A Quantum Mythology (33 page)

‘Do you have any drugs?’ Vic asked the man. ‘It’s just I’m really struggling with everything that’s happening.’ He heard running and glanced to one side. He saw five children wearing dead-skin masks joining the throng.

‘I am—’ the man with the stick began.

‘I don’t care,’ Elodie said. ‘What do you want, and what will it take for you to let us go?’

‘Elodie!’ Vic hissed at her. Elodie glared at him. Vic groaned inwardly, having realised he’d just given her name away.

‘Well, either one of you cuts the face off the other and gives themselves to the Hungry Nothingness that waits just outside, or—’

‘Okay, let’s do that!’ Vic said, a little too eagerly. Elodie started struggling, mostly so she could do something violent to Vic.

‘Or we saw off both your faces and gang-rape you to death.’

Elodie stopped struggling. She had one of the Dead-Skin Masks on either side of her, both gripping her arms tightly. She kicked the man with the grisly stick very hard between the legs. There was a wet popping noise and he started screaming. It was very high-pitched. Elodie was already swinging up and the high-pitched scream was cut off suddenly as she kicked him in the face hard enough to powder bone. He collapsed to the ground.

‘This is a child’s body!’ she shouted at the crumpled figure on the floor. A number of the Dead-Skin Masks scrambled for the grisly stick, which was grabbed by an inmate with the body of young girl. The scramble stopped and the other Dead-Skin Masks stepped deferentially aside.

‘This changes nothing,’ the girl said. ‘Make your choice.’

‘All praise the Hungry Somethingness!’ Vic shouted with mock enthusiasm.

‘I am going to kill you,’ Elodie told him.

‘Excuse me,’ a cultured voice asked, slightly stressing the sibilant. Vic saw people looking at someone behind him and eventually he was dragged around. He was surprised to see a diminutive lizard in a very tall cylindrical hat. He was wearing a black smock and holding an EM needler in each of his scaly, clawed hands. Vic was even more surprised when he recognised the lizard. His name was Mr Hat, and he was a bounty killer. The lizard hadn’t been too far below Scab and Vic in the ratings, before all their ex-colleagues had started hunting them. For a moment Vic was sure the lizard was there for them, and his bowels would have turned to ice had he not already evacuated them.

‘Look,’ Elodie whispered. Vic followed her gaze as she nodded towards the roof of a nearby house. Mr Hat glanced that way, too. It took Vic a moment to realise what he was looking at. A tall figure dressed in a pre-Loss-era suit, with tails, a waistcoat, a bow tie and a hat, similar in style and shape – though not size – to the lizard’s, was crouched, unmoving, on the roof. The figure was pale and looked human except for the lack of eyes. At first Vic thought it was an ornately dressed and peculiarly active blank but then he realised it was one of Mr Hat’s famed eyeless automatons.

Movement in the periphery of his vision caught Vic’s eye, and he glanced up to see another automaton, this one female in design. The automaton was wearing a long, black lace dress that looked like a more chaste and reserved version of the sort of thing Talia wore sometimes. She/it leaped from the roof of a house and into a tree that had a faceless body hanging from it. The leaves shook, but she hadn’t made a sound when she landed.

‘I’m terribly sorry to bother you,’ Mr Hat continued, ‘but I am afraid I will be needing Mr Berger to come with me.’ He pointed to where the Alchemist was bound to the car. Berger was conscious now. He was sobbing and making begging noises, but little of it appeared to be in any kind of rational language.

‘You are the one!’ the little girl with the grisly stick said. ‘You can arrange for our release.’

Even on the reptilian face, the confusion was obvious. ‘I cannot, I am afraid. I am just here to take him. Would you excuse me, please?’

The little girl stared at him. Even with most of her face concealed by a dead-skin mask, Vic was pretty sure she was about to have a tantrum.

Mr Hat watched the words form in the girl’s mouth. She was about to order the inmates to attack him. He sighed inwardly, pretending to himself that he didn’t want violence, but had that been the case, he wouldn’t have left his comfortable bath chair behind. His automaton worshippers were perched in trees, or on the roofs of the surrounding houses, like a silent murder of crows.

The girl opened her mouth to shout the order and her head went spinning into the air. For Mr Hat, everything slowed down. It took an age for the other people in the dead-skin masks to react. The three thermal blades on the smart monofilament rotated around his hat at speed. Normally he couldn’t use this weapon because most of his opponents wore armour, but here he could walk among all this soft flesh, the white-hot blades spinning like a rotor. The smart monofilament changed length and height, guiding the weapons to where they could cause the most damage. People went down as if they were being reaped. There was a nearly constant circle of red spray around him. He moved forwards, making for Mr Berger.

Mr Hat lowered his tail and fired the clustered-disc grenade from the launcher attached to it. The canister flew out and then transformed into secondary munitions. The tiny razor-sharp, spinning discs cleared a cone-shaped hole in the people who had closed in behind the lizard.

Mr Hat had synched the needlers with the revolutions of the three spinning blades. He target-locked one of the inmates and ’faced the order to fire. The needles would only fire when they could travel through the spinning blades cleanly. Each needle load had a different neurotoxin – again, they weren’t weapons he got to use very often, but the non-augmented environment was allowing him to have some fun. Some of his targets’ hearts stopped, others had their respiratory systems paralysed, a few tried to flee in abject terror and died from shock, several hit the ground in the throes of a terrible, final orgasm that would eventually overwhelm their nervous systems and kill them, and a couple were caught in the throes of powerful hallucinations.

Still they kept coming, charging him. Few of them made it anywhere near him, and those who did were mostly limbless when they got there. They were, however, slowing him down, particularly when he had to start walking across a carpet of slippery corpses. He used his clawed feet to dig into the human bodies for more purchase.

Vic found himself lying on the ground, painted red from head to foot. Elodie was standing over him, a knife in each hand. She was also covered in red. Vic looked up at her, panicking.

‘When I said I’d cut off your face, I didn’t—’

‘Get up!’ Elodie demanded, not even trying to hide the contempt in her voice. She did, however, hand him one of the red knives. ‘Down!’ she shouted and landed on top of him, forcing him to the ground. The multiple bangs of superheated air came so rapidly that they merged into a long ripping sound. The night became red as two G-carriers rose over the houses firting their forward rotary lasers, reducing hundreds of people to a humid red mist. The G-carriers stopped firing but remained hanging in the night air above the houses.

‘C’mon!’ Elodie said and rolled into a crouch.

‘I don’t wanna!’ Vic protested.

Elodie turned on him, the young boy’s face a mask of fury. ‘I will stab you in the fucking stomach and then tell them who you are!’

Vic thought about killing her right there and then, but she was too frightening for him to act against her. He started to get up.

The slaved G-carriers had momentarily cleared a path for him. Mr Hat’s augmented vision pierced the red mist as he quickened his pace. He couldn’t risk firing the strobe guns too close to Mr Berger. As quickly as the rotary lasers killed hundreds of people, still more filled the gap, charging into the spinning blades and deadly needles.

Now
, he thought. His automaton worshippers launched themselves from the roofs and out of the trees. They landed in a line and charged the dead-skin mask-wearing inmates. It looked like a wave breaking. Soft, unaugmented human flesh met the armoured superstructure of the eyeless, anachronistically dressed automatons, and broken human bodies went flying through the air.

Mr Hat brought the spinning blades in closer to his hat and followed behind the automatons, pausing only momentarily to dispatch an inmate they had missed. More came from behind. He turned and began firing as the blades started spinning again. He was almost at the car.

It looked as if houses, trees, ground cars and road had suddenly thrown themselves into the air in a long line. The heavy electromagnetically driven shells fired from the window-frame-mounted cannon batteries all but disintegrated any inmates they hit and churned up the earth where they impacted. The air was filled with fragmented of bodies and larger chunks of spinning debris.

‘No!’ Mr Hat screamed in rage and frustration. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he demanded over the ’face link.

‘We—’ a frightened-sounding Isaiah began.

‘Not you, the other moron!’ he demanded. A chunk of concrete hit his hat and sent him flying. Only a chemically and neunonically controlled nervous system allowed him the presence of mind to continue ’facing.

‘We detected a large-scale disturbance,’ Al told him. ‘We were dealing with it.’

‘Cease the barrage immediately. That large-scale disturbance is me committing mass murder, you fucking idiot!’ He’d stopped the blades spinning as he fell and the monofilament had sucked them back into the mechanism of the hat. Crouched in a ball on the ground, he was suddenly underneath a pile of automatons. He was receiving information about how many of them had been destroyed in the cannon barrage. Another was destroyed when a large chunk of masonry landed on the pile of automatons shielding him. They kept him safe, but several at the top of the pile were badly damaged.

‘You’re in the privacy nano-swarm,’ Al explained.

‘That’s what the macro-cams are for! Do you think I’m fucking lying to you? Stop fucking firing! Or I will find an immersion to keep you in that will allow you to be constantly anally raped to death!’

The hypersonic bang of the cannon fire stopped, followed by the sound of debris falling to the ground. Slowly the automatons started disentangling themselves and standing up. Finally Mr Hat pushed himself back onto his feet and brushed himself down. The air was full of dust, which was causing his lung filters problems and obscuring his vision. Even through the dust he was able to see that the suburban street had been turned into a series of craters. He walked quickly through the red-smeared rubble towards the ground car. A cordon of his automatons killed any of the surviving Dead-Skin Masks who tried to charge him through the dust. The ground car was mostly intact. Berger was gone.

‘Nooooo!’ he shrieked. ‘Find him! Bring him and anyone with him to me!’

The automatons spread out. When they left the blast area, they leaped upwards and started moving from rooftop to rooftop, tree to tree.

‘Well, try and fucking run!’ Vic said, all but dragging the Alchemist with him after Elodie.

‘I’m a fucking dolphin. We’re not built to run!’ Berger/the Alchemist complained.

‘I’m an insect. I’m coping with the lack of limbs!’

‘It’s not the same. It would be like asking you to echolocate!’

‘No, it’d be like asking me to swim! Which I can!’

‘Shut the fuck up! Both of you!’ Elodie hissed. She was crouched down and looking all around. All three of them were covered from head to foot in blood and dust after running through gardens at the back of the houses.

‘Where’s the rendezvous?’ Vic demanded.

‘Here,’ Elodie said, pointing at the garden they’d paused in. They’d managed to flee about two miles away from Eden Street.

‘Where are they, then?’

‘You get that we can’t communicate with them, right?’

Vic’s human eyes widened. ‘So when are they coming?’

‘Another two hours?’

‘Two hours!’

Elodie stood up and strode over to Vic. ‘You have not contributed. In fact, you have been nothing but a whiny pain in the arse since we started!’ she hissed, waving a bloody kitchen knife at him for emphasis. ‘Now either cope, or I end you right here, right now!’

‘All right, calm down,’ Vic said, a little taken aback.

‘Inside, now!’ She pushed them into the closest house.

It was a spacious open-plan bungalow. They entered through the kitchen door. From the lounge, five faces turned to look their way. The two adults had been tied to chairs placed back to back and looked like they had been pretty extensively tortured. The three children had just stopped dancing around the adults. The children were carrying a mixture of household utensils, tools and caustic cleaning products.

Elodie stepped forwards. ‘Get out of here, take the adults with you, torture them to death somewhere else,’ she told them. The kids stared at her. She stared back, the knife in her hand dripping blood. To Vic it felt as if the stand-off went on for a very long time. Then the kids bolted, leaping through the already broken lounge window. Elodie sighed. They’d left the adults. The adults immediately started begging.

‘Put him in the fridge and get the kettle on,’ Elodie told Vic. ‘I’ll deal with them.’ Elodie started walking towards the two tied-up adults, knife at the ready. They started to beg and plead for their lives.

‘Breathe,’ Elodie told Vic as he hyperventilated into a brown paper bag. She took another sip of the coffee. It was quite good, she decided.

Vic jumped as something landed on the roof. He opened his mouth but suddenly Elodie’s hand was over it. There was a scrabbling noise, and then the sound of breaking glass as a figure dressed in a blood-smeared suit complete with tails and tall hat dropped through a skylight and landed in a crouch. The tall, thin, eyeless figure stood up straight.

‘Just keep hyperventilating into the bag,’ Elodie said. Vic nodded and got on with his panic attack. Elodie took another sip of coffee as the automaton slowly turned around, looking without eyes. Then it stalked off to search the rest of the house. Vic opened his mouth to ask a question – between wheezing for breath – but Elodie held up her hand for silence.