Read The Factory Trilogy 01 - Gleam for Free Online Page A

The one in the headlock grabbed his opponent’s penis and squeezed, hard. Alan flinched, looked away, looked up at Daunt. She could barely contain herself. She was pointing and laughing hysterically. There were whoops from the crowd. He looked back into the pit, and one was on the floor, being kicked in the ribs. He couldn’t tell them apart. They were both covered with streaks of blood now, and blood poured from their noses and ears, and spattered across the floor of the pit as they moved. The one on the floor somehow wriggled into a position where he could reach the other’s shin with his mouth. He sank his teeth into it. Now they were both onthe floor, writhing around after each other. The ash coated their skin, sticking to the blood and the sweat and rising in clouds around them.
    Alan felt hot breath on his neck. Daunt was leaning down to speak to him. ‘They can’t feel pain,’ she said, her lips brushing his ear. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’
    Alan just nodded.
    ‘They can’t really feel anything.’
    One bone-cracking blow after another. The musclebound bodies were hard and heavy. Faces were pushed into the ground. Everything was grey. Fingers were forced through skin. Extremities were pulled and stretched. Details blurred. The fight became impressionistic: impossible bodies in torturous configurations appearing in glimpses through the fog of ash. Sometimes dark fluid sprayed out. The crowd seethed and swayed. Fists pummelled the air and mouths opened to cheer and did not close again. Everything was slow. People were touching each other. Alan’s skin tingled and his cock grew. There was some kind of music but he could not work out what it was. He looked up at Daunt and saw that she had a hand beneath her skirt and her eyes were half closed. Her other hand found the top of his head and she ran it through his hair. One of the men in the pit suddenly hauled himself up over the side and stood before the throne. He could only open one eye, both ears had gone, and blood bubbled from between his lips and ran in black tracks through the grey filth coating his chest. The crowdquietened. He raised one hand and in it was something soft and fleshy, no doubt torn from his opponent’s body, but due to the state of it, and the ash, Alan could not tell what it was. Daunt wound Alan’s hair around her fingers as she clenched her hand into a fist, and the whole room heard her gasp.
    Later, she took him to her private chambers and bade him play for her, then pleasure her. ‘You are the appetiser,’ she explained to Alan, as the pit-winner, still bleeding, watched from the corner of the deep red room. The room was a nest of furs and silks and skins and dark wooden chests. A censer burned. Cabinets lined the walls, full of glass bottles, the contents of which were difficult to determine. As the pit-winner watched Alan and Daunt, he drank some kind of concoction that, Daunt explained, would keep him going for as long as she needed. His presence would normally have put Alan off his stride – not because he was a man, but because he looked near dead – but something in the air or the food or the drink enabled Alan to shrug off his reservations and devote himself. He didn’t want Snapper seeing, though; he turned the guitar over before he began to perform his ministrations.
    Later still, when Daunt was preoccupied with the bloody, hulking beast, Alan scanned the shelves for what he wanted. The sex coupled with the increasingly strong smoke from the censer made it difficult to concentrate. He got dizzy looking at all of the glass and all of thereflections in the glass. Green glass, red glass, yellow glass, brown glass; fat jars, delicate vials, tall bottles, twisted baubles.
    There. He thought he’d spotted it.
    His mouth was dry. He hadn’t expected to get this far. He hadn’t expected to be presented with this opportunity. Except maybe it wasn’t an opportunity; maybe the hulking beast-man currently grunting away beside him