the house by the sea pt. 5: the smell of death

Some way along the coast was a caravan park that hugged the cliff edge in honour of civilization. Static homes glared silvery white in the dull sun, symmetrically lined in allocated pitches like creatures basking. From the house by the sea they could see a thin plume of smoke that rose like a faint pencil line from one of the caravans in the heart of the park and they both fixated on it as though in its frailty lay the solution to the problem. They ate tinned ham mottled with fat and anaemic and cut into thick flabby hunks with dried crackers which were light and easily transportable and watched the smoke rise through slight cracks in the boarded windows as though they were a television and the only sound was the breaking crackers. It drifted day and night for several days after their arrival and they watched it as intently as if they had never seen fire before. They found the prospect of other survivors to be almost as wretched as the problem itself, but knew that they would have to go to the caravan park because they couldn’t make it on their own for the indefinite future which felt so much longer when you put a name to it, because their resources would run dry or spoil, because two people would tire quicker than ten people or even five.

In the early morning they took the tandem and cycled peacefully on the deserted lanes and gravel crunched beneath their tyres, and they followed the coast road for just a few minutes until they reached the site, and he could feel the handles of the screwdrivers in his jeans pockets, could hear Linda’s breathing behind him. The sign said “Manor Caravan Park” and beneath it someone had written in thick brush strokes “survivor’s camp”. Linda held his arm and he looked at her but although her eyes spoke endlessly she said nothing and they rested the tandem up against the two metal gates that were padlocked closed and he helped her climb over and followed her himself and up a rough track which ended at what had been the reception office and a small convenience shop, both of which had been completely boarded up. He walked around to the back of the building with Linda close behind him. There was an awful smell in the air and the sound of insect wings was almost industrial. Laid out on the floor behind the building was a dead woman. She looked to be in her twenties and was very tall and quite heavyset and was stripped naked and her legs were far enough apart so they could see the shadows around her vagina, but she was patchily covered in a blanket of flies who feasted and laid their young beneath the surface of her rotting skin and did not fly off despite their presence because there death overwhelmed life and outnumbered it. There was dried blood caked to the insides of her thighs and her throat was slit and had bled heavily out and also dried in huge crusts across her chest and seemed to breathe with blowflies, but he could see no evidence of brain trauma or other signs of infection and impulsively felt his pockets for the bulge of the screwdrivers.

“You’re alive?” He and Linda both turned towards the voice and armed themselves clumsily. Three men were standing some ten feet from them. They were all unarmed and the middle of the three raised his hands in a well-meaning gesture that felt especially futile.

“She’s not,” he said. He pointed a screwdriver at the dead woman.

The three men looked at her regretfully. It started raining very softly and it was the sound of the drops on the leaves that betrayed its subtlety. “Shall we?” said the same gesturing man, this time inviting them to follow him into the camp.

He started to walk and Linda held him back. He took her hand and squeezed it and nodded and laid his palm flat against her cheek and she closed her eyes a moment and they walked together in the direction the man had indicated.

“We saw you,” the man said. “Saw you at the cliff edge several days ago. Saw you throwing those bodies over.” He and Linda walked in silence. “Are you holing up there?” the man continued. The other two said nothing and wore bright blue jeans that were short on their legs. “In the house over there?”

They walked through the empty camp. The caravans were all locked up, padlocked from the outside, metal security grilles fitted to many of the windows. He noticed how well protected the camp was, flanked by a large perimeter fence and by the cliff, and thought of the holidays of his past which had failed to cohere and of the dead woman resurrected in the squirming maggots that took nourishment from her botched tissues. They approached a caravan in the very centre of the park and they saw the trail of smoke still rising as it did from a tall metal chimney that had been rigged to its top.

“What happened to her?” he said. “That woman?”

The three men looked at one another and two of them wandered off to another caravan and climbed the three steps up into it and closed the door behind them. They were left with the third man.

“It was an accident,” he said. “It was one of those things. She was very sick.”

“The problem?”

The man nodded. He led them into his own caravan and invited them to sit down on a foam padded sofa, and offered them a drink which they refused. It was piled about with papers covered in thick pencil diagrams drawn so hard the paper had in places torn and that appeared to them both to be nonsense, as well as scientific textbooks that from the typography and photographs on their covers looked outdated, and these things spilled onto the floor and even into the plastic sink that in drought had turned orange in dry lines around a past water mark. The one fold-down table in the kitchenette was lined with bloody tools and utensils and there were flakes of skin and pieces of what looked like flesh caught in the teeth of the blade of a small hacksaw. The kitchenette units were the kind of flecked mottled brown in two or three tones that tended to betray an era of stagnant design. The man cleared some paperwork from a wooden crate that was upturned and examined the top few leaves of drawings and scribbled notes, and nodded intensely to himself as though they contained incredible truths or even spiritual revelations, and he placed them alongside one of the other piles and lowered himself to sit on the crate.

“Name’s Charles,” he said.

He and Linda looked at him. They looked to be about the same age but his beard was wispy and looked fragile against the caravan’s interior. “What is this place?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Research,” he said. He poured a small glass of water from a five litre container and drank it slowly. The caravan moved slightly in the wind and the door chattered in its frame like a deliberate protest. “Before all this,” he said, and held up a large carving knife that was thick with dried blood, “the problem, we worked at the university. ‘Wayward scientists’,” he said like an endearment, like a club name.

“Into what?” said Linda.

“Methane,” he continued. “Compressed natural gas. We were investigating alternative sources of fuel. I’m sure you’re aware that we’ve fucked the world over, built an unsustainable dependence on an unsustainable fuel source.”

The three of them were silent, as though out of respect or shame.

“We managed to escape the city for this place as soon as we saw the first dead. It was weird, as though for all these years we had expected this to happen. I don’t know why. I had to kill five of them. You?”

He felt Linda’s hand tighten around his and thought of Mad Tom and of the child and he nodded.

“I find it helps not to think of them as people. Whatever fragile connection we might claim to have with our personalities is pretty far gone by the time the problem takes a hold. The temporal lobe’s really the first thing to go.”

He thought of Mad Tom and of the child.

“They’re not people now,” said Charles. “In fact they might be something far more useful.” He stood up and looked outside. There was rain over the window pane and they could hear it on the roof of the caravan. The house by the sea waited patiently along the cliff and they both wished they were behind its walls. He pulled on a thin plastic jacket and fastened the hood tightly around his face. “Follow me,” he said. “I’d like to show you something.” He walked out of the caravan and towards a large wooden storage barn at the very edge of the site.

Linda shook her head no but his eyes told her they must go and must see what these men were doing here and he too stood up and took one of the dirty knives from the tabletop and they followed Charles towards the barn, and jogged a little to catch up with him. There were several oil drums with smouldering fires lit inside them and struggling against the wind and rain lined up along the gravel paths. Charles saw them looking.

“Beacons,” he said. “Let’s people know we’re here.”

Charles took a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door to the barn. It was warm inside and there was a faint electrical light which must have been powered by a generator. There were piles of the dead all around the room, thirty or forty bodies. He held Linda’s hand very tightly and felt sick and afraid.

“This probably looks a little odd,” said Charles. “But this,” he said, kicking one of the bodies in the side, “and this,” he said, kicking another in the head, “are fuel. Dead bodies release methane. That’s what the awful fucking stench is.” He kicked another of the bodies in the front of the face and the toe of his tan leather shoes sank through the skin and was flecked with tissues when he pulled it out. He wiped the shoe with his hand and his hand on his trousers. “You see the problem is a wakeup call. A socio-economic crisis. An ecological crisis. We’ve put all of our eggs in one oily basket and now the party’s over. Preoccupied with oil, preoccupied with greed, with overdevelopment – it couldn’t continue at this rate, the world couldn’t sustain it. No resources, no space. We needed to wipe the slate clean, to reset the clock, to start again. The problem does all of it.”

“People are dying,” he said. His voice sounded very far away, over the cliff edge, under the sea.

“People are dying yes, and people are not dying, but a desperate situation requires a kind of desperate change. And it’s the bulk, the fucking wholesale consistence of the death that might just save some of us, that might make some of the thousands of years it took to get here worth the effort. We have to build a new society from the ground up,” he said. “And an intelligent society, one that’s going to last, does not forge a dependence upon an exhaustible resource that takes hundreds of thousands of years to form; no, it makes use of the abundant, the commonplace, of the very death and decay that brought its societal predecessor to its knees in the first place. We’ll use the methane produced by the decomposing dead to fuel the growth of a new social system, as vehicle fuel, as electricity, as the fundamental building blocks of a new utopia borne of ancient mistakes, one in which death is de-personalized and de-sanctified, a resource as ripe for exploitation as coal or oil once were. One thing the problem has driven home is that death is not special; it is arbitrary and cruel and remorseless, so let’s not hide behind tradition and taboo and shroud the whole filthy thing in ceremony. What better possible afterlife could there be than the knowledge that the gases from your own dead meat would aid the running and growth of a continuing society? It doesn’t get any more tangible than that. It’s the ideal response to the problem and it’s happening right here. This is what we’re doing,” he said and flung his arms back into the distant darkness of the barn, “we’re doing it right now. The threat is neutralized on two counts. The dead die and new life takes all the fuel it needs to stoke it aflame. You’ve been there, you know how many dead there are. Really dead and problem dead. Hordes of them just littering the ground. The resource is inexhaustible by definition. You said it yourself: people are dying. That’s the one fucking certainty in life, friend, the one thing you can sure as dark shit count on. Death’s coming. The biggest problem we’ve got now is how we can harvest it quickly enough to capture the fuel they produce. We need to run this right. We need all the help we can get. Leaving those dead to rot outside of a lab is as senseless as flushing crude oil down the toilet.”

They looked at each other, at the wood of the barn, at the piles of dead flesh.

“What happened to that woman out there?” he asked again.

“Woman? What does it matter? What does one woman matter now, what do a hundred women matter? The scale of the death and of the change out there destroys any meaning the individual might have had, which to be honest was negligible anyway.”

“Something has to matter.” Linda’s breathing was very loud and so was his own.

“It does. Survival matters. That much we owe to ourselves. We made this happen, the least we can do is to keep on going.”

“What do you plan to do?” he said. Charles smiled at him and then at Linda, and they felt his eyes on the shape of her body, felt them pierce her clothes and all over her skin.

“New society needs people,” said Charles, “to make it last. We need able-bodied men to join us and work with us.” It was all now inevitable. “And we especially need women.”

“We should go,” he said to Linda, and they walked to the door.

“Things have changed,” Charles said to their backs. “Everything. The old system failed. Relationships, monogamy, genetic exclusivity, it all failed. People no longer belong to one person. Breeding is imperative. It’s the way it has to be.”

He put his arm around Linda and pulled open the door of the barn and didn’t look back. The two men from the camp office were a few feet from the door with two others they hadn’t seen before and they blocked the pathway. “Come on,” he said to Linda quietly and they walked around the four men onto the thick wet grass and away from the path to follow the perimeter fence back around to the gate. The four men turned to watch them as they walked but none moved to follow and they both did everything they could to not run. He pushed Linda along slightly and glanced over his shoulder and saw that the men still stood beside the barn, and he gently pushed Linda again and in his mind urged her to keep going and felt the nervous heat burning through her clothes and glanced back over his shoulder a second time and saw that the men had gone. They cut between two caravans and he could see the gate a short distance away and Linda stopped dead, said “my God”, and he looked down at the path before them. There were the bodies of eight or nine women strewn in the grass that grew between their limbs and fringed their bodies as though their presence here were a fundamental part of the natural order, meat truck-stacked and ready for processing. They were all naked and like the woman at the camp entrance none showed obvious signs of infection and the smell of their rotting tissues was foul, and they had been beaten horrifically, their faces swollen over their eyes and beyond their features, and each had a small hole of equal size drilled into the centre of their foreheads, and there were finger shaped bruises over their throats and their thighs, and dozens of stab wounds were flecked over their chests and arms and faces. He and Linda looked silently at the bodies. Some were face down and their backs were tanned like an ancient pigment by the drying spilt blood. He tried to swallow and looked up and Charles and the four other men were around them and the bodies.

“They weren’t up to it,” said Charles.

“We need to go,” he said.

“No, you need to stay.” He looked to Linda as he said this. “We need women, women who are up to it.”

“This isn’t the way things should be.”

“It’s the only way things can be.”

One of the four men came at Linda with a hand extended, to take her arm and lead her away. She moved quickly, she grabbed him by the hair, she pulled a screwdriver and she stuck it into his neck, he gurgled and spat blood and they heard it sucking down his throat, and he started falling down and she still held onto his hair and pulled the screwdriver free and stuck it again through his cheek and then through the side of his head just above the ear. She let go of his hair and he dropped onto one of the dead women and his body twitched and the leaking blood steamed. Another came hissing bitch and he sank the knife he had taken from the caravan into his chest and his stomach and he died almost instantly. He looked at Linda and she was shaking but okay.

“You killed these women,” he said. Charles nodded.

“They couldn’t do it,” he said. “Give themselves over to the new society. Sacrifice the ego. They couldn’t, wouldn’t do it. This is how it is. You two are stronger than this. Stay with us here. Help us build something good out of all of this shit.”

There was blood on his fingers from the dead man and it ran slowly down the back of his hand to his wrist. It was already drying.

“I don’t think so. Society,” he said and took Linda’s hand, “is overrated.”

They stepped over the bodies of the women and the two men and made for the gate. The other two men looked at Charles who nodded and they then made a move for him and Linda and they stuck them hard with screwdrivers and watched them die. Linda’s screwdriver was stuck vertical from the top of the skull like a bizarre implant and was too imbedded to remove and blood had arced from the wound and the trauma to his brain was fast and grave, while his own had shattered windpipe like brittle plastic and the fractured edges of the trachea emerged slightly glistening and almost alien from the skin wounds that flapped somewhat and there was blood from the mouth and from the neck alike. Charles watched calmly and moved not at all.

“You needn’t leave like this,” he said. He was smiling. “We three – we can make it happen.”

“Everyone’s alone,” said Linda. “Please don’t pretend otherwise.”

He walked over to Charles and pushed him over onto the floor. He fell without resistance surrounded by death and reached without thought for the hand of one of the dead women which he clasped tenderly. Linda rushed forward and kicked the hands apart, then stamped down on his hand three or four times until they heard the dreadful sound of the bones breaking, and when she took her foot away there were odd bits of finger bone torn through the skin and it had sunk down a few centimetres into the soft mud. Charles had not screamed as the hand broke but he was crying and his tears looked very unfamiliar. He crouched alongside Charles and wiped his screwdriver on his jeans, then held it over his throat.

“Let me,” said Linda. The dead women seemed to rise momentarily and applaud. She picked a loose brick from underneath one of the caravans which was charred black along one edge from past barbeques and she knelt on Charles’s chest and looked him in the eye but he couldn’t see her because of his tears and she smashed the brick down into the middle of his face, and with one strike his nose caved in and with three his face was gone and only brain tissue and bone fragments remained, the components of a life.

She dropped the brick onto the floor and the sea groaned and they took each other’s bloody hands and they left.