination caught on her face as they drew closer to the cleft, and she could smell the approaching jungle, rich and overwhelming after the mortifying austerity of The Lost Quarter.

“I guess I am learning how to take care of myself,” she smiled into the light, observing the backlit greenery with a feeling of immense liberation.

“So, what are your plans?” Number Nun asked her.

“Well, I’m heading into town. Alphonse wants me to go to the terminal and catch a bus out to the outer Necropolis.”

“Why? What does that imp expect you to do there?”

“He wants me to deliver a letter.”

Number Nun processed this. The whales had moved further afield and she watched them recede into the crystalline depth, still turning like a skittle in their churn.

“The letter is a card with lots of needle-point dots,” Number Nun stated matter-of-factly.

“Uh huh.”

“It is a Death-Jinx.”

“Hectic.”

“You see something was left over from all those lost and ruined cities. Something very precious to the old reptile people, one of their gods in fact.”

“A god?”

“A dead god.”

“How does a god die?”

“Well they don’t my dear. Heathen gods never die. The cursed things always find some way to live on no matter what I do…Perhaps this god was something like a white crocodile – it certainly must have looked like one before it…changed. But now it has no face and so they call it Devoid. It inhabits the outer Necropolis, living down in the pits and passages. The letter you have is meant for this Dead God.”

“How does a God without a face read a letter?”

“The needle points are Braille, and they spell out a name. You see they just couldn’t let dead Gods lie, these foolish sinners. They had to find a way to communicate with it, and so they did. The legends of the jungle caution that congress with the dead god will bring about the destruction of the world - but this of course only titillated them more. My guess is that Mister Sister’s name is on the card. You see Alphonse in his infernal way has somehow managed to gain favours from this savage and ancient jungle god. Nobody seems to know how he managed this. Alphonse is, after all, a truly diabolical imp. In any case, Devoid will eat the sno-globe of the person whose name is on that card. And this will be so much worse than death. So much worse.”

“So Alphonse will have the last laugh!” Taty cheered.

“Alphonse will always have the last laugh Childbride. But don’t be too happy for him, for his laugh can only signal ruin and debasement. He is an utter abomination. A true house-cat of the horned one.”

“I suppose he wasn’t very nice to me.”

“He violated you utterly, as he did me. The only difference of course is that I am a precision instrument and you are a sno-globe. Lost little girls ought not to be treated like precision instruments.”

“I kind of…I kind of liked him.”

“Pheromones. They make him impossible to dislike. Your childish crush was his silver puppet string.”

“I do not have a crush on Alphonse!”

“I must go, I see a narwhal.”

Number Nun cut off abruptly, leaving Taty in a state of extreme annoyance. She threw the walkie-talkie to the floor in a huff and would have probably thrown a tantrum were it not for the grandiose spectacle of the approaching crevice. She quickly pulled on her large sunglasses as the boat buffeted into the churn of current squeezing through the channel. The arch of the creeper cave passed overhead like the arch of some alien cathedral and the dawn light caught them in blaze of paleness. Mist and haze uncoiled as the speedboat knifed out of the darkness, entering onto the wide, brown expanse of the river with no name. Dense jungle lay on either side of the broad body of water, saturated with morning mist and pierced with shafts of pellucid light. The river with no name was the largest river in the Zone and fed down from the high escarpments of jungle plateaus, widening into an enormous delta of flat swamp and black mud mangroves on its way to the sea. Trade routes had been established all down the various settlements on the river and disused passages to Namanga Mori still existed in the swamp. They picked up speed and the wind skirled up Taty’s hair. She pulled her fur against the morning chill and struggled to light a cigarette. The view from the speedboat was spectacular and she could see dawn breaking like some enormous cosmic egg, spilling its mess over the tangled panorama of the jungle. Pterodactyls wheeled in this glowing penumbra while flocks of flamingoes loitered, haunting the fogbound tree line like an army of spindly strangers. Far away, down the vista of churning water, she could glimpse the ghostly hulks of bathing Brontosaurus, They shambled like bluish dumpster trucks at the shore, occasionally letting out long whale-ish moans which travelled mournfully out across the morning distances. She attempted to enjoy this scenic journey down the river but remained annoyed at what Number Nun had intimated before she signed off. It was the sort of irritating thing that became like a fungal rash of the mind, impossible to avoid scratching and just as impossible to cure.

The speedboat was fast and they quickly reached the flat marshlands of black mud where the anacondas kept their lonely breeding grounds. It was the hot season and the swamp was muggy and oppressive, despite the earliness of the hour. Taty was regretting not having brought her bikini. She had left it behind in some fit of closure and was now drinking cold ginger beer and cursing her foolishness in the claustrophobic heat. Large flies and insidious mosquitoes rose up off the stinking black mud plains, causing her to smoke in exasperation. Soon she was sticky and irritable, stripped down to her cotton briefs after packing away the fragile dress for fear of ruining it. The landscape was utterly deserted and Paw Paw was brain dead in Paris, so she remained shamelessly semi-naked, brooding beside the fridge and keeping a sharp eye out for danger. Large glinting flats shimmered beneath the naked eye of the rising sun, speckled with clumps of reeds and rushes, which sprouted here and there like tufts of green hair. The buzz of insects was irritating and noxious fumes caused her to grimace and complain under her breath. After an hour or so, she desperately wanted to bathe or swim, to wash the cloying swamp off her. The reality of having left the comforts of the house seemed to suddenly crash upon her and she became morbid and fidgety, faced with the prospect of the hot black world she now travelled across alone, with no-one for company but the dead man driving.

Islands appeared in the swamp, dark, brooding masses, emerging from the watery wastes like the beached corpses of ocean behemoths. She watched these archipelagoes wheel by in the afternoon sunlight, grim and uninhabitable, choked with tentacle masses of vegetation. Soon these islands clustered together to form landmasses and they began to rejoin the jungle. Inlets appeared like wounds at the edge of the waterlogged tree line and Paw Paw unexpectedly angled for one, cutting the engine down to a low chug. And then, almost like waking from a dream, Taty found herself skimming down a long corridor of greenery. The shade and coolness of the closely tangled plants was delicious after their exposure out on the delta and Taty scooped bottlefuls of clear water to splash over herself. When she was done she lay drip-drying and satisfied on the couch, sucking caviar and watching the jungle glide by. The channel was so narrow and the edges of the forest so close, that leaves brushed the sides of the boat on either side. Branches knitted overhead, creating a pleasant dappling of green light. Monkeys gibbered from the trees, passing above the boat in caravans. Taty snagged a malice fruit from a vine and sat picking shiny black seeds from the yellow flesh as they glided along. It grew quieter in the trees and the temperature dropped. When she was dry she squirmed back into the dress and brushed out her hair, still determined to remain as presentable as possible for the escape. The channel began to widen, and after an hour or so it fed into an estuary. Across the silty water she could see the hazy skyline of Namangi Mori, the low buildings jutting like broken teeth against an asphalt sky. A heavy concrete bridge spanned the estuary just before it met the sea and Taty could glimpse the riverside jetties and barge ports of the industrial district. She recognized the area and realized that once they landed it would only be a half an hour’s walk to the esplanade and the vicinity of the Nebula Shell Sea. The bus terminal was downtown, on the far side of the strip and she got the notion that she would pass by the hotel for old time’s sake, maybe say hello to Romeo before leaving town. After all, it had been months since she had been in the city. An entire lifetime had passed.

It was high noon when she reached the Nebula Shell Sea and a blinding sun beat down on the empty streets. She was shocked to find the city unpopulated. It was something she could feel before she even disembarked – the unforgettable sensation of a vast deserted space. It was strange, even surreal to feel this after her trip through Lost Quarter. Almost as though the dead cities were extending their borders - which in a way they were. She considered getting back aboard, but Paw Paw had already begun jetting back on some mental autopilot. She watched the speedboat recede, left alone on the small concrete jetty with a feeling of intense abandonment. Here she was at square one, on the road again, yet bereft of childish wonder and the indestructibility that came with it. The city may have been un-peopled, but it certainly wasn’t unpopulated. The Symbs infested it like a plague. They were everywhere, dangling upside down from highway overpasses like man-size locusts, clinging to buildings, squatting in the street. Left to their own devices the beings had begun to revert to the mineral stillness of their native sphere. Many did not move at all, standing like green metal statues, hot to the touch and apparently lifeless. The more recent transformations moved slowly, following her with their eyes and heads but rarely changing position. She was almost universally ignored. The entire city had taken on their character: malformed, frozen and hideously unnatural. Human conflict had left gaping wounds in the fabric of the city, yet there were no bodies. These had all been either cleared or undergone complete transmutation. Some buildings were shattered completely, while others had restaurants where meals had been abandoned half eaten. Namanga Mori had become a ghost ship. She lugged her suitcase through these streets with her machine gun held out before her like a wand. Her teeth were chattering with fear and she had to bite down to keep from losing control entirely. There was a horrible silence in the city, a silence made pregnant by the consciousness of thousands of alien life forms. Now she stared up at the wreckage of the Nebula Shell Sea. Windows had been broken and parts of it were gutted by fire. Pages of an unfinished novel spilled down the street, catching in plants and gutters. A pile of acoustic guitars lay smashed beneath one of the windows. Someone had cut down all the palm trees and the place suddenly resembled a film set from some tawdry, low-budget period piece. Despite her fear she was forced to make frequent rest stops. The case was heavy and she was dripping with sweat from the noonday sun. She stopped outside the hotel and sat on her suitcase, lighting a cigarette and swabbing perspiration from her brow. The heat had a way of muffling sounds, so she did not hear the soldiers approaching. In fact the only time she heard them was when one shouted across to her. She jumped up in fright, her machine gun trembling in her hands. A squadron of soldiers in green uniforms, mirrored sunglasses and mustaches were standing in the street. They had evidently been out on patrol and now stood watching her, long black flamethrowers cradled in their gloved hands. The napalm tanks they all wore gave them the incongruous appearance of scuba divers and pilot flames danced at the heads of their weapons.

“I said what are you eyeballing out here!” the soldier repeated.

Taty tried to speak but found that her mouth had gone completely dry. Her legs were also numb and she had started to quake. The soldiers had their flamethrowers trained on her and she was terrified that her trembling finger would accidently pull the trigger.

“This campsite has been flagged a bug-fuck zone!” the lead soldier shouted brusquely across at her. “You shouldn’t be out here -what are you a frog fonder?”

Taty started stammering only to be cut off by another soldier.

“Release that peashooter!”

She quickly dropped the machine gun and three of the soldiers approached her, grabbing her by the hair and arms. She squealed in resistance as large hands ducked down her head, pulling open the back of her dress. She felt the delicate material rip against the hard rubber gloves and struggled uselessly until she was panting in exertion.

“She jockeying no bug hump,” one of the soldiers reported after meticulously inspecting her naked back.

The lead soldier grabbed her face and yanked it up into the sun. She coughed and spluttered, blinking up into the terrified refection of her own face, dancing like twin moons in the mirrored eyewear.

“How come you not greening out little girl? How did you squeeze through the cheese?”

“I…please, Daddy Bast gave me meds to lock up my spine so I can’t, they can’t change me.”

The soldier rubbed his unshaven face and considered this for a moment. Her arms were pinned back painfully and she was dangling from their grasp, pulled up onto the tips of her toes. She could see soldiers lighting cigarettes off their flamethrowers in the street. They were examining the glitter decals and kitten stickers on her machine gun in amusement.

“So the cat gave you a magic pill and the bug boys steered clear of you?”

“No they still…they still got with me, I just can’t, they can’t change me see…”

She had started to cry now and was almost babbling in hysterical fear.

“She’s clean of the green,” another soldier muttered, slapping her quaking thigh.

“We’re evacuating the city,” the lead soldier informed her. “You’ll have to come with us.”

“But I’m fine, really, I’m ok, I’ve got my machine gun. You can just leave me here, please. I’m ok. I’ve got to catch a bus. I’ll be late.”

She gazed pleadingly into the soldier’s unshaven face, blinking tears in the harsh sun. The other soldiers loitered in the street, occasionally torching things with their flamethrowers. The lead mustachio stared at her for several moments before turning to one of the stragglers.

“Pablo!” he yelled. “Get in that hotel and find us a room with a clean double bed.”

The soldier on the street nodded and trotted up the steps of the Shell Sea. Taty watched in mute fascination, unable for a moment to fathom why he was being sent inside. The lead soldier took hold of her face again, pulling it up so that she could again see herself in his sunglasses.

“If you can ride the bugs, you can ride the whole rodeo Chiquita. Get her in there and get her clothes off.”

One of the soldiers in the street cheered, firing Taty’s gun into the air. She began to screech and howl, clawing violently at the soldiers faces as they pulled her back up the steps of the hotel - steps she had so often climbed in the dreary routines of another life. She was dragged, kicking and screaming, out of the blinding high noon and into a terrible deformation of her past life. The hotel was utterly deserted and their passage through these halls of memory was like a claustrophobic dream. Empty rooms yawned around her, peopled by symbiotes and the detritus of a fallen world. It looked like a film set of the Nebula Shell Sea, but it was not even that anymore. She had crossed the river with no name and the delta but had not yet left the Lost Quarter. The dead cities had spread like a disease, infecting even the past.