Biohell (15 page)

He padded on, Mel behind him, her
claws clacking the pavement like an obedient hound. Occasionally, Franco
glanced back at his fiancee, all eight-feet of muscled rangy monstrosity. He
shivered in apprehension. Gods, what would happen if he couldn’t get her
changed back? Imagine the
food
bill.

The local doctor’s was only a
couple of blocks away, and as Franco turned a corner he stopped. There was a
corpse, in the road. It had no head. Franco glanced about, and felt the hairs
on his arms and neck prickle. He pumped the D5 and moved to the centre of the
road, approaching the headless corpse with apprehension. Blood streamers led
off across the street, swimming with a few lumps of vegetable soup gristle.

Franco’s eyes narrowed. “Not
good,” he muttered, spinning in a slow wide circle, D5 primed as he eyed the
many, many narrow alleys, dark doorways, perfect places where an enemy could
hide and ambush unwary Francos.

He stopped. Heard a slurp. He
blinked. “No,” he said. Turning, he stared hard at where Mel had her disjointed
muzzle buried in the corpse’s open neck cavity. “Urgh! Gerroff! You dirty
bitch!”
He whacked Mel across the head with the butt of his shotgun, and she pulled
free her muzzle and stared up at him with wounded eyes. As if to say,
What
did you do that for?

Franco held up a finger, his eyes
wide. “No! No eating corpses! Bad girl!
Dirty
girl.”

Mel whined, and a long brown
tongue like a slug slurped blood and chunks from her tightly stretched mottled
lips.

“Come on. Follow me.”

Again they moved, Franco on a
hairline trigger, his tension building with each and every footstep. There! He
thought he saw a shadow move in a doorway. And there! He was sure he saw the
flash of a pale white face. Franco accelerated, little legs pumping, until he
reached the block where his doctor’s surgery nestled. He stopped by the door,
and glanced up and down the street. Distantly, he could see something and he
squinted. It looked like... a pile of bodies? Franco shuddered. Prioritise, he
thought. Sort Mel out. Get her back to normal.
Then
worry about the
apparent disappearance of The City’s entire population.

He moved to the door, shaded his
eyes and peered inside. There seemed to be signs of a struggle. A smear of
blood led to the lift. Franco frowned, and behind him Mel rattled the chain
which tugged against his hand—like a dog straining against its leash. “Down
girl,” he said, without any hint of comedy.

He hit the kube’s buzzer. It
buzzed.

After a long pause, so long
Franco was about to turn and walk away, a wavering voice said, “Hel... hello?”

“Hi,” said Franco. “This is
Franco Haggis. I’ve come to see Doctor Gentle. He’s my doctor, he is.”

There came a long, considered
pause. Strange rustling and grunting noises came over the kube.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Franco Haggis.”

“Are you one of them?”

“One of who?”

“What do you want?”

“I want to see Doctor Gentle.”

“He’s dead.”

“What? How?”

“One of the
things
bit off
his arm.”

“The things?”

The kube went dead. Franco buzzed
it again.

“Yes?” snapped the voice.

“Can I see
another
doctor,
then?”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s my girlfriend. She’s...”
Franco’s brain worked fast. “... ill,” he said. “Nasty virus. Laid her low.
Made her... a bit odd.”

Above, ten storeys above, a
window opened. A head peered out.

Franco stepped back, staring up
at the face.

“Is that
her?
Hell, man,
you weren’t bloody joking when you said she was a bit odd! She’s had a biomod,
hasn’t she? Changed into one of the
things.”

Franco shrugged. “What things?
What’re you talking about?”

“What the hell have you been
doing,
you lunatic?” said the head from the window. “Everybody went
crazy.
People—those
people still normal—are saying it’s because of the biomods. The nanobots have
mutated people! Lots of people. Millions of people! It was on the news, until
they took down Broadcast Central. Now all the TVs are dead.”

“Let me in,” said Franco.

“Oh no. You might be infected.”

“With what?”

“The biomods!” hissed the head. “Haven’t
you been listening to a word I said?”

“Wait. Wait.” Franco held up his
hand. “Look at my girl here. Mel, she’s called. She’s like a little lamb. A
little puppy.” Mel growled. Franco kicked her. “She wouldn’t do no harm to
nobody. All I want is to be let in, we’ll get a doctor to see her, sort her
out, get her back to normal, job’s a good ‘un.” Franco beamed. It seemed quite
logical to him.

“There are no doctors
left,”
said
the disembodied head. “They were all vain! They all took biomods! So they
all... changed.”

Franco put his hands on his hips.
“Now listen here,” he said. “This just sounds like a load of horseradish
bullshit to me. Are you sure you’re not drugged up from the partying? This hot
damn bloody bollocks of a situation is all bloody ridiculous, so it is.”

“Shit, they’re coming back!”

Another head appeared. A woman.
She looked worn out, bedraggled, even from ten storeys below. “Oh
no!”
she
groaned, her voice low and bubbling with terror. “That’s where they’ve been!”

“Where?” said the first head.

“For weapons!” hissed the woman.

Distantly, they heard the rattle
of a machine gun. And an explosion, which
boomed,
a muffled detonation.
Franco’s ears pricked up. That was a G7 Frag Grenade. Military. His head tilted
to one side. He frowned. A G7 shouldn’t be used in urban developments.

“You’d better go!” snapped the
woman, looking down at Franco with haunted eyes. “They’ll rip you apart, eat
your liver, tear out your spine! We’ve seen them. We’ve watched them!”

“Why don’t you just let me in?”
said Franco, persistent as a terrier, through gritted teeth.

The window slammed shut, and
Franco heard the click of a high-tensile lock. He buzzed the buzzer, again,
then rattled the doors. Taking a step back, he levelled the D5 and a
boom
rocked
the street. The lock held. “Damn and buggery.” He turned to Mel, but Mel’s long
neck was stretched out, her small round head focused on something further down
the street. Her distended jaw worked noiselessly. Saliva pooled in long
streamers, like thick tobacco drool, to connect her with greasy umbilicals to
the road.

“What is it, love?”

“Grwlll.”

And they came, stampeding down
the road, hundreds,
thousands
of distorted, grotesque, twisted,
transmogrified figures, monsters, beasts, abominations, flesh hanging from
faces, eyes dead in disjointed skulls, many with missing limbs or bearing huge
jagged wounds; they grunted and moaned and screamed and chomped, teeth
gnashing; they stomped in a dark grey pus-oozing swarm, a tidal wave of rotting
flesh preceded by a
stench...

“They’re...”

Franco paled.

“They’re...!”

Franco’s eyes went saucer-wide.

“They’re...!!”

He turned, and with Mel on the
leash, sprinted for his life, arms pumping as the fast-moving surge of
deformed, twisted, ragged creatures swept after him, the stench of putrefaction
and decay washing over Franco and making him gag, vomit splashing down his
shirt even as he ran with all his might, Mel galloping alongside him on her
chain, her head down, talons crashing the road...

Groans filled the air, a terrible
moaning, wailing sound of agony and despair.

“They’re
zombies!”
screamed
Franco in terror. “Bloody
zombies!”

He turned, stumbling for a
moment, and they were almost on him. Hands clawed at him, raking his flesh and
trying to find a grip, trying to put out his eyes and pull him down to the
ground. And they moved...
fast.
Dangerously fast.

Franco slammed a right hook.
Kicked a zombie in the crotch. Punched another, cracking its six-inch long
grey-pus nose. The D5
boomed.
A zombie’s head was blasted clean from his
tattered ragged disjointed body, but still he came at Franco who was stumbling
backwards, Mel at his heels, the swarm before him, ululating. Franco’s D5
boomed again, and the monster’s legs were blown off at the knees. And still the
headless, legless torso crawled after him leaving a slick trail of gore.

Franco stared into a sea of snarling
gibbering hanging grey faces, many without ears or eyes, or teeth or hands,
some with puke-green flesh, some the brown and black of necrotic leprosy. And
he realised, in the blink of an eye, that this diseased and decadent mob
carried...

Guns.

They sported shotguns, rifles,
sub-machine guns, pistols, and Franco saw the gleam of a grenade. Weapons
bristled amongst the decaying, flesh-eating ranks.

“Holy mother of God,” whispered
Franco.

He turned, and sprinted for his
life...

As machine gun bullets slapped
his heels.

~ * ~

CHAPTER 4

A KNIGHT AT THE OPERA

The
sound of a 1250cc LC12 titanium lekradite single-cylinder engine cut through
the Galhari morning, a high-pitched screech to the backing track of heavy
industrial military might. Choppers swam through the distant sky. Infantry K
Freighters hung on the horizon.

Keenan slammed the quiet roads on
the outskirts of the city, Dekkan Tell. Dekkan Tell was a low-slung scatter of
white stone buildings sporting terracotta tiled roofs, orange doors and
shutters, and connected by wide paved highways and a proliferation of the
bright orange Dekka flower which gave the locality its name. Whilst classified
a city, it had a modest population which coincided with the solitude of Galhari
as a planet on the fringes of the Quad-Gal in general, and made an ideal place
for those wishing for a quiet existence. Until now, it would seem.

Head thumping, mind weary, and
leaving a trail of dust in his wake, Keenan smashed down twisting roads in a
controlled panic. He had to get a message to the Quad-Gal Military. If the
junks
were
invading Galhari, Keenan was sure the quiet, peaceful, and
easily outnumbered authorities would already have fallen. Keenan, however,
being Combat K, had military-grade kit. He could kube for help on military
channels...

He pulled from the main highway
and roared down a dusty single-track road. Stopping beside his white-walled
wooden house, he kicked the bike onto its stand and pulled free his lid.
Beneath, his hair was sweat-streaked and he ran a hand through the tangle, then
glanced off towards the sea. It glittered turquoise, and he could see boats
with brightly coloured sails, bobbing. They seemed crazily at odds with the
warfleet hanging ominously from the sky.

Grimly, Keenan ran up the path
and steps, boots pounding. As he approached the door he palmed his Techrim 11mm
and entered, dumping his lid and jacket on a low-slung leather couch. Keenan
searched through his home methodically, Techrim by his cheek, a casual comrade
in violence, and only when he’d cleared the final room did his powerful frame
relax a little and he placed the Techrim back in its holster.