Omega (47) I nodded. "It's possible." On that flimsy advice, we walked in the direction Una indicated, under a sky that was gradually filling with the first substantial clouds I had seen for several days, but occasionally permitting our shadows to stretch to our side as we walked. Beta looked at Una's baby who was fortunately fast asleep and wholly unaware of his surroundings. "Were there any awful things happening in the City like we've seen and heard about here in the Suburbs?" she asked. Una stroked her baby's head and reflected. "Not as bad as here, I think. Not as far as I know, anyway. I think everyone's been leaving the City and coming here. Mind you, when I left the Ambassadorial district, I did pass by the Academy and there seemed to be some trouble there." "What sort of trouble?" I asked. "Like at the Art Gallery?" "Art Gallery?" "It's been ransacked, firebombed, vandalised, ruined!" The Artist bewailed. "Masterpieces lost forever! A cultural heritage in smoke!" "No, not as bad as that!" Una said with some concern. "Did they really do all that to the Art Gallery?" "And worse!" Emphasised the Artist. Una raised her eyes in horror, but restrained herself to an account of what she'd seen of the Academy. "There was a demonstration outside. All sorts of people. Some throwing stones and books at the building. The police were guarding it, in riot gear. They were obviously prepared for things to get very disagreeable. Some academics were being led out of the building, their heads down and with police plastic shields over them to protect them from the missiles. I don't know why they were being attacked like that. Perhaps it was for their political views. I heard that a lot of academics came out openly on one side or another of the political spectrum during the Election. Perhaps that's what was upsetting the demonstrators. I didn't really want to find out more. I just headed for the nearest motorway junction." The way ahead soon lost the deceptive calm we'd been enjoying. The road became full of disconsolately wandering people, carrying bags and suitcases, while all around them were the battered ruins of abandoned cars and vans. Most of the houses remained intact, although they had broken windows, damaged hedges and garbage spilt over their drives. Some of the houses, however, had suffered considerably worse than others: trails of smoke still rising through blackened and charred roofs and smashed possessions scattered over neatly mown lawns and tangling in the geraniums in the flower beds. There was no particular direction in which the mass of people were heading. Some were wandering towards us. Some in the same direction as us. Some had abandoned any pretence of going anywhere at all, and sat in huddled groups on their luggage by the roadside, their eyes wide open and their faces pale in disbelief and shock. Beta grabbed both my hand and that of Una, who seemed as much in need of comfort as either of us. We soon came to the grounds of a community centre, in comforting red brick and white painted railings. It hadn't escaped unscathed from the violence and destruction: many windows were smashed, a van marked Suburbs Community Project was lying on its side, wheels still spinning in the breeze which had noticeably picked up strength, and the walls were sprayed with graffiti which, amongst other things, declared that this was a Black Party Republic. In the grounds of the community centre was a huddled mass of dispossessed and miserable, sitting in groups on the grass, with cups of hot tea grasped in their hands and many with blankets around their shoulders. Presiding over all of this misery was the bearded gentleman whom we had met the day before in the City and who had advised us to come to the Suburbs in our pursuit of the Truth. He looked up when he saw us, and strode towards us over the legs of the homeless Suburbanites and their children. He handed the stack of paper cups and the tea urn he was carrying to a centaur who was helping him in his charitable work. "Oh dear me! Dear me!" He said with sympathy, looking at the Artist and Una. "What a nasty gash! And such a helpless baby! Come inside the both of you!" He indicated the entrance to the community centre where a nurse was standing by a piglet who was playing with the remnants of a Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted sign. He put his arms around both Una and the Artist, and eased them in that direction. Before leaving, he smiled at us again with his infectious smile. "I'm so glad you were able to bring these poor unfortunates here. There are so many victims of this quest for the Truth. So many who've lost their homes or have been maliciously and randomly attacked! I just hope that I can be of some small assistance to them in this their most urgent hour of need. I take it that you have come here to pursue your great idealistic quest." Beta nodded. "But it seems so irrelevant now with all the awful things that are happening here. There hardly seems any point now to looking for the Truth any more." The gentleman nodded, still smiling but with a concerned frown on his face. "I doubt that very many of those supposedly seeking the Truth are really here for any other purpose than to cause mischief. And a mischief which is inflicting so many casualties! But your pursuit of the Truth is an altogether more noble endeavour. It is not my place to advise you to do anything, but do not be unnecessarily disheartened by those who pervert a worthwhile cause. If it is something worth doing, then it is worth continuing despite the evils visited on so many in its name." With that the gentleman led the Artist, Una and her baby up the small concrete staircase to the community centre entrance, where the nurse took the Artist from him and scrutinised his cheek with professional care and attention. They then disappeared inside the building, leaving us by the kerbside in front of several hundred miserable people, many in distressing silence broken by the muffled tears of the younger children. In amongst all the people were others who were wandering amongst them, doling out comfort, sympathy and practical help. The centaur was bending down awkwardly to pass down cups of tea, a small dragon was distributing sleeping bags and a woman in denim shorts and tee-shirt was doing much the same with heavy grey woollen blankets. She saw us, and wandered towards us. It was the Actress whom we'd met in the City, sweating profusely from her exertions and with a dirty smudge across a cheek. "Well! Fancy meeting you here!" She said, grinning broadly. "Well, not that surprising, I suppose, knowing about your search for the Truth. I don't suppose you've found it yet, have you?" I shook my head. "We've not really given much thought to it since we arrived." "Pity. It might end all this flipping senseless violence if someone were to find it! But I don't blame you for not thinking about it much. It's flipping grotesque, what's happening here. You wouldn't believe that the General Election would result in so much blooming chaos. It's a real crisis. I wonder if the government has yet declared a State of Emergency. They blinking well ought to! Look at all this! It's flipping disgusting, that's what it is!" She turned around to view the people huddled on the grass. "These aren't the worst cases. They're all inside. Babies and children orphaned. People nearly dead from the vicious attacks they've suffered. Some people who've been nearly burned alive. Some who have lost their minds totally. That Rupert bastard certainly was inspired when he directed his thuggish followers to come to the Suburbs. The place is utterly unprepared and incapable of handling this kind of chaos. I didn't believe it was nearly as bad as this when I heard about in on the News, but then you don't do you? You hear of all these flipping awful things that happen in the world, but until you actually see it, you just don't flipping know the half of it." "Why are you here?" Beta wondered. "Shouldn't you be performing in the theatre?" "In The Lion of Naples? I suppose I would if I could. My theatrical career does usually come first, I must admit. But all the theatres are closed down, those that survived the fire-bombing yesterday, that is. I think that only the cinemas are open, and not all of those. No, I saw the news about all the awful things that are happening in the Suburbs and immediately volunteered to help. It's only right, isn't it? I can't claim to be a socialist if I'm not prepared to help my fellow compatriot when I can. And anyway, I'd never been to the Suburbs before. From what I've seen of it, it can't always be like this. Most of the time, it must be jolly peaceful. Dead, in fact. And now look at it! Blinking awful!" She stared across at the ruined semi-detached houses, the church with the weather-vane dropping by a wire down its steeple, the shops with smashed windows and mostly totally gutted of its stock, the shells of previously well-polished automobiles and the garbage and rubbish being blown by the strengthening wind over the road. The evening sun was hidden behind the darkening clouds, and no electric lights shone from the windows of the surrounding houses. "Are the Suburbs the only place which have suffered?" I wondered, feeling for the desolation that marked my home. "Mostly yes, I believe. Mind you, it's only what I've seen on television and heard on the radio. Most of the worst of it is here. But there are other places that have got it quite bad. There's been an eruption of gang violence in some of the poorer parts of the City, for instance. That's not too unusual, of course. It has to be jolly bad for that kind of thing to be newsworthy, and with all this happening in the Suburbs and that invasion in the Cat Kingdom, it must be absolutely dreadful for it to even warrant a small mention. There are pitched battles between gangs of youths of different political and cultural affiliations all over the place. Housing estates have been burnt down, schools ransacked, shops looted. All that sort of thing. Almost normal in some parts of the City, I suppose. It's just the scale of it that's unusual. People have been machine-gunned. Grenades have been thrown. It really does sound gross. And I daresay it'd be worse still, if so many people from the City hadn't left and headed here to the Suburbs." "Are there very many people from the City here?" I asked. "Not just the City, of course, but since more people live in the City than in the rest of the country put together, I suppose, yes, there must be. Some areas of the City are apparently almost like ghost towns; so many people have left for here. Particularly those parts of the City where the Illicit Party is particularly powerful. Inevitable I suppose, given that bastard Rupert's call for all his followers to come here. Although, as you probably have already noticed, there are a lot of people here who have absolutely nothing to do with the Illicit Party, supposedly looking for the Truth..." "Yes," agreed Beta. "We've seen some very strange people. Monsters, gargoyles, all sorts. I've never seen people like that before!" "I don't know where they've come from," mused the Actress. "I've not seen them myself, but I've heard about them from these poor blinking unfortunate survivors. They really do sound like something out of the ordinary, don't they?" The Actress looked back at her wards, and then glanced down at the blankets over her arm. She puffed some air through her cheeks. "Well, it's been nice talking to you. But I've got work to get on with! Best of luck with your quest." With that, she turned round and waded back through the kneeling and sitting crowds of Suburbanites distributing blankets to those which seemed most at need. Beta looked at me, with a troubled frown. She ran her fingers through her hair to clear it off her face, and pushed it over her shoulders. "I suppose we ought to carry on with our search?" She said with a faint hint of doubt. I shared her doubt, but I couldn't think of any real alternative. I nodded, gently squeezed her hand, and then we walked away from the community centre in the direction which seemed least damaged and vandalised. The crowds of people gradually thinned. Families carrying their baggage trudged by, looking neither left nor right, immersed in their own misery. It was probably best that they kept their eyes distracted from the ruins of homes and motor vehicles they were passing by. Some people just stood or sat by the roadside, abandoning any pretence of going somewhere. It was by a bus shelter, on the plastic seats provided, that we saw another familiar figure, still naked but shivering in the cooler evening air and with a distinct blueness about her shaved head. "Xenana!" Exclaimed Beta, running up to her childhood friend. "Xenana! What are you doing here?" A brief gap in the deepening cloud let in a shaft of weakening sunlight, illuminating a face with smudged mascara and fading lipstick gazing sadly up at us. "I could ask the same of you, Beta," she said, unable to prevent a smile creeping over her face as the shaft of sunlight disappeared leaving her again in the shadows. "Still with your boyfriend, I see. Did you come here for the fun as well?" She laughed haltingly and slightly hysterically. "Fun? We didn't expect any fun!" "I did! Or we did, anyway. We thought it'd be fun. Not that it's been any flipping fun at all!" She laughed bitterly. "We thought: the Suburbs, the Truth, all these thousands of people... Let's party! We all loaded into this car one of us had. We had some absolutely brilliant drugs, and we drove here in real party mood. Though it was no flipping party getting here. All that traffic! One long blinking traffic jam from the City to the Suburbs." She laughed again, caught herself and stopped abruptly. "And here we all arrived: all in the mood to party. I'd never been to the Suburbs before. None of us had! We'd no idea what to expect. We thought it'd be at worst boring, at best a good laugh. But it's turned out to be a real bad trip, and none of us had dropped any blooming acid!" As Xenana launched into another badly tuned laugh, Beta sat down next to her friend, and put a comforting arm around her shoulder. "Where are your friends, Xenana? Shouldn't you be with them?" "I'd love to be!" She exclaimed with another short bitter laugh. "They've got all the flipping drugs, if there's any left by now! But when we arrived there was just flipping nowhere to park. We crawled around the Suburbs for flipping hours - or what seemed like hours. We were getting really teed off. And then it was a flipping nightmare! I couldn't believe it!" She laughed again. "Out of flipping nowhere they came! Blinking dozens of them! Two dozen at least! I'd never seen people like them before. Real ugly things they were! Real monsters! Just like you see in flipping nightmares. Horrible horrible faces. Cruel fangs. Enormous claws. And laughing and shouting and cawing. We thought it might've been the drugs, at first. This can't be real! Have you seen these repulsive things?" Beta nodded. Xenana looked around her hopelessly. "I've lost my handbag. The worst of it I've also lost my ciggies. And all the reefers I'd rolled for the occasion!" She laughed again in a tone that was dangerously close to crying. "Hamid was the most blitzed. He must have taken something he'd not shared with the rest of us. In retrospect it's probably a blinking good thing he hadn't. He got out of the limo in a sort of stoned good-natured way. He stood there in front of all these dreadful things, like as if they were just naughty primary school children. 'Couldn't you like let me and my friends like just pass by?' He said. They looked a bit bemused themselves. They didn't expect people to talk to them like that. 'Hey, you guys. You can let us pass, can't you?'" Xenana paused. She wrapped her arms around her as a gust of wind blew by raising Beta's hair up into the air and rustling through the dark foliage of the hedge behind us. Her eyes were wide open and a dark tear of mascara trailed down her cheek. "They didn't say anything. One of them - a cross between a pig, a horse and a spider - suddenly punched Hamid on the face. From inside the car I saw blood burst out of his nose, and smear down the windscreen as his head slid down. We just screamed. This wasn't a flipping joke any more! This was no blinking fun! We piled out of the car as fast as we could. I started running and running. I didn't flipping care about my handbag or my purse or any flipping thing. I just ran and ran! The monsters didn't stop. One of them grabbed Maria and I could hear her screaming and screaming while I ran. Their scales, feathers and claws made unbearable grating noises just like their hideous cackling laughs." She let loose a breathless winded bark of a laugh herself. "I don't know what happened to the others. As I ran all I could hear were the echoes of Maria's screams. They pierced through the air like the jagged edge of a saw. My stomach was churning, my chest was pounding and I was feeling jolly ill!" "But you're alright now!" Beta said comfortingly. "I can still hear Maria's screams. I can still see Hamid's crushed nose on the windscreen and all that blood and snot smeared there. It was a bad dream! The worst trip imaginable. But a real one! Not one in the flipping head!" Beta sighed. "This has really been a ghastly day!" "It has been! Everything bad is happening on one day. I blame the Election. It was alright before! Now, it's chaos. No flipping fun at all! Why are all the bad things happening at once? The News broadcasts we heard on the radio were jolly depressing: we just had to turn it off and listen to cassettes. The siege of the Academy. The theatres closing down. The war in the Cat Kingdom. There was even the news that the famous businessperson, Lord Arthur, had been shot..."
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