Toxicity (37 page)

Fitting into a normal state high
school, Bolltton School for Dweebs, came with great hardship. He knew nobody,
and found it hard to fit into any kind of established friendship group.
Instead, he ended up siding with the idiots, the geeks, the muppets, the
greebos and the... poets. Poetry became the outlet for his angst, for all his
teenage fears, for the way he’d been treated by his old school chums after the
complete reversal of their friendship. The back-stabbing bastards.

Poetry, and more importantly,
quickfire poetry competitions where speed of mind and tongue were the Masters
of the Competition, had helped sculpt and build Svool’s life; but more, helped
sculpt and build his
control.

Now, as he faced General Bronson
and his gunfighter brethren - dirty, stinking, kidnapping horrors to a man - as
the tinkling of the music haunted him down through a billion years of primeval
horror, he saw his terrible plight simply as a quickfire poetry contest. He
deconstructed it back, stripped it way down from life and death to an exchange
of words. And one thing Svool was superb at was exchanging words...

The music stopped.

“And although I walk in the
valley of the shadow of death, I will not fear evil...”

“What?” snapped General Bronson,
gun in hand and rising fast.

“‘Cause you are a weevil,” rhymed
Svool, as he drew and fired.

A single bullet slammed across
the space and took General Bronson between the eyes.

There was a hushed, shocked
silence as Bronson stood, swaying, staring with disbelief at Svool and his
smoking pistol.

“You goddamn killed me there,
son,” he said, sitting back down on his rump with a thump. Dust rose around
him. Svool stared at the end of his pistol as if he was holding a tarantula.

With the other gunslingers
distracted by the sight of their illustrious leader being gunned down by the
Sheriff - not something they had expected in a million years and, truth be
told, not the outcome
Lumar
had expected in her wildest dreams - Lumar
knelt up and carefully slid a long knife from the boot of the gunslinger
charged with keeping her down on the boards. By the time General Bronson hit
the dust, Lumar had a knife in her hands and had cut the bonds which held her.
By the time the gunslinger realised she had a knife in her hands, he had a
knife through his heart and was coughing up blood as he collapsed to the
boards.

What followed was a cinematic
chaos.

Herbert reared up, neighing
wildly, and charged at the other gunslingers, who leapt to their feet, drawing
pistols, and Svool fired with maniac abandon, his arms like wild pistons, his
mouth opening in a silent scream of prayer and insanity. Unfortunately, his
one-in-a-million headshot on Bronson was not replicated, Svool’s usual
uselessness kicking in with a savage ferocity.

It took a few moments for Bronson’s
men to realise that Svool was charging towards them, firing his gun but without
the actual ability to
aim.
They snarled and growled, showing yellow
teeth and ugly faces, but by then Lumar had found her feet, and was in the
middle of the group, with a knife and a serious axe to grind.

Lumar stabbed left, then right,
ducked a pistol shot which filled the porch with gunsmoke, drove the knife
through one throat and then back-handed it across another. Men screamed around
her, suddenly scrambling to get away, their pistols firing wildly. Two
gunslingers shot two of their friends. And in the middle was a cool, calm,
collected Lumar, her tongue flickering, her knife cutting and gouging. There
was no compassion there, no kindness, no empathy. Just hate and vengeance. They
had abused her and promised further violence to come. Well, she’d show them.
And she did.

Within a minute it was all over,
and bodies lay strewn about the wooden boards, either dead or wishing they
were. Herbert galloped to a halt, legs flying in all sorts of directions, and
there was a
click
as the steel brackets released Svool. He leapt from
the metal horse, scowling and rubbing at his cramping legs. His pistol was
empty; he threw it on the ground in disgust.

Lumar strode from the wreckage of
corpses and stopped, hands on hips.

“Well,” she said.

“I came back for you!” beamed
Svool.

Lumar stared at him, then at the
horse, then off down the street. “So you did,” she said. “Eventually.” She
considered her words, then sighed, and recognised that without Svool’s help she
would, in fact, be having a worse time that she currently was. “Okay, I
concede, you did indeed come back for me. It was... a brave thing to do.”

“I had some help,” said Svool,
sheepishly.

“Neigh!” said Herbert, Svool’s
Special Friend. “But you’ve got to admit, old Svool boy, that was one
incredible piece of shooting! Never have I seen somebody so brazenly take down
an evil gunslinger like General Bronson before. You know, I myself saw him
stand in over two hundred gunfights and walk away without a scratch. It’s
almost like it was destiny!”

“Destiny,” said Lumar, looking sideways
at Svool. “You hear that?”

Svool was staring at Bronson’s
body. He sighed, and held out both hands, palms outwards. “I confess, it was an
absolute fluke. If you notice I fired off all the other shots and hit
nothing.
It was a one-in-a-million lucky shot.”

“Yes,” said Lumar, “but it was
the one that counted.” She coughed, forced the words through tight, compressed
lips. “Well done, Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV, Third Earl of Apobos.”

Svool went bright red, which was
ironic, for only a few short days before he would have accepted oral sex from
five strangers without breaking stride. He was used to praise and adoration in
his position as poet, musician, sexual athlete and academic. Not so much in the
world of rugged adventuring gunslinger hero.

“We better get moving,” said
Herbert.

“Oh, yeah?” swaggered Svool,
putting on his best tough-guy voice. “Well, we did indeed kill them all dead,
we did indeed.”

Herbert flapped his metal lips.
“Yee-es,
but Bronson’s brother might be here real soon. They probably heard all the
gunshots. And he won’t be happy.”

Svool paled. “Bronson’s brother?”

“Yeah. Black Jake, they calls
him. He’s even
meaner
than General Bronson. Known to stake out men,
women and children and let rattlesnakes eat their eyes.”

“I’m sure we can handle one more
unwashed cowboy,” smiled Lumar, twirling the bloodstained knife.

“It’s more his forty or fifty
desperate wanted men I was worried about,” said Herbert, grinning with his
curiously intelligent metal horse lips. He flapped them theatrically, showering
Svool with a shower of oily spittle.

“How do we get into this shit?”
frowned Svool, staring at Lumar and opening his hands in confusion. “How did
our lives go from a comfortable wealthy ease of constant drugs and sex to one
of such incredible madness and pain in such a short time frame?”

“Speak for yourself,” muttered
Lumar, and rubbed her eyes. “Okay, let’s round up some weapons and ammunition,
find another metal horse and get the hell away from here. Herbert, we really
need to make contact with the rulers of this planet - this is a disastrous
diplomatic incident just
waiting
to happen. Svoolzard here, well” - she
coughed, and clenched her teeth as she said it, eyes narrowing, tongue
flickering -”he’s a very important poet and film star. Very famous. We need to
get to the capital city. Dare I say it? Take us to your leaders.”

“You need Bacillus Port. No. No,
wait! Even better, we could head for the Greenstar Factory Hub. That’s where
all the top dogs and nobby nobs and politicians and lawyers and bureaucrats
hang out. All the important folk on Amaranth. You know. The buggers who poison
it.”

“What’s the quickest route?”

“From here, buster, I’d say
north, then northeast. But there are a thousand obstacles to overcome, from
packs of radioactive hunting dogs to strange diseased creatures that have
evolved from the mud. You think Bronson and his boys were bad? There’s much
more bad than that out in the Wild Wastes! Oh, yes!”

Lumar sighed. “What about the
nearest city? Maybe renting some kind of high speed air vehicle?”

“All banned,” said Herbert
smugly. “At least within a thousand miles of where you’re standing. Would
you
want someone like Bronson getting his hands on a military chopper?”

“So we’re out in the shit, and we’ll
have to walk to safety?” snapped Svool.

“Yes. No. Well, there
are
the
Mines of Mercury...” He allowed the words to hang in the air like an
embarrassing metal horse fart.

“That doesn’t sound safe,” said
Lumar, narrowing her eyes.

“Well, they’re a
massive
old
network of tunnels that run under the Mercury Peaks. That’s a big wide mountain
range that cuts this half of the land in two. If we go through the Mines of
Mercury, we’ll miss the Lungpuke Forest, the Faeces Teeth, the Strychnine
Plains, the Anthrax Forest... oooh, it’d be my top vote for crossing this mad,
bad country without getting a spear through the ear.” His horse tongue lolled
out and touched the ground, and with a mechanical clicking sound, he wound it
back in again.

“You’re sure these mines are
safe?” said Lumar, eyes narrowing again.

“Oh, yes!” brayed Herbert. “They
were cleared out by Greenstar
years ago.
There’s nothing more dangerous
than a luminescent mushroom. Trust me, I know whereof I speak.”

“What do you think?” said Lumar.

Svool nodded. “Sounds like a plan.
I seriously need to get off this shithole. It’s ruining my karma, my clothing,
my ego, my vanity, and my street cred. Let’s get going!” He gestured to one of
the hitched metal horses that stood, with heads lowered, looking forlornly at
the ground now that their masters were all dead.

Lumar strode towards the metal
beasts, and Svool rubbed his hands together, cackling inwardly.
Aha! Now
you, too, can get your own Special DumbMutt Special Friend with a
nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-year lease and the ability to lock your ankles to
its body whenever it sees fit! Try it on for size! See! I’m not the only dumb
smack idiot around here, y’know?

Lumar leapt nimbly into the
saddle. The metal horse lifted its head and seemed to perk up considerably. Its
head turned around. “Hello,” said the metal horse. “My name is Angelina.
Welcome aboard.”

Svool capered forward. “Go on! Go
on! Say it!” He flapped his hands frantically. “The special friend dumb mutt
stuff! Say it!”

“Oh, no, no, no,” said Herbert,
coming up behind Svool and nuzzling him. “Angelina is a freehold model. Anybody
can ride her without ownership protection clauses and deed of ownership. It’s
only
you,
buddy, that has that special relationship with your special
friend round here! It’s only
you
with that special honour and special
friend trust.”

“Hmm,” said Svool, scowling. “I
can’t say that I asked for it.”

Herbert’s head rotated and fixed
him with a beady stare. “A Special Horse Friend is for life, not just for
[Insert Applicable Religious Festival Here], buster.”

Svool frowned even deeper.

At that moment, Zoot the PopBot
came zipping down the street and stopped, hovering equidistant between Svool
and Lumar. He spun, slowly, lights flickering on his matt-black shell.

“Hi guys! Is everything okay?”

“No thanks to you, fuckwit!”

“Hey, I was zapped! A PopBot can’t
help it when he’s zapped!”

“I thought you were supposed to
be my bodyguard?” snapped Svool. “What use is a bodyguard that’s taken down in
the first three seconds of a fight, leaving me -
me!
- to fight my own
battle and face certain death? Eh?”