Toxicity (49 page)

Jenny motioned to Zanzibar, and
she veered left down the cold, deserted - but sparkling clean -platform.
Zanzibar went right. Meat Cleaver followed Jenny, and Nanny followed Zanzibar.
Bull turned and covered the escalators with his SMKK, his face set and hard,
eyes focused.

Jenny reached the end of the
platform, but it was deserted. She signalled back to Zanzibar, who also
confirmed no activity; they jogged back to the centre of the platform and
peered into the dark hole of the tunnel.

“So we wait,” said Zanzibar.

“They know we’re coming.”

“I, also, have this feeling.”
Zanzibar slapped her on the back. “Into the lion’s den, little lady. Don’t
worry overmuch. We’ll give them a taste of their own toxicity; that is a
promise.”

Jenny nodded, ran a hand through
her hair, and checked her weapon. It was new, and stiff, still showing traces
of manufacturer’s grease and PASS testing stickers.
It’s like they’re
waiting for a war... preparing for a day when each and every factory or base
will have to defend itself with an army.
There’d been enough weapons in the
armoury to indeed equip an army; five armies, if the truth be told. Certainly
many, many battalions.

Within minutes, they heard the
train rattling down the tracks. It roared from the tunnel, decelerating with
incredible force and noise. It was a single carriage, and it was empty. The
doors slid open with a hiss.

“Too easy,” muttered Jenny.

“Like stepping into the jaws of a
beast,” said Zanzibar. “And yet we must do it.”

“I know. Let’s go...”

“You’re not going anywhere,” said
a strangled, pain-filled voice, and Jenny’s head swung up fast. There was a
clatter of a grille, and Randy Zaglax crawled from the narrow pipe with his
pistol trained on Jenny’s face. He was soaked in blood, presumably his own. One
arm hung limp by his side, the other held the pistol. However, despite his ragged,
battered, torn appearance, the whistle and hiss of air moving through his torn
throat as well as his lipless mouth, and the sodden footfalls on the platform
from his blood-soaked feet, his one good arm, holding the gun, was straight and
true and steady.

Jenny felt Zanzibar tense by her
side, but raised a hand. “No!” snapped her command, and everything fell into
languid, honeyed slow motion. Jenny lowered her own weapon, which had snapped
up the moment she heard Randy’s voice, and her eyes narrowed, fixed on Randy.

“You can’t stop us,” she said.

“Oh, but I can.”

“If you shoot me, my squad will
drill you full of bullets. You’ll be dead, Randy. Dead and gone and wasted.”

Randy’s rebuilt face twisted in
pain, and he twitched, the fingers of his limp arm clawing his leg
spasmodically. “No!” he hissed. “Stop it! Stop telling me what to do! Get out
of my fucking head!”

“We still clear on the escalator?”
said Zanzibar from the corner of his mouth.

“Yeah,” growled Bull.

“You have two minutes before the
train departs,” came a mellow female voice over the speaker system. The train
sat on its tracks, humming gently to itself. It seemed almost to vibrate, as if
in eagerness to be off on its journey.

Randy’s gun wavered now, and then
sharply rose, the heel of his palm rubbing against his own forehead. His pistol
was pointing at the ceiling. Zanzibar made a gesture to kill, but Jenny waved
him down. She approached Randy.

“Hey. Randy?”

His gaze snapped back to her. His
eyes were rolling and crazy. Saliva pooled from his lips, falling down his
bloodied chest.

“No! No, I won’t do it, I don’t
care, you can only push a fucking man so much and
you’ve gone beyond a
fucking joke, bitch!”

The gun was waving around
manically, and Jenny lifted her own weapon. Randy had passed beyond sanity and
she could see he was a danger to everybody. Even himself. She made a grim
decision. It was with no joy she would have to kill him... maybe once, when he’d
been sane and evil; but not now. Not like this. This would be like putting down
a rabid dog. Simply a necessary act that had to be done. Complete. Finished. A
necessary kill...

“Wait!”

Randy’s hand slammed up, gun
still pointing at the ceiling, and his lips were twisting silently as if
speaking impossible words. And then he fixed Jenny with a look that she would
never forget until her dying day. It was like a man looking out from behind a
mask. Utter, total, cold sanity stared out through those bloodshot, watering
eyes. Randy looked out at her from the cage of his own mind; from a torture
cell of his own making.

“I’m sorry,” he said, through the
blood and the spittle.

Jenny stared, unsure of what to
say.

“I’m truly sorry I did those
things to you. I’m sorry about everything that happened. I had a madness upon
me.” Then he seemed to relax. He was breathing deeply, the hole in his throat
whistling. “It all got fucked up. Can’t you see? I went beyond the mortal
realm. Into Hell.” He laughed. “Go, Jenny. Detonate the lirridium pumps at the
Hub!” His gun turned on himself, and a single shot rang out. There came a
chink
as the shell casing bounced on the hard tiled floor of the station. Randy’s
body crumpled straight down in a heap, and blood leaked from the bullet hole as
his pulped brains dribbled like a streamer of jellied mush.

“Shit,” breathed out Jenny, and
turned to Zanzibar.

“Jenny?” whispered Randy.

Slowly, very slowly, she turned
back to the corpse. The eyes were lifeless. Gone to another realm. But the
mouth was moving, tongue flickering, teeth chewing spasmodically.

“Yes?”

“Come to us, girl. Come to us at
the Greenstar Hub... we want to watch you die!” Randy’s lips and voice made a
high-pitched cackling sound, and then were still.

“Holy Mother of Manna,” said
Zanzibar, and made the sign of the protective horn. “She possessed the dead!”

“Who did?”

“Renazzi Lode. The Director. I
recognised her voice!”

“Thirty seconds until departure,”
came the mellow voice of the train’s simple AI brain.

“INCOMING!” yelled Bull suddenly
from the foot of the escalators. Machine guns screamed. Bull’s SMKK rattled,
return fire ejecting from the barrel, bullets yammering up the incline and
punching three guards from their feet. Bullets kicked shattered tiles from the
tunnel wall, punching dust into the air, sending shards flying outwards.

Then there came a dull bass
WHUMP.
Bull was picked up, folded into a ball, and tossed across the space. He hit
the back wall of the tunnel with a slap. There was a rattle like machine-gun
fire, but it was Bull’s bones snapping within the pulped skin ball of his body.
He fell onto the tracks, instantly dead.

“Onto the train!” screamed Jenny,
and the remaining members of the squad backed onto the train, guns blazing.
Zanzibar shot out the windows and they hunkered down between benches, guns
yowling across the platform. Guards came sprinting down the escalator, wearing
body armour and helmets. Their own guns were roaring. Bullets screamed like
jungle insects.

And there was Vasta, cool, calm,
walking between the guards and holding... an E3 Accelerator.

Jenny’s gun trained on Vasta, but
her bullets seemed to worm around the woman, failing to puncture her flesh.

“Time for departure.” The door
shuddered shut, peppered with bullet holes.

The train gave a sudden jerk,
then a lurch, and accelerated rapidly into the tunnel opening. Jenny turned,
breath caught in her throat, and saw Vasta run, leaping down onto the tracks.
The Head of Security turned the E3 Accelerator into the darkness... and the
remainder of Jenny’s squad ducked down, heard the painful dull WHUMP... and for
a second, nothing seemed to happen. Then the rear of the train screamed and
steel compressed and the train bunched up into an alloy-and-steel fist,
slamming towards Jenny, whose mouth was open in an O of shock and surprise...

I never thought I’d die this
way...

I never thought it would end this
way...

And the darkness of the tunnel
seemed to last forever.

~ * ~

FIFTEEN

SVOOL
WAS EXHAUSTED. Never had he felt so tired. Not even when he’d slept with the
Sixteen Sluts from the Wheels of Hell, drunk a full three litres of Jataxa
Spirit and taken enough drugs to drop a platoon, before going on to pen (what
was widely agreed to be) one of the greatest Saga Poems of the millennium, in a
fit of alcohol and drug-fuelled debauchery which left his sexual health in
tatters, but garnered him considerable respect from his peers. No, not even
that
blip
on his chart of insanity could match the utter, total,
complete sense of emptiness, hollowness and despair that now filled him from
crown to crotch with the direst exhaustion. He stumbled along, often held up by
Lumar who was there for him, strong for him, mopping his brow and helping his
legs motivate.

They had marched for days.
Through caverns and tunnels, through mines and stairs and portals and up and
down sheer rock chimneys. After a day, Herbert and Angelina had been left
behind, for the under-mountain terrain had become narrow and impassable for
them, breaking down into crawl-tunnels through which only Svool and Lumar could
squeeze. So they had parted - but not before Herbert had blown Svool a big,
oily, sloppy kiss, winked, and said he’d catch up with him
real
soon.
After all, they had a nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-year relationship to look
forward to. Svool had scowled and looked less than impressed, and even as they
left in a steel boat across a deep lake of lirridium, Herbert had blown yet
another kiss and waved a sheet of metallic, hole-punched paper at him.

“What was that?” said Lumar, eyes
narrowed.

“My deed of ownership,” said
Svool miserably.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning he’ll find me, no matter
where I go. Curse Metal Mongrels, Inc. Curse their mad robotic creations of
Hell!”

That had been two days
previously. Now, Svool was ready to weep. No. It was worse than that, and he
never thought he’d be willing to voluntarily shuffle off his own mortal coil;
but dammit. He was ready to chuck it all in and die.

Svool staggered on, lost in a
private world of pain and suffering and misery. The cool breeze helped soothe
his skin, but it really was a disgrace, really was asking
too much
of a
poet and future awesome film star of the Quad-Gal. His cowboy boots clattered
on the metal walkway, but he felt weak at the knees and almost collapsed. He
grabbed at a metal rail and again Lumar was there, bless her little cotton
lizard socks, there to help him along as he murmured on the edge of reason and
understanding. And then bright lights dazzled him, and he dropped to his knees,
and vomited again, and no matter how much Lumar urged him on he just lay there
and sank, swiftly and with welcoming arms, into a state of deep
unconsciousness.

~ * ~

WHEN
HE OPENED his eyes, Svool was in a bed. He stared at the ceiling for a while,
luxuriating in what he could only describe as the most unbelievable comfort he
had ever experienced. No more walking. No more crawling. No more starving. No
more pain... and then the pain
did
hit him, and it was a pain of chafed
skin, of blisters, of tiny cuts and scratches and bruises that seemed to run up
and down his entire body.

“Urgh. Where am I?”

“Hello, Svool!” It was Zoot,
hovering at the foot of the bed. Zoot seemed to be glowing pink, which was the
colour he always used when extremely happy about the entire Manna Galaxy and
everything happening within it.