Lucy's Drowning

by Amanda Sichter

You can hear her there, on the radio, if you go looking. In the empty bandwidths, in the dark night, in between the static and the white noise, you can find her. She moves across the frequencies, seeking salvation, and if you search long enough you'll eventually hear her slow plea.

'Lucy's drowning.'

It's all she ever says, all she can ever say. I found her in the early hours ten years ago and, every night since, I've fallen asleep to the sound of Lucy drowning. According to those in the know she was there ten years before I found her. She's haunted the airwaves for twenty years and no-one's ever been able to find her.

I hope they never do.

They call me a frostygirl. A new name for a new profession. After the plagues came and the ruinstorms and the world moved underground and Isis-Elek took over what was left of Britain, came the frostygirls. When they finally got the plasborging right and found out ways to make dead men walk again, it didn't take that long for the wrong people to work out that dead men also want to fuck.

I fuck dead men for a living.

I did it for the novelty. And I thought dead men wouldn't like hurting me as much as the live ones did. Guess I got that wrong.

So now - I do it for the drugs. And hell, there's nothing else left to do.

If you don't work for Isis-Elek there is no work. Everything's on tap. You want food, you want drugs, you want to be raised from the dead, all you got to do is find a way to make someone like you. You want to earn an honest living, you work for Isis-Elek. Otherwise you spend your life indulging every dark whim, every forbidden pleasure your mind can think of.

My pimp/landlord/whatever-the-fuck-you-want-to-call-him can't work out my problems. 'Why do you care?' he asks me, as he ties me to the bed and pisses on me. 'You got whatever you want, whenever you want. You don't like fucking your dead men, then fuck your mind with drugs and you'll never even know you do it. I'll always keep you supplied. Just keep doing what I like.' He slides the needle in my arm the same time he slides his cock into my cunt and, even as my brain explodes with something like a supernova of ecstasy, I can't work out which one of the two I loathe the most.

And when I come back from the high, he's untied me and left me, and I get up and wash and paint on my prettiest smile and go and fuck another dead man so he'll give me enough drugs to make the world explode again.

He'd let me, he'd give me enough that I could do it forever, never wake from ecstasy, never remember who I was before I was a frostygirl, never remember what the world was like before the end came.

That's what they want - the dead men, the wrong people, Isis-Elek. They want us happy, they want us smiling, they want us to appreciate how good the world is now no-one's got to do anything and we can all indulge our every fantasy, fuck ourselves up in every way it's possible to be fucked.

The perfect world, the hedonist's ultimate fantasy, that's what they've created.

Which is all very good if you're the one doing the fucking. They don't really care what it does to those of us that are being fucked.

So every night I go home, after the drugs and the novelty have worn off, and I search through the frequencies and I find her soft, slow voice.

'Lucy's drowning.'

She's a young girl, you can hear that, and she's terrified and she's in pain and she just wants it all to stop. I can see her, in the dark, under the water, can see the wash of water in front of her eyes, and it's cold, I know it is, and she can't see and she can't hear and she can't breathe and she can't die. All she can send out is her plea for someone, anyone, to find her, to take her out of the water and let her live again. She's drowning, she's been drowning for twenty years and I hope that she'll be drowning forever.

Because as long as Lucy's drowning there'll always be someone in this world worse off than me.

The End

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