Toxicity (36 page)

Horace sprinted up the slightly
skewed steps, noting cracks in the alloy and concrete.

A man appeared ahead of him, and
Horace shot him in the face. He knew not whether he was an enemy or simply a
member of the public. The gloves were off. All would die.

Fuck them, thought Horace.

Fuck the world.

He burst out onto the roof. A
wind ripe with toxic stench slammed him, stealing his breath. Towering
stormclouds rose overhead in great billows of iron-coloured bruises, offering
naught but threat. Sunlight burst between the columns, radiating beams of
freedom.

Horace stared around. The roof
was large and flat, punctuated by thick pipes and blocks of fans.

Machine-gun fire rattled behind
him. He squeezed off five shots down the stairwell and ejected the mag,
replacing it with a
clack.
He limped across the roof and leant against
the low wall. Below him, streets spread away, filled with queuing groundcars
and ribbons of tourists buying tat and crap from tat and crap shops. There was
no obvious place to jump; Horace was going to have to climb.

From over the Biohazard Ocean
came the clatter of rotors. Horace’s head snapped up. A chopper. Shit.
Coincidence? He doubted it.

A hotel receptionist appeared at
the stairway, carrying an SMKK. Horace shot him through the eye. He’d always
wanted to do that. Fucking snooty hotel receptionists.

The chopper came close, making a
bee-line for the hotel. Horace heard the spin and whine of charging miniguns
and cowered behind the low parapet as bullets howled around him, chewing
brickwork and rendering, sending huge chunks spinning off into the toxic
tourist haven below. People started to scream and run, scattering for cover.
Groundcar horns screeched. The thump of the chopper’s rotors grew louder.

More people appeared at the
stairwell and started to fire, SMKKs bucking in hands like live wild creatures.
Horace returned fire, T5 slamming his hand, his mind bleak, memories a
wasteland. One, two, three heads exploded, and Horace turned his attention to
the chopper sweeping overhead, a line of bullets chewing the concrete by Horace’s
boots and skidding off across the hotel roof. Horace sprinted for a huge
section of pipes, but had to dive low and long as more hotel staff appeared,
all shooting at him. His mouth was a grim line.

I’m going to execute every last
motherfucking one of you.

He smiled at that, tasting dust
from the roof, and rolled onto his back. The chopper swept overhead once more,
and Horace began to fire the T5. Bullets glanced from the flanks and whizzed
and pinged through the rotors. Horace had been hunted by choppers before. And
he knew he could bring one down with a T5 with just the
right
shot...

There came a strange whining
sound, and Horace frowned. It was out of context; unusual. He’d never heard
that sound before. What was it? He spun onto his knees, shot more hotel staff,
who seemed to be pouring like an unending stream from the building beneath his
feet. Bullets whizzed and flickered past him, but he seemed suddenly immortal,
untouchable, as if God had blessed The Dentist and sent him forth onto Amaranth
to do His Bidding-Horace laughed out loud.

Shit. This was living! This was
joy!

There came a hiss and
thump,
and
Horace coughed. He coughed blood. A bright red splatter hit the concrete.

Horace looked down at the barbed
hook protruding from his chest, then turned, slowly, following the swaying
cable back up to the chopper. The whining sound. Now he understood. A tensioned
harpoon gun.
The fuckers.

He looked over to the hotel
staff. There must have been twenty of them now, all heavily armed. Horace
counted their dead. Thirteen. Nearly every single one had been taken out by a
head shot. Damn, he was good. The rest of the staff had lowered their weapons
and were staring at him. Their faces were grim.

The cable gave a small tug, and
the barbed hook before him settled into his flesh. He heard steel cable grate
against his breast bone as the barbs dug in tight and he gasped, coughing up
more blood. The chopper engines increased in pitch, the rotors whining fast,
and then suddenly he was yanked off his feet and up into the sky like a fish on
a hook.

The pain was incredible, tearing
through him like fire.

But worse was the total
helplessness...

The hotel dropped and Meltflesh
City spun away like a toy, the streets, the groundcars, the cowering tourists,
the bright Hawaiian shirts, the candy floss, the anti-tox chewy bars, the beach
loungers and umbrellas to protect against the sun, the little coloured
windmills for children, the foam surfboards with an anti-melt guarantee and a
thousand other bits of trinket and tat endemic to any seaside resort... It all
fell away, and Horace dropped his T5 weapon, his hands coming up to grasp the
barbed steel fixed in his flesh, in his breastbone, barbs biting like steel
teeth. His fingers prised at the barbs with inhuman strength, with android strength.
But they were fixed tight, pinned in place by his own body weight. To get it
free he’d have to carve himself a new chest cavity.

Horace spun like a child’s action
figure on a string. The chopper headed up, high, and then turned and powered
across the Biohazard Ocean. Within moments, Meltflesh City was gone; within
moments, all that surrounded Horace was the ocean, yellow and purple and red,
sloshing and churning, an unhappy toxic mix of God-only-knew-what deadly
chemicals and savage pollution.

Horace started to laugh.

He roared with laughter, as pain
rioted through his punctured frame.

He was fucked. He knew that.

He was dead meat on a hook.

Greenstar had
won.

Eventually, the chopper stopped
and hovered in the sky against clouds of iron and lead. Horace hung, suspended,
swaying in a sea breeze that cooled the dome of his skull and ruffled his
disintegrated, bloodstained suit. That hurt him more than the pain. He was
going to die looking scruffy. Damn.

Horace grinned, and his teeth
were stained with blood.

“Hey!” came a voice. “Hey,
Horace!”

Slowly, Horace looked up. There
was a woman there, but he could not make out any features; everything was going
blurred. Weakness crept through his limbs like a slow poison. Suddenly, his
feet felt cold. That was bad, he knew. It meant he was dying.

“Who are you?” he slurred, voice
barely audible over the sounds of the chopper.

The thump of the chopper’s blades
was giving him a headache. It reminded him of a bad hangover. A
real
bad
hangover.

“I’m Vasta, Head of Security for
The Company,” she shouted. She seemed to be smiling. It was hard for Horace to
tell.

“I... was coming for you,” he
said, and his head hung low. He could feel strength and life ebbing from him.

This was it, he knew.

This was it.

“I know,” she shouted, and the
chopper swayed. The storm was coming; Horace could see it sweeping across the
ocean, a great wall of violent rain. He swung on his steel cable. His arms fell
to his sides, limp and useless. He felt his eyes closing.

“We couldn’t let you live,”
shouted Vasta.

“I know,” whispered Horace.

“I’m sorry it has to be this way,”
yelled Vasta. There was true regret in her voice. After all, Horace had been a
valuable asset. A perfect tool in the extermination of - well, whatever
Greenstar needed exterminating.

Another face appeared beside
Vasta. It was the Fat Man.

“Drop him,” he said.

“No last words?” said Vasta,
looking into the Fat Man’s dark eyes.

“No. Fuck him,” he said. “He’s
just a tool. An organic machine.” He smiled. “He’s just an android.”

Vasta’s muscles clenched along
her jaw, but she said nothing. She signalled to the pilot, and the man hit a
button. There came a click beside them in the winch gear, then a sudden violent
whizzing sound.

Beneath, Horace plunged to the
Biohazard Ocean, the cable flapping and plummeting with him. He hit the water
with a great splash, and sank beneath the waves, turning slowly, unconsciously
winding himself up in the steel cable and further sealing his fate.

The Fat Man spat after Horace.
His face was a snarl. “Good fucking riddance to a bad android.”

Vasta said nothing. She signalled
for the pilot to take them back to the Greenstar Factory Hub.

The Biohazard Ocean surged, and
boomed, and rolled. And if Vasta hadn’t known better, she would have sworn it
was sighing.

~ * ~

TEN

“YEAH,
SON. WHEN the music stops, then draw and fire. I’ll do the same. Whoever’s left
standing gets the little lady.” General Bronson said the words in a deadpan
voice. A voice that had spoken the same words to a hundred condemned idiots
down through the years. General Bronson never lost. He was the fastest gun in
the West. Well, the South. You know what he meant.

“Er, Mr Bronson?”

“Yes, son?”

The watch tinkled away, the tune
getting slower, and slower, and slower...

“I have a question?”

“Yes, son?”

“About this music, about when it
stops...”

But it was too late.

The music stopped.

For Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV,
Third Earl of Apobos, that splinter of time lasted an eternity. He remembered
his childhood, sat under huge palm trees, writing poetry with his crayon. All
the other toddlers toddled over to him and drew scrawls on his poetry, but for
Svool, the poem was perfection, and he batted away their crayons, then batted
away their heads. They tended to hit the ground hard, being only toddlers, and
sometimes Svool kicked them in the face for spoiling his poems. Times were
hard, and toddlers were rough, and Svool knew how to deal with them.

Then he was in school and he
remembered meeting his two first playmates, Darren and Kevin. Darren and Kevin
were nice, and they also liked poetry, and so began years and years of “poetry
raps” and “fuck yo bitch poetry comps,” where they’d have stand-up rows about
poetry, and compete with alliteration, personification, and battles of
enjamment. It was truly exhilarating! And in the under-11s, Svool ruled the
poetry in the playground. Nobody fucked with his poems. Because Svool was Poet
King.

The transition to high school -
Raptor, as it was known to the high fee payers and snub-nosed posh parents -
was difficult. Svool came, despite his grand title of Third Earl of Apobos,
from a relatively poor family that struggled to feed its thirteen children. The
Estates of Apobos took every single dollarpound for upkeep, and Svool’s parents
had such massive financial headaches that even the basics of Svool’s upbringing
were sporadic at best. Still, he had his poetry to care for him, and spent
hours and days - and weeks and months - doodling away in his ever-fattening
notebook, convinced that one day his poetry would become the saviour of the
family. He would write his poems, and become a zillionaire, and save the family
fortune! In the end, though, his mother ran off with what few dollarpounds
remained, and thus precipitated the crash and sale of the Apobos Estates and
Svool’s ignoble ejection from Raptor School. He remembered the day with shame
burning his cheeks red. The booing and hissing as he dragged his huge trunk
down the massive gravelled drive, without help, its little wheels sticking in every
rut, its rectangular bulk bouncing and wobbling like a drunk fat lady on a hen
night. All along the avenue, the other students booed and hissed at Svool,
pelting him with wholemeal bread rolls and bananas (Raptor liked its students
to be regular), and tears streamed down his reddened embarrassed face at the
shame and the horror. Reaching the end of the drive, he turned back to face his
thousand or so tormentors, and he screamed, screamed until he was blue, and
spat as he screamed, “I’ll show you! I will immortalise you all in my poetry!”
And he did. He penned
The Horrors of Raptor,
which sold three billion
copies before he was twenty years old.