this Evil environment. Like the virus, without 'civilization' they have no host. It is up to us.
Those who Kill will be Free: Those who do not Kill are Infected.
Cleanse the planet.
Kill the virus.
Guns will make you strong.
I finished reading it a few seconds before Bobby.
'Save it to disk,' I said. 'That's not going to be there tomorrow.'
When Bobby had saved the page, I scrolled back to the top and read through it carefully again. It reminded me of a hundred manias, badly photocopied screeds thrust at passers-by on street corners and skimmed on the way home out of sheer boredom; rants half-overheard in the shadows of bars late at night, voices smudged with alcohol and ignorance and anger. But there was something different about it. I sat back in my chair, and worked out what it was.
'Give him credit,' Bobby said, when he had finished reading it a second time. 'He's been to the library and looked at some books. But it's basically an insanity thing. Right?'
'Yes and no,' I said. 'Terms like 'supplanted' don't fit. Or 'anathema'.'
'Couple clever words don't make it a work of genius. They could have been copied straight out of something.'
'Every single apostrophe is in the right place, Bobby. Plenty of people out there who'd take this as the word of God. Militia guys, for a start. Could even be them behind it.'
He laughed. 'I doubt that. You know what they're like. Grey-haired vets and kids who've seen so many straight-to-videos about 'Nam they half-believe they were there, too. They build a camp in the woods and polish their hardware and fight over the womenfolk.'
'Not all of these people are cavemen. Or stupid.'
'Of course not. But we're talking guys who devour Soldier of Fortune cover to cover and buy books telling you how to cook napalm and build man-traps in your backyard. People who took a bath over hoarding supplies for the millennium — and were actually disappointed when it all came to nothing and civilization shambled on. They put on fatigues and yack up how the world's gone to shit and the Jews and the Hispanics are to blame, not to mention Capitol Hill and Saddam Hussein. You'd be better off worrying about the blacks in the inner cities, like the guy says. The homeboys are really pissed, and some of those fly motherfuckers have whacked someone before they've been laid.'
'It's the same thing. People who've never felt part of any community except the one that's small enough that they know everybody by name.'
'You're making me weep, Ward.'
'Fuck you. You put your trust in a country, love it as much as it tells you to, and then you find out it was just a stroke to keep you quiet and what it really meant was 'Anyone can have everything, apart from you guys. When it comes to you, we didn't mean it'. It's cultural abuse. How are you going to react to that?'
'Okay, Ward. There's genuine sentiment there and the overall IQ probably isn't much lower than in the House of fucking Representatives, and I'll admit that some of them have sometimes got a point. What I sure as hell don't believe is that they co-ordinate. Most of these outfits have trouble keeping thirty people pointed in the same direction, never mind agreeing aims and objectives with some other group — much less groups — living hundreds or thousands of miles away. Maybe out there in the big bad world.
But not here.'
'Before the Internet,' I said.
'There's stuff there,' he admitted. 'Enough manifested psychosis to blow the mind of every therapist in
the country. Hate groups, end-of-the-worlders, the illuminati burning effigies of owls in Bohemia Grove
— and the face on Mars is a missile base for social control and the nukes are all pointing right at you. But I spend my entire time looking at that shit and trust me — any worldwide movement ain't run by these guys. These people hate everybody who isn't them. Put them in a room together and they'd just combust.'
'You can't find every file on every server,' I said. 'You only see what's been left to be found. There could be some whole other Web, using the same computers and the same phone lines and hard disks, full of killers and killing and a plan for the future — and unless you knew where to look, you wouldn't even find the contents page.' Bobby rolled his eyes, irritating me. 'Fucking listen to me. That's what we're like. Don't you know that? Academics created the Net in their spare time so they could trade facts and while away tenure in role-playing Star Trek. Next thing you know you can't log on without people spamming you to death and every shoeshine concession has its own domain. Even before that it's wall-to-wall pornography and ordinary men and women sitting in darkened rooms writing each other about how they'd like to dress up like Shirley Temple and be whipped until they bleed. That's what the Net will become — a way of hiding behind anonymity so you can stop pretending you're Mr and Mrs Good Neighbour and be how you really are: so we can stop pretending we give a shit about some global village when our Christmas-card lists are about the size of a small prehistoric tribe and we feel like cutting half of them.'
'Nice to see someone so proud of his fellow earthlings. You sound like you're ready to join the cause.' He rubbed his face. 'Ward, this could be just some guy out on his own weird limb.'
'Bullshit. We got here from a bookmark on the computer of a man who shot a few minutes of video in which he referred to 'The Straw Men'. That man and his wife are dead, along with someone they knew a long time ago. A threat sent to the place shown in the video caused a house and a hotel to be bombed less than two hours later. Christ, even the architecture of The Halls fits in. They're making million-dollar caves for hunter-gatherers.'
'Okay,' Bobby said, holding his hands up. 'I hear what you're saying. So what now?'
'We've found this. What are we supposed to do next? There are no links, no email address, nothing. What's the point of this thing, unless it leads somewhere?'
Bobby turned the laptop towards him and pressed a key combination. The screen changed to a view that revealed the page's naked HTML, the hidden multiplatform Web language used to display the page
to whatever kind of operating system tried to access it. He scrolled slowly down through the lines.
Then he stopped. 'Hang on.'
He toggled the view back to normal again, and flipped down to the very end of the document. 'Okay,'
he said, nodding his head. 'It's not much, but there's something.' He pointed at the screen. 'You see anything there? Below the text?'
'No. Why?'
'Because there is something. A few words, but they've been set to appear exactly the same colour as
the background. You're only going to know they're there if you look at the code or print it out.'
'If this strikes some kind of chord, in other words. So what are the words?'
He flipped to HTML again, and selected a short section right at the bottom. Hidden amongst the
gibberish was:
<font colour='#339966'>The Upright Man</ font>
'The Upright Man,' I said. 'Who the hell is that?'
Part 3
History is on our heels, following us like our shadows, like death.
Marc Augé
Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
22
Sarah didn't remember the first time she thought she'd heard him. A day or two ago, maybe. He was coming slowly, biding his time. He'd come in the night before, she believed, fading away again as soon as he knew that she'd realized something was afoot. She'd wondered if she might be sensing him during the day, too, but back then her head had been clearer and she'd been able to convince herself that she was just being fanciful. Then late one afternoon she heard him above her, and she knew that if he was coming in the daytime then things had to be getting worse.
The psycho had visited a couple of hours before it happened. He had talked for quite a long time. He had just talked and talked and talked. Some of it was about scavenging. Some of it was about a plague. Some of it was about some place called Castenedolo in Italy, which sounded like a place you'd go on holiday and drink nice drinks and maybe have some food like spaghetti or salami or steak or squid or soup but obviously wasn't. Instead it was a place where they'd found some guy buried and where he was found proved he was made out of Plasticine or Pliocene and at least two million years old and what did she think of that?