darknation's Doomworld Forums Blog

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Segue 07a - The Value Sausage of Destiny (27/02/12 RC01)
MN – still need to decide on chapter placement
3400 words (1075 words alpha)
Imported into veni6.doc 27/02/12 (C??-C??)


It was my heart’s secret desire to remain unemployed until the end of time, leisurely idle until the day the Sun went supernova and vaporized the atmosphere of the Earth. The globe would be scoured clean with purifying flame; gigantic solar flares would strike forth and boil the moisture from the living flesh. The agonizing death of all life would finally be at hand, but most especially the life that happened to work at the Jobcentre.

I had always preferred the title of Labor Exchange; it was an appellation snappier and less sanctimonious than that of Jobcentre. In a similar vein, I had always preferred the title of Dole Scum over the more politically correct term of Job Seeker.

Alas, everything changes, and seldom for the better. As a callow youth, I had followed my father into the heart of the Labor Exchange, a brief but necessary detour to be made before we continued on towards the bookies. My father bade me wait by the doorway as he joined the queue of those waiting to sign on.

I stayed where I was put and was not tempted to explore my surroundings; viewed through the eyes of a child, the Labor Exchange was indeed a harsh vista.

The room was grey and hard. White sheets of paper, stamped with angry black capital letters, were nailed to walls in their hundreds. The floor was made of speckled concrete; the building rattled with the echoes of footsteps and the scraping of cold metal chair-legs. The air was thick with fag smoke, the smell of stale tobacco mingling with the reek of unwashed alcoholics to form a heady concoction.

I had learned to recognize the unmistakable aroma of human despair from a young age. The sights and smells of this destitute institute scared me a little, but I also knew that there was a certain truth lurking in the shadows here; no effort had been made to disguise the nature of this Hell, for Hell would be no deterrent if not honest about its nature.

Satan was eventually dethroned, of course; Margaret Thatcher, whist not dead and buried, is insane with dementia and eats her own shit for breakfast. Risen to power in her place are the unholy Homunculi, Tony Blair and his fellow demon-seed; upon their ascent to throne, the first order of business was to redecorate.

Gone are the grey walls conjured forth by the depravity of Thatcherism; they have been replaced by plasterboard, warm and painted with swatches of light, bright blue. Thus the walls, which had previously only been fit for stopping the roof from falling down, could now also inspire the clear-sky thinking deemed an essential part of the contemporary Job Seeker’s mindset.

Gone are the black and white notices thumped from the press in 72 point Impact, notices that possessed all the tact and subtlety of a half-brick to the face. The shock of the new comes forth in full colour, bright posters that dazzle the eyes and command the conscious with all the threat of a rainbow. This seductive propaganda portrayed the varied and diverse culture in which we now live; happy, smiling peoples seeking jobs in all walks of life.

Here we see the quintessential black man, clutching a surfeit of job application forms beneath his armpit whilst shaking the hand of his pale-faced oppressor. Here we see a grinning mother with rosy-cheeked babe in arms, the part-time work her position demands overflowing from the pram behind her. Over there, a lesbian in a power-suit grins inanely as the Job-o-Matic computer shits out City jobs on command.
Old men, young men, gay men, single men, single parent men, old single gay parent men; all are depicted smiling, all mugging pretentiously from their posters with so many jobs they don’t know what to do with them.

The posters do not reflect the reality of the situation.
Even the air which you breathe in this place was an artificial assault upon reality, thick with febreeze and the cloy odour of the bizarre plastic fern that dominated the freakishly modern decor. The Labour Exchange would have suffered no such pretense; I recall standing next to my father, getting faintly high on the reek of the heavy-duty disinfectant deployed whenever one of the old alcoholics who seemingly lived there lost control of their bodily functions and deposited some form of excrement upon the cold concrete floor.

There were no jobbies in the modern Jobcentre to amuse the infantile and the infantile-minded; like the poop-deck of a ship, the title was a sad misnomer.

There were no right-angles to be found here either; the architects and designers had removed all sharp edges from the furniture. The desks were deformed ovaloids, the partitions parsed between computers were bizarre half-circles. Even the chairs had been melted free of any rectangular edges that might offend some passing extraterrestrial species with mankind’s wild, crazy ideas about square geometry; make no mistake, these were alien chairs, built with no regard for the dimensions of the human arsecheek.

None of this really aided the humble Jobseeker in the seeking of an actual job; that particular function of the Jobcentre, long overlooked by those in charge, fell to the Advisors. And in my case, the position of Advisor was filled by none other than Briefcase Willie.
Briefcase Willie was the Jobcentre’s accursed cats-paw, and it was he who was tasked with bringing me to heel and integrating me into normal society. He was the pariah of the Gambit family, the outcast second scion of that noble line of Alcoholics; disowned and disavowed, he was a brother to Gambit in name only.

The list of shames he writ upon his birthright was lengthy; he was sober, to the despair of his brother. He was homosexual, to the anguish of his father. His mother was oft heard cursing the Briefcase was born; she would never forgive him for the ruination he wrought upon her private parts during birth. Indeed, oft times during her many deliriums locked away within the Murray Royal, Gambit’s mother was witnessed to pull up her hospital-issue gown and exclaim that, because of the Briefcase’s tremendously fat skull, she could now do naught but piss at 90° angles.

But of all the scorn heaped upon his deformed vag-ravager, the weightiest was the matter of his employment. In sacred Blairgowrie, working for the Jobcentre marked one out as a turncoat and a race-traitor. Following the Revolution, Briefcase would either be first up against the wall or sent to the Hague to be indicted for war-crimes.
Briefcase Willie's hatred for me was a very palpable thing; the contempt that radiated from him in waves was almost radioactive in its potency, warming my skin malignantly and scratching at my senses like the death-rattle of a giger counter.

He had found employment with the Jobcentre shortly after leaving school. Conversely, I had found unemployment with the Jobcentre shortly after leaving school. I had been his first caseload on his first day of work, and it was my ambition to be his last caseload on his last day of work; I would be both Alpha and Omega, a shining example to all the unemployed of the land. I would be a dire portent of the idle future to the Department of Social Security; they would look down upon the works of the unworking and despair.

I would be a leader of men; for was not Jesus Christ, First and Only Son of God, unemployed during his most influential years? Did not Mahatma Gandhi change the world by the simple expedient of resting leisurely upon his boney behind for months and years at a time? Did John Lennon, great and holy John Lennon, ever really do much other than smoke dope in bed, eat Pringles, twang on the sitar and occasionally pork Yoko Ono?

Show me a brace of great men, and I will show you men whose great works would not have been possible if the Jobcentre had sank their wicked talons into them first. John Lennon would be placed on innumerable restart and retraining courses. They would force Jesus to shave his beard and get a haircut to improve his prospects.
Mahatma Gandhi would doubtless end up working in a call center, and the world would be a poorer place for it.

If I was a bum with a messianic complex, then Briefcase Willie was a deranged political assassin. I would declare him Nemesis, but perhaps nemesis was to strong a word, too potent a term to apply to the borderline retarded schemes and half-spastic machinations that the vile man spewed forth on a fortnightly basis.

He was a lesser foe in my catalogue of villains, a mere irritation to be dealt with at a later date. I thought he posed no threat to me, and I had become complacent in my superiority; I would be harshly punished for my slipshod sass.

I had turned up a few hours late for my appointment at the Jobcentre, as was my prerogative and custom; the idea that I would be out of bed and abroad job-seeking at seven in the morning was patently ludicrous, just another of the petty torments inflicted on me by the equally ludicrous Briefcase.

I muttered an insincere greeting to Gambit’s brother, who was displeased with the hour of my arrival. I explained that the active and passionate pursuit of employment engaged upon by this particular Jobseeker would not often find common ground with the draconian schedules set by the petty-minded Briefcase; as such, allowances would need to be made.

I elucidated upon my late appearance with a truly epic tale of delayed buses, broken alarm-clocks and a series of no less than seventeen concurrent occupational interviews that unhappily ran over-schedule. Only once my heroic fiction had reached a climax worthy of standing ovation did I stick out my paw to await receipt of my giro.

No giro was forth-coming; in its place, I received a job application form and a biro pen, accompanied by an evil little guffaw from Briefcase Willie. The meat processing plant in Coupar Angus was apparently in need of laborers; it was to be the Tesco Sausage Factory for me, the Briefcase announced with malicious glee.

I was forced to fill out the document on the spot by this grinning minion of evil, who immediately removed said document from my grasp and locked it away inside his ridiculously shaped desk; his excuse for this blatant banditry was the offer to slip it into postbox for me, lest the application form be mysteriously misplaced en-route to the post office.

It was galling, but such things happened occasionally. The Briefcase had obviously put much thought into ending my reign as King of the Dole Scum, and so far his plan was working. He was, annoyingly, quite pleased with himself.

He was rejoicing prematurely, in my opinion.

Within the week, Rhombus Post pushed a summons to employment through my ragged letterbox. I debated treating the unwanted missive with the contempt it deserved and hurling it straight into the bin. Such rash action would, unfortunately, bring the wrath of the Department of Social Security down upon my head; my benefits would be cut for three months as punishment for willful non-compliance.

I pondered upon this turn of events, scheming on how to turn the situation to my advantage. I eventually decided that I had no choice but to turn up at the Sausage Factory at the appointed hour; they would be presented with a man who had apparently recanted of his wicked ways and was born anew. This eager looking individual would appear to be ready and willing to enter the world of full-time employment, whilst all the while stealthily engineering his way towards a tribunal for unfair dismissal.

So came Monday morning; I crawled out of my camp-bed at some ungodly hour, battered my unruly hair into some semblance of normality and trudged down to the Wellmeadow bus stop. Tesco had, with great foresight, laid on a special staff coach for those poor lost souls who regularly worked down at the sausage factory. It was a wise precaution against temptation; Tesco didn’t want half their staff absconding from public transport as they drove past the multitude of pubs en-route to gainful employment.

I was not the only one standing at the bus stop who had been royally shafted by the nefarious Briefcase; the Jobcentre’s favored servant had obviously been putting in the overtime recently. Cocky the Pot Noodle Chef stood glum beneath the bus-shelter, clutching his successful application form in a white-knuckled death-grip. Ten Inch Dave was likewise staring into space, the thought of full-time employment sending his synapses all awry. Other, longer serving minions of Tesco milled around the concourse, their jaws slack, their eyes cold and dead to the world.

That, I knew, would never be me.

The bus journey passed without incident and I was holding myself together admirably; it was only when I was shoveled out of the bus and into a pair of mismatched Wellington boots that the horror began to affect me; like my colleagues, I suspect that the prospect of manual labor drove me slightly mad.

I entered my new place of employment and the first thing to brutalize my senses was the stench, which was beyond foul. Raw strands of meat were power-hosed from the machinery and conveyor belts at half-hourly intervals; the drains were constantly clogged, meaning our feet splashed through a dilute soup of mince and gristle. Thin strips of sinew and flesh wormed their way under rivet-heads, table-legs and stuck under the treads of my Wellingtons. Spray from the power-hoses turned into tainted steam on contact with the refrigerated air and a stinking fog rose from the wet slurry that slushed around our feet.
Ranks of men and women dressed in stained white coats stood either side of the mass conveyors. At the head of the line was a monstrous, clanking steel brute; this, according our esteemed training officer, was the Sausage Master 800.

As far as I could ascertain, the Sausage Master worked in a manner reminiscent to a giant Mr. Whippy Ice Cream machine. In the center of the clattering contraption was an oily metal sphincter that irised open and shut like the aperture of a camera. A dead-man’s handle sprouted from the side of the machine; when the handle was pulled, the sphincter of the Sausage Master gaped wide and shat forth an unending coil of raw sausage meat.

It was my job and privilege to stand aside the almighty Sausage Master for twelve hours a day, filling five-meter long sheathes of skin with mechanically recovered meat before dumping the resultant rope of fat intestine onto the conveyor belt. Cocky the Pot Noodle Chef would take it from there, twisting the long cylinder into individual links of sausage before passing it on to Ten Inch Dave.

Dave would pick up the links and split them into eights or twelves; that done, he would lovingly tuck the sausages into their little polystyrene trays and send them off down the line, wiping a tear of pride from his eye as he did so. From there, the sausages would be shrink-wrapped, labeled, chucked onto freight-lorries and ferried out to Tesco supermarkets all over the country.

Giving up my free time to feed the hungry of the world was a noble duty, especially considering the piddling pittance Tesco were paying me for doing it. And yet, despite the righteousness of my cause, I couldn’t help but feel slightly unfulfilled; there was a niggling doubt in the back of my mind, a voice telling me that I was destined for greater things.

I felt a little underutilized as an inconsequential cog in Mr. Tesco's mighty machine, and decided to raise the matter of career advancement with the line supervisor at the earliest available opportunity.
It transpired that the supervisor was from Wales, and therefore not a man famous for his well-developed sense of humor. In no uncertain terms he made clear his opinions regarding any managerial aspirations I might harbor.

He struck me as a man lacking in imagination; through no fault of his own, he was incapable of seeing the singular vision for the Tesco Sausage Factory that I possessed. It was obvious that he saw a dark and dismal metal cave, where human beings could be trapped against their will and forced to repetitively perform mind-numbing tasks until their willpower broke and they became nothing more than unthinking drones of the Tesco Empire.

I, on the other hand, saw the potential for a place of light, love and laughter. I saw a way forward, a way to reignite the dim embers of human passion and resurrect the dead souls that languished in limbo around me.

Rather than bandy further wasted words with the blind fool wearing the supervisors helmet, I decided to act upon my instinct. I would display the initiative that Tesco had doubtless hired me for; working conditions needed to be improved. Staff morale had nose-dived into critical levels, and the only way to heal that morale was with the medicine of laughter.

I reached for my secret weapon; hidden within the darkest recesses of my wallet was a condom, which was borne more with senseless optimism than any realistic expectations. Now, my visit to the family planning clinic would be rewarded tenfold.

I carefully removed the sausage skin from the clanking machine beside me, cunningly replacing it with my banana-flavored cock-snarfler. With meticulous care, I aligned the sausage-shitting orifice and the open condom until I was satisfied. Eyes alight with life for the first time since I had been frog-marched into the factory, I leaned forward and pulled the dead-man’s handle.

As any bored adolescent would be able to tell you, the condom is a magical thing of impressive stretching qualities. Those issued by the health board are doubly magical, probably because those issued by the health board are doubly thick; oft were the times that I had witnessed some drunken wit asphyxiating upon the pub floor, having managed to stuff their entire head into a single flexible contraceptive with no thought given to an exit strategy.

As a youth, I had co-opted the Durex company into the manufacture of some particularly fine water-bombs; like the bouncing munitions of the legendary dam-busters, this advancement in water-bomb technology revolutionized the soaking of bastards upon the playing fields of Blairgowrie High.

And yet, there was no doubt in my mind that this was my finest hour; the union of Sausage Master 800 and Family Planning Clinic was nothing short of glorious. I sent a sloppy Hindenburg a-sailing down the conveyor belt, the banana-scented plastic creaking and straining to bursting point with barely constrained sausagey-goodness.

The laughter started slow but built rapidly; soon, the Tesco Sausage Factory was united in hilarity. All work ceased, so jubilant did the workers around me become. It was then that I knew, thanks to my inspired morale-boosting action, that a promotion was surely in the post. The Welsh supervisor himself stormed up the line to congratulate me for rejuvenating his flagging workforce; his face was glowing red with pleasure, his fists were bunched before him in delighted gratitude.

Alas, before he could pluck me from the minimally-waged masses and elevate me to the post of Lord Solar Commander of Tesco and Associated Subsidiaries, my hilarious meat-zeppelin exploded. My promotion prospects suffered accordingly; I was fired from my position as chief sausage-stuffer.

This was but the first terrific blow I would suffer that day; the Welshman, liberally coated in dripping sausage meat, saw fit to punch me in the left eyeball.

This is assault, as any court of the land will confirm. And the use of physical violence as a means of castigating employees for transgressions in the workplace is frowned upon. The law is quite clear, and the legal consequences for such deplorable violence were dire; it was fortunate for Tesco that I was a charitable fellow, and willing settle out of court for a four figure sum rather than subject them to the trial of the century.

I returned to the Jobcentre triumphant; word of my magnificent victory had spread out around me in concentric circles, reaching the ears of possible employers with gratifying speed. For weeks afterwards, Gambit’s brother desperately continued to send out application forms in my name; all were returned to sender without a stamp.

Thus the Jobcentre was defeated, and I was free to claim state benefits for perpetually. The hubris of Briefcase Willie was shattered upon the anvil of my awesome will; from that day forth he was forever a broken man.

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The car crash was as awful as anything you can imagine; the horror crawled past in slow-motion, like a bad road-safety advertisement.

The first second stretched out, empty but for the dreadful conclusion; seeing the universe outside the car hurtle towards me, watching the world through the windshield crack and shatter. Then, an explosion; everything flashes white, polka-dotted with blood.

I saw Ziggie, her eyes wide, the airbag smacking hard into the side of her head. The force tore the glasses from her face, the metal frame buckling on impact and ripping a bloody skin-flap from the bridge of her nose. Everything around us was spinning, spinning.

Gambit was screeching like a banshee somewhere behind me; to the fore, a fleeting vision of a red car tumbling away. A surreal morass of flailing arms and legs writhes within; then, the world tilts up upon its axis and begins to spin once more.

The car slid down the grass embankment and I felt the fingers of gravity plucking, pulling, trying to flip us over. Then the Mercedes acceded to gravity’s caress and began to roll onto its side.
I prayed that it wouldn’t happen, that somehow we would resist; I felt the tremor run through my seat as we hit the bottom of the trench. There followed an agonizing moment of indecision as the car dithered in mid-air, unhurriedly choosing which way to fall.

Eenie meenie miney mo…

Beyond the window, the dim sky of dawn held motes of rain in slow suspension. Then, inevitably, we tumbled upside-down and spilled out into space.

Falling debris clattered around me as time returned to normal. I found myself smeared face-down upon the sunroof, the dirt and grass pressed smooth against the glass. A small earthworm was trapped and wriggling, its segmented body squashed and flattened against the pane.
Droplets of blood drooled from my scalp and tapped out a tattoo on the glass.
I was bleeding profusely from where my head had smashed into the windscreen; fortunately, my entire body was numb with shock and I could feel no pain. I felt half-paralyzed; the only thing that convinced me that the crash hadn't broken my neck was the reassuring itch of my trenchfoot prickling away deep down in the sewer of my subconscious.

Attempting to shift my limbs revealed to me that the ceiling of the car had turned into a demented game of Twister. Someone kept on kicking me in the back of the head, but I couldn't ascertain who the guilty party was; Ziggie’s muffled voice was moaning something about her step-father’s car into my left buttock, a mumbled confession counterpointed by Gambit burbling the Lord’s prayer into the impious cleft of my right armpit.

Gently, testing for broken bones as I went, I began the delicate process of extracting myself from the mixed wreckage of ruined automobile and ruined humanity surrounding me.
Opening the car door when the car itself was upside-down proved to be impossible; the roof had sunk three centimeters into the muddy ditch, and as a result the door was wedged shut.

I couldn’t summon sufficient strength or leverage to push the door open more than a few centimeters. Giving up on that, I instead tried to roll down the windows and effect our escape that way. Alas, the Mercedes came with electric windows fitted as standard and there was no way to manually retract them; with the engine dead and turning stiff, the windows were rendered inoperable.

Trapped, I sat and fumed, reflecting on how a car that had seemed perfectly comfortable and spacious five minutes ago had become as tight and claustrophobic as a closed coffin. I stared with hateful impotence at the glass wall that was entombing us, resolving to write a stern letter of complaint to Mercedes Benz regarding this unforgivable design flaw.

I was halfway through mentally composing the third paragraph of obscenity that would form the basis of my missive to Mr. Benz when a pair of Nike trainers appeared by the window; the cavalry had finally arrived, and assuming they had brought a tin-opener with them, they day might yet be saved.

Our mysterious Nike-clad savior grasped the door and began to pull; to aid him, I put my back against the glass and began to push. Thanks to the Herculean efforts of both our personages combined, we finally managed to force the door open.

I collapsed backwards from of the buckled ruin of the Mercedes with my face towards the sky, a gentle drizzle falling on my features. Fresh air had never seemed quite so clean and good; I sucked in great gasps of sweet freedom and let the fine misty rain cleanse my perception. The claustrophobia released its tight grip on my lungs and my chest breathed free once more.

Reveling in my release was one thing, but good manners dictated that I open my eyes and thank the agent of my salvation. The face of my liberator swam into sight, inverted and grinning gormlessly.
It was the face of Paul Fucking Cruickshank.

His puzzled smile telegraphed his surprise to see me, and words to that effect followed as I was assisted to my feet. I waved him into silence; as puzzled as I was by his presence here, releasing Ziggie from the Mercades was a matter of higher priority.

She was clutching her stomach as if she was going to vomit, hissing and gritting her teeth as we pulled her from the vehicle. She shoved me away as soon as she was clear and upright, any move I made to try and comfort her was met with what I can only describe as a snarl. I backed away, stunned and hurt by the ferocity of her reaction.

It was safe to say that whatever had transpired between us in the front seat before the accident was no more; that moment, that most excellent moment, had been sadly fucked away.

Gambit was more receptive to my offer of aid. He simply accepted my hand as I lifted him to his feet, dusted himself down and made a simple pronouncement of “I have shit my pants.” This declaration was slightly inaccurate; from a purely technical stance, Gambit had actually shit Mo’s pants.

Oblivious, Gambit hobbled off down the Kingsway. I last saw him heading in the direction of some promising looking bushes with nice big broad leaves.

I didn’t want to look at whatever atrocities against nature that Gambit was perpetrating and I didn’t dare to look at Ziggie. Instead, I examined the exterior of Ziggie’s father’s Mercedes. The rear end of the car had been completely caved in; the panels it had slid down the embankment on were a scraped, dented mess. The rear axel had sprung from its housing and the chassis was almost certainly bent.

I finished my walk round and performed a few quick and mental calculations. It was time to phone the scrap merchant for sure; this car, I declared, was totally fucked.

Whilst I was staring at the wreck trying to find something positive to say about it, a mental flash of Ziggie’s step-father superimposed itself upon my vision.

He looked rather unhappy.

I risked a quick glance in Ziggie's direction and saw her sitting cradling herself by the side of the road; her own imagination was doubtless awash with similar specters. The esteemed owner of the devastated Mercedes was likely to be driven purely by vengeance from this point onwards. The best case scenario was that he would suffer a massive cardio-vascular accident before he got around to the actual act of murder.

Ziggie’s step-father was a scary man at the best of times, and he was going to be even more scary in the very immediate future. He was going to go absolutely A-1 apeshit insane when he saw the miserable wreckage of his prized vehicle; he would actually explode like a supernova of apeshit, and it wouldn't just be Ziggie that was destroyed in this mighty superheated fireball of simian fecal-matter. It suddenly occurred to me that I would be held just as accountable for the night's disastrous events.

Cold dread flowed through my veins as once again the phantom of Ziggie's father appeared before me; the ghost of Christmas Apeshit pointed his long and hairy finger at me, rattled his chains and assured me that I was doomed.

Bananas. The word just popped into my mind there and then. The man was going to go bananas.

Absolutely, totally bananas.

Bah.
Nah.
Nahs.

The word ‘bananas’ started spinning round and round inside my skull like a psychotic yellow boomerang. It bounced and span and multiplied until it utterly consumed my thoughts and I could think of nothing else. My brain was filled and fit to burst, overflowing with mental bananas. Saturated and feeling like my head was about to explode, I had to open my mouth and let them out.

“Bananas,” said I.

Paul Fucking Cruickshank was still standing nearby, and he looked over at me as I gave voice to my yellow nightmare. He seemed to understand the nature of my outburst, and offered me a swig from his lager tin in sympathy.

I eyed the Tenants warily, as a terrible suspicion was building in my mind. I looked over my shoulder, searching for the red car that had crashed into us. I had quite forgotten about it, to be honest. I think I must have been in shock.

I beheld a red 1980’s Ford Orion suffering from a terminally smashed front end. The grill was folded at an acute angle, giving the impression that the car had turned cross-eyed. The headlights were still shining, the beams cutting across each like a pair of wonky bat-signals. A pair of indicator lights winked at me spasmodically and the alloy wheels were cracked to hell and back.

Despite all the damage, it was still a car I recognized on sight. It was, in fact, Paul Fucking Cruickshank’s car.

Paul slurped his Tenants as I surveyed the ruins of his automobile and fought down a near irresistible urge to punch the man. Around the Orion milled a gaggle of bleeding and winded people. Familiar faces abounded.

Speiros was there, helping Andrew Croll from the wreckage of the Orion. Cocky the Pot Noodle Chef was nearby, combing out shards of glass from his natural tonsure with a luminous pink hairbrush. Arran, son of a preacher man, was walking crab-like across the road towards us, his eyes fixed firmly upon the bushes with the big broad leaves, the very-same foliage that Gambit had disappeared into not three minutes previous. He nodded his greetings as he passed me by, his salutation preceded by a breek-borne stench that smelt akin to the devil’s diarrhea.

These men I knew. Alcoholics all, brothers under the pump and ale tap. Already a crate of Tenants had been liberated from the wreckage by the survivors, the cans spilling foam everywhere as the crew cracked open the badly shaken lager.
Numbly, I asked Paul where they had been going at this ungodly time of night. He blithely informed me that they had been heading to Tesco to do a bit of shoplifting.

I was too done in to appreciate the irony of the situation. Exhausted and spent, I watched the clouds above turning a bleak crimson red, the astral bruising signaling that the long awaited dawn was close to breaking.

This brave new day found me unable to continue; I was ready to give in, to cast myself into bed and face the hangover like a man. Already my head was thumping as reality began to settle back in. This would be but the first of the pains that assaulted me over the course of the next five minutes; my various extremities began to report back to my brain, signaling that they could take no more maltreatment and that they recommended an unconditional surrender.

My neck ached. My hair was tacky with blood. My left hand was beginning to spasm in time to my uneven heartbeat. My trenchfoot was agony unrivaled; it felt like a poisonous jellyfish had been dry-humping my leg.

Blessed oblivion was calling me. I was making all the necessary preparations I would need prior to collapsing on the spot when a ferocious banging began to emanate from the boot of Paul’s car. The bleary insouciance that had previously dominated Paul’s drunken features was cut through with concern.

“Ah, shit! Ten Inch Dave!”

Now, the reason why Ten Inch Dave was traveling to Dundee locked inside the boot of Paul’s car has never yet been established. Frankly, there were more pressing matters at hand at that particular moment, and afterwards, when everyone had sobered up, no one could remember. We can assume that it must have seemed like a good idea at the time and move on from there.

The group rushed over to the Orion and Paul released the lock; the boot flew open and Ten Inch Dave sprung out like a demented jack-in-the-box. His face was sheet white and his hand was wrapped around his throat. To my horror, I saw thick clots of blood oozing from in-between Dave’s fingers.

Chaos erupted upon the Kingsway.

Ten Inch Dave was choking out words, his eyes glazed with panic as he felt his lifeblood slip away. Speiros was screaming for an ambulance. Andrew and Cocky fought one-another trying to get more pressure on the wound. Paul danced from one foot to the other, his thoughts aflame with the recognition that the appliances of the authorities would have to be summoned to the scene. Time spent at her Majesty’s pleasure in one of her Majesty’s prisons was a cast-iron guarantee unless he took immediate remedial action; ignoring the plight of Ten Inch Dave in favour of saving his own skin, Paul dived headfirst into the Orion and began to desperately swipe at the steering wheel with a rather snotty handkerchief.

No one was paying attention to him; Dave had collapsed on the embankment, his eyes bulging from his head as Andrew and Cocky strangled him to death. Broken words guttered out of Dave’s mouth as he beseeched God to save him; please, that he couldn’t die, not today, to tell his parents that he loved them and Oh God! Please don’t let me die today!

Speiros had finally stopped flapping his arms around and screaming for help at no one in particular. He now walked a more proactive path and was thumbing out a triple-nine on his mobile phone.
Ambulance, he informed the operator. Car accident, he told the NHS 24. Slit throat, he said to the Paramedic; on the Kingsway about a mile away from Tesco. No, he didn’t know if we were North or South of Tesco. Yes, please hurry, you have to help us. You have to save Ten Inch Dave!

I was over at the poor man now; I had torn the shoelace from my holey boot and had strung it out between my hands in preparation to tie a tourniquet.

Dave, horrified by my obvious intention, burbled helplessly on the grass verge beneath me.

There followed a brief argument about the prudence of tying a tourniquet around someone’s neck; no one present had any medical training, but I had seen Black Hawk Down and was pretty sure I could stick my finger in an artery and stop Ten Inch Dave from bleeding to death before the ambulance turned up.

Fortunately for Dave, Ninewells Hospital was located a scant five minutes down the road, the drab grey clinics and campuses of the infirmary clinging to the city-limits of Dundee like a cluster of medicinal leeches.

Unfortunately for Dave, the cabal of managers who ran the hospital had not been schooled in modern medicine; theirs were the dark arts of postmodern thinking and the public relations coup. Over the course of the past year they had bent their will to the problem of the hospital’s relative location in regard to the city they served and the perpetual gridlock in which the roads existed. Consultants were summoned and spread-sheets of many colours were scried.

The vehicle dispatched by the emergency services bore a strobing blue light that put the fear of God into Paul Fucking Cruickshank. The paintwork was white and splashed with yellow reflectors. It even had the word "AMBULANCE" writ in bold reverse across the front, and yet it was not an ambulance of any type previously known to man.

Ninewells had sent its legendary rapid-response vehicle to the scene of Dave's impending expiration; Super-Nurse was riding to the rescue.
She was clad in green and perched precariously atop a small white scooter with a dynamo-powered siren nailed to it. Like something out of Scotch & Wry’s worst nightmare she came trundling towards us, the engine chortling aloud with a full 50cc's of power.

God help me, I laughed at the sight of the damn thing. Of course I had read about Super-Nurse, her profile featuring in numerous Dundonian propaganda rags over the previous few months. And I could see the logic, I really could; if a pizza delivery boy on a scooter could get to any part of Dundee in less than ten minutes, then a paramedic could logically do likewise. Lives would be saved by this bold new initiative, assuming the casualty being attended to needed nothing more than an elastoplast and a mummy-kiss-it-better.

Or maybe a pizza.

It was so fucking stupid that we all temporarily forgot about the dying man on the ground beneath us.

Speiros was the first to awake from his temporary stupor, tearing his gaze away from Super-Nurse and kneeling down next to Ten Inch Dave. He grasped Dave’s free hand and told him that the Ambulance, such as it was, had arrived.

Super-Nurse dismounted her mighty steed, retrieved her satchel of Band-Aids and approached us by means of a professional little jog. Already she had noted the mangled wrecks of our cars and doubtless come to a fair conclusion regarding the sobriety of the drivers involved.

She waved us back and knelt down next to Dave, taking stock of the hand clamped over his throat and the dark blood running through his fingers. Super-Nurse sighed in dismay and shook her head. Then, whilst smothering Dave in soothing platitudes, she reached for his hand and began to pull.

We all held our breath; the first finger came away, revealing a throat slick with blood. Dave stopped his feeble thrashing; he suddenly became as rigid as stone, every muscle in his body straining against itself. She hauled away the second digit, which revealed a clotted black mess underneath.

I was in the middle of an inner conflict; I knew that I didn't want to see the ragged mess that lay beneath those final two fingers, and yet I knew that morbid curiosity would compel me to look regardless. Compromise was the order of the day; it was with one eye screwed shut that I waited, watched and cowered.

With one final pull and an ear-splitting shriek, Dave’s entire hand came away. The company reeled back as one, expecting a pulsing arterial hose to spray us all in the face. My body cringed away instinctually, turning away from the half-glimpsed mess of gore that slathered Ten Inch Dave's throat.

Super-Nurse calmly held Dave's hand; when it came to life-or-death situations, she was more experienced than we humble alcoholics. She reached into the satchel lying by her side, uncorked a bottle of stinking fluid and began to apply iodine to the two inch gash that had lacerated in the inside of Dave’s palm.

Ten Inch Dave took a few explorative breaths and was pleased to find his throat devoid of punctures. The collected ensemble breathed a sigh of relief, followed by a fair smattering of muttered curses. Dave, for his part, at least had the decency to look vaguely embarrassed about the whole thing.

Paul Fucking Cruickshank never saw the Lazarus-like recovery of his friend; Paul Fucking Cruickshank had already set upon his heels and high-tailed it into the hills. The enemies he made this night would be myriad; the constabulary would wish to speak with him at the earliest opportunity, as would any passing tax disk inspectors. The M.O.T people would be displeased with him and the DVLA would soon come-a-calling with Paul Fucking Cruickshank’s name upon their lips.

More sirens were echoing in the distance. The misted air was beginning to flicker blue on the far side of the Kingsway. Super-Nurse looked at us anxiously, wondering how we were going to react now that the police were approaching the scene.

I could understand her apprehension; we looked like the sort of lawless individuals who might be expected to assault NHS staff whilst under the influence of alcohol. When confronted by the constabulary, things could be expected to turn ugly; perhaps Super-Nurse feared an impending hostage situation. Or, we might hijack her scooter in order to escape the authorities and end up as a national laughing stock on Police, Camera, Action.

She need not have panicked. To a man we decided to follow Paul’s wise example; with the exception of Ten Inch Dave, who was in no fit state to run anywhere, the assembled alkies scattered. Speiros and Andrew vanished into the night with commendable speed; Arran, son of a Preacher Man, had never reappeared from the bush of many uses, and if he was sensible he would remain hidden for the foreseeable future.
Gambit too I left to his own devices somewhere in the bushes; it seemed like the safest place for him, really. Like a little alcoholic homing pigeon, I had the utmost confidence that Gambit would eventually find his way home.

Ziggie had… I stalled my headlong flight, cursing, spinning around in little circles as I searched for my errant ex-girlfriend. The vista before me was sadly lacking in Ziggies. It was, for want of a better term, completely Ziggieless.

I stumbled through trench and over grass, calling out, searching all around me. I was trying desperately to remember when I had seen her last; before Ten Inch Dave had made it his business to make a strident arse out of us all, certainly.

Pausing only to rescue the alcohol from the upturned Mercedes, I left the scene of the crime and disappeared alone into the night.

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