Toxicity (7 page)

Jenny usually hated to be touched
by people she did not know, but the fight, and her realisation that her gung-ho
approach had perhaps not been the best of early introductions, had left her
wired tighter than a junkie on peppered koona jock-strap. She let Randy ease
her tension. And realised, suddenly, that she missed the basics of human touch.
It had been a long time. Far, far too long.

“Just don’t get any ideas,” she
growled, long and low.

“All my ideas are my own,” Randy
whispered in her ear.

Jenny relaxed more thanks to
Randy’s questing, nudging, teasing fingers, and she found herself smoking, and
drinking whiskey, and looking around the table at the other squad members. They
were all at ease with each other, and seemed unconcerned that Jones had been
removed from the action. Unconcerned, in fact, that Jones had not just had his
head kicked in, but a knife put through his shoulder blade.

Mentally, Jenny re-scanned the
metal leaves for each of her squad members. Their cell, Impurity5, was part of
what the government liked to call “an illegal and violent radical
terrorist
cell,”
“under the enfolding embrace of the greater umbrella, The Impurity Movement”.
Yes, sure, Impurity had an official, legal, political and positive face to
their actions; the face that went on TV and cubes and ggg, smiled for the
cameras, condemned The Company for its constant illegal and repressive
underhand recycling techniques, ran for government and tried - vainly, it would
seem -to achieve votes. But when Impurity’s members started being randomly
picked off - assassinated - and those assassinations were rumoured to be
carried out by the highly illegal and dangerous
Anarchy Androids,
Impurity
had decided to fight back with the creation of a covert paramilitary wing:
cells, squads that used underhand methods - as did The Company - in its fight
not for freedom, but for an end to pollution.

Impurity fought to highlight the
toxic poisoning of their world; something so obvious it was in front of every
member of the Manna Galaxy daily. Unfortunately, it would seem humans and
aliens alike enjoyed their happy Utopia so much they would cheerily condemn
Amaranth to its Toxic World status without the blink of an eye, without a
thought for the dropped hot-dog carton, the frothing psycho-sud suds, and - as
with everything - a constant eye on the fucking bank balance. At the end of the
day, Jenny, and every other member of the Impurity Movement,
knew
the
whole shitty corrupt process was about money. No... Money, with a capital
fucking M. And that was what was so galling. If Greenstar, if
The Company,
did
what it said it would do - recycle
everything
in a completely nontoxic,
ethical, positive, life-affirming manner - well, then everybody would be happy.
But they didn’t. They cut corners. Saved money. Pumped shit into the soil and
the water. And as a result, people died.

And, Jenny knew, there was a hard
core who wouldn’t stand for it.

She
wouldn’t stand for it.

Which is why it pained her so
much, truly, to fight somebody like Jones.

Hell. They shouldn’t be fighting
each other.

They should be disintegrating The
Company and its lack of ethics.

People, animals, fauna;
everything on Toxicity was dying or dead. T-Day was coming. Total toxicity.
Then there would be no going back; then, there would be no more time to stand
up and fight and be counted. On that day, Jenny knew, it would be a good day to
die.

Out of the game, Jenny shooed
Randy away, who skipped off, his pointed boots with skull buckles clacking, his
cuff lace fluffing; she smiled wearily, tested her bruised jaw, and lit another
cigarette.

Meat Cleaver was also out of the
game, and she watched him carefully. Stocky and powerful, even at a game of
cards he must have been carrying... what? Ten or twelve sheathed knives about
his person. And of course, down the middle of his back like some
Conan-
wannabe,
a massive, slightly curved meat cleaver which, he claimed, was more accurate in
combat than any petty trinket samurai sword. “What happens when you meet a man
with a machine gun?” had been Jenny’s first question on hearing that Cleaver
refused to carry a projectile weapon of any sort. He’d grinned toothily at her,
looked up to the sky, and said, “God works in mysterious ways. And you’d be
surprised what seeing my meat cleaver does to a man’s aim.”

Jenny’s eyes moved further round
the group, past the dazzling gorgeousness of Flizz (gorgeousness she’d used,
predictably, to ensnare many a border or gate guard, dazzling him with beauty
and smiles and lip gloss, then rendering him unconscious with a kick to the
nads and karate chop to the neck).

Beside her was Nanny, the oldest
member of the group. Female, hair in a crew cut, face harsh and haggard and
brutal and square. She’d be the first to admit she was the complete antithesis
of Flizz; where Flizz dazzled, Nanny groggled, where Flizz beamed smiles, Nanny
cracked sour cynicism, where Flizz laughed and skipped and bounced, Nanny
moaned and plodded and waddled. Nanny was stocky, muscular, heavy-set, big-boned,
wearing size 12 boots and with fists like shovels. She carried several pistols
and was the resident detonations expert, having once worked the infamous
DemolSquads of Old London. Often the others would poke fun at Nanny, and her
nickname was not, as Jenny had first suspected, because of her age; but because
of her supposed resemblance to a goat.

Finally, there was Sick Note. A
small, skinny, gangly-looking man, completely bald, with thick veins crossing
his polished dome. He was never to be seen without either a cigarette or a
quarter bottle of whiskey. He constantly moaned (he was moaning now, about
losing his hand in the game) and was a hypochondriac. Jenny had questioned this
fact when she’d first read it, only to be told, with a wide grin, “Wait till
you meet him!” They had, of course, been correct; Sick Note earned his name for
good reason. Not a day went by without him developing some new cancer, deadly
virus, genetic mutation or terminal illness.

More drinks were drunk, and a
feeling of euphoria washed over Jenny. The group were completely at ease with
one another. They oozed not just confidence, but... the ability to mesh. Like
gear cogs interlocking. They were a team, a unit. And that was good...

Except for Jones.

Had she misjudged?

Zanzibar gestured to her, and she
stood, and stretched, and followed him outside into the cool night air. A light
rain was falling. It tasted bad on Jenny’s tongue, like ash. Like toxic
rainfall. Which, surely, it was.

“Don’t worry,” said Zanzibar.

“About?”

“So coy, mistress,” he grinned. “About
Jones. I know how the human mind works. You can see us all as a unit, and you’re
wondering if you fucked up. Trust me, you didn’t. What you’re witnessing in our
behaviour is the absence of Jones. He is a fly in our butter. A maggot in our
collective sweet, juicy apple pie. There is a deep prejudice in him, a deep bad
strand. Nobody here thinks less of you.”

Jenny shrugged. “It’s good of you
to say, Zanz.” She clasped his hand, wrist to wrist. “Internal bitching and fighting
is a pointless excursion; we have a common enemy. A common enemy we need to
bring down and fuck up with extreme prejudice.”

“You’ve come to the right place,”
smiled Zanzibar.

Jenny nodded. “Well. We’re going
to make a difference. I promise you that.”

~ * ~

JENNY
SAT ON her bunk, in a tiny 8x6 bunker, and checked over her weapons. She had a
Browning 13mm, an SMKK standard-issue machine gun, and a variety of weird and
ingenious grenades, everything from smoke and white phos, to DetX and Detox
pills.

Happy everything was in order,
she kicked off her boots (in need of a polish) and lay back with a creak of
springs. She wriggled around for a few moments, trying to get comfy, but
resigned herself, as a bad-bed professional experienced in the art of shitty
military springs,
never
to get comfy. She closed her eyes anyway and
grasped for strands of sleep, but it wouldn’t come. As was usual when she drank
enough to mess with her mindset, she thought about the drink, the alcohol, and
drifted back through time.

Sleep tugged at her like a dying
man on a rope, and she drifted in and out of consciousness. She felt bad about
the fight earlier; in an ideal world, a true world where only good things
happened, the fight wouldn’t have happened. But the problem was, there were too
many arseholes with too big an ego floating around. Yes. Ha. Even in
her
unit.
Her eyes flickered, and she licked dry lips, and for some reason she was
thinking about her dad, Old Tom. She smiled grimly, for although there were
many, many nice thoughts of Old Tom - snippets of early childhood, of laughing,
being carried high on strong broad shoulders, of wallowing in warm oceans, of
building castles in the sand - there were also other memories, more recent
memories. Bad memories.

Jenny blinked, and for a moment
he was standing there, long hair tangled and unkempt, a bottle in one hand
filled with colourless piss, swaying, staring at her with that vacant stare he
always had when hammered.

“Please stop, Daddy.”

“Ach, don’t be silly, little Jen.
I’ve only had a few.”

“You drink too much, Daddy.”

“Just keeping the winter chills
away.”

Always a line, always an excuse.
She scrunched up tighter in her bed, eyes narrowing. She had been too young,
too frightened, too weak. But her older brother, Saul, he should have known
better. But no. He had one cruel eye turned on the piggy bank, the other
holding onto the self-destruct lever and ratcheting it down one notch at a
time.

“Saul, do something!” she would
hiss, with bright eyes.

“He’s okay, he’s a grown man. He
can look after himself.” But she caught Saul checking out bank statements,
taking Old Tom’s bank cube when the old man was too frazzled on cheap liquor to
even know his own children’s faces, never mind how many credits he had in his
account. And with a gradual, cold, slippery descent into understanding, Jenny
had come to realise what her own brother was
really
like. He didn’t care
about Old Tom. Didn’t want to get her father help. Oh, no. He was
waiting
for
him to die. Waiting for the bastard to drink himself into an early grave, thus
funding Saul’s lazy, drugsmoke, groundcar-obsessive lifestyle.

Years later, they’d head-butted
it out. But not now...

Not now.

“Why didn’t you help him, Saul?”
she murmured, as she fell into a well of sleep.

~ * ~

WHY
DO YOU hate your father?

Oh well, that’s a long story. A
complicated story.

Well, why do you hate your
brother?

Longer. Even more complex. And
much more savage.

And your mother?

Poor, dead mother. Don’t cry for
me, my darling.

And... your sister?

Nixa? Sweet dead Nixa. I’ll cry
for you, honey. We’ll all cry for you.

~ * ~

OLD
TOM. TOMAS to his friends. A likeable man. Big, jolly, funny, intelligent,
friendly. Not a bad bone in his good bone body. Shaggy hair, shaggy beard, the
kids called him “Chewbacca” and he laughed alongside them, laughed with their
jokes as his hand touched the cold glass of the bottle in his pocket.

Tom liked to walk, and would head
into the hills around Kavusco, long strides in his sturdy shoes. He wore thick
molecule-tweed and smoked a pipe. A lot of the locals chuckled, and nudged one
another: “There’s Old Tom off on another walk. A simple man. An honest man.”

But what they didn’t know about
this loveable, amiable friendly giant was that he was on a
mission;
he
had his orders, orders so important the Quad-Gal Military could have issued
them from top Army Brass. The order was: to drink. And the mission was: to
drink. And the secondary briefing was: not to get caught. And a sub-mission
was: to hide it from his family. Old Tom’s own mother, Jenny’s grandmother, was
on a slippery descent into death; she was ancient, frail, withered, skin like
dry paper, eyes losing the light of life. Her batteries were discharged. Almost
empty. Almost gone.