Beware of the Dog

David broke free from the crowd of demonstrators and was confronted by a dog.  'Here, boy,' said David, holding out a hand.  It knew better to be fooled by an empty hand.  Somewhere behind him David's sister was searching for him, calling his name.  He could hear it even though her calls barely rose above the shouts of the crowd.  The dog stood and stared unblinking.  David tried smiling.  Something was going on in the background.  The marauder had emerged from the levelled building.  Five young men jumped on to its roof with their lumps of rock and wooden posts, hammering away pathetically at the impregnable machine.  From the dog's right eye, five lethal bolts of sound disrupted the functioning integrity of the young men's internal organs.  They slid from the machine like cast off skin.  The crowd fell silent.  David ran.

Meanwhile, Janyka finds a sheltered spot between the shadowy pillars of a historical city council building now derelict and hauls out her datapad.  She knows it's no good when it comes to future research data and, of course, there is always the chance of the signal being traced, but, nonetheless, she tries.  Then she tried punching in David's identity code.  And when she had tried, she tries again, and though it's predictive cells have never been adequate, she will try again.  She lets her head fall back against the loose stonework, realising that the data-facility is shifting her tenses.  It's buzzing back and forward with her still attached.  A second or two forward; half a minute back, so that she repeats the whole process, but gets nowhere.

She thumps the pad and it takes her strikingly back to the point when the five guys are eliminated right in front of her.  This doesn't happen.  Data-facilities don't fool around with time-lines.  They might produce the data, but they go there.  Meanwhile, the albatross, her brother, will have to be found and probably given another good slap.

Sticks and Stones Won't Hurt those Drones

Janyka and David found shelter among the coat tails of a crowd of watching protesters.  Others, less inclined to stand by and do nothing were attacking the marauder with bricks, fence-posts and anything they could lay their hands on.  For all the good it might do.  Marauders were first-level, workaday drones, completely empty, like all of their mechanical kind, of human pilots.  Somewhere - no one knew where - their guidance and manipulation was carried out by faceless personnel; some said they operated without any human intervention at all, but responded to some murderous algorithm.  But it was all talk.  No one knew.

'I'm hungry,' said David.  'When will it be my turn to eat.  I't was your turn yesterday.'

'I gave you something.  You didn't like it.  You don't like anything.'

David peered between the stinking rags of the protesters, trying to catch sight of the creature that appeared before the wall collapsed and allowed them to escape, but it was gone.  Perhaps it was never there.  Just something he imagined.  'There is something I'd like.'

'Not that again.'  Janyka shook her head.  'You know I can't take you to see Pa.  It's too dangerous.'

'I'm not scared.'

'You don't understand.  It might be dangerous for you.  It's even more dangerous for Pa.'  David frowned, pushed out his bottom lip and nodded slowly as if he understood.  But he inched back between two women who were still roaring their contempt for the controllers beyond the Mesh who had sent the marauder.  Another inch and then a step.  Janyka momentarily turned away and turned back.  And he was gone.

Approach of the Marauder

The noise grew louder.  Like a dentist taking the scenic route to your molars.  The basement walls and floor began to shake.  The ceiling and the floor above, such as it existed, started to join them.  Janyka and David both noticed that the rats were already gathering up their young by the scruff of their necks and heading out via the incoming sewage.  David looked at his sister and shook his head.  No way was he joining them.

Janyka staggered across the vibrating floor to the derelict doorway through which the two bankers had pushed their way.  But this, their only escape route, was where the whirring, cutting machinery was at its loudest, a vortex of plaster dust, stone and metal debris signalling the approach of the marauder.

'There might still be time.  Come on!' she yelled and grabbed David's wrist.  But David wrenched himself free, returning to pick up his pencils and paper.  The drawing of the angel fluttered to the floor.  Janyka  screamed in frustration, as he stopped to pick it up.  Even then, he didn't move.  Just stared at his picture.  That was when a staircase in the neighbouring hovel gave way, an adjoining wall and the spiralling tip of the marauder surged forward out of its own hurricane of dust.

Something flew out of the doorway over Janyka's head: a bird or a bat or a flying reptile.  It clung somehow to the wall opposite.  David watched Janyka's face, the skin stretched and red with screams of anger, but he could hear nothing for the rumbling of the machine yards only away.  He turned to stare at the creature gripping the exposed brickwork of the opposite wall.  Then the stone collapsed or disappeared.  It fell away to nothing.  They didn't wait for explanations.  They both scrambled out into the greyness of the day, covering their heads and faces, protecting them, not only from the stone chips and metal filings that filled the air, but also from the monitors that were everywhere.    

Anjjelz

Every time Janyka looks over his shoulder, David turns away and curls his free hand like a protecting shell around his drawing.  He spends some time on the details, on the delicate marks, the free-flowing outline, the careful shading and the naming of it underneath.

Janyka turns away, visually assessing the half-underground hovel that's been sanctuary for the last two nights: its plasterwork crumbling, the ceiling caved just above them, the raw sewage bubbling up in one corner.  'That's not how you spell Angels.'

'It's how I spell Anjels.'  He peers this way and that at his writing, a spidery scrawl next to the fine accomplishment of his drawing before forcing in another j:  Anjjels.

'What are those marks?' says Janyka, trying to sound as uninterested as she possibly can.

'Those are scales.  Those are the anjjels' scales.'  Janyka nods and sighs.  She should have known better than to ask.  A beetle walks across David's scrap of paper.  He watches it intently, his eyes occasionally darting in his sister's direction.  As he watches the insect, Janyka watches him.  'Do you have more paper?' he asks.  Its a diversionary tactic and she knows it.  For as Janyka picks up her bag, he quickly snatches the licorice-black creature and throws it into his mouth.  One crunch and its swallowed.  Janyka drops the paper back in her bag, closes her eyes in desperation and runs her fingers through her hair.

'We have to get out of here, David.'

There is a rumble and the wall behind Janyka vibrates so powerfully in unison with the noise that it shocks her into jumping to her feet.  It's the sound of machinery.  A drilling, grinding sound.  One she has heard before.  The unmistakable approach of a marauder.

Unravelling and Brain-smogged

David starts to unravel.  He shakes his head.  Claws at the backs of his hands.  Pulls at the yellow, plastic overall that everyone under sixteen has to wear.  Janyka, still brain-smogged by what she has just witnessed, reaches for his shoulder, but he swipes her hand away and thumps his head repeatedly against the wall behind him.  'Davey, Davey,' she whispers and reaches into her bag, pushing aside the rotting fruit, the hard biscuits, the scraps of paper and datapad to find a red wax crayon.  Still writhing he stares at it, occasionally glancing at his sister's face, searching for intentions.  Then, like a hungry animal, he grabs it from her, curls up around it and slowly calms down.

Janyka's tears aren't acidic enough to melt the tender chains that bind the two of them. Eventually, David's body unfurls and he slides towards her opening arms.  Minutes pass without a word passing between them. 'Don't call me Davey,' says David finally.

'My name is David.'

'Yes.'  Janyka keeps hold of him, takes an apple and rolls it towards where they saw the hole in the Mesh. They both watch mesmerised as it trundles across the angled floor, hesitates among the debris of plaster and regains its momentum to the spot where the two businessmen disappeared.  It doesn't get as far as them.  It's immediately zapped, as if it hit by a heavenly lightning bolt.  'We have to find another place, David.'

Rats and Bankers

Raging tears fill her eyes as she slaps David hard across the face.  Over her shoulder a feeling of remorse is waiting to stem the hot flow of blood in her temples, but she resists it.  David says nothing.  He has grown used to it.  He collects the coloured pencils scattered among the debris.  As he reaches for the vermillion, his favourite, one of the rats snatches it and runs to the far corner where a seething nest of newly-born young tumble over each other.  But before it reaches its home base, an electrical charge flashes across the derelict room.  Both pencil and rat are reduced to two small carbon deposits in the grey dust of the floor.  In a daze, David crawls forward to inspect the remains.

'No, David!'  Janyka grabs him by the ankle and pulls him back.  He kicks her hand away, still seething from her slap, but he gets the message and sits still, just staring at the brown powdery marks.  The once-living rat made of the same stuff as his pencil.  Not that he has any thoughts or feeling for the rat.  But his pencil...

Minutes pass.  'I don't like rotten apples,' he says.  What he means is that he is prepared to travel a little way towards reconciliation, but no further.  Not that it ever lasts long anyway.  His sister resents the responsibility she has been left with. He resents her resentment and the fact that she never takes him with her to the hospital.

They sit staring at nothing.  Janyka forces herself to enjoy an apple, avoiding the canker, the maggots and decay, until an unexpected crashing, shifting of broken furnishings and straining human voices penetrate their thick, heavy cloud of reciprocal hatred.  They shrink back to their nearest wall.  Knees pulled up, heads down, cowering.  Using hands to brush dust from their shoulders and the sleeves of their dark suits, two men, maybe in their fifties, one carrying a dark brown briefcase, push aside what remains of a door and enters the cellar.

'It can't be here.  It can't possibly be here,' says one, replacing the tail of his blue silk tie inside his jacket front.  'My, God.  The stench.'  His companion says nothing.  He shrugs, holds up the locator installed on his phone and walks towards the spot where the rat was zapped.  His friend follows.  This time, there is no sudden electrocution of frail life-forms.  Instead, for a brief moment, the blinding lines of silver light of the Mesh, a finely woven translucent net appears and is gone.  The men, too, are no longer in the room.  

Too Close to the Mesh

Two children sit perilously close to the Mesh.  It shouldn't be here, but it is.  It wasn't here when they scurried in three days ago, out of sight of blackbird drone, but somehow it has shifted and it is here now. Not that they know.  She is fifteen and he might be ten.  There are no records, and, if there is some place where they exist, it is not here.  Not in their ragged pockets.  Not in her rotting leather bag.  Not on a stone-dusted shelf in what remains of a bombed-out basement.  Rats fill the corners, a broken sewer oozes effluent into the lower end of the tilted cellar, and feet shuffle by up at street level.

Her brain is ridden with red mist, having run the gauntlet of the other inmates in the prison hospital, where her father has permanent residence.  On the way back, she clambered over the remains of a shattered house, once grand, lying among its broken trees, to fetch a few rotting windfalls.  These, she thought at the time, could be their food for the next few days.  It was while she was watching the street for hovering militia and carefully picking her way among the blackberry thorns, crackling electricity cables and steaming plumbing that a grenade landed a few feet away.  Instinctively falling down behind an upturned bath had saved her life.

So relieved to get back to their basement, she flew into a fit of anger when David let the apple roll down the sloping floor into the sewage.