Hardcore - 03 (57 page)

Greya turned, and pointed at a solid brick wall, painted in the sterile puke-green colour which could only appear on a hospital's deranged palette. "That way."

"But it's a wall."

Greya stepped forward, and her arm seemed to enlarge suddenly, swelling and punching out with savage unstoppable force. Bricks exploded, steel shrieked, dust billowed, and within a single second there was a rough and crumbling doorway.

"Now it's a door." Franco gulped, as Greya's arm returned to normal size, then he glanced at the axe, and gulped again. He was pretty sure it would take more than a simple melee weapon to destroy
this
particular creature.

"This way," she soothed, taking him by the hand.

"OK," squeaked Franco, scooping up the axe, and stepping through the portal.

Keenan stepped from the oil-smoke stairs and found himself at the edge of a playground. Keenan had seen this sort of thing before, in huge hospitals built around central hubs or courtyards; an outdoor space, usually a square, surrounded by towering hospital buildings and used by unfortunate children staying in hospital for whatever reason. Keenan had always suffered uneasiness around such medical playgrounds, for whilst their intentions were obviously noble, they simply reminded him of disease and death... and not just disease and death in general, but the affliction of the young.

He glanced around uneasily, his guns feeling wrong in his hands. What is this place? What am I doing here?

He realised immediately that they'd been forcibly separated, and intuition told him it was VOLOS. So then, a test of some kind. A test before they progressed to meet the maker of Sick World? Keenan gave a sick smile.
How fitting
, he thought.

He moved forward, slowly, carefully, gun tracking and waiting for the next enemy. Around him the windows were like eyes, small, square, black, and lacking any emotion, any sympathy. They were a testament to sterility; the sterility of medicine. The hopelessness of the dying. The bitterness of the dead.

And something smelled.

Something smelled
bad.

Keenan stopped, fake grass crunching underfoot. Before him were a row of four swings, a climbing frame set with two slides, a rubber tyre suspended by chains, and a sand pit. A cold wind blew, and autumn leaves drifted crackling across this sterile playground. Keenan shivered. He looked up at the stars, but there were no stars in this place, just a terrible velvet blackness which coated the sky like tar. And then he remembered: he was far under the world. In a fake place. An ersatz hospital world. A
sick
world.

Keenan turned, the cold wind ruffling his brown hair. His eyes narrowed, and he saw movement at a window. It was pushed open by thin white arms, and Keenan saw a young girl there, no more than ten years old. She leant out slightly, looking down at him, and something chilled Keenan to the core of his soul. She was pretty, with long black hair, but her eyes were black, lacking emotion, devoid of empathy. They stared at him as if he were a bug in a killing jar.

Keenan fought the urge to wave, and he watched her watching him. Her lips moved a little but no words came out.

"Hello," said Keenan, voice quite low. He didn't want to advertise his presence. But then, if this
was
a test by VOLOS, anything of danger already knew he was there. "Shit." He raised his voice. "Hello, girl; can you show me the way out?"

"There is no way out," she said.

"Where am I?"

"The playground of death," she said, and turned, as if talking to somebody within. Keenan saw the back of her head, then. It was caved in, crushed, showing yellow shards of bone emerging from a pulped skull. He could see blood, and he could see the terrible blue-grey of the girl's brain. Even from this distance he could distinguish maggots crawling in her flesh, in her living tissue, in her brain-matter, and Keenan felt the urge to vomit well swiftly inside him -

His hand slapped over his mouth, as along the hospital wall more windows opened, high and low, right across the expanse of the hospital face. Behind, he heard clasps being undone and hinges squeaking, and Keenan turned and watched as a thousand windows were opened by a thousand children, all eerily quiet, all staring with the same black eyes, the same lack of emotion, the same essence of the damned.

"What is this place?" he whispered, spider-legs creeping up and down his spine. Keenan shivered again, his hackles rising, his blood chilling, his heart stopping, his soul dying, as he turned and turned and turned, and watched the hundreds of children, each with a very special wound or illness or disease, each and every one different, unique, and
special
.

One girl had no eyes, just bloody eye sockets. A little boy had a slit throat, blood pumping down his chest. Another boy held hands out with only stumps for fingers clasping the sill. A girl had a screwdriver in her head, the shaft protruding around bubbling brain-matter and blood. Yet another had facial burns, a little girl had a disease of the mouth and nose which left huge, gaping holes in her face through which her working soundless jaws could be seen. More and more and more, each affliction unique, each devastation destroying a child's happiness, future and, ultimately, hope.

"Stop!" he cried, pain flooding him.

"Welcome, Mr. Keenan," said the first girl who'd appeared. Keenan stopped his cycle of turns, and stared at her. His mouth was dry, head pounding, and by God he could have savoured a long cool draught of Jataxa spirit. The whole fucking bottle, in fact. It was on days like this Keenan wished he was dead; dead and eking out an existence in damnation, with his murdered little girls.

Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, he thought sourly. There was no such thing as a cure, he knew. Remission was just a temporary shelter until the day he began again. Keenan licked his lips.

"Who are you people?" he said, eventually, voice a lullaby. "Why are you all here, like this? Why are you all so..."

"Injured? Wounded?" The little girl smiled, although her black eyes held no emotion, no humour, no understanding. Her eyes were piss-holes in the snow. Portals to another, darker, dimension. "This is the Children's Ward, Mr. Keenan." She savoured the words, her little pink tongue like a quick, darting fish. "This is where we come to suffer, to be tortured, to feel agony, and to die."

"No," said Keenan.

"Yes," said the little girl. "I am Amra. I am here to show you that dreams are worse than reality, I am here to show you that life can be worse than the horror of imagination; I am here to make you suffer, Mr. Keenan. I am here to make you pay."

Suddenly, all the wounded children started screaming, the boys and girls howled high-pitched and loud, ululating cries ringing out and out and filling the cubic playground with pain and terror.

"STOP!" bellowed Keenan, but his voice was drowned as by a waterfall of sound. The screams continued, all merging into a whole of high-pitched squealing noise which seemed to pierce Keenan's ears and drill right through to his brain stem. He covered his ears, and felt something hot there, and when he looked at his fingers he realised it was... blood.

The screaming continued, an endless river of sound, and Keenan turned around, useless gun clasped in useless hands as he realised, for the first time in his life, despite his personal armoury of guns and bullets, knives and bombs, his elite training and decadent, single-minded purpose, he was effectively unarmed, helpless, weak, more childlike than the screaming children who tortured him. He tracked with his weapon, but dropped it. How could he shoot injured children? And what was their crime? To scream? To show their pain and endless torture?

Across the playground, a gate suddenly opened. It was a wooden gate, painted in bright, gay colours. It squeaked, a penetrating noise through the cacophony of deranged children, and Keenan's gaze snapped to see -

His mouth fell open, for there were his two young girls, Rachel and Ally, and they ran to him across the playground, eyes bright and excited, faces flushed with joy. They wore long dresses and sandals, and hair flowed behind them as they ran. They stampeded across the playground, seemingly ignoring the hundreds of screams, and they fell into their daddy's arms and he was on his knees, holding them, smelling the fresh scent of their hair and feeling the soft warmth of their skin.

Keenan fell into his little girls, fell into their smell, into their essence, into their very being. As they hugged, so the screaming backdrop began to subside, began to drop in pitch, declining like a turbine winding down. Eventually, the screams were gone, and only Keenan's peripheral vision showing hundreds of faces, mouths twisted in silent Os, like automatic kids with the volume on mute, disturbing his equilibrium...

"We missed you, Daddy," said Rachel.

"We love you, Daddy," said Ally.

And Keenan was sobbing, great tears of mercury falling down chilled cheeks. A cold, ice-filled wind blew, ruffling his hair, cutting between their embrace like a nitrogen knife. Keenan pulled back a little, looked into their eyes and they smiled sweet beautiful child smiles and something
cracked
inside Keenan's heart, like a delicate rare bird's egg breaking to spill out precious yolk. There was something wrong. Something twisted. Something
deviant.

They are not real, whispered a part of his soul.

They are... dangerous.

But he was overcome, with joy, with grief, with regret, with frustration, and he chose to ignore the warnings because the love he felt, the great surging uplift of joy and thankfulness, quelled any and all negative energy and Keenan decided, there and then, that if he had to, he would die with them, die for them. No regrets. No bullshit. He would be with his girls, forever.

"Will you take us on the slide, Daddy?" asked Rachel giggling.

"And the swings oh please the swings first!" cried Ally.

And it was there, the strangeness; the looks on their faces were wrong, as if they were wearing human masks, and Keenan pulled back a little, frowning, and this action saved his life. The knife blade whistled a millimetre from his throat, so close it almost kissed his flesh, and he blinked, hard, staring at Rachel whose face had changed in an instant from love to hate, from create to destroy.

"Motherfucker," she snarled, and stabbed forward with the blade, young face twisted into a vision that should never sit on a child's face. Keenan swayed, fast, an instinctive movement, and his right arm smashed up and right, knocking the blade away. He rocked back on his heels, took several steps back, and surveyed the two girls.

"What are you?" he whispered.

"I'm going to kill you, Daddy," snarled Rachel, advancing, the long knife held out. Keenan saw ice glittering on the blade. More cold wind blew, sending leaves skittering across the playground. It smelled like fresh snow.

"I'm going to cut out your liver,
Daddy,"
said Ally, and she was more calm than Rachel, less filled with dark emotion. "I'm going to eat your organs.
Then
we'll see how much you fucking love us." She giggled, the sound jangling, out of place, echoing and hollow like dice in a tomb.

Rachel charged, and she was fast, a blur of movement, too fast to be human and Keenan twisted as she leapt, the blade flashing past his face, but Ally was there, also leaping and Keenan ducked, whirling around and back, backing away, reclaimed gun limp in his hands and he could shoot, should shoot, should mow them down because they weren't his girls, weren't his dead children, they weren't human, no human could move like that, twisting and bending, spider-like in their flexible leaps, but they
looked
like his children and his finger slid from the trigger. How could he kill his little girls? How could he kill them, again?

Crying, Keenan was backing away. Rachel and Ally spread out, grins elastic on pale faces.

"Gonna cut you up."

"Gonna fuck you up."

They charged, moving fast, twisting and bending and Keenan backed to the see-saw and tripped, fell hard. All wind was knocked from him and Rachel and Ally appeared above, demonic faces gazing down, sneering at him, mocking him.

"Not so tough now, soldier boy."

"You're going to taste death, you pointless cunt."

Keenan blinked, in lazy-time slow-motion. The world descended into a hazy, snow-filled globe and everything was moving slowly, disjointed, unreal. Keenan lifted his hand and stared at his fingers, and they were pale white, fish-white, and he moved them, in slow-motion, as the girls continued to speak but their voices were slowed, lethargic, deep and masculine and making no sense. They lifted their knives, a unity in destruction, and the blades plunged down fast, hard, intent on death and Keenan moved so fast he felt his muscles straining and tendons tearing and self-preservation kicked him up into the sky from a deep well of despair and he slammed sideways into the girls' legs, toppling them like skittles and rolling fluidly to a crouch, eyes narrowed and lips compressed and gun, now real, no longer a dormant thing, in his hands.

"You want to kill me?" he growled.

The girls climbed to their feet, legs heavily bruised, and snarled at him with strings of saliva and snot pooling from clacking jaws. They shook their heads from side to side, as a dog shakes a bone. Their eyes were black now, and feral.