Biohell (29 page)

Cam zipped off into the black,
and was instantly swallowed.

Franco peered at Keenan. “Hey,
now it’s really spooky. We’re alone together!” he said, and shuffled a little
closer.

“Don’t get any ideas.”

Franco looked injured. “I was
just, y’know, attempting a bit of brotherly solidarity. A bit o’ bonding.
Strength in union, an’ all that.”

“Well, give your girlfriend a
cuddle,” said Keenan, voice harsh, eyes sweeping the tunnel. “She looks like
she could do with a bit of sweetening up.”

They moved through the swirling
water, warily, twitchy, constantly on the lookout for pursuing zombies or
whatever hell else was down in the tunnels. Franco stayed close to Keenan, eyes
wide, and Mel followed to the rear, head sometimes banging from the tunnel roof
and smashing tiles to tumble with concrete pepper into the soup through which
they trudged.

“What is this place, anyway?”
asked Franco after a while.

Keenan shrugged. “Not sure. But
look at the walls.” He moved his MPK, which highlighted several horizontal
streaks. Franco stared at the streaks, then back at Keenan.

“So, it’s got streaks?” he
ventured.

“No, those are marks left when
the water level is higher, up near the top of the roof.”

Franco considered this. “So it
floods?”

“Aye, either it floods, or there
is some kind of sluice. Draining water from somewhere to somewhere.”

“So water could come smashing
down at any moment and wash us away?”

“Yeah. Our dickhead friend Betezh
forgot to mention that bit, didn’t he?”

Franco nodded, chewing his lip. “I
definitely
do not like this place. It gives me the jitters, the creeps,
the heebie jeebies. Come on, let’s push on; get back up to the fresh air.”

“Fresh air filled with zombies?”

“Zombies I can shoot,” muttered
Franco. “But down here?” He stared at Keenan, deadly serious, mouth a line
which had lost all sense of humour. “Down here, well, it’s enough to make a man
mad.”

~ * ~

“You
hear it?”

“Hear what?”

They stopped, water lapping lazy
at the edges of the tunnel.

“It was a hiss,” said Franco.

Keenan glowered at him. “Don’t
start jumping at shadows again, you mad midget. Zombie fish? Hah! I don’t want
any gunfire until a target’s identified. Clear?”

Franco said nothing. He was
staring past Keenan.

“You mean like that?” he
muttered.

Keenan whirled to see three dark
shadows moving fast along the edges of the tunnel. They gleamed, metallic, and
were quite obviously designed as killing machines.

“They
don’t
look like the
sort of robots I’d want to meet in a dark alleyway.” Franco licked dry lips. “Shit.
I think we should, like, run.” Franco sprinted away down the tunnel, water
slopping his groin and chest. Keenan ran after him, struggling to move at speed
through the high water-level, and he cocked his MPK ready for contact. Mel kept
pace with the two men.

Keenan drew alongside Franco. “Look
out for the service chute,” he hissed.

Distantly, there came a deep,
bass rumble.

“Hell’s teeth, what are they,
Keenan?”

“Advanced killing machines.”

Franco glanced back. “They’re
gaining.”

There came a series of metallic
shrings.
Nyx, Momos and Lamia were running in a tight, close formation, a dark,
inverted V of water in their wake; Momos had drawn her yukana swords and the
three machines gleamed, faces rigid, gloss black and terrifying in the gloom as
they closed for the kill...

“There!” snapped Franco. Above, a
chute protruded into the tunnel with ragged edges of twisted ladder barely
visible. They stopped, and Keenan and Franco sent volleys of machine gun fire
screaming down the tunnel at the pursuing AIs. Bullets rattled. Everything was
chaos. Fire lit the darkness. Metallic screams charged the air. The three GKs
ignored the spinning bullets which spat sparks from casings, deflected by hardy
TitaniumVI armour.

“Get up there, Franco,” snarled
Keenan, pulling free a savage BABE grenade. So named because, as the military
contract literature proudly proclaimed,
IT GIVES YOU A GOOD FUCKING!

“I can’t make that jump!” wailed
Franco. “I’m only a little fella!” Mel was there instantly, and she hoisted him
towards the roof where Franco grasped metal rungs, legs dangling and kicking.
With a grunt he hauled himself up, and glanced back.

Again, there came a deep rumble.
This time deeper, so deep as to not be heard, just
sensed.
The walls
shook. Water sloshed wildly around Keenan’s waist.

“Come on Keenan!” Franco
bellowed.

“One minute,” said Keenan,
holding up a finger.

Mel followed Franco, squeezing
herself into the narrow aperture with a crunching of armour, a tearing of
concrete, a twisting of steel. Powdered concrete rained down on Keenan... as
the tunnel began to vibrate.

Keenan pulled the pin from the
grenade.

The three GKs were closing
fast,
but Keenan blinked, eyes narrowing as he watched the machines pursued by an
increase in rumbling, thundering, shaking and he realised the tunnel water
level was rising, swirling violently about him and he tossed the BABE, a small
matt globe which sailed out towards the charging enemy robots as a wall of
water slammed them from behind picking them up and spinning them and Keenan
leapt for the ladder—but too late as a smash of frothing, seething liquid
plucked him from his jump and pummelled him along with the flailing, shrieking
GKs, and Keenan’s MPK roared and spat under froth and foam, and somewhere,
distant, as if deep down in a dream muffled by distance and the ocean, there
came a terrible subdued
crack
and super-heated water and steam rushed
past him in a terrifying violent surge and he thought or dreamt he heard a
high-pitched metallic scream but everything was chaos and Keenan was pummelled
and torn and smashed, he hit the tunnel wall hard, battered, slapped, was
slammed along without control until something snagged his WarSuit, held him
there under the onslaught of charging water like a fish struggling for life on
a hook—

Water surged and pumped. The
world was darker than dark, filled with violent random currents and bubbles.
Keenan was slapped repeatedly against concrete, and each blow felt like it
shattered bones. He could feel his WarSuit, so many times a saviour, this time
betraying him, holding him ensnared with invisible fingers... holding him there
to drown.
He kicked out uselessly, trying his hardest to swim with the
current; his MPK was lost and everything was dark and choking and suddenly so
very, very cold. Keenan couldn’t breathe, simply
could not
breathe, and
pain slammed his brain with flowering stars as he struggled desperately,
trapped under the flooded tunnel. A dawning realisation forced clarity like a
burst of fireworks exploding in his mind.

After all the shit he’d endured,
all the battles and wars and demons and AIs he’d faced and fought and killed...
here, now, Keenan realised with an ultimate clinical certainty that he was going
to die.

~ * ~

CHAPTER 8

CHILD PROTECTION

It’s
been said a man’s life flashes before his eyes prior to death. For Keenan, it
wasn’t his life—it was a single moment, a solitary incident stretching away
unto infinity. It was a moment of beautiful simplicity, of honesty, of
happiness. Standing in the park, in the sunshine, his two girls—Rachel and
Ally—on the swings, giggling, squealing when he pushed them too high. To one
side, on a bench, sat his wife Freya. She’d tossed back her long hair in the sunshine,
and rays sparkled through individual floating strands. Her face looked so calm,
so serene, so ultimately at peace. This image, a tableau, remained fixed in
Keenan’s mind as the powerful rage of the underground flood buffeted him,
pounded him, and his burning screaming screeching lungs finally gave out and he
breathed—breathed
in
water. Keenan gagged, choked, tried to vomit—and in
doing so inhaled even more, desperately drawing more water into his oxygen
starved body, arms and legs thrashing wildly and panic, a raging beast closing
jaws over his brain, his sanity, his ability to
think.
Keenan fought the
invisible foe of the flood; and for once, for one long and painful moment he
realised this was a foe he could not beat. Tears fell from frustrated eyes to
mingle with the flood.

And... he could see his girls.

His sweet, dead girls.

Waiting for him by the swings...

Something grabbed him, a harsh
connection, violent in its suddenness, and he was jerked with a jarring pain
back into a world of snarling reality. Everything was a confusion of bubbles.
He was stunned. A blow connected with his jaw and he spat in anger, hatred and
pent-up frustration and violence as he blinked and realised—

It was Mel.

She swam like an otter,
undulating the entire length of her body. She circled him with powerful
strokes, fighting the violent torrent. But even as her strong talons sliced
through whatever had snagged Keenan and held him a prisoner beneath the flood,
so he felt a dark fist of unconsciousness take him; the sun was shining strong
and Freya looked so pretty sitting in the warm yellow light, sunshine diffusing
her hair.

Mel dragged him by the scruff of
his WarSuit up towards the chute, and forced his limp and failing frame up past
the ladder which bubbled and fizzed with detergents, frothing a brown foam
soup. Franco grasped Keenan from above, hauled him up onto the city street and
slapped the man’s soaked dead body onto the tarmac. Franco heaved on Keenan’s
chest, forcing flooded lungs to disgorge. Water bubbled from Keenan’s mouth,
ran like brown vomit across his face and into his eyes. Franco rolled Keenan
onto his front, heaved on the man’s back forcing yet more fluid out. Then he
administered the kiss of life... as Mel squatted, small head weaving left and
right, scanning for zombies.

Franco inhaled, exhaled, inhaled,
exhaled. Pumped at Keenan’s lungs. He checked the man’s wrist. He could feel a
pulse, fluttering weakly, and suddenly Keenan choked and coughed, rolling onto
his side, foetal, and wracking as he choked out the remains of the invasive
tunnel water.

There came a few long minutes
where Keenan simply lay, panting, staring at the ground like a limp fish.
Franco squatted by his side, D5 shotgun in his calloused, scarred knuckles,
watching for zombies... and the three
things
which had attacked them in
the tunnel.

What were they? A manner of AI
Franco had never before seen, that was for sure. Extremely high-tech, not like
the primitive GE Razor Droids of pre-Helix. No. These were fast, fluid, lethal.
Franco knew killers when he saw them; and the things hunting them in the tunnel
had been awesome.

Keenan sat up, breathing deeply.

“Cheers mate.”

“No problem Keenan. Listen, I
know you don’t want to be hearing this right now, but we need to get moving. Those
things from the tunnel—God only knows how far they were swept. I don’t want to
meet them again in a hurry.”

Keenan nodded, allowed Franco to
help him to his feet. “I lost my weapon.” Franco handed him a Kekra
quad-barrel, which he hefted thoughtfully. Then he turned to Mel, waiting
patiently, her lead lying by her side. Keenan smiled. “And... thank you.
Melanie.” He met her gaze. There was pain there; a mixture of feral
understanding, and... tears. Keenan nodded. She was trapped inside another
shell. Yet she still felt... at least partially... the same.