The Beauty of Destruction by Gavin G. Smith Page A

smoke. They’d only had to avoid a few attacks. Still, du Bois found himself using all his concentration to navigate the streets. This at least stopped him from becoming angry thinking about whom he was going to see.
     

    They’d had to dump the bikes when the press of people became too much. A military convoy was making its way down Kensington High Street between the designer shops and pricey cafés. Challenger tanks and Warrior armoured personnel carriers with eight-pointed stars painted on them crushed expensive German saloons and Italian sports cars as their tracks rolled over them. The armoured vehicles had loudspeakers bolted to them, playing something that du Bois’s internal systems assured him was a form of music called UK Grime. The soldiers were handing out SA80 assault rifles, ammunition, and other weapons to young men and women wearing shell suits. As one of them ran by, du Bois could see that he had shaved off an eyebrow and crudely tattooed a postcode just over his eye.
    There were bodies hanging from lampposts, street names carved into their flesh. Directly across the road he saw a table of young men outside a café. They had salon-groomed beards and hair. They were wearing tweed and very tight trousers. They were studiously ignoring each other as they frantically tapped at their phones. Du Bois wondered for a moment if they were communicating with each other via text instead of talking, or just describing the firefight on whatever passed for social media on the corrupted internet. A stray, or perhaps not-so-stray, bullet caught one of them in the head and he fell sideways off his chair, spilling his latte.
    Du Bois and Beth backed further into the doorway of a designer make-up boutique. Du Bois glanced behind him to see naked men and women painting make-up on their bodies in a way that reminded him of tribal war paint. There was a severed head on the floor of the shop.
    Beth’s eyes were wide. Again it looked like her body wanted to panic but the technology in her system was fighting it. It had been so long since he had first been in a battle that what was going on in Kensington High Street barely registered with him. Though the battle’s location did feel a little incongruous.
    ‘Beth?’ du Bois asked. She ignored him. He was pretty sure she would be shaking if the nanites in her body hadn’t been controlling her biochemistry. He wasn’t surprised that she wanted to shut down. The fight with the Do As You Please clan in Portsmouth had been one thing. They had obviously been evil and they’d taken her sister. What was happening here was on such a massive scale as to be abstract. Du Bois had no doubt that Beth was tough. He had seen that first-hand, but there was only so much a mind could take in one go and this whole situation had been engineered to drive humanity insane.
    ‘Beth!’ du Bois hissed louder.
    Beth jerked round to look at him. ‘What’s the fucking point?’ she demanded. There was the snap of bullets passing close to them. A nearby car bounced on its suspension as holes appeared in its bodywork and the remaining glass in its windscreen shattered.
    ‘I’m sorry to break this to you, but people lived like this all over the world before today. Just because it hasn’t happened in your country for a while doesn’t mean you can just give up!’ He knew it was harsh but he suspected it was what she needed at this moment.
    ‘What’s your fucking postcode?’ an almost guttural, south London accented voice demanded.
    Du Bois glanced over at the young man with the tattooed postcode above his eye. His hair was shaved into a pattern that du Bois suspected was supposed to be a Tube map. He looked very young. Du Bois found himself reminded of the root of the word infantry. London was at war, it just didn’t seem to know who with. It was a horrible inverse parody of the blitz spirit.
    ‘Do you think there’s any way I can convince you of the imbecility of fighting over an address?’ du