Biohell (44 page)

“That bullet enter my flesh, and
I say to myself, ‘Olga girl, this is it! Ze zombies, they will feast on your
brains! They will gorge zemselves on your generous rump!’ Yes. Until my hero,
my little ginger Franco, he came to ze rescue.”

“Actually,”
said Franco,
“technically,
it
was Keenan who rescued you.”

“Fuck off,” came Keenan’s growl.

“Come on Keenan, help me out
here!”

“You started this,” said Keenan,
looking suddenly evil in the glow of the bio-mechanical unit’s cockpit, “so you
can damn well finish it.”

“That’s hardly brotherly.”

“I ain’t your brother.”

“You call me bro’, sometimes,
when we’re in the shit.” Olga’s hand had moved up to Franco’s thigh.

“Yeah well, that’s because we’re
in the shit. This is different. This is your wayward stupidity at play again.
You summoned Olga’s affections, and you can deal with the consequences.”

“Hey, I was only trying to sniff
out some drugs! I was just, y’know, minding my own business! Like a good boy! I’m
always a good boy! You know that Keenan! Come on man, it was the drugs I tell
ye! It’s not like
me
to go looking for women in odd and strange-smelling
places!”

“Oh yeah? Well,” said Keenan,
smiling broadly, “you certainly gave
her
an addiction. Looks like you’re
going to have to satisfy it.” With that, he moved away, over to Knuckles who
had his eyes fixed rigidly on the screen showing the brutal exterior of this
vast inner-city world—in all its desperation and accelerating decrepitude.
Knuckles sat, open awe tattooed on his face.

“You OK lad?”

“Yeah, Keenan.” He shivered. “Sorry.
Felt like somebody walked over my grave.”

“Happens to me every day,” said
Keenan, with a hint of bitterness. In his mind flickered the images of his
little girls. Dead and gone, he told himself. Dead and buried.

“I thought I was dead back there.”
Knuckles was clasping his knees.

“It was a tough call,” said
Keenan, remembering the three GK AIs, and Nyx in particular. It had seemed to
him, at the time, that there was something personal in the attack; a sense of
revenge.
But how could that be? Keenan had never before met the AIs. “Shit. Another
puzzle.” He shrugged away the concept, and patted Knuckles’s shoulder. “Listen,
you did well, lad. Really well. That idea with the fire extinguisher—genius.
You might make the army one day.”

Knuckles looked horrified. “Why
on earth would I want to join the army? I have everything I need right
here...
in The City.”

Keenan said nothing. A cynical
part of him wanted to point out that The City, at least for the foreseeable
future, was doomed. It was a ransacked shell. A desecrated temple. A biohell.
Ground under the boots of a pirated, hacked, cracked and mutated biomod culture
hell-bent on its own vain physical improvement—and instead, finding only a
mutated version of
hell
inhabited centre-stage by the very people who
sought to abuse their own organics at a genetic level. However, to point this
out to Knuckles would be like kicking a kitten. Despite his streetwise rough
tough image, Keenan could see, deep down under the young boy’s onion-layers of
panel-beaten hardness, ingrained cynicism and enforced maturity, he was still a
ten-year-old boy, a ten-year-old orphan, lonely, weak, and in need of the simplicity
of love and affection all children required. Keenan smiled grimly. And, in
fact, exactly what he himself craved.

They sat for a while in
comfortable silence, with only the grunting of Franco and Olga’s locked
stalemate interrupting the hum and buzz, the distant clanking, of MICHELLE’S
stomping advance across The City.

“Can I ask you something?” said
Keenan, at last.

“Sure, Mr Keenan.”

“Why do they call you Knuckles?”

A veil dropped in front of
Knuckles’ face, like a blast door slamming down a split-second before
detonation. His eyes hardened. His face lost its boyish charm. He said nothing,
but Keenan noted his hand, straying to a small velvet bag at his waist.

“It’s OK,” Keenan said, voice
gentle. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. Maybe another time.”

“I’m... sorry, Keenan.” Knuckles
seemed to breathe again, and a red flush flooded his face. “I’m just... I,
well, I lock my feelings away. In here.” He punched his breast, over his
gore-stained clothing. “It’s how I survive in The City. Life has... not been
kind to me. And I’m not used to sharing feelings. I’m not used to... talking to
people.” He grinned, then, and rubbed at a smudge on his gloss red boot. “Not
unless it’s to decode a small amount of cash from helk-fur wallets. Keenan—when
we sort Mel out, turn her back into a human for Franco, decode this SinScript
for the Quad-Gal military man, Steinhauer; then, then I’ll tell you.”

“You listen a lot,” said Keenan,
eyeing the boy with respect.

“It’s part of my trade,” smiled
Knuckles. “I’m a kid, yeah? Most of the time people forget I’m there. I blend
in. A natural chameleon. But I’m there all the same. I listen. I understand. I’ve
got a brain, and I know how to use it.”

“You think Xakus will restore Mel
to humanity?”

Knuckles met Keenan’s gaze, and
what the Combat K man saw nearly broke his heart. Knuckle gave a narrow,
bloodless smile, without humour, and with—ironically—a hint of condescension. “Not
this side of hell, he won’t,” Knuckles whispered.

~ * ~

Keenan
was jerked from his weariness when MICHELLE halted, and the muffled clanking
stopped. He felt the cockpit
roll
nauseatingly, as the huge bio-machine
settled down, and he rubbed at weary, bloodshot eyes and wondered not just what
time it was, but what
day
it was. Time, on the permanently darkened
planet of The City, seemed to have little meaning now; it had simply become a
question of passage.

Keenan stretched his back,
wincing at bruises and strains which, in the heat of battle, had failed to
exist. Now his body felt like a well-used punch-bag. He glanced over at Franco,
who was asleep, snoring, with his head on Olga’s lap. She was stroking his
shaved ginger hair, and humming a soothing lullaby to the battered, middle-aged
soldier.

“We are here,” said Professor
Xakus.

Keenan nodded, standing and
prodding Franco. “Come on midget, time to move.”

Franco sat up, glared at Olga,
and gathered his pack, checking his weapons. He then glared at Keenan, his
shaved head just a little tufty, his eyes filled with a distillation of
anarchy. Then, finally, he glared at Xakus. “I suppose,” he said, rubbing his
goatee beard, “that we have to get out of this contraption the same way we got
in?”

“You are correct,” said Xakus,
eyeing the small man.

“I just can’t believe it.
MICHELLE is gonna
shit
us out.”

“You’ve got it all in the wrong
context,” persisted Keenan, shouldering his own pack. “This is disembarkation.
It’s like getting off a train. Climbing from a chopper. Hell, you’ve been down
water-chutes in a water-park before now, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, but they weren’t full of
shit.”

“The only thing round here that’s
full of shit,” said Keenan, “is you. Now
move.”

Grumbling, Franco and the group
followed Keenan into the narrow chute. The
feeling
was one of
disorientation, as rings of what could only be described as
muscle
eased
them one by one onto the pavement. Keenan was first free, and his Techrim
covered arcs as Franco arrived, slumping onto the pavement in a heap, then
wearily standing to cover Keenan with his Kekra, shuddering and shivering with
massively repressed horror.

Olga, Knuckles and Xakus arrived,
and Knuckles pushed forward to Keenan. His face was that of young boy again,
obviously ready to see his friends—his
gang.
“Come on Keenan, let’s go!”

“Not so fast.”

“It’s quiet,” mumbled Franco.

“Too quiet,” agreed Keenan. “Franco,
take point. Knuckles, stay with me. This place was crawling with deviants the
last time we were here; I don’t see why it would be any different now.”

They moved to the building, which
still had security shutters in place from Mel’s fortification. Franco gained
entry using codes given him by Knuckles, and they stepped into the deserted
skyscraper’s cool, glum interior.

“Let’s move,” said Keenan, and
glancing back at Xakus he gave a short narrow smile. “I hope to God you can
help Mel after all the garbage we’ve been through.”

“So do I,” said the large black
man, voice soft. “Let me analyse her coding first. Then we’ll talk.”

They moved across the ground
floor, past several zombies which Mel had slaughtered on her building flush.
The lifts were still lit, and they climbed into a wide spacious interior.
Franco hit R for ROOF. It triggered a distant memory; of being pursued through
a mental institution during his breakout from Mount Pleasant. He grinned at the
thought.

Music piped through tinny
speakers as the lift hummed upwards. Ronan Keating’s truly ancient
Life is a
Roller coaster,
the eternal re-re-re-rerecorded Quad-Gal hit, the one song
in the entire Sinax Cluster which just never seemed to
die,
filled the
ascending metal box with a surreal and ghostly presence.

Keenan tapped his foot in rhythm.
Glanced at Olga, then Franco. He nudged Franco, and mouthed,
We
found
love, So don’t hide it, Life is a rollercoaster, Just gotta ride it.

Franco nodded, grinning back with
wide drug-plate eyes, and mouthed,
Bugger off and suck dick you alcoholic
arsehole.
Then he gave Keenan the thumbs-up, hoisted his Kekras, and
stepped forward as the lift reached the roof.

Immediately the doors opened they
knew something was wrong. The fire was out. Not even glowing embers remained.
The roof was deserted. Franco stepped forward, wary, guns tracking, humour
wrenched from him like a tooth.

“Mel?” he called quietly. Then
louder. “Melanie!”

No reply.

Knuckles burst out, past Franco,
and stumbled through the dead fire. He stopped, whirled, eyes scanning—then let
out a little cry. He sprinted towards a large air-con outlet, and Franco and
Keenan ran after him, skidding to a stop as Knuckles fell to his knees beside
the neatly piled corpses of the children.

“No!” screamed Knuckles, pounding
the floor with fists as tear-filled eyes raked the rows of tiny, pale-white
bodies, like ribs in a dead and rotten behemoth. Bullet wounds glistened in the
night-gloom across every child’s torso. Eyes stared glassy at distant, cold,
hydrogen-ringed stars.

“Franco, check the roof,” said
Keenan, voice quiet, and dropped to one knee beside Knuckles, his Techrim by
his cheek. “Knuckles... Knuckles, we have to get out of here, lad. Whatever did
this...”

“We need to find them!” He turned
his tear-streaked face to Keenan. “We need to find them, Mr Keenan. Find them—”
he hardened, “and kill them.” Keenan nodded, and helped Knuckles to his feet.

“Come on.” He grasped the lad’s
arm, lifted him up, eyes scanning the dead bodies of Skull, Sammy, Glass,
Little Megan and the others. A huge weight fell from his soul, then, and a
powerful feeling of meaninglessness encompassed him. Who shot these poor,
orphaned children? What purpose did it serve? Keenan’s face hardened. It served
no purpose. It was evil in its purest form.

Franco returned, panting. “Mel’s
not here, Keenan. But I found this.” It was a small grey unit, not dissimilar
to the PADs Combat K used. Keenan eyed it warily.