Wild Angels

The Wild Angels were out hunting.

Sensible people closed their doors tightly and stayed hidden behind them.  The Angels never broke in anywhere, never entered without being invited first.  There was the occasional rumour that the Angels were actually vampires but that was ridiculous.  Vampires don’t exist.

It was nearly dawn and I should have been behind a closed door myself.  I should actually have been in bed sleeping, shivering under a thin blanket and hoping that when I woke up there would magically be more food in the cupboards than I knew there was.  It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford to buy food, it was just that I could find anywhere to buy food from.  For the five days previously the estate had been on lock-down because the Shakespeariana (highly-educated in the literary arts and more bitter than quinine about their job prospects in the Recession) had staged an attack on the Pantone kids and managed to kill an entire number group.  The Authorities, by which we mean the people with the weapons who think we should stay quiet and die peacefully and picturesquely so we can be recorded in history as a desperate and tragic underclass, immediately put the estate under lock-down to avoid retaliation.  Which worked, but there was no sign of the lock-down ending, and we were effectively besieged.

I was woken by the strange high cries of the Wild Angels, and realised almost immediately that they were celebrating.  That could only mean that they’d made a kill, and a righteous one at that.  The thought struck me like a nail: a righteous kill at the moment for the Wild Angels must mean that they’d breached the perimeter of the estate.  The lock-down must have a hole in it until the incident was discovered.  There was a chance to get out of the estate and find food.

I didn’t want to go, but I wasn’t really under my own control.  My brain switched off input from the rational side and launched me out of bed and into the wardrobe like a marionette with cut strings.  I was wearing the most ridiculous mish-mash of clothing, much of it from two decades earlier when we still had a Press to produce fashion advice and fashion magazines, instead of today’s bland, televised fascion with its obsession with jackboots and close-fitting, military style garments.  I staggered, half-dazed from the wardrobe and managed to remember to lock my front-door behind me before I set off in the direction of the whooping cries.  The rational part of my brain was screaming at me that it was suicide to try and find a Wild Angel, but the starved, animal part of my brain was willing to try anything to get food.

I saw the bodies first.  There were three of them, slumped over a howitzer that looked like it had ammunition enough to bring down an entire tower-block, and that would destroy over half of the estate when it fell.  Their clothes – black, form-fitting, functional fascion – were torn almost to strips, revealing that their underwear (also torn to strips) was as uninteresting and uncomfortable as their outerwear.  The howitzer was jammed with something, and as I tottered past I realised that it was the heads of the soldiers that had been forced into it.  I hoped that the heads had been removed first, but either image made me feel ill.

Something howled behind me like a fox on heat.  I froze, even the animal part of my brain responding instinctively to a noise that primal.  There was the whisper of soft fabric, the snick of a knife and the kiss of  a breath of cool air on my cheek.  Then a hand cupped my jaw, and turned my head.

“Angels, look!” The voice was high and beautiful and I wished it were mine.  The breathe was hot and foetid though, and I tried not to swallow.  “Angels, the Eloi have awoken!  They run to join us!”

I hoped that the Eloi were less bloodthirsty than the Wild Angels, or, if not, less inclined to play with their food.

“Tell me, Eloi,” and the Angel shook my head with its hand, “where are the rest of you?”

I was the Eloi?

“Just me,” I managed, though it hurt to speak with my jaw held so firmly.  “Just me.  I went for food.”

“Brave Eloi,” said a voice behind me that sound so deep and full and gorgeous that I could feel the first tingle of an orgasm from listening to it.  I knew that they used technology to augment their voices, but it made no difference when you heard it.  You could know that they ate babies and it wouldn’t stop you loving the sound of them.  “Let it run, sweet Angels.  The siege is broken, let it carry the standard.”

A flag was pressed into my hand, and my fingers gripped it numbly.  It sounded like I was going to be let go, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up.  Better to resign myself to death amongst the Angels.

“Run now, and proclaim that the Angels have judged,” said the deep voice again, and I quivered all over.  I did run though, when they let go of my head.

Douchebag scrimshaw

The estate was lively now that dusk had fallen.  The concrete monstrosities that a previous government had erected in the hopes that they’d be mistaken for homes towered above us, and on the skyline, not that far removed, cranes were silhouetted against the last of the light, building more expensive architecture for people with a better view and better prospects.  But people buzzed and hummed around, made happier by the shadows that concealed the prison-like surroundings, and in many cases faces and skins damaged by substandard living in corner-cut housing.  There were conversation going on around me that I idly eavesdropped on.

“Look bruv, I got the new Dulux tones.  I reckon I’m dusky rose, whatta ya think?”

“Bruv!  You can’t say dat!”

“Bruv, what?  My skin like, it’s either Dusky Rose or Bladderwrack Beige, and I think it’s closer to the Dusky Rose.”  The speaker, a kid with brownish-grey skin and acne, held a piece of laminated plastic against his cheek.

“Bruv, dis is a Pantone manor.  You can’t go bringing no Dulux Tones round here!”

“Aw shit, man.”

I stopped listening, transported for a moment back to the day, three years ago, when the Residents Association had knocked on my front door.  I’d answered with my hands covered in worming powder and the dogs barking in the kitchen, and they’d looked a little taken aback.

“We’re here about your sign,” they’d said, all three of them speaking in unison.  I figured they must practice after their meetings.  “Um, is everything alright?”

I waved my hands theatrically.  “Cocaine orgy,” I said.  “The dogs are too keep the unwanted out.”

“Oh.  Well, your sign.”

“What about it?”  I was genuinely puzzled, it was a small rectangular plaque for the postman that simply read “No circulars, junk-mail or anything targeting marketing groups B and below.”   Well, ok, it wasn’t that small, but you did have to get at least ten feet away to be able to read it.

“The font you’ve chosen is inappropriate.  We did issue you a list of fonts when you moved in.  They were all pre-approved, and you could have come to any of our meetings and submitted your choice of a new font for approval.”  They were still talking in unison, and it was getting very disconcerting.  The dogs were barking louder too, and the worming powder was making my hands itch.

“Sure,” I said, wanting to be rid of them.  “I’ll get it changed.  Any preferences?”

“We like Bodoni,” they said instantly, and I nodded and closed the door.

The kids with the designer skin tones and sheep skin-diseases had wandered off while I reminisced, and so I moved on a little, leaning against a supporting column here, a wall there, reading the graffiti and checking the Resident’s Association notice board.  Apparently they were organising a coach trip to a work-house; work-houses had come back into vogue again after the fourth consecutive recession and the imposition of austerity cuts on anyone too poor to be able to buy their way out of them.  Then I rounded a corner and found myself just outside the circle of light cast by a oil-drum fire.

Around the oil-drum concentrating hard, were three teenagers, gaunt and skinny to a man.  One of them was being supported by another, his head lolling slightly, his tongue protruding from between teeth so white they had to be dentures, and his eyes rolled back in his head.  The other one was working with a knife on his arm.

It was douchebag scrimshaw, I recognised it instantly.  The arm had been laid open from just below the elbow to just above the wrist and pinned to a board while the kid with a knife carved the living bone.  He was working fast, but he had to.  They’d have called the ambulance before they started, and he needed to get the bone carved and the arm stapled back up before the paramedics got there.  They’d be slow and late because it was this estate and they didn’t like coming out here.  They liked taking any of us out of here even less, but they still did their job, and an arm as mangled as this needed the hospital and a blood transfusion on the way.  The kid getting it done looked like he’d been given some drugs this time; too often they just relied on the recipient passing out when the pain from having his or her arm opened up kicked in.  Sometimes they didn’t pass out, which was a serious merit badge on the estate.  Sometimes they didn’t survive.  There was a memorial garden for them that the scrimshaw kids thought no-one knew about.

I stepped backwards and back around the corner again.  It was a weird little scene they had going on.  They would pick and carve at the scar they got from the stitching too, shaping it to look like the carving on the bone beneath so that people would know what they’d had done.  All things considered I preferred the Pantone kids with their obsession with being able to assign a number to anyone based on their skin tone.  I was still trying to figure out how the hierarchy of numbers went after that, but at least they didn’t seem to kill anyone regularly.

Well, less regularly, anyway.