Horsehead Soup

Chapter One

The ram raid was a bit of a shock.

Rachel and I were just walking down this tatty old street when there was a bit of a commotion about a hundred metres away. A four-wheel drive backed violently over the pavement and crashed through a shop window. Glass went everywhere.

‘Oh, super! Wizard,’ yelled some idiot behind us, clapping her hands with glee. ‘An olden-day-style ram raid! Oh, I do love a good ram raid. I do hope they get away with heaps and heaps of stuff.’

Rachel leant on my shoulder and muttered in my ear, ‘This place is full of fruitcakes, the sooner we get out of here the better.’

The four-wheel drive came careering back out of the shop, crunching glass and squealing its tyres as it roared away. The rear door was still hanging open and a couple of figures could be seen in the back. Unless I was mistaken they were trying on stolen leather jackets. People in the street clapped and cheered. Beside us the fruitcake squealed, ‘Oh, ripping! Super! Well done!’

Two security guards in uniform rushed out of the smashed-up shop with drawn guns. They stood fair in the middle of the street and opened fire at the departing vehicle. The sound of the shots was incredibly loud. The fruitcake clapped her hands over her ears. A figure fell out of the back of the four-wheel drive and lay sprawled on the cobblestones.

‘Oh, well shot, sir!’ yelled the fruitcake, still with her hands over her ears. ‘Well hit!’

The people who’d just been applauding the raiders now started to cheer the security guards. The guards both took a bow and sauntered back inside the shop. In the distance the body lay sprawled on the road.

Rachel turned to the fruitcake, ‘Excuse me, lady, but I assume this is some sort of stunt,’ she said. ‘Those guns were full of blanks? That guy in the road is a professional stuntman?’

‘Eh?’ said the fruitcake.

‘Have we just seen a fellow human being shot dead or haven’t we?’

‘Well I don’t know if he’s human or not,’ the fruitcake said, ‘but he’s certainly dead. Unless they just nicked him. But he’s not getting up, is he?’

I looked at the fruitcake, she was dressed in a daggy pair of shorts and a T-shirt. The T-shirt had ‘Born to Shoplift’ written on it in fluorescent pink. Her hands rested on a shopping trolley piled high with cans of dog food. She was a bit overweight and I reckoned she was about thirty years old. Maybe she lived on dog food. An ambulance roared by with its siren wailing. It screeched to a halt by the man on the cobblestones. Two ambulance officers sprang out, grabbed the body by its shoulders and feet and flung it into the back of the vehicle. Seconds later they were hurtling away, narrowly missing an oncoming tram.

‘This really must make you feel at home, Spud,’ the fruitcake said to me. ‘I’m so glad we got all this old-world action during your first outing. Sometimes this city is terribly dull.’

‘What do you mean – first outing?’ Rachel said. ‘How do you know Spud’s name? And who the hell are you, anyway?’

‘I’m Millicent Mouldweed. I’m the Director-General of this city. I’ve come to take you back.’

‘Back where?’ I said. I thought for a minute she meant she was going to put us back in the liquid nitrogen tank. We’d only just got out.

‘Back to where you woke up, back to the historic sandstone terrace house we’ve provided for you. You shouldn’t have ventured outside without a guide. You woke up sooner than we expected. Perhaps the nitrogen wasn’t as cold as we thought.’

The fruitcake seemed to know all about us. She knew my name. She knew we’d just woken up from the sleep of the dead. She knew we’d once fallen into a tank of liquid nitrogen. And whatever the fruitcake thought, the nitrogen hadn’t been very warm. It had been minus 197 degrees. Actually, it wasn’t just me and Rachel who fell in. Rachel’s mate Gazza and a dead racehorse we were trying to shove off a forklift truck fell in as well. It had all been a bit of a shemozzle. We’d been trying to preserve the horse for posterity, because it was dead. But we got preserved for posterity ourselves, although we were alive. We all tumbled in and hit the nitrogen. Ping! We were snap frozen. We were solid cool. We’d probably been frozen solid for millions of years, just waiting for some bright spark to work out how to unfreeze us.

We’d woken up an hour ago in nice warm beds in a pretty average sort of house. It was a terrace house with a cobbled street outside. There were trams in the street, and cars and bicycles – even a horse and cart went creaking past. The cart had a sign on it which said ‘Heritage City circa 2000’. And the horse was our old mate Staxa Fun, the one we’d been pushing off the forklift. They’d gone and unfrozen him too. Rachel had twigged immediately: we were in a Year 2000 theme park. The bright spark who unfroze us must have had the brilliant idea of trying to make us feel right at home by cutting down on the culture shock. No sudden freak-outs for us. We wouldn’t have to cop a load of weird stuff that had been invented while we were ice. They’d gone and made us feel right at home – sort of.

So Rachel and I had left Gazza, who was still asleep, and gone for a walk in the theme park. But unfortunately they hadn’t got it quite right. It was a theme park that had been designed by a nong who had a funny idea of the Year 2000 – the cart Staxa had been pulling looked like something Ned Kelly might have bailed up. And the bikes people were riding – some of them were penny-farthings, antiques. We’d seen this grotty old building called the Bygone Era Fun Parlour covered in old posters and crap. It wasn’t exactly a cinema complex with total surround sound. And then there’d been the ram raid. Not something I’d ever seen before.

‘Look, young lady,’ Rachel now said to this Millicent fruitcake, ‘I don’t think we need to be taken anywhere, least of all by you. We are adults. Well at least I am, Spud here’s just a teenybopper. We are quite capable of going for a walk around this tacky old burg without coming to grief.’

‘Yeah,’ said this Mouldweed woman as if she were explaining something to a dolt, ‘but this tacky old burg is a similacrum. This whole place,’ she waved her arm in a wide sweep, ‘is Ye Olde Heritage City circa 2000, to give it its full title. We organised for you to wake up here so you wouldn’t go mad. We’ve done it to make you feel safe and secure. Because, believe me, if you’d strayed outside the city walls you might have become totally deranged.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Rachel said.

‘Look,’ said Millicent Mouldweed, ‘many of the people who normally live outside this city are a bit disturbed. And they were born there. They can’t take the rate of change. It’s the most common cause of suicide: change-angst.’

‘Well, suicide would fix them,’ Rachel said. ‘There’s no change after death.’

‘Yes there is,’ said Millicent. ‘Suicide has no effect – everything keeps changing, just like it did before.’

‘Not for the person who’s dead,’ Rachel said.

‘Being dead makes no difference,’ Millicent said.

‘Look,’ said Rachel, speaking slowly and clearly, ‘if someone is dead, then all his or her neural circuits stop functioning. This means …’

‘You don’t understand,’ Millicent said. ‘Death has no dominion now.’

‘Poetic claptrap,’ said Rachel.

‘No, it’s the law,’ said Millicent. ‘Extermination of the individual is forbidden.’

‘So what do they do if you jump off a cliff?’ said Rachel. ‘Turn off the law of gravity?’

‘Only if they see you do it,’ said Millicent. ‘Otherwise they just scrape you up.’

‘Well there you are; you’re in a changeless state. Deadybones. Strawberry jam.’

‘Only for about a month. They just get some DNA from the scrapings and grow another you under accelerated conditions. Then you’re back to square one.’

‘I don’t believe this.’

‘I know you don’t,’ said Millicent. ‘It’s the culture shock. That’s why you ought to take things slowly. Let’s go back to your historic sandstone house.’

I said, ‘Do you seriously think life was like this where we come from? Do you think this … err … theme park is for real?’

‘Oh, we know it is,’ Millicent said. ‘We’ve studied the footage. All the old television programs. And the late night news.’

‘Take that ambulance,’ I said. ‘Where we come from ambulance crews are a bit less hyper. They spend some time stabilising the patient. You know, stopping the bleeding, patching the guy up – that sort of stuff. Then they lift the guy gently onto a stretcher. If he’s badly hurt, they drive very carefully.’

‘Oh, how tedious,’ Millicent said. ‘There can’t be much fun in that. What on earth do they do it for?’

‘To save life,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes, that’s right,’ said Millicent vaguely. ‘I keep forgetting. You see, these days death has no dominion.’

‘So you keep saying,’ Rachel said. ‘Look, you’re starting to freak me out. If you don’t mind, I think Spud and I will just go and see if Gazza has woken up.’

‘Of course I don’t mind,’ Millicent said. ‘I’m your guide. Where you go, I go.’

So Millicent started to shepherd me and Rachel back down the street. I got the impression that if either of us made a dash for it she’d head us off with the trolley full of cans.

‘Tell me,’ Rachel said, ‘if you don’t mind me asking, why have you got all that dog food? Do you own a pack of hounds or something?’

‘No, I just stole the cans for fun. From the Hyper-Mall-o-Mart. When I bumped into you I was on my way to abandon the trolley in front of some unfortunate citizen’s driveway.’

‘What?’ I said.

‘So that he’d back his car into it and ruin his duco.’

‘Good God!’ Rachel said. We both stood stock still and looked at Millicent. She smiled happily at us. Finally Rachel said, ‘Err … can I ask exactly why you were engaged in this activity?’

‘I was just filling in time, waiting for you people to wake up.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Rachel said. ‘What I want to know is, why did you want to park the trolley where some guy would run his car into it?’

‘It’s one of the most popular pastimes in this theme park,’ Millicent said. ‘It typifies the late twentieth century: Shoplifting and Trolley Abandonment. But you’d know this, of course, since you come from that long-forgotton era.’

‘Actually, no,’ said Rachel. ‘No, I don’t think I’ve ever stolen a tin of dog food in my life. And I’ve never abandoned a shopping trolley either.’

‘Oh,’ said Millicent. She sounded dreadfully disappointed. Then she brightened up. ‘Well, perhaps you would like to have a go now.’ She thrust the trolley’s handle towards Rachel. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘It’s splendid fun. Find somewhere really special to abandon it. What about the tram tracks? That’s always a total hoot: the tram comes rattling down the track, the driver sees the trolley and speeds up …’

‘Look, woman,’