We bit our lip. “Listen,” I said, nearly shouting over the din, “there’s something . . . off.”
“You use ‘off’ like I use ‘rotting’, yes?”
“Where’s the music coming from?”
She opened her mouth to say something smart, looked round, and closed it again just in time. There was a long pause as she scanned the room, peering into every corner, over the ceiling and through the faces bobbing on the floor. Finally she said, “All right. So there’s no speakers. So?”
“So that doesn’t surprise you?”
“I am never surprised.”
“That doesn’t interest you?”
“As a means to an end, perhaps it is of some curiosity.”
“Where’s the sound coming from?”
She shrugged. “You’re our saviour.” The word dribbled out like bile from an empty stomach. “You figure it out.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be helping me?”
“I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on you. The rest was left unspecified.”
“Fat lot of use you are.”
“I got you in.”
“You were going to shoot—”
“I got you in.”
I scowled and turned away. The music made my head hurt, the beat thrummed up from my toes and used the insides of my stomach as a trampoline. I edged along the counter, trailing my fingers along the smooth metal, almost frictionless, sterile and clean, drifted to the nearest wall, where the plasma screens wriggled and writhed, pressed my fingers against it, then my ear, listened.
Dum dum dum dum dum dum . . .
I could feel it in the walls, it made my ear ache. I squatted down and ran my fingers over the floor, and it was there too, setting the ground beneath my feet tingling like it was crawling with ants. A kid nearly trod on me, shouted some kind of abuse I couldn’t hear, and went on dancing. Pressing my back to the wall and facing the dancers, I edged round the length of the room, trailing my fingers over every surface I could find, tasting the air, smelling the sounds, looking for a way down deeper.
I found it: a locked door, unmarked, the same colour as the rest of the room. I felt around in my bag until I found a key of the right make, slid it in, coaxed it to an appropriate shape, turned it, opened the door. A wall of sound hit me, louder even than on the dance floor, deDUM deDUM deDUM deDUM deDUM deDUM
UV light in the ceiling, nothing else; that uncomfortable blue that hurt your eyes, the brain aware that more was hitting the retina than it could understand. I walked down the corridor, found the manager’s office; it was empty, papers and cash, mostly cash, strewn over the desk. I kept walking, found a flight of stairs, the sound crashing on my ears, deDUM deDUM deDUM . . .
A door at the bottom of the flight of stairs. Above it a sign read, “Boom Boom - Executive Officer. By appointment only.”
It was not our place to question a name like “Boom Boom”. After all, you can’t run a nightclub and be called Leslie.
I looked over my shoulder; no one behind, no one in front. I knocked, but my knuckles were a nothing in the din, so, I opened the door.
The room inside was UV blue. The great semicircular arc of the sofa bed was blue, the floor was blue, the walls were blue, blue lights were hung from a blue ceiling and the two goons standing inside the door with blood trickling down from their shattered eardrums were lit up blue by the reflection of all that blueness. They caught me as I came in, grabbed my arms, pushed me back against the door as it slammed behind me. I looked into a pair of young faces, boys, spotty and greasy and pale, dressed in hoodies and fashionable trainers. Their blood looked purple in the light where it had pooled in their eardrums and dribbled down the sides of their necks, the capillaries stood out gleaming from the wide sockets of their eyes, their faces were empty of all feeling. Our instinct to hurt them faded at the sight of those faces; two walking hunks of deafened meat guarding the door, two kids who’d never hear again; it seemed pointless to set their blood on fire now.
We let them pull and shove and generally manhandle us into the middle of the room, pleased at not killing them for their indifference. If we had,