Toxicity (40 page)

A chainsaw’s roar broke the
squelching and cracking in the chamber, and the men with baseball bats backed
away. Sick Note sagged against his chains, weak, battered, but still defiant.
He spat out blood and broken teeth. “Fuck you all!” he growled, and Jenny’s
heart went out to him then, went out to his strength and courage and
fearlessness. The chainsaw was buzzing, and blue smoke filled the chamber. The
blade came into view, and Sick Note was watching it uneasily, his face still
strong but his eyes betraying a shard of fear for the first time.

“What’s first?” came a woman’s
voice. “Fingers, toes or cock?”

“No,” growled Sick Note, “not
like this, not here, not with a chainsaw. Make it clean! A bullet! Give me a
soldier’s death.”

“No soldier’s death for you, you
hacking, coughing piece of human offal.” The woman - Vasta - advanced. She was
dressed, bizarrely, in black PVC. Almost a sex suit. Jenny’s mind was spinning.

“Make them stop,” she snapped at
Randy. “Make them stop! I’ll talk. I’ll tell you everything!”

Randy reached up with a tiny
spray can, and sprayed it in her mouth. Something grew fast, like expanding
foam, filling her mouth and bubbling out, forming immediately into a solid
ball. It almost blocked the back of her throat. She wheezed, struggling to
breathe.

“Shhh,” said Randy, sharply, a
finger to his lips. “I think he has something to say.”

Tears were streaming down Jenny’s
face.

Ahead, Sick Note was trying to
strain away from the tiny spinning blades of the chainsaw. It buzzed, revving
again and again, each time accompanied by a squirt of blue smoke.

“No!” said Sick Note, head
thrashing from side to side. “No, I’ll talk, I’ll tell you everything you want
to know...”

“Too late,” hissed the woman, and
the chainsaw descended, buzzing and bucking, cutting through Sick Note’s arm.
Blood and flesh spat out and back towards the mirror, and Jenny found she was
thrashing also, tears streaming down her face. Sick Note was screaming,
screaming, screaming, and an ocean of blood flushed onto the floor. As the
chainsaw cut through and came free, his body slumped to one side and his
severed arm flopped about uselessly on its chain, drooling gore. Sick Note was,
miraculously, still conscious. He was babbling inanely. “I’ll do... do... do
it. Anything. What you want? You want to know about Jenny? Jenny Xi? Please. No
more. No more. Please. I’ll talk. Anything you want. I’ll tell you anything. Just
keep back. Keep away. I can’t... can’t think.”

The woman revved the chainsaw. “Who
cares anymore?” she said, advancing on Sick Note’s other arm. In a feeble
display of desperation, he tried to beat at her with his stump. Jenny watched,
face flooded with tears, unable to believe what she was seeing. It was a sick
charade. A freakshow tortureshow. Designer-fucking-entertainment for the sick,
slick masses. She was amazed they didn’t have the cameras rolling with a
billion fat fucks slouched in couches stuffing popcorn and pies into slack
jowls whilst slack brains observed slack entertainment on the Dead Eye...

The chainsaw rattled and buzzed
and cut into Sick Note’s remaining arm. Flesh and blood spat. The chainsaw
jigged. Sick Note thrashed, dancing, a marionette with cut strings.

There came a sudden
whap
and
the chainsaw got stuck. The woman started to tug at the machine, and Sick Note
was making a low moaning noise. She tugged and pulled and wrenched, but the
damn thing was stuck halfway through his arm. She turned to the camera/screen
in her ridiculous PVC outfit, and gave a kind of half shrug.
Sorry, guys,
that
half shrug said.
Damn bloody chainsaw got stuck in a human being again!

The scene faded, the long mirror
returning to its state as a mirror and fading Sick Note from view.

“You see?” Randy was close again.
“You see what you did? You fucking people, you fucking
terrorists.
You
think you can go around destroying what is ours, what belongs to Greenstar
Recycling, and you think that’s fucking acceptable? We own the fucking police.
We own the fucking politicians. And we own
you,
little bitch. So you
will tell us what we want to hear. Or else...” He laughed then. “Or else fuck
it, I’ll kill somebody else just for fun. Just to watch your eyes widen. Just
to watch the colour drain from your pretty little cheeks.”

“Mmmnnnn,” said Jenny, thrashing
her head from side to side.
Don’t! Please don’t do it! Please don’t kill my
people! I’ll talk! I’ll tell you everything you want to hear. Anything and
everything, and even shit I didn’t know existed in the bottomless pit of my
fevered brain. I’ll
do anything you want. Anything. You have won. I can’t
see my friends die like this...
But of course she could not speak, and
could not plead. She could not enunciate her message.

All she could do was watch. And
suffer. Like her squad suffered.

~ * ~

FLIZZ
WAS WHAT could only be described as glamorous. She was tall, voluptuous, with
shining golden hair, perfect healthy skin, white teeth, blue eyes - but more
than all these things, things that went up to make a glamorous woman, they all
connected
in the right way, every part of Flizz complementing every other part of her
to create a platter of damn near perfection. She somehow was more than the sum
of her parts. The day Jenny met Flizz, in a downtown toxpark at a wayward
stubborn no-leave village at the foot of the Mercury Peaks, she had been quite
literally
blown away.

They sat together, on a bench,
watching toxi-scarred children playing on the swings. The kids didn’t seem to
mind their horrific injuries, inflicted by Greenstar’s ever-loosening safety
procedures and an army of corrupt lawyers willing to sell their souls to
whatever devils inhabited their own personal hells in order to win the case.
So, much as it had always been.

Jenny took occasional sideways
glances at Flizz, finding her at once beautiful and thrilling. There was
disbelief there as well, because the squad slip she’d been sent by McGowan said
that Flizz was the best sniper from their mountain training camps, high up in
the peaks where the snow and rocks were streaked silver by mercury poisoning.

“You’re our top ranking sniper?”

“Yes.” Her voice was low and
husky. Sultry. She gave a half-shy smile to Jenny, then looked away.

They talked for an hour, Flizz
explaining how her father had been a hunter, out in the remotest parts of the
mountains and out on the lagoons at their base. From an early age, he had taken
her on week-long hunts, teaching her how to conceal herself in her environment;
teaching her how to use all manner of different rifles. Flizz had been a
natural. Not just a natural shot, but a natural born killer.

All that came to an end in the ‘68
Acid Tanker Crash in the city of Faex, where four hundred and seventy-eight
thousand people died when the tanker pilot lost control, and the mammoth vessel
fell on the city, breaking in two, spilling its fifty-billion-gallon load.
Fifty billion gallons of sentacyclic acid. Flizz’s mother and father had been
amongst those thousands left writhing on the streets, skin burned off, eyes
smoking in sockets, lips scalded from mouths, fingers and toes melting into the
road like some bad cartoon on toxic comedy...

Of course, Greenstar had paid out
some minimal compensation via its insurance policies; their smallprint was
legendary. And the crash site at the core of Faex was turned into a shrine
blessed by fifteen different religions. It was only when news leaked to the
independent Quad-Gal media about both pilots of the Acid Tanker that things
really started to kick off; a lax attitude to medicals on the part of
Greenstar, a refusal to drug-test its pilots even though its pilots were
controlling ships capable of mass destruction; well, it could only go one way.

After the story broke, and
Greenstar Recycling Company were found culpable, Flizz had left her house and
made it known around the shady quarters of the city that she was seeking
gainful employment with the Impurity Movement. Her beauty stood her in no good
favour, and it took several knives between ribs, and the burning down of a
casino, to persuade the gangster syndicates that she meant serious business.
Eventually, word did get around. Flizz was beauty
and
the beast. Bad
news. Deadly trouble. And eventually she was picked up and monitored by Cell
Commander McGowan.

In many ways, Jenny had fallen in
love with Flizz the moment she met her.

She remembered their first
intimate moment. It was like a dream. It was a dream when it happened, for even
though Jenny knew she loved Flizz from the moment she saw her, Flizz was a hard
woman to crack, and never gave any indication that she returned her feelings.

They been training out in the
Shattered Uranium Jungle, building shelters, surviving off what they could find
on the harsh toxic beaches, avoiding the wild deviated beasts and cannibals. A
severe toxstorm had come in, smashing a bloody red string of bruises across the
sky, followed by the blood rain. Huge red droplets pounded the jungle canopy in
a torrential onslaught, and Jenny and Flizz had pushed into their narrow
shelter in a panic of drenched hair, soaked clothing and giggling.

For the first time in her life
Jenny regressed, felt like a happy schoolgirl again. This wasn’t training for
war and violence; it lost its sombre mood and purpose. In this slice of time,
she was young and carefree, enjoying life, enjoying love. They were pushed in
tight together, blood rain drumming on the broadleaf roof and running in
rivulets along the ridges, dripping in long spumes of red. The sky darkened
more, and thunder ripped in from across the ocean. Machine-gun lightning
crackled, smacking into the jungle in ten, fifteen, twenty violent strikes that
made the women hold their breath, anticipation shining in their eyes, fists
clenched tight. They’d heard about the lightning before, but never experienced
it first hand... until now.

Crack-crack-crack
went the wild machine-gun
lightning, random sparkles of electric violence through the blood-red rain.
Aftereffects snapped across the sky. At any moment they could be pulverised,
and they lay there, looking into one another’s shining eyes, breath held,
waiting for random destruction and death to visit them, to strike them, to
merge them into one being...

Flizz leant forward. Her breath
was sweet, tender, perfect. Their lips met, and they kissed as the lightning
continued to crackle above them, striking the forest in random bouts of intense
violence. And Jenny knew. To die now, that would be perfect. But they didn’t
die, and they kissed, and fell into one another, and as the machine-gun
lightning passed it left behind the tropical rain, pounding against the
shelter, and they kissed, and held one another, and slowly undressed one
another until they were naked and pressed tight in that narrow space.
Everything dissolved into nothing, into a microcosm of time and the universe.
Time had no meaning. The old clichés are the best, thought Jenny, as time
spiralled off into a maelstrom of eternity. They kissed and touched and
eventually made love, moving together, wet, sliding together, tongues entwined,
a languorous long eternal fucking.

Afterwards, they lay together and
slept and the storm eventually passed.

~ * ~

JENNY
HAD NEVER thought of herself as gay, and she’d had many lovers - all but one of
them men. But that time, that day, that moment in the storm, focussed and
distilled by the promise of lightning death - that had been the most intense
and beautiful moment of her life. She’d always been slightly dubious of
girl-on-girl relationships, wondering how you could possibly be satisfied
without the right equipment; but in that tiny shelter she had been satisfied,
and more than satisfied, not just by meeting a physical need but by love.

The morning after, they had
walked through the jungle in easy silence, stopping by various blasted trunks
to examine the damage. The storm had caused a riot, and the pools of standing
water were just beginning to steam as the green sun rose and cast an eerie glow
through the high jungle canopy.

“Why do they call it the
Shattered Uranium Jungle?” asked Flizz, at last.

“It goes back to the early days,
when Greenstar invaded Amaranth,” said Jenny, leaping lightly onto a fallen
tree and staring off through the jungle. “There were various indigenous local
tribes, quite simple in their beliefs; they refused Greenstar’s generous offer
to relocate them to another universe, and instead waged war on the tankers and
shitships that rumbled low overhead. So Greenstar sent in a series of mercenary
units to remove them; but the shitbag dirtbox mercenaries were not regulated by
Quad-Gal Military. They flew over the jungle using skimmers, located villages,
and exploded depleted uranium shrapnel charges over the tribespeople. Men,
women, children. Not military targets at all. Not
combat,
but
extermination. Well, there were a lot of fucking tribes, and nobody to
intervene; not police, not army, nothing. Greenstar were unregulated back then,
and anyway, they claimed to have no knowledge of the mercenary army causing
havoc in the southern jungles of the planet. It went on for months, and the
bastards left an army of corpses and pollution in their wake. Pollution that
causes severe birth defects. By the time Quad-Gal Military got involved and
wiped out the mercs, it was too late. The tribespeople who survived - well, let’s
just say they were made very ill and very antisocial. Such is the way with
corporate takeovers.”