| Somewhere, the music is too loud, and the children are dancing to it with strange neuroses; the lights flash up and down beyond the visible spectrum, into X-rays and radio waves, entering their nervous systems as the cities begin to burn once more... They're out again, the Fusion Gang, looting the night and deserted city spaces. Denim and leather and mirrors, boots laced to the knee. Boys with coxcombs varnished feet high, girls draped with coaxial cable. They are everywhere, anywhere, McLuhan's feral grandchildren. They've found a Straight, an upright citizen, his antique car finally expired under a guttering streetlight. This is the citizens' ultimate nightmare, catastrophic breakdown in a bad part of town, the stuff of urban myth suddenly turned real and sour. He's too terrified to step out into the dark and the danger, and his cellphone can't find a ground station signal to lock onto so he can call for help. He sits frozen behind the wheel, windows up, doors locked, and watches bechained wraiths coalescing out of the shadows around his car. His face goes blank, eyes signal overload, but he needn't worry; he isn't their immediate target. There is a story about the Fusion Gang. It is composed, it's said, of two circles. The outer circle is diffuse and hard to quantify, more a state of mind than a gang, comprising ultra-militant Greens, redundancy victims, New Luddites, hackers who have tired of cyberspace and want to do real damage to the real world, homeless children for whom a Cause is a useful substitute for an Identity. The Inner Circle, it's said, is much smaller. Less than a dozen strong. It's said they are elves, driven from their forest homes long long ago by the accelerating, inexorable tide of Man. The stories say they have survived all these years by becoming feral in the cities, hiding in sewers and Underground tunnels by night, grubbing in dustbins for food, driving themselves insane with hatred for Men. According to these stories, they have finally had enough, have decided to make a strike against the Industrial Revolution, though even they would admit that it's already too late. The Straight knows none of these rumours. His whole life is an extraordinary fortress holding back the Night. His work, his home, his family, everything has been aimed at denying the slowly worsening situation. He believes, somewhere back in his hindbrain, that if he ignores rising crime and beggars on the streets and widespread lawlessness all these things will simply not exist. Until tonight, driving from a business meeting and encountering an almost occult conjunction of gridlock, roadworks and sheer unfamiliarity with the streets he found himself diverted down. And then the fucking car had to break down... He stares out at the silent figures moving purposely around the car, too afraid to even notice that most of them are no more than children. A sudden thud on the roof makes him jump; one of the kids slapping a handkerchief-sized patch onto the car. The patch is laced with wires and chips and will jam the Straight's mobile phone, if he ever thinks of using it. Another of the kids, a twist of barbed wire around one bare bicep, is carrying an H-frame rucksack carefully packed and balanced. He's short and massively built, and when the others help him out of the straps he moves like a Lunar astronaut, suddenly divested of five-sixths of his weight. The hubcaps are first, prised quickly away from the wheels and laid in line by the front of the car while the rucksack is unlaced and esoteric tools arranged like instruments in an operating theatre. A small instrument, shaped like a piece of abstract sculpture, slides under the edge of the bonnet, springing it up to 45 degrees. Lengths of metal tubing are fitted together. Pulleys whose oil shines like wet fire in the uncertain sodium-light are inspected. The distributor cap and rotor arm are removed and laid gently in an upturned hubcap. Before the Straight's uncomprehending eyes the bonnet is unfixed and set down in front of the car. No orders are given, no word spoken. For all the Straight's terror this could be a long-rehearsed ballet, a dance dedicated to a god of high-tensile castings, machined tolerances, petrochemicals, pungent gaskets, a mysterious sparking heartbeat now stilled and excised, wires and cables snipped clean as arteries for transplant... For the Straight, who has the car serviced by a garage down the road from his apartment because he doesn't understand or particularly like machines, the slow, mannered dispersal of the engine is meaningless. He doesn't see an ordered, logical disassembly but a mindless destruction. His upbringing will not recognise the easy grace of people well-versed with their tools and their objective, he does not catch the intent, almost emotionless expressions on their wraith-faces. A faint atomised spit of rain makes a halo about the guttering streetlight, hawks a veil across the windscreen. It will be Winter all too soon, and the grimy spray will turn white and lace. It will wrap the city like a mummy-cloth, absorbing sound and buildings until only the die-hard troublemakers will bother to wrap themselves in warm clothing and go forth to do battle with Law and Order. Soon, as the shroud bites harder, even that resistance will falter, and the streets will become white deserts. Vagrants will die in their thousands embalmed in layer after fruitless layer of cardboard and newsprint. The Thames will freeze, but this time there will be no Frost-Fairs. A brief thaw - two days, no more - will flood the Underground, and the following snap of cold will choke the tunnels with filthy ice. On Christmas Eve a wolf will be heard in Hendon, and on New Year's Eve no living thing will move in Central London, though a terrible neurotic rumour will later surface among those few who survive that the Lamb walked through the City without leaving a footprint as the mercury sank towards -40 and Oxford Street rang with the sound of the cold shattering shop windows. Scientists will say this isn't possible; they will shout excitedly about ozone depletion and global warming and the slow incineration of the Amazon rain forest. It will keep getting colder. Nothing will avail. The last mineable reserves of coal will give out the last of their million-year store of sunshine. The North Sea and Atlantic fields will be pumped dry in one last desperate belch. All four of Britain's nuclear power stations will be forced, one after the other, beyond their safe operating limits, and the ghostly Cerenkov light will be extinguished in Britain for ever. The last television broadcast will be a plea by the King for calm; it will black out in mid-sentence as the transmitter's generator goes down for the very last time. They will say the Glaciers are returning. They will say it is the end of everything. Forty-foot drifts will suffocate Lincolshire, and one night in May a tiny hamlet in Gloucestershire will be the coldest place on Earth... In an astonishingly short space of time all the smaller parts of the engine are dissected out and placed in strict order around the car. The steel tubing is assembled into a tripod. Chains whisper through pulleys, and the engine block itself rises. The car, grateful to be rid of all that weight, lifts slightly on its springs. Castors on the tripod are unbraked, and the whole thing, the block swinging gently from its chains, is wheeled away from the car. The block is lowered gently onto the upturned salver of the bonnet, and it's over. The car has been gutted. Even the plastic squeezy-bag for the screen washers has been removed and lies in one of the hubcaps like a tough internal organ. In his terror the Straight has spent a lifetime behind the wheel watching them eviscerate his car, bile cutting his throat and acid burning his armpits. He watches the Fusion Gang as they dismantle the tripod, carefully clean and repack tools in the rucksack and help its bearer back into the straps. He adjusts the rucksack's belly-band, and without a glance at the Straight or his half-dismantled car they deliquesce into the diamond dark as if they never existed. Their very last act is to remove the jammer-patch from the roof as they leave. Somehow, fear has pushed the Straight far beyond reason. otherwise he wouldn't unlock the driver's door and get out to stand in wonder beside his car. He's standing there when a twelve-year-old with a rusty Smith & Wesson comes up behind him, blows his brains out, steals his mobile phone, and leaves him in the gutter, blood flowing to mingle with the spreading pool of oil from beneath the car. Somewhere, far away, the music has ended and the children have been shepherded home with the lights still burning up and down their spinal cords. The Fusion Gang, meanwhile, coalesce again, cast their shining eyes across the face of a multistorey car park, and move once more to attend to their perfect purpose, their Calling... |
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