Toxicity (24 page)

A bullet whizzed along Horace’s
cheek, a hair’s breadth from opening his face like a zip. Horace moved his head
accordingly, and even as the PUF officer was screaming in anger - hatred -
disbelief - a sound of violence and rage - so the shotgun came up and blasted
him backwards against the squad car, where his blood left a long smear down the
glass and panels. Horace hopped down from his perch and put two shotgun shells
in the officer’s face, effectively destroying most of the man’s head. The body
flipped and twitched and Horace knelt by the corpse, hand reaching out to rest
on the deceased man’s belly. “Shh,” he told the corpse. “Shh. It will be all
right now.”

He scanned the area as the
policeman loosened his dead bowels and a stench rose around Horace. Horace did
not mind. It masked his own aroma of sweat and metal - whether real or imagined.
Although an android was totally organic, Horace almost fancied that he was a
robot, a created thing of gears and cogs and pistons. He did not mind that he
was not human. He revelled in the fact, for humans were weak and shallow and
petty and pointless. Androids were strong and merciless. It was always the
strong and merciless that survived the horrors of Fate.

There.

Horace moved fast, leaping,
connecting with the final PUF officer as the man tried to make a swift covert
exit. The man hit the ground on his face, shotgun flying from slick slippery
fingers. He sprawled in the mud, whimpering, and very slowly rolled over onto
his back and stared up at Horace.

“D-d-don’t kill me. Please!” He
held up both hands, pleading, tears running down his face. “I have a young
wife, we’ve only been married a year, and a baby girl. She’s a beautiful
creature, something we’ve always dreamed about... she’s just started to walk,
and talk, and it’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever been part of - don’t
take me away from her, please, please, sir, don’t take away her daddy.”

Horace shot the officer through
the shoulder with his T5, and the man screamed, flailing back in the mud.
Horace looked left and right, bald head gleaming under the rainfall, and strode
forward to kneel beside the stricken PUF officer. Shards of bone poked from the
shell’s exit wound, and the officer was whimpering, crying, tears mixed with
rain. His hands clawed at Horace’s arm.

“Don’t do it. Don’t kill me, man.
Please. My baby girl...”

“I’m not going to kill you,” said
Horace, and gave a little smile.

“Thank God!”

“I’m going to torture you.”
Horace’s finger extended, and pushed into the officer’s eye. The man screamed,
grabbing Horace’s arm, legs kicking as he fought with what seemed an impossible
strength. Horace pushed, and felt the eyeball squish and squirm, then pop. Then
he was through, and into the mucous jelly. “I want to know,” said Horace
calmly, removing the eyeball with a little
pop,
“who set me up.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know!” screamed
the officer, thrashing, fighting, striking out.

“You really need to think harder,”
said Horace smoothly, “if you want the pain to go away.”

There came a flash and a
crack
from the darkness. A bullet slashed the arm of Horace’s suit, cut through the
flesh beneath to open it like a knife. Ignoring the sudden stab of bright pain,
Horace put a T5 bullet in the tortured officer’s eyesocket and leapt, clearing
the road, to plummet into the toxic underbrush...

Branches and grass whipped at
him, and he powered down a slope and skidded to a halt. The woodland was very
tightly knitted together, with hardly space between trunks and thorny bushes.
Horace knelt for a moment, observing the ridgeline of land above him. He waited
patiently, watching. Who had come? Backup? Support? Or had they dropped snipers
down the road a little earlier on to cover them? If that was the case, they’d
done a fucking poor job. Horace had killed ten cops. He spat on the ground. Ten
was not enough.

Shadows shifted, highlighted by
the flashing police lights. Horace had picked his spot well, as he knew. There
were three men. Special ops. Snipers. Whatever. They were being careful. Very
careful. Horace observed their movements, watched them split, saw the flicker
of their hand signals. They were spreading out, moving down the gradient,
through thick woodland. They were going to hunt him like an animal - or so they
thought.

Horace got down on his belly and
moved through the dense vegetation, slowly, a snake on its belly, picking each
inch with the utmost care. And then he waited. Waited, in the cold and the
dark, rain pattering on the treetop roof canopy, irregular thick drops dripping
all around. It was cold. Very cold. Only now did Horace realise just how cold
it was, and he realised his breath was smoking. He stopped breathing.

Without breath, Horace’s heart
beat sounded louder in his ears. Bu-bum, bu-bum,
bu-bum.
He eased
himself to his knees as the first armoured police sniper came past, drifting
like a ghost; professional, yes, but unaware of
what
he hunted. Well,
that answered
that
question. So. A simple response unit, then? Yes. But
they knew he was fucking dangerous, or why send so many men?

The man was shifting softly, each
footfall a gentle rolled depression. Horace eased himself up as the man glided
past, and his hands snapped out, taking the weapon. The man made a startled “Ah!”
taken completely by surprise, and drew a knife, but the machine gun cracked
against his jaw, breaking it with a brittle
SNAP,
and he hit the ground
squirming. Horace worked swiftly, stripping off the man’s clothing, taking his
own dagger, then cutting long grooves down both his arms, around his chest and
waist. He dropped the gun and with bloody dagger between teeth, Horace grabbed
the flapping sections of skin and - skinned the man. First he tore off the
arms, then the chest and back. The sniper screamed then, writhing in the mud.
He screamed and screamed and screamed, and his comrades came crashing through
the trees, voices bellowing, guns weaving frantically. They let off random
shots, but Horace was on his belly, waiting. As they arrived, and mouths
dropped open in horror and surprise, so the dagger went through the first man’s
boot, pinning him to the ground. He fell back, machine gun rattling, bullets
cutting up his comrade who dropped, spewing blood, to the woodland floor.
Horace stood amidst the three, covered in blood, eyes gleaming.

“Now, boys, it’s time to talk,”
he said.

And with that, Horace went to
work.

~ * ~

HORACE
WALKED DOWN the road and found the aircar “Chris” had told him about. It had a
SlickCloak covering it; a electronic light diffraction fabric. They weren’t
perfect, but unless you were actively looking for the hidden, or “cloaked,”
object, especially at night, they could be hard to spot. Horace pulled the
SlickCloak from the aircar, noting the BMW badges, the gleaming panels, the
stowed miniguns. Powerful.
Expensive.
Not normal PUF funded kit, of that
Horace was certain. This whole thing stunk like a dead donkey of Greenstar involvement.
Their own private fucking urban police force. Their own
army.

It had taken every inch of Horace’s
skill as an Anarchy Android torture model to extract the information he’d
wanted. He had tied all three PUF snipers together by their ankles, stripped
their skin, put out their eyes, castrated them, played Russian Roulette. The
officer accidentally shot by his friend had - unfortunately for him - not died
under the stray discharge of bullets. And so had begun his ordeal. It had only
taken ten minutes. But Horace was sure it was the worst ten minutes of their
lives... leading right up to their swift, brutal deaths.

Now, he sat in comfort in the BMW
aircar. It bobbed as he got in, and plush hydraulics closed the wide arched
door. His suit was completely drenched in blood - sodden, in fact - and the car
registered he was wet. Small hot-air fans hummed into existence and began to
dry him, wrongly assuming he was simply wet from the downpour. Horace pulled
out the control deck and fitted the headset. A HUD flickered onto the
windscreen internals and with several key presses, Horace ignited the
near-silent engines and lifted vertically from the covert parking spot, up fast
with streamers of rainwater cascading from the BMW’s gleaming hull.

Horace hit MANUAL OVERRIDE and
killed the lights.

“Warning,” came a gentle, female
voice. “You now have no lights and may present a hazard to other aircar users.”

Horace gazed down, at the large
white house with its sweeping gravel drive and three dead androids, at the skewed
Police Urban Force cars with their still-flickering stroboscopic lights, and at
the scatter of corpses. Nothing passed through his mind, other than perhaps the
concept that it was a job well done. The Dentist had carried out his work with
skill and precision, and, yes, maybe he had indulged himself a little bit in
the pastime of

(torture)

but, hell, an android was still
skin and flesh and bone, still had thoughts and feelings and emotions. Or so it
was claimed. Horace smiled at that.
So it was claimed. But maybe I’m
different? Maybe they made me different? Maybe I was intended for a different
market, a military market, or the assassination market?
Horace frowned, and
stared down at the distant corpses of the police officers. And that’s all they
were. Old meat. Dead meat. They meant nothing. Were as nothing. Yes, they had
wives and children and mothers that loved them. But so what? So. Fucking. What?
So did every other species on this planet and a million others. And when a
rabbit ran out into the road, was squashed by a groundcar into a bloody pulp of
split skin and bulging bowels, its squashed skull and brain painting a portrait
of fresh meat on the concrete roadway, didn’t that creature have parents, and
children, and another rabbit it had mated with? Did the human stop and get out
and weep and wail for the loss of a rabbit? When a wasp crawled on a human’s
arm, and was squashed by a heavy hard blow - guilty and murdered before
committing the crime - didn’t that wasp have the good of the hive, the good of
the fucking
Queen
at heart? What made humans so much better? So much
more important? Life was life was life. And if you live by the sword, then you
should fucking well die by the sword. Horace lived by the sword, and when he
eventually got a machete through the neck, sending his head rolling down the
road - then so be it. That was the way it went. But if you left the house with
a fucking gun or a knife, for whatever reason, or even if it was just your
fists and an intention to do harm - then you were guilty. And so many were
guilty.

Horace noticed he’d clenched his
fists. Anger was raging through his mind.

He calmed himself. Forced himself
to be calm.

He looked at himself in the
smoked-glass rear-view mirror.
Really
looked at himself.
Why so
angry, Horace? What’s the matter now?

But he could not place his finger
on it. Could not identify the deviant feeling inside.

Never lose your temper.

“The fuckers.”

He slammed the aircar into gear
and powered off, away from the murder scene. He swept away, through chundering
rain, away from the lights and the city, away from the people and toxic
pollution. Over slag-piles of abandoned crap the aircar hummed, until he was
gone from Bacillus Port and was out in the wastes, out in the rocky wasteland
where few wandered and few dared to explore.

After all, who knew what presents
Greenstar had left for the unwary traveller?

~ * ~

NOW,
HE HAD a name. A focus. A
target.
Juliette JohNagle. Horace confessed to
being surprised when he found out his new target was actually a man-i-woman.
Not that it mattered. Man, woman or child, he truly did not care who he
annihilated. Men-i-women were neither and both; not just a “chick with a dick,”
as some politically incorrectibles would deem them (usually in a pub after nine
pints of Japachinese lager), a man-i-woman was actually a full
merging,
a
full
blend
of two separate individuals. Sometimes a married couple would
do it - become one. Sometimes, it was strangers who had met through the small
ads of the ggg or cube, become bored with life, or felt that something
important was missing, something deep down at root level; a sliver of necessity
missing from their very existence. Whatever the reason, men-i-women tended to
be a strange breed of creature - mainly because there were two minds
intertwined, a schizophrenic made real, made flesh. And as the process was a
one-way process, there was a possibility of the two minds becoming sick of one
another. On many occasions, a man-i-woman had gone quite literally insane and
hacked itself (herself/ himself/themselves) apart with a cleaver or other sharp
implement in a mad, brutal attempt to get away from each other. Juliette
JohNagle, on the other hand, was a successful director of Greenstar - and a
successful politician peddling the success of Greenstar Company across the
Manna and the other galaxies.