Prophet Margin (29 page)

The gun felt like a lead weight.

Above the stairwell, the ascetic style of the villa gave way to an unexpectedly hi-tech zone: all the blinking, blipping, flashing paraphernalia of a respectable control room. At the other end of the room a second stairwell led down into a separate section of the building, and between the two openings a cylindrical pillar was revealed as the apex of an elevator shaft, also from below. Roolán wondered vaguely what else lurked within this peculiar temple, accessible only from here.

A man slumped enormously in a seat in the middle of it all, smoking a cheap rollup and grinning, fiddling with a camera. So intent was he upon his task that he completely failed to register Roolán's entrance.

On second consideration, the man wasn't so much grinning as leering. Yawning, perhaps.

Gaping, even.

Without needing to be told, Roolán knew who he'd found.

The man faced towards the camera and tapped lightly at a control, flicking away the cigarette.

"This is your prophet speaking," the man said, voice smoother than a polished Zephinoid fur-crystal. "The holy mountain of fire is now a mere two hours away. Hail to the Boddah!"

Through tinny speakers Roolán could clearly hear a great swell all across the city chanting "Hail! Hail!" The prophet nodded indulgently and deactivated the transmission with a jab at the console.

"Suckers," he muttered.

Mister Grinn looked every bit as horrific as Johnny had described: his reptilian lips and cavernous jaw contriving to make his eyes seem tiny, his eyebrows delicate like those of a child, and his hairless scalp catching the light like some otherworldly landscape. He looked like an egg that had been partially cracked.

What Roolán hadn't expected was his shape. He was huge. Great wattles of flesh bulged revoltingly from beneath each arm; his portly belly could easily have tripped him. More peculiar still, his face and shoulders were proportioned normally, with his morbid obesity manifesting only somewhere around his ribcage. He looked like a marshmallow that'd been forcibly rammed into a bottle.

It occurred to Roolán that anyone watching the bizarre figure above the console desk, as through the camera, would see only the man's upper limits, and would therefore be ignorant of his vastness.

It also occurred to him that in the footage of Johnny tumbling awkwardly from his pedestal, trailing blood, the man that had shot him was tall and slim.

Still standing in the doorway, gun clutched in his paralysed hands, Roolán saw a sheen of globular mucus on the oblivious man's forehead, and worked it out.

"Everyone," he said, before he could stop himself.

Stanley Everyone almost fell off his chair. Several of the monitors exploded around him, glass fracturing beneath the voice's weird oscillations. Consoles hissed, the skylights shuddered dangerously, and the shapeshifter shouted a very rude word.

His ears vanished with a slippery plop, subsumed into the greasy flesh of his cheeks and Roolán shrugged, uncaring. The gun seemed to arm itself, his fingers moving independently. Everyone's eyes, staring in mute terror out of Grinn's face, rotated along the barrel of the weapon.

Roolán wanted to shout: you killed my parents!

But of course he didn't care.

He wanted to shout: you killed Johnny!

But of course that wasn't Everyone, but Grinn himself.

He wanted to shout: you destroyed my home!

But Shtzuth was nothing but a ball of shit, its people were parasites, its whole existence had been nothing but a source of misery to Roolán.

And... and...

And he found himself holding a gun to a man he hated, with nothing left to justify it, with no tangible reason why he should kill beyond the rushing of his own blood.

"Look, kid," Everyone warbled, mucal sweat cascading from him, "d-don't be an idiot. I'm just standing in for Grinn. He's, h-he's busy. Y-you got no beef with me, right?"

Roolán's finger tightened on the trigger.

Revenge.

"
Trust me
," Johnny said, an echo of a ghost in his mind. "
It doesn't work like that.
"

And:

"
Say you get your revenge, what then?
"

And:

"
It snecks with your brain. It... it takes over.
"

And:

"
You say you want to be a Strontium Dog, right? Then you need to be professional. It's not personal. It's never personal.
"

And...

And he couldn't do it.

His knuckle relaxed, Stanley Everyone deflated with a sigh.

"Good boy," he grinned. "He's still alive, you know. Alpha, I mean. Grinn's with him now." One fat finger pointed towards the second stairwell, winding down into the darkness of the villa.

Roolán's mind flipped arse-over-tail.

And, quite out of the blue, an arm wrapped itself around his neck and tightened.

"My lord!" a voice shouted. "I've got him!"

All thoughts of Grinn and Stanley Everyone vanished from Roolán's mind. His eyes bulged. Things started to go grey, lights danced madly and his fingers clenched involuntarily. The gun lurched in his hands.

What seemed like a million miles away, but was in fact just on the other side of the room, Stanley Everyone said, "Nuh-", and collapsed, a blaster wound punched neatly between his eyes.

The arm around Roolán's neck abruptly released its pressure. "No!" the voice shouted, hysterical.

Abrocabe Zindatsel sprinted up to the body, ignoring his former strangulation victim and collapsed in a sobbing wreck beside his beloved - and very dead - prophet.

Roolán tried to say "sneck", but all that came out was a whiny "ss".

He thumped Abrocabe Zindatsel around the head with the stock of his rifle, was annoyed to discover this didn't make him feel better, and got on with the difficult business of breathing.

Jagged canines snagged at Johnny's shoulder, lifting him off his feet like the proverbial ragdoll. Even as he tumbled his attacker vanished; dissolving in a flashy lightshow and reappearing an instant later above, muzzle lifting to expose the teeth glittering within. It gnashed, flickered, and burned phosphor-bright.

Shivering like an agoraphobe at an all-comers openvoid concert; as unarmed as a snake; lacking teleporter, time-grenade and run-like-a-bastard-capability, and backed up by a partner whose recent confinement within a degraded data-stream had left him unable to discern the difference between up and down, Johnny found himself, not to put too fine a point on it, snecked.

He landed with a thump and rolled, ignoring the sounds of crashing teeth. The trick, he'd already established, was to keep moving.

The beast vanished again and this time didn't reappear, allowing Johnny the brief respite required to spring to his feet, all too aware of the cuts and scrapes across his body. The fleshwound on his chest continued to trickle blood lazily; the burns that Grinn had inflicted were itching and blistering; the scrapes he'd picked-up at Stix's hands continued to give him grief, and he now sported three ragged wounds where the shark's assaults had come too close for comfort.

Wulf was faring little better. Staggering around with many a curse, his frantic leaps were far too slow: already the creature had ripped a gash in his shoulder, its eye rolling appreciatively as his blood splattered its maw. To his credit, Wulf's way of coping with pain consisted largely of ignoring it. His face, Scandinavianly pale at the best of times, had emptied of all blood, and even the spastic jolts of the electro-helmet elicited only perfunctory yelps. He looked like he might stumble at any moment.

With the monster gone, the pair moved wordlessly into the centre of the room, back to back, vigilant for its return.

"Need to get out of here, big guy," Johnny muttered, eyeing Wulf's injuries. Turning his gaze upon the layers of rock around the door, he could tell there was little hope of dislodging the iron frame, and the opening switch was in the corridor outside.

Wulf, characteristically stalwart, managed to interpret Johnny's comment as a slight upon his courage. "Need to be killing der big brute!" he roared. "Not going to be running from der fish."

"It'll snecking eat you! You can't kill it!"

Johnny remembered a little too late that questioning a Viking's ability to achieve something was just about the only guaranteed way of ensuring he'd attempt it.

"Ha!" Wulf barked, staggering like a drunkard. "You think, eh? Then I give it der indigestion!"

Silence resumed, now tinged with the uncomfortable tension of an accepted challenge. Wulf, if anything, looked as though the prospect of proving Johnny wrong was helping him overcome the data-bends.

Every shadow became a threat.

The shark had pulled this trick twice already; eking out the suspension, leaving the hunters shifty and scared, expecting an attack from any angle. Even Johnny's shimmering eyes - enough to give him the advantage in all but the most lopsided of mismatches - were useless. The creature could bleed in and out of reality like stepping through a door.

"Seriously," he hissed, "Grinn's getting away. This is a waste of ti-"

The shark oozed from the rock below his very feet, semi corporeal skin fizzing where it touched him, beady eyes regarding him hungrily. He dodged, aiming a kick at its nose as he tumbled. His foot passed right through it.

"Sneck!"

It gusted after him at an impossible rate: a maw-tipped comet. Slamming into the wall, driving the air from his lungs, he flipped backwards on impulse, clearing the creature's mouth and catching instead on its rippling dorsal fin, billions of surface tendrils scratching at his skin. The shark didn't even bother to alter its trajectory, bursting through the rock wall like a fog, popping out of existence.

This time its return was rather more immediate.

Apparently deciding that Johnny's acrobatic evasions were too much bother, it turned its attention to his companion. For all his size and stamina, Wulf presented a far easier target. It splintered its way out of the subreal abyss, spiralling down upon the Viking like some obscene hawk, gills burning with blue fire.

"Wulf!" Johnny yelled, thumping his friend in the small of the back, propelling him forwards by all of half-a-foot. It was, as it turned out, half-a-foot of pure deliverance.

Thus denied its prey, the monster twisted like some luminous maggot, broad muzzle flexing around, jaws gulping. As impressive as its gesticulation doubtless was, it brought the creature's torpedo head within range of a pair of weapons more deadly than the sharpest of razor-teeth.

Wulf pushed his thumbs into the monster's eyes and pulled it into a bearhug.

The shark, predictably, went insane.

Perhaps most spectacular of all, as Wulf clung for dear life to the back of the galaxy's strangest bucking bronco, was the way in which he found himself subject to the same dimensional aberrances as his steed: dissolving and crackling, shimmering with weird light, becoming briefly translucent then snapping back into hard focus.

He screamed throughout pretty much all of it.

As Johnny scampered to avoid thrashing fins and flailing boots, something caught his eye. Out in the corridor something was moving: something astonishingly welcome.

"Roolán?" he shouted. The youth, ogling through the bars, sported a massive purple bruise across his neck.

"Open it! Open the door!" Johnny yelled, turning in time to see Wulf finally parting company with the monster in a snap of sticky ichor. He hit the floor with a thump, helmet adding insult to injury by electrocuting him. Out in the corridor, Roolán stabbed at the release control and opened the door.

"Shout!" Johnny ordered, trying to drag Wulf out of the way of the wounded monster, webs of light flickering all around it, "use your voice!"

Roolán pointed to his throat helplessly, gasping with little more than a pathetic squeak.

Johnny swore.

The shark lunged from nowhere, new and undamaged eyes coalescing with a neon burst, teeth mashing down with a bone crunching chomp on Wulf's neck.

Everything went slow.

"No!" Johnny howled, beating his fists uselessly against the monster's skin, even as it slurped away into the ether. Nausea and fury jockeyed for position in his mind, turning his head to see what ruined mess the beast had made of his partner.

"Is... is okay..." Wulf mumbled, looking just as astonished as Johnny felt. There was a notable lack of jugular spray.

The shark had made the same fundamental error that had doomed many of Wulf's various opponents throughout his long brawling career: mistaking the voluminous bulk of his beard for his neck itself. The attack had completely failed to even break his skin, achieving little more than slicing off his facial hair an inch below the base of his chin. To Johnny, this was a revelation of such enormous relief that he cried out, overjoyed.

Wulf, of course, didn't see it like that.

"L-look what it did," he whispered, holding the lacerated remains of his pride and joy in his hands. "Look what it did!"

Johnny had little time for Wulf's damaged pride, pulling him towards the door. It wouldn't be long before the creature returned, fizzling into reality and just as deadly. He didn't intend to be around when it did so.

"Come on!" he shouted.

"Der maggot worm fish! Is been eating my beard! I kill it! I kill it!"

Roolán grabbed Wulf's other arm and tried to help Johnny pull him away. It was like manhandling an iceberg.

"Is no good!" the Viking roared. "Der fish will only be chasing us. Must put der end to it here und now!"

Johnny had other priorities. "But Grinn! He's getting away!"

Wulf turned a bloodshot eye on his partner. He'd gone the colour of a beetroot.

"Y-you be getting to der Grinn," he said, struggling to contain himself. "I be dealing with der fish-worm, cool as der cucumber!"

"But-"

"Not is any buts! You be going!"

The shark hazed back into reality, eyes rolling, mouth gaping, daring his opponents forwards. Wulf bared his teeth.

Johnny could see arguing was useless. Wulf was stubborn when he was enjoying himself. With Roolán tugging at his arm, with the voice shrieking in his head
Make it personal! Make it personal!
and with Wulf's attention not even remotely focused on him, Johnny made a decision.