Toxicity (21 page)

The seven men grinned, and drew
their pistols, long, dark, gleaming weapons; six-shooters, battered and old,
but well maintained. Well-used.

“What’s it mean, General?”

General Bronson chewed his cigar,
and grinned at his men. “It means we have a new Law Maker in town,” he said. “And
new Law Makers are not
wanted
in this town! So we have to gun him down,
boys. Kill him right dead here in the street. No prisoners. No mercy.”

~ * ~

FIVE

THE
FIRE RAGED, an inferno of thundering and screeching and wild detonation. Chaos
lived. It walked the world on jagged legs of razors, breathing fire and gas,
its eyes pits into hell, its soul a tarry mess of compressed evil. Both Jenny
and Sick Note were picked up by the blast, and flung like rag-dolls away from
the Greenstar Reprocessing Plant. They were joined by the other special ops
soldiers, many of them burning. The hovering choppers, their bright piercing
searchlights fixated on the captured ECO terrorists, were slammed skywards out
of control in hissing, fizzing arcs, engines screaming and stalling, until they
plummeted to the earth a kilometre away to explode in roaring balls of flame.
Randy had been facing the factory as the explosion kicked in and the world
erupted. He, too, was picked up and thrown away like a plastic toy, but not
before the detonation blast had ripped most of his face off.

The Reprocessing Plant roared
like a dying monster as the fire tore up and outwards, and inside it a million
pieces of combustible rubbish ignited and detonated, and the whole messy
fireball raged and fought itself, purples and blues scything the heavens and
cutting the sky in half.

Jenny landed hard in a ditch, and
lay for a while, wheezing, all wind, all life kicked from her. She looked to
her left, and saw Randy lying in the mud with most of his face missing, his
blood-red features like melted wax, his nose gone, his face stripped very
nearly to the skull. Jenny coughed, and grinned, and realised she was on fire
herself. “Serves you right, motherfucker,” she managed, as she heard the screams
and the shouts. And then a squaddie cracked her with a rifle butt, put a knee
in her back, and after that, it was all stars and blackness and the eternity
pit.

~ * ~

IT
HAD TAKEN a lot of effort, money and time to infiltrate the Impurity Movement;
and even more effort, money, time and
cunning
to get accepted into the
Impurity5 ECO terrorist cell, as they liked to be known. Randy Zaglax, however,
simply thought of them as cunts. Terrorist cunts, if pushed for more detail;
but cunts all the same.

Randy had started his
infiltration a year previously when a tip-off led his surveillance team to one
of the minor runners working for the Impurity Movement. Technically, this
should have been a police or military job, but Randy, as Governor of Internal
Affairs at Greenstar Company, had been taking the recent bombing and hellfire
destruction of fifteen of the facilities under his direct jurisdiction
personally.
Also, with a background in covert ops himself, Randy felt more than
qualified to take on this little responsibility; after all, you couldn’t trust
nobody in this world, in this life, and he knew if the order had come from
above, from Director Renazzi Lode or Assistant Greenstar Director Sowerby
Trent, then somewhere along the myriad of connecting information streams there
would have been a
leak.
And, no matter how small, it would have
compromised his position; indeed, his very life.

And so Randy had set up his own
intelligence and observation systems and teams, which had been running on and
off for three years now. When the snippet of information about the runner, a
lowlife dregscum SLAP peddler called Caleb, had been confirmed as an Impurity
lead by his own people, Randy had sat down alone one night, naked on his jelly
couch, with a bottle of finest Isle5 HoneyWhiskey, and come up with The Plan.
And it had been a Good Plan. In fact, it had been The Best Plan.

Randy, as Governor of Internal
Affairs, had always kept a very low public profile within the company. After
all, he investigated the investigators, and a certain lack of familiarity with
staff and the public helped him no end in the kidnapping, torture and
interrogation of suspects. As such, he was well-placed to infiltrate the
Impurity ECO terrorist movement
himself.
A high risk, yes, but not as
high-risk as the wound he had taken to his pride, his ego, his self-esteem.
Impurity5, their Cell Commander and the Squad Leader he knew simply as “Jenny”
were fucking him over and pissing on the grave of his career. And Randy would
not stand for it. Randy would not stand for
anything.

With Caleb tagged, they’d watched
him for three months, building up a database of his movements and contacts and
rhythms. He was a SLAP dealer, and a SLAP user, which made him unreliable,
violent, unpredictable; but he did have certain routines which panned out over
a five-week period. Randy admitted he was amazed Caleb could
remember
the
sequence over a five-week period, but it later emerged he was fitted with an
in-brain electro-zap stimulator which would
painfully
guide him in the
right direction if he went off course.

Impurity5 were careful, and used
Caleb to courier messages between other message couriers. It was in this
careful set-up, one evening in November, that Randy had introduced himself.
Caleb was delivering his message to his superior, and they found themselves
surrounded by five PUF - Police Urban Force. Very nasty, very tough, very
aggressive. Screaming. Weapons cocked.
Get down on the ground,
motherfuckers, or we’ll shoot your fucking skulls in.

From a dark side-alley Randy
stepped out, and calmly put five bullets in five skulls. The PUF wore helmets,
but if you shot just below the visor then a round would smash through cheekbone
and into the brain beyond it. Instant kill. Headshot. Just like a game. Bam,
bam, bam, bam, bam, then Randy was helping Caleb and his superior up off the
ground.

“Wow, man,” groaned Caleb, in the
throes of a SLAP high. But the other runner, the superior, was switched on and
panting hard. “Why did you do that, brother?” he asked.

Randy shrugged. “I hate the
fucking system, man. Hate those Greenstar maggots. They killed my father,
right? So now it’s time for me to fuck them over in any way I can.”

“Where do you live?”

Randy told them, giving a shitty
downtown dreg address.

“We’ll be in touch.”

Randy went off the grid, then.
For
five weeks.
Five weeks living in a slum, eating from the gutter,
fucking only the warped and diseased meat that walked the toxic streets of the
downtown shithole. But playing his part well, and looking as good as Randy did,
it would have been foolish and out of character to not play the game. So he
went to bars and picked up hot chicks with tight sweating bodies and an
eagerness to show him how good they were. He fucked them all. He ate in the
shitty slumscale burger joints, forcing down tepid slimy meat which could only
be called meat because it came off some kind of animal; although he suspected
it was rotten, raw fish. And the beer! Don’t get him started on the beer, from
shit-filled kegs and tox-filled pipes, each glass afloat with scum like open
sewage, each mouthful a burning of his pride and body temple and purity. Yeah,
purity. Oh, the irony.

They were watching him,
obviously. So he threw in the odd hint. Beat up a PUF policeman outside a bar
one night; gave him a kicking so severe he’d be paralysed and pensioned off
from work; no doubt his family would descend into the slime like all the other
scumdreg who worked Toxside. But hey, you makes your choices, right? And Randy
was after bigger fish.

After five weeks of slumming it,
of casting aside his favourite lacquers and unguents, creams and potions, oils
and shampoos, waxes and aromas, of getting his long dark curls full of toxic
shite,
dirt under his nails, shit in his pores, effluvia in his bed; well.

She came to him.

Jenny. Jenny Xi.

Thus started the recruitment
process, and at least then Randy could drop some of the forced bad habits,
because he was now being “professional” for the sake of the unit, for the sake
of impressing his new employers. And they watched him, always watched him. At
this point, he reported back to Renazzi Lode, for the Director of Greenstar
Company, he knew, was the one person he could trust. She allowed him maximum
freedom and it had come as no shock to the petite, meticulous brunette when
Randy had disappeared. After all, he was either dead, or on a special mission.
He had a reputation for
doing
this kind of thing. Always for the benefit
of Greenstar. Always for the benefit of The Company.

The Impurity Movement gave him
tests, sucked him slowly deeper and deeper into their organisation. They were
in no rush, and despite anger and loathing burning Randy like a red-hot brand
to his scrotum, he paced himself, and played the game, and infiltrated the ECO
terrorists... all culminating in the attack on the factory, and the detonation
which had gone so very, very wrong.

Jenny Xi had clocked him, at the
last picosecond.

How had she done that?

How had she
realised
at
the last moment that he didn’t have the interests of the ECO terrorists at
heart?

Maybe it had just been a hunch.
Listening to her weird, twisted sixth sense. Maybe she was just being
extra-super-cautious; after all, Jenny had a reputation for being a bitch’s
bitch. Harder than hard. A radio-controlled psychopath.

And then... the bomb.

The blast. Destruction.
Another
factory destroyed...

Along with his face.

~ * ~

RANDY
ZAGLAX WAS a vain man. He was a
beautiful
man, for sure, but he
accentuated God’s fabulous gifts with an excess of effort. Every morning, he
would step from the soft cotton/silk sheets of his vast bed into a specially
directed stream of cool air, where he would languish for three or four minutes,
cooling off his night-sweat. Then he would walk, naked of course, for one as
fine as he should be
proud
of his body, to his gym, where he would spend
precisely thirty minutes in a hard workout, usually press-ups and sit-ups, or
bag work, or a thirty-minute sprint. Something to get the old cardio-vascular
system pumping, something to bring a red blush to his dashingly handsome
cheeks. Then it was to his vast porcelain bathroom, white and pure, so pure,
where he would begin with clipping his toenails, gently scouring the dead flesh
from his feet, then rubbing a thick lavender unguent between his toes and
around his heels, followed by electro-shocksocks which gave an electric-shock
foot massage for the duration of his pampering. Then into the shower with
tweezers, and as the hot water soothed his shoulders and spine, he’d generally
tidy up his leg hair, moving gradually up to the pubic mound.

Oh, how Randy loved his pubic
mound, the carefully cultivated bush of which he was so proud. He acknowledged
that
usually
it was the female of the species who took excessive pride
in her pubic smash of straggling garnish, because - let us be frank - a man
gives pride of place to his cock, and what a superb and magnificent cock Randy
did have stashed in his pants. Not thinking of the mass of scar-tissue beneath
it, no; but his cock, that was a thing of beauty. But, not to be outdone by so
many bush bashers he’d met in his career as Gigolo - after all, it would not be
done to drop one’s pants in the company of six or seven voluptuous Valkyries
just to have them mock and chortle at your barbed-wire tangle - Randy went to
great pains to trim and pluck and groom and condition and
pamper
his
poodle. Yes, it came secondary to his throbbing penis, but only an uncouth
barbarian would so overlook the quality of the silk matting behind such a
prominent rod. It was at this point that he obviously became hard, rock hard,
so hard it was harder than hard. Viagra? Fuck that. Viagra was for
other
men.
Men who weren’t hard. Or at least, not as hard as Randy.

So Randy would have his morning
masturbation, sometimes a slow sensual thing, his head buzzing with images of
all the fine ladies he’d known, for although at times Randy could be effeminate
and wear perfume and silks and lace and ruffs, thus confusing the odd homosexual
into thinking
he
was similarly inclined, in all reality Randy was hot
damn bona fide straight.
Straighter
than straight. Occasionally, his
wank would be a hard fast one, almost as if to get it over and done with; a
necessity of habit, rather than something sensual and romantic. Either way, job
complete and necessary satisfaction taken care of, Randy would continue his
grooming. Shampooing and conditioning first his pubic hair, then his brown
curls, washing behind the ears, and then stepping down to dry off with fluffy
towels... then the
real
cream and potion pampering began...